The Lesson
Well, it’s my 26th birthday today and as good of a day as ever to talk about my life, I suppose. Sorry it’s been a while in between blogs, haven’t really gotten back into the swing of everthing yet after the trip. I’ll start with the bbing news: not much. I minorly tore my soleus the other day, but other than that training is going good. The bruising is basically gone and it’s only sore to the touch-my functionality is fine. I have torn a muscle 4 times in my life and haven’t been to see a doctor for once. What do you think, bra eller anus?
I was born in Sweden and lived there until I was five; then moved away under somewhat questionable circumstances. I only say questionable because my two parents have two totally different stories and I can’t tell you for sure which one is true. They split when I was 2 and I don’t remember a whole lot more. My mom and I moved to my grandparents house in a suberb of Chicago where we lived for 2 or 3 years before getting our own house.
Most people would probably have described me a pretty happy kid and adolescent. This is kind of true, but I think the real truth is that I was, for the most part, when in the company of others, just very happy to see them and when not, a generally angry kid. Looking back on it, I think it’s kind of rediculous and I get upset at how angry I was all the time and how poorly I treated my mom. Never did anything outrageous-just constantly angry, not often being nice to be around.
I would say that that trend continued up until roughly last year. Not with quite the same intensity, but roughly the same nonetheless. Nice, patient, kind and loving with strangers; arrogant, full of pride, incredibly impatient and intolerant with those nearest and dearest. This has played out especially much with girlfriends. Up until recently, and actually still but not as much as before, nothing could irritate me more than my girlfriend-whoever it was at the time. Funny how that works. I always considered myself such a good guy too. Anyway, as of yet my relationships have been pretty much marred by girls pressing my buttons(which are not hard to find) and me flying off the handle in a kind of subtle way, if that makes sense. Just like with my mother, not freaking out, not yelling and screaming all the time, just me being visibly angry and clearly disappointed in what I was convinced was sheer and utter stupidity. I’ve since come to understand that the moment anyone finds themselves in the situation that I find and have found myself in so many times in which extreme anger arises from a misunderstanding, that we have then also found yet another person who doesn’t understand.
Life has a way of helping everyone out and evening out the the score at the same time, wouldn’t you say. I would. At least that’s what I’ve been experiencing for the last half year or so. Probably much longer than that, actually garunteed much longer than that, but the last half year has been obvious and here’ how it started:
Since I was a little kid, I’ve had a kind of religious obcession that soon developed into a kind of phobia, specifically focused in and around the subject of hell. It sounds kind of weird, but a lot of people have this problem actually and it’s one that’s not easily dealt with because there are, obviously, not too many ways to clearly prove or disprove anything in regards to it-and obcessive minds aren’t usually particularly prone to just accepting things because they make sense or don’t. So anyway, this has been a kind of gift for me in my life, really. It has been very hard but it, I believe, has been life’s way of getting me to search for a deeper answer into spirituality. There have been lots of these things in my life-for example: one day I found out that by using English gematria(a new system revised from the traditional one using multiples of 6) the letters in my first and middle name add up to 666-that struck me so hard at the time that it made me search for a deeper meaning-it was so uncomfortable that I just had to keep searching for answers-I literally could not let it just stand at that…and I think life knew that. Even if other people wouldn’t think twice about it, the obcessive person thinks way more than twice about it.
So anyway, I was reading up on one of my favorite subjects about 6-9mos ago-NDEs. I’ve read a ton of these over the years and I was always kind of scared and perplexed by the hellish type ones. And that day, probably that whole month as I recall, life was pushing me hard in that direction-that’s when I found out about the above. In other words, I was worked up-constantly reading about it, constantly thinking about it, constantly looking for some kind of answer, constantly not wanting to go to hell. Since going raw, I almost haven’t been physically able to get this obcessed about anything-my mind just isn’t that cloudy any longer, but this time around it really hit me and I needed an answer. So I turned to where I’ve always turned, prayer. This has always had a calming effect on me and this time I prayed over and over again for the truth. I need to see the truth, show me the truth. I prayed it silently, audibly, and even very loudly.
I walked over to a friends house that night, over a long bridge called Västerbron. We had a great time, I don’t remember barely any of it, but it calmed me down some and that was nice. But the moment I left and started walking home, the nagging came back. I needed, very badly, to see the truth in this; and again, I asked for it. Very loudly.
