And the way I didn't go.
That you will gain anything from reading my words is not within my expectation to guarantee. I do not have the heartwarming tones of picturesque landscapes to lead you through, not the comfort of a yarn-wrapped village home, not the consciousness developing exhilaration of tromping foreign soil, not the silken embrace of past authors to lend me the education of their prose.
I have the island volcano of my life, the hermitage of a socially avoidant housewife on a spiritual odyssey, the pithy toolkit of one who speaks largely with Themselves, the weariness of a pretend human who has accepted the limitations of their acting skills.
I love to draw pictures with words yet cycle through an un-captivating rolodex of potential subjects, over-thinking their relevance, settling on none. This is largely due to an innate knowing that the subjects are not mine, they are a collection of things I have seen people talk about, what I have gleaned to be supposedly important to anyone in this world trained to expect to live successfully, happily; entertained and entertaining.
So my fingers have been let loose on the keyboard to pick their own topic, one I usually reject as being too me-specific to be of use to anyone else. But if I don’t tell my own story, why am I here? If pressed to sum up the course of my life I would say that I have sought to not play the game. I took the route away from social expectation, away from achievement, away from material gain, the acquisition of useful facts, the standardised behaviours of assigned roles, conformity to what Julian Summerhayes calls the ‘dominant narrative’.
I finished high school as tied Dux of the year; spent a year abroad (both beautiful and torturous); went to secretarial college (I could not settle on a University degree, limited as the courses were in our town and an expensive undertaking; being quickly employable was the greater need) and finished that year as Dux of the college. I was scooped up by a local Accounting firm, hated every other moment of it (a conservative estimate of my dislike), did not get the promised support to attend Uni (as I became pregnant, having married just after getting that Dux - far too damn early and something I recommend to no-one, especially my children) and was sidelined. Pregnant employees didn’t get much favour in a firm where all partners and accountants were men, and all secretarial/typing pool staff were women.
I left to have the baby (an extremely difficult labour, birth and post partum experience) and resigned. Life from then onward was the Household Story; the rollercoaster of relationships, child raising, divorce, single-parenthood, budgeting to squeeze rent, food and other necessities from an extremely limited income, tussling over broken emotions and child maintenance payments. Then remarrying, more relationship training, more budgeting, more child raising, more solo-parenting (military spouses can deploy for extended periods).
Amongst it all was the affliction of believing that I was supposed to be doing more, being more, achieving more, learning more, exercising more, surviving better, achieving excellence as I did in school and living up to all that potential now subsumed by the busy-ness of laundry, child-caring, school runs, lawnmowing, cleaning bathrooms, floors and toilets, meal prep, doing all I could to improve the health of a chronically ill child, being the socially avoidant mother who made herself host birthday parties and play all the expected roles of a contributing member of society.
For almost a decade of this I powered through with insomnia, getting little more than 4 hours of broken sleep per day. I rushed into life because that was the expected pathway and each day Life found unpredictable ways to kick my arse.
Then in 2009 my world became strange.
Through all my days I have been spiritually switched on. The knowing that there exists a realm of beings and an ethereal experience beyond the human physical has been with me always. I note it most from the age of 4-5 years. I thought the Christian god was who I was looking for and became ensconced in that belief pathway for longer than was spiritually healthy. The fascination took me all through my teens and into my 30’s. Hindsight says that the anchoring of a book which people more educated than I affirmed to be a true account of an all-powerful being who apparently would move heaven and earth to assist me was what helped me get through those years of struggling to play my roles.
Many may think these roles are nothing to be struggling over, but my hindsight also says that it is firmly within the realm of possibility that I am undiagnosed neuro-divergent. Masking for decades to ‘be normal’, to regulate your nervous system, successfully communicate whilst your environment keeps changing around you in dramatic ways, being the anchor for a household reliant on you being able to get all the tasks done, will mess you up. It takes a large toll on the nervous and autoimmune systems. I never sought medical or psychological aid, that’s a part of the anxiety dysfunction and probably my nature.
I thought I was doing just fine, soldiering on like a ‘good girl’.
