Chapter One: I Exist

I EXIST & MY WORLD FALLS APART, SIMULTANEOUSLY

I EXIST. It’s what I kept coming back to, the only truth that wouldn’t crumble under force. I was thirty years old. The walls I’d so carefully built around myself were caving in. With one phone call, I knew without a doubt that this was the end of life as I knew it. On the horizon I saw a tidal wave of chaos headed directly toward me. I scrambled in search of the internal truths that might serve as my life raft. I knew only a few things for sure: I was not my thoughts. I was not my body. I was not the stories I told myself. I was so many things at once and yet nothing at all.

Somehow as a young child I remembered the truth of the I EXIST. It was simpler then. Society hadn’t yet infiltrated me with the “should” or “supposed to” of life. I was four years old, taking shelter under the kitchen table, wearing nothing but white underwear when I realized it. My parents were in the living room, rehearsing a familiar scene in which my dad was the perpetrator and my mother the victim. I heard the scene play out from the other room. It felt good to have the protection of the thick oak table over my head.

I distinctly remember gazing upon my half-naked body, the body of a child. Funny—I did not feel like a child. In fact, I felt ancient. This was not my body. It must belong to someone else. Nope, I was in it. That I knew. These emotions of fear, anxiety, and anger at the situation were not mine either. Those emotions belonged to this human body I inhabited. Another lifetime. I have been here before. Many times. More than my four-year-old brain could count. Not in this exact time and space, but with these same souls, playing out these same roles. Only the scenery had changed. This was but one of the realities I existed in.

The realization of the I EXIST calmed me instantly. I was the fixed point in the many realities swirling around me. I could expand from the I EXIST: from the single point in the body of consciousness into the experiences of the human before contracting back into the single point where my soul resided. My arguing parents, the unpleasant emotions—they were all simply human details, a tiny drop in the bucket of the vast experience of the soul. I realized none of my current so-called reality mattered. All that mattered was the I EXIST. There was the first clue, the first truth that was going to get me through this.

I almost forgot the I EXIST but found my way back to it in the face of imminent disaster. Life crises tend to have that effect—sending us back into the knowingness of who we truly are, what we are made of. The childhood memories I had worked so hard to bury flooded back into my awareness, serving as the proverbial breadcrumbs leading me back to the path of the soul—the one I had avoided for all these years.

As a four-year-old child sitting under the kitchen table, I wondered why all the people around me were so intent to live in just one reality when the possibilities were endless. Like me, they dreamed at night, existing in other realms, only to watch it wash away with the daylight. Those dreamlands were no less real than this one. If we existed in so many realities, why were adults so intent to focus only on this singular human life, which to me seemed more of an illusion than the others? Why could they not see what existed beyond?

At the age of seven, I decided to test my theory that realities—or dimensions—could intersect. At the time, turtles fascinated me. My bookshelves were lined with figurines of the mysterious creatures. In true child form, I begged and pleaded with my parents for a pet turtle. I wanted to experience the real thing. They would not budge, so I decided I would call one into my life. That night I entered a vivid dream in which I spoke to a turtle who introduced himself as Mortimer. I noticed he held the demeanor of a professor.

In the dream, I asked if he would like to come live with me. He said yes and that he would like to visit but did not want to live inside the house in a cage. He gently explained to me that turtles were meant to live in the wild. I agreed to his terms, and he told me in the dream he would arrive in three days’ time. Three days for a child can feel like three weeks to an adult. Time drug on until it was the day Mortimer was going to show up.

That summer morning, after eating cereal in front of television cartoons, I walked outside with my dog, a dopey blond cocker spaniel named Loopy. Together we rounded the backyard. Loopy used his nose to search.

“There he is!” I yelled at Loopy. He gazed at me in confusion.

A six-inch box turtle slowly made his way through the lush Saint Augustine grass carpeting the backyard, stopping to chew on a blade every now and then. I curiously watched him and wondered if the turtle existed in my imagination or as an actual creature in physical form. I found it terribly difficult to tell the difference at this age; the lines between the realities were too faint to decipher.

I crept up behind him to see if I could touch his patterned shell. When I pressed my finger down, it was hard, and I traced along the ridges of the shell’s patterns. The turtle quickly retracted his head and feet when he felt the vibration of my touch. Full of anticipation, I held myself still, holding my breath and waiting for his head to come back out again. I needed to see his eyes to tell if this turtle was Mortimer. Eventually, his head and feet came back out. His golden eyes seemed to glow as he stared directly at me.

