To: K-list
Recieved: 2000/12/30 18:51
Subject: [K-list] introduction
From: Samantha Atkins
On 2000/12/30 18:51, Samantha Atkins posted thus to the K-list:
Hi,
I just signed up a day or two ago and wanted to introduce myself. I
hope you will forgive the length of this post. There is so much I want
to share and understand with a group like this!
I am uncertain what is and is not the effect of K in my own life. I
have a history of some interesting stuff so I'll share a bit of me, I
would appreciate feedback on sorting some of this out.
When I was around 8 or so I had a very interesting experience in a
seeming dream. I and my entire family were huddled in the kitchen on
the floor beside the kitchen sink and counter, very frightened. The
sink is at the window to outside. Outside there are these creatures
that I know in the dream I know are aliens. Mind you this was back in
'62 where most 8 year olds didn't hear about such. In the dream we are
all being very quiet hoping not to be discovered. Even our thoughts are
shut way down. There is a voice from outside, no more than a mere
whisper. It says one word, "candlelight". When I hear this word it is
like a brilliant search light has been turned on right in my face and is
filling me and running through my body and totally ripping apart ever
part of my being. I awoke sitting bold upright in bed with intense
tingling goosebumpy to the nth power energy running up and down my body
and feeling like every part of me had been totally electrified. I was
shaking like crazy. Energy surges in me when I just remember it. I don't
know what it was but I was always convinced afterward that I was
fundamentally changed by this experience. My Mom said that up to around
that age I was very happy-go-lucky. But afterward I became very serious,
detached and a bit strange.
I was a strange child before this. I had a waking vision (ok aided by
a bit of psychedelics) some years later of when I was no more than days
or weeks old. Several adults were in the room. I was too young to have
any words but I knew exactly what each one was thinking, feeling and
going through. So much pain and confusion in them. So much of it
unnecessary. So much frustration in me that I had no means to
communicate or be of help. I was crying with frustration and enraged at
being deprived of the power to do anything much and especially upset at
being considered totally inept and nearly mindless by these poor
adults. During this vision I went through learning to talk again. I
experienced the word shape/sounds mixing in my mind with what I knew
inside and outside and slowly fitting together. I experienced my own
baby talk from inside and saw it for the experimental speaking and word
learning it was. I remembered some of my baby talk words.
When I was 5 I was playing with one of those clothespins that are two
pieces of wood held by a coiled spring. I was fascinated by it. I
reached out with my mind and let my mind flow around all parts of it and
especially flow all around and through the spring. I began to get
knowledge of how this spring thing worked in some fashion. It was very
intuitive. But when I understood the spring I also got intuition about
the steel it was made of, the way steel was made, its elemental
composition, its uses, the uses and properties of springs, tons of
related physics material and more and more information flooding into my
intuition until it spiraled out into a huge explosion of information
pulling in the planet! My head exploded. I had forgotten about my body
and sat down with a hard thump. I sat staring bug-eyed at the
clothespin. If all of that was in a simple clothespin then what kind of
world was I in and just what was "I" anyway?
When I was really young I would have terrifying vivid nightmares. In
the worse of these I would be totally out-of-control hysterical in my
sleep. There would be so much energy in me I felt like I was going to
explode into billions of pieces. But just when I could take no more
this being would lead me to a quiet and sort of dark room and talk to
me. I can't remember his/her face or gender. But I remember the voice
soothing me and attempting to calm me. Sometimes I was so keyed up I
faught hard against the voice as if it was robbing me of my power. But
many years later as an adult I realized that that voice was the voice I
had come to speak in inside my own head. Many years later I found
myself spontaneously going back to reach and heal and protect my younger
self.
In early school years I had that ESP thing I think a lot of kids do. I
would always know when someone was speaking about me and turn around and
look straight at them. It seemed to be bad manners to do that or
something so eventually I stopped. School was very strange. I felt
like there was a war going on inside me that school was causing. A war
between two ways of knowing. On the one hand I had a "fast knowing"
where the answer was present or was pulled out of somewhere when a
question was asked or I wanted to know something. On the other hand was
the memorization and plodding but dependable logic that I was learning
in school. I found it very frustrating that no one taught anything
about the fast knowing. After a while I began to discount it in my own
mind. I had learned too much slow knowing. Until the 9th or 10th grade
I actually thought I was sort of dumb. All the stuff in school seemed
terribly disjointed and incoherent. I thought there must be an overall
logic and plan to it tht was obvious to everyone else but me. It was a
great shock to find that there was no plan, except sometimes a plan to
make sure there was no plan(!), and that all the plan I had painfully
pieced together was my own invention!
