Suicide is not an Option, Part 1: History Repeats Itself

Author’s note: This article will be easier to follow if you first read Walking in the Dark.

Which came first, depression or this longing to just die and get out of this place? Hard to say, as both have been with me as long as I can remember. But before I get into all that happy stuff, a little history about my addiction to alcohol and cocaine and how I overcame it is needed, as I now see a clear link between that experience and the obsession with suicide.

In January of 1979, I found myself in a state of total collapse … mentally, physically, financially and spiritually. My best friend and business partner, Frank, was very concerned as he noticed my low level of functioning and general downward spiral. Unknown to both of us at the time, I was also severely addicted to alcohol and cocaine, and had been for many years. Also we had no idea that alcoholism was an addictive disease … and that that was what needed addressing. Overwhelming depression and compulsive thoughts of suicide were the other symptoms that led me to where I would end up. Frank arranged a meeting with a psychiatrist friend of his and this wise soul recognized my true problem promptly when I literally fell into his office for my 2:00 pm appointment, already intoxicated and “ready for therapy” … or so I thought in what was left of my mind.

A Shocking Intervention

A week later I was at my parents’ home drinking wine on a sunny Sunday afternoon completely oblivious of the event that would occur an hour later which would alter the course of my life permanently. When I arrived back home with my girlfriend, Frank was there and said that he really needed to talk to me. He had this serious look in his eyes that told me he had something important on his mind. Over the years Frank and I had spent countless hours in conversation discussing everything from our business to kids and girlfriends. We also had been roommates for many of those years and it was a very successful and profitable relationship and partnership. Frank had been informed by his friend the psychiatrist of the true nature of his best friend’s problem, that being alcoholism, and now Frank was fully determined to “fix the problem.”

Thus began a six-hour intervention where Frank would use all of his determination and substantial sales skills to convince me to enter a treatment program for chemical dependency in Long Beach, CA. This was something that I, in my mind of course, was never going to do. To make a six hour story short, I’ll just say that when arguing with a highly determined friend who loves you deeply it is best not to continue drinking alcohol and thereby blurring one’s logic and debating skills. For as it turned out Frank had a very well planned out approach to accomplish his goal. He also had two others in the wings to add support, as he might need it. All I can say now is that somehow after hours of intense debate he outsmarted me and I agreed to go into treatment only if someone was available to help move my girlfriend the next day. I thought this was a safe position for me to take because I thought I knew that no one was available on such short notice. I would thus escape this unjust assault on my freedom. But, at that very moment, in walks our friend, Tony, who bellows, “Don’t worry, I’ll move her!” At that point it was over and Frank’s wish that his best friend might actually have a chance to complete his natural life span became a possibility.

Even in my blurred state I remember being astonished at how well prepared they both were. Within a few seconds my girlfriend whipped out a pre-packed suitcase with everything I would need. In addition, the car was instantly running with the door open as it ominously beckoned me to enter … now. So, strangely, I did and off I was whisked to the emergency room of Long Beach Memorial Hospital. This is apparently where they admit you on a Sunday night. Also it was apparent that Frank had made prior arrangements for my admission. Talk about overly confident! The thoroughness of all this planning by a person who had no intervention training and who was also the chief enabler in this partnership is, in retrospect, quite amazing. I was even somewhat impressed at the time, although less appreciative than I am now.

A Rude Awakening

When I awoke the next morning, the only thing that I knew for sure was that I was in the wrong place and certainly with the wrong type of people! These people in here were sick and disgusting and certainly not my type or class. Over my three weeks stay I found out, of course, that we were all in the same boat together for a reason: we all belonged there!

