Slowly, I started to reform myself. I
started the inevitable building of myself around this body. I reviewed the past
through washed eyes and I wrote letters of forgiveness and apology. And I knew, in the depth of my being, that
God existed.
God being within and part of all things.
God being All. No thing exists without God. God as alive, awake and Life
itself. A no thing and yet, a some thing that lies within the core of every
thing. One is not different from another.
I realized that because of the enclosed
shell of hate, fear and unhappiness I had built around myself I had cut myself off from the human
experience. I was judgmental, critical and arrogant. I couldn’t find a point of
connection with humanity. Humanity was, for
me, a great mistake. I had believed that humans were basically evil.
They lied, betrayed, killed, stole, cheated and were selfish to the core. I had
watched the news as a teenager and felt that the world was about to explode
with human stupidity at any moment. To maintain any level of sanity, I had to
dissassoiate myself from being human.
At 21 I lived for almost a year as a
caretaker of a farm. I wrote, gardened, took care of dogs, inquired into life
and forgot about the world out there. I needed to get away from people. I
needed to escape from the noise in my own head.
One day, walking the dogs, the dried up
grass gold on the ground, Light struck the top of my head, changing my vision
for ever.
For three days and three nights I was only
light. My vision was clear, my body was nonexistent and I saw beneath the
surface. The top of my head was aglow, burning bright and beyond. And I
experienced, without doubt, down into the cells of my body, out into the
apparent differences in shape and form that we were indeed, all One.
I saw underneath the apparent surface, everything was made up of similar ‘stuff’. This stuff infused all things,
including air, and the space between things. There was no here, there was just
everywhere that existed in one moment. Up close and far away were the same.
Just ever increasing expression of shapes and colours. But we were all the same
stuff. Glowing alive magical stuff.
Loss
I lost my centre. I lost who I thought I
was. Everything was washed away with a light so bright it penetrated every
aspect of my previous self. There was no
me. There was only light.
Loss of identity.
Loss of ideas.
Loss of beliefs.
Loss of ambition.
Loss of purpose.
Loss of all the things that came together
to make me ‘me’. It was gone. There was nothing, at least for those three days.
How many of you value the ability to think
independently? … to feel like you’ve taken the lead…
Archetypically '… gods say to you.. pursue a` reality… that is
independent…’ Jesus’s contract… by getting you strong enough to see, you need
to be born into a family that doesn’t want you.’ - Caroline Myss
‘Sometimes it feels painful, but I promise
you,
the effort of feeling and
allowing feeling,
is
like discovering gold.’ - Tiffany Jones
Of course I cried. I cried bitterly. I was
angry and confused. I felt abandoned and set adrift. I was left where I was not
wanted and I felt defiant to the last.
‘Let everyone suffer.’ I couldn’t
go beyond that.
It was my 14th summer. Some weeks earlier I had been dropped off at my
grandmother’s house with the promise that my father and step-mother would come
pick me up in a week.
It is a phone call I remember etched with
detail; the beige telephone in my left hand, looking into the brightness of the
old fashioned kitchen, my right fingers entangled in the spiralling telephone
cord, the cold bench I leaned upon, the noise from the small TV behind me, the
greasy scalp of my grandfather near my elbow. I was conscious of his withdrawal
and active internal world and knew he wasn’t listening to my responses.
My step mother told me, over the telephone,
that she and my father hadn’t had enough alone time. They had been together for
seven years and they had been surrounded by children; children from their
previous relationships. They had decided
I was to live with my grandparents, and they weren’t coming back.
My father, for the first and last time said
‘I love you’, over the telephone.
All I could feel was a rush of fury towards
my step-mother, coldness quickly followed and then raging disbelief. I remember
saying ‘OK’. I remember being obedient. I remember hanging up the phone and
living through those hours in front my grandparents as if everything was
alright. When I went to the fold out bed set up in the ‘best’ lounge room where
nobody ever sat, I turned my face to the pillow and screamed with rage and
frustration and hate. And I cried bitterly.
