The Battle of Armageddon

CHAPTER THIRTY from CAUGHT UP Truth and Metaphor | An Imaginary Tale

The Battle of Armageddon

30

A stroll on a blustery beach in January was not Petra’s cup of tea. Irish roots be damned. The closest she came to the water’s edge that first winter was an occasional cigarette smoked atop a roadside picnic table.

“What was I thinking? It’s fucking cold in the Panhandle.”

Taking one last puff, she wrapped her coat around her shaking limbs and embraced a novel idea.

“I should go back to AA.”

The thought surprised her. It sucked the life from her lungs and caused her heart to race. Twelve-year-old Petra, fists balled up tight, resisted the very notion with all her might.

“Have you lost your mind? You’re going back? Don’t be stupid. We don’t need them. We’re doing just fine.”

Admittedly, everything had been going her way. The entire relocation process was like riding another perfect wave. Sales in her eBay store continued to climb, covering the rent and bills with ease. For the first time since the hotel job, she felt an actual sense of financial security. So, why the sudden compulsion to revisit Alcoholics Anonymous?

The desire persisted and, as wave riding goes, she met a woman named Cindy who introduced her to Monica. She lived on the opposite side of town and called Lila, who picked Petra up and drove her to a meeting.

“This group meets here every morning, seven days a week,” said Lila, opening the door to a local seafood restaurant.

They hurried through a fully stocked bar into the main dining room. It was packed. Boisterous voices competed for attention and filled the space with unrestrained, riotous laughter.

“This set-up is unusual,” said Petra.

“Yeah, I know. You get used to it.”

Aside from the vast array of liquor bottles on prominent display, the atmosphere was reminiscent of her first home group in Boynton Beach. Many members had long-term sobriety and the entire group exhibited a deep concern for the newcomer. An instant sense of belonging replaced her loneliness, a condition she was unaware existed before stepping into the room.

“Today our topic is Step Four,” said the chairperson. “Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.”

Midway through his opening remarks, an intense supernatural energy filled every inch of the restaurant’s interior. It descended in cascading waves, each more powerful than the last, until the veil between dimensions split wide open.

A spectacular array of divine beings materialized along the perimeter walls, pushing the boundaries of the previous enclosure aside. The entities were herculean in stature, seven feet tall at least. Soldiers dressed in Viking armor, fashioned from textiles, leather and brass. Some wore helmets; others carried shields in the crook of their arm. Fully armed, vigilant and prepared for battle, they appeared relaxed and jovial. The safety of an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, no doubt, offered a momentary reprieve from active duty. Their attention shifted from one participant to another. They devised elaborate plans, discussed obstacles that required a workaround, and celebrated the remarkable progress everyone was making.

The warriors laughed and marveled as the members shared their experiences and spun tales wrought with a kaleidoscope of human antics.

“Never a dull moment in a room full of alcoholics,” said one demigod to another.

Clearly, these divine beings loved and devoted themselves to their human counterparts, both individually and as a group.

Petra’s vision, which manifested in a five-second sliver flash, convinced her she was in the right place. She wondered if she would ever tell them what she had seen, but determined it was best to shut her mouth and keep a low profile.

—

The worksheet associated with Step Four is laid out in columns; columns she had filled out on three separate occasions with three different sponsors.

Petra’s exhaustive list of resentments against people, religion, government, society and everything she considered unfair or unbalanced populated the first column.

In the second column, she told the story behind each resentment; a novel redacted into a single sentence.

Before her introduction to this simple process, she had lived her entire life spinning around those first two columns. Her reasons and justifications for her anger with everyone and everything had blossomed over the years. They had grown into elaborate narratives that may or may not have been true. No wonder she was miserable.

In the third column, she wrote an honest appraisal describing her contribution to each resentment. This often required a sponsor’s help, as she was resistant to change, lacked self-awareness, and had little understanding of what it meant to put herself in someone else’s shoes.

