I woke up on April 8th, 2013. The day is forever burned into my mind, and it stands as the most pivotal point in my life upon which everything before and after is measured. When I say that I woke up, I am referring to what some people may call a burning-bush moment of major spiritual significance. Of course, it might also be a psychotic break characteristic of Bipolar 1. I’ve shared parts of the story with a few close friends and a host of psychiatrists. Their valuable feedback has led me to investigate my experience as both a spiritual epiphany and a psychotic break. I am inclined to believe the former is more true, but I will let you be the judge. I write these experiences not to convince you of anything, but to share with you my story and possibly meet others who have had similar events occur.
Up until April 7th—the day before I woke up—I considered myself a fairly ordinary (though certainly quirky) 41-year-old, white, middle-class male. The most unusual thing about me would probably be my sexuality. I never really fit into the gay stereotype and as such never made a big deal out of it. I understood that some people had problems with my sexual orientation, but I never gave them a platform to judge me.
In short, I lived a nice life. It was comfortable and mostly quiet. My partner and I enjoyed living in our small house with our two large dogs. I went to work every day; I had worked for 16 years as a public high school teacher. Teaching English was mostly a dream-job to me. In fact, I can say that during my career I always wanted to go to work. There was never a day when I wasn’t challenged, engaged, and ready to work. I had won teacher of the year and several other awards, and many of my students had stayed in touch letting me know about their successes and struggles in life. In 2006, I returned to school and earned my master’s. I spent two years as an administrator, and then I returned to the classroom where I remained until April 8th.
In the month that lead up to April 8th,
.
It’s as if the radio-play of my life switched from AM to FM: the program was still the same—that is, the people, places, and events were the same—but my perception had altered and with the change, everything became brighter, crisper, more electric.
I consider April 8th the Civil War of my life. Everything can be classified as pre and post April 8th much in the same way that American history can be divided by the events of The Civil War.
I woke up on April 8th, 2013.
I was Helen Keller, blind-dumb-and-deaf
And woven into my darkness
I felt the hand of some teacher
Ushering into a world unknown to me.
The spinning polyhedrons spilled from my brain to my hands
And I drew amazing pictures of geometric design.
I
Neutral Milk Hotel sings a song about a two-headed boy in a glass jar.
Presumably this boy is a carnival “freak”?
In any event, the song goes like this:
“Two headed boy
All floating in glass…
I can hear as you tap on your jar.
I am listening to hear where you are.”
– Neutral Milk Hotel
That sort of describes how the truth came upon me.
I hadn’t realized that my entire life was much like that boy in the jar.
I had been tapping at the glass, and then something tapped back.
I heard the reverberation of a music that expressed deeper thoughts.
I felt like Helen Keller in that moment when she realized a world was around her.
She had stumbled through dark-and-deafness unaware
And then her concept of the world imploded.
Holy shit! I was metaphorically blind, deaf, and dumb
And for some unknown reason, something woke me up.
Later, the psychiatrists would call it a bipolar manic episode with psychotic features.
In my 41 years on this planet, I’d never had this happen before.
And in the 6 months of being awake, my views of the truth haven’t changed.
Carl Jung said that some of his patients had episodes in which they lived out archetypal adventures.
And yes, I can easily read stories, fables, songs
And hear myriad truths within them.
As I opened my eyes to the truth
I could see all of the subliminal meanings imprinted in this world.
I awoke to filth and a veritable wasteland.
I was told many things, most of which are incredible.
I met God and the devil.
I met God’s son.
Before I continue with my story
I need to make sure I have adaquitly defined God, the devil, and God’s son.
If I can believe in a God
Then would it not be possible to believe that God could have a son?
When my world collapsed, God’s son is the only thing that saved me.
You see, by God’s having a son,
We were given a chance to understand and communicate with God
Without a God of the flesh, understanding our place in the world would be forever lost.
The message was very clear:
Pray to God through his son.
God is too omnipotent and more powerful and pure than we can comprehend.
We—being men—would likely be consumed by God’s power.
But His son is something that we can understand.
When the world cracked open, I had seen the truth
Everything in this world is patented, marked by numbers
ISBN, Social Security, license number, telephone numbers
All coded and woven into our lives.
I was told that the world is owned and we are all enslaved
We live on an enormous plantation
And even if we tried to sneak off and do things differently
We would be discovered.
There’s no escape.
I perused through beta data search engines
I asked the right questions
God has used every event so that we might wake up
And in every situation, with every person,
We all have a chance to be redeemed.
I was offered all of the knowledge of this world
It was thrown to my feet
And it curled about me like a snake.
I looked through the knowledge….
Did you know that pharmaceutical companies have changed our DNA?
