It came to me suddenly yesterday, while I was driving, that I was living life pretending to have a whole spirit.

But the truth was that my spirit was broken, and it had been broken my whole life.

The breaking had happened in my last life, the one that had ended in a concentration camp.  My spirit was broken (by the Gestapo?) even before I was put in a camp.

By the end of that life, I was full of hatred.

And this hatred did not suddenly vanish when I was born in this body, but grew instead (“To him that hath shall be given” *).  I ate wrongs, and excreted wrongs—-all with my irrevocably awakened conscience preventing me from exploding or melting down.  Instead I grew a “poison sac” (and perhaps colorful “warning stripes”, like a poison frog has).

Only lately have I come to see all this.  I’m sure that prisons have many inmates similar to me who did melt down or explode.

Now, because it takes so long to prepare one’s being for important transformation, because so many processes have to occur at so many levels, one is lucky (if you can call it that) to have this kind of transformation happen in one lifetime.

I think it helps to be Jewish here: a more patient spirit, perhaps.  Or a broader view.

The bottom line is that I have realized that my spirit has not been whole this lifetime—-not even close.  And that I’ve been running from that, denying it, all this lifetime.

Well, I’ve found the Source of Denial, and, if I choose, I can go on living—-in a seemingly conscienceless world, a world which seems headed for self-destruction.

Hmm.  I wonder what I’ll choose.

      Lou Gottlieb                                          11/11/2020

                    *   Mark 4:25  “For he that hath, to him shall be given: and he that                                        hath not, from him shall be taken, even that which he hath.”