For several years the man that was once depression’s child thought and brooded about the return. The return he had promised to himself those fifty-seven long years ago. The return that now held the key to his very sanity of self; of who he was and who he had become in this his personal journey of life. What bothered him most, of course, was the nagging possibility, quite rational and real and not the least bit remote, that the knowledge and memories he had come to know and held in his mind for so many years might not withstand the test of truth. The cellar visions of his very young childhood, the hidden waking knowledge of past life experiences, the spontaneous knowledge and writing that sometimes just appeared and the searching work he had done over his adult life might not stand the light of open scrutiny. They might well indeed all be sham and figments of his imagination. They might not contain a shred of truth, especially now, in this his late adult reality. A reality shaped by time and life forces he had found far beyond his ability to consciously control. But still he had to know! The truths he had learned, the many difficult and painful truths as well as the easy, fun and enlightening truths, would be suspect and essentially worthless if he could not test his knowledge and memory; and if that knowledge and memory did not withstand the test. Yet the actual truth of the results of such a test could very easily destroy the person he was. For his psyche and self had been built and grown over the years on who he felt he was based on what he learned and lived. To fail The Return test presented the very real risk that his psyche and self, as he knew them, did not exist even in what he thought to be his own reality! That risk was inherent in the very concept of the test. He questioned himself as to whether or not it might be better to just forget the whole idea and finish out his life, now well over half lived, as happily as possible. Forget those childhood visions that might have been nothing more than a fantasy and go on with living. But, and this haunted him as much as the visions and knowledge themselves, how could the three to five year old depression child have had the ability to create such fantasies? If fantasies they were. A child of that age, especially beginning his life in that barren, dry and wind-blown land without the radio and television of today’s environments, had no way to develop the knowledge and information for the detail of those visions. There was no known way that the depression child could have reasonably developed the knowledge to produce such fantasies. No, it was all too real for him. He knew it had happened. He would take the risk as he could not face his dotage and death without at least trying to re-discover and validate, if at all possible, the truth of at least this part of his childhood. Risk to his very self and psyche or not, he had to put not only the knowledge and memories, but the very essence of his self, of who he was, to the test. It not only bothered him, it frightened him… to the foundation of his being. The test itself would be deceptively simple. All he had to do was to revisit the prairie land where he first became aware of himself and his surroundings, and where the earliest visions and knowledge first manifest, and verify the accuracy of his memories. Luckily, he had a few close relatives still alive in that area who had been there when he was born that could provide the “scoring” for this phase of the test. They could verify and validate some of those special things from his memory. Things that had remained crystal clear in his mind although he had not been back to the Colorado prairie in fifty years. Then to find the place where he first awakened to knowledge of a past existence, a place where he felt he had lived before. Find this place and try to verify something, almost anything, from his childhood visions. A place and area that he had finally decided, after figuratively searching the world around, was nearby. At least nearby in terms of a three dimensional physical location, if not in time, to his humble beginnings. A place where his first perception of prior existence knowledge manifest on the trip when he and his family moved west to California. Finding any correlation at all between his memories and this area, which he had never physically visited, would validate that at least the information was real, even if there was no accepted logical explanation for how the depression child came to know it. Contemplating The Return, he remembered the time in 1987 when the four meditation images burned themselves into his conscious memory. How at first the feather image sent him looking further into Egyptian history and hieroglyphics for relevance and additional insight. How after three months of research without significant success he incidentally, for a reason or reasons still beyond his conscious grasp, while perusing the shelves in a book store encountered and bought a book about the Hopi. Upon reading the book he discovered that there is a Hopi clan called the Bear clan. His mind immediately associated the written words with the bear paw symbol from his meditation. He felt the connection! Buying and reading what few additional books he could about the Hopi reinforced his feelings that the land of the Hopi might indeed be the land of his childhood visions. Unfortunately, the books available on the Hopi were devoid of pictures or information that could validate his childhood vision experiences. He knew there would have to be a more specific association to validate that knowledge.
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