1975: Portrait of the artist as a young dog

It isn’t often that I enter into a spiritual experience in the middle of an article. In this one I settled into an expanded sense of myself with the same ease with which one might settle into a warm bath. Not a major event, but quite startling.

Since my sudden flash of recognition of what Archangel Michael wanted from me – by way of co-creative partnership, which he extends to all, not just me (1) – I’ve felt myself continually expand. Day by day.

I’ve taken strong and firm stands on some things I’ve tolerated for … decades. I’m having insights into my own and other’s behavior which I’ve never had before.

[Spiritual experience starts here.] [Italics are mine.]

It’s a little like I’m a balloon and I’m being inflated little by little from the inside out. [I’m actually describing the experience.] Every day I feel more of me present. That’s as close as I can come to describing the experience.

I feel myself expanding as I look deeper into what is happening in this moment.

Observing it, I see that, in the process, I’m healing from all the “should’s” and “do’s” and “don’t’s” I’ve grown up under. Part of what I’m emerging from – and it’s happening as we speak – is the dampening effect of these strictures.

And with that, I feel predominant elements of my everyday feeling state becoming visible. [End of notes.]

***

I see that I have an always, already-present element of despair in my overall feeling state. It’s always there as an undertone.

Having named it, I switch into experiencing it (rather than resisting it). I’m in the upset clearing process now. (2)

Long ago I accepted this feeling as the place I could not escape from (and would never escape from) as long as I remained around my Dad. The number of times he spoiled an occasion with his temper brought me to the point of despair. And, the twig having been bent, here I am, the tree.

Now I remember that his boyhood was also searing. I bore the brunt of it all my younger years in classic intergenerational transfer.

And my takeaway was despair. It just became a built-in feature of my emotional state and voice in what Werner Erhard called “the background of obviousness.” I don’t know what life would be like without it.

I experience it further. I breathe into it.

***

As each memory arises and is seen and felt, I feel a bit more release. The truth is setting me free.

I remember being kicked under the table and saying to myself that I just cannot trust that man; I need to keep my distance from him and be on guard at all times.

I remember being yelled at for pulling up a carrot, one of the earliest memories I have. I remember being yelled at for coming downstairs as a young child while he was in his workshop. I remember being yelled at for making a mistake with the lawn mower. One was always at risk.

Feeling despair, I next feel heavy, lethargic. This is the guna or cosmic force of thamas and it “rests” on me like a smothering blanket. All initiatives die when this feeling state sets in. Everything goes to hell in a handbasket.

This is not going to be re-experienced and released in the space of an article. I’m going to need to “be with it” until it decides to go, again another benefit of being a hermit.

I realize I’m gonna have to drain my own swamp here and I ask for divine assistance. I invoke the universal law of elimination and the Divine Mother and ask that everything connected to this feeling of despair be removed from me and the energy recycled and reused elsewhere.

Later

My history with my Dad lifted when I saw a benefit to all the petty violence he put me through. He awakened the warrior in me and for that I thank him. Seeing that some good has come of it gives me something to hold on to. After all the years I’ve processed “Life with Father,” I must be ready to let it go.

Footnotes

(1) I’m just the carney barker. See “Co-Creative Partners with the Company of Heaven,” June 12, 2023, at
https://goldenageofgaia.com/2023/06/12/co-creative-partners-with-the-company-of-heaven/

(2) See: