Forward

During the thirty-nine years I have inhabited this body, I have lived mostly completely unconsciously. Almost completely reliant on a self created fiction to navigate through my seeming tumultuous life. I had only fantasy at most times because I would not accept my reality. When I was young my imagined self coped with the hardships and the contradiction to truth I had encountered. Through this writing I will convey what I have come to know through this journey.

At an early age my mother and I were mostly on our own. She had suffered from mental illness and was hospitalized many times. I was left with relatives sometimes and also with temporary foster care. I was left to live a very free, unsupervised adventure. There was lots of fun. There was also lots of fear and confusion. I was angry with the ambulance drivers, and police that often forcibly hauled my mother away in tears and screaming. I was confused by my mothers confusion. I was angry because she was so unstable. We often moved, she was always running. We lived in several different cities, usually we would move once per year. I did not set down ay roots nor did I bond with any of my playmates for long terms. It seemed like anything could happen at any time. At age nine my mother had met a man who owned a grain farm, co-incidentally, very near the farm she grew up on. They met in Calgary several hundred miles away from the farms they were raised on.

After a short period of time we all moved to the small city a short distance from these farms. Until this this time I had almost always lived in a larger city. A year later or so we moved out to my mother’s boyfriend’s farm. I was aghast. There was no electricity, no telephone, and no indoor plumbing. We heated our home with wood (it was way up north and cold in the winter) and we used an outhouse. There was no television. Now I think romantically of how I learned to live , but then it was a huge shock to me. We settled there on that farm for the next six years, my mother seemed to have a break from the instability, both mentally and financially. I was at the same school for that time too. I had by that time become quite unruly, behaviour wise. I was very conflicted and had a difficult time accepting the status quo even at that young age. I did not understand why my teachers would tell me what they said was the way of the world and it was obvious even to a nine year old boy that the world was mad.

I was often very isolated and begun to live in my head. It started as play, and then as my life and isolation became unbearable it was full fledged escapist fantasy. I developed a few friendships mostly with older children or adults. I wanted so bad to be anything that I wasn’t. To be anywhere, but where I was. I began to drink when I was 14 and there I found an escape a break from the painful fiction I felt trapped in. From there my life went down hill fast. I used drugs, became involved in theft to finance my alcohol and drugs. I was arrested by fifteen and was in and out of prison for the next nine years. I spent a total of six years actually in custody. Many days were dark there. I was a complete whirlwind. I made attempts (feigned) on my life. I fought with other inmates and was threatened by guards. During the short breaks between my incarcerations I was earnest in changing my life, however I was always apt to repeat what I was doing as long as I was trapped in my limited thought existence. I finally in 1991 stopped getting in trouble with the law. I was still in deep suffering and creating a lot of damage in the lives of the people I had relationships to.

This next period became my “mental illness” phase of life. I broke free from the confines of the common reality completely. Ironically this is what I work to do today. Yet then I was still angry, confused and using my old ways to achieve the results I was after. This “illness” was at times mystical and exhilarating. I was hospitalized many times over the next few years. Once as many as four times in one month. I wound up in 1994 in a skid-row hotel room, renting by the week. Drinking, living in complete chaos, I was fed up and was tired of trying to change and failing. One fall night I was half drunk, alone (really alone) and I swallowed a bottle of my psychiatric medication. I did not really want to die. I just wanted the suffering to end. I stumbled a few blocks to the hospital and told the staff there what I had done. They asked me to drink a thick slurry of ground charcoal as it would soak up the pills in my stomach. I wasn’t able to swallow it, so security held me down as they forced a tube into my nose and down into my stomach so the charcoal could be injected. I was in and out of consciousness. The next time I was aware I was back in my hotel room. I came to understand later that I had been released that night from the hospital. I was just in front of the emergency, outside starring up into sky, when some drinking companion came by and recognised me. He told me later that he had found me and took me back to my room. Even the hospital was unwilling to continue with my game. I had no place left. I seemed completely wrecked.

Shortly after that I moved in with a friend who had tried to help me before. I had some sort of shift. I began to work on myself. I stopped using alcohol and drugs. I began to be accountable and to change very slowly. I accepted help from others and started to truly open my mind. I became willing to change, I didn’t know at first how I would do it, but change I did. I did have a lot of help and support from some very caring people. I was very scattered and volatile for a long time afterward. I was hospitalized for a psychotic break a year after that last pill incident and I had been drug and alcohol free for that whole year. I then had a very long depression that lasted for about two years. I slowly grew out of it and ever deepened my attention to the real reality. The point of this historical remembrance and sharing it with you is to give you a context of my life drama and what I had created as my story of suffering. It is the past and does not really exist. All that exists is here and now.

I give these words and thoughts to stir your attention to that which has always been you. The Oneness.