Bring4th

Full Version: A Small Picture of My Life
You're currently viewing a stripped down version of our content. View the full version with proper formatting.
In attempting to give an autobiography, I am left a bit woeful that it is so incomplete. There is so much more I would say. So much more to who I am. But I can't give you who I am in a few paragraphs. So I'll just give you a rough sketch which is surely missing some vital pieces.

Childhood

My name is Joseph. I was born a renegade in New Orleans, Louisiana on May 3, 1984. At every point in my life, I walked against the grain. Now, I finally feel that I have discovered a jetstream which flows against the grain, just as the bands in the outer atmosphere of Jupiter flow against each other.

I was raised rigidly Catholic. I took to this worldview until puberty when I suddenly came face-to-face with the contradiction between the desires within me and the belief system which labeled these desires as "wrong" (or at least that's how mom and pop spun it). I have since learned that most children my age simply abandoned the belief system in favor of the desires. Not me! I practiced a strict regimen of repression, relapse and self-flagellation. Classic Catholic guilt syndrome. Women would eventually be the death of Catholic Joseph.

I am the second oldest of five children. My older sister is the wisest and most balanced of my siblings. I think she and I are most most like my father in my family. My brother and my younger sisters are all emotionally firey like my mother. When we were growing up, my brother and I were always together -- yet I always felt like there was something that separated us. A microcosm for this relationship is the fact that we slept in the same bed (by choice) until my parents separated us when he was 9 and I was 10, yet I spent hours alone building and destroying lego worlds while he spent hours alone enjoying action figure adventures. Today, he won't talk to me because he feels I've been a horrible brother. I was never particularly close to my sisters. The youngest was 7 years younger than me, so it was hard to relate to her. The other two were closer to my age, but my sexual repression often left me with a confused mixture of love, lust and guilt involving them. It might not have come to that if I hadn't been homeschooled so much of my life, but these are my cards nevertheless. (I hated being homeschooled.)

When I was 10, we moved away from the neighborhood I'd come to love. You know, the one with all of my friends in it. They wanted to be closer to a church that lit them on fahr for Jesus. And they also moved to BFE, a rural town where everyone has at least an acre of land. This meant two things: my life suddenly became much more religious and my social atmosphere suddenly became much smaller.

I always loved to write and to philosophize. I was the kid who asked "why?" about everything.

I was also the black sheep. My parents once decided to purge my music library of all the music whose lyrics they didn't approve of. Unfortunately for me, I was listening to alot of metal at the time. I convinced them through pathetic sobs to let me keep Fear Factory's Obsolete. But I knew there was no hope for the Type O Negative (I remember my dad reading the lyrics to the song Be My Druidess: "I'll do anything to make you come"). By the time I was into black and death metal, they had loosened up a little.

Education and Marriage

When I was 16, I met Sarah. I, a depressed but intense boy, she a quiet reserved girl. Whereas my childhood left me feeling rejected and ignored, her childhood left her feeling betrayed and isolated. We quickly became deeply involved and, in a refusal to address our own problems, co-dependent. I went off to college in Dallas because my parents thought I was too smart not to go. She stayed in Louisiana and attended a local university. The distance was painful, so we got married in order to appease our parents who would have been outraged at the "cohabitation" if she had just moved to Dallas.

Through a strange series of difficulties, Sarah was never able to get a consistent (traditional) education, but I was an A student, so leaving school was out of the question for me. My sexually repressed awkwardness and my inability to socialize functionally didn't stop me from making a few friends in school, but the Catholic worldview certainly proved an impediment to my ability to synthesize the material I was learning (despite the fact that it was a Catholic college). I graduated after switching majors from physics to philosophy. By the time I had graduated, the relationship between Sarah and me had begun to spiral downward into a pit of unhappiness. I felt like the marriage had trapped me but didn't want to lose her and she was always afraid of losing the only person who cared about her. Co-dependent is definitely the right word for what we were.

I went to graduate school in Louisiana, LSU to be specific. It was in Baton Rouge that our lives transformed. Halfway through my master's degree in philosophy, the Lehman brothers went bankrupt and suddenly everyone was talking about the economy. I had lived in a bubble of music, girls, religion and philosophy for most of my life so I was like a deer in the headlights. I was set to graduate in a year and I had planned on applying to a Ph.D. program with the goal of eventually becoming a professor. But everyone I talked to gave me the impression that that would be an uphill struggle to find a pot of gold that may not exist. All I wanted to do was think and write. I also noticed in the course of my TA duties that I hated grading papers, I was completely turned off to the idea of teaching the same intro material over and over, and in getting to know the professors I was repulsed by their enormous administrative loads. The professorship gig was off. Screw that.

Sarah and I had become more distant than ever. Both of us were having major health issues. She was gaining weight due to what she eventually discovered was a hormone dysfunction, while I was experiencing the worst migraine spell of my life. I remember I had an intense headache straight for three months. We were both unhappy, and we began to think about divorce.

Transformation

But then something changed. I remember I woke up one day and realized that I could be whoever I wanted to be. I remembered the man I had always dreamed of being and decided it was time to start learning how to be him. I finally admitted to myself that I was not religious, so I began inventing my own belief system from scratch. This was the beginning of the release of my sexual repression.

