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“Knock!  Knock!”

“Who’s there?”

“It is I,” said my soul.  “It is I standing here knocking on your new-self-being born.  It is I who will not leave you alone now any more than I have ever left you alone throughout all those torturous years you were confined within your mother’s hell.”

“I hear you knocking.  But I can’t see you.”

“Do not worry.  I will not abandon you.  Neither will I leave you alone to follow your material self into oblivion.  I have too much invested in your life to lose you now.  God says the same thing, but it will always be your choice to pay attention – or not.”

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I wandered in tight corkscrew circles of oblivion from the moment in the evening of October 3, 1969 when my father brought me to the Anchorage International Airport and saw me to that plane.  Bound for Naval boot camp outside of Bainbridge, Maryland, I went because I had no thoughts of my own at 18 and one month.  Being shoved from the nest was the best thing, of course, that had ever happened to me.  I did not complain.  I left.  Just like I was told to do.

My soul was trying to wake me up even in boot camp.  Each of us 64 women in that Company were assigned ‘watch’ shifts, to sit with the ‘real’ Navy Wave throughout different hours, keeping guard.  On my very first shift I spent the first night listening intently with great interest, curiosity, and yes, hope, to the ‘real’ watch woman as she described the Mormon faith she had been raised in.

The start of my searching.  Unfortunately not many weeks passed after boot camp before I was exposed to alcohol and street drugs.  I used them all for searching.  I used relationships for searching.  I used books for searching.  I was a SELF starving to be born at the same time I was a soul.  I did not know any part of myself.  Nothing in my life would have made self knowledge possible.  Not the knowledge of the reality of my self.  Not the knowledge of how to go about knowing the reality of my self (dual:  soul-spirit AND self-material).

It took 22 months after I left home before my soul managed to guide me through tribulations I could not have imagined to an odd situation in Sacramento, California months after I had been discharged from the Navy for becoming pregnant.  In September 1971 I met a man there.  Out of his mouth one night came all the words my soul wanted the REST of me to hear – because I believe my soul was BORN knowing that Christ had returned “as a thief in the night,” and that He was calling His “people by a new name.”  I instantly knew this Truth.  I instantly knew I was one of these ‘people’:  Always had been, always would be, always will be.

No matter what avenues I pursued in my searching, there was no separation between the search and the finding.   But even having found what my soul wanted me to know I did not truly know that what I found was LOVE.  It has taken me another 40 years of continual searching along the entire pathway of my adult life to get me to this point TODAY where I can, for the first time in my life, actually recognize that LOVE is the only TRUE reality.  Everything that has appeared to me otherwise has been but a shadow, and like all abused infants and children, I know a great deal about what lies in shadow.

I did not, however, have a clue about what LOVE is.  I learn that with every breath I take because my soul most deeply desires that I figure LOVE out in this lifetime.

As I look back through the charred, blackened corridors of my 18 year infant-childhood of abuse I see that my soul guided and protected me all the way through it.  I would not have survived otherwise.  The problem, then, was that my soul rightly needed me to find my awake conscious OTHER self, the self that should have been awakening into my life from the moment of my birth – and was not allowed to do so – and did not begin to do so until after I left home at 18.

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When I began the task several months ago of writing my entire 18-year infant-childhood abuse story I did not anticipate the weight of the burden I would be faced with.  The burden of gaining a fuller awareness of the burden I survived as a child as I write has combined with the burden I feel today as I try to actually write the story.

I know I am at a crossroads.  I will either find my way to complete this writing or I will not.

Because I am so stuck under the weight of this combined burden as I work to write what happened to me when I was 10 and 11, I know the answer I am seeking so I can move forward must lie exactly in the reality of what I was experiencing at that middle childhood point in my life.

What I know so far is that clearly my independent CONSCIOUS material-world self woke up for the first time.  I also know that when this happened my mother reacted to my awakening self so harshly that if I had NOT gone back to sleep, she would without any doubt have killed me.

The gossamer lines of the story I am seeking, and seeking to tell, that lie deeply within the experiences I am writing about – invisible and as powerful as those gossamer lines are – tell that my soul was there when I had to make that choice, “Will I keep my awake self awake and let my mother kill me, or will I go back to sleep for as long as it takes so that my body can stay alive?”

True, I made that choice wisely, but I cannot escape the truth that I did make a choice.  My choice at 10 years old was a life and death choice.  I have managed to write, finally, about the circumstances during those days as I remember them well.

The gossamer threads of the story are harder to tell.  It is taking me days turning into weeks to begin to comprehend that as I chose to live, as I chose as an individual self to go back to sleep so deeply that Mother could not detect any signs that I was alive, could only have happened one way.

True, today I recognize that God created my soul when I was conceived out of His love for me.  I also today, this very moment, am recognizing that God created my soul with the power and ability to carry me through the 18-year hell of my childhood intact so that I could wake up the other part of me – my independent conscious worldly-self, when and as it was finally safe to do so.  God gave me my soul to do His job of ensuring my survival.  Both of my self-parts cooperated so that I did, indeed, stay alive against all odds.

I am sitting here writing this realizing that as a bird with my two wings – one of my soul self and one of my material self – I am more fully awakened as a whole self than I have ever been in my 60-year life.   I can find a way to tell my story in words but only by accepting the reality that both of these two parts of my self know what I experienced in different ways.  My survival depended on me being able to move through the abuse I survived as a split person – as a soul-self and a deeply sleeping unconscious world-self.

To pick up the gossamer threads of this story I am telling I need to unfold both of my wings, strengthen them, test them out as I learn to fly through my personhood being able to know what both parts of me remember.  My soul reads with my physical eyes Holy Words about retracing my steps as the “banished and faithful friend,” I have always been from the moment God created both my body and my soul.

It was never right that I was banished as a human being from living my life in my own body, but that is exactly what my mother (who most probably suffered from severe Borderline Personality Disorder with psychosis), in her devastating disease, forced me to do:  Be banished from my own self.  But Mother never touched my soul.  God and the angels – and in fact also my own soul – NEVER allowed that to happen.  It is now time in my life for my soul-self and my worldly-self to befriend one another as consciously as we possibly can so the banishment of my self with my self and from my own life can finally end.

By age 10 it is clear to me that I had to agree to this multilevel banishment in order to survive.  It has taken me another 50 years of journeying to begin to be ready to end it.  That, perhaps more than anything, is what writing my story of my abusive childhood is helping me to do – end the banishment that was forced upon me as my only option to continued survival by my mother through her escalated reign of terror against me during those last two weeks of May in 1962.

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POSTED AT:  GOD LOVE

*RETRACING MY STEPS AS THE “BANISHED AND FAITHFUL FRIEND”

*THE FOOD OF MY SOUL – “THINE HEART IS MY TREASURY…”

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SEE ALSO posts from yesterday:  +INFANT-CHILD VERBAL ABUSE – WOUNDS TO THE MUSIC/LANGUAGE BRAIN

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