Over 1,000 Beatings, Spiritual Sanity and the Rejection of Evil

Bill Neely

Description

This is a memoir and narrative of relentless terror and of combating hatred through following a path of a higher good and an inner guiding light as a child, a teenager, and an adult. From age 4 until 18 (1951-65) he is conditioned like one of Pavlov's dogs to scream and cry for his life at the hands of his biological father who is a monster. What gifts him with a spiritual sanity and a living soul to persevere is he cares for his 3 younger brothers, and he doesn't do to them or anyone else what is being done to him.

Sujets

• Vie de famille
• Soutien psychologique et conseils familiaux
• Fracture familiale
• Inspiration
• personal Growth

Informations

• Publié par: Outskirts Press
• Date de parution: 30 septembre 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781977219749
• Langue: English

Extrait

Over 1,000 Beatings, Spiritual Sanity and the Rejection of Evil All Rights Reserved. Copyright © 2019 Bill Neely v3.0 r1.0
The opinions expressed in this manuscript are solely the opinions of the author and do not represent the opinions or thoughts of the publisher. The author has represented and warranted full ownership and/or legal right to publish all the materials in this book.
This book may not be reproduced, transmitted, or stored in whole or in part by any means, including graphic, electronic, or mechanical without the express written consent of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
Outskirts Press, Inc. http://www.outskirtspress.com
ISBN: 978-1-9772-1974-9
Cover Photo © 2019 Bill Neely. All rights reserved - used with permission.
Outskirts Press and the “OP” logo are trademarks belonging to Outskirts Press, Inc.
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
Table of Contents
Introduction
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14: The Plight of My Youngest Brother, Jack
Chapter 15: My Brother, Jim’s Narrative
Chapter 16: Layla’s Narrative
Chapter 17: Osh’s Narrative
Chapter 18: Endeavour’s Narrative
Epilogue
Introduction
Evil is too incredible to be believed until it happens to you. I must not give up. I must continue trying…not to let the light within me die out.
I am seventy years old. I need to tell this life experience of mine to a listener with an inner ear. Most every day I feel like I am dying within. This is what I must combat. I am worthy of light, though in my mother’s own words when I was a child and teenager, I was evil, a devil kid, and an obscenity. She was the good parent.
My biological father was one of the worst of men. He was a torturer whose laughter was one of delight when I screamed and cried for my life. He would ambush me when I was alone as a teenager, straddling my chest, pinning my arms to the floor, trying to make me guess which hand he was going to slap the side of my face or head with. Then he would run his hand over my face, pinching my nostrils while cupping my chin with his palm, trying to close my mouth, so I wouldn’t be able to scream, laughing at me all the while. I am the only living witness.
The first thing I want to avoid is thinking that the only sane thing to do in this world is to be insane. Logic has failed me spiritually. It has come up short. It is inadequate. I seek throughout the day to transcend a spiritual gravity within me that never lets up in continually pulling me downwards towards a lower descent of thought, feeling, and being. I seek to spark an inner light of inspiration to attempt to create a spiritual sanity from within a higher good. I seek a liveliness, a spontaneity of innermost feeling and being.
I would be unable to write what is ahead without the attempt to express this inner light and spirit that are hopefully coming to be in a brighter way. To be alive if only for a few moments is to be in a way of a higher good and of a brighter light from within. I seek to ignite a spark of inner creation here to bring the darkness into the light.
There was a period in my life from age twenty-one through twenty-six that I had yet to begin to consciously self-destruct. I was optimistic and open for help, for inspiration to make a go out of living life. There was acquaintanceship and conversation with others, yet it was reading books that was the most compelling. It took me all of six years to go through most every single philosophy and psychology book in the Main Library in Philadelphia, searching for guidance on how to live my life. In addition to the library, there were bookstores and a lot of popular self-help books. I was a voracious reader. For fiction, I read psychological suspense, horror, romance, mystery, crime novels, and the classics.
I was looking, seeking an unknown something within any one of those books to enlighten me in attempting to live my personal life in a more constructive way back then.
The only passages I ever came across from any one of those books that I could relate to or identify with were from a couple of psychoanalysts. They had examined and written about some of the torturous and traumatic events of the early childhoods of a few of the past serial killers. This was no help at all. Back then, I never came upon anything that was written in a sympathetic or empathetic way about victims of violent crime or victims who were harmed grievously in their lives by other people whether in a short or lengthy period of time. I was left to my own self-knowledge.
My idealism, my aspiration and striving towards a noble, honorable way of living life, became one of self-destruction and self-negation. The spiritually insane and sick thinking that I experienced was that the most noble, selfless action I could ever perform on this planet with my life was just to end it…to snuff it out.
I vividly remember when at the end of those six years I finished reading the very last book from the psychology section of the library that it felt like inside me the final nails were being pounded into the lid of my coffin.
That was then, and this is now. For me the writing of this book is to embark on a voyage of hope…to aspire to communicate the phenomenon of inner light and spirit with my fellow man and woman.
Opening the door, a portal to my past has been the most difficult task I have ever undertaken in my adult life. I have tried to the best of my abilities to accomplish this feat with a practiced writing and verbal skill of using logic along with a spontaneity and liveliness of spirit and being to convey to the reader a limited understanding of what the experience of my life was back then.
I refer throughout my childhood to the monster that was my biological father as “my father” because that is what I knew him as when I was a child and young adult. In the latter part of the book, I sometimes use “my biological father” because saying or writing “monster” incited a violent hatred inside me. Such a feeling is what I want to avoid. Life is short. This monster is not worthy of thought or feeling on my part. He is deceased, yet not forgotten.
It isn’t enough to write only of what I experienced outwardly in the physical world. The evolution of my father’s predatory hate and sin at my expense…the shame, humiliation, pain, and torment are too overpowering and overwhelming for me to ever overcome inwardly. That is the reason this book was not written thirty, ten, or five years ago even though I had the writing skills. Only in the past couple of years have I experienced a strengthened spiritual sanity of inner life, inspiration, and being. I make continuous, daily attempts at an inner creation of light and spirit within me. Throughout the book, at the end of each chapter, are my own inner struggles reflected by my decisions and choices to be, instead of not to be. It is for good to triumph over the evil that occurred…for life to be worth living and valued.
The spiritual sanity I experience throughout my present day is an attempt to transcend ordinary living by following both an inner logic of thought and a spontaneity of feeling and being from within. I can’t fully explain spiritual sanity, but I do try to express it in a way of a higher good and of trying to brighten an inner light that I think is inside me and within most, but not all, people.
During the worst years of my life, from the age of fourteen up until I was eighteen, there was only one set of footprints in the sand. I thought back then and throughout most of my adult life that they were mine alone. I was wrong. I was carried throughout my ordeal. That was my experience. There is a sacred unknown, a living soul within me. That is who this book is dedicated to.
CHAPTER 1
To care and feel for another’s plight,
To shun a weight of depression,
To escape whirlwinds of torment,
To avoid hidden shadows of despair,
 
