As a child, I wasn’t very lucky.
I was not born in an era where children could very easily ask questions of elders and expect to get answers simply because they deserved to be answered.
In my time and culture, if you eventually succeeded in asking an unapproved question, you were scolded for it. Most children were shut down before they could finish asking their “unnecessary” questions. “You talk too much. Shut your mouth. Stop disturbing me.” Etc. Those were the regular responses we got.
Don’t blame it on my parents. They probably had it worse during their own childhood. Children and their parents didn’t talk to each other, except when children were asking their parents for the next set of instructions and the permission to carry them out to the letter. Imagine being raised by parents who themselves grew up without childhood privileges. You’ll be asking for too much even if you could ask. So, each generation passed on what it was given, unless a major shift happened that changed the paradigm.
The Questions I Could Not Ask
Due to this childhood pattern, I always had thoughts inside me that I could not share with anyone, either because I considered them to be taboos or because I had no idea who would be genuinely interested.
Now, I don’t recall how young I was, but the first time I came across the Bible portion that said, “…and for this reason shall a man leave his father and mother to cleave unto his wife,” Gen. 2:24 I said to myself, “What sort of rubbish is that?”
But, of course, I did not say it out loud. It seemed awkward to me that I should leave my father and mother to cleave to a woman because, in my culture, it was the woman who left her father and mother to cleave to her husband. It felt to me, right then, that someone was trying to tell men what to do with their lives. I totally disagreed with the statement and even realized it was not a direct quotation by any of the story characters. But I could not ask anyone these things because the Bible was not to be queried.
When My Heart Began Speaking
I had my own inner witness speaking to me, telling me things I could not share with anyone. Some I accepted, others I argued. I always argued when the voice told me that I would raise a very large family with many children, both biological and adopted, answering my name. I accepted the part about raising many children but always argued the part about marrying multiple wives. King Solomon always came to mind, and I’d heard pastors talk about how foolish he became due to his affairs with multiple women, so much so that I hated the thought of dating multiple women. When I began dating, it was one girl at a time. I could never imagine the idea of double-dating. It was a taboo.
The one thing I could never argue or fight as a child was how my heart easily loved, befriended, and genuinely supported people regardless of their gender. I made friends so easily that all kinds of people were my friends, including those I was not expected to mingle with as a prince of royal standing. I did not yet know that this was my heart playing me an innate script of how my heart is open to loving many by default. My brain was not permitted to identify with such a possibility as my default setting, but my heart kept loving everyone by stacking them in the friend zone because that was bearable.
Over the years, through intimate relationships, I started noticing a pattern. My male friends, and even their friends, mostly had me as their best friend, so much so that I became the best friend of many. During this same period, my female friends also grew very fond of me, so much so that some would entrust themselves, alongside their secrets, to me. They were so open with me that if I had been seeking opportunities to have sex, we could easily have done so without anyone feeling cheated. It was pure, unadulterated friendship, but something had been programmed into my brain that blocked off the possibility of sexual freedom.
At this time, I had begun listening closely to how differently things were within my heart versus how they were in the world around me. My heart and my brain had begun to set up friendly debates about what things were right, wrong, or permissible for me to do.
Now, being the kind of person that I am, my heart began to win the definitive debates, such that my heart became freed from the programming that the world, religion, tradition, upbringing, and societal pressures had built into me. I could see the difference between the world within my being and the world outside of me. I began to choose my inner world more and more, and one of the areas in which I had to make this decision was my value system. I could never condemn anyone, even if society had blacklisted them. I became a deep lover, whose heart poured out to others without measure, and whose depth was taken advantage of countless times.
But I did not stop loving as deeply as my heart would. I found joy in who I am within.
I became a generous lover, a giver, and a caregiver to everyone I knew.
When Love Changed Shape
Fast forward to my mid to late twenties, I had my first share of double-dating when my deep but silent love for a young girl was openly and lavishly reciprocated by her, despite the fact that I was already dating another. At this point, I was no longer thinking about taboos and traditions. Instead, I was acknowledging the deep love pouring toward me from the young girl, such that I did not deem it fitting to shut her out. Why should I do such a thing to someone who so genuinely loved me?
