59. The Dark Side and The Light

I woke this morning to the soft roar of rain on the leaves of the trees outside my window and the thrummimg of raindrops on my bedroom roof. When I got up and looked out, the brilliant colors shocked me awake – stunningly beautiful autumn leaves of red and deep yellow and coral-pink, drifting down, settling softly onto the grass and rain-pools on the pavement. I have come here from California where I lived on the east shore of the San Francisco Bay. There are no seasons by the Bay, just beautiful spring and summer weather all year. Now I am here in Oregon, a strange new land that astonishes me every waking moment. In the travels of my younger days, I lived on the East Coast, the Southwest and the Midwest, so I have seen colors, but never anything so breathtaking, almost heart stopping. I have seen red and gold but never, ever, pink.

This is a beautiful place, and I am surely blessed and grateful to be here. But getting here was a horror far beyond my wildest imagining. Something I never thought could happened to a strong, intelligent independent woman like me, did happen. Something that is happening to millions of older people everywhere in this country and in the world.

Scan this story from today’s news.
“Retired pilot went to the hospital. Then his life went into a tailspin. Many older people are one medical emergency away from a court-appointed guardian taking control of their lives.” – The Washington Post:
https://apple.news/AzXoOX4xdSUyivNtOcOS8TQ

If you want to hear my story, you may ask me for a link, but all you really need to know is that one day. the 2nd of May, I was suddenly physically taken from my home by a blood relative I had only met once before, flown to Washington where I was held, fed, and cared for like a animal in a kennel for 81 days. He soon returned to California, cancelled my apartment’s rental lease, and had all of my possessions hauled away by 1-800-GotJunk. Clothes, furniture, household things, books, and about 30 years of my personal journals. Everything I had in this world was gone, and he made me pay him for it, about $1,120. I pleaded with him not to do this, since my rent was already paid for the next month, but he insisted it must be done as soon as possible, and I must pay him for doing it. He convinced me to give him my car, and sold it immedistely for quick cash, at about 1/3 of its value. He said that God had told him to do these things to me.

What followed was nearly 3 months of confinement in shell-shock, confusion, disorientation, inescapable fear, helplessness and despair. I pretended a superficially cheerful personality, afraid to resist, cooperating and trying to comprehend. I had nowhere to go, and since I have a disability, pain and neuropathy in my legs, I could not run, or even walk, away. I lived in a 24 hour inescapable overwhelm of PTSD-like depressions, anxiety, and psychological trauma that I would come to call “The Terrors.”

Why it matters: Primarily because I came terrifyingly close to being trapped in a terminal-care locked nursing ward and left to die, the same place where this person sent my brother (his father) where he died 2 years ago. By the mercy of God and the enormous help of a loving niece in Portland, in late July I escaped. I have a safe place to live now, and after a painfully rocky few months, I have begun to heal and begin the work of recovering from the emotional and physical damage that this traumatic experience caused. My confidence has been shattered, and my body has been weakened and atrophied by the months of being immobilized in a small room with only a bed and a TV. I understand now what mental-health means, and I know that anyone can be seriously damaged and emotionally crippled, unable to help themselves or even to think clearly.

In my thirties I studied graduate psychology, and I have always been fascinated by how the Universe/ Spirit/ God/ the Great Consciousness uses any and all of us to bless or to challenge each other. We are thrown together in the most incredible ways, and all of it has meaning and value, though we may not see it for decades or maybe not ever. Yet all the billions of small parts fit together in an unseen symmetry and perfection that is beyond our capacity to comprehend with only a conscious, limited, mortal brain. I believe that the Greater Mind, the “still small voice within” is the potential greater self of each of us. We are more than we know, and we have all come here to learn who and what we truly are.

We are not equipped with the power to understand, in this form, and yet it is marvelous to be here in this amazing place, surrounded by so much beauty and joy and sorrow and love where every day, every moment is a potential adventure beyond imagining. And so here we are.

I can still remember a day in September when I was 18, a freshman at the University of Texas in Austin, sitting on the bank of Waller Creek. I remember lying back on the grassy riverbank looking up at the green trees and intense deep blue sky, and thinking “My God the world is so beautiful, I cannot understand why anyone would want to fight wars and scrabble for money and power when there is all this beauty for free!” And I still don’t understand why anyone could choose that instead.

I have lived almost 60 years since then, and learned from my adventures and mistakes that the dark side of humanity is also part of “the tapestry,” as they say. Just as the dark sky is necessary for us to see the stars, even though they were always there in the daylight, some darkness and pain, some tragedy, despair and loss are necessary in the world where we live in this form, in order for there to be another choice.

