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The Ball of Light A Dream about the Nature of Consciousness
and Being
By Roger A. "Pete" Peterson The Secrets of the universe are hidden in
the details of our experience. -Pete This is one of
the most profound lucid dreams I’ve ever had. Its significance and meaning is
still unfolding within me. As my awareness gathers into focus, I feel like a
crewmember on the starship The first room on my right is the school
administration office. To my left is the school library. Wanting to know
everything about this place, I walk over to the administration office and look
in through the door window. The chest-high counter that separates the student
area from the principal's office in the rear captures the dark yellow rays of
the early morning sun and my attention as well. To me this "gateway"
symbolizes the fear and control of public authority. As I study it, a mixture
of old memories begins to stir. Some are pleasant but others carry the hard
edge of anger mixed with fear and anxiety. Deciding not to relive these
disturbing memories now, I back away from the office and turn to look into the
library. As my eyes roam the tall bookshelves lining the left
wall, I begin to wonder about censorship and the structuring of authority in
our lives. Before these questions fully engage my mind, however, I shift my
attention to the large reading tables and low bookshelves scattered about the
room. As I study their arrangement, I quietly drift back to the school library
of my past. It is early in my freshman year and I am having an intense physical
and emotional reaction while sitting at a large reading table with six or seven
other students, all classmates of mine from previous years. As I think about this, I wonder if my breath smelled
as bad as hers before my diseased teeth were removed. Does my breath still
smell bad even though I brush my teeth regularly now? What a mortifying
thought! In the presence of the other students, this becomes a moment of
supreme discomfort for me and a moment of great sympathy for Next to the administration office is the janitor's
utility closet. The door is slightly open and the familiar smell of mops and
cleaning products fills the air. This brings back the memory of my oldest
brother Rudy when, for a short while, he was a school bus driver and janitor at
my elementary school. I would ride with him on his bus route after school and
help him clean the floors and straighten up the classrooms afterwards. We
enjoyed each other’s company and this was one way we could spend time together
because he was married and had children. Suddenly, the smell of floor wax
registers in my mind and I look down.
Daylight entering the windows from the other end of the hallway is
reflecting off the shiny linoleum floor, highlighting the crisscross patterns
left by the buffer. The student bathrooms are just beyond the janitor's
closet. I stop, turn, and stare at the locked doors as I react to their
symbolism. In my mind's eye, I watch as boys and girls enter and leave the
bathrooms as if it’s a regular school day. This reminds me of the time I helped
Rudy clean the girl's elementary school bathroom. In one of the stalls a girl
had written a sexually explicit rhyme. As I read it, I got all the more excited
because I knew a girl had written it. At the time I didn’t think girls thought
about sex like boys. This memory excites me now as I stand in front of
the girl’s high school bathroom. I suspect there’s a lot more graffiti written
on these bathroom walls but how do I get through the locked door to find out?
Suddenly, I remember I'm in a dream reality. What will happen if I leave my
present body and lie flat in the air in a less tangible one? Will I be able to
float through the bathroom door? Almost immediately, I find myself in a lighter
body lying flat on my stomach in midair. As I slowly float toward the girl's
bathroom door, I wonder what it will feel like to move through wood. Suddenly,
my direction changes and I zoom through the boy’s bathroom door. In surprise I
look back at the body I left standing in the hallway. I want answers for what
just happened but, to my disappointment, it looks like an empty shell unable to
think or act independently. In resignation, I decide to go with the flow of my
experience to see where it will take me. Once the decision is made I understand
why I’ve been drawn into the boy’s bathroom and not the girl’s. The boy’s
bathroom contains a much stronger emotional charge for me. Unlike the energy of
the girl's bathroom, which stimulates my sexual curiosity, the energy of the
boy's bathroom stimulates my fear, my fear of peeing in the presence of other
people**. Invisible and floating in the air near the ceiling
of the boy's bathroom, I watch as real and imagined high school bathroom
experiences spring to life. People materialize and use the bathroom with the
full color, sound, and motion of reality. Most use the bathroom and leave while
others stick around to talk, tease, and smoke. I even participate in some
experiences as they quickly manifest themselves and then seamlessly disappear
to be replaced by others. In one scene a teacher enters the bathroom to check
for smokers only to find two boys fighting. In another scene a boy makes fun of
another boy's habit of going into a stall to pee. It's as if a window into my
past bathroom experiences has opened to provide me with a new opportunity to
work through old fears, or at least, make peace with them. When the images
threaten to spill out beyond the high school bathroom and take me with them, I
put on the brakes. Somehow, I know there’s something more important for me to
do here. Returning to the body in the hallway, I remind myself I can revisit
these issues whenever I please. Staying to the left as I continue down the hallway,
I pass a number of empty classrooms and look in through the door window of each
one. I see nothing of particular interest in any of them. About halfway down
the hall, I begin to feel a growing sense of anticipation as I approach the
next classroom on my left. As I reach for the door knob the feeling of
anticipation and excitement becomes even greater and I pull the door open.