It’s my opinion that the 12 Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous are an amazing work of higher dimensional information which, when originally created in the 1940s, were brand new to that 3D world. I say that even though 11 of them may be found in the Sermon on the Mount. In the world of addiction at that time there was no recovery and only agreement among everyone that nothing would work. By 1979 when I came along recovery was well entrenched into our society, but in my world an alcoholic was a bum on Skid Row … that’s how ignorant I was then. In this hospital program, which was for the most part run by 12 Step recovering people, I began to learn what today almost all of us know about addictions, and how to deal with my newly discovered addiction to alcohol and cocaine. One of the things I looked at during my time at the treatment program was how my intimate relationship with alcohol had begun.

How it all Began

My first real experience in drinking booze came at age 15, and it was a full-on drunk which included vomiting my dinner all over my arm as it hung out the back of a friend’s car window. I remember thinking, “I’ll never do that again”, and I never did … drink such cheap booze and throw up, that is! I graduated immediately to the hard stuff and never looked back. I had found a new reality, and I liked it. The truth is that I was a kid who lived in some form of fear most of the time and that accelerated into terror on a regular basis. With alcohol I could feel “normal” and somewhat confident. So I began my spiritual quest, but the “spirits” involved came in a bottle. No wonder the old timers called their booze “spirits,” for it was through these spirits that I made it through high school, jobs, marriage, parenthood and life in general. Actually given what I knew then , I don’t know how I would have made it any other way. All my experiences and what I learned and did were, unknown to me at the time , connected to the consciousness and personality that the chemicals allowed me to create. You might say that I was an artificial construct of me with the real me well glossed over.

Two Obsessions

After 16 years of living with this dependency, I found myself helpless, caught in a compulsive obsession to use chemicals for survival, even though there was mounting evidence that using alcohol was, in fact, bringing about my demise. An obsession is characterized by the absence of all other thought (other than the thought of the obsession), so we can’t be surprised by my blood pressure reading of 250/180 having little effect on my actions! As another example, I had gotten to the point that the only way I could get a drink of water when I woke up was by having no more than two inches of water in a 16 ounce tumbler…in order to not spill it all over the place. That’s how badly my hands shook when I first awoke. Still a voice would scream in my head, “A drink will make it all better!” I won’t belabor the point, but clearly, as tough a physical vehicle as I have, my body was breaking down under the incessant deluge of daily chemical input. So you can see the dilemma … my consciousness was in “drink to survive” mode while my body was in “don’t drink to live” … a life and death struggle with myself. This battle was similar to what I went through in early 2005 and described in Walking in the Dark. Instead of the obsession to drink I was obsessed with dying and escaping the horror of how I felt in my life. And yet, there was at the same time, a deeply seeded need to live.

Checkout Instructions

At the end of my first three week stay in the hospital program, one of the counselors, Bob, who would later become my AA sponsor, gave all of us a lecture. He said, “Now when you leave here, there’s only 3 things you must do in order to stay sober.”

“Finally, the bottom line to all this,” I thought to myself. I’m real big on bottom lines, you see.

He continued, blissfully unaware of my thoughts: “1. Don’t drink/use one day at a time.”

“OK, I’ve already got that one,” my deluded mind more or less thought. “No big deal.”

“2. Read some part of The AA Big Book each day,” he said next.

“Oh shit, that damn book” thought I, cleverly concealing this insanity from all in the room. “Well, there are some good stories in there, so I guess I can do that, if I must.”

He concluded with, “3. Go to 30 AA meetings in 30 days.”

“No fucking way!” I screeched to myself. So here he was sharing his own wisdom of something like 15 years of sobriety at the time by giving me a simple formula for success for dealing with a killer disease. This plan had worked for many and yet my best response was total rejection of his simple suggestion. That’s the insanity in which I found myself in early 1979, but of course I didn’t perceive it as such. Nor could I speak my truth about it, a flaw that would almost cost me everything.

White Knuckle Living = A Second Hospital Stay

The days following my discharge were spent in a white knuckle “dry drunk” state with me just barely hanging on. With no real program for sobriety being followed, I soon ended in a relapse to “drinking to survive” mode and eventually a second admittance to the hospital. I would relapse four times that year and have a total of three 3 week periods in that hospital program. This would all occur during the first seven months of ’79. I just could not free myself from this obsession and stay sober. I ended up more depressed and hopeless.

