This story took place in a past life that was not lived on Earth. This might be triggering to some so please, if you're effected by talk of compliance or disidentification, be careful.
Ulma was the name we had all gone by in the life we had lived before the one in which this story takes place. We must have looked like Rozaya to Arther, because, as you're about to see, he insisted on calling us by that name until he discovered our multiplicity and warped it in the course of the pages below.
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Sit on the bed, Rozaya,” he said as we walked into the room. I obeyed, still a part of Ulma then, and unwilling to give up that name yet. Somehow, the name by which Arther had just referred to me felt off, as though he was talking to someone else, but it was something of meaning for him, and it was this fact that prohibited me from questioning his actions.
“We’re going to work on compliance today,” Arther said, sitting at the bottom of the bed, away from me, to my right. He turned to face me, his eyes drilling into my own as he added, “You have many of the basics of that skill down pat, but you use them without being aware that you’re doing so. you’re going to need the ability to consciously use those basics, and a lot more, when you get back to Earth.”
There was never a doubt in his mind of where I would be going after this life ended. He knew I wanted to return to my family, just as badly as I always had since I had died the last time. His job, as he’d put it to me when we were going through the process of setting up my place in his home, was to properly prepare me for the world, as I hadn’t been for my first time there. Of course, I had no memory of anything beyond the last life I’d lived, but I trusted his words. He was, after all, older than me, even if only slightly, and he seemed to have experience in these matters, which was a far cry from my own stage in learning.
I nodded in acknowledgement of his plan, and he proceeded to give instructions as to what we were going to do. He would guide me into a light trance, and while I was in that state, he was going to plant instructions on levels which words and thought alone couldn’t access. I had come to him about strange memory gaps I had been experiencing since our time together had begun, and he brought these up, telling me he would take care of them, and much more, while I was open in this way.
“I want to explain to you, Ulma, the first steps of compliance, before we begin anything of the sort,” he said, and went over to a drawing board that was across the room from me. He picked up a marker and wrote a list of words, with symbols indicating connections that I could not, as yet, grasp the meaning of.
“As you can see, the first word is understanding,” he said, pointing to the board. “Tell me, Ulma, what does that word mean to you?”
I paused, thinking, and finally responded, “Understanding means grasping, on a level beyond words, an idea that someone’s trying to teach you, or a skill you’re trying to learn.”
Arther nodded, and I thought I saw a flicker of sadness in his eyes as he said, “This is true, child. In a sense, all things can be understood in that way, even instructions. You and I are used to looking at them directly, so to us, they are not based in words, but in concepts and feelings. If you and I were home…”
He paused, looking away from me for a moment, and I saw him begin to shake.
“If you and I were home,” he continued, “That wouldn’t be a problem, because hardship, pain, darkness and suffering have far less of a chance to exist in the instructions we give to one another. On earth, that isn’t the case. On Earth, processing instructions on levels beyond words can pose a danger to one’s sense of self. Orders to kill, to injure, to cause harm in some way, or to allow harm to happen, are in much greater amounts there than they will ever be back home. If you took them in beyond just thinking about them long enough to obey them, you would be badly hurt. Even simple, less extreme instructions will often have darker goals behind them, and if you were to look at them in the way you usually do, you would quickly lose your mind. The people of earth don’t often mean what they say, but that’s another lesson, for another day.”
I shivered. Seeing this, he laid his hand on my shoulder.
“This can be prevented, Rozaya. You must learn to comprehend with your mind alone, to disidentify with any other way of understanding that you currently have access to. If you don’t learn this skill, you will ultimately see your final end.”
Now I began to shake, and upon seeing this, Arther signaled for me to lay down on the bed.
“The quickest way for this skill of disidentification to be learned is this,” he said, taking my hand in his. I felt the tremors running through him as he continued, “I’ve seen things in you that you yourself don’t know of, can’t know of, for your own safety. We must learn to use those things for the sake of your survival. The quickest way to do that is to put you into the state I’ve mentioned before and address all of these things at once, starting with teaching you to understand things with your mind alone.”
