Out of the Shadows

Last week I was given an assignment by my Reiki teacher to explore the ways in which my life experiences, especially the painful ones, have contributed to who I am today. Such type of self assessment and exploration is in no way new to me.  I can confidently say that I know most of the answers he wants me to figure out. Or do I?  When you grow up within the subculture of a cult, like Los Mita, you learn what your leaders, especially "the prophet ", want you to learn, you are not encouraged to think for yourself when it comes to spiritual matters. You do not inherit the values of your family, like most people living in the real world (well the one the majority accepts as real), your family is also completely assimilated into the cult culture.  Anyone who does not share those values, is no longer part of your family, even if they are by blood. You learn to accept everything you are told as the only possible truth, even when sometimes it does not make any sense to you, in which case you figure that you are the one who does not make sense. 

The first time I saw the movie The Truman Show it hit me.  I had lived in a fictional world for the first 23 years of my life.  The difference is that, most of the characters in my movie had also believed their own lies and forgotten about the outside world.  They had created a new worldview, a new paradigm out of some mystical experiences or out of their own psychosis, who is to say? And now they were trapped in this complex alternate dimension they created with the power of their own beliefs.  I swear I had an out of body experience when I saw Truman finding the door out of this huge movie set.   I was Truman and I was finally free to go have a real life.  

But those lies that you are told when you are just a kid- by the people you must trust to guarantee your own survival, before you are all grown up and can  fend for yourself- those lies become that superego you can not easily rid yourself of.  They had become your own voice, your own cosmology.  You can reject them on the conscious level while they will still be so ingrained  in your psyche: they are an ever present unpleasant feeling, the nightmares that wake you up sweating and weeping in the middle of the night, or in my case, severe recurrent Depression and acute Anxiety.  The devastation of seeing your world crumbling down; the vertigo of loosing your ground, your roots, your faith, the most basic sense of trust you ever developed during your formative years.  How do you come out of that? Figuring that out has been the quest of the rest of my life.  You can not give yourself rest until you have removed the last single thread tangling you up to the darkness.  You become a light chaser, you pursue Truth relentlessly, almost obsessively, just because you can not breathe in the presence of the shadow of a lie.