A blink in the unfolding of time,
To try to reflect a spectrum of colorful imagining,
A netherworld of orange and pink twilight within a bright, waking dream,
If only one spark to be.
 
 
THIS IS A morality tale, one of evil and of an attempted good to combat it. The rejection of evil is an accomplishment. Though outwardly nothing may happen, inwardly there is self-knowledge of what I am not. There is a feeling of being in a worthwhile way. At times when I was a child and a teenager, this was all that I had.
As a young child, I sought and was given comfort by my mother. To me, my mother was a beautiful woman. When I was in the early grades at school, I would dream of marrying someone who looked just like her. My father was a stranger to me. He never spoke or played with me. He was only someone who was always in the background behind my mother. When I think of the feelings that I experienced back then, they were ones of high anxiety, fear, and uncertainty.
In 1951 at the age of four, the introduction or insertion of my father into my life happened. I had my little arms wrapped around my mother’s leg for comfort. He spoke to her, but I felt intuitively, even though I was only four, that the words were meant specifically for me to hear. I also felt that there was an unspoken agreement beforehand about this between my mother and father because she accepted what he told her without protest or comment. He was short and to the point.
“You are not to allow him to touch you, nor are you to touch him.”
It was maybe a couple days later. It was right after lunch with my mother and father. In the afternoon, I went to kindergarten. I liked it. During class, we would finger paint or draw with crayons, and it was fun being around a lot of kids my age. I was standing in the dining room getting ready to walk the three or four blocks to school. I can’t remember what my father said to me,