I’ve recently encountered a situation that I’m having to understand the exact nature of the problems I had in my childhood, despite the fact that the problems themselves have been successfully eliminated decades ago.
How is that even possible, you might ask? How can you solve the problem first, and then understand what the problem was much later?
Well, it’s quite intuitive and straightforward, when you think about it. Imagine being struck by a stray bullet. You are first in shock. Then you stop the bleeding, call an ambulance, then they drive you to surgery, fix the damage, you heal, problem solved. You don’t know whether it was a bullet, a meteor fragment, a grenade fragment or something else. You assume it’s a random event, because things of that sort just happen to people. You shrug and move on. It’s a resolved problem as far as you’re concerned.
Decades later, you find out that it wasn’t a random event. Your neighbour actually tried to kill you with a rifle from a large distance. He also tried to poison you, but your dog ate the food and died, and you never understood why the dog died. You were sad, but things happen. You moved on.
But now, as you understand the new reality, you need to revise and recalculate your entire life from that perspective. Someone you were on apparently cordial terms with tried to kill you, and not once but twice. Did he hate you that much, or did he just see you as an obstacle? Is it even important that you know? Before, when you thought the events were random, you were at peace with them, but now, as you found out the truth, it’s as if the ground under the foundations of your mind is shifting and is forcing you to reinterpret everything in order to understand the nature of the world you live in, which is different from the one you lived in days before. Things didn’t just happen to you at random. Things that happened weren’t the will of God in some mysterious way that can only be accepted, and not understood. A very specific human bastard shot you and poisoned your dog by accident, trying to kill you. What the hell?
As you can see, it’s quite possible to heal from trauma without understanding its exact nature, but if this understanding comes under question at a much later date, it can require quite a bit of thinking and trying to figure things out from a changed perspective. Did you ever actually heal, if such revisions can take place? The answer is a resounding yes. You can heal, because healing relates to the outcome side of the equation. The bullet hit you, you went to surgery, it was fixed. Your dog died; you mourned, but went on. The outcome side of things is resolved. The cause side, however, is unknown and therefore unresolved. Your wound isn’t less healed because you now know who fired the bullet, but you now get to understand why you had to endure that, and why you still carry a scar. The cause side of things is something that actually influenced you in a much more personal way than a stray bullet would have. It was malice, not accident. It was premeditated. You lived your life thinking that it was determined by accident and chance, but your wounds were in fact not caused by a random Universe. It was a specific person with a specific agenda that targeted you specifically. The bullet wasn’t fired into the air by someone celebrating something, it was fired into your head and it missed and hit your shoulder. You need to rethink your entire philosophy.
This is the situation I’m in now.
It’s not resolving because I worked on it, or even cared about resolving it. I didn’t even suppress anything that would require digging it out and going through it again. I just didn’t know; but I thought I did. I dealt with the consequences. I resolved the outcome-side of the problem. At least I thought I did, because apparently, not knowing that someone intentionally fired that bullet at me was a misapprehension that created consequences that could no longer be ignored, so the guys “up there” rubbed my nose in shit, figuratively speaking.
It’s interesting how I have incredible memory, but it’s memory that’s combined with interpretation, and both are stored together. The events are remembered as I perceived them back then, not as I would see them now. Believe it or not, but it never occurred to me that my child self would not have a good interpretation of events. It was just stored as it was. No revision, no re-interpretation.
I was already forced to revise some of my memories of my brother – apparently, the guys above decided that I have incredibly “rosy” memory of him, and that started to get in the way of things. They showed me records of his thoughts and feelings while I was learning and practicing yogic techniques, while we were both living with our parents. I remembered things as both of us practicing spiritual sadhana, but that wasn’t the case. He was learning and creating electronics, and pretending to have a spiritual sadhana. He was leaving an impression that he was also doing something his own way, but wasn’t. He was a complete and utter fake, and when he observed me meditating, he thought I was trying and failing. There was cynicism and sarcasm in the astral print I was shown. No sign of spiritual progress. I was shocked, but it made sense; it explained why our paths diverged from there on. I was actually making progress. He remained the product of our parents’ upbringing, and the resulting trauma. As a result, he is what he is, and I am what I am. Shrug, move on. People choose their own path, I can’t do it for them.