The answer that my heart’s nature gave always won the day, and without effort too. So, I dated both ladies, not knowing that my earlier girlfriend was planning to abscond from me due to her traditional rules and parental pressures that were demanding that she be with a different kind of man. As a first daughter, she needed to be with a man with more financial weight, one who could generously extend his riches to her family. Even though her family members loved me stupendously for my personality, they preferred for her to do the needful, and so she did.
Left with my newer and younger girlfriend, my heart swung into a fuller range of loving, where it loved even more deeply and more fearlessly because, this time, it was already loving someone whom another person considered inappropriate for me to love.
Her cousin was one of my closest pals, and he didn’t like the idea of me dating his younger cousin, not because she was too young, but because he preferred me to simply be her elder brother. My heart rejected the taboo label and significantly embraced my love for his cousin even more, and she, too, was deeply involved. I ended up clinging to my girlfriend while my good friend walked away because his taboo could not accept my decision to keep dating his younger cousin. For many people, this event meant many things but, for me, it was a victory of my inner world over the outer world’s programming, where certain unreasonable excuses were given to handicap us from living the life that is coherent with our inner being.
It was also while dating this young lady that I opened myself more to deep love beyond the idea of dating just one person. Although I did not have many ladies to date, I was now open to it. The barrier, or mind-block, had lifted and, years later, I would gladly date another younger lady when my dear lover decided to take a break from our intimacy due to her difficulty with handling a long-distance relationship. For me, distance meant nothing but, for her, it meant everything. So, I began dating another here while she did the same over there. However, when she came back around, she wanted to resume her place while expecting me to cast aside the young lady whom I was now dating.
I could not. I would not. I did not.
So, one day, I was lying down and both ladies lay beside me, one to my right and the other to my left, my arms around them both. This was when I remembered the inner witness with whom I had argued vehemently as a child every time it told me about my potential of being with multiple women. I smiled as I realized that I had argued in vain against my inner self and now, even though I had not planned for this to be, I was living that life.
I lay there between both ladies who were trying to be friends and sisters to each other while, at the same time, trying to be my favorite, and that made me sad. I watched them compete and thought, “Do you two have to desire to be my special one when each of you is already special to me in your own way, simply because of who you are?”
I had to tell them to stop trying to manipulate me into favoring anyone or discarding anyone because I would never do that. If anyone was unwilling to continue with me, that one could leave but asking me to make that choice for you was not acceptable.
This happened in my late twenties. At this time, I had multiple lovers, most of whom were physically far away from me. But distance does not affect my love, so I kept loving them all.
The two ladies who slept by my side soon walked away, one after the other, as both could no longer continue with what had now become too much for them to handle. Every time they ran into me somewhere or phoned me, they still loved me just as they always had. Even if anger or disappointment had made them declare their hatred for me, whenever they decided to be honest, they said things like, “Honestly, I wish I could… because it doesn’t seem anyone ever loved me enough…”
This became the story of my love life. Many of my ex-girlfriends continue to love me till this day. While not everyone had the mental framework to permit themselves to admit it, their level of openness with me whenever we spoke, and how easily they confided in me, spoke volumes. I am a keeper of secrets for those who have entrusted them to me.
I do not spill beans!
The Years of Hiding
Then I got bitten by the guilt bug, telling myself that loving multiple women without setting barriers to my heart was my main problem with every woman I loved. I had to put the blame on myself because I could not find one woman who could understand, let alone appreciate, the way my heart loved.
I had to be the problem, I told myself, and that brought me remorse.
I stopped dating altogether and, if anyone was getting close enough, I told them I was a whore of some sort, just to get them to run away. They mostly did not believe me, so I might run away instead or find another way to push them away.
