Random Thoughts: I Promise That I Have Not Lost My Mind!

I got sucked into a Mary Kay

session today. I spent way too much money; discovered that the same products were available online for less than half what I shelled out; and realized yet again, that I’m a sucker when it comes to capitalism, business, and trusting random strangers to have my best interests at heart. Have I learned NOTHING from my previous life? DO NOT TRUST STRANGERS when they want money, sex, or favors. Some lessons, apparently, take lifetimes to learn.

I was worried after my last couple of blog posts that some people might think that I had lost my mind. Maybe the whole Mary Kay visit was about reconnecting with what people think is normal: spending money on cosmetics. Maybe, I thought, I’ll return to myself by spending money on stuff I don’t need to maintain the illusion of youth. This was the wounded Ego desperately trying to return to equilibrium. I want people to think that I am ‘normal’ and not so far off the deep end that I lose readers or end up even more marginalized by our culture than I already am.

Of course, spending money on cosmetics and wrinkle creams did nothing for me but leave me a couple hundred bucks poorer. There is no way to go back to the old, superficial ways of relating to others and Western culture. I’m too far gone, and I simply have to accept that nothing is going to be the same as it was before. If other people are not OK with that, don’t understand it, or pass judgement on me one way or another, then I have to accept that with grace and move forward. Of course, this is all in my head. Nobody has come out and questioned my sanity. Mostly, nobody says anything at all. I get the sense that quite a few people I know are just letting this pass and trying not to say anything for fear of me taking it the wrong way. I know that some people I love think that yes, I am deluded and out of touch with reality.

The problem is that I am IN touch with reality. It’s a reality that most people don’t see or acknowledge; the ones that do are marginalized. But this is my proper place in this culture, and this historical moment. I am on the fringe. I always have been, I always will be, and I have to find my comfort level with that. I will never fit in. I could lie and say that I am OK with that, but it’s simply not true. I would love to buy Mary Kay, get a face lift, play tennis all day, do some volunteer work, read women’s magazines, and go to the movies with my church ladies; but I can’t. It’s a culture of comfort and ease, and my lot is to be uncomfortable, confused, seeking, striving, breaking apart norms and paradigms to the best of my ability, and questioning everything that most people accept as given. For that, most of my time will be spent alone.

I used to laugh at people who believed in fairies, elves, gnomes, aliens, La Llorona, the chupacabra, Big Foot, and various swamp monsters. Now, I think they all exist and are products of our ongoing co-creation of reality. All of it is out there: ghosts, people reliving their time line, people living in alternate dimensions of reality, people reincarnating, souls returning as animals or plants, souls slitting up in various levels of reality, souls in Heaven, souls in Hell, souls reliving the same moment for all eternity, souls everywhere and all over the place experiencing themselves in an infinite variety of ways. There is no one way for consciousness to continue on, but endless ways. That makes paranormal investigations extremely rich and difficult to interpret. We don’t know how the consciousness we pick up on is manifesting itself. Can we know? I don’t know.

Given all of this, how do we meaningfully conduct investigations? How do we know how to interpret the information that we receive? How do we know we’ve contacted a living consciousness on another timeline, and not a gnome or a dark-eyed child or a dark energy that was never human? I have no answers. I will attempt to work on this issue over the next several posts. I thank you all for your patience with me and this long, strange trip.

–Kirsten A. Thorne

 

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The Constant Weirdness of the Spiritual Awakening, Part 2

I’m trying to live with this new world, and it continues to be a struggle. The old world dies hard and pulls me back in a variety of ways; but there is no going back. What happened will continue to play itself out for the rest of whatever ‘time’ is. Here is a partial list of the weirdness one might expect from a ‘spiritual awakening,’ or a sudden realization that everything you thought you knew about time, God, Heaven, Hell, life, consciousness, and reality is, quite simply, wrong:

