It’s been 7 1/2 years since I left my 7-year hermitage on the western slope of the Chiricahua Mountains in southeastern Arizona and moved to the town of Silver City, New Mexico, to recreate my life.

I’d been experiencing bizarre, confusing, and sublime events for years, some seeming like alien and UFO contact, some that felt shamanic and promising, and others that seemed to involve government agents who could immobilize me and leave marks on my body that terrified me with my helplessness.

I’d been drawn in different directions:  to bravely face the Mystery, strengthen my spirit, and open myself to teachings from the Unknown, and alternately cower in fear and even consider killing myself rather than let some unknown agents use me against my will.

Ultimately, I’d become afraid I was “a sitting duck” out there in the country alone, so I left the home I’d lovingly crafted over all those years out of straw, mud, and stone in natural shapes, and returned to society in rectangles of space and time, seeking new experiences to help me understand.

One of the first things I did was look for a UFO/alien conference that might frame my questions in terms of spiritual awakening.  I was thrilled to find this very conference was taking place within weeks of being paid for selling my home – and the conference was in Hawaii, with extra events available for those who wanted to swim with dolphins and discuss experiences – for ten days! – with others who believed in the spiritual potential of understanding the UFO/alien connection.

There is no unanimous theory among this subset of people experiencing what has been called “alien.”  Some seem to me to be terribly naive, others I distrust as manipulators, and liars, masquerading as exactly opposite of who they profess to be.

Of course, I’ve also considered that I could be paranoid.  And, alternately, that I could be naively hopeful myself, and my safety might lie in taking my fears more seriously.  So many conflicting theories; so many possible contexts in which to reevaluate my scores of experiences over my lifetime; so difficult, at times, to know what to believe about my own mind.

But I’ve tried:  I meditated.  I was hypnotized.  I prayed.  I did ritual.  I talked with others.  I attended shamanic conferences and events.  I refused to read books on the subject in order to keep my perceptions pure and untainted.  Then one day I decided to read books to compare my experiences with others’.  And I ignored the stuff, testing the theory that it was all in my head, and I could make it go away if I gave it less energy.  I tried to live a normal life.

But animals and even plants kept communicating.  I saw things.  I participated in healings.  I tested theories, and other people played out the results.

I kept records of my memories and anomalous events.  I studied and collated those events; then I went for years without looking at them, to frame them against the “normal world.”  I exercised my rational mind to assure myself that I had looked at these experiences from every vantage point possible.  And I worked to plant myself humbly within the mundane world for “grounding” and waited patiently for the big picture to come into view.

Ultimately, I accepted that I’d been invited by multi-dimensional beings to expand my consciousness and see more than the limited dimensions of this mundane world.

Eventually I traveled distances to talk to others who’d experienced events similar to mine.

I became a certified Transpersonal Hypnotherapist™.

I prayed for a teacher to lead me, and none came.  Or maybe many came.

For awhile I partnered with a Native American man who’d been invited by his grandfather, a Tewa medicine man, to learn the practices of a shaman.  He had accepted the training, then chose the option to not go forward and left the training.  It was a comfort to have affirmed the truism that the shaman’s is not an easy path, is indeed hazardous, and must be undertaken with clear sight, and is not for everyone.

It’s okay to say, This is not for me – so it’s said, but it seems that the spirits sometimes insist.

I wondered why I had found myself invited in the first place.

Was I like the man in the medieval woodcut peeking under the veil to see the many layers of reality?  Or was I failing my destiny for having not taken up the challenge with my total heart and soul?

Or was it more mundane than that?  Had I simply been taken as a child by government mind-controllers (evil demons or their human minions?) whose programming had exposed me to multi-dimensional reality, of which I was not developed spiritually enough to comprehend, so it was right for me to pull back from experiences I couldn’t yet negotiate safely?

I spent years in the mental tug of war, pulled between spiritual desire and utter terror of those who seemed able to enter my home at any time and leave me sick with mysterious wounds – or I found a tenuous balance between those ideas, which I tried to maintain, but never for long.

I certainly couldn’t focus too seriously on making a living, developing a new career, impressing clients that I really cared about their events I was hired to plan.  There were days when I laid in bed and wondered what options did I have to protect myself beside suicide.

I knew others who hosted weekly or monthly groups for “experiencers,” and I tried the same, showing movies and hosting discussions that I hoped would help me find others with whom I could share more honestly the full range of my experiences, but too often my groups attracted people whom I didn’t fully trust.  I spent thousands of dollars I couldn’t afford and gave myself the reputation in this new community as – I can only guess – another weird person with weird ideas.

