YellowButterfly

@Baotrader Guy, if you don’t like your situation you’re kinda in the right place. Even situations like yours aren’t hopeless. Hard but not hopeless. What could it hurt? Maybe try and stick it out to see if pursuing Spirituality and Enlightenment could help. If it helped me it can help you. And you say your decision’s not being made out of ego. I would plead you to try and see if that’s entirely true before you do something like that.

I have to reply to your topic because I’ve had a similar issue to you. Though with me it was completely in the reversed. Meditation really helped me work through this in me though I would EXTREMELY advise against continuing to meditate for you if it’s posing this sort of danger to you. Stay safe, but I would offer up one thing that I began to understand that helped me start tackling this. What you are considering as your higher self in these situations might not be what you think it is. You did state that you realized you were misinterpreting your prior experience. That’s a start. What my psyche would do for the longest time is act like a spontaneous limb reaction or similar to turrets. Have a fear? It would amplify it. Not want to do a thing? It would say, “Hey! Let’s do just that!” I know that just simply saying recognize this in yourself and fight it is cliche, but I had to. If you label it as your higher self, which I really don’t think it is, you can tend to think, “Oh, I HAVE to follow this because it’s higher self.” I’d recommend avoiding meditation and take your power back from it. Similar to the ego turning on you. Don’t let it. That power lies in your hands and your hands alone.

I’ve experienced a lot of that too. The sparkles, synchronicity, numbers, etc. and I still have a hard time wrapping my head around it. It does give you a pretty good glimpse into the nature of reality though I suppose.

I think what some people have difficulty with in this is that an enlightenment experience, this process, this understanding is merely a growth phase. A condensed growth phase, but from my experience a growth phase none the less. What causes you to heal and reconcile your life, what you've been taught, understanding. Like a growth spurt or puberty in your teens. People are just growing up through a very rapid process of understanding in their own minds. For some reason, probably because of the way human society has developed, it typically takes quite extreme circumstances to have an experience of "enlightenment", or a boost in maturation. What I see from Neo-Advaita is like an analogy I made before. A person who has been locked in a room their entire life only to finally be released and to see for the first time that there is an outdoors and to experience the outdoors might for a time develop an aversion to the indoors or confined rooms. Not simply holding a belief comfortably recognizing it is one, but instead clinging to it in desperation. Reconciling and balancing duality with non-duality and being cautious not to vilify duality. To not discard aspects of reality. This said person might then cling to the outdoors desperately until they start to become uncomfortable where others might say, "Just come inside, get some food, rest. You've been outdoors for days!" They might rail against it. Like a form of ptsd, if you will, out of fear of being confined again. When a person experiences true freedom it can be entirely overwhelming and a person will want to cling to something, to have a sense of control to stabilize themselves and feel safe amidst such freedom. For a person just coming into this understanding Neo-Advaita teachings might be helpful at pointing the way, but to not grasp and cling in desperation after an understanding has been made like clinging onto a hot coal. Unless one wants to of course. It's up to the person to choose and to reconcile. You can help and assist people with a lot of things, but unfortunately you cannot assist with another's mind. They have to do that themselves.

@WildeChilde Mine was induced through meditation and while I did know of kundalini beforehand I just thought it was so rare that it wasn't gonna happen to me, but it did. Overall I am glad that it happened, but it certainly didn't come without it's difficulties that's for sure.

That's like looking at the appendages on a frog and asking why does that hand act like a hand, or why does that foot act like a foot. Don't they know they're all one thing? So they should act... how? And while a lie can point to the truth this is typically done through metaphor. If you take a person from birth who is kept in a locked room his entire life and has never seen grass, never heard or been told of grass. Has never even been outside and you start talking to him about grass he's gonna have no clue what you're talking about until you take him outside to experience grass for the first time. Even if you put on a persona or some societal mask you are only mimicking. There is still the person underneath.

Hang onto your ass. This ain't gonna be no cakewalk. Oh, and non attachment. ✌?

I personally don't like the term enlightenment. It's more an experience that one goes through that can change a person, but the ego can never really be fully destroyed. Outside of the experience it'll always begin rebuilding itself. Not to mention every single person still has their own unique experiences and memories that make them who they are. Memories are not erased in an experience like that.

Kundalini is intense whether positive for the person experiencing it or not. It can happen during meditation or yoga practices, though I've heard of people having spontaneous kundalini as well. The whole nervous system fires up and it can potentially cause nerve problems, though in my case nothing major I didn't recover from rather quickly. Depending on the way you approach kundalini once the process starts determines a positive or negative experience. Most negative experiences happen by becoming afraid and trying to resist what's happening in the body which can shoot it up the wrong bundles of nerves which can cause pain and an overall unpleasant experience. Once the energy reaches the brain and pineal it can cause an intense, ongoing trip-like experience that causes a temporary psychosis which if not handled properly can land one in the mental ward for a time. It does produce an enlightenment experience and there are benefits, it's not all cons, but it's the most intense crash course.

I love this. It's very similar to how the "higher self" of you and your emotions, worries, etc. drives and controls your dreams, but you're not aware of it in the dream itself. Same thing in life. You have a "higher self" of you, if you will, that drives you in waking life, but you do have to be somewhat lucid to change the dream of life. Materializing things into your life through thoughts first, which then drives your feelings and emotions which then drives your actions. That gut feeling or intuition. It might take longer than in dreams, but people can and do materialize things into waking life.

I think it's largely just a difference in following more of your own internal guidance and intuition whereas a good many people have been cut off from it and just follow what the majority of society does. "The psychotic drowns in the same waters in which the mystic swims with delight." Joseph Campbell

‘The truth was a mirror in the hands of God. It fell, and broke into pieces. Everybody took a piece of it, and they looked at it and thought they had the truth.’ -Rumi 'Only a few find the way; some don't recognize it when they do; some don't ever want to.' 'Steps to enlightenment brighten the way; but the steps are steep. Take them one at a time.' 'The true student will read between the lines and gain wisdom.' 'Most people, in fact, will not take the trouble in finding out the truth, but are much more inclined to accept the first story they hear.' -Thucydides 'I've always felt that a person's intelligence is directly reflected by the number of conflicting points of view he can entertain simultaneously on the same topic.' -Abigail Adams

I used to get sleep paralysis all the time. Seeing shadow silhouettes and having hag syndrome where I felt hands around my neck, which could be so real at times I could feel the pressure building in my head from being choked but couldn't see anything there. Like half in and half out. Meditating literally stopped it for some reason entirely. I think having a lot of fear has something to do with it, but I'm not sure. It doesn't happen anymore and hopefully will never have it again.

I noticed a difference with me having to do with personal boundaries as well as fully accepting myself and loving myself enough to take my own guidance. I had some personal conditioning that made me not trust myself or my own internal guidance system and rather outsourcing it to others. Being told the way one thinks or is is somehow inherently just plain wrong by others because they don't do things that way and try to force you to do things their way and BELIEVING it was pretty bad juju for me. Turning to others thinking they knew better than myself, not to say one can't learn from others, of course people can and should, but I think it definitely increased my need for being liked. The more I saw that others worth was not inherently any greater or less than my own and focused more on my own learning and understanding and trusting it I found I needed people to like me much less. It was no longer posing that detriment of always worrying about it. Being told to love yourself can seem somewhat cliché, but it is very true.

How am I now? Much more outgoing and chill t.b.h. though it wasn't easy at first. It can be difficult to overcome that kind of fear, but it just took time, baby steps and challenging myself little bit by little bit. Like a prior post said I just became more concerned about being me and not caring anymore. Though it might be difficult it is possible.