Beep, wrong. Sugarcoated unicorn vomit fake interpretation of facts. Soothing, but fake as a plastic Fejka plant from Temu.
It all came up more recently, as people started contacting me about a neglected property I co-own with him; our grandparents’ house nobody lives in now that mom died. I observed it going to shit steadily since I broke contact with her and brother twenty years ago, so they were obviously not investing anything into upkeep, just spending the resource someone else left them, until its value was degraded to that of the empty building plot. Since nobody was using it, the obvious solutions were either to make it habitable by a serious investment, or sell it and divide the money. I thought the latter makes more sense, so I forwarded the inquiries to my brother: if you can agree a reasonable price with him, I’ll sign on it for my half and that’s that.
He contacted me about that, and I told him what I told you – people are interested, the price of real estate is high at the moment so it’s a good time to sell, if you agree with the money they are offering I’ll sign off on it for my half. My address and bank account for the contract are below.
He didn’t agree. He wanted 10% more, because he deserves it, because reasons. He had expenses for the upkeep. Non-negotiable, take it or leave it. So, of course, I told him that’s just bullshit. I don’t recognize any investment, because it’s not visible in the selling price; if the land and the house sell for the price of land, it means the house was degraded to the point where it’s worthless, and any “investment” he made had negative commercial value. Basically, mom likely sold everything but the walls in order to finance her lifestyle of never having to work for a living and just having everything handed to her because she deserves it. They also sold the family weekend house and presumably spent the money. The entire family had three properties: the house, the apartment my brother received as a gift from dad when the family broke up, and the weekend house with some land. Basically, those two managed to appropriate all three, sold one and squandered the money, they let the house go to ruin, and the brother got the family apartment. I got half the house as inheritance, and my brother thought this was completely unfair and he now needs to suck me dry, get more money from me because he deserves it, for all the hardship he had to endure in life.
I was shocked. This is not at all what I would have expected from the reasonable person that existed in my memories. I would expect the opposite: for him to tell me that he got the apartment, they spent the money from the weekend house, it’s right and proper that I get the house, or something. Even if that would be too generous to expect from such a self-absorbed person, I thought it would be reasonable to expect him to honour the will of our grandparents who wanted us to each end up with half of that house once mom died. But no – when I refused his outright blackmail and he refused my repeated offer of a 50-50% share according to our legal ownership of the property, he initiated a court proceeding with a goal of forcibly disowning me and selling my share at an auction, where one would expect it to sell for much less than the currently outstanding offers.
I looked at this and understood that somebody was trying to tell me something, and the answer from above was a pointed silence, in a sense of “yes, look into that, what does this look like?”
And I did. I really, really didn’t want to, because I wanted to keep a positive memory of my brother, but the Gods were having none of this. Obviously, they thought it was a harmful illusion and I needed to face the truth. So I did. The pattern I was seeing was matched by two things that I know from zoology. One is obligate siblicide, and the other is brood parasitism. Brood parasitism is a phenomenon where a bird lays an egg in the nest of another species, and the first thing its young does upon hatching is to eject the native young from the nest and claim all the resources. Obligate siblicide is a similar phenomenon, where the first thing a hatchling does is kill the other hatchling; it’s normally the older and stronger that kills the younger.
That explained his behaviour, the entitled attitude where he thinks “fair” is where he gets everything and I get nothing, and even then I would owe him for the fact that he had to put up with my existence at all. He obviously wants to claim all the family resources, and rewrite family history in ways that make me the problem that was his burden to solve. However, I was horrified at first, because I thought this was something he became, and the answer from above was a firm “no”. Look again. Look deeper.
