Our feelings are always there—waiting, attuned, alert, and yearning for attachment. So we were created. Such is the path of our lives. To fulfill this need, we become attached to God. Those who say they don’t believe in God become attached to their philosophy. And then there are those who want to rid themselves of all attachments, as from shackles. They have learned to still their mind so no thoughts come through it. And then there are those who have been shocked out of reality and live in a world known only to themselves.
The world is full of our feelings. We cannot subsist without them. In fact, we cannot exist without them. We are born with them. And they die with us. One of the most pleasurable things we do is share our feelings with one another. What happens to a five-and-a-half-year-old girl who is kept from sharing her feelings? She is deprived of great pleasure, of course. But how does she exist if her feelings are never expressed? She has to develop another set of feelings that she can express. She has to go to a different reality.
I suppose a child’s mind is more pliable than that of a grownup. Children are so close to the fantasy world that they don’t have to let go of their senses to enter it. They simply make-believe, and that can soon become their reality. Like in the story of Alice in Wonderland, they pass through some obstruction and find themselves in a totally different world. So it was with me.
Now a serious question arises: What happens to the part of the little girl’s mind that carries the previous reality? In my case, it became active in moments of danger. I referred to it as “my demon.” It nudged me whenever there was a threat in my new reality. It absorbed a lot of danger signals and, as the mind tends to do, put them into their own section of my memory. One day, when this little girl found out she no longer needed the fantasy world, she experienced a big shock. Danger signals from my previous reality came tumbling out. That was the next—and far more difficult— reality I had to deal with.
What my mind did not have and had been dangerously deprived of by that point was its own feelings and related growth. Great confusion ensued as a result. Years of grief and strenuous labor were needed to barely patch that gap of lost time. Such was the price I paid to stay alive. Over the course of many years, the misery it caused in my life put me in danger of ending it. Because of my suffering, the few who loved me suffered, too. And of those who loved me, the one and only I had begotten suffered most.
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