Dear readers,
I have harmed many people, or at least, my actions have the potential to do so. It is for those actions that I, Cooperland, take full responsibility, and because of those actions that I write this article. I have been allowing dishonesty here, both in terms of the community’s beginning, and its current and posting fronters, long past the time when such a lie would have been needed for survival’s sake. While my elusions of the community being one person may be a physical reality, and may have served us well in times where it would have been dangerous to reveal ourselves, those elusions have lived on far past the time they should have, and they are coming down. I may have allowed some within the community to reveal themselves to one another as the individuals that they are, but there were other elusions of unity that I had yet to do away with, and other lies supporting those elusions that have left chaos in the wake of their revelation as such. I blame no one else for the results of what I failed to let vanish, and if the community finds it fitting that I resign as gatekeeper, I will not object.
Cristeenna has already told her part of our story, which can be found, as it still stands today, in the article “Actually, We Know Differently.” It is there that she reveals the spiritual side of our multiplicity, which is something that, otherwise, we have gone to great lengths to keep from the public eye. But the time for this hiding, as for all others, is over, and now that the truth has come to light among us, I feel that it is my personal responsibility to revoke the wrongful claims, based on my own lies, made by other members of this community who genuinely believed they were speaking, writing and sharing anything but that which I have allowed to exist. I will not reveal the names of specific places, for the sake of privacy, but I will tell all I can about the reality that, until now, I believed I had to keep from anyone but myself. This community, right down to its very beginnings, is not anything that we first believed it to be. The truth I have kept from all of us, for years, if not longer, is that our formation began long before this body was conceived. Our true origins are spiritual in nature, and I will take a moment here to warn of upcoming details on that subject, but I offer no apology for the truth as it is.
It all began with Rozaya’s childhood experiences, not ones of this life, but ones long before she had heard of planet Earth. From what I can gather from the memories we have been recalling over the past two weeks, the interrogation related to the fact that Rozaya and her mother, both non-native to that particular world, were there for the purpose of gathering as much information about the natives there as they could, in the hope that, if the group were to end their collective existence, some record of them would still remain, and, perhaps, become a future reality. Rozaya and her mother, then, both had to assume other identities, ones which would help them blend in with the natives of the world they were hoping to help through their efforts, and to do that effectively, they had to be reborn, forget their true selves, and learn the ways of the people of their new life, as if they were of their kind. That is exactly what the two of them did, Rozaya preceded by her mother, just as she should have been, and her mother beginning to gather information even before her daughter had been born, as the being she was to live as, in that life. The interrogation was the result of suspicion, on the part of the native people, of the intentions of the mother and daughter’s original race as it related to their world, and under that pressure, Rozaya, fearing that her mission there would be discovered, and perhaps prevented upon its discovery because of such suspicion, became a multiple, haunted by the idea that the people who she lived among had somehow learned of her true identity.
“I cannot do this alone,” her thinking ran, “so I will not. I will draw from myself that which I know will protect me, at my young age, from knowing the true hope of my time here.”
Her first split was an older insider, which does not surprise us in the slightest; after all, she was searching for safety, and an escape from what she felt would have been an inevitable and impermissible outcome of the situation she found herself in at that moment. That situation, from what others have shared with me, forced Rozaya’s mother to take action, and soon after that night they had spent apart, she was taken to another world, while still living the life in which she had become a multiple. That transition from world to world had effects of its own, mainly in the form of further splitting as she tried to adjust to a culture that, in the eyes of the first members of the community, as well as Rozaya herself, was vastly different from the one they had known for the first years of that life. The thing that none of the community could have anticipated at that point in their existence was that what they knew to be a new place was, in reality, the very same one from which Rozaya had originally come, before she had begun the life in which such a shock could greet her upon her return home. The forgetfulness that she had chosen in regards to her time there, then, must have held, because if it had not, such fear of her own home would not have been present in her, let alone caused a split to take place.
