|
Argennon's
Story (from Singapore)...
My
online handle is Argennon, but mundanely I am known as Silver. I was popped
into existence in the December of 1980 as the first-born daughter of an
average Singaporean Chinese family. I share with you today, on this page so
generously provided by Mr. Schmidt, my experiences simply to let you know
that no man's, or woman's, experience is more or less unique than any other
man's or woman's. Too many people today seek to read about other people's
fantastic experiences, to say, "Oh my God, look at what he/she has been
through." My experience may be fantastic to you; it may be mediocre at
best to another. Ultimately, what does that teach us? That every man and
woman walks his or her own path, and that all paths lead to
God/Goddess/Universe/Source. Whatever you may like to call It. I hate
terminology. =)
As a child, I saw elementals in the air, floating along as they sang,
laughed, played and floated some more. Nature was not just a beautiful
landscape to admire, Nature was a living, breathing symphony of a million
separate beings, all guided in orchestra by a greater hand. Life spoke, in
language, in cadences not fully comprehended by my human brain, but rather
understood deep within me in a place I had yet to see or even find then.
Such was the innocence; such was the joy of then. We spoke together, we sang
together. The world speaks and it speaks with the same voice that your soul
speaks. To put it poetically, the wisdom of the ages is within your grasp
should you just choose to listen.
Then came the first waves of darkness. I was put into primary school, where
I had to mix with other children of various classes. What did it feel like
to me? It was like I opened my mouth to say something to another child and
that other child does not comprehend. I was lost. Such a cruel world it was,
and seemingly blind. Blind to the mysteries of life around us, seeing only
the things that pleasure on the material level. Desire for material wants
ran rampant even through souls as young as that. My soul recoiled in
horrified hurt. The material world was so alien to me. I did not do well in
school, nor did I make many friends. I was naive in the ways of the world,
and it did not take too long for the other children to realize that I was
very gullible to their wiles. I became unhappy, not understanding why
"other people were like that".
It was in high school that my own "dark night of the soul"
descended upon me in all its majesty. *chuckles* Quite a morbid way to put
it hey? Well, descend upon me it did and lasted a good whole 7 years, the 4
years of high school and the following 3 years of polytechnic education. It
was during this period of time that everything I was, or rather considered
myself to be, came under attack by everyone around me. Friends, teachers and
family fell upon me in a relentless battle to get me to "change".
"Change!" they cried, "Stop living in that dreamland of
yours! Wake up! Stop deluding yourself! Wake up to the real world!"
"Be a normal child and get good results!" cried my parents.
"Be a normal teenager and act like one!" cried my friends.
"Stop acting weird and pretending to see and hear things!"
practically everyone cried. *chuckles* Whoo-hoo, what a time THAT was. I am
surprised I made it out of there alive, much less sane as it is.
I tried, that much I can say. I figured, hell, I was not really getting
anywhere the way I was anyway right? *snickers* I only ended up proving what
a failure I was at being normal! But that revelation came only after 7 solid
years of denying myself. I blocked off all the channels I had to the other
worlds, took hard and serious study of what "normal" kids my age
liked and basically, tried my best to fit in. It was a hard, hard time of
struggle. Though I did not really feel it then, it was like committing
suicide. It was like I murdered every last bit of my soul, while it was
crying, "No! No!" It was a time of much pain, so much confusion
and even more hurt. In doing so, I denied myself the power of being what I
am, and became a puppet to be jerked around by the strings of everyone who
thought they knew what was best for me.
Everything finally culminated early in the year 2000, when I was about to
turn 20 years of age. By this time, I had fought a losing battle for 7 years
of my life and felt that I was still going nowhere. I fell into a clinical
depression. The effects of depression are an all-pervasive disease that
spreads slowly and surely through your every limb, invading your mind with
its insidious negativity, drowning and suffocating your heart in irrational
anguish and self-pity. Day and night ran into one another with no sense of
time. I lost all appetite, I forgot appointments, I fell ill constantly, and
horrors of horrors! I did not wash! Ugh! It just kept going downwards and
downwards till one not so fine day, I realized that I just wanted to die. I
cried out to the stars at night, "Take me home! I don't want to be here
anymore. I failed, okay? I just don't have the strength to do what you want
me to do here. I can't! I can't! Take me home! I want to go home!"
I don't remember how I managed to get out of it. It was definitely not by my
effort alone! There were friends who were there helping me. By mid-2000, I
had graduated, and was somehow wobbling my way back to some sense of sanity.
By this time, one of the major lessons in my life was mastered. Be yourself.
Be what you are. Let no one tell you otherwise, for no one else can know
what you are better than you yourself. It will not be an easy path, but it
will be worth it. To seek your true self is the first step to knowing your
soul. The true you cannot be packaged, cannot be classified, and cannot be
defined. Have the courage to follow it.
So, was it over, you may ask? And I'll reply, "Not by a long
shot!" The way to truth takes a long and winding path and it is a
journey that never ends. Today, I'll only be able to tell you what little I
know for now, who knows what else I'll learn tomorrow? True, I had found the
courage to be myself but in doing so, I was only just prepared for the next
stage of learning. The next lesson that was in my way is the one that will
defy all efforts to describe it. It is only something that can be
experienced. If I had thought that everything in my life had fallen apart
around me already, boy was I wrong. It was not a physical sort of ruin, not
as in loss of money, family, property etc. No, it was a falling apart of
everything that was inside me. Strange isn't it? That I had just found
myself only to have it fall apart? What does it mean? It simply showed that
everything I thought myself to be me was not I. Not by a long shot.
It was an incredible experience, even more so because I willingly submitted
to it. That much I had learnt, that the lessons of life come and go and they
only hurt when you resist them. Even today as I am typing this to you and I
think about it, it feels like a cup of clear, heady mead, a joy that slides
into your being as you drink it down bringing you up, up and never lets you
down! I could laugh from the pure, unadulterated joy of it! This is the true
culmination of the dark night of the soul, when everything breaks down for
the last time, WITHIN you and everything is made clear. What truly fell
apart were my EGO and all the illusions that I had of the world. It is like
Anthony De Mello says: "Want to wake up? You want happiness? You want
freedom? Here it is: Drop your false ideas. See through people. If you see
through yourself, you will see through everyone. Then you will love them.
Otherwise you will spend your whole time grappling with your wrong notions
about them, with your illusions that are constantly clashing against
reality."
Buddhism says that all suffering comes from the desire of the material
because man desires the material; hence all suffering comes from man. For
example, another quote from De Mello's book "Awareness" says:
" Anytime you have a negative feeling toward anyone, you are living in
an illusion. There's something seriously wrong with you. You're not seeing
reality. Something inside you has to change. But what do we generally do
when we have a negative feeling? "He is to blame, she is to blame.
She's got to change." No! The world's all right. The one who has to
change is YOU."
This whole thing about the dark night of the soul and all that is simply
about change. About YOU changing YOURSELF. That's what AWAKENING is about.
There is nothing more important than waking up, than changing yourself, than
accepting the illusions that you have about the world. De Mello is right,
the world is totally all right, it is US that have to change and the world
will change accordingly. Everything that I have said here is simply another
path, my personal path. YOU have your own path, your own road to change. And
it will be hard, oh I guarantee it, but hang in there. Just hang in there,
because it is like they say, "The hour before DAWN and the sunrise is
the hour that is the darkest, but fear not, the sun WILL rise and with it, a
new day."
If
you wish to contact me for sharing, my e-mail address is... argennon@visto.com
To all my Brothers and Sisters.
E-Mail
Home
|
|