“Mortimer!” I was ecstatic. As I yelled, he retracted into his shell again. I scolded myself for scaring him. I left him in the backyard and ran inside to tell my mom.

“Mom. Mortimer is here. Can I keep him?”

She shrugged her shoulders. If it seemed weird to her, she did not show it. After some thought, my mom guaranteed Mortimer a spot in the small, gated backyard garden. I liked the garden because it contained a large, smooth rock, which served as a perfect perch for a seven-year-old girl. I lifted him carefully by the shell to place him in the garden, where I would refresh his water bowl and feed him apples and the fat trimmed off dinner steaks. He had a buffet of plants to choose from as well.

Each day, I went into the tiny garden and perched on the rock to converse with Mortimer. Mainly, he talked while I listened, and I only stopped him to ask a few clarifying questions. One day, Mortimer explained to me that turtles—not just land turtles but sea turtles as well—were the keepers of wisdom here on Earth. He said turtles stored the wisdom of the ages in the patterns of their protective shells, and the mother and father turtles passed down sacred codes of wisdom to the baby turtles, so the information remained on Earth. Mortimer said ancient cultures knew this and, as a result, highly regarded the animals.

I wondered when and where that bit of knowledge had been lost between then and now. It was 1988 in the suburbs of Houston, Texas; we lived in one of the boxes lining our neighborhood street. As Mortimer told the story, I felt a long way away from home. An overwhelming homesickness caused my stomach to churn. The feeling made no sense to me—I was sitting on a rock in my own backyard.

I reverted back to the safety of my imagination. Delighted to learn of turtles living in the ocean, I imagined them playing in the waves and gliding through the currents of a clear blue sea—something I must experience in real life one day.
Mortimer cleared his throat several times to gain my attention back. Later, adults told me my inability to focus was some sort of human disorder called attention deficit disorder, or ADD. Once Mortimer pulled me back into the present moment, he became serious, explaining that I, too, held codes within me containing long-forgotten knowledge.

“Just as turtles are the keepers of wisdom on Earth, you are a keeper of truth,” he said, attempting to simplify so I could understand. I stared at him, confused.

“Truths kept secret for thousands of years,” he added.

Then Mortimer began to speak with me in images and sensations, which were much easier for me to understand. He showed me certain truths existed inside me, in my soul. In my third-eye vision, I viewed swirling patterns of numbers and symbols, light made of colors most human eyes could not identify and therefore had no names, and energetic vibrations I could only sense and not see, which expanded in all directions from the center of me, from the I EXIST. Whoa. I felt dizzy and steadied myself on the rock.

“Lauren, one day you will share these truths,” Mortimer said.

On some level, I believed him. This was the wise Professor Mortimer speaking. I trusted him but was reluctant to claim I held any sort of knowledge. I was only a child. Who was going to listen to a child? What did I really know anyway? I felt overwhelmed—almost panicked on the human level. At the soul level, I felt myself sinking into his words and images, swimming through the energetic currents Mortimer tended to radiate like I imaged sea turtles would in the ocean.

Then a question popped into my head. If the mom and dad turtles passed on codes containing wisdom to the baby turtles, where were the parents who passed on the sacred codes holding these truths to me? It wasn’t my human parents, to whom I felt no real connection at the time. And why was this all a secret? Had it not been safe to share? I wondered this but did not ask; I knew Mortimer was not going to tell me.

“Some things we must realize on our own,” he told me many times during our visits.

The intense reluctance to exist in this physical world I felt before Mortimer showed up ran through my body again. My imaginary world felt more welcoming and natural. I felt freer outside the physical body. At times, I felt ashamed to be living in human flesh, which seemed icky. I pushed the current thoughts and confusion aside. I really wanted to go swimming with the sea turtles. That night in a dream, I swam with them through a bright blue ocean filled with reefs of neon-green kelp that we dined on.

One morning, I walked outside to see Mortimer. He was gone. I imagined him carrying a stick with a red bag tied on the end, like the ones hobos carried in cartoons, as he moved on to the next blond-haired, blue-eyed girl to spread the wisdom of the ages. Keeping good on my word, I didn’t go out to search for him.