Did you know that the sound of a word can compel a person to behave in specific ways?
Did you know that the bottled water we drink, poisoned by its plastic,
Contains
“How do you pray to Jesus?” I asked.
I remember the feeling that overtook me. I was able to see the most amazing “coincidences” in the world around me. It’s as if I suddenly started to see all of the world’s connections. Pictures and paintings from time immemorial seemed to convey a message. Initially, I thought that I was the only person who could see life’s subtext, but I now know that is not true.
♀♀♀♀♀
웃
January 2013
A Slight rebellion at Hillsdale
There’s a rumor out there that teachers exorbidant vacation time. Every time I tell someone that I’m a teacher, the person will say, “Oh… It must be nice getting all that time off during the summer.” Are you fucking kidding me? I’ve been teaching for 16 years, and I’ve either had to teach summer school or spend my summer days planning curriculum with other English teachers or attending seminars and other professional development.
SO no. I don’t teach to get the summers off.
Anyway, I wanted to say something. If you have school-aged children, pay special attention to what I’m going to tell you: the school system in California is most likely damaging your child. It’s no wonder 1/3 of California’s students don’t graduate. We have a system that simply doesn’t work. If your child is in any way gifted or talented, he or she will be dumbed down for the sake of differentiated instruction, and if he or she needs remediation, it won’t happen. Teachers are terrified of intervening because it can bring on the heat, so we’re more inclided to pass your kid and let you do all the wondering when, at age 18, your kid can’t read, count, or think in a logical manner.
I walked across the lightly frosted field leaving footprints in the white. My classroom faced the outside wall, so I was able to enter it without having to go through the main office. A high school is a funny place when there are no students. It’s almost creepy. The halls echo when someone is passing through it, and all of those posters and fliers affixed to the walls are seen clearly because the walkways are not crowded with a mob of kids.
I opened my classroom door and immediately turned on the lights. It was a mess inside.
I dutifully spent the vacation grading a stack of essays, but I still felt rested. Most of the day, the kids seem bored and they busy themselves sending an inordinate number of texts. Because most of them are seventeen, I can sometimes mistake them for critically thinking adults, but that mistake is always recognized at the first sign of some stupidity.
Perhaps I speak harshly of the students. I don’t mean to. I like to think that I understand them better than most adults. Spending 16 years with teens as my colleagues, I’ve developed a keen ability to predict their behavior with an uncanny precision.
I spent the two weeks grading essays and watching movies. Carlos and I visited my mother and his family, but we decided to stay local. I was actually glad to get back to teaching because it felt familiar.
But this was the beginning of the rumble that would predict the events of April 8th. With the kids back in class and me teaching The Zoo Story, I heard the news about a mandated curriculum coming from top down. It was the principal who sent out a group email to all 11th grade teachers. It read as follows: “This is just a reminder that the American Exhibition projects are scheduled to be presented on March 15th. Please be sure to add the date to your calendar as your attendance is mandatory.”
Being new to Hillsdale, I began asking questions about this American Exhibition project. What is it? What am I supposed to do to prepare the students? If it was anything like the Senior Exhibition from last year, I wanted no part of it.
Schools are accredited by an organization called WASC, and Hillsdale—in an attempt to look good on paper—developed an 11th grade portfolio piece. students. decided that I would not teach school-mandated unit. I was being a bit of a rebel, but I felt strongly about making sure any curriculum would help the students succeed at gaining skills, and I didn’t understand why we teachers were being asked to teach a 6-week unit when nobody understood its purpose.
The assignment was titled The American Exhibition, an 8-page essay about cause and effect. Well, maybe it was just part cause and effect. Nobody was sure. Despite the fact that teachers had assigned it for ten years, everyone was in unanimous agreement that the assignment was fundamentally flawed.
That’s what the principal said to me when I asked why we were teaching it. He said, “Everyone knows that it’s a fundamentally flawed paper, but we’re going to have to teach it this year and perhaps come back to it during the planning sessions in the summer.”
“Fundamentally flawed?” I heard myself say in disbelief. “You know it’s fundamentally flawed, and yet you’re still asking us to teach it?” Ordinarily I’m a man of few words when it comes to my principal, but I couldn’t understand how I could justify spending 6 weeks on a paper that isn’t scaffolded with a purpose in mind. and nobody had explained to the teachers its purpose. It was the archaic dinosaur brought out every year but with no explanation and no reason.
When I to sign up my students at the library for a solid two weeks. Rather than paging through a class-set of outdated and archaic anthologies, I figured we could use computers for the lesson. After 16 years of teaching in public high school, I can too easily slip into teaching old lessons that were perhaps appropriate last decade.
.