Well, it turned out that those teachers telling me I was hugely bright
and that if I tried "just that hard" I would have straight A's were
telling the truth. But I was robbed of using my brightness and
continually dumbed down on all levels by school. The worst of it was
that I never learned to fully engage my strength or push its boundaries
there. This is not the way to grow young minds and souls. Much of the
way they taught seemeed so wrong-headed that it couldn't have been more
designed to keep minds from blossoming.
I had two other big challenges. One, my father was the original
Southern Baptist Deacon from Hell. Very controlling and emotionally and
physically horrifically abusive. Also, very pyschic. I swear the man
could pick up even the thought of rebellion or anger. So I learned to
shut down my own mind and abilities early. When it comes to that my Mom
is also intensely psychic. She has crystal clear dreams about the
future. I was her first child. We raised each other as she was barely
19 when I was born. When we talk today my third eye often goes nuts. It
feels like there is a communicaiton and power cable stretched between
our ajna centers. We finish each other's sentences a lot.
My dad terrorized all of us kids and my mom. By the time I was 5 I
knew with perfect clarity that I could either let go to all of the chaos
and forces inside and outside and go "insane" and be institutionalized
(if not killed) OR I could learn to control myself quite thoroughly, put
a lot of me undercover and use my energy (and it felt like others
available to me) to heal the scars as best I could. It was quite an
existential lesson for a 5 year old.
My other huge challenge was that I was born transsexual. I knew from
quite early on that I was female despite being born with the wrong body
parts. Thankfully, around 10 years ago I got to "change sex", to align
my body with my heart and soul. But that was another part of me I
buried deep and fought with myself over. I shut down a lot of unrelated
stuff because I was afraid that more openness, even with myself, would
make it impossible to hide this deepest darkest secret any more.
I had some interesting religious experiences early. Conversations I
used to have with God or some beings at a higher level. Of course the
Baptists taught that God was some fearsome being that would throw me in
hell if I didn't toe the line. But I never could buy that. That wasn't
who I was talking to. After a while the fear messages leaked in and I
shut down more. But I was quite precocious. I had a friend and sunday
school teacher who was a very bright and open minded theology student
when I was 9 or 10. We would talk about ESP and Rosicrucian teachings
and what Christ was really about and general theology every moment we
could steal. It didn't make any difference that I was so young. He was
always amazed by that. For me it simply felt like there was finally a
mind I could share with. Of course this made my father very jealous.
It was a force telling me I was good and special rather than totally
screwed up and sinful as he took every opportunity to remind me. He
couldn't stand it. So he painted my friend Buddy as a pervert and moved
us to a different church. Such a painfully little man.
I took every opportunity I could to argue philosophy and theology and
spiritual things with everyone I could get my hands on. Which were
precious few and not of great quality in my environment. One of my most
cherished memories is of a much younger Jerry Falwell, who was only
known as an evangelist in a couple of state circuits at the time,
arguing with me for over an hour in front of a church class when I was
around 12. At the end he was totally flustered and said "You are
inspired directly by the devil if you aren't one yourself. No natural
child can argue like you." <smile>
Finally I got very dissapointed with religion (such as I saw of it). I
not only couldn't find any answers but those who were supposed to know
didn't seem to have even asked most of the questions. By 14 or so I
decided I was an atheist. I got pretty notorious in my Bible-belt
school and community when I delivered a 3 hours seminar dismantling all
the proofs and arguments for God. But my humanities teacher wasn't
fooled, "You know, a child who puts this much energy into even arguing
against religion is not at all un-religious - if anything, you are much
more religious than most."