I became a teacher, a radio presenter, a relationship counselor, and a preacher of the Christian gospel on national radio. This exposed me to the storylines of many hearts, showing me how most people played one personality in public and another in private. I realized that most people never lived out their inner world but kept it hidden, buried and, sometimes, ensured it was completely forgotten.
I felt sad for them and for myself as well.
Soon, a group of fellow misfits gathered around me, people who wanted to live their own truth in a world that hated it. This became my first group of disciples and friends with understanding, but each person still had to battle the demon of his or her childhood programming.
Life within this group of open-minded fellows allowed me to reevaluate myself, both within and without. I created the Compatible Hearts Community on Facebook, and people joined from across the world. I decided that I would be myself even if that meant being myself alone.
I stopped dating anyone, no matter how deeply in love I was with them. I kept every relationship distant, and it was deliberate. Once you became close to me as a lady, I would friend-zone you or openly call you my sister. I was trying to protect my sanity, and it worked for a while. At least, it stayed that way until I became married to someone I loved so stupendously much.
At this time, I was so sure that the multidimensional lover aspect of me had accepted living in the world and simply flowing with the programming. I dated others virtually and kept them far away so that my heart was still loving many, while my physical person was only with one.
When My Inner World Was Found
One day, my wife opened Pandora’s box by reading my chats with some of these multiple ladies I was sweetly loving, and everything began coming out of the red room. I was still the same person I used to be after all. I had only mastered the art of pleasing the world around me, I realized. But I still tried to convince my wife that this was all such a bad idea and that I would try again to change. I even wrote a song about it:
One day I go change
One day I go change
Maybe if you love me, baby,
You can make it easy for me
Well, I sure didn’t make it easy for my wife, who could not wrap her head around the idea of sharing her husband with anyone. The old battle between my divinely produced heart and my world-programmed mind had resumed again but, this time, it was in my matrimonial home. I felt so much pain through those times that I could not tell anyone about it because I was mostly the villain, no matter whom I told.
A few people told me, “You, too, should have used a password that your wife would not have seen.” They somehow knew I was being gaslighted by the world, but they could not help me and would never openly stand by me in the situation.
I remembered the past with those two ladies all over again, and my wife would call me a flirt. I felt hurt, but I also felt she was right and so I began to build another type of distance. I could love you and never have to worry whether you loved me back or not. This was my safe space, holding no grudge against my wife but simply loving her my own way, even if that was considered filthy. I kept on going.
I believed that one day she would accept me as I truly am or, at least, stop fighting me for something that is intrinsically me.
Sometimes, it’s so hard to believe something unless it has personally happened to us.
Years into this newly discovered version of me, my wife broke down many times while I kept being both the lover and the bad guy, or the fall guy, because I refused to stop loving her and also refused to stop loving others.
One day, she allowed one such lover into our bedroom and wanted to be there to watch me make love to the other lover in her presence. This other lover could not resist it because she somehow believed that my wife was truly trying to become more open to the idea. My wife was dying beneath her smiling face, but no one could see it because a part of herself was also genuinely trying to figure out how this thing could really play out.
I could not bring myself to have sex with the other lover in my wife’s presence and, even behind her, I still could not do it. The other lover also knew we were trying to break a program that we had all been raised with because none of the three of us had ever had a threesome before. So, it was not possible.
But that single event gave me a different type of closure. None of us was wrong. We were just different, and we all deserve to be our true selves.
I kept this knowledge to myself and moved on with life in my marriage, trying so hard to be the loyal husband figure to my wife again.
Being a lover was natural to me but being a husband figure tried to subject me to rules and worldly programming that my inner being rejected by all means.
The battle continued for another few years when another lover entered the picture. A lady I had no reason to crave but every reason to love because she was coming from a loveless place in the world where her heart was broken and shattered to pieces from a relationship she had hoped would lead to marriage.
I often feel the pain of those who try to get married to their loved ones, because I married the woman I love, and never thought it could turn this chaotic for either of us.
I decided to give this younger lady a soft landing by showing her that love was never the problem with her recently failed relationship. It didn’t take long before I found myself loving her in the same deep ways that I had always loved.
