My Journey, Spiritual and Otherwise
A condensed memoir of 1995 to date
Introduction
Recently, I’ve thought about whether this publication would allow me to update my About Me story. I published mine here way back in January when I had previously written under the name Yohanan Gregorious and then Yohanan Marcus, had published only 20 stories of five minutes or longer and had just about 100 followers. Today I have 813 followers, with 140 of those joining me this October (double any prior month), a month in which I saw my subscribers grow from four just a few months ago to sixteen (now 20). So besides the fact that I purposely wrote that About Me story enigmatically, I have realized that many of my readers do not know my story. I started to think about this last week when engaging with a new friend on Medium, Maxwell Jordan, who simultaneously highlighted these words from one of my very first stories, Why is it so Easy for People to Believe the Most Obvious Lies yet Require Proof of God? Conversely, Why Does this Walking BS Detector not Believe 90% of Peoples’ Claims Yet Firmly Believe in Eternal Souls and God(s)?
The fact is no one dies. We return to Heaven and the cycle of soul, to soul with body and back to soul repeats as many times as soul wants
and commented,
Fact?!
How do you back this up?
And I am not being antagonistic here, but I am curious how does one know this is a FACT?
In crafting my reply to that very fair question, I realized that my story was spread among many posts, and pondered writing a comprehensive mini-memoir.
As synchronicity would have it, today, this publication’s new guidelines hit my feed. So without further adieu…
2/15/67–1998
Incarnate handsome Book-smart wealthy privileged Behind these 8-balls Face yours and others’ demons Emerge confident and Light
The first two lines of my tanka poem evoke the advantages with which I was born. The third line, the pivot, posits that these advantages actually hinder spiritual growth. The fourth line reflects that I grew up without intimate love from my parents and battled my father’s demons and my own demons of dependency, both on substances and other people instead of being self-reliant. The fifth line is the goal.
One result of my longing for connection was that at age 28 I married my first girlfriend, just four years or so after losing my virginity, which only happened because my best friend and his girlfriend set me up on a date with a nice girl who liked getting laid. Now let me give some visual context to this improbable scenario of me being a 24-year-old virgin:
Less than three months after the wedding, I had my first spiritual experience, which I only remembered a few months ago:
In 1996, during my first and mostly forgotten foray into the 12-Stepverse, the rehab took us to a “meeting.” The speaker told the story of his suicidal ideation. He had terrible insomnia along with alcoholism. He would stay up nights, drinking in his basement, planning his family-annihilation-suicide. He spent many a night meticulously planning for and rigging the boiler to explode to take out himself, his wife, and his children as his family slept. Then, the night he was ready to pull the switch, he fell asleep. Listening to him tell that story was the first time I felt the presence of God in my life. A presence I later forgot about for too long, but God never forgot about me.
Several separations and reconciliations later, Jenny and I split for good in late 1998. We always kept in loose touch, made amends to each other in January, and now are friends.
Fast Forward 1999 Through 2013
Met my second wife in January 1999, married in December 2000, had a daughter in August 2003, a son in November 2005, had what everyone thought was a picture-perfect marriage, and so thought my wife, but I was empty inside, my dear friend Andrew committed suicide in 2006, and in 2010 I left the marriage and the security of my position in the family real estate business where I was tortured daily by my 9-out-of-9-traits-pathologically-malignant-narcissistic-personality-disorder-cousin, and fell in love with a beautiful woman with borderline personality disorder, who I finally managed to break away from in 2013.
You are the greatest You’re disgusting I hate you Wait please don’t leave me Thrives sowing chaos around Rollercoaster ride from hell
The decoder ring for that tanka is here.
The Start of the Yellowbrick Road
A beautiful spring day in April 2012, rich blue sky, warm breeze, leaves on the trees, sitting against a tree trunk in Central Park I called my channeler, Anne (Ane), and we spoke to Andrew. The experience was incredibly moving and emotional. He knew this moment would arrive — that I would reach out. It wasn’t my fault he said — I could not have done anything to stop him. Tears streamed down my face then (I am crying now too after all these years — some pain pockets have infinite depth, the silver lining of which is that as they drain there remains infinite room to fill with Light). He had been hell-bent on suicide because he couldn’t see any way out. His family would be better off with him gone he thought. The insurance policy had fully vested.
I felt my ear tingling from energy surging through my cartilage. Anne then asked me if I felt any tingling sensation in my ear, as she saw Andrew sitting next to me touching my ear.
The connection to the spiritual dimension was very strong — it was unusually easy for Anne to translate. Andrew told me that what he had to live with forever, what all souls of suicides have to live with, is that the solution appears to them in the millisecond before their human life expires.
Three months later I returned to rehab.
I had arrived there hoping to find an understanding of God that meshed with my conception. I sought out counseling from a member of the spiritual staff whom I call Mystical Meredith (Spiritdecoder). I explained to her that I had bounced around between agnosticism and the belief that God was akin to the Force from Star Wars — the psychic energy emitted by all living things — and that I believed that some people had the ability to tap into this energy, psychics, and to a lesser extent, me and others who experience the phenomenon of de ja vu. I told Meredith that I believed in the existence of souls because I had spoken to the souls of dearly departed through a psychic, and I asked her how God fits into this — asking her if there was a hierarchy of souls with God at the top?
Before answering me, Meredith asked me why I thought I used substances abusively. I answered that I thought there was an irreconcilable conflict between my conscious and subconscious minds over things I had done, or not done, over the past few years, and I drank and drugged to run away from rather than resolve this conflict.