Standing squarely in the middle of the opening, I begin to examine the
classroom from left to right. On the left there are maybe eight rows of student
desks with chairs attached. On the right a large green chalkboard spans more
than half of the front classroom wall. Sitting in the middle of the room,
halfway between the chalkboard and the rows of student desks, is a large
teacher's desk and chair. On the outside wall, a narrow band of windows
stretches from the back of the classroom to the front. As I study the limited
view of the world outside, I remember how confined and claustrophobic I used to
feel in my old high school while, simultaneously, a small part of my mind
wonders where the teacher and students are. Suddenly, movement at the front of
the classroom draws my attention. In amazement, I watch as writing begins to
appear on the chalkboard followed by the slowly materializing image of a teacher
holding the chalk. Following this, students begin to appear in their seats but
before the reality of these images can fully materialize, I cancel them so I can continue to
explore the secrets of this classroom in silence and solitude. Further movement draws my attention back to the
student desk area. Two thirds of the way across the room the desks have
silently rearranged themselves to form a circle, and glowing brightly in the
middle of that circle is a large ball of light about seven or eight feet in
diameter. Despite my surprise I feel a profound attraction to this mysterious
object. In spontaneous excitement, I step out of my main body in a less
tangible one. Partly walking, sometimes bouncing, and sometimes floating, I
move past the rows of student desks while the glowing ball of light moves
forward to meet me. Silently, and magically, the student desks arrange
and rearrange themselves to accommodate the globe as it moves forward. The
nearer I come to it, the less glowing and opaque it is, until finally, as if
looking through clouds, I begin to see bits of color and form. Halfway across
the room my growing suspicion turns into certainty that what I am looking at is
a miniature version of the earth.
Standing close to it, there is no denying it is a perfect replica of
Earth in every way. Even the clouds are real, and when I put my face close to
the ocean's edge, I can see tiny waves curling against the beach! Pulling my face back, I wonder how the water on this
small world can stay in place within my dream world's larger field of gravity.
Suddenly, I notice tiny pins or pylons sticking out from the surface all the
way around the globe. One minute they’re not there and the next minute they
are! Looking closer, I can also see an almost invisible network of tiny wires
connecting each pylon. As I stand there amazed by the magical appearance of
this complex network of pins and wires, colorful pulses of light begin to move
from one pylon to the next as if they are sending messages. Picking up speed,
the individual pulses of colored light begin to flash back and forth around the
globe faster and faster until I can no longer track them. Before long, this
world within a world is a blur of flashing colored lights. Awed by the seeming
intelligence of this fantastic light show, I wonder if the globe is a living,
sentient being. Prompted by a new impulse, I move to the right
around the globe. My destination is the view outside the school. Sitting on the
shelf below the narrow band of windows, I put my face close to the glass to get
a larger view of the world outside. This act seems to be in direct response to
the loss of freedom I felt as a student when I was forced to sit in class day
after day, year after year, against my will. When I was in school, the small view
of the world outside seemed to mock my yearning to be free, free to determine
my own fate and course in life. Even the expanded view of the world I can see
now with my face pressed against the window doesn't seem large enough to
satisfy my desire to see and know more. Turning my head from side to side to
get an even better view of the world outside only feeds my frustration. The
limitations imposed by these windows, this building, and my own body are no
longer tolerable. As my frustration level rises to a sharp peak, I explode out
of my body in a state of pure consciousness and energy! With a rush of power and joy I fly through the
window to a point high in the air above the school! In this new state of being
I know I can act and react without the use or concern of a physical body. I
also know I am less tangible than the atoms and molecules comprising the air
around me and I revel in my newfound freedom. Seeing without eyes, feeling
without skin, and hearing without ears, I fly higher and begin to tumble and
roll through the atmosphere with great speed, zipping from here to there
without concern for pain or injury. In a moment of great exuberance, I fly down
into the earth through rock and soil as if I’m flying through the air,
something I vaguely remember doing before in other dreams. Despite my great confidence and joy, there is a
moment of fear as I enter the Earth's surface. I remember its great density
and, for a moment, I worry about becoming dense myself and getting stuck in it.