In my adolescence there weren't many psychic or K like experiences that
I remember. But my basically mystical and meditative nature kept
blossoming. I would spend lot of time just sitting quietly looking at
the world and waiting for it to open its meaning to me. Not much
occurred though. Somehow I was convinced that I had to hold myself
carefully or my thoughts would be picked up by other people or influence
them. I seemed to have a "loud mind". As a young child I was also
afraid to think along certain lines like to imagine what might be
outside a dark window. I had a deep conviction that my mind was more
than capable of making me see whatever I imagined. And I had a dread
that it might be capable of actually creating it. Throughout my life
I've felt as if there are abilities within me that I do not yet trust
myself to manifest. But even this suspicion was disowned "to keep me
safe".
I noticed at some point that I could cure people of minor maladies. I
would do it in sort of a strange way. I would in my mind transfer the
malady to myself and then dissolve it within me. Since then I've heard
that this isn't generally a very good idea. I also experimented with
some Huna magic techniques I found a book on. Especially influencing
the weather.
In the 10th grade or so I met this very interesting girl that I later
married. She was very intensely psychic. A natural witch. For some
reason throughout my life I have tended to have a lot of friends and
lovers who were witches or mystics or Rosicrucians or some such. My
intuition is that I provide some energy or anchor or balance for their
own work. I don't know quite what that is. The young marriage didn't
last long at all. Especially since the knowledge of my gender
differences came roaring to the surface around that time (17-18). I
wasn't ready to do anything about it. Hell, I was so socially inept and
hyper-sensitive that I could barely stand to go into a store and buy a
stick of gum! No way I was going to be standing out like that would
require. And there was simply no place in Greensboro, NC at the time
for a trannie to do her thing. The two I met there were representative
of the problem. One was a flaming drag queen as that was the only
public role there was for someone like us at the time. Even that was
very dangerous just a couple of years after Stonewall. The other played
house mom to a hippie house I lived in for a while. She almost never
went out. I was too afraid to let either of them fully in on what was
going on in me. So I buried it again for a while.
Growing up in the Vietnam era and seeing grotesque carnage on TV nearly
every night as a teenager deeply taught me that there is something
drastically wrong in the world. Like many I was called by the hippie
movement. I believed that only a change of consciousness could
possibly, somehow, make a difference. So I read my Leary, Alpert,
Huxley, and dear Alan Watts. I became the Acid Queen for a few years.
LSD allowed me to get inside my own psyche and rebuild and rewire a
lot. It also showed me ranges of experience and of energy and being far
beyond what I dreamed was possible. I spent many a night walking around
the city and reaching into the homes and minds of the people within the
area. I could feel them. I felt where they lived and had their being
much of the time and it felt so very small and confining compared to
being plugged into the universe the way I felt I was. Yet they had one
another and their comfort and their security while I felt incredibly
separate and alone. A cry went up inside me for others like me. I felt
just a few and seemingly so far away.
I was a strange soul. I had friends at the time come up to me and poke
me in the chest asking, "You really aren't in there are you?" And
mostly I wasn't. This body seemed to be an incidental thing that
somehow was supposed to represent me or even be me. It didn't feel that
way.
I was with another woman who was a highly trained witch when I was
19-20. In many ways she was the deepest love of my life. Things she
would say in casual conversation would come back to me filled to
overflowing with levels of meaning I hadn't the wit to capture when she
first said them. I never knew what she saw in me. She said that I
brought her mind and heart peace and that she loved my brilliance and
yearning. She was 6 months younger than me and yet much older at the
same time. Much like me.
I eventually left Greensboro and came to San Francisco in the mid 70s.
By that time I felt very battered. I felt I had hurt some people I had
not wanted to and that I should be much more together and whole than I
was. I wasn't sure anymore what was what I wanted to believe and what
was and wasn't real and what was real that I was desperately avoiding
believing. I was still very mystical but the seed of something
different, a rationalism, had begun to take hold as I had read Ayn Rand
the summer before. A good antidote to some shaky thinking but also very
antithetical to the psychic part of my being. But by the time I got to
SF this wasn't very sorted out.
I did a lot of just being in my room. Smoking pot and cigs too much,
reading a lot of philosophy and mysticism. Trying to untangle the knots
inside my being. I got very quiet and introspective. The one place I
could bear to go to for a while was a local coffee-shop - fittingly
called "The Sacred Grounds". Some of the people there befriended me
and I always had a joint or two of "the good stuff" no matter how poor I
was. But often I would just sit quietly at the table with them and
listen. At some point the listening went much deeper. I began to feel
and hear what was behind the words, then behind those things, then
behind those... Down and down it went. It got spooky. Soon I knew what
they were going to say and do long before it happened. Some of the
psychic stuff I had buried came out and developed further. I would have
dreams where someone I didn't know so well would be with me in the dream
and tell me all about themselves. Later I would find that every bit of
it was exactly true including things they had never shared with anyone.