Meredith explained that the conflict was not between my conscious and subconscious, but between my mind and my soul. Meredith’s conception of God, or the Great All, and how we and our souls fit in, is that when our souls leave the Great All to take human form we contract with the universe to experience certain painful things on Earth that are not spiritual so we can learn what is spiritual (love, kindness, compassion, charity, etc.)
Fast Forward to June 1st, 2019 and then the March 19th, 2020 Cataclysm
Strangers in the night Yet familiar like old friends Twas love at first sight Her passing awakened them Infinite eternal love
Lindsey and I met early in the morning of June 1, 2019. We instantly clicked. Back at my place we sat on the bed and listened to music and talked and talked about nothing deep but there was not a single awkward pause. It was like we were old friends getting together for the first time in years and picked up where we left off but knew nothing whatsoever of the facts of each other’s lives. I do not even remember if we fooled around. I just remember the feeling of wow I haven’t ever had this much fun with someone and I cannot even say what about it was fun — it just was; and when we were nodding off early in the afternoon, saying “you are so beautiful” as she smiled at me with a look in her eyes that I had not seen before in this life-cycle.
It was love at first sight only neither of us were aware; nor were we consciously aware that it was eons from first sight.
“Hello, I had hoped we would meet one day under different circumstances and write this mostly in the present tense. My name is Greg Maidman, I am a close friend and confidante of Lindsey’s. In fact, I love her. I am the person who went to the precinct and pushed and accompanied the police to check on her after they were being dismissive the previous day. I have never experienced such gut-wrenching sorrow as I did on that cold rainy street, but realize it is because I love her more than I know.
I want you to know how she was loved and cared for. Ours is not a typical romance, but make no mistake, a romance it is. She feels loved and safe when we are together, and I feel loved and appreciated, and we each want the nights never to end and for the next date to come as soon as possible. Though not spoken about, I think we each know that we each fantasize of a life together.
Your sister touches my soul and makes any day better. She is a wonderful woman, so gentle and caring and I do not want you to think she is anything less than spectacularly radiant.”
The wailing on the street was a sound that I did not know I could, nor how to, produce. It has emanated from me one or two times since. It cannot be purposely replicated. It is the sound of my soul crying out in pain. No, crying does not begin to describe it; it is the sound of unrestrained grief without any concern about the spectacle that I was for onlookers for an hour or more. Imagine having open heart surgery performed with a jagged and rusted scalpel without a drop of anesthesia; further imagine that it was at a frequency and wavelength that ripped a hole in space time and was heard across all eleven or more dimensions of the universe, not just then, but at every point in time. If you can close your eyes and feel the picture I just painted, maybe you will come close to understanding. If you can close your eyes and feel the picture I just painted, maybe you will come close to understanding my pain and my grief. And my Love, my Love, my Love.
The reverberations of the pain waves from the tearing out of my heart shattered the barrier between conscious and unconscious, and my soul emerged and filled the hole where my heart had been.
At that moment, I intuitively knew that I have a soul.
I experienced an irreversible spiritual awakening. The pain was amplified way beyond that which even someone who has experienced the here-one-second-gone-the-next can imagine because with awakening came the innate understanding that I had just lost someone after only 10 months in this life cycle that I have been in love with for all of eternity.
I Renew My Relationship with Psychic Medium Anne
Shortly after my instantaneous spiritual awakening, I had numerous conversations with Lindsey’s soul (her soul continues to be with me daily), and I started to seek the counsel of my spirit guides, all facilitated by my channeler/psychic medium, Anne (Ane). At the first meeting with my spirit guides, I learned that I have four. That first meeting and each one since has taken place at a tree-lined watering hole (that is how Anne describes it to me and while I have yet to see it, I can intuitively imagine it). Shortly before that, I researched what animal was likely to be my “Spirit Animal.” After reading a bit about how one can discern their Spirit Animal, I believed mine would be the Elephant. At my guides’ and my first discussion, an Elephant observed us from a distance in the treeline. I remember feeling a special connection to this observer.
In the next and every subsequent channeling, the Elephant took command — answering my questions, posing thought-provoking questions to me — if the others chimed in it was clear to me they first awaited his signal to do so. I intuitively knew early on the honor the universe had granted me but waited a week or so before clueing Anne in, waiting for the right segue, which presented itself when she remarked that she was in awe of my Elephant.
First, though I asked Anne to ask Elephant its name — the soft-spoken answer confirmed what I sensed. After the Elephant’s first appearance as an observer, and though I was raised Jewish, I intuited a connection to Hindu deities. Vishnu, part of the Hindu Trinity of Creator (Brahma), Protector (Vishnu) and Destroyer (Shiva), is synonymous with Ganesh, who is symbolized by an Elephant’s head. My elephant said its name is Rama. Rama is one of Vishnu’s human incarnations. That Elephant is my Highest Power.
My Elephant-Spirit-Guide is God and it is from our conversations that I know what I know about reincarnation that I stated to Maxwell in the conversation that lead to me creating this condensed memoir of my 17,043rd human life.
Take-Aways
Sometime later on, I asked Rama why me — am I special? Rama answered that God is available to anyone and everyone all the time if they only knew how to see and hear. That is the personal takeaway with which I shall end this story.
Lindsey and Andrew died the way they each died, Andrew a suicide and Linsdey from an accidental overdose, from the same malaise — people are only as sick as their secrets.
In Rama I create, with soul-energy surging through my body, inspiring me and breathing wind into my sails,
Marcus (Gregory Maidman)
My original post here is quite different, contains additional information, and is worth a read — I know I just enjoyed it immensely.
