The Day I Disappeared – Chapter 2: The “Here” Crashes In- Janice Coyle

This is chapter 2 of my memoir in progress – a spiritual life journey to solve a mystery – one we all long to solve.   Chapter 1 can be found HERE

Suddenly we are are on the bus and the only ones on the bus, Bill, Janet, me and the German driver. We are singing songs and having fun. How did I get down the path? What has happened since then?  I don’t remember anything since I was everything! What did I do after I was in the field?  Did I go back to the camp and the dormitory?  Did I have dinner that night? Now I’m here on a bus and not on the mountain.  I look at Janet. She is just singing with us and paying me no mind.

I  realize this is the same bus that took us from our house to the camp. But, that time there were many other children. Anyway, we obviously are going home. I’m singing with them now and everything is fine. I look out the bus windows at the beautiful hills and the thick forest on one side.  I see the moving purple lights around some of the taller trees. Fairies! Or, are they angels since they are so large?  I feel so happy. I have remembered!

I’m at home now and I’m waiting for a moment when I can talk to Mama alone. She is talking to Janet about the camp.  I watch her. Mama is so beautiful with her long  auburn hair and light green eyes just like some cats. She is always dressed very pretty. She wants everything in the world to be pretty. God likes pretty too, I think. I can’t wait to tell her about disappearing and remembering on the mountain.  Finally, she is in the kitchen alone making dinner – our favorite, spaghetti!

“Mama, guess what?  I was on a hill and I saw God.”

“What did you learn?”  She asked.

“That God created the whole universe just for me!”

Mama’s face is frowning.  She is not happy like I am. Why?  Then she says:

“How can He create the universe just for you?  What about me?  What about your sister?”

“But, Mama, it’s the same for you too!”

“How can God create all of the universe just for you and also create the whole universe for me, for Janet or for anyone else?”

“I don’t know but He did!”

Mama’s frown is worse.

“This is blasphemy!  You can’t say such things.  You can’t think like that about yourself.  It’s selfish to even say these things or think them.”

I don’t know what that word, blasphemy, means but I know it is not good. So I quickly just say:

“Ok! I won’t speak about it.”

I walk out of the kitchen – away from the smells of my favorite meal and her greatest creation, spaghetti with her special sauce everyone in the world wants when they visit. I’m so sad, I don’t understand!  Maybe it’s not right to say any words about being everything and what happened on the mountain when I remembered again. Anyway, my words did not really explain it.  So, it must be that no words are supposed to be said.

I agree – words do not work!  Also, I must be the only one who forgot then had to remember that we are everything and God.  Everyone else probably never forgot and so they already know to not say any words about it  I’m glad I remembered but how could I have ever forgotten such a huge thing?

I’m outside now and looking at the big green fir tree in our front yard that Janet and I named last summer. He is always so helpful to me. I call to him.

“Oscar, maybe you can help me.”

He is silent today and I don’t get his words coming into my head, but it seems he is reaching out his huge brown and green arms to hug me. I don’t see the fairies with him so it is just Oscar and me and it is nice to be with him. He is so sweet.

I am in my bed now. Janet is already asleep in her bed in our room with all our dolls sitting together on the dresser. I want to grab them all to sleep with me. But instead, I try to remember the blue and yellow flowers and the thick grasses. On the mountain, they were my bed.  I wish I was in that bed again with the flowers and the fairies and the huge sunshine.  I am remembering being everything, being nothing, being fun and all that love pouring out. I’m confused about how it is so perfect  there and  not perfect here? How can I get back there?  God, please take me back. Please!

I think of the fairies and angels.  I hear them singing most nights when I’m going to sleep.

“Can you please sing to me tonight.  I am sad?”

After a while I hear them. They seem farther away than usual but they are singing such sweet songs.  I let their sounds surround me.  I remember when I disappeared and was with everything. I want to be that again.

Good night God.

I love you.

Looking back from now:

Later, when I was older, I asked questions and concluded that about 3 days had elapsed between the time I walked up the mountain and the day I woke up to being “here.”  During these 3 days, I must have gone about my normal activities but  in an altered state of consciousness. There was/is no memory of those missing days and no evidence of anything odd that anyone noticed about me during that time.

Many seeds were planted on the day I returned home from summer camp. These seeds of doubt had immediate effect – the diminishment of my psychic perceptions – the dimming of the angel’s songs and the fairy’s presence   These seeds would further blossom into both fearlessness and fear, moments of inner joy and moments of God’s utter abandonment, and always passionate spiritual seeking.

My mother’s reaction was to have a powerful effect on me. For the next 20 years, I told no one else about my experience – not even my identical twin sister, Janet – no one!   It never occurred to me when I was growing up that my Mother did not understand the experience.  I interpreted her to mean only that it was not correct to speak about it.  On this day I believed I was the only one in the world who forgot what they are.  Many years later I would realize that most of the people on earth have forgotten.

Judgements and doubts of myself and others were indoctrinated and became confusing.  How could I be so imperfect “here” and so magnificent and beyond perfect “there”?   I thought the same of others. This day began what would become a passion to solve a mystery that would haunt me for life.  The burning question:  How can I know so well what I really am and at the same time, be so miserable?  How can others be so mean? How can I sometimes be mean?  How is it even possible?  There must be a reason.  What is it?

Seeds of self-doubt and unworthiness were planted in especially fertile soil.  I would in future years long for the love I had experienced on the hill.  I would be tireless in attempts to earn it.  Now from a very great distance, my insights about my own life and the lives of us all have grown. Many mysteries are solved.

Whether one has a remembering experience while “here” or never has one, does not matter. We are born from the same love and oneness I experienced and we all know it somewhere within us. We come in filled with wonder and confidence, full of ourselves –  then our natural state is dimmed.  We lose memory of what we are in truth.

I see now  that the bliss of remembering, the confidence in the angels and fairies became more distant as confusion and doubt set in almost immediately. This must be what happens soon after we are born, we forget what I awoke to in the field on that day.  More and more forgetting happens through the judgements and restrictions of the cultural upbringing we experience here.

I believe now that my experience at age 9 is an enactment of what happens to us all when we are born from spirit, knowing what we are, our power, our sovereignty, our zest and confidence, our oneness with All.  Look at the infants, they show us how it is “there.”  Then, the world quickly intervenes and we are swept into its very different dream, and the piece by piece forgetting of where we came from.

There have been many adult people who suddenly experience spiritual awakenings . They wake up  from a long amnesia I believe caused by their minds developed and integrated to “here.”  Then, upon awakening to the Truth of what we are, their bliss and insights permeate the developed mind already full of concepts with which to reflect and process the awakening. They note changes in all their prior concepts, ways of seeing the world and people.  Love and wisdom flow into them and they are renewed on many levels.

But for me as a child, this whole process was reversed.  I came back from “home” like the newborn infant but with just enough developed mind that I knew well the incredible differences in the “here” and the incredible light/love-filled “home.”

My experience on the mountain is the seminal event of my life.  After over 60 years, new insights from there  keep raining on my consciousness even now.  Other gifts include a lifetime of  intuition, minimal fear of anything, brief felt sense glimpses, empathy,  expanded consciousness, quick understanding  of spiritual concepts and the dynamics of cosmic energy, automatic affinity for otherworld intelligences and so much more.  There has come an understanding of all the discomforts of “here” – all of them.  I would in time grasp the Why of it all and the exquisite beauty in every experience.  That would make all the difference – eventually.

The memory of the day I disappeared never ended.  But a more crucial thing than memory was to fly away from me and I would finally discover what that missing thing was – but only after decades of searching, and after that, more decades to find a way back “home.”

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