Before this earthbound thought can become real, however, a new thought replaces
it. This one reassures me that resistance will come only if I refuse to accept
the reality of my present state of being as pure consciousness and energy. Once
again my confidence is restored and I relax and fly through the soil with the
greatest of ease, wrapped in the knowledge that my experience is always a
matter of focus and balance. In other words, we get what we concentrate on.
With great confidence I decide to test this belief by making my Energy Body
dense enough to feel the texture of the soil and rock around me. It feels
great, almost like scratching an itch. When my curiosity is satisfied, I return
to a state of pure consciousness and energy (awareness and action). In this
state, I know I am because "I Am" with no limits to my creative
choices! Next, I decide to fly over the center of town. It is
early morning and quiet. The only movement I see is a pretty young woman
pushing a baby stroller down the town’s main street. Attracted to her, I settle
into a position about fifteen feet above her head. Soon she’s joined by another
young woman pushing a stroller and the two quickly get lost in conversation
about life, family, and friends. Feeling strangely related to both women, I use
my intuitive abilities to explore our connection. To my surprise, I find that
each of us shares a similar mental and emotional makeup, a connection that
feels more like family than shared genes. (Is there such a thing as “family”
regarding types of consciousness?) Of the two women, my connection with the
first one seems stronger. Not only do I find her more physically attractive,
her personality has a richness and complexity that intrigues me. She's bright,
caring, and wants to know everything, characteristics I greatly admire, while
the other woman is a bit lazy and self-centered in her thinking. From my invisible point in the air, I wonder what it
would be like to live within this woman’s psyche, to be there when she makes
love to her husband, plays with her child, or thinks an exciting thought. Can I
occupy a small, unused portion of her mind and pay my way by helping her during
times of crisis or need? If I observe appropriate rules of privacy and
noninvolvement would she even be aware of my presence in her mind? And if I
help her find solutions to a problem or two, would she welcome me as an
important part of her psyche? Being bodiless and safely ensconced within this
woman's psyche sounds appealing to me. This way I can devote full time to my
pet projects free of material encumbrances and responsibilities. Further pondering life in this woman’s psyche, I
begin to see myself as a gentleman boarder at a country inn. Leaving my room in
top hat and tails for a trip into town, I encounter my "landlady" as
she busily cultivates the soil in the flower garden surrounding the inn. She
observes my approach and I tip my hat to her in passing. It’s been some time
since I've taken up residence in her psyche and she’s become quite comfortable
with my quiet presence, although she suspects I’ve helped resolve several
issues she’s had to face since my arrival. Her husband is working on farm
equipment in the yard and casting mild looks of suspicion in my direction,
while the children play happily nearby. In a sudden departure, I wonder what it would be
like to live within the consciousness of a large redwood tree. Instantly, it
becomes so. At first the quiet and solitude of living in the forest seems
delightful, it is so relaxing! Soon, however, other thoughts begin to creep in,
thoughts like “boring” and “limiting”. Suddenly, I have an overwhelming desire
to be back in my own body, in my own world. Even the desire to live in the
woman's psyche has lost its appeal as I think about the constant mental
tiptoeing, the suppression of my own natural impulses, and the loss of my
present body and family. With these thoughts, I leave the two women behind and
fly back to my dream body sitting on the shelf under the window. On the flight back, I wonder about my two dream
bodies. Are they still there? What were they doing while I was gone? Were they
just waiting for me to come back? My questions are soon answered as I fly
through the window and reenter the body sitting on the ledge below the windows.
