“…the most common features of ASS (AIDS Survivors Syndrome): extreme emotional pain, trauma, and depression; survivor’s guilt and low self-esteem; suicidal ideation; anger, over-guardedness, and chronic anxiety; social isolation; fear of aging; and difficulty envisioning a future.”
The media love to focus on suffering: “An entire generation of AIDS survivors is now struggling with a hidden epidemic” declares LGBTQNation.com
I’m an aids survivor. I don’t have ASS.
HIV taught me Healing Is Vital.
AIDS was my Accelerated Individual Discovery of Self.
Facing death led to me asking deep questions about life. This is why I call HIV the the greatest gift. When I opened my mind and heart to the universe, it responded by bringing me ecstatic inspiration and a sense of my place in the cosmic whole. I went from atheist to activated then activist. We are All One. I will even go as far as to say that’s what LGBTQ+ people are here to teach the world!
All those listed ASS symptoms are blown away by Spiritual Gnosis, Self Knowledge, Self- Realisation. All those symptoms are signs from our souls to dig deeper into who we really are.
Self, with a capital S, is a spiritual term for the core divine consciousness within us. Hinduism teaches that Atman = Brahman, ie the individual self is in fact an emanation of the God Self. The goal in life becomes to realise – ie make real – the divinity within.
Mystical Christianity points to the same thing. Jesus taught that the Kingdom of Heaven is within. Exoteric Christianity tells people to worship an exterior being who will return to ‘save’ them, whereas esoteric, mystical, Christianity teaches that the Christ Self – the divine Self- lies within. Medieval heretics (who were so known for their queerness that Ketzer – Cathar – became a word for German gays and we get the word buggery from the Bogomil heresy that originated in Bulgaria) believed that we can become united with the Christ while alive, we don’t have to wait until after death. But we do have to face our own mortality and learn to surrender to the greater spirit to achieve this.
People with HIV/AIDS are not life’s victims. We are front line troops on the path of Conscious Awakening.
The LGBTQNation article is, despite its horror-struck headline, a celebration of the work of Long Term Survivor Tez Anderson, whose website Lets Kick ASS AIDS Survivor Syndrome is focused on empowerment in the face of real and massive challenges. From what I can tell Tez did not go through the extreme process of full-blown AIDS that I did – it is that experience that makes me so vocal about putting the spiritual lesson at the centre of my AIDS activism, but of course he’s aware of that aspect too – at the end of the article Tez is quoted as saying “Living with one foot in the grave and one foot in the living is a unique perspective, and it helps us be sort of death doulas, if you will.”
His Long Term HIV Survivors Declaration states “We have valuable lessons to teach our community and the world about living and resilience.” I agree – and the message I personally am delivering is that HEALING IS VITAL – consciousness is what we are, connected to the cycles of nature, an eternal Self as well as an embodied one. We are body (Earth) mind (Air) emotion (Water) and spirit (Fire) – and beyond that we are Self, the I Am, incarnate. Consciousness is individual and collective, awareness and love are its core qualities. Some of us are here to be connectors of the multi-dimensional cosmic conscious reality – and we are often queer, as shamans have been in cultures across the planet throughout time: Bridges between human and spirit, between life and death.
We are here for the Great Reconnect. This is the term Arthur Evans, author of 1978 book Witchcraft and the Gay Counter Culture described cosmic consciousness in his later work Lady Moon Rising, a book that spotlights the loss of meaning in people’s lives as a prime source of dis-ease and discontent. He calls the work of coming together with other people to collectively birth a new era of enlightened awareness The Great Reconnect:
“Making the Great Reconnect necessarily deepens and expands the lives of the people doing the reconnecting. They become more open to learning from other people’s personal experiences, the cultural richness of humanity, and the wonder of the natural world. If they invest enough of themselves in the world, they will no longer experience it as an alien presence of external, lifeless objects, disconnected from their own inner needs, feelings and identity. Instead, they will come to experience both themselves and the world as mutually engaging parts of a larger, organic whole…” Arthur Evans. The Call of Cosmic Consciousness – rainbow messenger
To return to the ASS symptoms described above: extreme emotional pain, trauma, and depression; survivor’s guilt and low self-esteem; suicidal ideation; anger, over-guardedness, and chronic anxiety; social isolation; fear of aging; and difficulty envisioning a future.
These symptoms are I suggest life trials designed to make us grow. I do not think they are particularly related to being long term HIV+. I think they are the kind of challenges anybody and to some extent everybody will likely face. I don’t deny they have featured in my life – but my spiritual perspective affects how I experience them. The extreme transformation I went through with AIDS – the paradigm shift from materialist atheism (believing myself to be a random accident of thinking atoms in a cold, meaningless universe) to mystical spirituality (knowing myself as a shamanic soul on an eternal mission) – taught me that the darkest challenges contain the potential for the greatest light, healing and self-discovery.
rainbow messenger 