None of my childhood experiences seemed strange to me. Sensing my soul and dreaming turtles into life, imaginative play and interacting with energies without physical form felt more natural than the flat mental logic and heavy emotions I witnessed around me. I engaged in long conversations with trees seemingly holding more knowledge than my parents. I played with energies appearing in every color of the rainbow and beyond, colors that danced with me around the backyard. When a “color” would show up, I communicated back to the color with images rather than words, speaking to it in its native language. The language of imagery contained so much more information and sensations than limited human words—words in which I often switched the letters around as I tried to write them on paper.

I don’t even think my parents noticed any of my highly engaged interactions in our suburban backyard. They most likely wrote it off as childhood play, and because I was an only child, they had nothing to compare it to. They were too busy playing a strange game. My dad went to a place called “work” early in the morning and came home late at night, grouchy. He often left with a suitcase during the week, and when he returned on the weekends, he brought me little shampoo bottles from the hotels where he stayed. Later I learned he sold safety supplies to corporations so their workers wouldn’t get hurt.

My mom was like a cat: sleeping most of the time. As I got older, I realized she found life disappointing and most of the time feared her own shadow. I watched her try to make peace with being a housewife despite her affinity for writing, reading, and teaching literature. Regardless of her sincere devotion to being my mother, I sensed she never quite got over feeling her gifts and her life were being wasted. I understood, but her forced smiles made my insides hurt nevertheless.

I didn’t mind that my dad was always gone and that my mom slept so much. I disliked it more when they were together, the anger, sadness, and disappointment between them palpable. Their absence afforded me hours alone with the oak tree that shaded more than half the backyard. I often buried pennies by its roots as tokens of our friendship. Beings assuming all sorts of shapes and forms would come to visit with us as well. They all spoke the language of images and sensations. I found comfort in that. I especially liked the fairies appearing in flashes of light.

It wasn’t until I was eight years old that I learned I needed to hide who I truly was from the people around me—not only the adults around me, but also my peers at Wilson Elementary School. In third grade, Mrs. Banks asked us to stand in front of the class and share what made us special or unique. Some kids talked about their dogs, siblings, or favorite television shows. When I stood up to speak, I had nothing planned. It just poured out of me.

What made me different and unique, I explained, was I truly cared about the evolution of Earth—both its inhabitants and the nature I loved so much. I actually cared about things beyond my own situation and myself, I added. It was honest. I had noticed for quite some time people around me, adults and children, seemed completely absorbed in their immediate, physical surroundings and preoccupied with their current human thoughts and emotions. None of them seemed to see or sense the interconnectedness of everything, and it bothered me immensely. Why could they not see what I saw? Why could they not hear what I heard? Why could they not sense the way I could sense?

As I shared this, I began to cry and felt a massive expansion in my energetic field. It filled the classroom. I was used to having these experiences in my own backyard or talking with Mortimer—but in front of a classroom of eight-year-olds…fuck. The teacher and my fellow students were speechless. There was no applause from the audience like there had been for Billy, who before my turn had shared he was special for playing first base. I made my way back to the rug where the other children were sitting cross-legged and hung my head in shame.

“Why couldn’t you pretended to be normal?” my human self asked my soul self, who was beginning to identify herself by the name Sar’h, which she said was the Hebrew version of the American Sarah. I usually only spoke with her in private, but I was raging, and it couldn’t wait.

“Please don’t do that to me again,” I said firmly. “You don’t know how hard this is!”

I wanted to curl into a ball and disappear. An awkward silence that felt like it lasted an eternity loomed over me. The teacher called on Courtney next. She stood up confidently and said, “I am special because I am adopted.” The entire class erupted in laughter because everyone knew she had two older brothers, and they all looked alike. I witnessed the energy of the room around me shift, and I felt better. Then it occurred to me I might be the only child in the classroom—probably in the whole school—who physically saw laughter dissolve discomfort, the only child aware of the energetic dynamics of the classroom.