Then in 2009 the Spiritual Presence which I had been searching for, and actively inviting to come find me over the previous 30+ years, did exactly that. This is where my story may tromp too happily into the realm of ‘woo-woo’ for some of you. Now would be a good exit point if you are such a one whose ‘good sense’ is the dominant captain of your perception filters.
This Presence came in a dense cloud - not a quiet inner whisper to tickle the conscience. Subtle encouragement is what It had been doing for years until time ran out for that approach. Living on the crust of a large squishy ball speeding through the cosmos brought me to the pre-designated point of our meeting and our spheres collided. It laid me flat and It had a lot to impart. But I rush to say that this was not a consciousness separate from me, a distant ruling god or any such entity. It was Me. What I had been calling for all these decades was that larger conglomerate of my own Being, my own conscious intelligence, the ‘higher self’ (not in a way so many have now made into a pseudo-spiritual term for trendy weekend retreats).
Is it ‘higher’? Only in terms of higher states of coherence, but it is not something physically above in the untouchable heavens. More like being farther off in larger geometries of the patterns of reality ‘beyond’ or ‘outside’ of this one (which could be considered a small simple shape nestled like the infant of a matryoshka doll within Great Great Grandparents of Conscious thought shaping all we sense).
In that year, beyond any sense of uncertainty, my life departed the route of normal Western culture expectation, taking a trajectory I doubt too many bother to go searching for. If by accident they do find it, they pass quickly on by lest they be pulled into strange waters and called ‘woo-woo’ by well-meaning but spiritually inexperienced minds (which themselves do not wish to risk the loss of their reputation for being sensible and scientifically supported in their conclusions about immeasurable qualities of reality).
Now seems like a suitable moment to share that a connection with the Larger Self is not a bliss experience. The bliss or Nirvana state (as used in Western conversation), where suffering and ego is supposedly extinguished, is a nicely distracting plateau, a medication for the suffering mind.
Journeying past the trials of the ego, dis-associatively accepting suffering, feeling a blissful state of non-attachment to the idea of separation and duality appears to have become the life apogee of many a seeker. ‘Being in Bliss’ is taken to indicate that you have reached some ultimate enlightenment point, which must therefore mean you have found that thing called ‘oneness’ or a state of unity with the cosmos. That has not been my experience. If you experience a bliss state yet don’t come out the other side to have an understanding of the place of bliss within the cosmic organism, I feel that you still have some ways to swim. That ‘bliss’ can be a motivator, it shouldn’t be a final destination.
The greater a person’s burgeoning awareness of All That Is, the higher the likelihood that they will feel the crushing weight of a world in suffering. Bliss will not be able to medicate an aware mind out of that, nor should the one who wants to encapsulate the metamorphosis of an entire plane of consciousness try to be so distracted from the tumultuous waves of that change.
If you are connecting with high minded portions of yourself from other geometries of the creation, it may become apparent that they don’t hang around in ‘blissouts’ - not if they are actively engaged in the process of changing paradigms within a plane of reality, or a system of connected planes. I will add that they don’t use English as a first language either. If your Grandparent Self has started talking to you, you will have to spend a considerable portion of your years learning to interpret ideographic shorthand into something maybe a little more relevant to your human life - but it may still not ever be that relevant.
It will, however, be transformative.
As a note to the reader - yes I did eventually make use of the services of a Clinical Psychologist. Her name was Shelley, she was very friendly. She spent my money telling me about Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, which was nothing new to me. What I gained from her was an assurance that I am not experiencing psychosis and an encouragement to not use alcohol as a coping mechanism - a sound request which I took onboard.
Well then, so fun that you made it to this sentence. Thinking briefly enough on my past life with enough depth to write some coherently vague description of it triggered more anxiety/trauma response than I would have anticipated (especially as I had anticipated none). I am thinking now that this may be why I stare at that rolodex and don’t delve into my memory references deep enough to conjure things to write.
So what is the way that I didn’t go?
The way of normal, the way of good sense, the way with a recorded history and respected elders to direct the journey, the way of conforming to popular beliefs, the way which would have been something able to be talked about in general conversation.
Feel free to drop a comment. I may be back with more of this experience chronicling.
(Published previously on Substack)
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