It’s a strange thing writing these chapters, but considering the consequences of deeper awakening and the loss of desire that may result, it’s best this be done now.
My life was ordinary and had nothing to do with spirituality or meditation until my 16th year. I was born in 1992 in Los Angeles, California to a Thai mother and a white American father who’d met as co-workers at a hospital in the city. My father worked as a respiratory therapist and my mother as an EKG technician. My first memory was of the 1994 earthquake. I don’t remember the earthquake itself, but just remember sleeping outside and neighbors coming to give us blankets that morning. When my father married my mom he married the whole family. Everyone began living under the same roof. I grew up with my mom, dad, younger sister, grandma, aunt, uncle, his girlfriend and later two cousins. We watched movies on VHS in those days and the majority of our time was spent playing outside.
Thai was my first language. My first exposure to Buddhism was at a Thai summer school for kids at a Buddhist temple called Wat Thai in North Hollywood, California which was established in the early 70s as the first Thai Theravada Buddhist temple in California. My sister and I were the only not full Thai kids at the school so the bullying was severe. It was there I got into my first fights. Rage and isolation were born. The Thai kids told me everyday I’d never be one of them and that my blood was impure. One morning, I lost it in the classroom on one of the kids after losing in a game of cards. I smashed his face into the ground and I remember still how out of control my emotions were. As a kid I always felt I wasn’t smart enough and was continuously in want of acceptance. I remember in second grade when the end of the year standardized testing came, I had so much anxiety I couldn’t understand the questions I was reading. Nothing made sense so I just looked over my shoulder, cheated and copied my classmates answers. At that time up until I was 15 or so I was a kleptomaniac. I stole anything and everything I could get my hands on.
I was behind in my ability to read and write English so it was suggested I not focus on speaking or learning Thai anymore. There was an English learning program for kids that was popular so with that and my dad’s help, the summer going into third grade my reading comprehension and writing improved. In 3rd grade I received some minor reward for writing, which I was surprised by. In 4th grade for whatever reason, I couldn’t understand the math that was being taught. My day dreaming was extremely active and I had difficulty focusing on subjects I didn’t understand. My Dad brought home the Harry Potter series one day that year. I devoured those books. I never was really able to enjoy fiction after Harry Potter, but the series made me a life long reader. Today I doubt most kids even read Instagram captions. I was fortunate to have been part of a saved generation of readers.
Math was like a foreign language to me. I missed an entire 26 homework assignments or so which landed me in the lowest ranked 5th grade class the following year. In 5th grade I got into some more fights at school. Most I lost, some I won. The summer either going into 5th grade or coming out, I was hand cuffed and detained by security at a department store for theft. I was placed in a room while the loss prevention officer wrote up a report on me who then called my Dad to come pick me up. In hindsight, I think the guy attempted to make it sound more serious than it was, so I definitely thought for a minute I was a ten year old on his way to jail. Dad got me and we drove home. He was silent the whole car ride. He walked me to my room and I really thought he’d disown me, but instead he asked me “did you think I wouldn’t love you anymore?”
Which is exactly what I’d been thinking the whole time. I started crying and sobbed out a “yes.” He crouched down and with his green eyes, big beard and Marlboro reds on his breath, looked at me and said “son I will always love you no matter what you do” and then gave me a hug, which was followed up with “but you’re grounded until further notice.” That was my first encounter with compassion and unconditional love. Since I was a thief I rummaged through drawers often and one day going through his, I found a stash of crack pipes. I didn’t know what they were, but I sensed immediately something was wrong with him and bad about what I’d found. Underneath the stash of all the pipes, the smell of tar and crumbled aluminum foil was a picture of me in 1st grade. Holding that picture, my heart broke.
I began to notice more and more all the fighting between my parents. Daily fights. My dad never raised his voice at my mother, but wouldn’t curb or quit his drug use. Around this time I was accidentally exposed to my Dad’s porn. I’d had somewhat of a sexual experience earlier with a female babysitter in first grade. She was an older girl. I was more or less obsessed with sexual thoughts after that even though I had instigated the interaction to begin with. I did well in school up to 7th grade since it was tied into the whole approval from parents and peers thing. At the beginning of 8th grade, my Dad transfered me to another middle school to ensure I’d go to the better of two high schools in my hometown. Since things weren’t stable at home I projected security onto my friends at school. We’d do the 2.5 mile walk home together everyday and hang for another hour afterwards. One day on the drive to school he told me I’d be moving to another. I checked out after that and stopped giving a shit about any scholastic commitments and endeavors I had an older friend at the time who was a bad influence and taught me everything about being cool. So I followed suit and at 12 years old my life in smoking weed, popping pills, drinking, chasing girls and skateboarding began.