Next, in the dreaded fourth column, she listed all her defects of character. The list sparked a new level of conscious awareness, resulting in immediate and revolutionary changes to her personality. It exposed methods of operation, like blaming others, playing the victim and manipulating to get what she wanted; self-defeating behaviors that often re-injured her fragile psyche.

“I’m changing my fucking mind about all of this, effective immediately! No more blaming anyone or anything. This is my life, and I’m one hundred percent responsible for its condition.”

Behavior changes were attainable through vigilant self-discipline. All they required was accountability and practice. Over time, they fell away like a useless, outdated garment that no longer fit. However, the emotionally charged defects, hidden in the recesses of her subconscious mind, resisted all of her best efforts. These were the defects that triggered PTSD episodes, causing her to spin out into self-pity, worry, fear, anxiety and depression.

“What am I missing?”

There was a fifth column she had overlooked; the list of character assets. She did not possess many positive attributes, so why bother? In a desperate attempt to up her game and accommodate the process, she wrote a word that represented the exact opposite of each character defect, creating her first full list of character assets.

To clarify further, she grabbed a blank piece of printer paper and drew a cross. On the top left side, she wrote the word, “Defects.” On the top right, she wrote, “Assets.”

Under each title, she made a list of corresponding words.

To the left side of the cross under “Defects,” she wrote, “Victim, Blame, Hate, Rage, Envy, Discontent, Control, Unworthy, Depression, Anxiety, Guilt and Shame.”

To the right side of the cross under “Assets,” she wrote, “Creator, Praise, Love, Calm, Emulation, Satisfaction, Surrender, Worthy, Joy, Peace, Innocence, and Honor.”

On the top left over the word “Defects,” she wrote, “I Was,” and on the top right over the word “Assets,” she wrote, “I Am.”

She contemplated the pencil-thin line between who she had been and who she wanted to be. In the past fifteen years of recovery, she had made some considerable improvements to her personality. She was a kinder, more thoughtful person, but she had failed to arrive anywhere near the attributes on her asset list. It was overwhelming and depressing.

“What lies between the defects and the assets?”

Drawing an arch on the top of the page over the cross, she wrote, “The Battle of Armageddon.”

As soon as she wrote the words, the thin pencil line opened into a crack, which then widened into an enormous void, into the black, the place beyond her thoughts, the dwelling place of “I Am.”

The drawing became an indispensable mental image; a jumping off point in her spiritual development. In her innermost core, she felt compelled to examine her defects one by one and ask questions.

“Where did it originate?”

“What is driving it?”

“What is it trying to tell me?”

Everything that hid in darkness needed to be brought into the light. The prospect held zero appeal until a question beyond her reasoning power startled her.

“What if the defect is a seed that with proper care, has the potential to transform into an asset?”

“Oh, hell no! Sounds like a shit-ton of work to me,” said adolescent Petra.

In an avoidance tactic, she invented a shortcut that she, no doubt, gleaned from the internet. She narrowed her focus to the asset list and tried to feel them like she had felt joy. She placed the words “I Am” in front of each one, thinking she could somehow claim them. It was a fine practice, and she experienced some wonderful sensations, but nothing changed.

In one morning meditation, she repeated the words, “I am worthy” over and over. It was useless. She had no idea what self-worth was, much less how it might feel. Sensing the severity of her distress, Buddy Handler stepped in.

He took her back up to the high pinnacle where she had designed her life blueprint. This time, instead of the Earth sitting below them, dangling in space, a human body lay suspended. The skin was transparent and on the inside were elaborate electrical circuits conducting massive amounts of energy. Each circuit was a different color, with bright white charging points all along its course.

“You have two operating systems,” he explained. “The first is a human operating system designed to function within the parameters of the five senses in a three-dimensional world. It is survival-based. Running on instinct, it regulates your body, tells you to eat, find shelter, propagate and alerts you to life-threatening danger.

The second is a divine operating system. It is your connection to who you were before you entered this three-dimensional experience; your link to the source of all things, God, if you like.”

Buddy Handler allowed her time to assimilate what he was saying.

“Two plugs connect the systems. The first runs from the divine operating system into the human operating system. As long as you are alive, it remains connected.

