The Year of the Back

In many traditions there is precedent for a serious injury, illness or other disability that waylays a seeker and in that time they are transformed.

• Saint Teresa was paralyzed for three years and produced The Interior Castle.
• Frida Kahlo suffered bed-bound misery after an accident as a teenager. She used this time to create beautiful works of art.
• Chiron of astrological lore was the wounded healer, healing from his wound.

In nearly every shamanic tradition across cultures, the initiatory disability is required as the price of entry. I’m not placing myself with saints, but simply underscoring the importance of the wound to the work.

From roughly 2017-2019, I was active in a small church startup, on the business council and wholly devoted. The second in command told me they were discussing asking me to be the next pastor.

During that time, I read Psalm 37:4:

Delight yourself in the Lord, and he will give you the desires of your heart.

I realized it could be literally interpreted too, and I reflected on that as I prayed, earnestly, every day for two years:

Holy Spirit, lead me to the truth and give me the wisdom to discern it.

Truly, to know is all I have ever wanted.

Fluoroquinolone exposure in 2015 led to connective tissue vulnerabilities that, according to current literature, will stay with me for life. This manifests as torn ligaments/tendons, other soft tissue injuries, and, important for our story, vertebral disc insufficiency.

In 2019 I was fit, healthy and active.

And one day, my prayer was answered when I began to experience a kind of agony in my low back unlike anything I had ever felt. I remember sobbing in unbearable agony, trying to take small steps to get to the bathroom and not sure if I could even get one foot in front of the next. In a life filled with injury, surgery and chronic pain, I am not exaggerating when I say that this nearly took me out.

This began The Year of the Back, a period from 2019-2020 where I had a series of four herniated disc events that left me bed-bound for most of that time.

I immediately understood it to be the answer to that prayer, and I determined to make the most of it.

I might have been immobilized by pain, but I traveled across the universe in those 18 months.

Our pastor had suggested we read the Bible in chronological order through a year. I had begun that before my injury, and I remember concluding the year with this urgent, nagging sense that something was missing.

I began seeking, questing, searching for answers.

I talked to a friend who I knew had some sort of spiritual experience she only alluded to.

As a totally obedient Christian at the time, I remember the nervousness I felt when I said to her, “I think Paul might be a false apostle.”

Having walked this out long ago and been cast out of her synagogue for saying so, she wasted no time showing me, piece by piece, the evidence she had accumulated to that same outcome: factual contradictions, ritual errors, etc.

I took it and ran with it, reading my way through traditions, belief systems, history and scholarly works to arrive at completely the opposite conclusion in the end.

My stance has since then softened, finding Paul neither important nor memorable in my own path now. But at the time, it was everything. I bought a domain. We were going to go forward with our “proof,” and I was ready to study in earnest to prove the case.

Well, I proved something, but it had nothing to do with Paul.

The conclusions are for another post, but I want to set the foundation of where we’re headed with where I’m from. I can sum it up by saying I believe Jesus was real and he came to teach us wisdom critical to the development of humanity, but much of what we’re taught as “the infallible word of God” has some serious discrepancies and I set out to understand why.

During that time, I read:

• Books of Enoch
• Nag Hammadi scrolls
• Enuma Elish and other Sumerian texts
• Cassiopaean channeled material and books by Laura Knight-Jadczyk
• Dolores Cannon
• The Don Juan series by Castaneda
• Elaine Pagels
• Carl Jung
• Gurdjieff (through Ouspensky)
• Inner Christianity
• The Kybalion
• Michael Tsarion
• And Christian sources, like Secrets of a Prayer Warrior, Pigs in the Parlor, Spiritual Warfare, Having Faith to Live by Faith

I wasn’t seeking a pre-determined conclusion. I’m still not. That’s never been how I operate. For me, the joy is entirely in the seeking. And the seeking continues tirelessly to this day, several years later.

I restarted my library, and it currently contains about 280 books, almost all of deep philosophical and spiritual leaning. It is from there our story begins, from a heartfelt prayer to a thirst for knowledge that has since spanned nearly every major spiritual tradition.

It has led to some unexpected discoveries, and it is those I desire to share with you here, for I believe humanity is being asked to hone its discernment now.

To quote the Cassiopaeans:

Knowledge protects.

So, let's armor up.