Spiritual Enlightenment and my Descent Into Madness

[RolandM]

Hello all, sorry for the long post, I tried to keep it as concise as possible, but I have a lot to say about my experience.

First, some background:

I have always been a very depressed, socially anxious, quiet, asocial person who has constantly questioned everything. I am studying biology and philosophy in university, and have never been interested in religion, hippie, or new age interpretations of the world, nor have I ever sought out or been aware of the concept of spiritual enlightenment; my goal has always been to figure out this confusing existence on my own, even if that meant denying everyone including myself.

A week prior to my experience, I started going to therapy due to an extreme stress and skepticism I started having toward reality. All I could think about were the various bizarre contradictions we are faced with on a daily basis that we are expected to ignore in order to keep on living: how is it possible that we exist? Why does society strive for ideals that are impossible to reach? Am I an impossible ideal? Who am I?

Over the course of a week, I began going back to old and repressed memories that I would regularly ruminate on, really trying to question their source. I always believed I was the way I was due to the bad circumstances in my childhood; poverty, abandonment, abuse, etc. But memory by memory I started to realize I didn’t really care about my misfortunes in life as a child. Something negative would happen, such as my mother leaving, then the people around me would start telling me how horrible this is and how troubled I must be, and I would believe them and start to identify with this misfortune and express it in my personality (through music, looks, humor). Then I went further. Did I ever really feel anything, or was it a response to social expectation, like a child who falls down and only cries because the parent watching you expects you to. Unless the pain was directly experienced in that moment, then the pain was artificial. My pain only came afterward when I had concepts of who I was supposed to be and what I was supposed to have as dictated by others. I started to think I was a psychopath!

I eventually backtracked to a moment when there wasn’t any expectation for me to be a person: my first memory when I was about 3 years old. I remember sitting in a flower bed, looking at ants with a magnifying glass wondering “what dis? How it get here?” and then looking around with astonishment thinking “what am I? How did I get here??”

I realized that this, at its very core, was me. Everything after this stage was a path of others telling me what I should be, do, learn, feel, strive for; the various ways I was supposed to suffer. But what was I then? Nothing but curiosity and experience. There was no future, no past, no direction, no doubt. Doubt was gradually planted into me every step of the way, to ensure I developed into a “normal” kid.

I spent several days contemplating this. Things were finally starting to make sense, my entire ego was starting to make sense, as well as the contradicting behaviors of society. As I lay in bed that night, the dots began connecting faster and faster as so many of questions were starting to be answered by this new outlook (e.g. what is the point of preference? It seems like we create preference simply so we can identify ourselves with something, and in the end, we’ve just limited the enjoyment we can get out of life!) But there was something grand, something unifying about this pattern that I was on the edge of, as if ego and personality were an excuse for people to guard the pieces of this same overarching puzzle. I lay there in my bed, my heart pounding out of my chest, my head full of pressure as if it were about to explode. I remember thinking to myself “if I ask one more question I am going to die”. I was scared out of my mind, but I decided I was ready to die and that the truth was worth it, so I took the last step and let the questions answer themselves. Suddenly, in an explosion of euphoria I dissolved. Without words, the questions in my mind began to resolve themselves in an infinite cascade of logic (and not logic?). I was everything. I was nothing. I was the universe. I was God. I was all of those things, and none of those things. Language could only ever be a cliché metaphor for the truth, and before the truth I was only language. There was no meaning in that life, because concepts can only be clichés until they are directly defined by experience, and now was the only time I have ever truly experienced anything. As Leo put it, the phenomenal and the noumenal had collapsed into one without the conceptual world acting as a buffer. Logic and mathematics weren’t abstract anymore, they were the shape that glued reality together.

I didn’t sleep that night, I couldn’t sleep. Sleep didn’t make sense anymore, I could only close my eyes and go into a deep meditation. When the climax settled down enough that I could function again, I wrote about 20 pages in my journal in a single automatic flow, without thought or revision. I closed my eyes and could see the words scrolling through my vision. I went to the beach and truly saw the ocean for the first time, truly saw color for the first time. I couldn’t distinguish between me and the ocean, or a rock, or my girlfriend (any time I’d refer to “me” I’d unintentionally say “we” instead). I felt a profound duty to help all people and animals and environment, and I knew the ambitious path I had to take to get there. (I remember I accidently mashed an ant on my counter, and I spent the next 30 minutes trying to nurse it back to health.) Most strangely, and I haven’t read about this phenomenon before, I had the ability to control my perception of time. It was as if all I had to do was briefly set my mind on a task, such as take a shower, and then execute that task. I would then watch myself automatically do that task sped up with the utmost flow. There was already a path to take, purely determined, and all I had to do was watch it unfold like pressing fast-forward on the Sims. When I went out in public I had to have a metronome playing in my ear so I could calibrate myself to the speed of a second and not scare people with my fast movements. This was extremely bizarre, and I don’t really know how to explain it. (Possibly my sense of time sped up because my brain didn’t have to constantly refer to the ego while making decisions; maybe the normal process of planning ahead, remembering the past, and executing in the present gives us a sense of time that is slower. I don’t know, I can elaborate more on this if you ask).