I looked, and the first image from the memory is two of us enduring the incredibly violent and crazy parents. Then I looked past the memorised interpretation and into the actual memory, and saw something that horrified me even further: he was actually weaponising the parents’ violence against me. He would start crying and playing victim, and someone who wanted peace and quiet and didn’t give a damn about truth or justice would come, and beat the shit out of me because I was older, the younger brother was crying so I must have done something to him, and then I would be crying and he would be playing with the toy he wanted. There was never any regret or remorse in him. That was perfectly normal for him. He deserved everything he wanted, and if I happened to own it, he would cry against this injustice and help would come in form of parents, who always and almost without exception judged in his favour, because he was younger, and he was the “good” one; I was always noisy, inquisitive, breaking things to see how they worked, getting into drawers to see what’s there, asking questions that made them uncomfortable. He just stood there, quiet, with an angelic appearance of blue eyes and blond locks. That, apparently, qualifies as being good. Quiet is good. Noisy and active is “naughty”. Also, I was four and a half years older, so I was always to blame; he never had any agency.
What I learned here was extremely harmful to me. I learned that truth doesn’t matter, and justice doesn’t exist. I started shaping into a truly evil person, who will just do whatever because I’m always getting punished for everything anyway, so what would even be the point of being good. Eventually I understood that I’m being gravely harmed by this attitude and learned self-discipline that doesn’t actually care about feedback from others, but rather conforms to an ideal, because that’s something I want to be. However, there were years where I was truly a horrible person. And yes, I understood what he was doing, and when he would eventually get to be alone with me he’d get some payback for all his lies, manipulations and beatings I received in his stead.
As years went on, my mother’s psychosis progressed to the point where she was later my personal evidence for the existence of Satan and demons. I used to shrug at that – yeah, that was bad, but it was just in the “shit happens” category… until I remembered that she wasn’t always like that. She actually used to be quite nice, in my very early memories, from zero to five years old.
Before my brother was born.
And that’s another point where I pulled the handbrake – I can’t blame him for the way my parents were. Not fair. He was a fellow survivor of trauma, who just happened to develop his coping mechanism that was different from mine. His was passive-aggressive, using them to hurt me, while mine was to outright misbehave. And then I remembered that obligate siblicide thing and thought: how does a younger sibling kill the older, stronger one; evict him from the nest and get all the resources?
Weaponise the parents. Manipulate them to protect him and kill the older sibling. Make them do his work for him. And then the memories started flooding – details from my first five years of life. The parents were nice. Stressed because they had to live with the grandparents in tight quarters and resentment for not getting a place of their own, but they never even thought of hurting me. After my brother was born, they would beat me up with such savage hatred and express such honest regret that I was even born, and wish to get rid of me somehow – all expressed very loudly and without any compunctions – that one would end up in prison if he happened to treat his dog the way they treated me. It was savagery beyond belief. At one point, when I was in early high school, second year, it came to the point where my “mother” would daily repeat the mantra of hardly waiting for me to be 18 so they can throw me out in the street, because I’m a parasite who ruined her life by being born, and everything would be better without me; and that’s after my childhood since the age of 5 being filled with threats of giving me up to a home for unwanted children because I’m no good.
And so, at some point I said “fuck this”, and decided to kill myself.
I was thinking about it out loud with my brother, because I was in the habit of doing so, and he essentially blackmailed me: either he’s in, and we have a suicide pact where we both kill ourselves, or there was the implicit threat that he would rat me out to the parents and then I’d get fucked like it’s nobody’s business. So I agreed, thinking that I’ll kill myself and leave him with the weapon to do whatever he wants later.
When it came to the actual point of decision, I made probably the biggest mistake of my life. I managed to procure a crossbow by semi-legal means, and it’s a thing that required quite a bit of force to reset. Much more than my brother could muster. He saw, at the end, the truth of my plan: I was going to shoot myself and he would be left with an empty crossbow he couldn’t reset, and with our parents; and I’d be out. He started crying, begging me not to leave him alone with them. I had the worst feeling of wrongness ever then, or at least matching some terrible things I did against my conscience (and God’s will, in hindsight). It was so bad I had an almost out-of-body experience at that point. I thought “fuck it, I can’t leave him here”. I shot him, reset the weapon, shot myself, both through the heart, and waited to die.
