Confessions of a 30 Year Old Fringe Dweller

[center]The Cosmic Party[/center]

    It was 1995 when I was invited to my first Cosmic Party.  As a sophomore at the University of Michigan, I had already seen my fair share of parties.  Barrels of cheap beer.  Home-grown kind buds.  Lots of cute, young girls.  No parents.  It was a teenager's dream. 

    Yet I was discontent.  It sort of crept up on me, as they say, like a thief in the night.  Suddenly, or so it seemed, I was steeped in a brew of uneasiness.  A potent mixture of fear, anger, despair, and resentment - with no one element strong enough to cause major concern, but taken all together, a mighty force of negativity that was quickly overtaking my body and soul.  It was as if I had one too many cups of emotional jungle juice and realized that there was no turning back.  I had to purge myself or risk having my ethereal stomach pumped.

    It was a day much like today when I decided I was going to do something about it.  The sun was hanging low in the sky, though it was early afternoon.  A bitter cold wind forced itself through the seams of the window in the dorm room.  I looked out my fifth floor window, across the field, and to the bridge, where I saw students scuttling back and forth from their classes, the occasional brave soul on bicycle darting between snow-covered boots and treacherous patches of black ice. 

    It was a day much like today when I realized that I had a choice.  I could follow my regular routine of showering, skipping class, and heading off to work, pretending that I was happy while secretly hoping that tomorrow I would feel better about myself.  Or I could do something different.  I could face my feelings. . . or at least give them a voice.

    Like many people in a personal crisis I looked outside myself for an answer.  Somebody that I could talk to and confess how I really felt on the inside.  Somebody who actually cared, or at least would listen.  Somebody who maybe knew something I didn't that would help me get a grip on my situation. 

    Her name was Julie.  A sweet, motherly, hippie-girl who lived in the basement of a duplex known as the Happy Home.  Listed in the Rainbow Directory as a place where wandering souls could rest their weary heads in between Dead shows, Happy Home was a place that I visited frequently.  I had never been to a Dead show, but I certainly felt like a wandering soul, and I frequently needed some rest.

    I never knew who I would find at Happy Home, and I just loved the randomness of it.  Sometimes Homeless Joe would be there picking through the ash trays for cigarette butts.  Sometimes a group of hippies would be seated in a circle, fiercly drumming until their hands turned bloody.  Sometimes a few kids would be just chillin' on the couches listening to Jimi.  But there was almost always somebody there.  That day it was Julie.

    As I walked in between the brightly-colored psychedelic tapestries, the scents of nag champa and patchouli filled my nose.  ”Uncle John's Band” played softly in the background.  Julie was seated cross-legged on a beanie chair reading the I Ching.  She looked up, smiled at me, and got up to give me a hug.

    Julie's hugs always made me somewhat uncomfortable.  It wasn't just the intensity, but the length.  It was not uncommon for Julie to hug somebody for more than a minute.  Occasionally I would see her hugging a complete stranger in the middle of a room full of people for a solid five minutes.  Julie hugged everybody as if it were the last time she would ever see them on this Earth. 

    She was a very pretty girl.  Long, brown hair.  Deep, soulful eyes.  Always smiling.  Never needed to wear makeup.   I thought it somewhat strange that, despite her looks and my 18 year-old's libido, I didn't find myself particularly attracted to her.  Not sexually at least.  But I did feel something inside me inexorably, and inexplicably, drawn to her that day.

    Do you believe in accidents?

    That's what she asked me.  After all the hugging, some chit-chat, and a long-winded explanation of all the petty reasons I used to justify my unhappiness with life, Julie looked into my eyes, smiled with the wisdom of an ancient soul, and asked me a simple question.

    Do you believe in accidents?

    I remember being utterly confounded by the question.  My mind raced with images of chaotic scenes flashed on the nightly news.   Girls I knew who had gotten pregnant from some loser boyfriend.  A high-school classmate who was fatally shot one night at the 7-11.  The car crash I had been in the previous summer.  Accidents happen all the time, I wanted to say.  But I didn't.  Instead, I said the only thing that I was sure of at that particular moment.

    I don't know.

    Smiling knowingly at my unknowingness, Julie stood up and walked over to a makeshift bookcase crafted of plastic milk crates and old wooden beams.  She pulled out a dusty paperback and handed it to me as if it were an ancient manuscript written on the finest paper that money could buy.  It was a book by Dan Millman, entitled, The Way of the Peaceful Warrior: A Book That Changes Lives.

    Sometimes, as I look back, I wonder if my life really changed after reading that book. At the time I felt pretty confident that something was about to change, and that in itself was a change of sorts.  I certainly didn't expect to be invited to a Cosmic Party.  Yet that's exactly what happened. 

    As with many things, it started out quite innocent.  A healthy curiousity, one might say, into the world of spirituality and metaphysics.  Part skeptic, part believer, I set out to determine for myself if there was anything to the notion presented to me in that book- that my lack of satisfaction with the world had something to do with my lack of spirituality.

    I wasn't entirely unspiritual, but neither was I entirely unhappy.  The fact that I was so angry with God proved that I believed in one.  I just didn't know what to make of the whole thing.  I had been taught that God was an omnipotent, benevolent being, who took a personal interest in my happiness. Yet some of my own experiences throughout life seemed to flatly contradict this teaching. 