The library had a full set of computers as well as a working printer, and
While at work, I spoke with Jason—the teacher in the room next to mine—and I told him what was happening.
“Jason,” I said during the passing period, “Am I going crazy? How is this possible?”
Jason said, “No, you’re not going crazy. You’re just really focused. I think it’s great what you’re doing with the kids.”
“Alright,” I said, “but if you see me start to get out of hand or act weirdly you need to pull me aside and let me know.”
This being my 16th year of teaching, I had ample experience with respect to running my class. But I started to wonder whether my approach was truly benefiting the students and their long-term goals. Sure, I could get them to write a basic essay and read for the deeper meaning of a poem, but how many of the students would end up writing essays in the MLA English format? How many would become English majors?
For the past few weeks, I had given a lot of thought to my classes while I commuted to work. My classes were divided into two types of students: the “honors” kids and the “on-level” kids. Sadly—as it seems to be in most schools—the excelerated students were mostly white and mostly girls. The on-level classes were not white and most of the students were male. In the past, I’ve always enjoyed my on-level students because they remind me of myself when I was their age. I was not academic and only discovered a love of reading once I enrolled at the community college. But this particular group of students were impressing me in a way that I’d never before realized.
I mentioned that I had a commute, and the trek was very long. Sometimes it could take me upwards of an hour and a half to get home. During that time as you can imagine, I listened to a lot of radio.
Now remember, I’m 41 years old, so my taste in music is pretty well formed by now. My days of checking out new bands had long ended. But this commute was recently changing me. The freeway is actually quite beautiful. It’s a California Scenic Route, and it winds through an ocean of hillsides. Consequently, only a few radio stations came in clearly. One of the stations was made up of urban music which was mostly rap. I remember listening to the lyrics and I was so appalled. I’m paraphrasing here, but the lyrics went something like this: “Strippers on polls! We are hos! Take off clothes! Bitch “n—-r” ho!”
There is only one God; He is the most holy and his power and strength are infinite. So that we might receive His message, He sent his only son. His son was killed and then resurrected. His son will return.
We live in a world that is deceptive on all counts. Our history books are deluded with partial truths; our American Dream is now nightmarish. We are controlled through our diets, our education, our religions. Nothing in our lives is untouched.
Try to find anything around you that is not in any way associated with numbers. By numbers, I am referring to patents or ISBNs or anything that is marked by some kind of code.
I sat in my own backyard, a small open space that spreads out on the right side of the house. I know that the house was built in 1928, and when I look around, I see all of the improvements that I’ve made to it. The paint on the house, the cement that I poured, the mass-produced plants that have taken root. I purchased everything with a credit card, and most of the objects are completely manufactured by humans. I saw a little hummingbird darting along the trumpet vines, and I remembered buying the plants ten years before. No doubt, they came from select copyrighted seeds that sprouted their first roots under a fake florescent light in a warehouse that mass produced the plants. They certainly aren’t natural, and the little hummingbird takes some necter and flights away. Even the hummingbird is affected by the consumerism that has devoured us. Everything. The cement is some chemical compound, and the plastic….
The most frightening aspect of this global takeover is found in the form of plastic. All of the plastic containers—used for bottled beverages, packaged food, and myriad amenities—leak their chemical poison into our products. Why is it not detected by scientists? Presumably, it is the scientists who have created the poison, though they do not believe that it is a poison.
You see, the evil one is so thoroughly decieptful that even those who are most in power—those who think they understand the plot as it unfolds—are in the dark. They have been exulted by their education and poisoned by power. Given this is a war being waged—a war between good and evil and a war that we can’t possibly comprehend—the generals and sergeants believe they understand, but they don’t. There is no understanding a battle that is epic in scope.
God’s son told me in no uncertain terms that everything in this world is a lie and paradoxically that everything is controlled by God. Perhaps I’m not being clear enough. Our current world—with all of its depravity—is a carnival funhouse of lies. But when you turn your will and life over to God, when you listen to the message and blindly submit, you will see the truth. The truth has a strange beauty to it. I call it strange because when you awaken to the truth, you will see how deep the rabbit hole goes. Were it not for all the human suffering, you would laugh at how masterful God’s presence is. God’s word is eternal, and we can choose to follow God’s son and thus, if it is God’s will, follow Christ into the eternal kingdom.
. We are so blinded
The process of the deception has existed and will continue to exist. The pharmaceutical industry plays a major role in the perception of our health. These drug companies—fueled by economic greed—have poisoned us through chemistry; we are no longer able to feel and see and think in the ways of our grandparents.
One organization is responsible for
Message Royal Osiris Karaoke Ensemble
Me…. had a dream…. Talk…. She…. She’s… fire
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