30 Days To A New Life- Day 13

Dennis Rodriguez is in:
The Next Top Spiritual Author Competition
Click link to Vote: http://www.nexttopauthor.com/profile.cfm?aid=1005

There are so many places I want to go with The Superman Effect. It is my quest, but it is also the quest of all. I see the mythological hero’s journey; shedding the skin of the old serpent and touching the transcendent, but I also see modern thought from books like Mindsight or Blink, revealing the moment of personal transformation. I believe history, however grim, has much to teach us about whether there are movements afoot towards a collective moment when everything changes: The assasination of Archduke Ferdinand, Pearl Harbor, Woodstock, 9/11, 12/21/2012. As I read about the moment when everything changed in lives of influential people, I keep coming back to one word: Mystery.

“This cannot be real.” As a child I thought this thought all too often. How could I live out an existence where the most dramatic moments were always filled with conflict instead of happiness? I knew that my dad was hurting and that the yelling was a way to release his many years of pain. There was nothing I could do about us being in the line of fire except to withdraw deep into my inner world, searching for freedom amidst fear. I don’t think my father knew how destructive and scary yelling was, especially when directed towards our mother. She did her share of yelling but it was not the same. The man had the physical strength and so the fear that yelling would escalate to violence was always present and always scary.

I looked forward to the moment when a director would yell “cut” and my family would reveal themselves as actors in a movie designed just for me. “This cannot be real.” “What if it is real?” I had to believe that I was on this earth to play and have fun, not to worry about the safety of my mother and sisters. Growing up in the Bronx with news about gang violence, the Son of Sam or rampant drug abuse was frightening enough, was there no place where I can find peace?

I would head to the basement of our home and find peace in retreats of quiet and solitude. There was a peculiar dynamic in these moments of isolation: they typically revealed mysteries that intrigued me enough to attempt to unlock.

My mind has always been curious about mystery. “How could Jesus be my brother and God at the same time? How could he rule with an iron rod and look to be in so much pain nailed to the cross? What is air made out of? Who taught me to breathe? If I dig deep enough, will I really get to China?”

As I lay with my toy soldiers alone in our basement, I feel a pull to look out the 2 ft square window leading up to the ground floor. That is when I saw her. A woman dressed in all black, running towards our back yard. She stops in her tracks to turn and look at me: “Please, don’t follow me.” I could go out the back basement door but that would place me right in the middle of her spooky drama. I decided instead, to go up stairs and look out the ground floor window overlooking my back yard. She was nowhere to be found. I was scared, but it was a different kind of fear. Not of the type that lived with me as familiar broken glass, slamming doors or high pitched screams. It was a fear of the mystery of it all and it was exciting. I had never felt excitement in the presence of fear. Who was she? Where did she go? Why did I see her? What if I would have gone out the back door or spoken to her? What might have happened next?

The next morning I decided to go out into the back yard to see if there were any signs of her visitation. As I scoured the yard, I came across a piece of dirt that seemed less compact than the rest. I started digging and then I found what I was searching for. It was a rock about the size of a human heart with foreign symbols painted on it. I quickly ran inside my house and showed the rock to my mother and sisters. My mother immediately showed it to our tenant who lived in a small apartment adjacent to our basement. The tenant was into Santeria or “the way of the saints”- a mixture of Roman Catholicism and worship of African deities. “This is not good.” she said. “It is a curse and we must get rid of it. Get me a paper bag. We will put it in the bag and take it to a busy street. I will drop it and we will start walking back. You must not look back. Whatever you do, you must not look back.” I felt an unfamiliar thrill go through my body. “I have uncovered something that some say should have remained hidden. Can I do it? Can I get rid of it and not look back?”

Ever since that day, I have been looking for more mystery to be revealed in my life. I have been searching for the moment when I dig up the object of my fear, dispose of it and do not look back. The moment when a new path is charted that is good and full of blessings not curses.

This moment has one purpose: To teach us that fear is an illusion and that the object does not exist. What happens next in the life of one who arrives at this moment is glorious. A new being emerges and a clear vision of service is revealed that is in flow with the forces of the universe. WE are revealed: the royal WE that has as its birthright divine consciousness. This moment brings with it the recognition that we are the creators of our reality and that the time has come to operate from a place of knowing without attention to the vacillations of the human mind.

This book is about the moment. When does it arrive? Can we speed up its arrival? What happens to a person during the moment? Are we headed towards a collective moment when evolution takes a quantum leap and we serve a greater purpose of a grander scale?

I am not alone in this quest for the moment when everything changes. The conscious mind is not aware of all the motions of the universe, but all humans have an insatiable yearning for a fuller integration of mystery into our everyday reality….