As I witnessed the energy of the classroom shift, feeling entirely alien and alone, I vowed then and there to never share from the soul space. I never wanted to feel that kind of shame again. It was better to pretend to fit in, although I knew how bad I was at it. This was how I was going to survive in this cruel world. I learned in that moment that as a human you were expected to conform to a set of predetermined social norms. You were allowed some wiggle room to be different, but it couldn’t be too far out there. As a human you were expected to adhere to a pattern of goal setting and accomplishment. I did not understand the rigidity of this behavior. Creation was not a linear process; it did not come from thinking and hard work. I had proved that with my turtle experiment. It made me furious that I was expected to operate in such antiquated ways, that I could not show who I truly was at the soul level. The world around me was maddening. I hated everything. The damage of the experience firmly taught me never to speak of things that did not exist in the physical world again. I cried myself to sleep for several nights after the event.

In hindsight, of course I was wrong about being alone in my abilities and experiences. I found two other former classmates later in life with similar childhood stories. Surely there were many more who never shared with me. But I was eight. I found physical life difficult, especially in the sterile, rule-driven environment of public school, so I easily fell into the illusion of exclusivity. I did not know any better. No one around me spoke of such things.

Shortly thereafter, I asked my parents for a pet gerbil. After I launched a full-lobby strategy with handwritten notes and a presentation, they agreed. My mom and I picked out a soft, brown female at the pet store. I loved the way her whiskers and nose twitched when she stood on her hind legs to look at me from behind the glass. Together, my mom and I picked out a cage, toys, and food and brought her home. I found my mom really loving that day and noticed I was enjoying her company too. We were laughing and joking. She felt like a best friend who never judged me, and it made me smile. Maybe she was not my “real” mother, but she could be an excellent friend.

“What would you like to name her?” my mom asked when we got home.

“I’m going to name her Sar’h,” I said, using the Hebrew pronunciation, which sounded like sa-RA.

“Oh, after your new friend, Sarah?” my mom asked, referring to a new girl in school I was desperate to make friends with.

“Yes,” I lied, knowing she would not understand.

That night I placed Sar’h, the voice of my soul, into the gerbil and that gerbil into a glass cage.

“I’m going to try to be a normal child,” I told her. “I’m on the verge of making new friends, and I cannot risk another embarrassment like I had in Mrs. Banks’s third period. It’s social suicide.”

Sar’h understood and wished me well. I didn’t consciously hear my soul voice again until I was eleven years old, when we put the gray-haired, long-toothed Sarah the gerbil to sleep. The vet explained to me, as tears rolled down my chin, that Sarah’s three-year life-span was much longer than most gerbils’. I didn’t tell him I was not only crying for my gerbil but also because I knew it was time to bring Sar’h, my soul voice, back into my life. It worried me to have to live in two worlds once again. By this time, I had established a tight-knit circle of girlfriends whom I did not want to lose, yet something inside me told me I was ready.

These childhood memories began to light the way back to the path of the soul—my child self educating my thirty-year-old self. There was the memory of the I EXIST—the fixed point of the soul within the body of consciousness. With the memory came the understanding that all human pain and suffering was only a drop in the bucket of the vast experience of the soul, although it might hurt like hell. There was the inner knowing that there were parts of myself I would have to get to know again. The human self was one voice in a complex web that made up SELF. The other major voice, for me, was that of the soul—the wise master within all of us.

I understood, at age thirty, that I needed to invite my soul voice back into the conversation of my life to move forward. The memories brought back the awareness that imagination and dreams were two senses, tools I could use to mold and shape my reality. I held an inner knowing that many more sophisticated senses existed inside me if I could find my way back to the soul. The memories reminded me I possessed an innate ability to work with and interpret energies. As I remembered these abilities, I realized I used these gifts daily—I hadn’t lost the abilities, only the awareness of them. In the memories, I also learned I spoke the language of images and sensations fluently as a child. Like any language you don’t use enough, the translations move into the back of the file folders of awareness. The knowledge does not leave but must be dusted off, and atrophied muscles must be flexed for it to return.

​I also realized every human had access to his or her soul or master voice within, just as I did. It only required consciousness or awareness of SELF to realize the expanded nature of the soul. Everyone had access to these same senses and abilities if they opened themselves up, if they allowed them to flow inward, unfiltered by human thoughts and emotions. That was why it was so maddening to me as a child to learn that people could not see the potentials and possibilities dormant within them. I continued my search for other truths to help me through the impending flood—scanning my memories for any hints, even the slightest, tiniest clue.