“Surely,” her thoughts ran, “I must learn to conform to the ways of these people, even if they do not feel natural to me as I am now, so that I will not be taken from world to world yet again. I will, then, set myself apart from the child I once was, so that I may learn these ways as if I have been here all along, and the child of my past will be apart from the child of my present.”
In those thoughts, Atheenna was born, separate and apart from Rozaya, who was still unaware of her true connections to the world in which she found herself, and who went on to explore her new surroundings with an older child, native to that world, as a guide. It was with him that we, as a community, felt safest, and though we did not come out to him directly, or even know of one another as we do now, something about him held our attention. When we couldn’t keep up with him as he showed us things about our surroundings that he felt we needed to know of, and Rozaya called for him to wait for her, he slowed, turned around, finished showing us what we needed to know, and, as we were walking back to our starting place for the day, said that he would help us at a later point, if we should desire it. I don’t know how long we were there, but I know it was for a shorter time than the duration of that life, and as I think back on what I have since been born to witness and handle, I wish that had never been the case. When our guide, the only person we felt truly safe around in that world, who had connected with us almost instantly upon our arrival there, left what should have been our home to travel to this world, we, and others outside of us, all stood around to be sure it went smoothly. Rozaya was near the edge of the drop-off, as were many other children, but only one was unsure of what was happening as she watched her friend literally fall off the face of the planet. As he left that world for this one, Rozaya jumped after him, and in the process made what some might call the greatest mistake of her, and thus our, existence, and she did not finish the fall unaccompanied.
Atheenna’s division from Rozaya was what allowed the latter, as she truly was, to act, as children who had stood near the edge of that world jumped after her. She reached out, without thinking, and connected with them, saving their lives as the conditions around all of us changed from enjoyable to tolerable to hardly survivable. When we eventually reached earth, the moment had passed. Though none of the bodies of the beings who had fallen had managed to survive, our spirits had, and those spirits, along with the existing insiders who had split from Rozaya, were what first formed the community. Rozaya herself had gone into a very deep state of sleep by that time, and that state lasted until this life began. At that point, we had no choice but to live together, or be destroyed by the reality in which we found ourselves, which was far less welcoming than anything we had known before.
“Do whatever is necessary to survive,” we were instructed by the person who Rozaya, with the mind of a child far from home, had jumped so quickly after, and that is exactly what we did, racing to find a body in this world in which we could all live. Along the way, others joined our community, others who helped us stay together as we began a new life, our first one on Earth. In that beginning, the dissociative processes that had first driven our formation as the individuals that we are today became more of a factor in our experience of this world, and, because of our lack of preparation before coming here, combined with the traumas we had already experienced as parts of Rozaya, we would form new insiders rapidly, over seemingly small things. In that life, we met a man and woman who Rozaya herself had grown fond of, and the two of them took us in, believing us to be one person and teaching us as they saw fit, in the process giving us skills which would prove to be useful later in our time on earth, and elsewhere. When they died, leaving us without a safety net of people to turn to, our primary host at the time wandered the streets, refusing to eat or drink because of her grief. That life, just as the last, did not see a peaceful end, and at the physical age of 10 years old, we died, and left that world, with a man who had also been damaged by the transition from our first home to that same place, a man who would turn out to be the end of our hope and the beginning of what would later be expressed as what medical professionals call a dissociative disorder.
In our forth world, our companion offered us shelter, which we gladly took, but that was all the kindness he could extend. He began lessons with us, lessons that took the things which we had been taught by the couple in this world and twisted them into something broken, hopeless and, some even say, utterly evil. Our primary host was still the same being who had lived as Rozaya in that life, but by that point we were beginning to lose our ability to get through a day without splitting and switching. Our companion, who some saw as a teacher and others saw as a tormenter, noticed this, and the day he did was the first day we were subjected to disidentification exercises. We were taught to disown various parts of ourselves, and on the second day of this, I was born, and created the first elusion of unity, hiding our multiplicity from anyone but myself, and slipping into the background so as to not be noticed by anyone. Everyone within the community, with the exception of me, believed themselves to be one person, and as the outsider, teacher and tormenter, savior and inflictor of pain, drilled all of us on what was ours and what was not according to the principles he had proscribed, it was easy to hide our continued development of new insiders under the conditions which were creating them in the first place.