It’s as if I haven't been gone at all, as if no time has passed for my body. Standing up, I walk past the globe on the left and
notice a door hanging open on the side facing away from the windows. Curious, I
walk around it to look inside. Wow, what a surprise! Illuminated by a soft
white light that seems to come from the walls themselves, the interior looks
like a futuristic computer control room. Except for a small flat area at the
bottom of the globe, the shiny metal wall is filled with rows and panels of
blinking colored lights. A plush, white leather arm chair fills the flat area
on the bottom of the globe. Above it is a large white helmet suspended from the
ceiling and connected to the globe by two large electrical cables that coil
down to the floor before disappearing into the wall several feet up from the
floor. It looks like a football helmet minus the ear holes, although it's much
larger and thicker. Its design and position above the chair clearly suggest its
purpose. With nervous anticipation I enter the globe and sit
in the chair. It is very comfortable! Using both hands to pull the helmet down
over my head, I wonder what I’ve done to deserve such great good fortune. As
the helmet makes contact with my head, I suddenly jump to another world in a
different body and a different life. My final thought before the helmet made
contact serves as the central theme of this alternate lifetime. Born into a
primitive farming culture as a woman, I get married and have children. During
this lifetime, I constantly question whether or not I’m worthy of my good
fortune. Quickly bored by the limited conceptualization of this lifetime, I
skim its highpoints and leave. Taking a minute to collect my wits, I decide to
conduct another experiment. I want to see how well I can control the machine.
Will it let me select my parents, my sex, my environment, and the major
concepts I want to explore during the course of a lifetime? Holding my breath,
I decide to be a white female growing up on a nice farm with lots of animals, a
fruit orchard, and wonderful, loving parents. Because it seems to complete the
picture, I make us Protestants. With no clear sense of transition, I enter this
lifetime and become a young girl with a collie for a friend. We love to walk
around the farm and play, and on warm summer nights we climb out the window of
my upstairs bedroom to sit on the roof and look at the stars. While sitting
there I ponder life, what is all about? As this young girl, I go to church and
school because that's what everyone expects of me but my mind is full of
unanswered questions. Separating myself from her life to examine her most
probable future, I see the sadness of unfulfilled dreams. As a middle aged woman
she smiles happily outwardly but, inwardly, she feels as though her life has
been unlived. To keep others happy, she shaped her life in accordance with their
wishes and expectations, not her own. The questions she once asked go unanswered and
dreams she once had go unfulfilled. Disturbed by this vision of her future self, I return
to her present self long enough to insert new ideas and insights in her mind. Like
seeds, they will grow and enrich her sense of wonder and possibility. As I return to my seat in
the computer, I am confident she will experience greater joy and richness in her life. In a great burst of enthusiasm, I
create many lives as both male and female. Each one is placed in a different
time and setting so I can study the values each life is exploring in my search
for eternal truth. When I encounter another personality that piques my
interest, I slow down to examine his life more closely. He is a young black man
living in a jungle village. He is married with two children, and is highly
respected by the tribe for his mystical abilities. Much to my surprise, as I
quietly peer into his life and mind, he becomes aware of my presence.
Sensing my role in the creation of his being, he is overjoyed with my presence.
Quickly, I pull back to hide in the darkness of a large black abyss. No matter,
he walks to the edge of the jungle as if he knows exactly where I am and asks
to come away with me. Although I’m greatly moved by the depth of his spiritual
knowledge and sincerity, I cannot forget his family and tribe. They need him!
When I remind him of this he is saddened but turns and walks back to the
village, knowing in his heart it is the right thing for him to do. As I bring this experiment to a close, I realize that each lifetime is an opportunity to learn how thoughts in the forms of belief, attitude, value, and expectation work (interact) to create our reality. In other words, each moment, each day, and each lifetime provides us with an opportunity to create a better version of who we are. It makes no difference whether that reality is physically expressed or not. Wherever we are and whatever we’re doing, it’s all reality. With this realization, I remove the headgear and stand up to leave the globe. Walking up to the body I left standing in the classroom doorway, I turn and settle back into it. Backing up and turning again, I close the classroom door and walk back the way I had come. With no further need for the school it fades into blackness. Then I wake up to record the details of this dream in my Dream Journal before, it too, can fade away.
