Tuesday, November 17, 2009
Am I going crazy, or am I experiencing... God?
I've had a higher # than usual of bizarre "coincidences" (in quotes because I'm reasonably sure that there is no such thing as a coincidence) and things working unexpectedly in my favor recently, enough to be sort of eerie even to a confirmed mystic like me; some of this stuff just seemed beyond what's realistic to get from a brainless "engine" of karma, and it started to give me the feeling of being... helped.
Karma does NOT "help" anyone. Help of this sort requires... God, Jesus, guardian angels, whatever name you call it the basic concept is the same, that there's SOMETHING out there with a sentient mind and a great deal of power that's paying attention and affecting outcomes.
Now, as I've previously posted, overwork and exhaustion with no breaks or days off for a LONG time, on top of my naturally high-stress personality, had me worn to a frazzle even before the Bad Thing happened a couple of weeks ago, and with that added on I narrowly missed the plunge into "medical grade" anxiety, plus at this point have been fighting both the Bad Thing and my own tendency to slide into hyper-anxiety mode for 2 weeks. Because I'm a relentlessly logical person, it HAS occurred to me that the stress and anxiety have just taken a different route this time, and that instead of progressing downwards into acute anxiety I'm simply losing my mind, or, less melodramatically, that my natural desire to not have to keep battling both the Bad Thing and my own anxiety full-on every freaking second of every freaking day has led to my unconscious mind providing me with "proof" that God Himself is stepping in to take some of my burden and fix the Bad Thing so that I'll feel less anxious and stressed and thus be able to cope. OF COURSE it's occurred to me; even a brain not already stretched to the breaking point can go the self-deception route to protect its owner from a nervous breakdown. It happens all the time.
I'm going to start sounding a little disjointed now. I want to get this written down, and don't have the time or energy to make smooth connections between everything. I apologize.
A few days ago, I started talking to God, literally talking out loud to... whoever or whatever might care to listen by whatever name you call it. It somehow evolved from me talking out loud to myself, which I've always done, both to help think things through and to send the "energy of my desires" out to karma; I honestly don't remember how or when I got the idea that I was talking TO anyone, that's how messed up my mind has become. I just got it in my head somehow that something was paying attention; it felt vaguely comforting, which could easily be written off as being caused by loving the sound of my own voice, granted. It came to me to try to... take it further? My most religious friend says that when she's felt overwhelmed by problems she can't solve, she "gives up" and puts them in God's hands and asks Him to fix things... and He does. Last night, I did that; I said "This is killing me, please fix this." I said "Tell me what you want from me in return, if quid pro quo is even something that you care about, or what it is that you're hoping I'll achieve with my free will that your recent help has been meant to steer me towards... I'll do it." And "How will I know what you want? How will I know what I'm supposed to do? How will I know what comes next if I'm not crazy and this actually happens and I have to rebuild my entire world view?" And the answer came: "Joel Osteen. He had that story about how he realized that the wildly bearded preacher he'd seen on TV existed because he was in the form that some people needed to find God, and Osteen himself has always closely mirrored my ideas about how karma works, with the only difference being that he saw God as causing those things, so he'll be able to tell me what to do. I don't have to fret over this and struggle to figure it out, all I have to do is look to him and he'll give me the answers. He won't come knocking on my door, obviously, but he's got a show and books and a website; the answers are there." I felt such peace, such relief!!