It got really spooky. I found I could do it with strangers on the
street. Then I got scared and shut it down hard. I felt like I had too
much baggage and was too apt to misuse such abilities and cause myself a
lot more damage. I felt too inept to really use it to help.
But I had noticed for some years by then that I seemed to have some
talents that were therapeutic to other people. I almost became a junior
guru for a time. I had read everything I could get my hands on about
mysticism and eastern religions and pop psychology for some time. I
could sit with one person especially but also in groups and read them
(although I didn't know that was what it was at the time). I could see
right into them where their knots were. And I would weave a collage of
hippie talk, mysticism, psychology to get them to see what was going on
and to empower them to do something to help it. But it also felt like
energy was going from me to them that was really doing the teaching and
setting up the work. It was done almost automatically, as if something
else was working through me. I kept shutting it down because I thought
it was something from my ego or that my ego would foul up. And I
couldn't understand why the people couldn't see for themselves.
This takes me up to about 22 years ago. Not long after this I decided
that I had dabbled for long enough in the hippie and psuedo mystical
world. I got fed up with my own ineptness and confusion. So I went
hard the opposite direction. I went on a very rationalist, scientific
spell. I started my computer career and poured almost all of my energy
into it. For some 12 years I steered well clear of things magical and
mystical as much as I could. I tried to explain all of it away. I am
still burdened with a lot of doubts to this day.
Starting around the time of my transition all of the psychic, mystical,
spiritual memories and experiences began coming back online. Being able
to say yes to changing sex was actually saying YES to the Goddess on so
many levels that I am still discovering. Saying "Yes" for the first
time in a very long time. That began a lot of changes in me beyond the
obvious ones.
I fell in love with a guy who happens to be a 11th grade Rosicrucian
early on in transition. We became inseparable. One evening at his
place I had this experience. It felt as if Infinite Love and great
power was pressing into my back and wanting to flow through my heart to
all of the world. It was such a palpable intense feeling. A feeling
and a Deep Call to fulfill my purpose. I was afraid to let go to it and
I am still afraid. I know it will change me utterly. And yet I know it
is something I was put here for.
During transition I had a series of memories and experiences that
brought me back to the reality of Spirit. I eventually became
especially caught by A Course in Miracles. Which amazed me after my
years as a rigid atheist or at least agnostic. ACIM is very much about
living fully in Love. It spoke to me deeply. So much of it was what I
thought God and Christ must really be about when I was 9 or 10 years
old. But so very much more. I began to trust or at least to take
faltering steps to trust. My old abilities came back but cleaned up a
bit. The first time I went online psychically and felt the combined
pains, hopes, fears, and loves of an entire city without drugs to hide
behind was quite a mind-blower. I began to learn to simply let Goddess
/ Holy Spirit work through me and to have my ego stand out of the way
consciously. Sometimes when I did this I would do and say things that
weren't what I would call tactful or what I would think of at all. But
somehow they were just the right thing, they were the miracle needed or
made the opening for it.
Around this time I discovered a MCC (gay, lesbian and increasingly
transgender supportive) church in my area that was strongly
metaphysically oriented. I was afraid to go. I thought that if I ever
set foot in a church after all of those years that either I would burst
into flames or it would! But I noticed something very dear. I felt
lines of force coming out of my heart and connecting to other hearts in
the room. I was very surprised and overwhelmed. I had felt that part
of heart energy in me for a long time but I didn't know quite what to do
with it. Here at last was a place where it seemed naturally useful and
appropriate. Soon I was teaching ACIM at the church and was a very
loved member and leader. I began to believe that I had found my calling
at last, that I was home. In front of a church taking part in leading
meditations of my own design, prayers, consecrating and serving
communion, I felt as if many lifetimes of knowledge just automatically
kicked in. I connected to the spiritual energy of the church. I could
feel the angel that was the church during communion.
