The Loneliest Feeling

Graphic by Robin

Here’s a story I haven't told before. My old man is in hospital after suffering a minor heart attack. I don't feel anything? I either don't want to feel anything or I really don't care. Either way it's a little disturbing. At the age of 15 I left his house never to return. At that young age I had strong feelings about both my parents and those feelings drove me to move as far from them as I could get. I went to work and saved for a year and when I was 16 I left New Zealand forever. My father was out of control. He was physically abusive and totally arrogant in his approach to family,. He hated my mother and he hated the responsibility of his 4 children. The 5 of us continually attempted to please him but of course it never worked.  I remember feeling very frightened as a young boy.  I was never safe and I have horrible memories of hiding out under the hedge and in the potting shed, hoping he would go out or that he might forget my latest crime.

    

He beat me with a length of electrical cord that doubled as a jug cord for boiling water. He did this on a regular basis until I left. His beatings today would land him in prison and he kept me in the prison of his psychosis for 15 years.

My mother was driven insane by him. She could never please him and she loved him totally, though she had another relationship with a man of similar character to my dad, after he threw her out of the family home and moved his whore in. She never got over him. Until she died she was, in her mind, still his wife.

It was strange. My father successfully destroyed my family so that he could rebuild it in his own image. The whore he replaced my mother with moved right in and though I have never met her it seems she may have brought my father’s psychotic bent under control. At least things looked better.

My sister Deb was the other casualty of the family war. No one has seen her in years. I hear rumors that she is living in Sydney Australia or somewhere else but her life, apparently has been a horror of psychiatrists and drugs. 

No one will admit to my father’s insanity. They say, you've got it all wrong. He's a good man. Well maybe he is now that he has gotten rid of the problem. Now that he has thrown out his family and fixed up his pathetic life.

Now he has a heart attack at 80 or whatever age he is and I get emails even from my X-wife in Australia. I don't know why. She divorced me years ago?

I think I'm still angry and although I do not act out I have the same Psychosis - I do not beat people or even enjoy conflict but I feel him in me like a cancer. 

I forgot my family as a self protective device, I literally had to give them up even in memory in order to have a life. Now I hear that the old man is on his way out. Well, I couldn't care less and that is the loneliest feeling ever.

RESPONSE BY SOFIAH

Response written by Sofiah, a Muslim woman and Course in Miracles student.

Dear Robin,

Last night I dreamt, a huge chunk of my hair falls off and the left side of my head became completely bald. One of the feeling, I remembered from the dream was horror, and the dream then shifted to something else, very vague, and I just can't remember and then it went back , to me and my hair again and this time I find my right hand pulling out my hair and it starts coming off very easily and I find that, there's just a few strands of hair left, and I decided to take a shaver and shave whatever remaining hairs off my head. And the thought I have in the dream is that, people is going to shun a bald headed female, and I felt utterly alone in the dream.

What has my dream to do with your blog??. Here's some pointers:

''Dreams show you that you have the power to make a world as you would have it be, and that because you want it you see it. And while you see it you do not doubt that it is real. Yet here is a world, clearly within your mind, that seems to be outside. You do not respond to it as though you made it, nor do you realize that the emotions the dream produces must come from you. It is the figures in the dream and what they do that seem to make the dream. You do not realize that you are making them act out for you, for if you did the guilt would not be theirs, and the illusions of satisfaction would be gone. In dreams these features are not obscure. You seem to waken; and the dream is gone. Yet what you fail to recognize is that what caused the dream has not gone with it. Your wish to make another world that is not real remains with you. And what you seem to waken to is but another form of this same world you see in dreams. All your time is spent in dreaming. Your sleeping and your waking dreams have different forms, and that is all. Their content is the same. They are your protest against reality, and your fixed and insane idea that you can change it. In your waking dreams, the special relationship has a special place. It is the means by which you try to make your sleeping dreams come true. From this, you do not waken. The special relationship is your determination to keep your hold on unreality, and to prevent yourself from waking. And while you see more value in sleeping than in waking, you will not let go of it.''
[ACIM-oe CH.18.SecIII.paragragh 18]

For many years, my studying of the Course was one of utter frustration because my 'I' of the body that try to grasp its message, until I read DU or was it Wapnick, that said it was meant for the mind, which is beyond time and space.