I invited her into our matrimonial home, and my wife quickly accepted her like a younger sister. It was their closeness that made her tell my wife that I was showing her love and that she, too, was truly loving me in return.
My life came under watch again and, before I knew it, I could no longer blame the devil because now it was looking like the devil I sought to blame was my own heart. But I could never label my heart the evil one because I knew it too well for the angel it is. From childhood, and even before it became a human being, I knew it.
As a new series of love affairs triangulated in my home, I decided to manage the situation a little differently, but my strategies were not always consistent with any lasting principle.
I remember saying to my wife, “How can you be sad that two people are actually loving each other, as if that is a bad thing? How can we become sad at the happiness of another?”
She stomached a lot of hell, if I’m being honest, because I did not quickly consider that if my new lover were in my wife’s shoes, at that time or another, she would most likely take it even more drastically.
One day, she told me,
“I’m a woman and I know how your wife feels. I also cannot take it but now I’m entangled with you. I have never been loved this much. How can I throw it away? I would not bother her if only she could just accept me as before. I would take her as my elder sister.”
And so the confessions went on and on.
I listened to her and believed everything she said. The only issue was that my belief made no difference unless my wife could dare to believe it.
She did not.
How could she, who believed her heart was designed for exclusive love, accept such?
I became a preacher, trying to convince both women to find a common ground, and that failed the most.
I can now imagine how rotten my mouth must have smelled while trying to talk each woman into polygamy.
Neither wanted it.
My wife would not touch it with a long stick, and my new lover considered it a shameful thing to be with a married man when many unmarried men were out there.
Many times, she tried to leave but would often come back to her senses because of something else she had discovered in our relationship.
At the beginning, I said I believed that relationships must be purposeful. I held firmly to my conviction that whenever two or more persons come together, they must seek to do something productive together, not just for themselves but for the world at large.
I wanted the three of us to make that attempt, but I later realized we were three different worlds trying to coexist inside Mother Earth.
Compromises had to be made. I made many and, in fairness to them, they tried their best as well.
My entire life was now circling between one emotional issue and another as I kept parrying myself between two women, my wife and my lover, until I said to myself one day,
I accept my heart!
This was the moment I stopped trying to convince my wife that I would remain a monogamist and also stopped trying to make my lover feel she was extra special.
No one is more special than the other. Everyone is special. Each one is unique and, if I’m being honest, I just needed to treat my relationship with each one as that, a personal relationship. I no longer tried hard to convince one woman to accept the other but focused on whatever I was doing with each woman.
Still, it was hard for each one to stop reading my relationship with the other woman into my relationship with her. This forced me back into the explainer mode where I had to explain to you that my love for you is just as pure as it could ever be and ever was.
But you would not believe me, as long as the other woman was there, if you were my wife, and as long as I did not legitimately marry you, if you were my lover.
Both women had their right to happiness and they both made themselves so clear that I was forced to admit that I was the unclear one among us three.
The Spiritual Underlay
Clarity came for me when I took an inventory of my life over the last few years of moving in these matrimonial and polyamorous emotional circles. I asked myself the one question that mattered: Where is my true self and my life purpose in all these? I realized that my life could end up meaning nothing unless I took it back from the shenanigans of trying to prove myself to the world and to those whose minds were framed by its seemingly harmless limitations.
I took back my life and embraced my missionary journey all over again.
This is the spiritual underlay upon which my entire life story was built, but I had not mentioned it until this moment because I did not want to seem to be spiritualizing my own bullshits. Now, I no longer have to care what you or anyone thinks of me, for I have already set myself ablaze openly enough in these words that I am convinced my sincerity is my last true friend.
