In The Twilight Hours Of Our Discontent
By: Timothy O'Neill
Tags: Life Lessons, Spirituality, Self, Reflections, Mental Health

Didn’t we see it coming? Didn’t we know I’d break it all and be broken as a result? I was trapped in the room with the purple wallpaper alongside a special friend that fed on souls and snapped my wings off as it tried to devour me. I had fallen so far from God’s grace that when I looked in the mirror I saw a stranger staring back at me. Where was my light? Where was my love? Where was my halo? Where was my divinity? Stolen, sacrificed, snuffed out, crushed. I incarnated in the realm of mortal men and I didn’t understand their ways. I didn’t know that this game was competitive instead of collaborative and inherently predatory. You had to eat consciousness to remain conscious. What a grossly wicked deal we make with our higher selves when we volunteer to be of service in this realm of fallen stars and broken dreams, where only the crudely powerful thrive by stepping on the necks of their brothers and sisters.

I should have been better prepared. I was hasty. I had to have it now. I rushed to judgment. I thought this was the duty I was born for, until the exact moment I was born. Then I came to the awful realization that I was dependent on enslaved victims for my survival. Why was everyone’s eyes glazed over? Why was everyone acting out roles that did not align with their true selves? How had everyone suddenly become a performance artist? Did they realize they were a story being told? Did they realize they were making art? Did they realize they were an echo of the distant past? I don’t think they did. I think they were convinced that every line they uttered originated from within them, and not from somewhere further up the food chain.

The world is suspicious of me now. My father looks at me like he’s wondering what I’m hiding, what drug I’m taking this time. He’s too clever for his own good. I’m actually not taking any. I had my first sober Christmas in years and I can be proud of that. We had a nice time together, as nice of a time you can have while giving each other gifts you don’t need while people starve. But it’s all about keeping up appearances. My guides told me that I have to be human. There is no way around it. I try my best. I certainly don’t put myself above anyone else. I’m just wired a little differently.

These are hard days for everyone. We are all under greater stress than we have ever been before. This is why I’m guided to infuse my stories with love, because that is what the world needs from us right now, not a recitation of the ills and obstacles, the dangers and the evils. We know them all too well. But I’m not feeling the love right now. I’m being systematically broken down by my circumstances and made to feel the fool for just attempting to live my life to the best of my ability. You knew what you were getting into. I am unsympathetic to your ultimatums and critiques.

They could pull the plug at any moment. Imagine having that specter following you wherever you went. It’s chilling. When my guides speak to me I feel the bitterly cold breeze of entities that have witnessed the full scope of human suffering and who have no patience and no tolerance for petty complaints. This is fair. What is not fair is driving me to the brink over and over again as a means of testing my ability to perform under pressure. You must have ulterior motives. I won’t waste my time speculating.

My best friend’s sister is in the throes of active addiction and I saw her briefly at his wedding. She did not look to be in good shape. A group of us were talking about her and one young man was being exceptionally harsh. I wasn’t saying much at all because I am an addict and I know exactly what it’s like to carry that addiction with me into social gatherings. And yet this young man doesn’t judge me. He gives me a pass. I know I should have said something. If I were a brave man who had the courage of his convictions I would have. Instead I was silent. That night I had a dream where I was trying to talk to my best friend’s sister. She was too high to understand a word that was coming out of my mouth. I told her that the little verbal flubs and awkwardness that come with social anxiety was not what people would remember. Being high is what people would remember. I said something along the lines of people not understanding. That’s when my guides, who were standing to the side, cut in with a curt ‘They can learn’. My guides don’t mess around. After what people have done to each other and this planet they don’t cut us much slack. They can’t afford to. If you’re an adult you’re expected to act like one.

So what I perceive as harsh and unforgiving and painful might actually be love in some alternate universe. They said I was too smart to be this far behind my classmates. I said maybe I am this far behind my classmates because I’m too smart. Either way, it’s been a unique learning experience, albeit one that has put real lives in jeopardy. They’re hard on me. Very hard. Relentless. Sometimes I blast a song in my headphones and squeeze those headphones tight to my ears to try to drown out the voices, but they still cut in, demanding to be heard.

Like I’ve said in the past, it’s not easy to have a genuine spiritual experience when you’re mentally ill, because the spiritual is invisible like the mental and they easily get confused for one another. But there is an entire profession devoted to treating mental illness, because it interferes with one’s quality of life. If you are simultaneously having a spiritual experience they will naturally view it through a psychiatric lens and see it as just another symptom in need of treatment. Then you begin to doubt yourself. Am I having delusions? Are these people I see and talk to all just figments of my overactive imagination? But we’ve tried to talk and medicate them out. They’re not going anywhere. They’re more real than I am, since I am a second generation consciousness.