Think of your father as, a renegade mind, that believe in the reality of guilt and punishment, sending very sick messages to his brain/body which CANNOT BUT OBEY the dictate of that mind. If you can imagine the unhealed pain and sickness that must be there to make him behave that way, you cannot but pity him...as Jesus pitied and prayed for those who nailed him to the cross.( I know you were a child, and Jesus was 33 years old when he was crucified, but still you can go back in time and with HS's help see the dream differently) Here's some lines out of so many many others that Jesus taught in his Course about our true reality:

''The mind can think it sleeps, but that is all. It cannot change what is its waking state. IT CANNOT MAKE A BODY,NOR ABIDE WITHIN A BODY. What is alien to the mind does not exist, because it has no source. For mind creates all things that are, and cannot give them attributes it lacks, nor change its own eternal, mindful state... It cannot make the physical... Yet mind is mind, awake or sleeping..." [ACIM Lesson 167]

"When the mind elects to be what it is not, and to assume an alien power which it does not have, a foreign state it cannot enter, or a false condition not within its Source, it merely seems to go to sleep a while. It dreams of time; an interval in which what seems to happen NEVER HAS OCCURED, the changes wrought are substanceless, and all events are nowhere. When the mind awakes, it but continues as it always was.'' [ACIM Lesson 167]

Jesus said, 'the sole responsibility of the miracle worker is to accept atonement for himself', and as glib as this may sound to some, but I feel you must be ready to hear it, because you want to see things differently, so here goes: All that beating in your childhood, is your dream dear brother. Your father acted out the wishes of your sleeping mind. And for that matter, all the beatings I received in my childhood is my dream. My blessed mother acted out the wishes of my sleeping mind. My ''I'' of the body feels itself a victim, but through the Course, I know that is not my reality. And there are times, since understanding begins to dawned on my mind bits by bits, when I actually feel great remorse for holding so much that is untrue against my mother. I actually feel ashamed for having dreamed such a dream and dragging her into it, for not accepting Atonement in an earlier lifetime, recalling a few other passages:--

''There never was a time an idol brought you anything except the 'gift' of guilt. Not one was bought except at cost of pain, NOR WAS IT EVER PAID BY YOU ALONE. Be merciful unto your brother, then. And do not choose an idol thoughtlessly, remembering that he will pay the cost as well as you.'' [ACIM-oe CH.30.SecVI.Paragraph67]

''What matters it which concept you accept while you perceive a self that interacts with evil, and reacts to wicked things? Your concept of yourself will still remain quite meaningless.'' [ACIM-oe CH.31.SecV.Paragraph57]

''If you can be hurt by anything, you see a picture of your secret wishes. Nothing more than this. And in your suffering of any kind you see your own (mind) concealed desire to kill.'' [ACIM-oe CH.31.SecV.Paragraph57]

''Be vigilant against temptation, then, remembering that it is but a wish, insane and meaningless, TO MAKE YOURSELF A THING THAT YOU ARE NOT.(i.e. a body) And think as well upon the thing that you would be instead. It is a thing of madness, pain and death; a thing of treachery and black despair, of failing dreams and no remaining hope except to die, and end the dream of fear.'' [ACIM-oe CH.31.SecVII.Paragraph80]

When my mom passed away, in March'93 of brain tumor, I was the only one at her bedside, being an atheist and not fasting in the month of Ramadan. All my siblings left the hospital to break their fast. I was there, and it was her last gift to me. I cannot accept afterwards that God does not exist. And after dabbling in this teaching and that... found the Course in Nov'98, felt intuitively from reading the first few lines, that it felt familiar to me, as if I am meeting an old friend once again... I must have done the Course in my previous lifetime, and probably resisted its call for Atonement tooths and nails. Got born this time around in a Muslim world for that resistant, a female on top of that! My family are not fanatical, but do their best to be devout Muslim. After the Iranian revolution, fundamentalist starts to flourished in M'sia and lots of missionaries everywhere in the early eighties. I gave up on Islam shortly after my 23rd birthday in'82 and also in a way escaped putting on the veil which become so popular throughout the Muslim world from the eighties onwards. Yes I knew from the moment I read just a couple of paragraph of the Course that it is going to be the path for me, though now and again I'd get very resistant to its message and would leave it for months and months.

Thanks to the Course, I am now more willing to relinquish (Wapnick always said it is a process and to be gentle with ourselves in doing the Course) the dream of hatred that still lingers in the minds of my brothers and sisters for the Jewish state of Israel, and all things Jews. But for me the escape from this illusory world now looks more and more possible.(For those who think all these are not a dream but real, I'd say 'selamat' to them and I sincerely hope it be a happy dream for them, and may it never turn into a nightmare as it did for some people in the third world countries.) I truly feel I owed gratitude to three great Jewish figures in my dream, Jesus, Helen and Yes Wapnick.

Before I close, the link below, is a song that speak a truth for me. There's a line in it, that goes, ''till I (I took it as my ''I'' of the ego/ideas of bodies) finally die, which started the whole world living...'' well I have said it before, separation is a sick joke we played on ourselves, now I've got a song to backed me up.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W7r0piYk19o

The word 'selamat' mean a few things in Malay. It can mean, God's speed, be safe, good grace. I wish you, dear Robin.

Selamat, Sofiah