We both survived due to what was later described to me by the doctors as a sequence of about twelve consecutive miracles. And then he betrayed me, lied that he was a poor victim of an older crazy brother, pretended that he had no agency in the matter, that he went along with me because of my assertive nature or something, and did the same thing he always did, in hindsight: blamed me so that he could avoid consequences and get resources. I got blamed for premeditated murder, and he didn’t say a single word to counter the charges. He actually left a note before, saying I’m not to be blamed. They destroyed this evidence. Also, both he and the parents invented all kinds of nonsense they told people – my father opened the encyclopedia, looking up symptoms of mental illnesses, so that he could tell the police and the psychiatrists a convincing story about his insane son. Whatever I said was seen as confirmation of this, and I was far from coherent in my desperate state. I got locked up and the key was thrown away.
How I got out of that is a long and nasty story I have no desire to tell in great detail. Two years in a lunatic asylum for convicts. It was almost as bad as my parents, so I actually managed to get my bearings, once I was out of their reach. I managed to finish high school from there, learning a whole year’s worth of two subjects every week, and giving exams on weekend. People told me it was the most impressive fucking thing they saw anyone do, but me, I just wanted to get the fuck out of the frying pan, and think about the fire later. I mastered autogenous training and autohypnosis there, out of necessity; I needed something to neutralise the psychoactive drugs they were pumping into my system, so that I could think straight and give exams. I was successful with that, too. I solved so many unsolvable problems in those two years, my confidence changed from that of a beaten up victim to that of someone who just does hard shit and gives zero fucks.
During that time, my brother acted towards me with contempt and condescension; zero regret, zero remorse for setting me up. In fact, I was supposed to feel remorse for “doing that to him”. I felt betrayed, but compared to how I was fucked over already at that point, it felt like nothing. I was literally thrown to the trash heap of society and expected to rot, confirming my parents’ lies. As always, I failed to live up to their expectations, so I got out, graduated high school, entered the physics department of the University of Zagreb… and ran out of ideas about what to do next, because you can only run on spite for so long. The rest of that story is known – I understood that the material universe is software, a simulation, and I don’t know anything about the hardware. Got drunk first out of sheer despair. Then started solving the problem – I read literally everything in the library, trying to find what I missed before. Found the Upanishads. Understood the concept of Yoga. Understood that the philosophy hits spot on: the Universe is Maya, an illusion, or as I would say, software. God is hardware.
I told that story already, but my brother’s part was always sugar-coated. I attained initiations due to the practice of yoga. He pretended to go along, but did nothing but electronics during that time. Me, I was busy getting myself together, understanding the flaws in my character and fixing them, removing impurities, attaining virtues, meditating, learning in the darshan of the Gods.
He learned how to make very good audio components. I attained Kundalini awakening, learned Kundalini yoga from the Goddess, attained nirvikalpa samadhi, attained initiation into vajra after learning the concept of elements and their purification. Learned the inner space technique. Was told that I can’t leave this world because there are people who are here because of me and leaving now would get them stranded here without purpose. I started looking for them, figured out I need to make myself publicly seen, started writing on the bbs network, later usenet. As I said, that part of the story is known. During all that time, my brother finished the amplifier, a set of speakers and a DAC.
At some point, I left that place, rented an apartment. Soon thereafter, mom was so crazy that she was planning to have my dad locked up in an institution, just like they did with me, only she’d get his money. She tried to create some false pretence, make him angry so that he would hit her and she would call the cops and play the victim. She planned all that out loud, so he could hear. So, of course, he escaped to save himself and filed for divorce. Fortunately, I was out of that picture for a while by then. Also, it was about the time when my maternal grandparents died in close succession, so mom went to that house and made it the lair of Shelob, dad was learning what it feels like to be her target instead of her whip, and my brother ended up with the apartment.
On his own, and apparently having attained his true goal of getting family resources and being rid of me, he started turning into an increasingly worse person, until I was so done with him that I broke all contact for 20 years, until recently, when he called me with an incredibly fake mournful tone to tell me that mom died. I said “ok” and hung up. And now he’s after the remaining real estate of the family, because he deserves it all. After all, I was a problem he had to solve for all those years, and it’s only fair if he got something for his trouble.
And then, as I was prodded from above, I started looking into this, to see what they are trying to tell me, and so here we are.
