From Death to Life
an excerpt from a little bit of god
Sometimes a spiritual journey requires a descent into hell. So it has been for me. And yet . . .then I have been to hell twice. The first time in real experience, the second in remembrance. Maybe that's always how it has been. Maybe those who know of the "valley of the shadow of death" have been there, like me, to pick up their lost inner selves, the children within who were still trapped there. We never escape until every piece of us escapes. And we never make a clean getaway at the time. There's always the journey back.
There's a story in the east about a saint and one of his disciples. It is said that a saint will never leave his follower until the end of time, but a follower is perfectly free to leave his saint. This one had and proceeded to live such a life that, on the day of his death, he found himself in hell. His Master heard about it and dipped his thumb into the burning fire to cool it down enough so his follower could be rescued.
In a way it has fallen on me to do the same for my lost selves. Some part of me that I cannot really lay claim to has taken charge of the rescue operation and kept the temperature down low enough so that I could do what had to be done without further damage to myself. This greater Self has been responsible for bringing me to life. For that I am profoundly grateful.
My spiritual journey began l5 years ago. I say began, only in a manner of speaking, for what life is not a spiritual journey? My metamorphosis, then, began on a specific day, with a specific event. I was reading a volume of collected talks by a yoga Master. I had been reading this book for a few days, but on this day I quite suddenly became aware of the great love this Master had for humanity ‑‑ his message was filled with compassion, kindness and tenderness. This awareness did not come in an intellectual way; rather, I felt as though waves of love were beating against my chest, breaking down the walls surrounding my heart. I felt wave after wave of something that I had never felt before. It was painful, as my heart, previously virtually frozen, was forced to feel.
For a week, I held the book in my hands and wept. Then I knew that, until that experience, I had been one of the walking dead, living in a limbo world, neither really alive nor physically dead. I knew that love and life were synonymous, that without the one, the other did not exist.
I'm not claiming that ink on a page had miraculous powers ‑‑ I've since felt similar compassion and love for humanity vibrating from a taped talk by a Buddhist monk. Love emanates from the words and is present in the messages left by those who are filled with it. I was brought to life by the presence of love in the traces left by a saint.
Until then I had protected my heart from the absence of its necessary food by building thick walls around it and inside that airless environment, what should have been a fire of love ‑‑ my and every human being's natural birthright ‑‑ had been reduced to one glowing ember. I do believe that if that ember had been extinguished, my body would not have remained alive. But love provided the breath of life, and the pain of a heart awakening was intense.
From then on, love was present inside me, almost as a separate entity. I have been aware of it both from within and from without, as a physical sensation in my chest, every day. I have tried to nurture it, and I have watched it grow. Ultimately, I believe it was this love that led me to the story, the true story of my childhood. This story is more than just events, it is the emotional story of a heart deprived, of suffering, of loss, of horror, and of shame too intense to bear. Then it is the story of secrecy, of hiding, of covering up, of replacing the real self with a false one. (Don't call me by name. If I answer, I'm lying.) And then it is the story of shut‑down, of emptiness and depression. It is the story of psychological and cognitive adjustment and readjustment to a world too cruel to see squarely.
It is not a story that unfolded neatly from beginning to end, nor is it a story that can be told by one voice. The voice that you hear now is not the sole narrator of my story. Think of me as an explorer making forays into the depths of my own psyche, shining a light on stored sensations, pictures, emotions and thoughts, each associated and attached to a time and a place and a child that I was, then collecting and arranging and making sense of those living artifacts. I don't like the sound of that word, “artifacts.” No, not me -- someone who shares my body and mind rejects the word. Think of me then as undertaking a journey to the past, but being met constantly by smaller versions of myself travelling forward to greet me, offering their stories in small gestures, creating a journey backward and forward simultaneously. It has been in establishing communication between all these lost and hidden parts of myself that I have been able to recreate a whole self out of fragments, and re-enter the present, freed from the prison of the past.
One result of these multiple journeys has been these essays, each a collocation of the messages transmitted by voices of the past, wound together by me, the adult. Parts of these essays were told by child selves to me, other parts were told by me to them. And that is what my story is -- a telling of multiple tales by multiple selves to multiple selves, spinning unity out of multiplicity of experience, perception, and time.
The saints of the east say, and I believe it to be true, that it is the mind that separates us from our divine origin, from our soul. When the mind is twisted, we cannot experience our essential self. When it is twisted enough, we become the living dead. Ultimately, this is the story of one soul's ability, when fuelled by divine love and grace, to renew itself and create for itself a whole mind with which to experience itself. Like the journey into the underworld spoken of by so many mystics, it is a story of rebirth, a book of life.
Thank you for reading. The book, a memoir of recovery and discovery, is now available on Amazon.
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