Buddha was a wealthy royal. Jesus was self-aware enough to know he was experiencing being human. So, in their early lives they didn’t know suffering the way common people did. That was part of the gig—finding out. But you can’t find out if you’ve always got a backup plan in your hip pocket, like returning to your kingdom or your kingdom in Heaven. Perhaps for them to know true terror, true suffering, they had to have an unexpected, unpredictable outside agency come at them. Perhaps they were attacked by literal demons because they had no personal ones.
I, on the other hand, lived a life of middle class privilege that I felt guilty about and also had early childhood trauma that created a depressed, suicidal person who did not understand what good fortune he had. This person also had to contend with the terror and paranoia inherent in what he perceived, initially, to be aliens abducting him and his family.
When it came to having a weight cuffed to his ankle, my ankle, and being thrown into the depths of spiritual realization on purpose, with purpose, but with no purpose in mind, at some point I was possessed by what I perceived to be a demon that may have been a spiritual master in a hell I had been shown around in recurring dreams. And the demon was serene. He didn’t do the bad I knew he had in him. He basked in the glow of being alive through this body I call home. Then he left.
Periodically, when I allowed this energy that is me, but not my conscious or unconscious self, to flow, I felt phantom fears. Nothing devilish came of them, either. In these times an invisible presence in the corner of the kitchen that I could feel watching me as I let this me-not-me energy come alive and move the body toward unknown ends was watching. He or she was there. And it didn’t matter. It was not warrior-worthy. Maybe I got a pass.
Maybe I got a pass all along the way because I already knew what it was like to go without. I knew what it was to suffer and had always felt the pain of other people so deeply that I had to cut off the flow with cynicism and logical thinking. With righteousness. With humor, ultimately.
Or maybe I didn’t get a pass at all. Maybe I’m glossing over the alien abduction portion of the program too blithely; the portion that felt like it controlled me, forcing its way into my perception as a puppet master of my moves through the winking and nudging of synchronicity.
But then maybe that was me, too. And not me.
Maybe that was from a connection to a depth that I spent decades contending with—struggling against it, cajoling it, trying to control it. Maybe the aliens are familiar and ufology as a whole is stuck in the web of a trickster archetype because they are, indeed, a part of us. And not us. We are a part of them. And not them. Symbiotic and feeding one another. Perhaps we used to know aliens by a different name, one less alien but nonetheless mysterious. Maybe that name got corrupted by the church and abolished by science.
Maybe, perhaps, maybe aliens are the daemonic challenge in a future-haunted world. Maybe, just maybe, I had been rowing along the River Styx my entire life wearing man-made goggles that showed me technology where magic abounded. Maybe I wore these goggles because society told me that fiction alone is a dead and buried thing, but science fiction is alive with promise.
Maybe all along the way I paid the price with my life and the daemons were full of me long before I took off the goggles. And there we both were. Moving in each other. Enjoying each other.
On the road to God being me being God.