If everything were perfect and there were no other choices, there would be no opportunities to make mistakes and learn things “the hard way,” as my dad used to say. If we were never challenged, we would never learn and we would never grow. As far as I can tell, it looks like learning and growing are the whole reason for being here. I get it. The dark experiences are the price we pay for the opportunities to experience the joy.

This has been a crushingly devastating and almost Biblical “Job-like” experience for me, and I did not think I would live through it. But I am still here, and so are you. Whatever happens, I can care about you, and you can care about me. That’s the way it works.

58. Thou Shalt Not Be Perfect

Rule number one of the game of life: “Thou shalt not be perfect.” We are meant to make mistakes, to fail, to stumble and fall, some of the time. This is the main way we learn, anything. How to walk, who we are, how life works, what God is. My first conscious wondering about things like life and God happened when I was10. I wrote about it in the book:

“It was the summer I was ten years old and the warm lazy days flowed along so easy and carried me with them and there was plenty of time. That was when I first started to look at the world around me and to notice things beyond the end of my own nose. Sometimes when I was by myself I climbed up into the little pear tree and sat in the branches and wondered about things like life and God.
I’d be wondering about what God was, but then I’d notice a perfect green pear I could pick, so I did. And I ate the pear and it was warm from the sun, and crunchy and sour and sweet at the same time, and the juice ran down my chin and I forgot all about God. Everything was good, and God was taking care of it, and that was enough for me.”

As I get older (and yes, wiser) I find myself wondering again what God is. The only answer I get from the cosmos is that this is one of a number of things that a mortal mind is not sufficient to contain. I’ve read in New Thought “You are one of the infinite ways God expresses the world.” (I.e. you are God.) Oh how I want to believe this, to have a deep and strong and fearless faith. But being only human, this seems beyond my simple will of choice. Like all the truths Jesus taught, Simple but not easy. I have a hard time accepting the precept that I am God, by any standard.

As the species I call “God’s most risky experiment,” we all stagger toward a light that is invisible. I have concluded that we just don’t have a big enough mind for all of Godstuff, so there are things we are kindly not given to know, because they would probably be more than we could bear. But today in my meditation time, a message came, as unexpected truths sometimes do, and almost always flip a common belief or perception upside down and inside out. It said what God is.

“God is you at play in the world.”

And it also addressed the deep unspoken fear that has been haunting me these days but didn’t dare to ask, as I see my life winding down to its final chapters.

“God is not afraid of death, because God knows it is impossible.”

Do what you will with this. I don’t claim any clear understanding of it, but I’ve learned along my path to share what I’m given, just in case. Somebody else might need it and understand, even though I may not.
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If you’d like to read Book-1 of Victory Is My Name
you can download the E-book for free here:
http://www.darkhorsepress.com/betareaders.html

57. When Friends Don’t Like Your Book

Someone who was my very best friend when we were children (Vivian in Book One, and our parents were close friends too) started reading the first book of my memoir trilogy, then stopped when she got to the hard parts. Almost a year later, at my second request, she did read the rest. She praised the writing style, but never commented about any of the content, the story itself. She’s a great person, very perceptive, brilliant really, professionally accomplished and financially successful. I wondered why she stopped. I wondered if these truths about me and my family, never told before but never secret either, had somehow put me into a new category. Not so simple as we were then. My life would be full of mistakes and flaws. I took a different path from hers, one that led to much less monetary success, but much more adventure and wild beauty, and I wouldn’t change any of it.

I think it must have been uncomfortable for her to read about what I went through, back then as a kid when my parents’ marriage was falling apart, and then as a young woman when my desolate marriage did also. It’s possible that my truth now was embarrassing or even repellent to her. But to her credit, she stuck it out, and eventually did read it, for me.

I am arguably the black-sheep, the po’ white trash of our peer group. She was probably shocked to learn the painful extent of my birthmother’s descent into alcohol when I was eleven, and me stealing food from the grocery store and the wilted-produce dumpster by the loading dock. I am not ashamed of those things.

In my long life since then, among my careers I was a caregiver in an always-overwhelmed hospital emergency room for two decades. I have seen other souls in trouble, thousands, from alcohol, drugs, or other traps and addictions. I know that people do what they can. I don’t blame my birthmother for her addiction. I know it was not her first choice for dealing with the hardships of her life that were so painful and so many. Now, older and wiser, I don’t devalue her for her mistakes, or devalue myself for taking whatever means I could to feed myself and keep my spirit alive, as a child and as an adult. My story gets rough at times, it isn’t all pretty, but there are some incredibly brave and beautiful times too.

