Awakening - East Meets West

In this section, I am going to tell you about an experience that happened to me spontaneously over the course of the summer of 1998.   I began having these really odd symptoms in May, 1998, odd isn't quite strong enough.  Incredibly odd, there, that is closer.  :^).  I was 48 then and deeply enmeshed with the CWG discussion list that I talked about in "A Little More History of gene".  I thought to begin with I was having some sort of male menopause thing going on, the symptoms sort of mirrored what I knew women went through and I knew that some men had a somewhat similar, though certainly milder, experience.  The mild part was subterfuge.  Actually this event had begun with the golden globe experience though I did not know that for more than two years.  

This experience really begins with a story from my childhood.  You'll understand why as I finish up this section.  The first year  we were on our "own" farm, we also had our first dog, Bullet.  I think he was called that because he was so fast.  Don't really know, but what I do know was that he was my first best friend.  He was golden with russet overtones, my dad used to say he thought he was half-wolf he was so wild.  I don't know how or when we got him, though I remember so much about that year, he was just there, full grown, never a puppy.  And he adopted me, I was 5, turned 6 that September, so my brother and sister would have been 2 1/2 and 1/2, too young to really get "into" him.  I walked to school, across my grandparents woods, which made it a bit over a half mile, more like 1 1/2 by the road.  Bullet would sit at the top of the hill our farm buildings were on and watch me go down, cross the fence and disappear, when I'd come home, he'd be sitting right there.  He didn't stay there all day or anything, but he sure knew when I was due back, because as I'd come back into sight in the afternoon, there he'd be watching and waiting.  He was the first real experience of love in my life, animal, or human.  I knew that from my parents, and grandparents of course, loved me, but that was conditional, could be withdrawn with disapproval when I did something I shouldn't have done - and I was a precocious child, I told you unlike anyone else in my family, so I did plenty of things wrong.  Once, I'd said something smart to my mother, and she drew back her hand to slap me, and Bullet got between us and grasped her forearm, gently in his mouth.  He didn't break the skin, and she said many times later that she never felt threatened, but he made clear that I was his kid and she was not allowed to hit me.  People withdraw love when you displease them, but Bullet never drew back from me, never chastised me, never yelled at me.  Just loved me with his whole heart.  And I loved him right back.

Our rickety old house had only a wood burning furnace, not in the basement, there was no basement, just a crawl space under the house.  This furnace was in the middle of the house along the north wall, behind which was my parent's bedroom, we kids slept upstairs.  Well, to fuel that furnace, my dad and grandpa went out into the woods, cut trees, hauled them back and chopped them into chunks small enough to fit in the furnace.  It'd burn out overnight, so it was always freezing cold down there, worse upstairs, and we'd wait to get up until Dad had the fire going again.  

Well, one Saturday that next winter, I know it was Saturday because we'd been listening to radio shows, The Lone Ranger, The Cisco Kid (yes, that is where Cisco got his name, sort of), and it was time for lunch which meant Dad and Grandpa would be coming up out of the woods soon.  Bullet started barking, just racing around barking, so we thought maybe it was Grandpa and Dad, but when we looked out the window, there was this skunk, wandering around in our yard, stumbling, falling down, walking into things, like a drunk, if I'd known what a drunk was then.  Bullet was just insane.  I wanted to go out but Mom said, no, that skunk is sick, they are supposed to be sleeping in the winter, we can't let Bullet out.  That thing just kept stumbling around out there, came up onto our porch, it was open sided, just a wooden platform and bumped its head at our screen door as if trying to get in, all the while Bullet was just frantic.  While the skunk was on the porch, we could see Dad and Grandpa coming up past the barn, and the skunk saw them too, and sort of fell off the porch and headed toward them.  They got about to our garage, maybe 50 feet from the house, and the thing went  at Grandpa who gave it a kick, which sent it flying a bit, but it got back up and headed toward Dad.  He was carrying an axe handle and he swung it like a baseball bat at the skunk, knocked it flying through the air and it lay there motionless.  I was sure it was dead, so I opened the door to run out to see, and Bullet was past me like the rocket he was and just flew to that skunk, grabbed it by the throat and shook it until it was dead, if Dad hadn't already killed it.  He got tons of praise for being the brave protector he was.  I'll never lose that image, I see it as clearly today as I did then.  What I didn't know then though was what "sick" meant when it came to skunks out in the wintertime.  I found out the next day.