I continued to experience strange intrusions in my life.  More than once I woke up to discover perfect (surgically-created?) half-spherical “scoops” removed from my right finger, left scapula, and when I posted about that, a line of scoops across my anus.  Another time, I suffered for more than a day with extreme fear and nausea after waking on a urine-soaked mattress with a Taser-burn on my right forearm.  Once I drove into a strange fog on a remote section of highway, experienced a flood of strange sensations as my perceptions of time, space, sound, and visuals failed to correspond with each other, ending with the sight of the Continental Divide sign (at the top of the mountain ridge, of course) approaching me from below.  And that is just one of three weird highway events.

Today, I do not have a conceptual framework I’m willing to share, except vaguely.  I believe the larger framework, the larger Realty, is simply beyond what we humans have language for, or at least beyond what English-speaking Americans have language for.  Like all wise ones have said.  We see through a glass darkly.  The Tao that can be spoken is not the Tao.  Reality is far bigger and more complex than our words.

Since childhood, many of us have been told that spiritual realities are not real, and most of us have been forced into compulsory eduction, in which we’re forced to spend our days focused on the material world, and forced to see it the way our teachers tell us it is.  Eventually, we forget how to perceive other realities, all the other dimensions and wavelengths of energy beyond the narrow bands of human-perceived light and human-perceived sound.  And there’s so much more.  And then we interpret those narrow bands of vibrational information according to the rules that the teachers relay to us, and only decades later we learn that those rules are in no way certain, but our minds have been trained to work within their limits.

I admit:  so much of this game feels “evil” in every sense of the word:  So much of it is contrary to Life.  The rules of economics, for one example, murder countless people, decimate nations, and destroy the health of the very planet we depend on for all life.

Still, it seems wrong to call all this death “evil,” and it’s my garden that gives me pause in using that word.  Underneath the most lovely rose – and everything else alive in the garden – is a mix of life and death at its darkest complexity.

I’m no longer sure the terms “Evil” and “Good” hold significant meaning.  While Christians and other faiths find great importance in these concepts, I have begun to doubt them.

In my garden, for example, death is an essential component of life.  At the roots of the rose are an infinite number of dead things.  All the plants grow because they are fed with dead, dying, and rotting things.  The volvox, reputedly the first sexually-reproducing life form on Earth, requires – and probably introduced the requirement for – death eventually of all sexually-reproducing life.

Children commonly misinterpret the well-intentioned actions of their parents as “mean” and only decades later understand the need for those actions.

Children and adults seem to need to hurt themselves in order to learn about the consequences of our actions.  Simple things like learning to be conscious and pick up our feet are only learned by tripping and falling down.

Shamans and healers commonly recount terrifying ordeals in alternate realities that they must experience in order to learn their skills.

Many adults credit very tough life experiences for their maturity and even their greatest qualities.

Social movements gain momentum by sacrifices, sometimes human ones.

Et cetera.  So I conclude that just because I have physical scars and mental ones does not mean that I have been treated cruelly by evil beings.  It may simply be Life.  Or even my Creator.  I don’t know.

But I do know this:  I have become less afraid and less resentful.  And less certain that our Creator or “God” or “the gods” are necessarily “kind” or “evil” according to our way of judging.

I perceive a lot of truth in all the religions of the world, and most philosophies.  I also perceive a lot of lies and manipulation in religion and politics, education/academia, media/entertainment/news, society, etc.  But I feel less judgement toward it, less concerned with condemning it, more ready to compare our society to that of ants:  just getting their job done, maybe enslaving smaller ants if they themselves are large.

Even my sweet cat, Peaches, is a killer and tormentor of helpless lizards, birds, and mice.

Finally, the condemnation directed so commonly toward aliens, or human mind controllers, or alien mind-controllers, for the ways they treat their human subjects is no different from the ways we humans treat the other living beings around us.  I can imagine my indignation if I was treated the way I treat my cat – which I think is excellent:  fed high-end “pet” food, with little variety (a lot for a cat, I think, but far less than I give myself), perhaps missing vital nutrients (how can I know for sure?), confinement, and more.  And the way other humans treat animals in their homes, labs, and ranches – the aliens probably compare quite well to many human scientists.  And so I feel silly getting too upset about the things that I have experienced.

(And I wonder if we humans might be treated better if we treated our animals better?  As above, so below?  As below, so above?)

I conclude that I have really suffered little.  I’ve been afraid mostly, and most of my fear was around strange perceptions and the loneliness of having so little social support.  And memories of events that might still terrorize me but are long past.

Ultimately, those discomforts have done something good for me.  Simply, I now know (by experience, not by theory) that we live in a multi-dimensional universe, and I am a multi-dimensional being with an existence far beyond this one.  I know that I have assistance on other realms.  And more, but this is enough to share now.

In short:  Don’t get stuck in fear.  Don’t get stuck in black and white.  Be true to yourself.  Look inside.  And look beyond this world.  Don’t get stuck  in the limiting mindset of this culture.  Dream.  Connect to your soul family.  Be your best self.  Have faith.