College breakdowns

I was always interested in school.  I felt a compulsion and responsibility to do things as thorough as I could.  I liked being top of my class, and I felt confident in replacing my naivety with information.  I was still a quiet, mousy person, but bigger dreams were beginning to boil inside me.  I actually had to give a speech upon high school graduation, and was so frozen by the idea, I couldn't create an original one.  It meant to much to me, so I hid behind others' words.  I wasn't yet myself.  I was still trying to impersonate a regular person.

I seemed to want to know all of ancient history, as if there were secrets there I might decode and uncover.  I felt I had the technique for translation, I could read between the lines.  It was in my blood. One telling moment stands out in childhood when I picked up a book on ancient Egypt.  The idea that somehow the purpose of this civilization was lost to us in the modern era was extremely incorrect in my view.  I didn't know how I knew, but I was at once almost violently angry at the book and the scientists.  They were wrong, the connection between that era and this was still intact somehow, and came to me was an image of people, being born down the line from then to now, one to the other, the information living in us.

So when I got to college, of course I was an anthropologist, studying humans.  But I also could not continue my acting as one, it was becoming harder to just function and relax, I was overwhelmed.  I started to drink to numb my anxious emotions, my fear of self awareness.  Inwardly, I was trying to discover myself, outwardly I had no way to express it.  I also could not keep studying.  My brain began to rebel.  My self was getting stronger and more demanding.  It was like my true, real self was tired of playing a part, and wanted to be present, and wanted to be able to acknowledge what I knew.

The next memory that stands out in an almost forgotten blur of this period is the morning I found my first book.  I woke up, extremely hungover as usual, and went to drink a half gallon of orange juice to balance my system, but this morning my fridge was empty.  In desperate need, I drove to the nearby grocery, and on my way home, saw there was some huge community book sale happening.  I loved things like this, so I went into the cavernous warehouse and browsed around.  In the thousands of books, it was like seeing light for the first time, it glowed.  It was called Life after Life, I think.  How it glowed, was how my psychic eyes began to see what was valuable, and to guide me, and that was the first lesson.

Whereas before with my school books, when I would try to force my rebellious mind to obey and read, the words almost invisible in those texts, this book and every word was like a monument I could not ignore.  I had never seen words jump off the page like this.  It was about a subject I had been trying to understand since I was in high school, death, and what happens after.  It was like I wanted to look thru that pathway and see what was there.  In my scholastic upbringing, it was the only rational way I could find access to spiritual curiosity on my own.  And this book was first hand accounts of near death experiences, people who had communed on the other side and returned.

It would be several more years before I would find another book, but this was the first that helped to connect the reaching of my spirit to the extremely limited context of my mind.  People take for granted that everyone talks about the universe guiding them and to talk openly of ETs and past lives and auras.  That was not around just fifteen years ago, when I was trying to wake up.  It wasn't popular yet.  And I had to fight my way thru life to discover it for myself, which I realize now also made the journey extremely credible.