Right before I went to bed last night, my husband was across the room fiddling with my webcam, trying to get it into a stand so he could set it up to record some critter visitors to our yard. The program to use it was NOT running; it creates a window and overlays a control strip onto whatever window you're on when it IS running so there's no confusion. By some inexplicable method, suddenly the cam software came ON, all by itself, and there was MY FACE on the screen, he had somehow "accidentally" pointed the cam right at me right at that moment, and I'm screaming (since my face was covered in cream, and the damned cam was somehow also in RECORD mode, again apparently by magic), and he's trying to figure out what had happened, because it's impossible for that software to just come on like it did... fast forward to a dream I had last night in which I saw via a cam window that my car was being busted up by unseen people. I've had car-destruction dreams for over 20 years, and always dismissed them as being neurotic aftermaths of having my car vandalized several times in college. I half woke up, and my subconscious told me "No, it's not about the car, it's like how those dreams you have about discovering rooms on your house that you somehow never saw before turned out to be a common dream theme representing new possibilities opening up in your life, the car IS your life, and when you see that it's been wrecked it means that old aspects of your life are being destroyed and replaced with new ones," and when your own subconscious tells you what your dreams mean you better believe it, because it is after all the SOURCE of your dreams. It also told me that the cam, which had never appeared in a dream before, represented looking at my life in a new way, through new eyes. And interestingly, this was the first time I actually SAW the car being busted up, as before I always found the car already wrecked to various degrees.... which would have to represent the destruction of old parts of my life occurring right now, currently in progress, right?
Is there any other way to analyze this except in reference to my lack of belief in there being a God out there caring about me being destroyed and God being added to my life? And doesn't the impossible thing the real-life cam had done earlier almost seem like... it was done deliberately to make sure I saw the cam in my dream as part of a message from... well, DOESN'T it? Or did my collapsing brain create the cam dream BECAUSE of what the cam did? Possible, yes, but doesn't the cam incident itself, coming in the midst of this, lend, what can we call it, an air of authenticity to my feeling that supernatural powers are at work?
I wake up every morning with what to a normal person would be a brutal amount of stress boiling through me. That goes x 10 on Monday, my busiest and most stressful day of the week. And x 100 now that I have the Bad Thing hanging over me un-handled. THIS morning, I woke up feeling peaceful. I ran the religious stuff and the dream revelations through my head, and they were still clear in the light of day. I walked around feeling amazed, but of course I'd ASKED for that feeling of peace. I also had a vision in my mind of the Bad Thing being over and my interrupted work in that area being caught up and chugging along; it almost felt as if it was already over and done, although not quite. I could almost hear them saying that they'd made a mistake and had rectified it... as if I were hearing a faint echo of that being said. I got on my computer and brought up my inbox; when I have an ongoing issue that's being battled via email, checking my inbox will make my heart beat so hard that it feels like my ribs will crack, often with an accompanying light-headed fear sort of reaction, but that didn't happen, not the first time I checked it or any other.... which is a lifelong first. I somehow didn't expect an email from "them" today, I SHOULD have been expecting one because they owe me one, but I felt certain that it wouldn't come today, and I was right.
I brought up the home page of a site I do offers on to get free iPods... I know, I know, but this one's legit, I've already gotten 2 from them without spending a penny. They had exactly ONE new offer today, which is bad for a Monday. The offer is to "request FREE information about how to re-learn life." !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! As I stared disbelievingly at it, a new music video came on Metal Mania; one of VERY few non-Stryper metal songs with religious content, White Lion's "When the Children Cry." You can imagine my reaction to THOSE 2 "coincidences."
What do you get when you add all that up? Mental collapse or the beginning of a personal relationship with God? Either way, I knew I had to record it, so I have.
The idea of a powerful being of some sort that... CARES, and is willing and able to assist me, is of course powerfully seductive, I mean any sane person would want THAT... and of course it's also scary, because how does one maintain the approval, or even the attention, of such a being? Could it be like having an omniscient version of a parent, such that you don't dare scratch your butt for fear of a disapproving look (or worse)? It seems like such a being would be as indifferent to such things as WE are when a dog (to whom WE are deities) scratches himself... BUT, every religion insists that its deity has some pretty finicky demands (whether or not your head is covered seems to be a common issue), so...? Then again, if this is God He must know that I have no idea about etiquette, and must want something else from me, but if I'm so busy over-analyzing things that I miss His attempts to get through to me...
