Bad things happen, for no good reason. People are regularly cruel and brutal to each other. Shocking, horrifyingly sad events take place and no good comes of them.
I’ve had a hard time finding my place in this world. I didn’t want to belong inside this reality. If this was the game, I didn’t want to play.
Even now, it’s often difficult to stay here. I regularly feel the fear of being overwhelmed by grief. Every time I look at the news, it’s there… and I feel that familiar impulse to leave. It’s not that I go looking for razor blades or sleeping pills or fantasise about driving my car off the road. I’m not suicidal. But I am overly familiar with the feeling of leaving my body.
All the sensation drains out of my feet, legs, hands, arms and torso. I feel faint and light-headed and spacey. All I can sense is what comes through and swirls around inside my head. My gut twists into a knot and my heart closes down, creating extreme tension between my shoulders and across my chest. I’m disconnected from the neck down. I literally feel like I’m fading away.
And there’s this curious, consistent cycle around the leaving. The trigger is some strong emotion that feels too big to cope with. Rage, grief and terror are the most popular candidates. The emotion triggers the impulse to shoot up and out of my body. What usually happens at that point is that I physically leave. Sometimes that means walking to the other side of the room. It can mean going home from the party early. In the past, I’ve ended relationships and left jobs and dumped friendships and even moved countries because it was too uncomfortable to stay… without really recognising where the discomfort stemmed from.
Because then – after I’ve voluntarily separated myself – it hits me: I’m alone again. I feel sad and small and hurt. On some level, I know I’ve done it to myself. And then I feel ashamed because (quietly, in the background of my mind) there’s a story running that I’m failing at being human. The shame of continually creating and perpetuating my own disconnection powers a spiral of moving away from other people and from pleasure and from life that has been in place for a long time. I’ve been exiling myself in shame for at least a couple of thousand years, from what I’ve been shown so far. And the story – unconscious until now – has been that there’s no place for me in this world.
A few weeks ago, my Soul – and a couple of other beings that were almost too magnificent to look at – called me on the dance of shame. And it was a roasting.
“DON’T YOU DARE!” She roared at me. “Don’t you DARE – even for a MOMENT – doubt your own MAGNIFICENCE! We couldn’t do this without each other! You are absolutely ESSENTIAL!”
But I still doubted. So She decided to show me where I fit in the scheme of things. And this is a lot like what I saw.
cosmic_order_by_jp_talma-d3e2phr
She showed me a multi-dimensional fractal. She indicated that I’m a tiny whirl on the end of an arm of a tiny whirl on the end of an arm of a tiny whirl on the end of an arm of a never-ending swirling, whirling spiral. My human body occupies that single point, but ‘I’ am also every other point in the pattern… because every other point is another ‘version’ of me within multi-dimensional reality. My body lives ‘in’ this world and ‘in’ a solar system and ‘in’ a galaxy and ‘in’ a universe… one inside another and another and another. I am like a set of Russian stacking dolls that goes on almost to infinity, far beyond the limits of human sight.
THIS is my place. I am here – in this world, in this body – and I am everywhere out there. I am the whole fractal. And it gets better: I am also the algorithm that generates the fractal pattern. It’s so much bigger than my human self and yet, without that piece/version of me, it’s incomplete. Flawed. Broken.
I am essential to the perfection of the universe.
And it’s not only me. You are. We all are.
Every single one of us.
Yeah. It was freaky. I mean – I’ve read about the multidimensional universe. I totally believed in it, intellectually. I’d even longed for a direct, personal experience of it, mostly because I thought it would mean I’d achieved something in terms of ‘spiritual progress’ (yep – that’s embarrassing to admit). If a dear and trusted friend hadn’t witnessed the unfolding of it, I would have been tempted to dismiss my ‘vision’ as a diabolical projection of my monkey mind. But the latest Oculus Rift technology cannot even begin to approximate the full-body extravaganza of light and sound and sensation She served up to me.
I want to be very clear about something: I really don’t want to talk about this publicly. I haven’t even told my closest friends about it (um… until right now). Every part of me that is vigilant about my spiritualised ego is screaming “you can’t claim to have seen this!” And every part that doesn’t feel safe talking openly about ‘woo woo stuff’ is convinced I’m about to be burned at a stake. But She was very clear: this experience does not make me more special or more connected to my higher self or more spiritually evolved than anyone else. In fact, it wasn’t even about me in a personal sense, because what She showed me was (literally) a universal truth.
Also – I’m not claiming to completely understand or be able to explain this revelation yet. I’m still digesting the pictures and words and feelings She gave to me. I really wish I could remember the totality that I am in every moment, but I can’t yet hold a sense of my multi-dimensional self in conscious awareness for more than a few minutes at a time. I can only guess my nervous system is still catching up.
And yet, in the face of this visceral experience of the immensity of me, I can’t ignore the invitation She issued. She wants me to play
a much
bigger
game.
Not in terms of worldly success or fame or even my day-to-day level of activity. But She was very clear: I am at liberty to stop believing that I can’t handle being here. Any time I want, I can stop telling the story that this world is too painful to inhabit. In every moment, I can choose to stop being at war, whether it’s with my body, my thoughts, other people, ideologies… or with reality. And I can stop hiding who I am and what I know to be true.
At any time, I can simply be here and be human.
I can claim my place.
I can belong.
So this me. And I’m here to play.