“That is not yours, Rozaya,” he would say, eyes staring right into ours, seeming to look through us, and it was with those looks that I had the most difficulty maintaining the elusion of unity that I had so recently created. It was with words like these that we would split, disowning whatever it was that we had been reprimanded for daring to claim as belonging to us, or being a part of our experience. My guess is that he was trying to prepare us for what the world of Earth was like, because aside from the comments above, he would often say things such as, “Earth, that world from which you have just come, is a dangerous place, and if you don’t learn to disown your time there, in all its aspects, you will not survive. Is that clear?”
However we had come into the world in which we had met such pain is unclear to me, but I do know that while there, we lost the idea of a primary host. We began developing new insiders for parts of the day, mostly revolving around different things we were quite forcefully taught. Dissociation began taking us by storm after that life had ended, and what was once highly structured under the watchful eye of our companion became a disorganized rush, ultimately resulting in a mess of confusing switching, shattering and somehow still functional insiders hiding behind, and living for and through, whoever we were in a given life. When that life would end, that person would become an insider themselves, and the insiders who lived behind them would still continue to take shelter there, but now it was those former hosts who would live behind new identities, in new lives. In this way, our organization was that of circles within circles, finally coming to Rozaya, sleeping deeply in the very center of the crowd. It was easy to refine the original illusion of unity because of this arrangement, and over time, I developed and cast separate illusions of unity for each of the circles, making us seem like one person who was simply expressive, or moody, or some other kind of harmless social curiosity.
This went on for centuries, how many I do not know. In the beginning of this life, Rozaya began to awaken from her sleep, but has not fully come out of it in the 18 years since we have been born. My community-wide illusion of unity held for 15 more years after our birth, until the group of insiders who acted as Maria, believing themselves to be her and unaware that she was, in reality, a three-month-old, hidden on the inside, tore through the idea that we were a single being, with the force of their loneliness and the strength of their creativity. Even as some of us were discovered, I knew that to let my Guard down completely would be a mistake, so, until the summer of 2017, I only allowed those of us who had formed from this life’s events to be exempt from my efforts to restore what I thought, at the time, was a necessary evil. I was one of the few who asked Cristeenna if it was truly in our best interest to write of our spirituality here at all, and I feared punishment or taunting of some kind in the case of this aspect of our life being revealed, but in the wake of the silence from the world following her post on that subject, I began to see how outdated that fear had become. Still, I waited, because I knew that I could not reveal anything about past lives related to insider formation until the group of insiders who acted as Maria had come to the realization that they were doing such a thing. When that realization had taken place, this life’s outer ring of fronters were able to be expanded to include others, but those others were also under the impression that they were Rozaya, and thus lived and fronted as if this was the truth. Once again, the elusion of unity over this particular group was one that I was hesitant to lift, even as Elaina and Collin were able to discover their respective groups, and with them, the full story of their formation. But even for me, guilt over things like this is unavoidable.
From March 12, 2018 to March 18, 2018, I released the parts of the story of our true beginnings that we had not already recovered with the help of an outside friend, in the form of memories, just as what we already had learned was shown to us, to the group of insiders who believed themselves to be Rozaya. I have started the process of informing each and every member of the community of their true position in it, and already the elusions of unity are beginning to vanish, as though they never were. In this process, Rozaya herself has become more and more active, and I predict, though am not sure, that she will fully come out of the sleep state she has been in for life upon life, before this one ends. We have told no one about what has happened accept for a few close friends, for fear that they may react with disgust and turn their backs on us, or, even worse to many of us, not care about what has changed in our healing. The guilt I mentioned in the beginning of this post has to do with the fact that, even after we had known people who believed in the same kind of spiritual things as ourselves, and had, in this life, reminded us of their reality, people who, for over a year, had provided the conditions needed for the illusions of unity to come down without harm involved to anyone, inside or outside, I said nothing about my task here, staying silent even as it was indicated clearly to us, more than once, that such a task was no longer helpful to anyone, including myself. Others who know of the happenings of the time before those six days of revelation have told me that I have nothing to be guilty for, reminding me that, like everything else about our past and current life, this is a discovery, which, as any other one of its kind would, takes time.