Another longtime friend (Lois in Book Two) read the first two chapters of Book One for me when I asked her to be a beta reader and give me some feedback. She marked a few typos and said nothing more. No comments about content, or having found any sort of meaning in the story, though there was some, for sure. She didn’t “get it.” She too is someone who is well-established in the traditional model of success. She didn’t need it. But I reminded myself that this doesn’t mean that nobody will “get” my book, or that nobody will need it.

After my initial disappointment, I wondered, Why don’t these intelligent, kind, honest women get it? Why don’t they see anything meaningful here? And the answer that came from the Wiser Voice Within said, “Maybe it’s not so much that they can’t see, but that they don’t want to see.” 

So there it is. If your friends and family give you lukewarm or even chilly reviews, consider that they have baggage too, unknown to you, that may be as heavy as your own. Or – maybe they really are dumber than a rock, and have no literary intelligence whatsoever. (The first one is much more likely than the second, though both are often found.) I know only too well– The truth is dangerous, and often painful. As I look back from a distance now, one possibility seems embarrassingly obvious:

Maybe these friends don’t want to know the person that I really am, or who I was back then, unknown to them. They want me to be forever the person they knew, or thought they knew, back when.

Victory Is My Name is not about that. Victory is an adventure tale, a mystery story, and a love-letter to Life. As for myself, telling the truth has set me free. I love this latch-key kid from the not-so-great side of town. I admire her resourcefulness, her survival instincts, her courage and grit. I respect the young woman she became who tried so hard to do things right and then was used and abused for her innocence. I respect her courage in breaking away, more than once, from everything she had, and the sheer ferocity with which this least-likely darkhorse sought the most brave of dreams, and got there.

And I respect my absent alcoholic birthmother just as much, who did her best even while her life fell apart and the trap of alcohol made everything so much worse. The truth is, millions of good people have made the same mistakes. I know, as you know, that even now these things are still happening to many of us, and we hide it in some sort of undeserved shame.

When you write your truth, no matter what it is, you’re going to find that some of your friends or family may not like it, may not be able to embrace it, or even accept it. This is not your fault, or theirs either. And this is not a reflection of your writing’s value and worth to the waiting world. To write from Life is a calling. It’s not a job, not a beauty contest. It may cost you some things that are more comfortable in life. Write anyway. Tell your truth anyway. You know you must. And share it whenever and wherever you can.

Traditional storytellers, Nonfiction narrative and memoir writers of the world: Take courage, take faith, and take honest pride in your gift. Not everyone will want it, so don’t harbor any regrets for the ones who don’t. You aren’t here to do it for them, but for your own spirit’s calling. Write for the many more who do need it, who have made mistakes while honestly seeking life, just like you.

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Victory Is My Name, Book One: The Burning Barrel is available in paper or e-book worldwide.
Paperback 288 pgs   ISBN#  978-0-9841730-9-9 https://www.indiebound.org/book/9780984173099
E-book   ISBN#  978-0-9841730-4-4 https://books2read.com/u/bpDAE9
Read a sampler: http://www.darkhorsepress.com/sampler-victory.html

56. Faith

Faith is the power-source of human life, belief is the catalyst that sparks action, and action is the generator of our physical lives and our wider world. Belief produces feelings, and feelings create emotions, and emotions generate either action or the failure to act. Basically, we human beings think and feel our way through life.

Whatever we are taught or learn by watching others in the first 12 years of our lives, forms the permanent subconscious core beliefs that will direct the rest our lives, unless and until we somehow come to recognize them and question them in conscious reality. Even though they were probably intended “for our own good,” they are often untrue or unfair, and and can hold us hostage for life. They very likely may need changing, and this is very hard to do, because the roots are invisible or camouflaged, and they go so deep.

In the first 13 years of my life I was mostly taught not to believe in myself, not to ask for too much, and not to hope. I know now, that this was not unusual. Depending mostly on those early learnings, some of us believe that we can do things, and some believe that God will do things for us. Both are true. Whatever we believe and expect, and either desire or fear, tends to show up in our lives, even though we are not consciously aware of what we are believing.

Most of us, most of our lives, don’t really know what our deepest-held beliefs actually are. They were programmed into the hard-drive of our subconsciousness early in our childhood, before we were able to recognize and select our best truths. Most of us honestly, innocently still carry a personal load of well-intentioned but often damaging beliefs we learned as children.