The next morning, after Sunday School and church, my parents said grandpa and grandma were coming for Sunday dinner.  Sunday dinner was a big deal in the 50's to farm families, probably to most American families.  Mom was making all sorts of things she knew I loved, and told me about them as she was doing so.  I had not a hint of suspicion that I was being set up.  A bit later, my grandparents came, and we kids went running out to greet them.  My grandpa, opened the back door of his car, took out a .22 rifle and shot Bullet.  That's another image I'll never stop seeing.  Him lying there on the ground, his blood turning the snow bright red.  I was shocked beyond belief.  I went running into the house, screamed at my mother that grandpa had shot Bullet, dived under my parents bed and cried, and cried, and cried.  They tried to talk me into coming out but I wouldn't.  As I lay under that bed back against the wall, I promised myself I was NEVER going to love anything again, over and over, because it just hurt too much.  I must have fallen asleep under there eventually, because I don't remember coming out.  I had a recurring nightmare, for years, of skunks swarming up that hill from the woods, the ground just black with them, climbing the outside of our house, and coming down the chimney and into the house through the hole in the wall where the stove pipe was vented into the chimney.  I'd wake crying and shaking at that point.  I don't know how long those went on, but it was a very long time, not every night, but many.   I held true to my promise, I went through childhood without ever really feeling "love".  I mean I liked stuff, I liked people, but I knew I didn't feel what they did.  I really believed that I had shut off the ability to feel love in me completely.  I WANTED it back, desperately, but I couldn't get it.  Not with friends, not with girls when that time came, not with anyone.  I felt disconnected from everyone and everything.  I felt empty.  Like the space where that feeling should be was just gone.  

I grew up, I went in the service, I'll talk about that a little bit in the ANSIR section, because how I did that fits there, I spent nearly three years gone and then got out of the service.  While I was gone, all of my friends had gotten married, and there was this girl who was very aggressive in her pursuit of me.  The sister of one of my best friends through high school had taken to writing me while I was in Viet Nam, she said she felt sorry for me because her brother was so lousy about that.  I appreciated it, I was sort of freshly out of a relationship then, not a fully committed loving one, I wasn't capable of that I didn't think, but was still sort of on the rebound.  We developed a friendship which gradually turned more serious.   She came to get me, woke me in fact, the day I got home, freshly discharged and a civilian again.  

We had a sort of whirlwind thing, spent all our time together, decided to get married, I liked her, I really did, a lot, I felt guilty because I knew it wasn't love, but I told myself that I could learn to love her, that it would work out.  Well, that part never did happen.  They weren't horrible years, but they weren't blissful either, she worked, I went to college.  We decided to have our first child, he was born right at the end of my first senior year.  I say first, because that spring Gerald Ford had signed a law which allowed veterans 45 months of undergraduate study, up from the 36 month previous standard, and at that time my major was political science, I was planning on law school.  That spring my department added a new major, public administration, which caught my eye because it  meant that I could stay an undergrad another year by taking a few economics and business classes to add to my political science credits.  I thought why not, it seemed more practical, so I didn't apply for graduation, just declared the new major instead.  

Evan was born on July 31, 1974, at 10:16 pm, and when I held him in my arms for the first time, I knew, actually KNEW, I had the capacity to feel love in me.  He was such a wonder and that was such a relief.  His mother went back to work when he was 6 weeks old, we needed the money, and for that first year of his life, I was his primary parent.  She worked nights, slept days, I took a handful of classes, and spent my time with him.  The middle of the night feedings, the doctor visits, all of it was absolutely wonderful.  It was an incredible year, we developed a bond that lasts to this day.  I still had no capacity for "man-woman" sort of love, but I loved him, and my love of people in general began to grow, in a "we need to take care of each other" sort of way.  I was way liberal as a kid, very much so, I suppose because most of my classmates were not, I have always been something of a contrarian.  I still am.  

