Awakening: Epilogue

Have you read Awakening: Part I and Part II?

The Teaching of Wisdom is not a textbook with numbered pages. The Teaching is one of [spiritual] indications for life as applied to each necessity. ~Agni Yoga, Pp 304

In my early years, every Sunday was spent in church, eyes and nose running from the allergic reaction to the ungodly amount of women’s perfumes, dutifully standing, kneeling and sitting per the little, cheap mistlette’s instructions. The priest, shrouded in vestments waving incense, everyone in their Sunday best and the evil sounding pipe organ music lacked meaning for me from the beginning. The school bused us into town for religious studies twice a week. The nuns, all dressed in black with horribly wrinkled faces and gnarled hands, the only flesh visible, only served to terrorize my young mind, making anything they said only indiscernible noise to my ears. None of it came remotely close to what I had experienced in the woods that day.

No one ever mentioned anything like what I had experienced. I wouldn’t have known how to open the subject to talk about it myself, so I carried that memory with me in silence. Could I be the only one that had that happen to? I was certain that I was. And, never once did I question its occurrence.  That experience was more real, more truthful than anything I had ever experienced before, and for many years, since.

While much of what my parents’ prescribed religion required giant leaps of faith and undeserved trust, my experience seemed to prove beyond a shadow of doubt that those leaps of faith were required only when sense and logic were missing. There is no doubt, no question of truth.

In the end, my experience, though it revealed death to me, was far from terrifying, farther from pomp and even farther from doubt. My experience was a conscious memory of a past life. Because of this, I have never feared death.

Years later, I treated myself with a visit to a Psychic Fair. I had no idea what to expect or what I’d find there. I stopped at the table just inside the door of the conference room to pay my admission, and while I was looking down to stuff my change back in my wallet, I heard this very loud, almost deafening “Hello!” Snapping my head around, I soon saw this older man looking at me with a half smile on his face, then he went back to dealing his cards. That “hello” wasn’t spoken out loud, even though it caused a painful twinge in my head. In my mind, I said “OW!”

When I was in graduate school, I attended an Aikido demonstration at the university. Aikido, it turned out, was a martial art that uses the psychic waves of the opponent to repel him. They hung a tarp, stood people in front of it while an Aikido student would stand behind the tarp and throw psychic energy through it. The teacher explained that when the person was hit by the psychic energy, the pupils would expand. When I stood in front of that tarp and the energy was thrown at me, I went down to my hands and knees. I was quite a bit more sensitive.

Psychic communication and psychic energy used to repel, to me, are parlor tricks, and nothing more than a sidetrack away from spirituality. We all have the potential to learn to use this energy that is all around us, that permeates every thing in existence, if we choose to.

My experience led me to the beginning of my spiritual path. Everyone’s “experience” is solely their own, unique, personal, individual, whether it has happened yet or not. The path it leads to is just as different and is based on what a particular person is ready and able to handle.

I have to constantly remind myself of that truth since I become pretty outraged when I run into supposedly “religious” people acting very unreligiously. Hypocrisy is a major thorn in my side. I immediately become livid when I run into a person that thinks nothing of exploiting another while bragging how active he is with his church.

Yes, my path is a bumpy one. I choose to learn, to grow, to live my life based on ethics and values 100 percent of the time. To be otherwise would be a lie.