Sarah and I both independently decided that it was time to take care of ourselves and stop trying to please the other. When we sat down to actually talk about whether we'd divorce, we discovered that we didn't want to leave each other. Instead, we just wanted to become ourselves and stop trying to be what we thought the other person wanted.

My approach to philosophy had always been systematic. I intentionally took a course on each subject within the field so that I could bring them all together and unite them into my own unique philosophy. It turned out that this approach was not encouraged in school. I was supposed to select a field, not synthesize them all together. University began to feel like a prison for my expansive mind as my best and most exciting thoughts were quickly shot down because they did not fit into the mold. Once I had finally completed my personal goal of learning about each field in philosophy, I decided I was happy with my education and ready to continue my work without the university. It was time to build my belief system.

My research about the financial crash also led me down the rabbit hole. I learned about all the conspiracies and mystical concepts. I shared this information with Sarah and we both deprogrammed ourselves, disconnecting from the matrix, which ultimately led us to leave Baton Rouge and its painful (though transformative) memories behind. Sarah and I now live in Knoxville, Tennessee. These mountains feel like home.

The Law of One

In early 2009, I found David Wilcock's website, wherein Wilcock directed his readers to Bob Childers' study guide. I was quickly enraptured. I had never been exposed to any channeled material before, so the Law of One was extremely fresh to me. I read the entire study guide in one sitting. The next day, I started reading the actual material. A few weeks later, I ordered the first four books (still haven't bothered with the fifth. I'm waiting for the scholar's edition.) What amazed me, what virtually brought me to tears, was that Ra's worldview precisely matched the belief system I was building. It put everything in its place. It was simple, coherent, powerful, practical, straight-forward, and usually commonsensical. Furthermore, it presented a challenge: now I finally had a philosopher I believed in and I didn't have to invent my own philosophy, and because the material was often so dense, I had an opportunity to exactly build upon it. To this day, this has been my task. I have set about grasping, understanding, synthesizing, and filling in the gaps. At least for now, it has become my mission to flesh this work out into an clear and complete picture, through the lens of which the truth of all other religions, philosophies and spiritual systems can be seen. In the process, I have explored the big six religions (Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Taoism, Buddhism, Hinduism), voraciously devoured all the best channeled material, researched holy book after holy book, explored physical theories as well as theosophical systems. And in the process, I have studiously applied the Law of One to my own life, seeking every moment to find the lesson, the catalyst, the love, the joy, the sorrow, the Creator. I do not know exactly what my mission in this world is, but I do know that I cannot stop what I have started.

In the last four years, Sarah and I have learned to be fully open and honest with each other, exploring our relationship in ways that are well outside the norms of what people call a "marriage". In fact, the legal document is really more like a relic from a past life now. In those four years I've become the man I always dreamed I'd be, and more. I have taught myself to dance and play musical instruments, to speak from the heart and meditate, to forgive and process negative emotions, to walk in faith, trusting the Spirit. In those four years, I've transformed my sorely blocked red and orange energy centers into sources of abundance and confidence. Women who would been weirded out by the former me are now comfortable with me. I can't really express how crucial the Ra Material has been in my transformation, though my dedication to expanding it into something clearer and more palatable may perhaps be a step in that direction.

I can honestly say that I do not know what the future holds. But I do have a vision. A vision of a world where hearts are open and people are not afraid to be vulnerable, where people actually care about evolving spiritually, where we do not need laws because we rely on love and respect, where community is more important than commodity, where I can be my outrageous self and people will love me all the more for it, and where I finally find my family.
(07-12-2012, 07:25 PM)JustLikeYou Wrote: [ -> ]...I do have a vision. A vision of a world where hearts are open and people are not afraid to be vulnerable, where people actually care about evolving spiritually, where we do not need laws because we rely on love and respect, where community is more important than commodity, where I can be my outrageous self and people will love me all the more for it, and where I finally find my family.

Excellent ! We will make it happen! Smile
thanks for the story Joseph.

yes, the Law of One has transformed many people's lives; it's like a handbook for their soul Smile
My heart is really touched by your story J. Thank you. I think it's amazing what you have accomplished in your life so far.

Many blessings to you and Sarah.

I drove through the mountains of Knoxville in May, such a beautiful majestic place you have to call homeHeart

I love the vision you have for our world.
Thank you for sharing you're story so far Joseph!

The "ending" chapter was quite moving. Godspeed ,) to you and Sara!
Thank you, Joseph.

Meerie

Thanks for your open and honest sharing, Joseph. I found very impressive that you and Sarah did not split when difficulties arose, and decided to work on your selves, that is pretty amazing.
Heart Smile
What an amazing story! Thank you for sharing Joseph!
Good job, Joseph. Well written account of a very interesting person--lots of catalysts in there. I look forward to more good stuff.
Thank you everyone. I wanted to write so much more, but I didn't want to overwhelm. And I rather feel that I gave the downward spiral more emphasis than the upward rebound. I think it is important for other people to know how far you can come.

Also, I've been largely absent from the forums because I have been focusing my writing on personal projects (a systematic re-casting of the principles of the Ra material, a set of courses teaching these systematic principles, and the Ra Glossary project). Hopefully, I'll have some of these completed soon and you all will again see my contributions.