After my second relapse, I actually attempted a suicide that failed probably because of my physical capacity for drugs and alcohol. I had been careful to not leave any evidence for those around me to come across and took all the pills and alcohol I had, but it led only to a long sleep and eventual panic for my loved ones when they finally figured it out. When Frank and my girlfriend realized that their peace and quiet from my annoying intoxicated presence had lasted too long, they rushed me to the local ER. By then I had regained enough of my senses to hear of the doctor’s plan to pump my stomach, so I ran as fast as I could, jumped a wall, and took off toward home to escape the planned assault on my near destroyed body. I am sure you can easily find empathy for what these poor people were going through, being saddled with loving me during those hellish times. At least they weren’t bored.

This incident remains the only time out of hundreds (thousands?) of times of thinking about suicide that I actually took action. It wasn’t that the pain level hasn’t been as great since then, as I have been obsessed with thoughts of removing myself from this earthly plain for many hours, many times. I can say that I’ve not acted on it mainly because I was terrified of failure more than pain, and I was reasonably certain that the very moment I left my body, I’d find myself standing next to it saying something like, “Damn it … now what?” It would be a final failure and one that I couldn’t undo … and worse, I just knew that there would be others on the other side that had depended on me for more waiting for me to explain the unexplainable. This would end up as some type of final failure, and failure is one of my greatest fears.

Fear Has a Value

Now I must interject here that this is a great example of the 9th dimensional belief that everything has a value … even something like the fear of failure, as it’s kept me alive for years! I suppose that the intense hopelessness of my addiction to date and my failure to succeed in my two attempts at getting sober added in with the state of the affairs of my life in general, and combined with the great amount of alcohol in me at the time temporarily overcame this innate fear of dying in this way … and I succumbed to the fear of living. But apparently I have very good guides who were on the ball that day as I did come through it and eventually ended up back in the treatment program for a third time. Jelaila claims that her information is that I have retired many guides in this lifetime, and that some have retired as guides altogether! Maybe she’s fibbing to me … but then maybe not.

After this event, I did think about dying a lot as even the times spent in the hospital’s protective controlled environment became more and more difficult, depressing and completely hopeless. All I thought about most of my waking hours was drinking. I was enraged and miserable all the time, especially when it was time to go to a meeting.

A Second Attempt

Before leaving the hospital for the second time, Bob, once again gave his 3 step key to keeping sober. With one failure under my belt, I found the willingness to try it his way instead of mine. Sure enough, I did not drink one day at a time, I read some of the Big Book each day, and I attended 30 meetings in 30 days, complaining bitterly each day as I left to go. But I was very careful to listen very attentively to each person at every meeting no matter how boring or irrelevant I thought they were. He wasn’t going to be able to ask me if I paid attention and catch me saying no … I was too smart for that! What I failed to really take in was at the end of each meeting, I really did feel a little better, a bit more at peace. This should have had an impact on me, but when there’s a hidden agenda there is little hope. In 30 days I had attained 30 days of sobriety for the first time since age 16, yet I only saw this as failure since I still wanted to drink in the worst way and secretly knew that this program would never work for me even though I knew that it would work for everyone else. How’s that for reverse grandiosity? If only I could have had enough honesty to tell someone that little thought. But, I did not.

When I reported in to Bob at the conclusion of my 30 days he merely smiled and cheerfully said, “Good, will you do that for another 30 days please?” Clearly he did not understand what I was going through. How could he? After all I would not tell him. I guess I thought he would just reach down under his chair and pull out a bottle of Smirnoff 100 and hand it to me saying, “Here you go … I see this program just won’t work for you!”

