The Last 2 Years

All There Is To Life is Work I Hate and Fucked-Up Relationships

My oh My, You Know It Just Don’t Stop

The death of my nephew, age 30, on 1^st September 2004 blew me to smithereens. Not, I hasten to add, because I was particularly close to him – I wasn’t – but I think there was something physical/genetic going on. Many other people die on a daily basis and I scarcely register it in my being, but his death registered big style. His death was my death – almost.

Shortly after he died, I was blasted by a sort of massive live wire. [The only other reference I’ve ever found to this “live wire” is in the writings of U.G. Krishnamurti (if you know of any others, please tell me)]. This huge electrical cable of shakti quite literally blew away parts of my mind. The “mind” is a tricky thing to define (and people disagree). It wasn’t that my functioning mind disappeared – I could still speak, write, read etc., - but some remaining remnants of ego-mind got blasted away, is one way I could describe it, resulting in a wholesale avalanche in my Being.

I saw quite clearly that death was final. It has taken me almost two years to confidently assert what I “saw”, because from my perspective this is just too good to be true! There is an end to all this shit! It has also taken me two years because others have since asserted that I may have been wrong, reincarnation blah blah. Others have said that it may be true for me that death is the end, but it may not be the case for them and others. This latter is possibly true – but I actually don’t think so.

For I also saw quite clearly that all ideas of reincarnation were only an ego-conceit: another trick of the ego to fool itself that it is important etc. That was one huge piece that also got blown away – my ideas of my own self-importance. Not that I had been necessarily arrogant, only that somewhere deep in my psyche I had been convinced I was important, special in some small way, with even a “mission” to complete. All garbage! However one may or may not function in this material world, we are no more important (as U.G. also says) than anything else on the planet, from the ants to the trees.

I saw that whoever I was, awake or not, clever or not, whatever – I was not (of course) immune to just being treated by life as any other ordinary person. I had already “got” this on some levels in the previous 3-4 years, but this blasting really brought it home to me.

My body went insane. I don’t know how else to express that. My body was insane at living here and suffering all of this for no reason whatsoever. The utter meaninglessness of it all was revealed and experienced. But, worse, the fact that I was going to have to continue to experience this painful, meaningless suffering for possibly many more years to come, for nothing. Now that is insanity.

My mind, sensibly, thinks of nothing more than suicide most days now. But my “mind” also got very, very much over those few months that it was not in control of anything. And so although sensible thoughts of suicide still arise, my body-being seems to not want to do anything about it.

Another part of my ego-mind that got blasted away was a self-protective piece: experiencing death so close at hand, and knowing its inevitability in a whole-being way (not just intellectually) totally reversed some of my survival strategies. Now, instead of running away from scary situations, I walk right into some. Even being murdered doesn’t seem such a big deal now – it would be scary, but so would wasting away with some degenerative disease in an old people’s home.

Around that time (September – November 2004) I also got catapulted away from my life in Swansea, where I’d lived for 12 years, and thrown into a new job, place and situation in the north-east of England. I’m from there originally, and my two sisters already live up here, and I had spoken of moving back from time to time. However, I certainly made no mind decision to move back during those months: it either was totally out of my control or you could say being-body decided to move.

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I arrived in the North-East at the end of December 04, already traumatised from the past years of spiritual seeking, various initiations and revelations, their integration, then “2^nd birth” awakening in 2001 concurrent with two years of being stalked by someone who wanted to murder me (but who ended up committing suicide himself) and the events post awakening into the non-separateness of it all - to yet more rude awakenings and intense suffering. It seems to never stop.

To begin with, the weather was absolutely freezing compared with Swansea and my body was shocked by it. Then my new job was (and still is) an utter nightmare for all sorts of reasons I can barely bear to go into (from the utter boredom of it all). Suffice to say I had taken a post as Chief Officer of a small voluntary organisation, and when I arrived (unbeknownst to me from the interview of course) the organisation was in a right mess, with 8 members of staff having walked out the previous year and a current complement of staff who were largely untrained, had been recruited casually, and who were looking to me to literally be their saviour. And mother.

Then, I was in a strange town (South Shields), with no friends either at work or outside of work – and the natives didn’t seem very friendly. I didn’t know my way around geographically at all, didn’t even know where the nearest supermarket was.