* Normally, we don’t talk about issues like diseased teeth and pee shyness. They’re too personal and can be viewed as weaknesses or character flaws. In a world where we constantly compare ourselves and one another to outside standards of being and performance, an admission of this sort can lower other people's opinion of us, subjecting us to criticism and ridicule. In other words, we know from experience that public knowledge of our “flaws” often works against us. No wonder we have such a difficult time learning from our experiences and changing our behavior. We become too busy hiding our flaws and negative experiences from others and, often, ourselves. If we want to evolve and find our way back to love, we need to embrace and move through our negative behaviors and experiences, not deny or delay dealing with them.
My Crooked Teeth
As a young boy I hated my permanent teeth because they had grown in crooked. Like everyone else, I wanted to look my best, but in my mind, my new teeth made that impossible. Every time I opened my mouth to talk or laugh, I was conscious of them and how bad they made me look to others because they looked bad to me. Whether I was talking, laughing, chewing, or expressionless, I could feel the sharp point of the most crooked front tooth pushing into the back of my upper lip. In anger, I refused to take care of them. In my mind, they had betrayed me and I hated them for it! How much did I hate them? One day during the winter of 1955, I was returning home from a friend’s house several miles away. A heavy crust had formed on the surface of the snow during the night so, instead of taking the road home, I took a shortcut through some woods and a farm pasture. Walking through deep snow without snowshoes is almost impossible but sliding over crusted snow with your feet is fun. It was very cold, in the mid teens.
As I walked through the woods, I kept breaking through the crust in areas penetrated and weakened by tall grass but once out of the woods, I was able to make good time as I slid down a long slope into the middle of the pasture. Half way down the slope, my left leg broke through the crust and I came to an abrupt stop as my leg sank into the soft snow beneath, up to the middle of my thigh. Worried about breaking a leg and sweating from the exertion of climbing a slippery hill, I had to open my mouth wider to get more air. When the cold air hit my cavities, the pain almost knocked me to my knees, it was so excruciating. I shouted at my teeth in rage, "Fuck you, you sons a bitches. This is what you deserve!” To emphasize the point, I pulled my lips back even further and purposely sucked in big drafts of frigid air to create even more pain in my teeth. “Suffer you bastards. I don’t care if I have to feel your pain as long as I know you feel it too!” I was a madman, talking to my teeth as if they were conscious and blaming them for threatening to ruin my life.
What fear, what intolerance, what anger! To be honest, part of my anger and frustration was directed at my parents. My father's dental insurance didn’t cover orthodontics (braces), or only covered part of the cost, and he didn’t want to pay for the expensive procedure out of his own pocket. My mother told me to keep pushing on my front tooth with a finger, as if that would straighten them all out. All it did was hurt my fingers because the point of my front tooth was sharp. As a result of my ongoing anger and neglect, my four front teeth had to be removed and replaced by false teeth right after school let out for the summer. I was thirteen years old, embarrassed and ashamed.
Why tell this story and risk harassment and ridicule? Because many of us have similar experiences in a world that so highly prizes perfection and so strongly condemns imperfection. My personal situation involved crooked teeth but what if you're a woman with small breasts or a man with a small penis? What if you're Asian or black in a predominantly white society? What if you're deaf, blind, or intellectually impaired? What if you're a woman in a man's world or a child in an adult's society? There are many ways we can discriminate against ourselves and one another in a world of external values, which classifies various aspects of human appearance, function, and behavior as right or wrong, good or bad, and reinforces those judgments with mechanisms for assigning guilt and administering punishment.
As a child I felt like an island, alone and on my own. Everyone around me was so completely absorbed in their own lives there were few opportunities to experience and share love. Unconsciously, I bought in to the framework of right and wrong, good and bad, guilt and punishment (See: My Catholic School Experience). When my permanent teeth grew in crooked, I felt betrayed by my own body because I didn't think there was any way I could possibly overcome or compensate for this "flaw" in my looks. I already had some shortcomings and this one seemed like the clincher, the end of a meaningful life. I saw how my older brother, Dicky, whose eye teeth were forced out over his other teeth, self-consciously kept his upper lip pulled down over his teeth, or put his hand over his mouth, when he laughed. I knew that with false teeth, I could no longer hope to become a commercial airline pilot. And what girl would want to kiss a guy with crooked teeth like mine, let alone marry me? I had become a master fault finder and I was totally focused on how bad my teeth were. I was capable of seeing the good in life but when it came to me and the fulfillment of my dreams, I focused almost exclusively on the negative, or whatever threatened my chances for having a meaningful and happy life.