Simple Truths

The beginning of Chapter 5 of the AA Big Book is read at the beginning of many AA meetings. I’ve heard it many times, yet I never tire of it because it has such amazing bits of wisdom and truth in such a simple form. And, of course, they really applied to me! For instance, “The result was nil until we let go absolutely.” Not the results were so-so, but nil, nothing. And not letting go mostly or almost completely, but absolutely. Likewise it says that those who wrote the book have noticed that almost anyone could get sober on this simple program, even if they were mentally impaired, if … and that’s a big if … they had the ability to be honest with themselves. Clearly, I was, at the time, one of those few who did not possess this important part of consciousness. What I did possess was perseverance and tenacity, however, and that part of me would save my life. I just kept coming back.

Success Brings a Desired Failure

So off I went going to another 30 meetings in the next 30 days mostly to prove him wrong, but without really knowing that that was what I was doing. I was just not quite able to consciously get to those thoughts of proving him wrong … they sort of rambled around inside my head but never seemed to light long enough for me to realize that they were indeed my thoughts, and therefore my own hidden agenda! At any rate, in spite of this rather unclear state of mind (using the word loosely), I proceeded to stumble along for another 30 days of rage and AA meetings only to arrive at that very special day of 60 days of continuous sobriety. Amazing … this program does really work. Of course it helps if one can notice when it is working. Sadly, I could not. So there I sat with my astonished girlfriend sitting next to me at the bar in Seaport Village drinking away at a double Chevez on the rocks telling her, “See, I told you this wouldn’t work!” She just shook her head and watched the one she loved plunge deeper into his disease to be followed soon by yet more pain and complete hopelessness … and an eventual 3rd stay at the now all too familiar Long Beach Memorial Hospital, my home away from home.

A Third Visit

One could easily imagine that the third time would be the charm but then I’ve never been one to conform much. I can only report that the very best efforts of 12 counselors, my family and friends and myself did not result in me obtaining my sobriety … not yet anyway. I even had friends who were practicing alcoholics call me up with encouragement, but no answers. Deep in my darkness, I couldn’t seem to come out of a paralyzing depression enough to even hear what anyone said. It was as if their words were hitting a field of molasses around me. I could look up and know that they were speaking but had no idea what they were saying … and I just did not care. The only exception was Bob. Somehow he seemed to be able to come into my room, sit down and say something that would get me through the day, something that I was able to hear, and that would help a little. His words were like a candle light at the end of an enormous tunnel. I realize now that the light that he lit was hope, and it was hope that I needed to be able to continue on my search for sanity and sobriety.

A New Plan

When I left the hospital for the third time, he came up with a new plan in addition to his 1-2-3 step plan that I was using. In the hospital we also worked through the first 3 Steps of AA*, but now he suggested a rather radical move. He asked me to start work on my 4th Step, a written personal inventory. In addition he invited me to an aftercare group in which everyone was working on their 4th Step. I was very surprised that he would do this as I did not even seem to be able to get the first 3 Steps, so how could I be qualified to do the 4th? When I asked him about this, he merely smiled and agreed with me, but then said, “Yes, I know, but I just have a feeling that this is what you should do now.” So I did.

After I began to write down each resentment one by one, starting with my earliest memories, something shifted. The constant obsession to drink started to subside a bit, and then a bit more.

What I didn’t know at the time is that when one creates a new context for oneself, that at that very moment of creation that context is like a large empty fish bowl. My new context for living was called sobriety, but the first thing to drop into my fishbowl (context) was the obsession to drink in order to survive because my entire state of being was based on this belief. This I considered unacceptable and thought it was proof that something was wrong. I didn’t know how to allow that thought/need to exist in my newly created context/world of sobriety. I just couldn’t and wouldn’t accept it on any consistent basis and rejected it and fought against it. Of course what one resists, persists. And so it did.