The second runs from the human operating system into the divine operating system. This is where problems arise. That connector, controlled by human perception and instinct, is hard-wired from childhood with prompts to plug into the creation, rather than the Creator. For instance, you might choose to plug into drugs, alcohol, material possessions, relationships, sexual appetites, pursuit of power, and so on.

When you make those choices, you place yourself under the authority of whatever external, three-dimensional experience you’re plugged into. Do this long enough and you lose sight and sense of your divine nature. You become trapped in the physical three-dimensional reality, dependent on people and things to make you happy. You become lost in a sorrowful, suffering world, striving and competing for scraps; a world where nothing is ever enough, no matter how much you accumulate.

It is a world void of any true and lasting satisfaction, a world fueled by base emotions like anger, fear, lack, pride, unworthiness, greed, lust, depression and anxiety.”

“I feel all tied up in those kinds of emotions,” said Petra. “It’s like I’m at their mercy. I don’t know how to stop.”

“Let me give you some good news before we get into practicalities. Understand this: your worth resides within your divine operating system. No human life experience can threaten it. When your parents, your educational system and society, implied that your worth was based on how well you perform, that was misinformation designed to control and manipulate.

No person, no accomplishment or failure, can add to or subtract from your worth. It is your divine right. You will exit this life with the same measure you entered. Your human experience has no effect what-so-ever on your worth. And, in case you were wondering, every human being carries the same measure. There are no hierarchies where worth is concerned.”

That information yanked Twelve-year-old Petra’s chain.

“I knew it! These assholes have been dicking me around the whole time. The media, consumerism, everybody telling me I’m no good unless I have this or that. No matter how much I tried, I was never good enough. Oh, my God! That’s why I shut down. No way I could live up to such ridiculous expectations and, you know damn well, they were all a bunch of hypocrites, anyway.”

Lights going on. An entire mental switchboard springing to life.

“I guess plugging into alcohol and drugs wasn’t the best solution. It seemed so right and so smart, but that was the plan all along, wasn’t it?”

Buddy got a kick out of adolescent Petra. He loved her raw edge and her penchant for confrontation.

“The plan is to bring you to the end of yourself and your dependence on anything external, thereby forcing you into an attitude of total surrender.”

“Forcing me? That’s harsh, even for you, Buddy,” said adult Petra.

“We are talking about your purpose; the reason for all of your suffering. Don’t despair. You have already accomplished a great deal, but the most challenging work lies ahead.

You remember that street urchin inside you? That root system is your divine operating system. Entanglement is the nature of its design. The real problem lies in the calcification and all those barnacles stuck to it. The suppressed emotions associated with traumatic memories have encrusted your divinity, strangling, and suffocating your everyday reality.

Consider the pencil thin line between your defects and assets that opened and expanded into the emptiness of ever-expanding space. That void is the source of all that is; everything that has been and everything that will ever be. It is the soil where transformation takes place.

It is time to let go; to fall into the void. Surrender yourself into what feels like nothingness, but in reality, is everything. From that holy place, you will feel the emotional weight of your hidden memories. I am not asking you to re-experience them, but you will need to process every suppressed emotion. As you work through your feelings, trapped energy will release. Do not fear. I will be with you. You will sense me holding you.”

Unnerved, Petra contemplated her future. He was commanding her to face the feelings she had been running from her entire life. And what about his claim that the street urchin was not a parasite but her divine operating system? That was an unexpected turn of events. She realized there was no turning back. It was time to put up or shut up.

“I’m going to find another EMDR specialist.”

In less than a week, she was sitting in Olivia’s office.

---

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A harrowing tale, shot through with unlikely humor and fantastical creatures.

This autofiction (autobiography meets fiction) novel revolves around a lifetime spent underwater struggling to find the surface. The narrative follows the journey of an unlikely heroine from the bondage of childhood trauma to self-awareness and freedom.

It is a roller coaster ride from the depths of hell to triumphant success that finishes with a big Hollywood ending.