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PROLOGUE
The first signs of the 'angelic beings' occurred when I was two and a half years old. I was playing in an inflatable green pool in the backyard at Rose Street, Liverpool, in the western suburbs of Sydney. I had a very clear and real sense that I was not alone. Something was caring for me, protecting me and parenting me. It was gentle and flowing and conscious. There was the warm strength of the sun being absorbed by my skin and the blue summery day. There was the cool running water that washed from the hose that was both startling and soothing. I thought that this feeling of 'otherness', that offered some kind of basic and ongoing exchange, seemed to be coming from the sun itself.
I was born with Autism. My childhood world was imbued with a sensory kaleidoscope of light, sound, texture and color that were disconnected from each other. Often I was overwhelmed by my surroundings. My coming awareness into an external physical reality from preconsciousness was a gradual process. While I appeared to be remote and disconnected from what was going on around me, I was developing in my own way, seemingly under the guidance of a benevolent universal consciousness that I first referred to as God. If I had simply been allowed to be, then I would not only have remained with God, I would have remained as God is. Any awareness or influence of human nature and of mass societal consciousness had the effect of impinging on my consciousness, so I alternated between exploration and withdrawal from the outside world.
I was already an outsider through the very nature of my different neurological processing. Physicality and the ways of humans, including other children, were perceived as invasive, unpredictable and brutal. So I withdrew to where the reality was nurturing, safe and unchanging rather than harmful. I crouched in a corner and hid in a dog box. I placed things in straight lines to create order from chaos. I felt under attack on all levels from family, teachers and other children, because they insisted that I be like them and do the things that they did. But I wasn't like them and the things that they did held no special interest for me. Also I was unable to do them without feeling stressed and confused. But society was also attempting to hold itself together. So from the moment I was born, it would beat its version of reality into me. I felt like people were forcing me into a way of being that had been lost from God. I felt as if a world of barbarians were attempting to destroy my essence, to steal me out of the arms of the 'angels' and the 'angelic realms'.
During this time I turned to animals for spiritual sustenance and in return I become their protector. I was completely absorbed in the natural world. Throughout my twenties the sound of a whale song would cause me to enter into a trance state, as if experiencing some kind of seizure. My psyche was being pulverised by knowledge so immense that I was unable to contain it and remain conscious at the same time. It felt like I was in a state of suspension, while the knowledge of the universe blew through me like a wind. The sensation was of falling through endless space and time and of screaming endlessly as I fell. As this occurred I felt as if I was made up of an infinite variety of lifeforms and/ or states of consciousness.
There were also other memories, memories of living beneath the ocean, of births and deaths of consciousness, memories of the light of eternal creation. One morning I woke up from a vivid dream where I had been a wolf stalking deer in the snow. It took me a long time to shake that consciousness from my life, and those shifting realities and ways of being, or at least to push them back down into the psyche where I could no longer remember them. This 'wolf' or 'dog' consciousness would surface in the future where I smelt food before I ate it, howled like a dog when in despair or bared my teeth at someone, without being aware of what I was doing until a partner drew my attention to the behavior at a restaurant in my mid-twenties.
He said that I was like a wild animal that couldn't be controlled or understood. I have also been called non-human, alien, a witch in its negative context, an angel, a demon and devil's spawn by people who are afraid. Meanwhile, the psyche seemed to contain an eternity of departing and arriving states of being.
At twenty one years of age and with no understanding of what might be going on, this 'infinite knowledge' simply blew the psyche apart and I found myself restricted to various mattresses on the floors of share houses for months on end, being looked after by my partner of the time. It was a long road back into the world and especially in the gradual regaining of my lost skills, due to the further regression into autism, that had occurred during various periods of my life. This time as I either crawled back or broke through into a state of ego or conscious awareness, I chose to leave that world of multiple consciousness, memory and eternity behind, and to focus on injustice in the external world through my work for animals and the environment. Since I had felt so oppressed I naturally wanted to assist the most oppressed sentient beings on Earth. |