Something in him had shifted, I knew it, but I could not put my finger on exactly what it was. He guided me to focus on my breathing, and to imagine that I was walking down a staircase, directly into feelings associated with my first childhood. I smiled, the memories of those times flooding back to me as I sank deeper into the trance that Arther was so skillfully weaving around me. Under his direction, the seens associated with the feelings I was experiencing vanished, leaving me surrounded by blackness on all sides. But my fear was nonexistent. I simply had no reason to feel it.
His voice had become as far away as those seens, and it was only by a monumental effort of will that I was able to work out the reason behind this. He had simply made it that way, telling me that his words were my thoughts, and that I had no reason to need the understanding that came from hearing the words themselves directly from him. I had been so immersed in a part of my past that, until that point, I had had no connection to, that I had let the idea become a reality without a second thought. I had no reason not to. I trusted him with my life.
As I floated in the blackness, a new feeling slowly began to dominate my experience. It was a strange separation, between two things which I would later understand to be thought and emotion, and at first I fought it.
“Do not fight this, Ulma, for it is your lesson.”
The question of how he had discovered my name vanished as quickly as it had come as the full effects of the separated state crashed over me. The words were not words in the way they would have been if I would have heard them out loud. They were, as the rest of Arther’s interaction with me in trance had been, completely in my mind, but something had changed. It was as though they were coming to me somewhere between spoken and written, not raw concepts, as I had always known thoughts such as these to be, but some combination of half-spoken, half-visualized intentions which had no place in one’s innermost mind. I stumbled over each word individually, trying to piece them together, and, from the bed, I reached out to he who had created the situation in which I now found myself.
“Don’t think about it,” he said, and the translation of his words into my thoughts was quicker this time. Absurdly, my feelings didn’t match them, couldn’t match them. I began to panic, wanting desperately to get out of my own mind. That thought’s words, devoid of any of the fear that now gripped me, echoed loudly there, bouncing back to me from all directions in that endless void. I sat up on the bed, screaming to him to pull me back, quickly, before I died. He put his arm around me, and he must have given another instruction, because I was suddenly able to hear his words again, just as I had before the induction of the trance had begun. I was still deep in that trance, though now the fear I felt was eased somewhat.
“Ulma,” Arther said, and I looked at him, fully expecting to be punished for my reaction. But no punishment ever came. He simply told me that there was only one way to stop the panic, and when I heard what that was, I began crying so hard that I thought I might throw up.
“It must be done. It must be done,” he said, and never moved to take his arm from around my shoulders. I was shaking too hard to speak by that point.
“I don’t want to lose myself,” I managed, finally, to say.
“I know you don’t, and you won’t, if you let me do this. Let me teach you this, Ulma,” he said, and the strange thing that was thought apart from feeling acted upon those words, so that the order echoed loudly in my mind, in the black void that it had become thanks to the absence of emotion where it rightfully belonged.
“This will help you, child. I promise.”
I wanted to scream, but didn’t, couldn’t. whatever he’d done while I was deeper in trance must have been working, because I found myself lying back down on the bed and following his finger as he pointed to the board across the room. The word ‘understanding’ was above the word ‘obeying,’ and to each side of those two words was a list of others. The left one read, ‘without raw concepts,’ ‘without knowing why,’ ‘without deep thought,’ ‘without inner conflict,’ without questioning.’
By that point, reading the right Colom was unthinkable. Just the consequences of what might happen if the left’s ideas were actualized were enough to frees the air in my lungs.
“You will actualize all of these things, if you want to survive on Earth, ulma,” Rather said, and a growl crept into his voice. “Read the other list.”
My eyes scanned it, and chills rushed over my body as I read it. This one had to do with the emotions, and it read, ‘without reaction,’ ‘without choice,’ ‘without destruction,’ ‘without suffering,’ ‘without breakdown.’