Feeling unloved and unwanted except by our family dog, King, and feeling put upon by society through school and its demand that I do what I'm told whether I like it or not, I had become fearful, angry, contemptuous, and intolerant of most of the people and much of the behavior I saw around me. With a frame of mind like this my teeth didn't stand a chance. Now, suppose I was the leader of a country and I was fearful, angry, contemptuous, and intolerant? How would I react if some of my countrymen opposed my rule and threatened to keep me from fulfilling my political ambitions? Would they end up with burning tires or nooses around their necks? What if a person controlled by fear, anger, contempt, and intolerance was a parent, teacher, or employer? Would you want them to have authority over you? If you were fearful, angry, contemptuous, and intolerant, how do you think it would affect the health of your body and mind? What kind of a parent, child, friend, teacher, doctor, employer, employee, or politician would you make?
Anger, contempt, and intolerance grow out of fear and fear grows out of a sense of separation and vulnerability. When we strongly believe we're separate and there's not enough to go around, we make victims of ourselves as we compete with each other for survival in a dog-eat-dog, devil-take-the-hindmost world. With this world view it's not hard to see how we would conclude we're basically bad and can't trust ourselves. To survive in this hostile world what are we willing to do, what limits are we going to set? Are we going to have any limits beyond those society imposes on us? Is it okay to lie, cheat, and scheme against others in this world view? Is it okay to sell our soul to the company store for money, power, and prestige? Should we network with others of similar mind to increase our personal chances for survival in this hostile environment? All of these actions seem normal and logical in a mind that sees life as a matter of survival of the fittest. Just think of the cliché, "All's fair in love and war". Now we can add business too! Obviously, many of us buy into the belief that we're all separate and there's not enough to go around. We see these ideas played out in business, art and and politics every day, as well as in our personal relationships with each other people.
When we buy into this negative world view, we make if hard for others to love us and we make it hard for us to love them. If there is so little love in the world, how do we survive and do as well as we do? Because there is another world view present within the dominant world view. I sensed it in animals and a few people as a young boy and yearned for it to fill my life. I think much of the fear, anger and frustration I felt as a young boy was directly proportional to the absence of love in my life.
What keeps us from destroying ourselves completely is the occasional moment of intuitive appreciation for the magic and wonder of life. When we see the birth of a baby, a beautiful flower or a magical sunset, a sense of awe breaks through our hardened exterior. These sacred moments remind us that we know far more than we think we do in terms of intuitive knowledge. We know, intuitively, that life is no accident and we know, intuitively, that all life and being ultimately comes from the same source. We know we're all made from the same basic stuff, just put together in different ways. And we know the earth can provide us with all we need if we share, we're creative, and we don't ask for more than the earth can provide. We know that to live in harmony with the earth, and each other, we need to balance the number of children we have with the earth's ability to provide for all life, not just human life because all life is interdependent. Biblical proclamations like "Be fruitful and multiply" might have been appropriate once but not any more. We need to take personal responsibility for what we do and not leave it up to others. We are not only the result of creation, we are creators and creation itself. We are the artist who paints and the canvas we paint on at the same time.
Who we are and what we do individually and collectively, matters! We need to be partners in survival, not competitors. We learn these things in those too few precious moments when we let our awareness penetrate the fog of limitation and fear that surrounds us in this Value Judgment World of right and wrong, good and bad, should and shouldn't, guilt and punishment.
Pee Shyness
Being afraid to pee in the presence of other people is a logistical nightmare in a world with so many people. Is this another malady created by value judgment in the world? In my case, yes! Until I reached the age of seven or eight, I had no problem peeing in the presence of other people. My older brother and I, and some of my friends, had peeing contests to see who could pee the farthest. My fear of peeing in the presence of other people started when my mother first saw me pee from high up in the large pine tree in our side yard. She caught me twice in quick succession and both times she screamed at me, "Roger, what are you doing? Stop it! No one wants to see you pee." As she leaned out of the laundry room window and screamed up at me, she had a look of panic on her face. She was worried that the people in town would think she was an unfit mother if they knew she let her kids pee outdoors. If she had been rational, she would have realized her screaming would do more to attract the attention of any passerby or neighbor than me peeing from high up in a tree because the trunk of the tree was wider than my body and I was standing on the back side of it facing away from the road. There was one house beside ours but some small trees shielded me from their view.
