The transformation described in the previous chapter took place in early February. There were subsequent events of lesser intensity over the next four months.
There were several telling revelations as well. The most interesting and easily conveyed are here along with a little background on events that both precede and follow what I am sharing in this post.
A new breed of people began to come into my life. The woman-child who brought me the book COSMIC CONSCIOUSNESS became a regular visitor (later she became the mother of two of my daughters and my third wife). It was not long before she brought two friends with her. One I’ll call D. and one M.
On our first occasion to meet M. made a comment that I interpreted as diminishing my experience; an attempt to reduce my respect for its power. I may have simply misunderstood his intention but I failed to appreciate it none-the-less. I felt anger. I asked him to leave. He refused. I became brusk and demanded he leave. Years later I realized he was jealous of my experience. He had been aware of man’s possible evolution from his diverse studies and wanted it for himself and here I was, completely uneducated yet rich with experience. It irked him I am certain.
As a result of my “throwing him out” I found myself four seasons later in a position unable to refuse living in a house with him as the “Lord of the Manor” for nine months. It was a dark time. My ego had regained its grip and I felt separate and empty of joy. The fourteen other housemates of Avenue B. and I were crammed in an eight hundred square foot, two bedroom building with an outside shower owned by a female deputy sheriff. Little did I know the fourteen others were reflection of my suppressed psyche. I’ll bring more to light about Avenue B later.
During our time together M. found ways to take me apart bit by bit. I suppose, to discover why me and not him. There is some truth to the old saying angry men take heaven by storm. I was a very angry man. My second child, whom I thought to be my first, was conceived in the later months at Avenue B. And honestly… this was not a deliberate decision on my part. This too we will return to later.
Now the events that preceded my leaving the home in the swamp next to the radio station.
You could call those months a period of revelation defining the Revelation. Not to confuse you but the next (roughly) seven years became a period of definition recovery. Meaning the main transformation was a desolation of the self (ego) as a set of definitions and beliefs described as me (Michael). To survive in the world there had to be a redefining. Since the end of the seven year period (age thirty) following the transformation I have worked toward the ability to come and go from definition at will.
Within a few days of the transformation I became severely ill. Blue sky appeared to have a dark overcast, as if full of dust. The sun became a dirty orange. I had a fever that lasted for three days. I was weak and could not move from my black Naugahyde couch. I was experiencing the healing crisis mention by Saul of Tarsus in the New Testament. But I lay there without concern. My joy was so complete I cared for nothing. My boss came to me and asked me if I needed a doctor, do I want to go to the hospital he asked. I decline saying I was just fine. He had no idea what had happened and I felt no need to tell him. On the third day, as I lay there, I was looking up into the corner near the ceiling and a hole appeared to open up in the ceiling. Inside the hole there was nothing but clear light. No color, no distinguishing qualities, simply clarity as a visual experience. As if seeing into infinite, clearly lit nothingness. Then I remembered a gentle, loving man I had met eighteen months earlier in Iowa. As we sat in his living room listening to music with awareness as a theme, he said with all the sincerity in the world “Ah, for a moment of clarity.” I pray he got his as well.
One afternoon I was sitting in my Naugahyde throne-like chair contemplating my naval when in the space before my eyes was overtaken by an image that opened up in front of me. Like a dream, but surrounded on the periphery by what were the walls of my living room. Within the “dream” were two of me in a unique environment dressed in bland, light grey suits. Each simultaneously withdrew a sword, a rapier, and one became still as the other proceeded to attack the other without remorse or affect. When I became a little startled the image went away.
In another instance I was laying on my bed, resting from a difficult day in the production room. Suddenly I was in a dream sequence where I was detached from and following behind my body as it walked down an aisle between the old fashioned experiment desks often seen on old college laboratories. Test tubes and Bunsen burners and racks of apparatus on each side. My body was wearing a white lab coat over a tweed coat and blue tie. As my body reached the end it sat down on a bench and I instantly entered the body, clasp my hand over the back of my neck and a white light exploded in my head obliterating the world. I awoke realizing I had achieved enlightenment experimenting with the mushrooms.
Over those last few months I resided and worked at the radio station in the swamp I felt strongly I was in the wrong place doing the wrong thing. I discovered from experimentation that I was very psychic and could send and receive information. I read Dr. John Lilly’s CENTER OF THE CYCLONE among others including ESP by Susy Smith, PSYCHIC DISCOVERIES BEHIND THE IRON CURTAIN by Sheila Ostrander, Lynn Schroeder. I read the bible from cover to cover and understood it for the first time. The information in them confirmed many things I suspected were true but in the past felt they did not apply to me. I learned from Dr. Lilly’s book how to remain open to psychic information.
A few years before I had used a Quija Board to communicate with what I believed to be an entity named Bonnie Knight. I would beam a thought across a short distance to the board sitting between my mother and sister. The board would spell out answers while they sat and carried on casual conversations with others in the room. Only I knew the questions. Only I understood the answers. I had yet to realize my role as a psychic. So when I sat with a woman after my reawakening in the swamp and tried to use the board again I was dismayed at how slow and muddy the movement was. The board slowly spelled out “stop demanding.” I never went back to it.
Years later I worked with a professional astrologer in my study of the subject. With her I found my Moon’s South Node conjunct the most psychic of star formations. It clearly states what one should give up to attain enlightenment and conveyed I was a professional psychic in my most immediate past life. Further, any effort to use this for personal gain would be counter productive. When I tested this by advertising myself as such some ten years later I found the work very tiring. As well, I attracted people seeking mundane answers. Not much fun for the spiritual teacher whose North Node stated was his destiny should he choose to more fully awaken.
The culminating event, the impetus to leave the radio station, finally occurred in early June of that same year. As a sixteen year old I fractured my spine along with other injuries. The fracture went undiagnosed for twenty years. In the meantime it became a source of extreme pain, often nearly crippling me. Because no one would, or could, tell me why I was in such pain I tried to ignore it.
That day in June, in the humid, stillness of the mobile home with no air conditioning in a swamp, as I lay on my couch dripping with sweat and naked, the pain became nearly unbearable. Then I remembered what I had read in Richard Buck’s COSMIC CONSCIOUSNESS about soldiers in battle who had been wounded. There, on the battle field, in immense pain, suddenly propelled into The Highest State of Consciousness their pain was no more. Identification with the body ceased and pure awareness became their ply frame of reference. Pure awareness cannot know pain. Pure awareness knows only love.
With this in mind I chose to surrender to the pain and deliberately allow it to wash over me. I ceased my resistance, my struggle to find comfort, and immediately found myself in bliss. Before my minds eye there appeared two visions. The first was an image of the earth from space. It was consumed by fire. Like the wick of a candle the earth was aflame. As it evolved it became composed of the human multitude as one passion for being. This passed slowly and then flashed out to become a bird’s eye view from a high place. The scene was a group of people far enough away that I could not see detailed faces. They were sitting in a grassy field in a shape like the earth aflame, tear shaped. I felt strongly this was a spiritual community, my personal connection to humanity. I immediately wanted to be there with them. It appeared to be in the Appalachia mountains.
The next day I gave one month notice I was leaving the radio station. The owner, my boss, responded “you can’t leave now. You’ll kill us.” I waited one week, put a few pieces of clothing in a box, snatched up my faith and walked out the door.
In the next installment I’ll tell you about Larre.
