-Since I was a child I kept having the sense there was another side to things, something missing. I kept looking for this but was distracted by the socialization process I went through. This process was not just parents, but everyone and everything I met. There is a general cultural myth you are taught to fit in, and you are considered a bit touched in the head if you think otherwise. Even though our religions and cultural past is full of stories telling us this “other thing” is there, we aren’t supposed to really believe it.

-I spent most of my childhood learning to be what others thought I should be and feeling they did not care what I wanted. I felt empty, unimportant, and afraid to share what I really thought lest I be mocked. Being fat and depressed this was a worry of mine. Children like to be accepted and validated, but there was no room for much of what happened to me. It is not that I resented being trained to fit into society, but it seemed the training was the only thing available, no human in the mix. There was also little acceptance for when I would find myself transfixed, like life had stopped, and I was in the feeling of “something.” Other times I would suddenly shift out of my normal internal discussion and become very present, feeling a still silence inside, waiting for a voice, but there was only the silence.

-By the time I was 18 I saw life as finding the proper social role to play, submitting my needs and desires to gain acknowledgment and validation from others, the very same people who also played social roles and sought validation in those roles. I could see a life only of doing what was set before me; get a job, get a wife, have kids, test social bounds but never leave them, pile up a bunch of cash or debts, get old, reminisce, and die.  There did not seem any room for me, though I was not sure what this “me” was. What I called me was within the description of the socialization. Yet there was something else.

-One afternoon, when I was 18 I came home from school and found my mother dead. She had gassed herself by covering all the ventilation holes in the garage and turning on the car. As I stood six inches from her, staring at her face, shocked, I heard a loud crack, like a large dry branch snapping, on the right side of the vertebra lined up with my shoulder. Suddenly I was up on the ceiling, looking down on me, looking at her. There was silence, a waiting for something to be said, and then it was said. A soft, clear voice, not mine, not hers, still yet riveting, not really words, yet spoken clearly.

-“Is that all there is Doug, to be somebody's son, to be somebody's, husband, father, to work and then die?”

-The loud snap happened again and I was in my body looking at mom, stunned. I wheeled, opened the garage door to let air in, called my dad to tell him, and ran to the medical center to get help for my dead mother.

--This voice defined my life. Finding my mother was a shock, but that voice, that floating on the ceiling, that snap, had far more impact because there was no explanation to understand them. My life became an intense struggle. On the one hand I knew this voice, yet there was my life of  socialization which dismissed it. I tried many things, being a street person, LSD, stretching the bounds of social expectation, theology, ideas and opinions, being a bookkeeper learning logic and order  and becoming the role I would play. Yet I felt even worse. I still felt empty, yet knew there was something else, something I could not reach.

-When I was 40 I was still the same, just better at being stuck. I was invited to a nine day spiritual experience and I figured why not. On the second day I finished an anger release and as I calmed I sank inwards to a most peaceful place. Visually it looked like a light blue sky with thin wispy clouds all swirling together. It was the first peace I had ever felt. I floated in it for what seemed like eternity when suddenly a “force” swirled through the cloud right towards me. It stopped and vanished. I felt a hand softly caressing my cheek. I opened my eyes to see who it was. There was no one standing there, yet I felt the hand still slowly tenderly touching me. I asked “What is this?” Then that voice, that one by my mothers side, spoke. “You know who I am.” And then poured in the most amazing feeling, like eternity loved me, pouring into a body and psyche that felt irrelevant and unloved, flooding me as I began to shutter and convulse almost to the point of having a stroke. I survived, but now I knew, it was still here.

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