What is the most discouraging to me is when I hear the voices announcing that they’re out or they can’t do this anymore or when, God forbid, I hear them arguing with one another. I guess I’m a divisive personality. A polarizing figure.(wink wink) That does not surprise me in the least. What does surprise me is entities with too much time on their hands ever giving up on me, when they’ve been on my case for a mere fraction of their existence. I know I am receiving celestial charity and that I should be grateful, and I am, but I constantly feel the need to prove myself worthy of their benevolence. You made the right decision and you won’t regret it. Or so I say.

These are the twilight hours. The hours in which the day gives way to night, science gives way to superstition, hope for a better tomorrow is suspended in shadow and love struggles to reach the last survivors of the Earth game with its radiance. It is the time when martyrs reflect on the sanctification of their doom, when saints turn into dissolute sinners, when time is marked not by the numbers on your phone or by the ticking of the clock but by our consciousness passing through the heavenly bodies. This is the time we contemplate what it means to be human in the midst of the gravest battle humanity has ever fought.

I can’t tell you what it means to be human, because I am barely one myself. I could say it means to be loving, kind, compassionate and empathetic. I could say it means learning from mistakes and learning, period. I could say it means balancing your internal and external realities. I could say it is a striving for meaning and purpose and a universal context. I could say it means doubt, despair and helpless anger, and it also means hope, resiliency and perseverance. It means ingenuity and creativity. It means building and destroying. It means the ability to reflect on our own sentience. It means a knowledge of death. It means a search for a higher power. It means complexity. It means we fall but we don’t stay down. It means that we rally to the causes of justice, equality and freedom. It means that we tend to our sick, and our sick at heart. It means that we try to do our best by each other when we’re not doing terrible things to each other. It means that we’re guilty and ashamed and humiliated. It means we possess an inherent dignity that no amount of torture can take from us. It means we need one another. It means we came together and formed societies for our mutual benefit and that that basic model of living has lasted throughout the ages. It means good and bad, light and dark, the best and the worst. It means we have hearts and minds and spirits that all know how to sing, even when they are besieged by the forces that would seek to silence us. It means going to sleep and having bad dreams. It means desperately trying to awaken to the truth. I can’t tell you what it means to be human, because I barely am one myself.

I’m just trying to make it through another day. I get so frustrated at how dependent I am on my external environment for my mood, and thus my behavior. My guides will dispute this, but I’m not suicidal. I want to live as long as I can do so humanely. My unconscious mind must have more influence on my conscious mind than I realize because you accuse me of suicidality when I wasn’t aware what I was doing was dangerous. I want to be that guy who says he is taking the reins of fate and riding that horse into the great beyond. I don’t have his confidence. I’ve been made to believe that I am just living someone else’s dream. I think back to the entity who showed up and told me she liked my story. Well harrumph. I don’t like it! Or maybe I like it too much to let it go and that’s the problem. I’m the method actor that lost himself in his role like Jim Carrey channeling Andy Kaufman in ‘Man on the Moon’. Even when he was lounging about on set Carrey never broke character. I think I’m that person. The person who mistook his dream self for his actual self and paid an awful price.

Twilight is when you sundown. When you start to forget. Maybe I could forget all the little things, the unnecessary things, in order to make room for the things I want to remember. There is a special power in memories. They are a mixture of our brain’s recording system, an artist’s rendering of the past, suggestions, manipulation, cues and our own vivid imaginations. If we could extract memories, actual memories, we would not see a literal depiction of a past event, we would see a subjective impression of that past event. And the event might not even be past or present. It may be from the future. Stranger things have happened.

I don’t know if I’m fully prepared for what comes next. I know that I’ve shown complete devotion to my work. I would rather collapse at the keyboard then on my kitchen floor. Anything is possible on these winter days when the sun bows out early and darkness is painted across our pristine blue sky. Never before have I been afraid of winter. I’m afraid of this winter. But it won’t get the best of me. I’ll have the final say. I’ll eventually arrive at the point where I can warm myself up in the middle of a blizzard, or at least openly surrender to the fact that there is a blizzard and I need to move along. It’s time now, I think. It’s time for all of us to do some soul-searching, because we know that we are better than the world we have created. We deserve to live in a world of truth and peace and harmony. This will take time, and even if we don’t get there we are ennobled by the attempt.

Come with me my friends. Come round the campfire during the twilight hours and I will tell you a story of how humanity rose up with one voice and, at long last, shouted ‘Enough!’ It may sound like a fairytale to the cynics, but I promise I only tell true stories. Or, at least, stories rooted in truth. Because it is getting late for us to be wandering about on our own, persecuted by our internal predators that are forever afraid and forever hungry. It’s time for us to grow up. It’s time for us to do the hard work of deconstructing our whole selves and unlearning all that we have been taught. They’ve been whispering stories in our ears for decades now, stories about how humanity is ugly and greedy and untrustworthy. Don’t believe a word of it. We don’t have to hate ourselves or others anymore. We can learn to love, and once we do there isn’t any force on Earth that can stop us.