I’ve lived alone for some years now, so had no partner or husband to share the difficulties or lighten the load in any way. My two sisters, who live up here, gave me some support - one in particular, whilst my other sister was herself traumatised, of course, at the death of her son, and was needing support and comfort from me, which I could barely give. Anyway, what could I say? I felt I couldn’t tell her what I’d experienced, as that was the last thing she wanted to hear, as it was far from comforting. I also felt more traumatised than she was – or at least more conscious of my traumas – but that was difficult to explain to her. I wasn’t more traumatised than she was at the loss of her son, to be sure, but just more traumatised by life and everything I’d already gone through.

She had become involved in all sorts of “spiritual” things whilst her son was ill and her interest intensified after he died. Oh boy. I found I had to (or I did) bite my tongue about it all, because 99% of it was complete bullshit so far as I was concerned. But what could I do? I didn’t have the heart at the time to rip away what she was clinging onto. So I kept quiet, but this made my relationship with her increasingly difficult.

I was physically fucked – worn out by the blasts and the revelations that had accompanied them; worn out by the actual physical move and being forced so soon into a new, highly-pressurised job, working many more hours and under more intense conditions than my last job; having to find my way around unknown streets in the dark and cold. And all these strange people who didn’t know me, let alone like me. And my two sisters, who actually, I came to discover, didn’t know me that well in a whole load of important ways. For one thing, I’d never told either of them much about my whole awakening process over the past ten years or so.

Every stone had been upturned, it felt, and the Disorientation was immense.

Around January/February 2005 I experienced what felt like an earthquake in my whole body and being – literally. My body and the ground were shaking in enormous ways and at the same time, as I came forward yet more into embodiment, I experienced what felt like a sort of heart attack and then later what felt like a stroke on the right side of my body. Luckily, there were no ongoing medical symptoms of a heart attack or stroke – well, I never got them checked out by a doctor anyway. The fact that there had been an earthquake and tsunami that winter in Thailand and surrounding areas didn’t escape my notice. Was I experiencing the reverberations from that earth-event, or was this my own personal earthquake and tsunami?

More than anything I was PISSED OFF in extremis. My whole body, mind, being were PISSED OFF in one MASSIVE way. To have all this happen after all I’d already been through. Give me a fucking break! But no break came…

And there was scarcely a drop of sympathy or support to be found anywhere. Instead, all I had were people wanting my attention, my care, my sympathy, and my hard work. But nothing coming back. Everyone I knew in my life seemed to be going through such a hard time that no one had any time left for anyone else other than themselves.

I’m still struggling hard to express adequately one other thing that has manifested: the simultaneity of criticism. In other words, I now see almost everything I criticise others of is also true of me, either now, or some time in the past – or presumably even some time in the future. Is this because of non-separateness? It’s a mind-blower indeed. Yet the criticism of others (and receiving a lot of criticism from others) continues. Anyone who knows this dynamic and can express this more clearly – please let me know! (I love good expressions of my Reality).

My attitude to health and eating has also changed : I have barged my way through various and many ailments (including the above-mentioned “heart attack” and “stroke”), never consulting a doctor (I’m not saying I’ll never go to a doctor again, only that I haven’t these past two years). I don’t want to be fixed. I-body don’t want invasive, violent treatment of any kind. And I’m also on a partial suicide mission to get out of here, so why do I want to be “cured”. Ironically, I think one reason I-body wanted to move up here was to get future support from my two sisters as I get older and more frail. But now I actually fear their interference should I fall ill – they will try and force me to take all sorts of treatments and cures that I DON’T WANT.

It is like there’s a price to pay for every “revelation” given to you. The near-death experience I had in 2004, and all it revealed and entailed, simultaneously has catapulted me and plunged me further forward into (this dreadful) life. My body is contorted and pressurised every day by the twisted, unawake and unembodied transmission of most people around me – and the crazy mind-laden workload I’m supposed to cope with. I spend many evenings lying in agony on my couch after a day at the office. Any ideas of meeting anyone even vaguely on my wavelength have almost disappeared: it’s now two years down the line and I haven’t met anyone I could even seriously contemplate becoming friends with.

Recently things have “blown up” between my sisters and I eventually “came out” to both of them by sending them my God to Gateshead essay. What comes of this I’ve yet to find out, but I got to a point where I could hold back no longer. This feels a very scary thing to have done – as I risk losing or alienating one or both of them (the only “support” I have here). Once again, I find myself totally alone in an alien and hostile environment with little or no support. But it also sort of feels good – I just couldn’t take the pretence anymore.

And, to those few of you out there who have even the faintest idea of what I’m talking about, you’ll know this account is only scratching the surface of the daily ordeals we go through. Ironically, there is also a feeling of “my life is no worse than anyone else’s”. It is just more conscious, physically more painful, and I have no more ways of deluding myself that things are ever going to get better.

Essays by Colleagues