This absolute joy and satisfaction with life lasted about a week, but eventually things started to break down. I had not ate or slept this entire week since I was so engrossed in everything other than my body. The ego would start to slip back in, and try to conceptualize a thought that was beyond words. “Obviously this can be explained with string theory. Obviously this is M-theory. This is religion, or some psychological phenomenon.” Worst of all, “this is mental illness.” My ego violently tried to take back my identity with the concept of doubt. I would read something online, or watch a video: obviously EVERYONE is talking about the truth; the struggle in the storyline of a movie, this is my struggle, this is the universe’s struggle. The movie is talking directly to me, to itself. This sounds like mental illness, doesn’t it? People in the streets, talking about each other, gossiping about each other, gossiping about me. This sounds like mental illness, doesn’t it? I’d try to explain my theories to my girlfriend and my therapist, it sounds like gibberish because my mind has made connections between concepts that only make sense in the nondual state. Schizophrenia? I am extremely elated because everything I experience is giving me immense joy and a sense of energy. Mania?

This is when paranoia set in. Obviously, if I were an immoral person this state would be extremely dangerous. I am extremely perceptive of the flow of communication, if people knew this they would think I’m trying to manipulate them. If they knew how happy I was they would be jealous. If our capitalist society knew I didn’t need to buy from them they would disregard me. If people saw my odd behaviors they would think I’m unpredictable and fear for their lives. I am the gene that could break evolution, and it only makes sense that the masses would benefit from destroying me. And that’s what they did.

My therapist called an ambulance when I tried to explain this to him. He diagnosed me as psychotic and manic and they took me to the hospital on an involuntary hold. Things got really, really bad. Confined to my hospital bed, my perception of time spiraled out of control. My mind would race through the infinite at top speed, arrive to the conclusion “but this is illogical, you are crazy” and then iterate this loop over, and over, and over. The form of logic began to express itself through a rapid flow of arm movements and hand gestures, and I appeared as a crazy man flailing his arms around wildly. They tied me down to the hospital bed so I couldn’t move. The doubt that was instilled into my mind manifested itself in the form of pure evil. With the variable of doubt, nothing can make sense. Everyone around me was trying to hurt me, all I wanted to do was help them but no one can trust my oddities. And I can’t trust them. I can’t trust myself. I am Jesus nailed to cross. I’m in the 1940s, doctors are trying to lobotomize me. I am in the future, people are trying to dismantle me. I am in a coma and I’ve been trying to wake up for hundreds of years. I am the singularity of a black hole. I am the chaotic void before the big bang. I am pure universal destruction. My thoughts and perceptions began to leave me until nothing was left but abstract colors and shapes, completely removed from this world. I spent what felt like 100s of years in absolute hell, in every sense of the word.

I regained consciousness 4 days later, while sitting in the dining room of a mental hospital. I looked down and saw a violent abstract painting that I had no memory of painting. I was profoundly confused and disoriented, and it took me another 3 days before I could fully understand where I was and what had happened. When I went home they had me on antipsychotics, which just made me want to eat and sleep all day. I had to drop out of the semester, and I had slipped into a deep depression for the next few weeks. I thought I had the truth, and then I lost it. Maybe it wasn’t the truth after all.

I recently weened myself off of medication and I am feeling much, much better. Despite the hell of the situation, I feel that what I got out of the beginning has improved my life drastically. I haven’t felt depressed, my anxiety has gone down considerably, and I don’t ruminate over the past. I thought I was absolutely nuts until I started reading and watching Leo’s content about enlightenment, there is a lot that coincides with what he’s saying I’m starting to feel like what I had experienced has more in common with enlightenment than mental illness. After all, if mental illness has changed my life permanently for the better, why should it be perceived as an illness? The experience I was having wasn’t the damaging part, it was the stigmatization and paranoia about mental illness that society instilled into me. It was doubt about who I really am, who we really are. The same doubt that was instilled into that 3 year old child all those years ago.

I want to go back to those first moments, before the doubt set in. But first I need to learn more and become more disciplined in rejecting doubt. I’ve read a lot about how to get there, but no one really talks about how to stay there, how to adapt and function in this new world. Hopefully you guys can help me out a little. =)

What do you think? Was this mental illness, enlightenment, or something else? Do you think others going through psychosis are getting a glimpse of enlightenment without the proper understanding to interpret it?

[dorg]

@RolandM Have you read Paul Levy's book "Dispelling Wetiko"? He had experience not dissimilar to your's. He has a very dim view of psychiatrists and mental hospitals. He also has video's on Youtube.

I think you are undoubtedly sane.

And welcome to the forum.