Nonetheless, my mother's emotional outbursts affected me because from that time on, I became self-conscious about peeing in the presence of other guys. Making matters even worse, I started to imagine that, as guys stood beside each other peeing, they compared themselves to one another for everything from penis size, pee-stream size and noise, to the length of time it took someone to start and stop peeing. Finally, I avoided peeing in the presence of other people completely.
It was bad enough in high school but much worse in the Air Force. In high school I could go home to pee after school but in the Air Force, during basic training especially, home was a barracks shared with seventy other guys or so with long, open-trough urinals. Most of the time I had to sit on a toilet to pee because, with so many men living together, there always seemed to be someone using the bathroom. I often tried to overcome my "dis-ease", but if someone walked up beside me before I could start peeing, I would freeze and pretend I was done. It was really pathetic but there was nothing I could do about it.
I had no control over my body in this regard, until I discovered the affect of alcohol. After Basic Training I moved to the other side of the base to start training as a medical technician. After school we were on our own. My favorite destination quickly became the Airmen's Club where I drank alcohol and partied with my friends. I had discovered that alcohol made me relax enough to be able to pee in front of other people. Hell, half drunk, I was even able to laugh and have fun! When I was sober, I was shy and stone-faced, almost totally paralyzed by my inhibitions. Growing up in a world of value judgments, where almost everyone is trying to straighten you out, assumes there's something wrong with you and it had me tied up in a million knots psychologically. In catholic school the nun in catechism class told me "You're basically evil and you can't trust yourself", while in public school, the message I received was "Sit down, shut up and do as I tell you because I know what's best for you!" I was severely conflicted and almost completely dysfunctional. As a result, drinking alcohol became a nightly ritual throughout my time in the Air Force.
To give you an idea of how debilitating and dangerous this "dis-ease" was, when I took a train from San Antonio, Texas to Portland, Maine after Basic Training, I was unable to go to the bathroom the whole trip, two and a half days! I tried to go several times but I couldn't. When I finally arrived at my parent's house it took two beers and an hour of sitting on the toilet for me to pee. My kidneys had almost completely shut down. My urine was so thick and yellow I could almost see my reflection in it when I stood up to flush the toilet.
Shortly before my discharge in mid 1964 I lay on the grass outside my barracks building late one evening. Looking up at the stars, I wondered about school and drinking. I was a high school dropout with a GED (General Education Development Certificate) I'd earned after joining the service. I dropped out of high school in my senior year shortly after my seventeenth birthday and joined the Air force to get away from home and school. I felt alienated from the world, like a stranger in a strange land. I wanted to meet new people and visit new places. I hated school and, for a while, I thought I hated learning too, but after almost five years in the service, I knew there were things I wanted to know and school seemed like the best place to learn them.
In that moment, I realized I was going to go back to school and complete college. I also thought about my drinking problem. It didn't require a college degree to know that I couldn't do all the things I wanted to do in life if I kept drinking the way I h ad been. So, while looking up at the stars I decided to stop drinking too. If people didn't like me the way I was (inhibited and uptight) that was just too bad. I wasn't going to drink myself to death just to keep others happy. To cap off this momentous evening of revelation and decision making, I also realized, all I wanted to do was be me! Society, with its right and wrong, good and bad, should and shouldn't judgments, backed up by the threat of guilt and punishment had done a number on me and I wasn't going to have it any more. So started my journey back to health and sanity.
Why share such personal and painful stories with you? Because we all have our own, and even more important than that, there's much to be learned from them. These kinds of experiences are like lifelong nightmares that affect our lives in ways we can't imagine. They're so emotionally charged we never forget them, especially if we don't outgrow them and learn what they have to teach us. Experiences like these need to be confronted and transformed into something positive if we want to find our way back to love.
The Root Cause of All Violence and "Dis-Ease" in the World
Boy, what a loaded statement! It makes me glad I'm old and not dependent on public acceptance for my income. This way, I can say what I really believe without fearing the consequences, unless, of course, these ideas trigger some kind of homicidal rage in someone who doesn't want to hear them. Then my recommendation is, don't read them! Unnatural fear is the root of all violence and dis-ease in the world except for infirmities we're born with, or suffer from as a result of natural disasters such as earthquakes, drought and storms, although we can exercise some measure of control over natural phenomena with our minds. (More on this later.)