    I remember, as a youth, turning to the Bible for some answers, but coming away with more questions, like:

    Why was the world created twice?, or,

    Where did Cain and Abel's wives come from?, and,

     Who was this King Melchizedek guy, and how did he have neither a father nor a mother?

     Mostly I wondered why God seemed to be talking to everybody else but me.

    I remember going to church on Sunday morning and sitting amongst pasty white folk who smelled like stale roses.  Sitting.  Standing.  Kneeling.  Singing.  Praying.  Having a priest put a wafer in my mouth.

    The Lord be with you.

    And also with you.

    Lift up your hearts.

    We lift them up to the Lord.

    Let us give thanks to the Lord, our God.

    It is right to give him thanks and praise.

    Truth be told, most of the time I didn't feel like thanking or praising God, and as much as I tried to feel holy with the wafer in my mouth, I usually just felt thirsty.  Thirsty for something more than a reminder to be nice to other people, and to put money in the basket.  Thirsty for a meaning to it all, or at least a rational explanation for the lack thereof.

    For all its stubborn persistence throughout the ages, I found religion to be anything but rational.  It wasn't just all the killing in the name of a loving God, or the notion that unbaptized babies who suffered an early death could never get into Heaven.  It was the blind faith that people placed in the cryptic, and frequently contradictory, teachings of a single book, which they claimed to be the one, and only, true Word of God, that I found particularly unconscionable. 

    I, on the other hand, had chosen to put my faith in an old man named Socrates, that crafty and enigmatic character from Millman's book, whose antics on the rooftop of an old gas station challenged a young man's belief in what was possible.  At least I could identify with the struggles of that young man who, unlike the many bearded descendants of Abraham, lived in a world not too different from my own. 

    To be sure, I was still more than a bit skeptical, but I was willing to give ol' Soc the benefit of the doubt.  After all, he was offering me the possibility that the magic and wonder of an age long past was still accessible to those of us living in the modern world.  He was offering me the notions that there are no accidents, and that everything happens for a reason.  But mostly, I listened because he was offering me hope.

    It's funny what a little hope can do.  Within a few short weeks I was waking up earlier, walking to class with a spring in my step and greeting customers at work with a smile on my face.  Nothing about my life had substantially changed.  I hadn't found a purpose.  But for the first time in years I felt that maybe I had one somewhere, waiting to be found among the chance happenings of life. 

    Maybe it was just coincidence that a few weeks later, while browsing the metaphysical section at Borders, another book literally fell off the shelf and landed at my feet.  It was titled The Pleiadian Agenda:  A New Cosmology for the Age of Light.  I didn't know at the time who the Pleiadians were, or what the Age of Light was all about, but I certainly knew that I could use a new cosmology.  Mine seemed rather fruitless and drab.  As I opened the book to the very first page I was surprised by what was written there.  It said:

    You are invited to a Cosmic Party.

    A Cosmic Party!  The words of Satya of Alcyone, as channeled through author Barbara Hand Clow, resonated throughout my being like in a child first learning about a jolly red-hatted fat man sliding down the chimney to leave presents at Christmastime.  A dubious proposition, to be sure, but the excitement of it all made it easy for me to suspend disbelief. 

    As I flipped through the pages of colorful tales from multidimensional beings such as King Lizard, Lucifer, and Anu, I learned how the natural evolution of human beings was short-circuited by fourth-dimensional reptilian beings called the Annunaki who, once plotting to institute a totalitarian regime over the entire planet, were now interested in helping us find our way back to our true path.  I learned that the Earth was entering a Photon Band, emanating from the Galactic Center, which would dissolve the 4D “net” that had been constructed around the world, limiting our possibilities for higher evolution.  My heart raced with the possibilities of becoming a Galactic Human, a process which, I was assured, would be complete by the December solstice of 2012. 

    At 18 years old, 2012 seemed like a long time. . . almost as long as my entire life up until that point.  Lucky for me, Satya and gang had good news.  I wouldn't have to wait all that time to experience the liberating effects of the Photon Band.  By 1998, I read, the effects of the Photon Band would be so strong that life would feel more like floating in a multidimensional “sea of possibilities” where the time between the occurence of a thought in my mind, and the manifestation of that thought as physical reality, would rapidly collapse to zero.  Just imagine, being able to manifest any of my heart's desires at will! 

    All I had to do was abandon the concept of a white, male God, which was pretty easy to do since I had never really bought into it, and integrate my consciousness with Gaia, our somewhat forgotten, but ever present and loving Mother Earth.  But how to do that?  No worries, Barbara and Satya assured me that, as for Gaia, “The men will truly feel her by 1998, when men and women will remember how to express the resonant vibrations of Gaia sexually.” 
   
    1998!

    That was just around the corner!  I wasn't sure how it would all come about, but I knew for certain that I would be willing to give up drugs and rock n' roll to be able to resonate with the sexual vibrations of Gaia.  It sure sounded like fun to me!

    As in the words of many a teenage college student, I was ready to get this Party started!