I have been posting in this forum for a few months now but have been poking around the forum for almost a year. I have been waiting for a good time to post an introductory essay. I wasn't really sure what to say. I wanted my introductory essay to be meaningful but I have had a hard time deciding what is significant enough to talk about. I wanted my intro to be a good representation of who I am. This is what I have finally decided to share:
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A person is best understood by the turning points that occur in his life. The major actions, epiphanies, and coincidences that change his life in such a way that it will never again be the same. In my short span in this form and this universe I have only been able to identify a few such occurrences, but these events have had the most bearing on who I have become and who I will become. I often marvel at how different my life could have turned out, how easily the laws of probability could have shuffled the cards of my existence.
That then makes me wonder how much of who I am is inherently me and how much has been induced by things that are out of my control. Would I have been the same if the circumstances of my life were changed? Is there such a thing as fate? Was I fated to be who I have become? One can ponder such things for eternity and gain little insight into the question, but one should not expect to even gain that much at all. All that I wish to do is to keep examining the events of my life and hope that they can offer insight into other questions that come along.
In my life there has been one turning point that I have credited as being the most significant thing to ever happen to me, though, it is hard for me to describe it as a point. In reality, it was a series of events that took place over the course of a few months. The net effect of these events were to open my eyes, expand my consciousness, and finally give me the insight into my own nature that I needed in order to understand my place in the world and to give my life a more tangible purpose.
While growing up, I always felt like an outsider. This feeling was easily overlooked during the blissful ignorance of grade school, but it always there looming over me and subtly influencing my actions. Subconsciously I longed to fit in. I longed for approval. It may sound a bit cliché, but I wanted to be one of the cool kids. It was more than that though. I wanted to be liked by everyone.
Looking back, I can see that most of my actions at the time were caused by my misguided notions: Living in a major city and going to a predominantly Hispanic school, I took to the more urban of trends. I began listening to rap, watching wrestling, pierced my ear, almost anything that the other kids were doing. On top of that, I aimed to please the authority figures in my life. I became an A student and tried to follow all the rules. I was polite and well behaved. In second grade, my teacher gave me the nickname “Dr. SWIM”. All my efforts were for naught, as in the end, most of the other kids probably saw me as that smart white kid who thinks he's black. Needless to say, I was never one of the “cool kids”.
Then came middle school. Now I was at a predominantly white school. My first reaction to this was that I would finally be accepted and that the kids at my old school were racist or something. I would be proven severely wrong. I learned first hand that innocence and propensity for acceptance are directly proportional. Not only was I not a cool kid but I was cast out as a pariah. I was actively ridiculed and put down because of the my inability to conform. Soon this ballooned into outright humiliation for any reason possible.
By that age I was too set in my ways to change and I didn't want to let my antagonists know that their remarks were effecting me. I developed a pretty severe case of depression and became introverted in order to hide my emotions. I went through periods, sometimes a few weeks long, where I would say almost no words. This state persisted for three or four years, through my first two years of high school. By that time, I had given up on most social interaction. The way that I saw it, if I didn't interact with anyone, there was less reason for anyone to give me a hard time.
Then during the summer before my junior year, I just stopped feeling as depressed. It was quite sudden. Along with that came a brief flicker of an epiphany that I would slowly kindle over the next few months. For a split second, the thought crossed my mind that the most logical path for me would be to embrace my alienation. The thought passed with little contemplation, but I doubt it ever left my subconscious. So began, the most significant sequence of events that I have ever experienced. Each event being a coincidence that played off the results of the last.
The next event in this chain happened at the beginning of the school year. In the past I was averse to having long hair seeing as how it is generally less socially acceptable for males to have long hair. I bothered my mom to cut my hair for a few weeks in the beginning of the school year but she kept on forgetting. Soon I gave up and decided to let it grow out. When it got even longer, I was too lazy to get it cut. Then, when people started telling me I should get it cut, I felt a strong urge to spite them. As my hair grew, so did my openness to new ideas and my enjoyment for disregarding societal expectations. It was becoming much clearer that I was not meant to fit in.
Then, near the end of the school year, the last book that we were assigned to read in my literature class was a book by Herman Hesse called Demian. Before the class was to read any of the assigned books, our teacher would assign one pair of students to do a presentation on the author and another pair to do a presentation on some of the background concepts in the book. I ended up being assigned a presentation about Carl Gustav Jung and Jungian psychology.
While at the library looking for books about Jung, I happened across a misplaced book on the historical and contemporary use of hallucinogenic mushrooms. I was strangely drawn to the prominent picture of a blood red fly agaric on the back cover and as I skimmed through it, I noticed that there was no mention of major side affects, short term or long term, and no potential for addiction. Up until that point I was very much anti-drug, but then I realized that I had been lied to or at least mislead. I had bought into the idea that all drugs were bad for you and that their was no point to use any drug unless prescribed to you by a doctor.
I checked out the book and could not stop reading it. It became more and more clear as I read this book that the drug war was totally a propagandized attempt to maintain complacency and conformity. I was amazed at the lengths that the authorities would go to lie about any and all drugs. I was at least thankful that there were actually people trying to provide unbiased information about drugs to let people make their own decisions. To say the least, this totally shattered my past ideas of right and wrong and from there on I vowed to make my own determinations as to what is right or wrong.
Almost immediately, another quick jab of truth hit me while researching Carl Jung. His ideas seemed so radical and yet when I read them, I couldn't help but feel like I have had these same ideas rolling around in my head for my whole life but they were never directly contemplated or explicitly articulated. He made claims that all people, and even animals and inanimate objects are interconnected through an inherited collective unconsciousness that is not directly observable by the personal consciousness. This collective unconsciousness is comprised of archetypes that act as the scaffolding upon which an individual's personality is built. He explained that people aim to unite their personal consciousness and the collective unconsciousness into a more harmonious form in the process of individuation. This idea has a lot of similarity to the Buddhist idea of enlightenment and I could see that at that time I was just beginning to consciously attempt my own individuation.
When I finally got to reading Demian, the message was so much more profound. The allegory of the story had so much personal meaning. I truly identified with Emil's conflicts and realizations because I was having a similar experience at the very same time. For those unfamiliar with this book, I highly recommend it. It is about a boy named Emil Sinclair and the story follows Emil's self-realization and struggle between the illusory world of light and the world of truth. It really paralleled my life in many ways and introduced the concepts of balance, duality, and gnosticism to my metamorphosing psyche.
By the end of my junior year of high school I had been reborn. I finally felt like my own person and was so much freer from the societal expectations that had caused my earlier unhappiness. I could finally start finding out what made me happy without having to worry about pleasing anyone else. I saw through the fear and lies to find my way out of the mindless herd.
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Thanks for reading this. Sorry it is so long but I'm a proponent of the go big or don't go at all mentality. I look forward to continuing the expansion of my consciousness with you guys. With as much of a loner that I am, I still think it is much easier to learn with the help of other like minded people than to set off on your own and that is what brought me to the Nexus.
Thanks again. PEACE.
Maay-yo-naze!