When I was 17 I wanted to become enlightened because I thought it was the thing to do. I really couldn't get that excited about anything else in life except a beautiful girlfriend and girlfriends were expensive. So I studied Computer Programming in College so I would have enough money to marry someone really amazing and beautiful and intelligent and spiritual and gifted like me.
However, life has a way of going ways completely unexpected. So, I remember being 20 years old and sleeping in my sleeping bag on top of my father's workshop in the desert between two skylights about 15 feet off the ground up on the roof. I looked up into the crystal clear summer night sky and realized that when I looked forward through the next 10 years of my life I would rather be dead or do anything else than what I saw coming for me. So in desperation I decided that I was advanced enough to project my soul out of my body and just not come back. (At the time I didn't think "partly because I was only 20" about what this would do to my parents, relatives and friends"). So anyway out of desperation I projected myself out of my body intending never to come back. However, I was intercepted somewhere between earth and the stars by Angels (likely my Archangel friends from childhood and beyond). And they said to me, "This simply will not be allowed. You must go back into your body. However, we will give you a gift. You will experience your body like it is a car you drive and you will no longer feel imprisoned by it like you did before. This will lessen the impact of what you sense is coming. And by doing this we think you will choose to stay alive and do what we sent you to do here on earth."
So, as I was forced back into my body I noticed my body felt different. It was a reference point much like a car that you drive to get somewhere but that I didn't have to be just in my body I could be multiple places at once. So even though I was really upset to be back on earth and having to face a daunting 20s I knew that there was at least a good chance that I would now survive my 20s despite what I would have to face that I could see coming and feel coming in my future. I also thought that whatever was so important to stuff me back in my body by Archangels must be important enough for me to try to endure my life on earth through my 20s. And I did. Barely.
So, by 30 I had been excommunicated from my church one year later at age 21 for being too 1960s and a part of the social revolution of our times. My girlfriend broke up with me that I had intended to marry that had gone with me for 2 years and could not speak to me because she wasn't allowed to by my religion.There were about 25 girlfriends who kept me alive so I didn't commit suicide by their love, friendship and kindness towards me and about 4 years later my live in girlfriend got pregnant.
And then my son came along and before he was born I married. Because of my son I had good reason to stay alive a long long time now to make sure he was raised right. My first wife and I married at age 26 (she 21) and stayed together for 4 years (married 3). And at 30 I was a single Dad raising my son. But then my life changed from age 32 to 37. I married a lady my own age with 2 kids from her first marriage and the 5 of us had a really amazing 5 years home schooling our kids in the Wilderness on 2 1/2 acres at 4000 feet with a beautiful view of Mt. Shasta. This time of spiritual growth and home schooling our kids and of travels to Idaho and Canada and India and Nepal and Thailand was a dream come true and washed away all the difficulties of my 20s. And this five years was topped off with my father dying (if you haven't experienced this it was really awful) and a 4 month journey to India and Nepal and the Kalachakra Initiation with the Dalai Lama and 500,000 others in native dress from all Tibetan Buddhist countries in Bodhgaya. Then going to Dharmsala, India (where the Dalai lama lives in the Himalayas) with a Tibetan Lama friend we met in Santa Cruz, California by train from Patna, through Benares, Agra(the Taj Mahal) and even more amazing experiences. And then being sent to Rewalsar (Tsopema) a Padmasambhava holy place near Mendi in Himchal Pradesh State of India. This was 1985 and 1986. This amazing time of studying with Tibetan Lamas and Native American Medicine men which I found in attitude to be very similar in some ways was the most amazing time of my life. I had my health. I had a good family. The kids were young enough to travel and we intuitively lived our lives until the oldest was 12 and then we bought a business on the Northern California Coast because the California Coast is very expensive to live on and because the kids wanted to be in a regular school again through junior High and High School and into college.
So, I guess what I'm saying is that even if you look at your life and wish you could just leave it you might just need to stay to do what you came here for. And maybe the best is yet to come!
Note: When my father passed away I was completely unprepared for it affecting my life so completely. I realized I wasn't mature enough to keep my marriage together with my father gone and I was really horrified at this. I had thought (wrongly so) that my father's passing would only make my wife and I closer. Instead the opposite thing occurred. I think now that middle aged crazy(the fear of nearing death) triggered by my Dad's death (I'm next!) took me to a very difficult place. And it wasn't until I almost died of a heart virus at age 50 that I learned to be grateful for every day of life as if it were your last. Because it just might be!
Without this experience I would have never started writing online. Because in the "Heart Room" where 30 to 50 people on gurneys (stretchers with wheels) waiting for angiograms (like me) or electrical heart stimulation (like me) or open heart surgery (not me) waiting and we all wondered if that day was our last. After that every day was a good day if I was alive and with my wife and family. Five or Six months after this doctors told me one day that I wasn't going to die. Whoopee!
Unfortunately, my wife's mother had passed away a month before and her stepmother had passed away the month before that and her mother passing away and me almost dying had cost my wife a miscarriage. So I came out of almost dying into another problem. My wife no longer wanted to live for herself at all. However, since she was a trooper she stayed alive for her 3 year old daughter and me even though she was pretty angry at life (and at times I was the scapegoat) for a couple of years.
But all in all my forced retirement at age 50 has created the most pleasant 12 years in my life since I was 18 years old. It's true I don't have the health that I had in my 30s but life has been so much more amazing than I ever could have believed at this age until I actually experienced it. Life can be completely unexpected in a really good way. Be open to it!
No comments:
Post a Comment