• You might feel dead already. This is one of the strangest symptoms for me. It often feels like my heart stopped beating, and that there’s an absolute stillness in my chest. It seems like I have stopped functioning as a biological entity. Obviously, I continue on as a physical being, but the supreme importance of my biological functions has been reduced to practically nothing. One day, my body will stop working completely; and I will continue on. I used to think about that a lot; now I know it, because it’s already happened. I HAVE DIED SEVERAL TIMES AND I REMEMBER IT. It’s a big deal, because you have to start over in a different illusion, but that’s OK. So I can now access the feeling of being dead and it doesn’t really phase me. It’s just weird. It’s not scary.
• You might never sleep a full night again. My energy patterns have completely reversed themselves. I used to wake up around 3:00 AM–and I still do–but I would hop out of bed at 6:00 am with no problem. Now, strange energy bursts wake me up completely at random times, but ALWAYS around 3:00 AM. In the morning, I can barely function, and I would sleep in if the cat allowed it. But these unusual wake up times are accompanied by intense mental processing, not only of the significance of Mary, but of other memories from other lives. I’m now trying to work out the meaning of my life in the 1920s, where I worked at a speakeasy during Prohibition. I am also reliving scenes from my current life that I thought didn’t require additional processing, but clearly do. There is tremendous pain left over from my teenage years that, as it turns out, I didn’t deal with on an emotional level during all those years of conventional therapy. Imagine having to relive your worst, teenage traumas at 3:00 AM.
• Food tastes strange and you lose your appetite. My normal food preferences have undergone a bizarre transformation. Nothing tastes that great. The intense pleasure I used to get from certain foods like chocolate has been replaced with a certain lack of interest in any particular food. I don’t even look forward to mealtimes like I used to, like a dog who can’t wait for her kibble. Now, I simply don’t care to structure my day around food like I used to. Yes, I had the flu, but my weight loss started before. I have not lost huge amounts of weight, but I have dropped pounds because I’m always thinking about other things now, and the role food used to play as entertainment, distraction, or supreme projection of my desires is . . . over. This might be the strangest thing of all. Food filled up all the empty spaces. The empty spaces are now full.
• Time stopped. The clock keeps moving, but it’s not measuring anything. I can now feel the complete absence of time. Existence feels like complete stillness, a state of being, not a state of doing anything. You can do things, like write a blog post, but al the doing doesn’t move anything forward or backward or anywhere at all. There is nowhere to go. Things happen all of the time. Things change position or state. But there is no flow to it. The flow of everything has stopped. It’s kind of terrifying sometimes; after decades of feeling things moving, often too fast, now I can’t feel anything but the present moment. I know that that is the goal for much of Eastern religion, that ‘be here now’ concept. I read about this state for decades, but it never made any sense to me. Now I feel it. It’s almost panic inducing, because how in the world do I take all my tasks and errands seriously when nothing feels pressing? I literally have all the time in the world . . .
• Ambition? Projects? Goals? Yeah, I was always the girl with a Project or a Plan. I’ve never experienced life without some big Goal that I was working on, because, you know, Time is Running Out. No longer. I do things. I write, I read, I take naps, I follow a routine. But there is no internal drive to do it because it’s important. There is nothing pushing at me to Get Shit Done. I don’t care if I publish a book, show up on TV again, win an award, or anything else I can conceive of. I have no ambition, no interest in accolades, no need to be loved or liked, no need to convince anyone of anything. My needs have become basic and my desires are offline. And it’s completely bizarre for me. This is not who I was.
• Oh My GOD!! WHAT HAPPENED TO THE DRAMA???? There’s lots of drama at work. Students have drama; institutions have tons of it. My kid has drama. My friends have occasional drama. FB has drama. The United States has drama. Pres Trump lives for drama; he full of it and it drives him. But me? I can’t feel it anymore. I can’t work up much interest in it, and I can’t even take sides. Everyone knows how vehemently anti-Trump I was; and I still feel the need to work constructively to safeguard certain rights and protect the marginalized. But that work is divorced from outrage, pulling out my hair and rending my garments. I don’t scream at the radio when he talks. I don’t have the energy. I see Trump and other histrionic individuals as playing out a personal drama that, while we might have to protect ourselves from it–is not permanent, not cosmic, not even important. It’s your circus and your monkeys. Yes, I will protect my community from the damage your circus causes, but I don’t hate your circus. It’s yours, it belongs to you; I just won’t be buying any tickets to the show.
• Distinctions break down. We tend to define ourselves and everything else by what we and everything else IS NOT. I am this; not that. Recently, I can’t see much essential difference in people and events. I see difference in choices; but not in defining essences. As far as paranormal research is concerned, we are all operating under the false pretense that there are ‘living’ people and there are ‘dead’ people who float around the living like ghosts. Nope. It doesn’t work that way. We are all living. Some of us occupy this dimension in this universe governed by these laws, and some of us operate in that universe, governed by those laws. And by ‘this’ or ‘that’, I don’t mean to imply that there is any space or time separating us at all. It’s a matter of perception, whether you’re ‘here’ with me, or ‘over there’ with the others. There are no dead people. There is continuous, living consciousness. I am not aware of someone who shed their body and is now in a different state, but there’s a whole lot that I’m not aware of. That doesn’t make what I cannot perceive ‘dead’, or unreal. It’s just beyond my current capacity to perceive. That will change when I shed this body and move onto something else. So we need to stop asking insulting questions to people who do not see themselves as ‘gone,’ or ‘dead.’ We need to start talking to people as the living beings that they are. And we need to stop assuming that somehow they are ‘somewhere else’ and we occupy the privileged, ontological space. Their space is just as real, or more so, than ours. We need to respect that. We are the ones operating in darkness and confusion. Not them.
• I still don’t want to be sick or old. Not everything changes. I still don’t want to suffer physically. I don’t want to be incapacitated, in pain, or so old I can barely move or use my senses. I still don’t like the extra skin under my chin, or the bags under my eyes, or the fact that the barista always calls me Ma’am with a deference reserved for Old People. I don’t like the physical aging process. So I’m not all Enlightened and crap. I have lots and lots of work to do on multiple issues. I just don’t feel any pressure to figure it all out now. And for that, I say, Thank You to whatever or whomever pushed me over the edge. I’m over the edge, and I did not die. There will be more edges to be pushed over, but that will happen when it happens. Or, it probably already did happen, but I’m not yet aware of it. Because of no time, and all that . . . speaking of, I need to do something with my day! Or not.

