In September and October of 2007, I began to experience especially intense feelings of utter meaninglessness as to my reason for having been born into this world at all. I had experienced these existential crises before, but this seemed to be the worst. My entire life felt like a wasteland. There seemed to have been no reason for my coming here, except to experience my absolute otherness in relation to everyone and everything that I encountered. I did not feel that I was made for this world.
In an uncanny and peculiar way, I felt especially drawn to the statements made about Jesus Christ in Isaiah 53:3. For when evaluating the whole of my life experience, I definitely felt "depised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief." However, I was also powerfully resonating with The Gospel According to John's statements, (10:30) "I and my Father are one," and "I do nothing of myself alone, the Father he doeth the works." One night, at a recovery group that I avoided and did not feel emotionally safe at, I shared my sense of being completely estranged from society and the world. I was then so emotionally distraught and embarrassed that I had to immediately leave and go to my car, where I encountered one of the most intense spontaneous bouts of grief that I had yet experienced. As I shared these feelings in recovery groups, I sensed a subtle yet powerful overshadowing of my own personality within, but I did not exactly know what was happening. I tried to tell myself that whatever it was, it was only occurring on the 'psychological' level, since I realized that it was considered blasphemy to not only fundamentalist, but even mainstream orthodox Christianity. The one thing that I did know, was that the Christianity that was coming home to me, from the inside out, was a very different Christianity, than that in which I had been raised. I later confirmed in The Power of Myth, that Joseph Campbell claimed that transcendence is achieved through a mythical or mystical identification with the deity, as seen in Hinduism. Furthermore, Alan Watts in his masterful Behold The Spirit, powerfully warned of the danger of losing the spiritual effectiveness of Christianity, because of the progressive loss of the spirit of mysticism within the faith.
I even went so far as to dare to work with this energy by dressing up as Jesus at a recovery Halloween party. On the front of my costume, I wrote "Despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, acquainted with grief," and on the back, in an orange, red and black background of chaotic fire, "Follow Me or Go to Hell!"