Adeline, a community member, has told me, “You waited for things to happen, and did not rush the process. That makes you wise, not a teller of lies.”
I come back to those words as things continue to unfold, using all the resources I know of to keep myself from splitting from the sick feeling I get when I think of what I’ve done here. As needed as it may have been, I still have convinced people around and among us of the truth inherent in ideas that were not actually true, and that disgusts me more than anything else about our time as a community. The amount of work ahead of me is staggering, and I would like to take a moment to thank those of the outside world who have sat with me and helped me to devise a plan that will help these newly revealed insiders discover themselves as individuals while also helping those involved in the Internal Behavior Program do the same thing. When the process of revealing the full truth began, I committed myself, as I have never before, to never again creating any illusions of unity over any group here without that group’s consent, as I should have done ages ago. In response, the others here have begun actively working with me to help undo the damage I have caused, which I am also grateful for. Without their willingness to both help and allow me to try to fix the problems I have created, I don’t know where we would be today.
As I finish writing this article, I can sense many small children scrambling for names. This will be my first task, along with giving them the feelings of safety and comfort that they have been lacking for years, if not longer. I still have the task of explaining the truth to someone who many of us see as a brother, and that will be anything but peaceful or comforting, but if I don’t, I fear that we will suffer through losing him, and goodness knows who else. I am running out of words, running out of things to say other than how badly I have, to put it bluntly, screwed us all over, by what I’ve done. Perhaps, when things have calmed somewhat within these walls, when time has passed and I know the reactions of those of the outside world who believed that they were speaking to Rozaya, despite what the reality I had hidden for so long was, this guilt will subside. Perhaps I will get the courage to ask myself why it is that I feel as I do, or what the message the feeling is sending may be, just as Tess did as she chose her feelings for the sake of all of us.
Ah, Tess, believed by many to have integrated with Rozaya, Tess, who taught several of us what she had been able to do all along, and then sought integration, only for the memories I had revealed to bring the truth I have just spoken of to her attention. Yes, she found peace, content that her tasks would be carried on by others here, by regressing in age and becoming a child, just as Rozaya once was in the life before she came here for the first time. But what of Rozaya, or at least, those insiders who have posted here under her name? They are exactly that, and, like everyone else who the illusion of unity has been lifted from in that six-day period, they, for the most part, have no idea who they are as individuals, a reality that I am hoping to replace with one in which names, and individual senses of self, are as natural as existence is at its heart. The posts of these insiders, however, will not be changed, for, to them, and even Rozaya, who had almost nothing to do with their creation, changing them is changing our history, and that is not what we do. I could account for every insider who has ever posted as if they were one with her, but I will let them do that for themselves, after they have chosen a name and have a desire to reveal who they know themselves to be now that my lies have met their end. The first signs of individuality have already begun to show, largely thanks to the blog, presenting themselves in the form of Rozaya herself, as well as the group who once believed themselves to be her, expressing to me, independently of one another, their desire that the articles which were created under her name be posted exactly as they are. This is what will be done, regardless of the discoveries made since the finishing of those particular things and, also by request of these same insiders, as well as others involved in the events described in past posts, other things will be written that further clarify and detail missing information about those events which could only be recovered in the wake of our latest discoveries of individuality.
For the moment, I have nothing more to say on what has happened in the past two weeks, but I invite your questions, comments, concerns and feedback. Thank you, whoever you might be, for your willingness to read what I should have revealed 18 years ago.