My search for the truth

[Bring4th_Austin]

Welcome to the forums Majana Silvio, and thank you for sharing your very touching story. I was moved by your ability to express the different emotions and feelings you had throughout your life. Your English is quite good, and I think you're a great writer in general.

The experiences you had with dreams and experiencing different beings around you during the night sounds very much like other experiences had by "abductees," or the more sensitive and inclusive term, "experiencers." Have you ever had any regression hypnosis done, or are you at all interested? I don't know if it's something you feel has left a traumatic mark on your life, but some people who go through such experiences have some trauma that remains unprocessed.

Last year I read a great book about such experiences called Abduction: Human Encounters With Aliens by John E. Mack, who was a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. He approached so-called abductees from a clinical perspective. After he broke through the barrier of believing that something legitimate was happening, he began trying to understand how to help people heal and transform from such experiences. The confusion and emotion you describe around your experiences is very similar to how some of Dr. Mack's patients have described their own experiences. I only recommend in case you are seeking more answers. I found the book incredibly fascinating.

I was most moved by the rest of your story and how you describe your journey. I had a similar experience of "culture shock" when I first attended a big public school. I remember the first day of school after moving to a bigger city, I saw a girl trip and fall on the ground. I started running to help her, but then saw everyone around her laughing at her. She was okay and wasn't hurt, but I was so shocked that the other kids were laughing at her accident rather than trying to help. Then, like you, I was bullied a lot, up until high school anyways.

I think the experience you had of forcing yourself to fit in, to build a personality so that you could survive in the world, is a common experience for many, especially wanderers and those who end up on the path of the seeker. It sounds like for you it was a more more intense, vivid, and conscious experience than for most.

But the formation of a "persona," as Jung would call it, is a way for us to adapt to a society in order to have an interface within it. In other words, in order to live a full life where we are not constantly alienated by society, we have to put on certain masks. At a young age, we don't fully understand what these masks are or why we are putting them on (usually). We sort of adopt different social identities in order to be accepted by society.

I think that for many seekers, the initial stages of their awakening is when they realize that this is what they have done, that they have a "truer" self beneath the masks, and they begin to search for that truer self and try to find ways to express it. It sounds like that is what set off your own journey of seeking.

But that initial stage of developing the persona, I think, is an important step in development that is made extremely difficult by a harsh society like ours. I think people who bypass this step find difficulty in maintaining meaningful social relationships and navigating society in a way that allows them to feel free or uninhibited. For someone who never creates this interface with society, they might be limited in how they cannot experience connection with others in their social sphere, and become alienated even more.

There's a contraction and expansion process I see at play. From young childhood, we "expand" as a true version of our young selves until we are met with resistance by society. Then we begin to "contract" and pull in, forming habits, morals, identities, values, and other things that will make us feel more acceptable to society. Then at a certain point, perhaps once these things are full formed, we "expand" again, recognizing which things we have taken into ourselves only to be accepted. Our "persona" then becomes transparent and malleable. It still allows us to have an interface with society, but it does not restrict our truer self. And through this means, we are able to transmute those values that society has impressed onto us that might be distorted. By adopting them and then changing them, we help to change society itself.

I was very inspired by your description of this process. If you disagree with the idea of this process, please ignore it!

Thank you for sharing so openly and honestly with us.