So what does this story have anything to do with an Awakening, let alone East meets West?  Well, this is where I tell you about that.  :^)  I'd been on the CWG list for a couple months when I began having those symptoms I mentioned at the beginning of this story.   First, I lost the ability to sleep, or more accurately, stay asleep.  I'd fall asleep as quickly as ever, but I'd wake after 3 or 4 hours, be unable to get back to sleep, so I'd just get up and come out here and write to the list.  A couple months later, I started having hot flashes, prickly sensations around my forehead and scalp, when I'd be writing something about which I was really passionate, whether spiritually or emotionally.  I would just burn from within.  I'd be sitting up here in my loft, where I am writing this, and I'd have the air conditioning on and I would just be pouring sweat.  As I walked around at work, or on break, or just sat at my desk, I'd have the hot flashes, where incredible sensations of heat would just suddenly flow through me.  I began having mood swings, I reacted more strongly to things than was normal for me.  I've always thought of myself as a relatively calm person, and for the most part I have been.  I've always been at my calmest when things around were me at their craziest, someone has to be able to think in a crisis, and that has always been me.  

I was responsible for a flame war that broke out on the list in June that year, I got into an argument with someone I'd met before on another list on AOL, who was also on this list at Spiritweb, indeed he was the only person I knew there, when I got there.  He had an odd way about him, I knew he was a deeply caring, loving man, with a wonderful soul, but he would sometimes be so blunt, so provocative that people would read insult where he intended none, many little fights sprung up around him during those first months over that quality, which to some felt like a lack of empathy.  I defended him, I was in between the two camps, I loved both sides, and the discord really troubled me, so I'd defend him, and try to smooth things over.  I think I did that well, mostly.  I shared so much of myself there, so much of my story, much of what I've written here and a lot more and had made many dear friends, indeed, I felt closer to those people than I did to anyone I knew in the "real" world.  All those dark hours out here writing to them, reading their responses to my stories, created loving friendships that I treasure to this day, though I am in but rare touch with only a handful of them still.  I was asked, after I'd been there nearly three months because at that time we were just screen names to each other, no pictures yet, just conversation, and because my name gene can be either gender, via private email whether I was male or female, which made me giggle, because I thought it pretty obvious from the stories I'd told that I was a guy, so was amused that anyone would be confused about that.  I got letters from those who read but did not post, telling me that my stories had touched their hearts, that they felt I was writing directly to them.  And in a way I was.  I am here too.  I always feel as if I am speaking to one soul, when I write, and I guess it comes across that way to others, so if you have felt that here, well, good, know it is true.  :^)

Back to the main story, sorry for the digression.  Not really, but it seems appropriate to say so.  :^).  There was a young man, age 21 I think, who posted there sometimes, always about the same subject, he felt he was transgendered, a woman trapped in a man's body.  He had enormous conflict over this, he would post something then go silent for weeks, then post again, the same thing, I could "feel" the confusion and fear in him, I worried about him, I cared about his pain, and there was a lot of it.   I worried he might do something to himself, he sounded so sad, so desperate.  I guess I was overly sensitized to that because of Brandon, it had only been 15 months since he died at this point.  Well, one day he posted his usual story, and my prickly friend, in his rather cavalier way, said in response, well, whatever blows your skirt up.  I don't know why, well, I guess fear for him, but I  was just incensed over what I felt was a callous remark to someone in such emotional distress.  I actually felt it could have driven that young one to lose hope of anyone ever understanding him and do what my own son had done.  I blew up.  I said angry things to my friend, whom I had defended so long, I decided I could no longer post with people who treated other people like that and I decided to leave the list.  And I did.  But it was hell.  It produced SUCH emotional turmoil in me, which I have since learned is one of the things that brings on what I call the Awakening process, actually it was Jenna who told me that, who gave it that name, and it has always been the name I've associated with it.  So I left the list near the end of June, these symptoms growing stronger, and more numerous, by the day in me.  