Bye all, drop me a line.

–Kirsten A. Thorne

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If This Is a ‘Spiritual Awakening,’ It Really Hurts

There is no way that this post is going to make sense of what has happened to me, and I can barely explain it to myself, much less to my dear readers (if there are any left). I have debated endlessly if I should make any of this public, since it is so desperately personal, but if I do not, then Soulbank will close down. There will be nothing else to write about if I don’t face this crisis first. I will do my best to start the process, if only because I can’t be the only one this has happened to, and I do truly and honestly desire help from those who know what I am talking about. Here is the first fact: three weeks ago, I remembered how I died in my previous life as Mary, a drug-addicted street kid from San Francisco who met her end after her ‘boyfriend’ injected her with a lethal dose of heroin.

Maybe at this point you are done reading, thinking I’ve become a New Age hippy, or you think I have a big imagination, or perhaps I’m just deluded and have read too many books. Trust me, I have had all of those thoughts. As much as I want to explain away Mary’s story, my life, and everything it entails and means, I can’t. The reason why I cannot, is simply because this person’s life was my life, and for 52 years I tried to keep the whole thing buried in my subconscious. But now, the memory has worked its way painfully to the surface, and there is no going back. I died. I remember dying and what it felt like. It was a textbook overdose death. I lost the world. Everything started to shut down, like a computer going off-line, and finally I was unable to catch my breath. I tried desperately to breathe, but I could not inhale air into my lungs. I watched as the ‘boyfriend’ walked away and left me to die alone on the front steps of a Victorian row house near Haight Street. I raged at his betrayal, I panicked at my failing senses, I was desperate and terrified. And then it ended, and I died.

Therapists want me to find Mary’s documents. Therapists want to me to ‘prove’ that she was real. Therapists want to know if I ‘went to the Light’ and if I talked to God. Well. I’m sorry. I don’t remember going to the Light or talking to God. I remember the fury and horror of dying at 15 and wanted to come back, AS SOON AS POSSIBLE. I probably did meet God, but I had no time for communing with God or any other well-meaning deity, because I was mad that God would allow me to die like that in the first place; I suppose that I rejected the Light in favor of a quick return. Ah, how I wish I could remember meeting God.

Regarding ‘proving’ Mary’s life, I can see how other people would find that interesting and how it would make a stronger case for reincarnation. However, I don’t need to prove it. I remembered it. That was more than enough for me. Mary was in the foster care system, possibly a kid interned at Edgewood near the Mission District, and would have passed around 1964. I might be able to find her if I looked hard enough. I don’t remember her last name. In fact, I get the sense that she changed her name or someone changed it for her. The best I can come up with is Mary Tillerson, but a search for that name yields nothing. It could be Mary Thompson. I am not sure I want to locate her records. I don’t want to open wounds that are still so fresh.

There is a great deal that I could write about what I remember and the intense repercussions that this realization or epiphany has had in my life. For three weeks, everything I thought was true has been upended. I used to ‘investigate’ the paranormal, keeping a safe distance from my life after death theories. I wrote and read about consciousness as something not produced by the brain; but I never believed my theories 100%. There was always part of me that I held in reserve, a corner of my brain that doubted that we survived physical death. I didn’t want to doubt it, but I did; I wanted to believe, but now I know. KNOWING is far different from SUSPECTING. I can’t emphasize this point enough. When you KNOW something to be true, it changes everything about your life. When you only suspect something to be true, you don’t really have to change anything.

