My Faith

By Romana 12/03/2014

When I started elementary school in 1948, I learned to hate story problems.  Trying to define faith would have been worse, if not impossible; I felt like an odd feather buffeted upon an illogical wind.  My life had been characterized by constantly trying to make sense of forces I could not comprehend.  When kids tried to impose their religious beliefs on me, often with an unhealthy dose of righteousness, I viewed it with total disbelief.  I guess I was stuck in my left brain and had no connection to any intuitive concepts whatsoever.  Faith was left at the starting gate.

I was not devoid of interests.  I liked dinosaurs and astronomy.  As soon as I learned to read, I checked out every science fiction book from the library not labeled for adults only.  I wanted to write science fiction stories at an early age; my earliest attempts were devoid of any human interest.  I had developed faith in science, and I thought that science could answer every question.

Teachers would often yell at me for no reason I could discern, and other kids would bully or play tricks on me.  My father and I did not get along, and I felt unloved and purposeless in life, but I did not think about having a failure of faith.  This is the lot of many autistic children.

I developed a death wish, the opposite of faith, which I have only recently overcome.  I was told to act very male, but I gained no kind of male privilege by doing so.  At age 10, I developed an interest in dressing like a girl, but it was so inconvenient and embarrassing that I suppressed it for another 37 years.  Crossdressing was also illogical and inexplicable in my science-based faith system.  I never dreamed that crossdressing would eventually improve my life.

After I graduated from high school, I had to admit that I liked girls.  Pursuing girls seemed logical, but actually getting a date turned out to be nearly impossible.  Running on testosterone without any social skills did not work very well; yet, this desire would turn out to be my key to liberation from my ignorance of the meaning of life.  It was a new kind of faith: having a woman in my life became necessary for my well-being, which was definitely not science-based.

I got a degree in physics; then I went into the Air Force, because I got a draft notice.  For the two months prior to leaving for basic training, I had constant panic attacks, because I had no faith that I could tackle military service.  I was chided frequently for worrying too much.  I was not being cowardly; I was terrified.  When I tell people I served three and a half years in the Air Force as an autistic man, they cringe, wondering how I managed to survive it.  Even after military service, when I got my first civilian job, I was clueless how to do almost anything that was not technical.

I met my late wife, Carolyn, in 1979 on a lonely-hearts radio program.  There wasn’t much logic on my part here, since she was a Mormon, and she had two children in their early teens.  When we were married a year later, I thought I finally solved all my problems, but my life journey had just begun.  I had a lot of issues with obstinate behavior and anger management.  I was really desperate, so I started crossdressing, thinking that this underlying desire might get me out the box I felt trapped in.  I never caught on that my stepson was using my bad behavior, and even my good behavior, to sabotage me behind my back. 

When Carolyn had a bad fall and never came home again, any faith I had crashed.  I had some faith that stepson was my friend in need, but he trapped her in a hand-picked adult family home and got me legally banned.  Once she was isolated, Carolyn likely died of a broken heart.  I felt destitute, especially since I believed I had somewhat contributed to my wife’s death through my ignorance.

I had had thoughts of suicide throughout my marriage, sensing, but not knowing for certain, about the dark deeds of my stepson.  The day before my wife’s funeral, my faith had bottomed out, but Carolyn’s Mormon bishop stopped by and prevented me from killing myself.  Did I have a karmic relationship to my wife’s bishop that I don’t understand, or was this a total accident?  I felt cheated from death for several weeks, until I returned to my meditation practice early in 2011.

I have written much about the insight I have gained from meditation.  I examined my subconscious mind and realized that I was persecuting myself, thinking all reality was picking on me.  My developing faith was constantly challenged by the ineptness of institutions that were supposed to protect me.  It turned out that courts and lawyers would not come to my rescue, unlike in the plots of popular television dramas.

My stepson had forged a phony will in the name of my beloved Carolyn, who was no longer around to stop these actions.  I had to fight the legal system, the State, and King County for relief from my stepson’s oppression.  Before she died, I had tried to rescue Carolyn from her captivity on a couple occasions, by taking her to a different adult family home, but I was always stymied by my stepson’s lawyer’s legal tactics.  Unethical legal practices were trumping justice.  I thought I had failed, but my suffering brought me enlightenment, and it is still ongoing.

I have developed faith, but not faith in deities or other external forces.  I have faith that the processes and forces that created me are a benevolent form of non-corporeal intelligence.   It is like the perfect parent practicing tough love: when things go well, they are not rewards; when things go badly, they are not punishments.  It is my job in life to intuit this in a non-conceptual manner.  I doubt that neither I nor others can never adequately figure any of this out.  Tibetan Buddhist scholars have produced the largest volume of scripture on this subject in the world; none of it really makes much sense.

My life situation has improved, but it could be a lot better.  I am financially well off, but I live alone and may never get another partner.  I still live on the fringe of our culture, as an autistic transgender woman.  I have mostly overcome Asperger’s syndrome and developed improved social skills.  I also have a sense of ethics, integrity, and fair play, but I think our society places too much emphasis on obedience to culture standards.

My faith allows me to withstand all the negativity that comes my way, without any hope of it going away during my life.  I have developed a sense of how reality actually works, but my insights have mystified my friends.  To really understand what has been revealed to me, one would benefit through having a meditation practice, since meditation allows one to calm the mind and peer into the subconscious. 

None of this overwhelms me anymore, and I no longer fear death; it might even be the happiest moment of my life.  I have seen how karmic forces have ridden me, when I should be riding them.  It is tricky to discuss me as having two parts: my body and conscious mind; and my karma, soul, or subconscious mind.  I received my karma at birth, but I think it was heavily damaged due to excesses in its previous lives.  It was sort of like a spoiled brat, which wanted its way or death.   While everyone has some fight or flight reactions in their personalities, mine was way over the top.

I feel that when I die, my conscious mind will disappear, but my karma will go on.  Unlike in its previous lives, I have finally tamed some of my karma. By doing so, I have gained a type of immortality, since my karma and I have become more of a unity.  This is the power of meditation supplying faith.

This might seem morbid to some, but my discipline has brought me joy, and I am fascinated by the human comedy I see unfolding around me.  Many are obsessed with material pursuits that are not really justified.  I see that Carolyn and I were karmic soul-mates in the past, and that our karma will be reunited in the future.  The ferocity of my stepson’s attack on me indicates it was also karmic, since our interaction scarcely justified all his anger.  The situation was more like suitors fighting over a woman.

The cycles of birth, life, and death have been going on throughout eternity.  I am not going to triumph over this process; rather, I have learned to work with it.  This might seem dismal to most people, since there is no promise of any idyllic life or after-life.  There is only what really is, without the filters of rose-colored glasses.

There is a down-side to this kind of faith, since I no longer believe that suicide, as my life-long escape clause, could actually work.  It would be so nice to kill myself and gain eternal rest, but that is only a fantasy.  I think I have broken my karma’s chain of suicides.  Its next life should be quite auspicious.  I have also lost my naïve kind of innocence.  I now understand that it pays to be observant about the details of one’s life.  I am still unraveling many of my life’s tangled threads.

Maybe my karma has been purified enough for rebirth in paradise; however, I have made a bodhisattva vow for my karma to return to earth to help liberate others from suffering.  Buddhist scripture implies that there will be an intermediate rebirth in the Tushita Heaven, for a kind of bodhisattva boot camp.  That’s a fantasy that remains to be experienced.  I want to remind the reader that I am not implying that I get to live again, only that my achievements might live on.

Not long ago, I vehemently proclaimed that science-based faith was the only way.  I now believe things that I once thought impossible.  Enlightenment has changed everything.