Teaching ACIM was such a blessing. I felt so blessed to be part of the
healing, opening and growth of souls! I watched people be reborn in
front of my eyes. There is nothing better than that. One evening when
I felt particular filled with Spirit one of the people in the course
looked at me very strangely. When I asked him why he said that he had
looked at me and instead of a person sitting there there was just this
big egg-shaped mass of pure light with just a hint of human features.
It was a very high and holy time. I became convinced that I was called
to be a minister and that I should use my software goddess abilities
only to pay off my debts and take care of my dependents quickly so I
could go fulltime into my true work.
After a time though, I felt that I simply did not know nearly enough and
had not done enough work on myself to be able to really do this work.
Spirit was working through me but I knew how many doubts, fears, hangups
and how much ignorance was in me. I knew I needed a lot of work. One
place where I thought to get it was by learning a good formal meditation
practice. So I asked to be led to what was needed. This took me to
Ananda.
Ananda was started by a student of Paramahansa Yogananda many years
ago. It teaches a westernized, householder Hindu yoga path. It
particular uses Kriya meditation as its primary spiritual practice. As
much as I loved MCC I knew I had just found a much (in most ways) deeper
end of the spiritual pool. So naturally I just had to jump in!
There was a bit of a ticking time bomb. When I first entered their
church I asked immediately to speak to a minister and asked to know
whether I would be facing prejudice and extra barriers due to being a
post-op transsexual and predominantly lesbian in sexuality. I told her
that I was asking not to put her on the spot but because I knew deep
within me that I would fall utterly in spiritual love with the
teachings,practice and church and I wanted to know if it was a place
where I would be ultimately jilted. She pretty much assured me there
was nothing to worry about on that score but I felt an edge of something
different. It was to turn out that there was a lot of prejudice toward
me and mine there but that is another story.
I began to take classes and read every word Yogananda had every written
including his massive and beutiful translation and commentary on the
Bhagavad Gita. Soon I took discipleship vows. It was a bit of a
challenge for me because as much as I loved Yogananda I wasn't sure if
he was my guru. I had long taught of Christ in that role if anyone
was. But I had a key dream that convinced me that he was indeed a guru
to me and present no matter what I did. In January 97 I recieved Kriya
initiation and the first Kriya technique.
I learned basic and more advanced meditation and began practicing for an
hour and a half or more every day not counting other related practices.
I felt like I was filled with energy and walking on air. I was having
trouble integrating into my work-a-day life though. I began to have
some intense flashbacks of what I believe are past lifes as a monastic.
Both in Eastern and Western traditions. I had some incredibly intense
lucid dreams. I will close this already too-long email by sharing one
which shook me to my core 4 years ago.
The dream occurred not long before the time I would awaken. I had been
practicing only simply breath watching (Hong-Sau) and some listening for
the inner sounds type meditation regularly at this time. It was some
months before I received Kriya. And I was engrossed reading Master's
Gita.
In the dream I was older and a nun of many years practice. I am in some
kind of small temple taking part in a ceremony. In the ceremony I
simply was to go to the altar and light a candle with as full
consciousness and devotion and as an act of deepest love of God. In the
dream, after many, many years of practice my heart and mind is very
clean and focused. As I walk forward I am inventorying my mind and
heart and releasing each place where I am holding onto "me" or holding
back in any way. I am systematically attempting to make of myself a
pure offering to God. As I reach to light the candle I let go of the
last of me and only pour out my love to God.
Suddenly I feel as if I have been turned completely inside out. The
breath WHOOSHes out of me. My body crumples to the ground. I am caught
up in and dissolved in the reality, in the Presence of God. Never have
I felt such pure Power, Love, Knowing and deep endless boundless Joy.
My entire life, all of my lives, all of the lives I could possibly have
flash by before my inner eye. All of it is so incredibly tiny compared
to the immensity that I find myself within. There is just enough of me
to say over and over again, "My Lord, My God! I am yours, I am yours
forever!" But a small part of me even then says "not yet, you're not
ready yet but REMEMBER".
Afterward I awoke immediately as I usually do from this kind of dream.
Tears poured down my face and I felt utterly spent. I prayed to God and
thanked God and Guru for a very long time. For many months I was sure I
was destined to be a nun. Inside I felt like one.
OK. I will stop for now. This should be more (probably much more) than
enough to see what matter of strange creature comes before you. <g>
love,
samantha
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