Most parents teach us the best they know about life. As we live our own lives, we learn more. But until we learn and make the conscious decision to change, our lives will follow the template we’ve been given. We can’t change it until we discover and recognize what false or limiting beliefs we have been carrying unaware, and then begin to reconsider and replace the ones that have imprisoned our hopes and limited our faith. Faith in ourselves and our lives.

The miracle is that so many of us, even as children, somehow find a deeper truth than the surface reality, and hold onto that. There is an inner truth that is ours too, and it is stronger than we can even understand. This is real, and a gift given to each one. It has been called the soul, spirit, the God in us, the Christ within, the inner Counselor, the Buddha nature, the still small voice, and many other names through eons of time. Whatever it is, whether we believe in it or not, it’s there. It guides us by intuition, synchronicity, intercessions of grace, and if we listen, the voice of authentic Self. It is always present, always available, but if we don’t listen, we will not hear. If we don’t dare to believe, we will not change.

Believing is the hard part. Letting go of the assumptions and rules you’ve automatically lived your life by and set your path by up until now. What “everybody” does. You have an infinite number of choices, but only if you know it.

The New Thought teaching says “The point of power is now.” In any present moment, all options are open; all things are possible. You can change your life for the better, but it takes great courage to step off the edge of your comfort zone into the unknown. Without the help of faith, nobody has that kind of courage.

54. Why Kids Kill

I usually try to aim my posts toward something hopeful, positive, and a bit uplifting or inspiring. But there are times when we will all have to face realities that are tragic and destructive, and take a position for what is right. This is one of those times.

I sent a similar letter to Whoopi Goldberg and The View, 9 years ago after the Sandy Hook massacre, and also to some news reporters and legislators and other publicly known people who claimed to oppose “bullying.” They ignored it. Now the brain-disease of pre-programmed subconscious violence has spread worldwide. What about you? Will you still refuse to read this, even caring people as you are? Still refuse to notice the truth, so glaringly clear, right in our faces? 

If we can’t see the elephant in the room, it’s because it has already swallowed us, and we didn’t notice. Please read and see this truth, which once seen, is a clear and obvious explanation of what’s happening all over the country and the world, and offers the only path to end it.

Basic facts we must recognize. 

1. We the adults of the pre-techno-fantasy generation created the wildly uncontrollable violence and mass-murders in the world.
2. How? By giving children video murder-games instead of human contact as a means of early-learning socialization, the child’s natural learning what life is supposed to be. 
3. Almost all of children’s video games are relentlessly programming and quietly brainwashing the users with the subconscious mindset that brutal assault, murders, and massacres for little or for no reason are normal, ordinary, and fun.
4. This training commonly starts at age 5, when the human brain is learning its basic concepts that will become their core-beliefs for their lifetime. From video-games they learn, and subconsciously BELIEVE for life: “Whoever kills the most, wins.” Then in any crisis, this automatically evokes their “normal” response to a real or imaginary, physical or psychological, threat or danger.
5. It’s hopelessly self-defeating to blame cities or cops for not being able to protect us from ourselves. Though they may not all be blameless, neither are we. There can never be enough police to cover every person on earth; we must take some responsibility for our own lives. 

90% of all network TV content is violent and gruesome, and children are bombarded with it from an early age, right at home. There’s no escape. Commercials for anything and everything are full of explosions and fires and brutal sex scenes, even actual acts of sexual assault, to sell cellphones or cars or movies. There’s even a commercial for a children’s sugary cereal where one cereal bit murders and then cannibalizes all of its friends.

As thousands of hours of horrific violence have poured into our living rooms and into our children’s unresisting minds, millions of us have just looked the other way. A friend of mine who is a really fine kind and compassionate person, has 4 young boys who all play video games. She said “It’s just pretend- they know it’s not real.” But in fact, statistically, neurologically, they DON’T know it’s not real. They can’t, because in fact, every normal healthy brain (at any age) is unable to distinguish between physical reality and vivid images. This is a medically established scientific fact. All input goes onto the same “hard-drive” of the brain with equal status. We can never decrease crime while we are allowing so many hours of our kid’s conscious learning to be focused on violence and murder, all day, every day. Please just for a minute, think about this.

American children (by statistics) usually begin this psychological terrorist-training at about age 5, exactly the time when every child is first learning what life is supposed to be like, and their core-values for the rest of their lives are being formed. It’s convenient for hardworking parents to give kids, even toddlers, colorful cartoon video games on tablets and cellphones, and it gives the adults some break-time. But the result has been a whole generation of kids, now turning into teens and young adults, who have practiced committing thousands of murders and hundreds of massacres without any sense of wrong or guilt, and without consequences. They truly, literally do not have any solid sense of reality or death. In what they’ve been taught to believe was reality, the murdered people come back to life as soon as the player pushes the reset button. And they, the player, control everything. 

