March 7, 2018
“Enlightenment is becoming aware of the nature of the self through observation. By observation of the self (our self) with detachment, we can become aware of its processes without being caught up in them. Doing such allows one to better interact with others and our environment.”
-Pocket Wikipedia, on ‘Mysticism’
For a long time I was sick. Sick with greed and selfishness. As I put money above everything in life I began to grow sicker. I stopped trusting people and I had no friends. If you weren’t able to make me money or please me I was not interested in knowing you, including my entire family. I was a cheater a liar and a thief, if you had a weakness I could exploit. I never showed my dark side until it was too late for you to notice or I could get away with you never knowing. If you don’t get caught there’s nothing wrong, the American motto. I didn’t always think this way but when the opportunity arose I assessed my gains and losses.
After awhile, over a decade, I began to notice principles of action, or karma. I noticed when I took I lost. These consequences never connected and the results were never from the people I hurt so why would they be connected. Life is external and a material game of survival. What is love but a show of face value and words. After time and time again I would notice my income dwindle away, my relationships crumble and my happiness a fleeting show that left like the sun at dusk. Nothing satisfied my hunger for money, my want for sex or my need to be as high as I could to forget this world. As I continued my search for material stability and happiness in my confused mind I kept stumbling over the same principles, blinded by the obscurity of the situations, clothed in different circumstances, personalities and stages. Close to death but never seeing the cause was myself. I could no longer hide myself from the truth. The situations became bigger and the karma became over bearing, the levies broke leaving me in shambles drowning in my results. Is death just an end to existence or is it a clean slate when the load is too heavy for one to continue under such conditions. My eyes started to open more and more as my vision became more clear, fumbling over my footsteps of my heavy habits continuously knocking myself on the head. When I took I lost and I could not lie to myself any longer. The world became interconnected closer and closer until I could not see the lines between you and me, between my actions here and the results there, nothing was seperate. I began to see my need for getting high was to blur my consciousness from the truth, my want for sex was the love I so dearly searched for and could never find, my hunger for money a feeling of security, the stealing cheating and lying to mask my hurt by projecting it to everyone in contact with me so they knew how it felt. These are the subjective realities I look back on to see the truth today, this frenzy of self destruction was my aimless groping in the dark of a reality just beyond my fingertips. As I crawled out of the sludge and shadows the light was so blinding I could not comprehend myself with clarity, my reasoning or desire, but every consequence was clear as the blue sky. From my father’s death to my biggest falls, from being robbed at gun point to losing everything I owned, from waking up with a bag over my head clawing for air to looking for a place to lay under the bridge, running a car into a tree at 60 miles an hour to getting frost bite inside my throat and suffocating, the causes of my anguish and suffering became known to me. I could hide in darkness no longer, the only way was up. Years before i saw the light I remember driving around forever countless hours everyday, picking the next person up who wanted to smoke a blunt and cruise the city, they would ask were are we going and I would point up to the sky and say “straight, straight to the top” only to find out that’s where I was headed the whole time.
I started to see deeper into the way things moved, underneath it all. Today as I talk to people in prison and walk around they see a quiet, polite, well mannered man, not muscular but not in need of security, mediating and reading, listening and giving advice, not the person I used to know.
As my eyes opened I knew I was in a position to help, give charity and live in abundance. Making fifty thousand a year I was not struggling in one of the lowest income cities in America, Cleveland, Ohio. I was importing marijuana and hashish and I started to realise the benefits that were helping those around me, I started watching documentaries of how it was healing people and becoming medicinal and recreational. I stopped selling other drugs like a cocaine and MDMA and focused on this medicine within my hands. I started to feel like Harriet Tubman freeing the slaves from their own confused minds and self inflicted illnesses. I saw the woman of my dreams standing next to me waiting for me to come home. Sometimes we don’t see what is right in front of us until we understand we have already asked for it all to be here in the first place. My heart opened up to the world I had only involved my mind in. The heart had no place in my life before, it was just a hindrance, but now it could become the master, the leader. Once you know something you must act in accordance to its light or you will be hurt more than if you never kindled the fire in the first place. I began to work, I began to love, I began to forgive. I saw that this is just a quick time we have and I had been holding on by a tread all this time for this moment to happen. My subjective mind knew I was so close but I could not get the hint until it was beaten into me. I guess some of us learn the hard way. None of this world belonged to me, it belonged to us all. All this weed and hash was not my weed and hash, all this money was not my money, it was ours…
Albion Chryst
DOC #690741
