Death: A Personal Encounter With The Adversary
Originally published at The Searcher Journal. You can comment here or there.
In the past thirty years, I’ve died at least three times.
These deaths I speak of are not a physical death. No, they are more of a metaphorical death followed by a glorious return to a whole new life. It is the death of one version of “I” and the beginning of a new “I”.
As I learned more about who I actually was, I discovered a great number of things I didn’t like about myself. More importantly, I began to develop a sense of who I could be.
Back when I was a miserable, isolated and lonely high school student, I made a lot of excuses for why I was the way I was. “I’m just different than everyone else,” I would tell myself. “It’s their loss for not taking the time to get to understand me.” I let my hopes become expectations and my personal delusions become my reality. I was depressed, constantly, and, to a lesser extent, angry with the world.
At the time, I didn’t know it, but that was all holding me back. Keeping me in my rut, steeped in an unhealthy darkness of mood and mind-blind to the similarities I shared with those around me.
That’s when I got my first glimpse of my Adversary… and of the beauty of the Universe.
In the gloom of my darkest hours, I began to notice things. I began to notice patterns in my life. To see that every time my life just plain sucked in one way, some other area would open up and be better than ever. Now, that other area wasn’t always my area of choice-which is why it was so hard to see back then-but when I did finally realize how interconnected everything was, the final pieces fell into place.
Before those pieces fell into place, though, they had to be shaken loose from the pile of crap they had been mixed in with.
In order to “deal” with all the pain and suffering of my middle school and high school experience, I had built up walls around myself. That’s a common defense against The Adversary that many use. The “Strange Me” I had cultivated was insulation against some of the suffering I felt I was subjected to. It was also a prison of my own creation.
The simple fact is, any construct-be it physical, emotional, mental or spiritual-that keeps something out also keeps something in.
As my walls built up, things piled up inside them. By the time I was graduating high school, I was up to my neck in crap. Crap that I had generated in my own mind. Crap that society had thrown on me (just high enough to get over the top of my wall). Crap that was very soon going to blot out any view I had of anything good in the world. Crap that began, in my internal wanderings, to take on a life of its own.
Without knowing it, I had given my Adversary the most fertile ground to thrive on it could ever hope for.
Within weeks of discovering the wonderful world of “not the place I grew up in” (also known as college), I had made some real friends and found a level of acceptance that I had never before known. I shared those first few weeks with a number of great people-most of whom had been outcasts in high school.
But inside, I was still the high school me. I was still almost over my head in crap, trapped inside the walls I had built. I could feel those walls becoming weak, being pressed well beyond their limits from both sides. I could feel the separation those walls were creating between the people I now cared about and myself. And on an even more terrifying level, I could feel something else within those walls struggling to get the best of me.
Like it or not, those walls were going to come down.
That’s when I got my first full view of my Adversary.
It was more than I could really handle on my own.
And so, a tentatively asked my new friends Chris and Sarah if I could talk to them for a bit.
They got to hear about everything that had been going on in my head. About all the dark things I knew I had running around inside me. About the little bits of Divinity I had glimpsed and the connections I felt among events.
I talked a lot.
To their credit, they managed to not look too freaked out. (I know I must have worried them a bit, though… it was pretty intense, even by my own standards.)
Suddenly, the world was a different place.
I was a different person.
Through telling the story-through sharing my burden-I dragged my Adversary out into the light. It was difficult to do. The thing wanted me to keep quiet about it, it’s power was mostly in getting me to isolate myself. Alone, it could taunt and tear one little bit at a time from my self control and happiness. The Adversary is always cunning and for a while I had been playing right into its twisted hands.
Once I got a good look at it, though, I could see how familiar it was. I could see that it was me.
In that moment of realization, I accepted it as a vital part of myself. My Adversary lost a lot of power that day… and I came out of the meeting a different person.
The old “I” was dead and gone. In his place was a completely different individual.
The walls that had been built up had collapsed and their rubble had settled into a new foundation. The useless, broken pieces were easy to discard after that break. I was able, for the first time since a weekend long hike in the mountains a couple of years earlier, to feel part of the Universe.
I had finally found stable, permanent happiness.
It lasted for a year and a half.