RADICAL DEPARTURE
Unless something changes dramatically, this may be my last entry for a while. I’ve just recovered from a terrifying experience for which there are no words. I researched it online and have discovered no analogues. I believe it occurred because of the tremendous pressure my conscious mind was putting on my sub-conscious to reprogram it. To put it mildly, my sub-conscious went supernova.
There's no need to recount it in full, except to say that for two weeks every waking moment was bathed in absolute fear - like having a knife against my throat. There are no words to describe the relentless horror I felt, and there was literally no reprieve during my waking hours. If not for the fact I could still sleep, I might have lost my mind before it began to subside.
I've been through a lot this past year, much of it positive, but this event was so utterly consuming I've lost touch with every facet of spirituality I have accumulated since leaving Atheism in 2005. Such a statement may ring of hyperbole, but it is uttered with sober decisiveness. Perhaps this is my flight from Nineveh. Perhaps my destiny arc will one day lead me there, but after what I've seen, it will be through the belly of a great fish – of that I’m certain.
As I depart, I offer several reflections on and questions about this cautionary tale:
- The mystical journey is a river and the unconscious mind a stream. Does a person benefit from swimming upstream in either case? Can it be helped? The conscious mind pulls one way, and the unconscious another. The harder one strives to divert the unconscious mind, the heavier the unconscious mind drags in the current. A war ensues, a bloody, cacophonous clash of discordant forces that will not yield, will not compromise, and will not agree on what is best. If pressed beyond the threshold of what the mind can withstand, eventually it crashes upon the rocks - potentially resulting in lasting mental damage. So I ask: do people have control over their destinies?
I cannot currently answer this question. Both answers are utterly intolerable to me. I am neither capable of reprogramming my unconscious mind, nor willingly to fall into its flow and see where it takes me. Neither answer can effectively explain what I've become, why I have both gained and lost so much. So where do I go from here?
- Despite the necessary resignation, I'm not willing to let myself off the hook entirely. I have no idea how to heal me, and am left feeling there may be no final solution to the problem of being me. Am I actually going anywhere, or are the incremental nudges merely pressing me onward until I find myself whence I began, damned to repeat the exercise ad infinitum - a la Sisyphus?
Perhaps life is nothing more than a perpetual cycle on both the macro and micro scales - an endless cycle of birth and rebirth and everything in between - both mired in and perfected by an emerging acceptance of its ironically juxtaposed beauty and squander. Once having accepted it, will we even wish it to continue?
- Now that my senses have returned to me, my desire to always press the outermost boundaries of my mind has followed close behind. One thing is certain: I have parted forever with predominant New Age thinking, though the things we pick up along the journey never really leave us.
It is time to pursue something new. I want to believe this universe is evolving into something better than exists at present, and that humanity will be a beneficiary of such evolution, but have yet to grasp what that means for me in the near or long term. To me, humanity fits the description of a transitional species - highly successful, yet transitional - which may ultimately be the operative descriptor of every highly-adaptive species in an emergent universe. We're a messy mixture of limbic instinct and neocortical cognition. We can't do too much of one without the other, but they don't play well together either. What can be deduced about the metaphysical structure of reality from this? I intend to explore that to what extent I'm able.
- Finally, the body of work this Living Christ presented was a lie. It was insidious because it held to many of the virtues and teachings of Jesus Christ, which made it deceptively enticing. Additionally, this Living Christ shared many things with me that proved to be quite beneficial. The twist - that clever lie that made it all unravel - was in his handling of the Parable of the Talents.
He constantly emphasized that I had been provided talents, and it was up to me to multiply them. I was given revelations and guidance along the way, but I was solely responsible for subduing the unconscious programming preventing their multiplication. As time went by the internal pressure to multiply them became extreme and the threat of having them all taken away, as in the parable, became very real to me. I believe this was the reason for the psychological rift and is why I no longer choose to meditate. If God wishes to speak with me, I'm listening - consciously, rather then entranced.