This insidious false belief has penetrated the basic core beliefs of millions of people who are unaware of it. They have been “socialized” (the psychology term for a child’s basic learning process) by illusions that to them seem completely real, and this is what “real life” is, for them. This set of beliefs doesn’t show on the outside except in cases of bullying or outright violent attack. By then it’s much too late. A few weeks ago, a 5-year-old one day simply shot and killed his 3-year-old sister with a loaded handgun he found at home. 

No one ever dreamed this would happen. I have to ask you, WHY NOT? How can we still be so unaware that we ourselves have created this astonishing explosion of crime and violence? By allowing, even helping, our children become so efficiently brainwashed and effectively taught to be bullies, terrorists, and casual killers? For these kids, it IS normal. On every movie and newscast they see spectacular insane acts, and these become the celebrities that they have for primary role-models. It’s too late to change what we have already created. Millions of these kids are damaged for life.

We can never control the pandemic of crime and mental illness with more police or more laws, because these guiltless killers have been casually breaking all laws as a daily habit in their hours of practice of  legal video murder-games. Donald Trump showed them that the way to be a winner is to lie the loudest, rob the most people, kill the most, and get away with it. That’s the “winner’s edge” and millions of young people believe this, unconsciously but absolutely, and they see proof everywhere. The stars of every newscast are the perpetrators, the criminals, the murderers. 

There is no way to stop this on the surface, with punishment after the crimes are committed, and the innocent are dead. We have to start at the root cause. The police (though human and flawed too) didn’t make kids, or anybody else, lawless and violent. The mental programming did that, set that up, and has been spread and supported by corporate media and money, and we are STILL LETTING THIS HAPPEN. The murder reports always say “police are looking for a motive. THERE IS NO MOTIVE! Crime and killing have become so common, everyone assumes “that’s just the way it is.” What we have here is a problem whose root cause we are overlooking completely, not even trying to stop crime and violence where it starts, in the minds of the innocent who trust us to show them how to be. 

Disrespecting and protesting against law and law-enforcement only puts more fuel on the fire. These games that actively kill everybody for “fun” also kill police officers. Decent cops are leaving the career in droves. Just imagine yourself having to shoot a kid because he has just murdered some people, and is shooting and killing your fellow officers and you? How gut-wrenching that must feel?

These kids, like Donald Trump, are living in the delusion that life/reality is a video game, where they are the only one who matters, the player, who can do anything. That’s not reality, but it’s what they have been mentally programed to believe. Trump is an extreme example of the delusional psychotic sociopath. He really believes that he is always right, and somehow justified in killing. This is the delusional mindset that allowed a teenager to shoot and kill kindergarten children at Sandy Hook, and many more to murder their classmates at the growing number of high schools and middle schools. This is the same mentality that makes so many people demand the right to keep on killing innocent people by deliberately knowingly spreading the deadly covid virus. They insist that the Constitution guarantees them the freedom to kill an unlimited number of people, because that is their chosen pursuit of happiness. This too is clearly insane, but it’s still happening, and is totally supported by the Republican party. How can this be? How can we not see it?

Silence gives consent. Are you going to keep on tuning it all out? And saying nothing? And doing nothing? And taking no responsibility for what we as a nation and a species are doing not only to our governments and our planet’s environmental life, but to the innocent minds of kids?

Standing against the widespread popularity of crime against humanity will not be popular. Massive opposition will come from the rapidly growing big-money “Gaming” industry. One East Coast college actually announced new scholarships in gaming. Not inventing, but just skill in PLAYING murder-games. 

In these hard times, fantasy as a way of life is becoming more and more addictive. Human beings are escaping into non-reality by the millions. This mindset of violence and killing is out of control. Millions of people can’t be saved, it’s too late. And we have made “mental illness” the “get-off-free” card. To me, that is NOT okay, especially when so many now are taking that path knowingly, as an easy escape from justice. When cold-blooded killers like the teen mass-attacker in Wisconsin get off as “not guilty” for a crime that the whole world saw him commit, that is a death-sentence for justice.  

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Please don’t allow your children to practice mass murder and destruction as a game of skill and fun. It goes goes directly into their innocent minds, plants deep seeds for a lifetime, that we don’t see until it’s too late. It may already be too late for this generation, and many of the ones who are caught in it but don’t want to kill, are now committing suicide in stunningly large numbers.

Christmas is at hand. Remember whose birthday it is, and please, Think about this. Don’t give your children weapons or terrorist training for Christmas.