There are two main schools of thought in regard to surviving trauma.
One, of modern “psychology”, seems to think that any kind of trauma necessarily damages you and nothing can be either healed or overcome, only avoided.
The other, older and especially espoused by Nietzsche, states that whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, basically saying that trauma is the main instrument of personal growth.
It’s easy to respond to unpleasant experiences by whining and adopting the attitude of perpetual victimhood – woe is me, bad shit happened. This is the most useless attitude one can possibly have and it simply keeps you stuck in a position of perpetual impotence and incompetence.
It is also easy to overcome trauma and rationalize how it was actually good for you because it made you into who you are now, and you turned out fine. That’s how people who were beaten up as children learn to beat up their children, and the circle of evil persists and propagates.
It would be very easy for me to say that the bad things that happened to me forced me to overcome them and thus develop an incredible amount of mental strength. It would be easy to justify everything from my past in hindsight, and say it was all for a good purpose, and now I finally understand. But that would be to adopt falsehoods and to rationalize evil.
The only purpose of that evil was to destroy me. It wasn’t there to help me do anything, and it wasn’t designed so that I would grow by overcoming it. It was designed to prevent me from incarnating my full potential, to cripple me in such a way that I would never become capable of even believing who I actually am. It didn’t make me into what I am now – my consciousness is the same now as it was before. It’s only my knowledge and abilities that grew. If you knew me then, I couldn’t say the things I now know. I couldn’t do the things I now can. My mind was uncomfortably tight and lacked power and reach. My consciousness and essential character, however, were the same then as they are now. I am aware how the events in my childhood and youth were designed to gradually destroy me and put me out of circulation. I know that Sanat Kumar did it on purpose, because he actually bragged about it. It was also designed in such a way that if I overcame, he could claim the credit, he could say that he set everything up just so to make it possible. But I saw the pattern, in myself and in others. He trains us like one would train lions to believe they are sheep, to love eating grass and to hate eating flesh. He trains us to fear, to be small, to be vulnerable, to be alone and unprotected and threatened, and he does so in order to permanently, fatally cut our personal connection with God, to cripple us in such a way that connection with other humans, within the confines of his plan, would remain as our only option.
He trains us to be weak, crippled and damaged, because that is how he wants us. That is what the God of this world has in store for us if we just believe in his plan. We get to be the bonsai kitten, a part of the human caterpillar.
If someone wanted me to manifest my power, I know exactly what was to be done, and it is essentially the opposite of what my life looked like. You don’t train someone to be a king by giving him over to psychotic people with servant-mentalities to teach him how to be a broken servant. You don’t isolate him from knowledge and truth. You don’t bombard him with humiliations every single day and teach him by bad example. No, that’s what you do when you want to destroy someone so permanently and finally, that he never, ever has a chance to grow to wield any kind of power, and if he does, he will retain fatal vulnerabilities that you can exploit to either control or neutralize him. I have no illusions about that, and although I went through the events of my past considering the possibility that it was the only way that would realistically lead to the present-day results, I quickly saw that it wasn’t so. In fact, I learned more useful things from those rare few positive things that happened to me, than from overcoming any difficulty. If anything, having to overcome difficulties convinced me that I’m alone and without help, that I’m unimportant and that I don’t matter. Those were all things that I had to deal with later, with help from above, but they were the actual intended result of what this world and its maker had in store for me. That I overcame is not something he rejoiced, as he would have had he indeed designed it all as temptations to provoke growth. No, he saw it as a disaster, a peril and a grave threat. There is never light at the end of the tunnel he digs for us, and it’s not a tunnel, it’s simply a hole in the ground he intends to close behind us when we get to go deep enough. It’s a grave for souls.
The main difference between myself and most people who have had shit happen to them, is that I saw a great deal more, as it happened. I was not as blind as most. I was, however, very much inclined to justify everything in hindsight, but I saw that as an emotional response and I stopped it in its tracks, and proceeded to look into things calmly and rationally. I saw the design of the trap. In hindsight, I was supposed to see how it’s all designed to produce great things, if I succeeded to get out. If I failed, I would get to see how it was all my fault, because I did things that broke God’s perfect plan for me. I would then try to fix my mistakes in the next attempt, where I would be further weakened and damaged, and so ad nauseam, until there’s not much left. The mechanism that is supposed to weaken the captives is completely ridiculous now that I broke it on the global scale, and actually keeps bombarding me with “failure, mistake, sin, failure” emotional charges, without any sense or pattern, only because it’s what it’s designed to do and its guidance is broken so it does it randomly.
I actually get to see the inner workings of the system; my analysis isn’t merely a theory. I see the metaphorical cogs and wheels. It’s interesting how you can’t really believe it’s all for some greater good once you’ve seen the inner workings, once you’ve seen the guidance scripts and their triggers. It’s even more interesting how you continue desperately wishing to forget what you saw and rationalize it all away, to believe that some good God designed this world for the purpose of evolution, to help us grow and know his greatness in the end. It’s interesting how we have the desire to attribute our victories to God’s prescience and plan, and how desperately we desire to interpret everything bad as our fault, our willful action that broke God’s perfect plan.
And it’s even more interesting to see how this motivation is external, how it’s the result of a script running in the system.
There is a danger of people seeing me as an example that spiritual evolution is possible in this world, if only you are good enough. This of course implies that everybody who failed did so because they weren’t good enough, and I am certain the scripts of the system will make sure that everyone self-depresses with this thought. There are two problems with that, though. First is that I haven’t changed much, my consciousness is the same as it was when I was born, so the theory about me evolving is questionable. The second thing is, how many others like me, who started as equally good, didn’t make it? How many had killed themselves, or died in despair, or were so damaged that they kept running in senseless circles trying to heal themselves unsuccessfully?
If this is a place for evolution, why does an NDE experience of the astral world have greater positive transformational effect than all the things specific to this world? Wouldn’t the opposite be expected if Sanat Kumar’s story were true, if the higher worlds were those of stagnation, and if you want to evolve you need to subject yourself to the rigors and temptations of this one? How is it then that a brief experience of the astral world does more for one’s spiritual condition and is more transformational than the rest of one’s human life? How come the spiritual people aren’t seen as more spiritual because they had more experiences of matter, but because they had more experiences of God?
I read a story once, that hit incredibly close to home. It’s a story about a prince who angered his father the king, who disowned and exiled him. He spent years and decades of his life as a beggar, forgetting that he was once a prince. At one point, his aging father changed his mind and ordered his servants to find his son, reinstate him and fulfill any wish he might have.
When they found the former prince and offered to give him anything he wanted, the beggar begged them to give him a meal.