If that's not proof of how emotionally warped my childhood left me; I can't imagine that even GOD will find me acceptable if I perform less than perfectly. {sigh}
So: How will I know if God fixes the Bad Thing or if it just gets fixed because I followed reasonable steps and they worked? How.. what... but... if... I just need to release myself from all these questions and see what happens.
Are you there God? It's me, Omni...
Karma does NOT "help" anyone. Help of this sort requires... God, Jesus, guardian angels, whatever name you call it the basic concept is the same, that there's SOMETHING out there with a sentient mind and a great deal of power that's paying attention and affecting outcomes.
Now, as I've previously posted, overwork and exhaustion with no breaks or days off for a LONG time, on top of my naturally high-stress personality, had me worn to a frazzle even before the Bad Thing happened a couple of weeks ago, and with that added on I narrowly missed the plunge into "medical grade" anxiety, plus at this point have been fighting both the Bad Thing and my own tendency to slide into hyper-anxiety mode for 2 weeks. Because I'm a relentlessly logical person, it HAS occurred to me that the stress and anxiety have just taken a different route this time, and that instead of progressing downwards into acute anxiety I'm simply losing my mind, or, less melodramatically, that my natural desire to not have to keep battling both the Bad Thing and my own anxiety full-on every freaking second of every freaking day has led to my unconscious mind providing me with "proof" that God Himself is stepping in to take some of my burden and fix the Bad Thing so that I'll feel less anxious and stressed and thus be able to cope. OF COURSE it's occurred to me; even a brain not already stretched to the breaking point can go the self-deception route to protect its owner from a nervous breakdown. It happens all the time.
I'm going to start sounding a little disjointed now. I want to get this written down, and don't have the time or energy to make smooth connections between everything. I apologize.
A few days ago, I started talking to God, literally talking out loud to... whoever or whatever might care to listen by whatever name you call it. It somehow evolved from me talking out loud to myself, which I've always done, both to help think things through and to send the "energy of my desires" out to karma; I honestly don't remember how or when I got the idea that I was talking TO anyone, that's how messed up my mind has become. I just got it in my head somehow that something was paying attention; it felt vaguely comforting, which could easily be written off as being caused by loving the sound of my own voice, granted. It came to me to try to... take it further? My most religious friend says that when she's felt overwhelmed by problems she can't solve, she "gives up" and puts them in God's hands and asks Him to fix things... and He does. Last night, I did that; I said "This is killing me, please fix this." I said "Tell me what you want from me in return, if quid pro quo is even something that you care about, or what it is that you're hoping I'll achieve with my free will that your recent help has been meant to steer me towards... I'll do it." And "How will I know what you want? How will I know what I'm supposed to do? How will I know what comes next if I'm not crazy and this actually happens and I have to rebuild my entire world view?" And the answer came: "Joel Osteen. He had that story about how he realized that the wildly bearded preacher he'd seen on TV existed because he was in the form that some people needed to find God, and Osteen himself has always closely mirrored my ideas about how karma works, with the only difference being that he saw God as causing those things, so he'll be able to tell me what to do. I don't have to fret over this and struggle to figure it out, all I have to do is look to him and he'll give me the answers. He won't come knocking on my door, obviously, but he's got a show and books and a website; the answers are there." I felt such peace, such relief!!
Right before I went to bed last night, my husband was across the room fiddling with my webcam, trying to get it into a stand so he could set it up to record some critter visitors to our yard. The program to use it was NOT running; it creates a window and overlays a control strip onto whatever window you're on when it IS running so there's no confusion. By some inexplicable method, suddenly the cam software came ON, all by itself, and there was MY FACE on the screen, he had somehow "accidentally" pointed the cam right at me right at that moment, and I'm screaming (since my face was covered in cream, and the damned cam was somehow also in RECORD mode, again apparently by magic), and he's trying to figure out what had happened, because it's impossible for that software to just come on like it did... fast forward to a dream I had last night in which I saw via a cam window that my car was being busted up by unseen people. I've had car-destruction dreams for over 20 years, and always dismissed them as being neurotic aftermaths of having my car vandalized several times in college. I half woke up, and my subconscious told me "No, it's not about the car, it's like how those dreams you have about discovering rooms on your house that you somehow never saw before turned out to be a common dream theme representing new possibilities opening up in your life, the car IS your life, and when you see that it's been wrecked it means that old aspects of your life are being destroyed and replaced with new ones," and when your own subconscious tells you what your dreams mean you better believe it, because it is after all the SOURCE of your dreams. It also told me that the cam, which had never appeared in a dream before, represented looking at my life in a new way, through new eyes. And interestingly, this was the first time I actually SAW the car being busted up, as before I always found the car already wrecked to various degrees.... which would have to represent the destruction of old parts of my life occurring right now, currently in progress, right?