And I promised myself not to be hurt again. And to do that, I needed to
hate. And that’s what I did.
On the Subject of Loss
On that day, over 25 years ago, I lost my
father. I lost everything he meant to me. I lost trust, faith and protection. I
lost my idealisation. I lost one of the foundation stones of my belief
system. I lost a story.
I had been a daddy’s girl. He had special
rules. He was a thief and a conman. He stole for a living and he was paranoid
and difficult to live with. He was also charming, personable and he was the
only rule in my life. There were rules
for the inside of the house. There was another set of rules for outside of the house. There were
things we didn’t mention. There were things we didn’t talk about. Intuition was
important and valued. Reading people was important.
Life drained out of me. Everything that had
sustained me thus far in my life, my belief in my father, was taken away from
me. I felt as though I didn’t have anything left. It was certainly death for
me.
Between 14 and 18 I had the most stable
environment I had experienced in my life. I slept in the same bed for four
years. I ate at regular hours. I had a grandmother who cared for me and asked
me how school was. I had a grandfather
who drove me places. I made friends. And I was festering with self-loathing,
bitterness, rage and despair. By 17 I was suffering severe migraines and was on
daily medication to cope with the pain.
At 20, for no apparent reason, I suffered
sciatica so severely I was sometimes unable to walk. Doctors couldn’t find a
reason. Massage and osteopaths didn’t help.
I had cut off my relationships with my high
school friends. I felt like my life was a huge lie. I had never spoken about my
father’s lifestyle to anyone.
Once outside of the structure of high
school and the assumption of University for a bright girl like myself, I was
lost. I didn’t know what to do. I was continually suffering rage, hatred, fear
and confusion.
I decided to move to the country. And I
did. I needed to get away from the maddening crowd. I needed to find answers.
Here I am holding my big sisters' hands in the early 70's.
This is part of a novella. Here is the first exert of The Day My Buddha Burned Ideas like Building Blocks
We are like small children with coloured
building blocks. We sit there totally
absorbed in placing one block on top of another and either because we haven’t
placed our blocks well, or because we get fed up, the blocks fall and quite
happily, and without questioning what we are doing at all, we rebuild. We often
rebuild without seeming to learn anything from the last structure we built. We
build without any view to an end point. We build until it collapses.
And then we start again.
The coloured building blocks are ideas and
belief systems we individually construct within the walls of our minds.
We are all born with the building blocks
before us. Some of the ideas we build are based on the blueprints handed down
to us by our family, friends, society, culture and country, and others are drawn
up in direct consequence of what we have perceived as positive/protective
responses to life’s events.
Deconstruction and re-planning occur in the
teenage years when our hormones coupled with an expansion of perception create
some of the biggest conscious changes we have thus far been aware of. Many
people don’t change their mental landscape again until their retirement.
However, for others, we have been forced by
personality or circumstance, to abandon ideas housed within our minds and
perhaps to put up temporary structures to aid us in different moments in life.
Perhaps some of us can even be called nomads, resting in easily constructed
rooms for comfort and being able to adapt according to the changing seasons.
I’ve written down some of the changes to my
thinking in the past 40 years.
I've been writing this short novel for several years. This is the first instalment. You're welcome to leave comments.
Here I am writing in my journal on a train in India, 2007
This sacred journey through life hits upon
moments of intensity that we know are special, different, as if they’ve been
dabbed with a fluorescent marker, to stand out as important. I’ve written down
a few.
I do believe we’re here to take another
step or two further along the pilgrimage of our soul’s journey. The sacred centers are
those moments that stand out high and above the normal every day scenery and
represent moments of clarity, of learning, of wisdom, choice, power. They are the
sacred centers of our life and sometimes we are so obviously shaken out of the
normal, we know we are in vibrant times, though sometimes we only recognise them
in the hindsight.
