My spiritual awakening part 8

During our conversation by the mailboxes, Jessica asked me if I wanted to come over for coffee some day. So the next day, I wrote a message on Facebook, asking her if I could take her up on the offer. And a few days later, we were having coffee at her house. 

We ended up talking for several hours. It turned out that we did not just share many spiritual views. We also had many copies of the same books in our bookshelves, we were both vegan, not particularly fond of political correctness, we both came from Värmland originally, had jews among our close ancestors, had lived in Gothenburg at the same time, had backgrounds in the metal subcultures and we shared many other similar life experiences. 

It feels good looking back at this now. We’ve been together for almost four years now and gone through much together. We’ve struggled and had conflicts, like most couples do, but we’ve never lost the respect for each other and we’ve never resorted to petty stuff, such as name-calling. But even so, it’s easy to forget these beautiful moments, when things get tough, the miracles stop (yeah, real miracles! - I’ll get to that later) stop happening and the struggles of everyday life kick in. It’s easy to focus on the bad rather than the good, thereby holding on to the painful memories, while allowing the joyful ones to fade. This is what I, sadly, to a large degree did for a long time. And I did so while Jessica shut her eyes to everything that was not working, while only seeing the good.

And it’s true that you keep memories alive by thinking about them. So if the past is considered to be part of reality, I guess that in a very provable way, you actually do create your reality by what you think about. I guess this would be true about the future as well. If you think about all the good things that might happen, you live in more positive expectations, thereby creating a positive future in the now, independent on what will actually transpire in the future.

My spiritual awakening part 7

Back to my time at the university. After having tried a few different courses, I decided to major in Religious Studies. I had realized that if all of this spiritual stuff was real, which I absolutely believed, then I wanted to dedicate as much time and energy as possible to it, so if I could dedicate my education to it, this was what I was going to do.

In my spiritual search I had started to become drawn to the the occult (the type that wants to be a force for good), so I decided to specialize in Western Esotericism. For quite a while, I even wanted to become a professor. But towards the end I got disillusioned with the whole academia, plus that a few things happened that made me just want to get away from everything. So instead I sold my apartment and moved to a village called Fåglavik, outside of Herrljunga.  

This was where I went through what you could call a second awakening. I moved in next door to the woman that is now my wife. We met by the mailboxes two weeks after I moved in. I was picking up my mail and she came home from the grocery store. I introduced myself and we ended up talking for, as I recall it, about half an hour. It was a pretty long time anyway. She told me that she had a partner that she was living with and I remember thinking: too bad. She was cute. 

I also picked up on when she told me that she liked the energies in Fåglavik. This made me wonder if she had an interest in spirituality or if it was just a figure of speech. 

Little did I know that this meeting would be the beginning of my real spiritual awakening, or that I through meeting Jessica, would learn just how much other people affect how you evolve as a person.

My spiritual awakening part 6

When I first went from atheist/Laveyean satanist, to a believer in God, I was pretty alone with this. I started buying books on religion and spirituality. Any books on these themes really, since I didn’t know exactly what I was looking for. So I started ploughing through anything from purely academic books to books written by Eastern mystics.

I had been living in a very deep unconsciousness when I started to wake up. As I said in an earlier post, I was still partying pretty hard. And I was also largely hanging around with the same friends.

I also had tons of other patterns and other issues that stemmed from this unconsciousness. Actually, I believe that a part of my life’s journey, is to learn how to deal with all of the problems that one causes for oneself. 

One major thing that I did, that I didn’t realize quite recently, was that I pushed down my emotions to the point where I felt kind of shut off and probably acquired some kind of world record in bodily tensions, which in turn messed up my back. I think that this started when my mother, whom I was living with and was very close to, died when I was 13. This messed me up pretty bad. The adults around me at the time did the best they could from where they were, but they honestly didn’t handle the situation very good. Basically they wanted to change a lot of thing in my life, where I still to this day believe that it would have been better, if they would have as much as possible allowed me to continue living as I did with my mother.

A teenager cannot be expected to get a grip on things and start making conscious choices in the face of a tragedy. But honestly, I allowed it, together with the bullying that I also went through in my teens, to continue affecting me through my adult life. I turn 40 this year and I still haven’t let go of the pain. I know it’s a bit of a cliché, but I can feel it as a lump in my chest. Like a heavy, physical lump, pulling me downwards. 

I’ve noticed that a disproportionally large amount of people that are waking up, carry different kinds of traumas from the past. Often from their childhoods and teens. And even though it wasn’t our faults, it’s our responsibility to fix it. Fair or not, no one else is going to do it for us. And the ones that will suffer the most if we refuse are we.

My spiritual awakening part 5

While I was writing this, another memory came up. When I was six years old, one of my classmates asked me if I believed in God. I said no, whereupon he said that he did. This memory stuck with me. My thoughts were already back then something along the lines of “no evidence = no God”, even if I didn’t use those words. 

This shaped my beliefs until I had my initial awakening at 23. 

Obviously, my this awakening left me with a lot of doubts, even though I didn’t recognize them as such. I knew that I had found something precious that I needed to hold on to, but it was resting on a pretty shaky foundation.

I feel that I also need to mention that from my early twenties, I experimented a lot with psychedelics, and not in a very responsible way (sorry for messing up the timeline here). And I started to have what I would call spiritual experiences. At the time, I had no idea that there was a spiritual culture around them. Thich is quite interesting, since I had no prior knowledge that could shape my experiences and I was very anti when it came to religion and spirituality in general. And actually, even before I got robbed, I had started looking into Buddhism a bit, as a consequence of the things that I started experiencing. Since there was no God in most Buddhist teachings, this was a pill that was a little bit easier to swallow, for someone that had called religious people idiots for most of my life.