And then the truth began unravelling itself…something very special happened. I’m standing on the bridge again, it takes about 10 minutes to walk across, and see a kind of ethereal glowing white vertical stick of sorts-way in the distance. Very luminous, very noticeable, and far away as I recall. I knew, I absolutely knew something was up. As I walk nearer, I realize that this kind f glowing stick is actually the white cane of a blind woman. I walk right up to her, right beside her, and realize something is very wrong. It becomes very clear to me that this woman is about to jump off the bridge. A lot of people commit suicide here in Stockholm this way. So I get immediately very nervous, but realize that I can’t just walk away, and talk to her. She’s going to commit suicide. She’s crying, she’s amongst the most physically unnatractive people I’ve ever seen, she has one totally dead eye, and in all honesty, resembles what you might think a troll would look like. I can see that this person has had a hard life and now I’m really anxious beyond basically anything I’ve experienced before-very scared would be a good way to describe it. Anyway, we’re going back and forth and in the state I’m in, I’m trying, even though I don’t actually believe or perscribe to any of this, to help her with kind of religious talk. And it does nothing. As I recall, she insulted it. This struck a chord with me.
What did seem to work though was connecting with her, and trying to connect with her lighter side-the happier side of her personality-trying to make her laugh. She told me that everyone has a right to do whatever they want with their own body and that it was her body and she wanted to jump off the bridge. I promptly told her that I agreed and that this was my body and I wanted my body to keep her body from jumping off that bridge. I also reminded her that I was much stronger than she was and that it just wasn’t going to happen. She didn’t really laugh at this but it was a start for me, it sparked a small understanding.
I pretty quickly got the attention of a woman over the highway and she came over and helped a lot. She, of course, worked in the same building as the mental institution this woman was just released from-despite the fact that he told them she was just going to go back and commit suicide. Coincidence? This woman was my savior because she made us laugh, and then that helped me make them laugh and that created a situation in which suicide became much less of a reality. Once the first joke came in, it was like everything was going to be ok-once our deay lady smiled. I knew the lady wouldn’t be dying tonight, but I wasn’t totally calm.
It was around that time that I was mentally confronted by a scipture that I had read earlier that day about the Good Samaritan. It’s funny how it all played out, because that woman that I hailed over was one of the two that stopped out of several more than just walked or rode their bikes right by, not even acknowledging the situation. It has become pretty clear to me that the truth that I was praying for was in that lesson-dropping everything and doing everything I could to help this person. Even though, to be honest, I was crap at it-it wasn’t until that other woman came over that the situation really calmed down-she called the police as well. When the police came and took her away, I asked where they were taking her. I called my girlfriend at the time and told her everything and told her that I wanted to go to the hospital to make sure she was alright and to see if we could helpme-then my girlfriend actually asked to talk to the girl because she, too, had been suicidal and thought she could help. In the end, the police took our woman away and my girlfriend came and we went right to the hospital. I went with a Bible in hand as well as a Bhagavad Gita. Haha, that must have looked funny. Haha, nutjob?
The attendant wouldn’t let us see her, so we gave him our phone numbers and emails to give her if she ever needed someone to talk to. We then left and that was the end of that. I saw my dear lady a couple of months later walking with someone here in my neck of the woods and that made me feel real good. I don’t know how she is doing now, but I know she made it past those couple of months and it felt nice.
Since that night I have had many such occurances-which I have referred to for the last half year as my ’secret life.’ I’ve come to understand that even though it may seem as though I am helping other people, these things that I have been doing have been life’s way of helping me. Helping me understand and helping me to physically raise my energy level and turn me into a better person after having spent so many years as an angry one-while at the same time doing some penance and helping others. I’ll go into them in more detail in another blog, but it’s become real clear to me that in the future people are going to become much less able to just stand by as others suffer. The people I have come into contact with and helped, I have not helped because I am a particularly good person, but because I could physically NOT not help. A deep hot anger would rise up inside of me if I didn’t, and I was scared of it. I’m going to have to finish this later so it doesn’t all get jumbled up so I’ll talk to you soon.
September 20, 2008 at 10:26 am
happy belated birthday, man! hope you were able to fit 26 candles in a raw steak!