Jenna told me that what was happening was an Awakening and she told me that the symptoms were going to keep growing in strength, duration and variety through the summer right up to the Saturday before my 49th birthday, when there would be a culminating event, a completion.  She told me she wanted me to plan to be alone that weekend with her, my actual birthday was Labor Day that year.  She told me she'd be with me through every moment of it, that it was going to be painful, but not unbearable, that she would explain what was happening and that I was not to be scared, that it was her, within me, physically and etherically, reconstructing me, loving me from within.  Through July and early August it seemed like there was a new symptom every day.  I had this hot little ball of energy rolling around inside me, I could FEEL it, like an egg sized thing, hot and hard and moving around under my skin, sometimes it would feel like it would flatten out into a rod and I could feel it from my spine through to my chest.  It HURT, not horribly, just a soreness.  Other things began happening, I was still in touch with many of my friends from the list on email so I knew a flame war had broken out over my leaving and that harsh words were being exchanged,  transcripts of some of those conversations were sent me, I felt such guilt over having caused so much strife, but I couldn't make myself go back.  Not yet.  One evening in mid-July I got this joke, I don't even remember what it was now, something about four old ladies being stopped by a police officer and for whatever reason I started to laugh, I couldn't stop, I was absolutely hysterical, I mean I sat here at the computer, pouring sweat, laughing so hard I could hardly breathe, tears streaming down my face, for minutes, I'd stop for a second, catch a breath and it would start again.  I got up from my chair and staggered into my bathroom, still laughing uncontrollably.  I thought if I moved around it would stop, but it just kept going, I went downstairs, and collapsed on my couch, laughing like a mad man for another few minutes when suddenly it all stopped.  I felt and SAW these shapes come rolling up out of me, if you've ever seen a Freddie Krueger movie, you'll know what shapes I am describing, they were horribly ugly, they looked like the souls ensconced in his body in those movies, ugly rusty colored "things" with horrible faces, just rushed up and out of me for what seemed like minutes, and then it was over.  I was no longer laughing, I was just exhausted.  Jenna told me that was me releasing every old hurt I had ever stored in my body.  We do that, we physically store emotional injuries, insults, anything we experienced strongly, negatively in our bodies, mostly in our back along either side of our spine.  She said for me to progress toward Saturday, September 5th, I HAD to let those things go.  I didn't feel any different really, not like lighter or anything, but she insisted it was an important thing that had to happen.  

That didn't stop the other symptoms which were still building daily.  I was still in such distress over what I felt I'd caused on the list, I felt a growing urge to go back, and on Evan's birthday, 7/31, I wrote a letter first to my friend, apologizing for what I'd said to him, assuring him something else was going in me and that I didn't really think him a monster, asking his forgiveness.  Then, I wrote a letter to the list, a long one, apologizing to them for the conflict I'd caused, and asking permission to come home.  I sent it with a great deal of trepidation, afraid I'd not be welcomed back.  But, the response was overwhelming, I have rarely, if ever, felt more appreciated and loved than I did on that day.   I got so many wonderfully loving responses and welcome backs.  My friend, who did not need to do this, posted the letter I'd sent him, so that everyone would know that I wasn't being untruthful in my apology.  He didn't have to do that.  I told him in my letter that he still had my heart, and when he posted it, he said he was not only worried that he'd hurt my heart but that he feared he'd "stomped it flat".  I was so relieved to be back.  

