Something new this time.

I'm not going to give you my latest insights on the latest website I've stumbled upon. Instead I'm going back in time. My time~ My ego would like to think my experience is different from yours but it's really not. You'll see why.

Going back to the time as a teenager when I was interested in the occult. You know, like Paganism, rituals and magic. I was alway interested in fastasy books. I've read thousands of pages of Dragonlance chronicles and the Eye of the World Series.  I was spellbound by powerful wizards who could harness the powers of nature and the universe at their command. My desire to be like them was something I kept locked in my mind.

I was never that into the psuedo-Christian, Catholicism, that was passed down to my mother, Mary, and then dutifully passed on to me. Come on, I'm a Taurus, an earthy Dionysion person. Don't get me wrong, I love the architecture and most cathedrals inspire awe, reverance and curiosity every time I see one, but this cat doens't dig the dogmatism.

Side-note. My original got erased as my iGoogle decided to refresh on it's own. And that is where I left off writing my blog.  This is where is a stream of thought that I want to remember from that version goes. 

So going back to the story. There is a line to walk between fantasy and reality. There are many thoughts that can hold one back from expressing themselves. A common one - the one I am most familiar with is, "what will the others think?" Those who are not me.   Here's the joke: All of us have the same thoughts, feelings and questions. It's true. And most of our thoughts are not new either. Sure maybe for us they are new.  Maybe even those who took the credit for their genius, like Einstein, Copernicus, Tesla, these cats came up with new ideas for the whole world, were not the originators of these ideas.

We also have the spiritual revolutionaries like Christ and Siddharta (the Buddha) who mastered physical reality. These guys introduced radical new thoughts and transformed humanity on massive scales. And Christ said we could do works great than he. WHAT? Christ walked on water, multiplied food, and oh, did I forget to mention resurrected from the dead! Get that. Christ said that if I get hit by a truck and die, I have the ability to resurrect myself from the mortuary.

Getting back to my desires to be a powerful wizard; I think my soul started to glimpse the applications of all this but I still didn't have any outlet to direct this energy. The Catholic church just kept on doing their rituals each month. Minnetonka Junior High just kept right on teaching math, english, and science. But what about turning one loaf of bread into many. What about walking on the water? I don't want to learn about Algebra! I want to know how to have power over my environment like those wizards I had fanticized I could be like. The core of my being screams out to be like those wizards. Not some damn stock broker, for heaven sakes not a Western MD. I want to actually understand the mysteries of the universe, of life, of GOD. WHAT AM I DOING HERE?!

So like any troubled teenageer from the suburbs with divorced parents with no answers I found ways to numb myself from the darkness I saw in my future. The future with no answers for my desires.

Just in the knick of time I pulled myself out of that world of intoxication and numbness in order to graduate high school. Since I was expelled from Minnetonka, I transferred over to the neighboring city of Wayzata to finish up my senior year. Luckily for me I was able to fit the year I missed being in rehab, plus the current year studies, all into one year and graduated right on schedule. That was 1995.

Thus began my spiritual kindegarte;  I found myself in the world of recovery. So it's the routine of meetings, 12 steps, mentoring and finally being a mentor. My life gained some stability in all aspects: mentally, spiritually and physically. I consumed many books on spirituality. A few that stick out were 'The Sermon on the Mount', 'Celestine Prophecy', 'Impersonal Life' and many others.

This time was great because this is when I learned to go within through meditation. It freaked me out at first because I could seem to 'solve' or get peace with any area or thought that came into my mind. I also learned to pray and participate with groups for the common purpose of healing.

This part of my life in recovery lasted from April 1994 to June 2003 when left to go into basic training for the United States Air Force Reserves. The joke this time was that after calling myself an alcoholic for 9 years I could drink just fine and have ever since. To tell the truth I'm really not much of a drinker, makes me tired.

So some Air Force buddies talked me into letting them by me a drink.  I needed to experience some humanity for awhile.  My time with the reserves was a lot of fun. I was able to travel and meet a lot of great people. Yeah enough of that story.

Sure you may want to hear about jobs I had. You might.  But that's for another time~