Sobriety … Finally

One day I did reach that acceptance that is described in the AA 12 Step program. It was the level of acceptance that allowed all the various parts of my life … the obsession to drink, a feud with Frank, problems with my kids, etc. … to drop into my fishbowl/context with no influence at all upon the context itself, my sobriety. It happened during those weeks that I was writing out my 4th Step. I awoke one morning, sat up in bed and said, “That’s it, this is over. I will never drink again.” I meant it 100% and I knew I had the tools to do this and I knew that I would use them, and go to any length to do it…just like it was told to me in the beginning. Now I finally had it! I now recognize this state of mind as one of taking responsibility for my disease, but what a journey to get there. Sanity was now a possibility. I also noticed that the constant desire to drink was lessened, and one day it disappeared forever. I just did everything that I could, one day at a time, and all other parts of my life came second, even though those other parts often objected. There was a commitment to me that I felt and knew in my heart.

I soon found myself in two key groups where, as an assistant to the facilitators, I began to teach others what I most needed to learn myself. In retrospect, I see this experience of working in the hospitals as a kind of tithing, or a giving away what I had learned and taken in from the groups in the hospital, the counselors, AA meetings and the very mentality and consciousness of the 12 Steps to others in need. It seems to me that teaching what one needs to learn oneself is perhaps the highest form of teaching. I just had to remember that I, more than anyone, needed to listen to what came out of my mouth as I spoke to others, sometimes not actually knowing where the information came from. One time I can remember being in a rush of fear and panic when this great message came out for a patient, and I actually had had no cognitive thought at all connected to it before I spoke it! This taught me to keep going no matter what fear was present, and I would be OK.

This teaching/learning process I continued for over five years mostly working in hospital programs that I had no credentials for which to be hired at all. Once I was hired to create a family program at one hospital even though I had never done that particular part of a program before. I found myself working at positions where other applicants had credentials and yet I would be chosen above them, once when I didn’t even want the job. I guess destiny was in progress, and it didn’t need me to agree.

Now you have the story of me and my journey to sobriety. This is the total experience whereby I created a rock solid, unshakable sobriety where before only an obsession to drink and use drugs had existed. This sobriety, over the years, has stood the test of much pain and fear as well as some good times…marriage, divorce, death, a great new business, new friends and family, and the loss of it all. Never once was this sobriety threatened, never once did I ever want or consider a drink or a drug. It just wasn’t an option. That’s how well this program works.

As it would turn out, this experience would all be training for the trials and tribulations that would be connected to my work as part of the Nibiruan Council, and the battle to really live life free from not only negative 3D programming, but also negative multidimensional programming of a galactic nature and depth. This work has included using positive beliefs from other dimensions to shift behavior here as well.

So What about Suicide and Templates?

So the question at this writing for me now is: Can this long hard road to sobriety be an experience that can act as a foundation for dealing with the obsession to suicide out of the madness that I’ve described in Walking in the Dark? Can I find a way through and out of the manic depressive mood swings, the deep paralyzing depression, the hopelessness, the fear, the panic and the terror all accompanied by the shame of feeling all these things in the first place? And I do mean a way out, not just a way to tolerate it all. In Part 2, I’ll do my best to answer all this and give the tools I’ve used.

As a final thought … since the reptilian species represent the Dark, we can know that fear of these above described feelings exists underneath all the accomplishments, durability, relentless perseverance and the general very powerful mindsets of those of us with such coding. In addition there are also those races out there in our universe in various reptilian, hybrid reptilian, crossbred reptilian, and cloned reptilian forms that are engaged in relentless wars and other unending conflicts that can’t be resolved. We can also know that some of these races are so polarized that they can no longer even reproduce their species and are desperate for an answer. This reptilian template must be completed for all of us and all of them that await the outcome of this battle in which so many of us find ourselves.

Suicide is not an Option, Part 2: Finding the Answer

Suicide is not an Option, Part 3: Creating the Template

In service,

Jonathan Starr

Written August 2005

*The first 4 Steps of AA are:

• Step 1. Admitted we were powerless over (what ever your affliction) and that our lives were unmanageable.
• Step 2. Came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.
• Step 3. Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as I understood him.
• Step 4. Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.