I will always remember the night of my conscious rebirth when I felt death and the fear it brings with it.
It was 1971 and I had already been dealing with the effects of a bad experience with alcohol and marijuana for about a month. The experience triggered a dark night of the soul experience in which I lost thirty pounds.
For about thirty days I lived in a mental and emotional torment within. It was like a pandora’s box was opened within me. I began to wonder if I would survive it. I suppose it was the beginning of a psychotic break.
Terrified is not a strong enough word for what I was feeling and the strong dark voices in my head were not of a loving nature.
For some reason I decided to go to my parents’ bedroom and get the family bible we never used. I wanted something to distract the mental and emotional hell I was experiencing within me.
Day by day the pressure of the inner torment was growing. I found some comfort from the reading of the psalms in the bible as I realized that David or Solomon knew fear and human weakness.
I was very shy, introverted and very ignorant of life and myself at 21. My whole world was turned upside down a year before, when I could not go back to college and did not know where my life was leading me.
The night I met death I had reached the end of my rope on carrying the load of my mind and emotions.
It came in a moment of the deepest fear I had ever experienced and a sharp painful realization that the person I was and had been all my life must die for the pain to go away. I was terrified to realize that the person must die and suicide became a powerful thought and emotion.
Fear cut so deep in me that I felt that I was being torn apart. Scared is not a strong enough word, terrified is a closer one. I knew a part of me was dying without knowing another part would be reborn.
At the moment of my rebirth in consciousness I was laying on my bed with a bible on my chest. The fear and darkness I felt was all consuming.
I knew that if some relief was not in sight I would die or have to end my life.
I uttered a prayer to the God or universe that I did not know and with the utmost sincerity I hoped against hope that a miracle could happen.
Somewhere during that prayer, it felt like a bolt of lightning hit me. My entire body felt charged with an indescribable peace and serenity I had never experienced in my life. I wept like a small child. God or something showed up.
My body seemed to glow with a light that radiated above it a few inches and a powerful and clear voice vibrated through me, it said “I am the way, the truth and the light, no man cometh unto the father than through me”
Over the years I have come to understood that those words and that voice were my higher self, communicating to me at the level my mind had been conditioned to understand spiritual things. You could say it was a come to Jesus moment or a salvation experience, but I have come to realize it over the years as the beginning of my awakening.
Spiritual awakening or the truth are far above our understanding, and we must experience them to gain clarity about the true nature of our existence. A belief or beliefs cannot do that.
My experience was an extreme experience that most likely shows the hardness of my ego through lifetimes. I have often felt that I spent lifetimes as a monk searching for redemption for lifetimes I spent walking in the dark side.
Some of this has been revealed to me and I am sure over time I will learn more about the truth of my many lives.
Robert