And a couple days later, I posted about what had been happening in me.  I called it Light Globes and Hot Energy.  I had told them about Jenna before I'd left the list, but not the light experiences, so I told them about those, all three, and then described these crazy symptoms I'd been having, that there was a new one every freaking day.  And I asked if anyone there had ever heard about such a thing.  Well, as I said earlier, this was an eclectic group, people from all faiths and traditions around the world, and several knew immediately what I was describing.  I got an email first, from a dear friend.  But just looking at it my inbox scared me, I don't know why.  I just watched it for a while, before I dared open it.  It really did scare the hell out of me.  It talked about an Eastern practice that yoga masters devoted years of study to, in order to call out of them, mostly unsuccessfully, what had just happened to me spontaneously, it was very much fear-based, it talked about people actually managing to do this, apparently it was HARD to do and rare that anyone could, and the symptoms could, and did, make some lose their minds completely, so completely they dropped into psychosis and never emerged.  Well, THAT wasn't very encouraging, let me tell you.  But Jenna said, gene that is NOT right, that is NOT what is happening, look again in your mail, and the very next letter was another list of symptoms, virtually ALL of which I had going on at that time, but based in love, not frightening at all.  And Jen said, remember I told you this is ME loving you from within?  THIS is the truth of what you are feeling, my love.  That process in the East is called Kundalini rising.  I can go on about that for a long time, I FELT the "serpent" rise through my body and I've read a lot about it over the years. And I know that it is NOT supposed to happen spontaneously, though here in the west there are now reports of what happened to me also happening to others spontaneously.  I don't know that I was the first, but I've not read about an earlier one.  And it wasn't done yet.

Some list members, had decided to meet in person, this was about the time the pictures thing happened that I described in Jen's story, more than a few were going to gather at a member's house the weekend of September 5th, I was asked to attend, and I declined, I told them what Jenna had told me, I actually reminded them, because I had first told them what she told me about the coming event back in June, those I was in touch with on email only at that time, that I needed to be alone with her that weekend, that something "big" was coming, though I didn't know what.  They still attempted to persuade me from time to time, but Jen always said no.  I would very much have liked to met those wonderful people, but I followed her guidance.  The symptoms never abated during August, that list has like 60 or 70 different physical symptoms on it and a bunch of emotional ones (I still have it and will send it to anyone who wants to see it) and I had them all.  I woke on Saturday 9/5, feeling okay, I somehow had the idea that was going to happen was going to happen at noon.  I suppose I had the idea that noon was when the veil of the temple was torn in two when Jesus died, I don't know exactly what made me think that but I was sure it was supposed to be then.  So I was up here writing to people and noon came and went with absolutely nothing happening.  So I thought what?  All summer she's been telling me about this big "something" coming and nothing happens at all?  I was more than a little disappointed.  I stayed up here for a couple hours, went downstairs and read the paper for a bit, and she said lets take a walk.  

There is this little 2 1/2 mile about circle of a route I sometimes walk and I thought why not, its a beautiful day, nothing ELSE is going on, so I went out, she said don't take Cisco, which was okay, but sure disappointed him.  I started out and got maybe a quarter of a mile when my chest, right in the center just started to rage, that hot little ball of energy centered right there and hurt so much, I had to stop and sit for a minute, I got a little scared - my dad had his first and last heart attack at age 62 and though I was but two days from 49, the idea of that was in my head, she assured me there was nothing to fear, that I was perfectly fine and we should keep walking, well, as I said, I was already well into the habit of believing her, she hadn't been wrong about ANYTHING up to then, and had loved me through a process that I knew by then was NOT normal, that did NOT just happen spontaneously, and that we'd gotten through it without fear or psychosis, or so I told myself, because she HAD been with me through every moment of it and I truly was not afraid.  So I got up and started walking again, my chest hurt like hell, I was having trouble breathing, I had to stop and sit for a few minutes several times making that circuit, and there were a couple times I wasn't sure I was going to make it all, but she kept her arms around me from within, talking softly to me, encouraging me and I made it all the way around, a trip that normally took me a half hour tops, took more than 90 minutes, so it was about 5 when I got home again.  