Imagine that you thought UFOs must exist, due to the vastness of the universe. One day, a UFO lands in your backyard and you watch the aliens come out and wave at you. It’s something like that. I now have had a direct, emotional experience of a past life. When I remembered my death and all the sordid, sad details of it, I cried like my soul had been ripped from my body. I cried harder than I have ever cried in my entire life. For most of my life, I have grieved a death that I wasn’t consciously aware of: my own. Every single day of the last three weeks, I have been rocked by revelations concerning my life as Kirsten. I blamed other people for trauma that they had not caused. I acted out in unhealthy ways because I didn’t understand that Mary’s life had ended, and Kirsten’s life was different. I allowed myself to be manipulated, abused, and used in various ways because I didn’t remember that HER life was over, and MY life didn’t have to be a continuation of a trauma that didn’t belong to me. Except that it did, or does; because Mary, or whatever her true name might be, IS ME. The fundamental misunderstanding was that the circumstances of my life had changed; I was in an infinitely better situation, but I didn’t grasp that and continued acting as if I were still dependent on bad people to survive.

This, I suppose, is what they (the gurus of the Internet whose advice I seek countless times a day) call a Spiritual Awakening. It is, if I understand it correctly, what happens to you when you finally understand that you are not your body, but a consciousness that never ends; you just change form. There are many ways to arrive at this conclusion, but for it to really sink in, it has to connect emotionally in a strong enough fashion to crack open your current reality and blow apart your ego, your routine, your reality, your relationships . . . everything. A Spiritual Awakening is NOT a logical supposition you arrive at after studying the subject of life after death for a decade or two; it’s a massive, spiritual meltdown that leaves you reeling in a sea of uncontrollable emotions. It actually kind of sucks. There are many days where I wish that I could just go back to the way it was before, my familiar life of quiet desperation. Now I live of life of raucous, intense, and continual freak out.

Yes, there were and are moments of the promised bliss of Enlightenment; sometimes I giggle like a child at how beautiful the world is. I think I’m already in Heaven, and I assume, wrongly, that this state of joy will last forever, because, dude, I’m like, Enlightened. Then I realize that that self conception is a complete joke. I know nothing. I am at Stage 1 of a long journey. I had not even started on the path to Enlightenment until three weeks ago, and I’m guessing I have several lifetimes ahead of me before I reach it. What is so ultimately confusing about all of this is the chaos of emotion. As you could probably tell from reading this post, I have significant anger over these memories. I feel victimized and pissed at God. Then, I realize, I have no clue as to why I needed that life, but I need to trust that it was for the good. After all, I have the distinct privilege of experiencing Kirsten, and I like her. None of what I have discovered would have happened if it hadn’t been for Mary and her short existence. Kirsten owes Mary her very life.

One of the unfortunate results of this realization regarding our infinite self is crippling anxiety. I thought, stupidly, that this step towards Ultimate Knowledge would bring peace and Buddha-like contentment. Nope. It throws the brain into a spiral of confusion and pain. My brain has always worked very hard to keep me and my loved ones safe from harm (don’t tell my brain, but it never works. Or rarely–sometimes my anxiety actually allows me to take preventative action when necessary). Now, there has been a radical reconceptualizing of my brain’s job. Even if I die, I will be back. Or better said, there is really no death of me at all. My body will crap out, but that doesn’t really do anything but change my circumstances. I have now fully realized that my Self is operating outside of the confines of my brain and body, so my poor brain doesn’t know how to keep this non-physical Self ‘safe’ from the world’s terrors, so it decides that EVERYTHING is a threat; it can no longer distinguish threats from non-threats, as it hasn’t figured out that NOTHING can threaten the Self. Until my brain catches up with Kirsten’s existence as a non-temporal, non-spacial being, it’s going to go nuts trying to keep me alive. Brain: nothing can kill me. Your job is just a practical one now. You know, you can still let me know that the brown thing on the hiking trail is likely a rattle snake. But your existential job of keeping the terrors of Death at bay is O-V-E-R.

To conclude: I am an emotional mess and would greatly appreciate hearing from others who have gone through this or who are going through this. For those of you who suspect you are, but aren’t sure, just Google “Spiritual Awakening” and see what it’s all about. I recommend Jim Tolles’ site. After you’ve had a chance to read through some of what helps to explain all this better than I can, please let me know what happens next. I used to write this blog from a place of having answers and being an authority. I now realize how ridiculous that is and how wrong I was. I don’t really know anything. I am trying to learn. That tables have turned.

All I CAN tell you is this: if you’re afraid of death, get over it. You can be afraid of dying, or suffering, or other indignities that life throws at us; but you will always be you in different circumstances.

I’m exhausted. Thank you for reading.

–Kirsten A. Thorne

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