Initially, I was extremely reluctant to blame him for anything other than faking spiritual work instead of actually getting himself sorted out properly, the way I did. That part of his failure was obvious and undeniable. However, I tended to hold him completely blameless for everything before that, until I dug through my oldest memories with enough detail to understand how everything changed for the worse when he was born. I once told him, when he made me angry by lying and being a douchebag, that all the worst things in my life lead down to him as the root cause, but I couldn’t later remember why I thought that, only that it felt like an absolute truth that managed to break free despite my intent to deny it. And indeed, when he was born, it’s as if he produced some pheromone or astral field that affected the environment in ways that create an imperative to protect him and destroy me. It’s not what one would normally expect, when a younger kid is born and the older one feels neglected. No, this wasn’t merely neglect, this was violence that stopped short of murder only because my parents were afraid of prison. They would have killed me and thrown the body out to rot without a second thought if they could get away with it. The savage brutality of it was so incredible, that I was too shocked to think about the contrast it made to the first five years of my life, when everything was perfectly normal. His birth tripped a switch that turned a normal situation into a nightmare of violence and neglect. I was constantly made to feel like an unwanted spare, someone that needs to disappear to make them all happy. Even when I was much older, I was constantly told I was a burden, a drain on resources, and they can’t wait for me to finally leave. Interestingly, they told none of that to my brother, “because he was younger”. When I finally managed to get enough cash to rent a small apartment and left, the first reaction my father had was to get angry because I was planning to leave behind his back, and he’s now done with me and will finally throw me out. My answer: “you can’t throw me out because I’m leaving”. Result: surprised Pikachu face.
One would think they would just switch the abuse to the younger brother, but that never happened. It wasn’t his turn to be told he’s a parasite who will be thrown out to the streets. No, he was gifted the family apartment. Everybody treated him with protective kindness. But at that point, at least I was out of reach, and whatever any of them wanted to tell me in order to hurt me, I no longer gave a fuck, because I had much more important things to deal with, such as teaching students, writing my first book, and trying to figure out where money will come from, which wasn’t obvious.
It’s the part of the story I never intended to tell, but I figured that it needs to be done, because if I don’t tell the truth, others will make up lies, as they always did. I can’t convince anyone that my story is the truth, but, unlike my brother who is a lying back-stabbing cunt, I tell things as they are. It is the best attempt of straightforward recollection and interpretation of raw memories that I can manage. It’s incomplete, because a complete version would be a thick, traumatic book nobody should ever read because they would end up with brain damage. I don’t want to do that to anybody.
There’s only one important thing I omitted, and that’s my first failed attempt to figure out my true identity from before this life, which overlapped with the increasing violence of my parents’ hatred, until the point where I gave up on myself altogether. Some parts of it are interesting because of how close I got to figuring things out; all I lacked was a few right books and it would have clicked. Unfortunately, it was not to be, and despair swallowed all my efforts. So, yoga was only my second attempt at self-realisation. I wonder now whether I would have succeeded to figure things out, had he never been born, and had my spirit not been transformed adversely by all the violence and humiliation. I can only shrug, because I did get a second chance at it, and I was more successful than anyone likely thought possible, so I don’t really have a right to complain.
The interesting thing is, my early memories are accompanied by a calm, meditative state that I regained only since I started the practice of yoga. For all intents and purposes, I was normal in my first five years, and then again since I was 20. In between, I was beaten down into a trauma-induced psychosis that almost ended my life before it attained any semblance of purpose, and I have my brother and my parents to thank for it. Truly, they served Satan well. He’s not here anymore to give them their reward, so tough luck.
So, now my mother is dead and recycled in hell, my father is playing a role of a good Catholic, and my brother is trying to fulfill his dream of owning the nest and destroying the spare hatchling, for all the good it will do him, now that none of it matters anymore.
You can now rightly point out that this doesn’t look like a story of someone who was fucked up, learned yoga and attained enlightenment; it looks like a story of formation of a tulku of an already enlightened being that was interrupted by Satan’s efforts and almost failed, where the role of yoga was to repair the damage caused by that interruption, rather than elevate a lower being’s consciousness into the realm of possibility of initiation. If so, you would be right, but that cat left the bag even before I wrote the most recent book. 🙂
And yes, I also take pictures of daisies. 🙂