What is unnatural fear? First, we need to define natural fear? Natural fear is momentary fear that comes when we need it and goes when we don't. It's a healthy fight or flight response that is necessary to preserve life in the moment. Unnatural fear, on the other hand, is chronic or long term fear induced by societal and/or personal beliefs. For example, when we believe we're all separate and there's not enough of what we need or want to go around, we put ourselves in competition with each other, competition for survival. No wonder so many of us believe the acquisition of money, power, and prestige is the key to success (survival) in this the world, that dominance over others is king. And no wonder we believe we're basically bad and can't trust ourselves. By focusing our attention on separation and scarcity, we create a dog eat dog, devil take the hindmost world that makes victims of us all, and that's scary. You see, it's not mankind that's bad, it's our ideas about who we are and what reality is that are bad. And even ideas aren't bad, it's the kind of reality they create that's bad. It's really up to us, we don't have to buy into them if we don't want to. Unnatural fear results when we buy into core beliefs like separation and scarcity because whatever we believe is reflected in our minds and social institutions.
In other words, society plays a major role in creating and perpetuating the violence and "dis-ease" we see in ourselves and the world by virtue of the beliefs it supports and projects out into the world through its policies, actions, and institutions. We, as individuals, also play a major role in creating our reality because we can choose what to believe and how to react to the life challenges we're confronted with. For example, if it were someone else whose teeth grew in crooked, they might have reacted in a totally different way than I did. They might not have liked having crooked teeth but they might have accepted them anyway, which would have enabled to get them straightened out later in life when they could afford to pay for the procedure themselves. The same with my pee shyness, someone else might have reacted to my mother's hysteria differently. I was a very sensitive and serious boy who took things to heart, which brings us to another human characteristic we need to take into consideration. It's sympathetic reaction. When you put cells from two different hearts together, they beat as one. Humans do the same.
When two people come together, they have a tendency to think and act alike. We all want to be loved and valued so we have a tendency to cooperate or comply with other people's thoughts and actions whether they're reasonable or not. This is especially true when we lack strong values of our own and the person or person's we're dealing with are friends or powerful authority figures in our lives. We can also ignore good sense and betray our own values when we're offered large sums of money to carry out someone else's wishes.
All I want to do is be me!, I thought as I lay under the stars outside my barracks in 1964. Why would I want to be me if what I am is bad, if I couldn't trust myself to be good? By 1964, I had seen myself in action long enough to know that what I am is good, my parents, the catholic school nun, the public schools, and my own past selves be damned for telling me anything different! If we stop looking for what's wrong and bad in us and, instead, start seeing what's right and good in us, we'll all come to the same conclusion. Who wants to feel they have to hide themselves from others? Pretending to be someone we're not, is lying and who wants to lie, besides it takes a lot of energy to armor ourselves against a hostile world and keep up a false front. If people can't stop making value judgments and love us the way we are, that's too bad! I, for one, refuse to be cowed by society and negative beliefs anymore. What we are, what all life is, is totally amazing and we need to realize that! When we use our intuitive abilities and inner senses to peek below the surface of our being, the magic and wonder of All That Is becomes self evident.
There's another set of core ideas we're all aware of and subscribe to, to one degree or another. These ideas reflect the knowledge that we're both one and separate and there is enough to go around if we share our resources and live within the earth's ability to provide for us. We know this but focus on it to little. Within the framework of these ideas, we value our Oneness and Individuality equally. We live and operate in partnership with each other, not competition. We take responsibility for our own actions and values because we know that the freedom to be ourselves can exist only in an environment of mutual respect, honesty, love, and appreciation. In other words, we do what's going to work best for all of us because we know that will work best for us in the long run, since all life is interdependent.
Many of us in today's world, and throughout history, have known we're all cut from the same cloth but have ignored this knowledge to survive in a hostile world of our own creation, a world that demands most or all of our attention to survive in. We can no longer do that if we want mankind to survive in physical terms. We need to realize that what we are is good, otherwise, we'll keep looking for evidence that we're bad, and we'll find it! Then what do we do? (See: Encounter with the Energy of Unconditional Love)
As We Think, We Create. Change what we think and we change what we create!
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