As I woke up from coma in the beginning of 1979 I had a feeling that some kind of miracle had happened to me. To my mind there are no miracles as such. I thought that the universe hardly operates against its own natural laws. A miracle was in my mind a sudden incident where things fall into place. When a miracle usually has a positive effect my illness was a negative pole of a miracle. I had a vague memory of the words of Richard Bach, which I had read in autumn before my illness in his book Illusions.
Within each of us lies the power of our consent to health and to sickness, to riches and to poverty,
to freedom and to slavery. It is we who control these, and not another.
Richard Bach
The first person I wanted to see after my awakening was my male friend. I called him friend and so I will do also now. With him I had my first love affair. We had nice time together, but there was no deeper mental connection between us. I felt I couldn’t count on him when I really needed him. Despite of my thoughts I soon found myself in his bed. On the one hand he was a wonderful lover and I enjoyed the time with him. On the other hand I had accusations against myself: “Am I completely unconscious! I just want to please everybody and things happen to me as if I had no control over them, and as if I could not decide myself where my path leads me.”
With each passing week our physical connection became stronger and stronger, but I felt that mentally we were on different wavelengths. The stronger our physical connection became, the clearer I saw that we had no real mental connection. When I thought about the final high school exams I had before myself, I knew that I had to end our relationship.
One evening when my friend called me I begun to talk about this thing. He was shocked. “No way! You cannot leave me! You…” He burst into tears. “You are so extraordinary girl”, he was sobbing. ‘What! Is he joking with me?’ I thought. “You’ve been playing me for a fool!” he accused. ‘Does he say that to me?’ I wondered.
He was assuring his love to me and I said, I had to think about the exams I should take just after the turn of the year. He calmed down and we agreed that we will see next time after the exams.
Two weeks passed by and my legs were taking me to his place again. He was surprised and delighted, but I was furious at myself. I felt that I had totally lost control over myself. Since the death of my mother nothing was more important to me than the feeling that I could decide myself what I was doing. I myself wanted to direct my life. And now, an invisible force drove me just as it wanted to. I was completely at a loss. I was facing a totally new challenge. My problem was not my friend, but I myself.
In the evening I lost consciousness for the first time I was with my friend, feeling very relaxed and happy. I had come to some kind of agreement with myself: I thought that whatever happens to us, it is for our own good. But I still felt that I had led my life to a dead end.
As I lied in hospital I was asking myself, why had my friend become so important to me, although I wanted to leave him. He came to see me daily, but in the course of time his visits became rarer. I couldn’t really get connected with him. I was wondering, why did he completely reject me now when he had a real opportunity to show me, how much he loved me.
I haven’t read the book of Richard Bach – Illusions – after I read it for the first time. For this writing I found it to see, if there are other thoughts than the one I have written above that might have influenced my thinking before I had the stroke:
- The best way to avoid responsibility is to say, ‘I’ve got responsibilities.’
- You are led through your lifetime, by the inner learning creature, the playful spiritual being that is your real self.
- Your only obligation in any lifetime is to be true to yourself. Being true to anyone else or anything else is not only impossible, but the mark of a fake messiah.
- There is no such thing as a problem without a gift for you in its hands. You seek problems because you need their gifts.
- What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the master calls a butterfly.
As I read the following story it felt like meeting with an old friend:
Once there lived a village of creatures along the bottom of a great crystal river. The current of the river swept silently over them all – young and old, rich and poor, good and evil, the current going its own way, knowing only its own crystal self. Each creature in its own manner clung tightly to the twigs and rocks of the river bottom, for clinging was their way of life, and resisting the current what each had learned from birth.
But one creature said at last: ‘I am tired of clinging. Though I cannot see it with my eyes, I trust that the current knows where it is going. I shall let go, and let it take me where it will. Clinging, I shall die of boredom.’ The other creatures laughed and said: ‘Fool! Let go, and that current you worship will throw you tumbled and smashed across the rocks, and you will die quicker than boredom!’
But the one heeded them not, and taking a breath did let go, and at once was tumbled and smashed by the current across the rocks. Yet in time, as the creature refused to cling again, the current lifted him free from the bottom, and he was bruised and hurt no more. And the creatures downstream, to whom he was a stranger, cried: ‘See a miracle! A creature like ourselves, yet he flies! See the Messiah, come to save us all! And the one carried in the current said: ‘I am no more Messiah than you. The river delights to lift us free, if only we dare let go. Our true work is this voyage, this adventure.’
During the last weeks I have heard the song of Abba: I’ve been waiting for you.
Every now and then I have searched my own photos in computer and I have listened the melodies of pure love looking at my own photos. I am wondering, why do I have to view my own photos. Usually people look at the photos of their beloved ones when they listen to this kind of music. My question raises a thought in my mind: People are searching for pure love in the world, but in order to find it they must find it in their own heart first.
My heart was singing to myself. And my ego joined to its melody.