So here I is. Writing. Apparently. It's an odd thing to comprehend - to come and do - but...here I is. Writing.
A few weeks back the practically-complete and long-lost remnants of my old website (minus the pictures) were delivered to me by someone who had a back-up copy on a CD, and I suppose seeing that stuff again has given me a lot to think about. Ultimately, it's driven me back here. I guess there's a part of me that has something more to say.
It's over two and a half years since my last web-entry, unless you count minkturtle's nonsense, which I don't. It's also about two and a half years since, during my mad Dublin days, I finally went through the rigmarole of deleting some eight hundred thousand words of entries, as well as the only copies of all my pictures, for reasons which somehow escape me. Probably I was just sick of everything, and felt that doing something drastic might help me out. Probably I couldn't really think of anything else to do. In any case, it was done, and it was gone, and now it's back. Just as I is.
So what to say? What to do? Maybe a recap for the old imaginary audience, the ones who've been wondering where I've been, the ones who followed my tales, are familiar with my story, my life, the ones who find all this as fascinating and wonderful as I apparently do (he writes, sarcastically, sardonically). Maybe...
Last thing I remember - well, not the last thing I remember, but, I suppose, the last thing I remember documenting - I was, like I say, living in Dublin with my old mucker John. That followed a little two month trip to Canada - which I did write about - during which I kind of fell in love. And that kind of changed my life.
See, Dublin was the final straw. I went there on a dream, and I had hopes of this and that - continuing the healing, writing a book, having more mad adventures and growing some more 'in the spirit' - but, in the end, I just went a bit loopy. In the end, I couldn't carry on. In the end, I called up Mother Meera, told her I didn't know what to do, and when she asked me if I had a job - as she had done two years previously - I knew it was finally time to get my ass earth-bound and set my mad life in order. So that's what I did. Eventually.
I say 'eventually', 'cos it took me a long time, and it was hard. My head was still filled with wild dreams. I had no idea where to go, what to do, or how to make it work in a 'normal way'. I was lost, and so I took myself off home, back to Yorkshire, and back to my hometown of South Elmsall – back to the beginning, to start from scratch, and to hopefully build my life up again from the nothingness that I had made it. And that's what I did.
I found work as a postman. That was okay, but didn't really suit me, and I felt like I was wasting my time, and wanted more. I moved in with one of my fellow posties mothers, and started volunteering as a classroom assistant at the school in which she taught. I loved it. I fell in love with it. I loved the kids, and I loved what I was doing - I felt like I had finally found something I could actually do for more than two weeks, something that felt right. I made up my mind, there and then, that I would go to university and obtain the qualifications I needed to become a teacher. Within a month I found a place at the University of Kent doing a BA in Religious Studies. Within two, I was there. And there I've been, give or take, and until a short while ago, for the last two years.
I feel like everything changed with my enrolment at university. I can distinctly remember walking down Canterbury High Street following the interview in which I was formally accepted and noticing that, all of a sudden, I didn't feel absolutely and completely different to all the people that surrounded me. I felt like I was back on Earth, as though I had returned. I feel it even more so today.
Re-reading my old journal entries – particularly those from the two or three year period following my 'spiritual awakening' – I am overwhelmed with the sense that they were written by a madman. It's actually quite hilarious! And yet, insane as I was, I never even knew, and still look back on that period as one of the happiest of my life. It's simultaneously a confusing and fascinating thing.
These days, of course, with the benefit of some reading, and some good old, dry and theoretical academic study, it all makes perfect sense: I got a whiff of my spirit, lost myself in bliss and ecstasy, and went hurtling down the road of madness, delusion, and more than a little self-aggrandizement and egocentric nonsense. I've heard of and read dozens and dozens of almost identical accounts from men and women the world over, and since discovered that it's a well-studied phenomenon. I suppose the biggest question is, why didn't I snap out of it sooner? And I guess the answer is, either, I couldn't, or wouldn't. Or, perhaps, just wasn't supposed to. In any case, it ran its course, and now it’s done.
And what was it? Madness! A ridiculous befuddlement of the mind caused by a few – I still believe – authentic experiences of the soul. But madness, none the less. I’m embarrassed and chagrined – or would be, if the whole damn thing wasn’t so painfully amusing – to remember that I not only believed myself to be a Buddha and Messiah, but proclaimed it with such heartfelt gusto on this very page. I’m embarrassed and chagrined – or would be, if it hadn’t been so very genuine – to read again my entries of three years ago, in which I seemed to be capable of expressing little else other than gushing gratitude and marvel at the wondrousness of God, and life, and everything that came my way. I mean, bless his little heart – the Rory of back then – but, Gordon Bennett, what a nutter! What a space cadet! What a bliss ninny! I really was high – and loving it – but, looking back, it wasn’t all good, and certainly not something lasting or stable, and absolutely not what I thought it was at the time. Which I guess is what I’ve come here to say; I want to declare myself as a really ordinary human being who got pretty seriously lost in the crazy mixed-up world of Western spirituality, Messiah complexes and all, and who has, perhaps, finally made his way back down to Earth, mostly thanks to the presence of a rather wonderful woman, the love he feels for her, and the desire this produced to get his head sorted out, his arse into gear, and his life back on track in a grounded, Earthly, get-yourself-a-job-and-stop-mucking-about kind of way. This is probably not news to anyone that knows me, or who watched me lose the plot in such magnificent fashion, but it is to this website, and by stating it here – and perhaps investigating it and my subsequent life a little in the coming weeks – I hope to finally draw a line between what I was and what I am, as my writing has so often helped me to do in the past.
Which brings me to the end of this entry. Goodnight!
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