I was too fearful to scream, to speak, or to run. My body had turned to stone, my eyes only moving when Arther waved his hand in front of my face again. When I could finally manage to produce words, they came out in a rush. Mostly, I protested. I told him that this, more so than anything on earth, would destroy me. He didn’t listen, silencing me at last by telling me that the only choices I had were to do as he wanted or find another place to stay. Of course, the second choice wasn’t really possible. I gave up, sobbing, as I realized that even if I wanted to leave, I was only ten years old, and would probably be killed in some way because I didn’t know the world I was in all that well.
“I have to give you reality, Earth’s reality,” he kept saying as my tears dried and my sobs slowly calmed. Taking my hand, he continued, “I have to teach you compliance, which means you have to learn to process commands without deeply thinking about them. The first step in that teaching is done. Your thoughts are separated from your feelings, which means that you won’t be hurt on deep levels by orders to cause suffering that you might get. But you are still identified with both your thoughts and feelings, and the two can still impact each other. You must learn to disidentify with them, both of them. You cannot stop them from effecting you otherwise.”
I said nothing. He went on to explain that, in the state I was in at that moment, an order to kill would still cause resistant feelings to arise within me, which would, in turn, give rise to resistant thoughts.
“You still cannot process words without having feelings about them, Ulma, and that is what we are going to work on next. That is your next problem, and it is going to be resolved today.”
He gave me no time to protest, launching right into the beginnings of a disidentification practice that was going to change my life as I knew it.
“Look at your hand, Ulma.”
Obediently, I did so.
“Look at the wall. Which one belongs to you?”
“My hand does, but the wall doesn’t.”
“You’re wrong,” he corrected me. “Neither of them belong to you. Tell me, are you your hand?” he questioned, looking me directly in the eyes, in the way I hated.
“No,” I answered softly, shivering.
“Are you any part of your body?” he asked, continuing to stare at me. I wished he would look away, at least for a moment, so that I could regain my sense of balance and come out of the dreamlike state I was slipping into, but I knew better than to protest his actions.
“I’m all of me, my body, my mind, and everything else,” I answered, but he corrected me again.
“Ulma,” he said sternly, and I could hear the growl creeping into his voice again. The dreamlike feeling grew stronger and stronger as, for the first time, he spoke the words that would haunt me for lives to come.
“You, are not, your thoughts. You, are not, your feelings. You, are not, your body. You are nothing more than the observer and passenger, watching it all. You will learn this to be true, Ulma. Do you understand me?”
“I am nothing more than the watcher of my experiences,” I said, but the words didn’t feel like my own. I saw myself laying on the bed, Arther nodding, smiling as I smiled with him. I watched my own eyes as they stared straight ahead, still locked with his. I couldn’t move, couldn’t react, couldn’t do anything but watch as arther said, “Very, very good, my student, you have done well today,” and my body, no, the body of another now, rose from its position on the bed.
“I am the observer of my experiences,” the voice that was once my own said again, and this time, I knew that the words were not mine.
“I am not Ulma, I am Armonney,” I thought, and though the words still echoed loudly in my mind and the blackness that had first surrounded me was once again doing just that, I knew it to be true. Arther didn’t hear me, though. He had ears only for the person who was, once, a part of me.
I drifted in the dark for a time, listening to the two of them as he drilled this new person endlessly, telling them the advanced ideas of his twisted truth.
“You are not one person. You are a collection of parts. Those parts are made of some combination of thoughts, feelings and actions. I will call you Ulma, but you are not Ulma. You are not one. You are many. You are not one. You are many.”
“I am not one,” I finally heard, in response. “We are many.”
I wanted to throw up, but didn’t, couldn’t. In the darkness, I felt another slip from within me, and knew that I had been joined by someone who had been only a part of me a moment ago. I slipped behind them, and listened through their ears, as they had communicated to me that I should in the moment before their birth. Arther was still talking to whoever was in my body, no, our body now, and I could still hear what he was saying, but this new insider seemed to be taking the meaning of the sounds and translating them to me without their emotional aspect.
“You are not one. You are many. I don’t care how you divide this life, or any others, just do it. I don’t care how few or how many times you have to create new parts, just do it. Hear my words. Understand them. Act on them. Comply, Ulma. Now!”
With his last word, all awareness fled from me.
I would not wake up until 2017.