Paradigm Shift

3/8/24

A couple of weeks into my 7th grade school year I became unable to move my left leg properly. I started limping. I complained to my mother, but she ignored me. Back in the 1980’s kids were checked by the school nurse for scoliosis. I was singled out. The school called my mom, and she was forced to take me to the doctor. The doctor discovered my back was fractured and a disc in the lower lumbar region was herniated. There were only 2 other cases of kids in North America with herniated discs. One had been run over by a tractor and the other was in a massive car accident. He asked me what happened. I couldn’t remember.

It was decided that I would be on bed rest in hopes that my disc would heal. If it didn’t the next step would be surgery. I was taken out of school in early October and spent the rest of my 7th-grade year laying in bed on the 3rd story of our tall townhouse. 2 floors below me was the kitchen. I couldn’t get up and down the stairs. My dad had died 2 years before and my mother was going to school and working part time. She never bothered to bring me food. Once a month she would bring pain medication and put it on my bed table and replace the cup I used for water for when I hobbled to the bathroom nearby. I existed on chocolate turtles my friend and neighbor brought me every few days. I was 5’ 6” and by the end of that period, I weighed less than a hundred pounds and looked like I had just gotten out of Auschwitz. For more than a year after the surgery, I couldn’t eat anything more than a handful of button mushrooms without vomiting because my stomach had shrunk so much. I didn’t get my menses back until I was 17 and even then it was permanently erratic coming once every few months until I went through Menopause in my forties.

The effects of this had deleterious effects on my health and was a clear case of severe child neglect, it was also one of the best things that happened to me. An event that defined who I would become. It forced me inward. I spent all day, every day alone. Once a week the Vice Principal of my junior high school came to teach me American History because I was required to pass a test on the constitution to enter 8th grade. I had no other education during this period. I suppose I was lucky that my mother didn’t allow my 4th grade teacher to skip me up two grades. My precociousness came in handy but still, I had no English, no math, no science, and only one hour a week of history. Kids regress after a summer off which is why schools have been restructured to have shorter summers than when I was a kid. When I was folding back into school it wasn’t easy but I digress.

I spent nine months alone in my room on the top floor of our townhouse. I had a neighbor/friend who brought me chocolates a couple of times a week and my hour a week with the Vice Principal but 90% of the time I was in bed awake thinking and meditating. I was born psychic and the trauma of childhood likely exaggerated that natural ability for survival reasons. Later I found out that in many indigenous cultures, young people with psychic abilities are taken at ages 12-13 at adolescence and put on a vision quest. These young people are cast out into the wilderness to commune with their inner selves, go deep, meditate, and find their power. This was my experience as well. I read a book on TM and began meditating regularly, spending my days thinking about the nature of god and projecting myself into the future.

It was during this period that I was in communion with either a higher part of myself or a higher being. It showed me the nature of the universe as a circle within a circle within a circle infinitely in every direction from the micro to the macro. It used my simple 12-year-old point of reference to show me the notion of “as above, so below,” or what Michael Talbot calls, “the Holographic Universe,” what I later came to refer to as the fractal universe. All of these ideas have the notion of the tiniest parts containing the same shape and form as the bigger part and all parts being part of the larger. I was also shown the nature of the godhead as being like a diamond with many faces. This same diamond metaphor applied to the shape of own consciousness.

Another way to explain this is that each facet of the diamond is a face of the divine and a pathway to the center or an adage all roads lead to the same place. Meaning it doesn’t matter what god or goddess you worship they are all facets of the same divinity. Another way to think of this is the way Jung explained it in psychological terms as archetypes. These archetypes repeat throughout ancient civilizations and reverberate in modern culture. They are keys or more aptly maps to our divinity, not to our perfection as there is no perfection possible in this universe.