Growing up in that part of the San Fernando Valley my closest friends were all Asian and Mexican. I noticed their families actually went on trips and did things together and how their dads would take them camping or to the Grand Canyon. I couldn’t believe it. It blew my mind that people got to spend time with their Dads. As a teenager I remembered how my Dad was more present in the past. In high school entire months, even a year passed where we barely spoke with each other. He was deeply depressed and addicted to meth and porn. At the time I blamed him for that.
I fell in love with my first real girlfriend when I was 14 and snuck out more or less every night for the first half of 9th grade to spend time with her. I barely slept at night so would sleep at school all through first and second period. I got in a fight with a guy who kicked my ass in 9th grade. I decided to learn kickboxing after that, which was a good outlet for the rage I was dealing with. In 10th grade I started selling pot and ecstasy. That year I broke my best friend's ribs in a fight with my right knee. I was arrested for and charged with misdemeanor theft. I had a probation officer and sold drugs in the court mandated after school juvenile education programs and was arrested and cited for other minor offenses like curfew and underage possession of alcohol. My high school had a 2yr foreign language requirement that needed to be fulfilled. I failed Spanish 1 twice and also failed American Sign Language. So no longer being eligible to graduate, I dropped out of high school in 11th grade at 16 and convinced my dad to put me in a home schooling program that would still get me a diploma.
Home schooling gave me more time to sell. So I made use of the time. I started bringing in $500 a day, sometimes even 1k through ecstasy. With the arrests that happened earlier in the year and the year before, I started to experience rampant and consistent paranoia. One night while alone I ate 3.5 grams of golden cap mushrooms. Everything was fine until I went into the bathroom and looked in the mirror. My eyes turned black and eternities of screams filled the room. I was swallowed by inescapable horror and in that moment my spiritual life began.
Enter the Shadow
“to be touched by a demon is to be touched by the backhand of God.”
—Vanessa Penny Dreadful
My eyes turned black and a cacophony of screaming came from every direction. Hell Hounds were snarling, clawing and banging against the bathroom door. My mind entered non-locality and began experiencing multiple realities simultaneously. I saw, became and was every person that touched those mushrooms. I became the smuggler, the gun, the tied up woman being thrown in a ditch and the bullets that ended her life. Floors upon floors upon floors of endless screaming. I was taken to the pyramids of the ancient Aztec world and experienced the dark power the shamans received from ritual sacrifice. I was shown how at the moment of death, in a ritual sacrifice, there is an immense amount of psychic energy that is released. I saw how that energy was harvested as food by inter-dimensional non-human malevolent intelligences and in return “power” would be conferred upon the shaman priest class. The whole enterprise of ritualistic sacrifice was fueled by a hidden reality of ancient demons. I experienced the ritual sacrifices from the perspectives of the killer, the killed and the malevolent beings feeding on both.
I suffered psychic trauma from what occurred. The experience was so intense and so dark I became fearless in regard to spiritual and occult phenomena. Having been consumed by evil in that hell of human sacrifice and psychosis, I drowned in my own screams until I couldn’t scream anymore. I was dismembered, killed, sacrificed. I experienced the horror of my heart being ripped out and held beating in front of me again and again and again. I received the dark side.
After countless forevers of screaming abyss, my consciousness phased back to the bathroom. I was still standing and staring in the mirror. I didn’t look or feel like myself. I stepped into the shower and looked down at my hands and arms as they turned to scales while all human emotion left me. My mind went quiet and a voice spoke to me. I’d never heard anything so horrible or so evil in my life. I then became an ancient reptile consciousness and all I could think of was wanting to eat people. To rip them apart and sadistically enjoy drinking every ounce of their suffering. There was no love, no compassion, no empathy. Only cold sadism. By the time I’d stepped out of the shower my ordinary consciousness was beginning to set back in. A couple hours later I was feeling normal again and decided thoroughly to rid my life of every wrong. I gave away my remaining stock of drugs and began a journey of consciousness exploration. I wanted more than anything to understand what happened to me that night. Where did I go? How was it possible? I didn’t believe in demons so how was it possible to become possessed by one?
Every question was fueled by a yearning to know more about altered states of consciousness. A deep interest, obsession and fascination with lucid dreaming, shamanism and out of body experiences arose. I began to read everything I could on the subject and within a short period was able to enter dreams consciously.