Is there any other way to analyze this except in reference to my lack of belief in there being a God out there caring about me being destroyed and God being added to my life? And doesn't the impossible thing the real-life cam had done earlier almost seem like... it was done deliberately to make sure I saw the cam in my dream as part of a message from... well, DOESN'T it? Or did my collapsing brain create the cam dream BECAUSE of what the cam did? Possible, yes, but doesn't the cam incident itself, coming in the midst of this, lend, what can we call it, an air of authenticity to my feeling that supernatural powers are at work?
I wake up every morning with what to a normal person would be a brutal amount of stress boiling through me. That goes x 10 on Monday, my busiest and most stressful day of the week. And x 100 now that I have the Bad Thing hanging over me un-handled. THIS morning, I woke up feeling peaceful. I ran the religious stuff and the dream revelations through my head, and they were still clear in the light of day. I walked around feeling amazed, but of course I'd ASKED for that feeling of peace. I also had a vision in my mind of the Bad Thing being over and my interrupted work in that area being caught up and chugging along; it almost felt as if it was already over and done, although not quite. I could almost hear them saying that they'd made a mistake and had rectified it... as if I were hearing a faint echo of that being said. I got on my computer and brought up my inbox; when I have an ongoing issue that's being battled via email, checking my inbox will make my heart beat so hard that it feels like my ribs will crack, often with an accompanying light-headed fear sort of reaction, but that didn't happen, not the first time I checked it or any other.... which is a lifelong first. I somehow didn't expect an email from "them" today, I SHOULD have been expecting one because they owe me one, but I felt certain that it wouldn't come today, and I was right.
I brought up the home page of a site I do offers on to get free iPods... I know, I know, but this one's legit, I've already gotten 2 from them without spending a penny. They had exactly ONE new offer today, which is bad for a Monday. The offer is to "request FREE information about how to re-learn life." !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! As I stared disbelievingly at it, a new music video came on Metal Mania; one of VERY few non-Stryper metal songs with religious content, White Lion's "When the Children Cry." You can imagine my reaction to THOSE 2 "coincidences."
What do you get when you add all that up? Mental collapse or the beginning of a personal relationship with God? Either way, I knew I had to record it, so I have.
The idea of a powerful being of some sort that... CARES, and is willing and able to assist me, is of course powerfully seductive, I mean any sane person would want THAT... and of course it's also scary, because how does one maintain the approval, or even the attention, of such a being? Could it be like having an omniscient version of a parent, such that you don't dare scratch your butt for fear of a disapproving look (or worse)? It seems like such a being would be as indifferent to such things as WE are when a dog (to whom WE are deities) scratches himself... BUT, every religion insists that its deity has some pretty finicky demands (whether or not your head is covered seems to be a common issue), so...? Then again, if this is God He must know that I have no idea about etiquette, and must want something else from me, but if I'm so busy over-analyzing things that I miss His attempts to get through to me...
If that's not proof of how emotionally warped my childhood left me; I can't imagine that even GOD will find me acceptable if I perform less than perfectly. {sigh}
So: How will I know if God fixes the Bad Thing or if it just gets fixed because I followed reasonable steps and they worked? How.. what... but... if... I just need to release myself from all these questions and see what happens.
Are you there God? It's me, Omni...