I sat on the couch trying to deal with the pain, which was slowly growing worse, trying to breathe, which was hard to do through the pain.  I sat there until 6 when I was so weak, so in pain, sweating like I'd run a marathon, with the air conditioning on and set cold, I was so weak I decided I had to get up to my bed.  I literally crawled up the steps, I didn't have the strength to walk.  I got onto my bed, sweating, with a fan full blast on me, covered myself with a blanket and lay there shaking so hard, I was literally bouncing on the bed.  The pain in my chest was incredible.  Twice during that last hour, I reached for the phone to call 911, I was sure I was actually having a heart attack, and each time she said, no, gene, please, just stay with me, this won't last much longer, and so I just crawled back under the blanket and shivered and cried, by this time it hurt so much I was not able to stop crying, the last time I thought I had to call 911 was like 6:45, I had my hand on the phone, and she again was so insistent that I not, that I trust her, that I was okay, I said okay, but I don't know how much more of this I can take Jenna, she said just minutes my love.  Then, right at 7 on the nose, I heard and FELT this horrible ripping pain in my chest, I mean I HEARD it, and the pain was incredible, and she said its over, and the pain started to ebb immediately.  In 15 more minutes it was gone completely, I was so drained, so exhausted, that I just closed my eyes, and the next thing I knew it was 3AM and I felt wide awake and just fine.  I got up, went to my computer and told several people, who I knew were waiting anxiously, what had happened.  

I felt SO good, I mean as good as I have ever felt in my life.  I made some coffee, wrote emails.  Even though I felt so good, I was a little suspicious still, that something had happened within me, and so I decided to "test" it, you'll learn a bit more about that proclivity of mine in the next story too, and went out for a run.  It was the easiest four miles I'd ever done.  And about a half mile into it, I heard this female voice talking to me, so clearly that I looked around, but it was her.  I'd never heard her that clearly during a run before, runs are taxing and I always sort of emptied my mind while running, focusing on stuff like breathing and moving, my thoughts got disjointed while I ran, but that morning we had a conversation as clear as if she were running alongside me.  She told me what she'd done the night before.  That Sunday when I lay under my parents bed, the day Bullet died, I had shut down my heart chakra so completely, so tightly, and held it that way for so many years,  that what she had needed to do was reopen it, so that I could experience, and then share the totality of the love that I am, that is in me.  The chakra system which western medicine, for the most part, holds as bunk, is as real as any of our other physical organs.  There are things we cannot see with human eyes.  There is an etheric energy field that fuels the chakra system that cannot be measured by western medicine and which therefore to western medicine does not exist.  We can't see infrared either, nor x rays, but they exist too.  

The way Jenna has explained this system to me, and it is explained well in Books 1 and 2 as well, is that for here and there to exist, there must be something to hold them where they are.  If there weren't anything to do that, everything would be smooshed together, as small as the head of a pin, as it was in the moment before God created the physical universe.  We'll talk more about that in the blog, maybe I'll write more in here too.  But the easiest way to understand it is to "see" it the way she's given me to see it.  You are wherever you are as you read this.  I am here where I wrote it.  What keeps you there and me here, rather than smooshed together is the space between.  It is not empty, that we see nothing in it, does not mean some force holding us each where we are doesn't exist.  That WE exist where we are, is proof that it is there, in duality it can be no other way.  Gravity is not the only force of nature.  Not by any means.  There is very little "matter" in the physical universe, yet is is unimaginably huge, everything that is not visible is part of the etheric energy field that holds everything else in its place.  The emptiness is far from empty, without it, without that energy holding us where we are, this universe could not exist.   There is no such thing as empty space, it is ALL used, and it is ALL a part of the body of God.  And there is nothing about it that is not love.  Because love is what God is, and we, His/Her spirit children are not only made of the same "stuff" we ARE the same stuff, we are truly One People, One World.

 Now we are ready to begin our real conversation.  You and I.  We.  But to do that, to do that well and properly, we must know something about each other.  And there is a perfect tool with which to discover first ourselves, then each other.  ANSIR.  I'm going to talk about Ansir for a bit, then we'll begin to blog.  And at this point in our mutual journey, I begin ending my stories, and my posts, with the closing I have been using since my first days on the old Spiritweb list, with this phrase, and below it this request, much love, :^ ) gene

If today brings even one choice your way,
choose to be a bringer of the light.