Being someone who has clear memories of:
- my life on earth before this present one,
- my life in my spiritual or heavenly world after a past earth lifetime,
- my life within the source of life as a formless individuation of the source,
- my life as a spirit-offspring, being breathed forth into this world from the divine breath of a great being whom the world still misunderstands till tomorrow, or at least till this moment,
- my life as a pilgrim spirit with a mission into this world to transform it by living and showing the way of life that truly emanates from my spirit-father, whom the world worships as God but barely dares to know,
- my transmission date into this physical world from the cosmic realm and my entrance into the womb of the woman who would become my mother,
- my kindred spirits who came here into earth to also carry out similar or related missionary work from the same source of life and spirit family,
- my life in the womb of my mother as a self-conscious spirit trying to fit into its human body while also growing with it and occasionally stepping out to do other things, mostly play, in the non-human realms of my existence,
- my first psycho-physical and paranormal encounter with the divine being as a seven-year-old,
- my countless intimate but silent encounters with the voice of my inner witness, with whom I’ve had more conversations than with anyone in this world,
- and the numberless visitation dreams, visions, and revelations in which my spirit-father showed up to update me or upgrade my consciousness to remember more, know more, or grow more in the dimensions of my being.
I was clearly not cut out for the regular human life and my mistake was trying too hard to blend in. But the mistake was also good for my learning.
I have now learned the difference between loving and being loved, just as I have accepted the fact that being a lover is the most beautiful thing one could ever be, in this world or in the hereafter.
Now, my inner witness does not get debates from me because my inner life and my outer are becoming one again.
I am a lover, a multidimensional lover of all and of as many as can be loved into the dimensions of their own being.
All my love life has one underlying goal: to initiate recollections of yourself so that your innermost self emerges again as your outermost through the discovery and recovery of your higher self in your current lesser, or human, embodiment.
This circles back again to my original purpose in life and my true purpose in every relationship: to facilitate a return to the source and spirit-father or to spirit-mother, for those who are so emanated.
My knowledge of the spirit world and the principles that hold the spiritual landscapes are intact and fully restored to me. Now, I am only trying to navigate through the daily human life that I have already built through my days of humble beginnings and foolish leanings.
I am still the lover that I was and will always be, but no longer do I seek for anyone to accept me or appreciate me for what I am.
I have rested in the peace that my being is!
The Shepherd Way
Finally, in accepting my true self, my missionary life kicks off again, not in the ways that the world imagines it. Especially not in the way the religious world has always framed it. Not in the secular way of worldly governments.
I walk this path in my father’s way, which also is my way, The Shepherd Way, where life is lived in stewardship and stewardship is permanent.
I have therefore begun documenting my knowledge so that the world, or those who care, might begin to use it as a reference point.
No longer do I care to woo my wife or lovers into this path with me, nor do I seek for anyone to come into it with me.
I love everyone as they are and where they are, but I would never again abandon myself or my path to please the world or anyone, for that matter.
Ask me who I am to you now and I will sincerely and boldly say, with a smile,
“I am the one who loves you enough to want to see you shine your light in this world.
I am a steward who hopes you would become one again when my life and ways as a steward become desirable enough for you to recover yours.
I am the shepherd way, truth and life and this is who I am, whether in public or in private. Regardless of what roles I am playing, I am still the same.”
To my wife, I am still her husband because I have already married her and I remain committed to what I have started. I would never divorce her if she also chooses to continue to be with me.
But no longer will I be laid on the table, ready to be dissected and knifed like a common criminal because of the way my heart loves my people, regardless of their gender.
To my lover, I remain the true lover I am, and I stand firmly in my originality as a shepherd-being. I will never abandon anyone for as long as we both accept the realities of our unique personalities and the non-conformist stature of our shared love life.
But never will I be weighed by the expectations of anyone who wants me to earn their trust when I am already giving the very best of me without asking for anything in return.
To everyone else in my life, children, parents, siblings, business partners, neighbors, students, or clients, I remain a man of many capacities, also known as Mr. Resourceful, whose life and lifestyle must offer you a new way to see life and to live yours also, by choice.
To my source, I am grateful for the gift of being and, to my spirit-father, I am more than thankful for the gift of mentorship and true friendship, for it is from this divine experiential life that my current identity is shaped.
Peace and Love!