Edited September 11, 2018 by dorg

[Mu_]

@RolandM

First rule of fight club, is dont talk about fight club (at least not to your therapist or family and perhaps friends for the time being since this may alarm them and set of that idea that your going crazy).  You had a awakening it sounds like and one that shook you pretty good.  And your right, if things improved why question it.  Hmmm your asking a big question, one that not many people can answer.  If you want to fully stay there, your probably going to have to invest your life and being with a group of people who are genuine in their pursuits can help, along with a teacher/person of knowledge that can provide insight and value to your search.  But the doubt thing your hoping to overcome is a hard one, it may always chatter in the background, but if you can learn to see it for what it is, you can stabilize in a evolving truth (again this isn't a recipe kinda thing, its a learn as you go thing).  For now I'd say get some basics in order, like getting a education or something that will allow you to provide for yourself first.  Continue to watch video's, read about the subject and be apart of the forum.  Pick up some mediation and look into gratitude practices within the time you have with your studies.  Maybe practice a little yoga of some sort, Leo seems to like Kriya yoga I believe.  Hell even just lifting weights in a conscious way can be excellent.  Look into shadow work, but be prepared for some resistance and really dealing with some shit you don't like.  And keep coming back to your awakening experience with curious attention, looking for nothing, this can possibly provide fuel and openning and intuition into how to proceed (like try to refeel it and feel the insights you had).  You had some profound insights, so keep coming back to those and trust yourself (you wrote them eloquently)

HOWEVER, if you have a burning in your heart that continues to eat at you to do more to illuminate this, then listen and follow that   Feel free to ask any more questions.

[Barna]

Man, this was the best read I had in months. You're amazing  

On that night I think you asked questions and answered them repeatedly until the answers looped back into the questions, the process became faster and faster until the questions and the answers became the same in a non-conceptualized form. 
I'm also trying a similar kind of looping meditation, not with thoughts but with awareness. If I would put it into words it would sound like "being aware of being aware of being aware of...", and I'm trying to be this loop until it blows up, or collapses into itself like a singularity. 

[Key Elements]

17 hours ago, Mu_ said:

First rule of fight club, is dont talk about fight club

Very nice saying. There's no point in starting a disagreement or debate. It's best to find ways to show by example. 

[Hamilcar]

at the age of 17 , when I was having dinner with my family , I had a moment of existential crisis while looking at the top of a bottle of soda .
and I still remember... I was saying to myself , "this isn't possible ... everything is wrong " and it was like I wasn't able to think anymore...
actually , to be more precise , I was able to think , but I had no ownership on any thought...
this shit made me panic , I seriously thought I was going crazy

 

[Nahm]

@RolandM

Welcome to the forum. Great Self Inquiry work. Top notch. That is one heck of a purification to have went through to say the least. There’s no proper interpretation of anything, so it doesn’t matter if you’re labeling yourself crazy or sane, or what anyone else thinks you are - it’s the attempt to re-label the thoughts & sensations to ‘a self’ that stands to be rooted out. Rather than create doubt and reject it, see how you’re creating it. 

Is it like you’re in a pinch, not about to settle for feeling less than great, now that you know - but the old patterns are a’creepin? If so, gotta be friends with it. Can’t defect or reject it. Crown chakras open now, it’ll stabilize more over time, but use that awareness to have a look at the doubt as it arises, be confident, and be patient, and don’t turn away from anything. ‘Slow & steady wins the race’ might serve you well for a while.

The doubt sneaks back in through the recreation (a thought) of an a priori I, (the assumed, overlooked, made up “ I “, another thought )  by using past or future (another thought), to regret or second guess (more thinking), and there for feel limited (a thought) by, the past (more thinking) - and projecting that doubted false I (it was a thought to begin with) onto a thought about the future I (another thought) , causing worry. 

All this transpires, while you’re sitting there, perfectly fine, in the now - just over thinking.

(Don’t take that personally, just trying to convey the relationship between now (joy) and over thinking (covered up joy).

Opening the rest of your chakras, kundalini, creativity, focus, strategic thinking, etc - whatever experience - will be in this exact same now. The scenery will change, your feelings will change, but the now will never change. There will always be the option to be present, now. Get comfy in it. Own it. It’s you. Feel the peace in Being. Challenges come & go. Being is eternal. Recall “what is aware of these thoughts?”, and have a laugh because it’s you, and be honest about what you know and don’t know of you. Let the honesty be enough. 

Plenty of time ahead of you to do practices, read up, create the life you want, etc, if you like. (It will be awesome.) 

 

Breathe from your stomach. There’s a big difference between breath, and air. 

http://www.inpursuitofyoga.com/blog/2015/3/11/chest-breath-vs-belly-breath 

Journaling Is a great way to be in the now. 

Check out this long list of different meditations. Some might be very helpful. (Sorry if I missed where you’re at with meditation in general, if at all.)

Hope some of this was helpful.   ??

https://sites.google.com/site/psychospiritualtools/Home/meditation-practices

[RolandM]

@Barna Thanks for the suggestion, his work seems interesting and I will definitely read more of his stuff!

@Mu_ Thank you for the advice. This comment inspired me to get back into contact with my old therapist, who I found out specializes in spirituality. He definitely gets my situation from both psychological and spiritual perspectives, which is immensely helpful in helping me contextualize the experience and confront sources of doubt.

@Barna Man, you explained the loop thing so elegantly its as if I said it to myself (tehe)! Since this post I have been focusing on understanding and systematizing this loop phenomenon, and I've gotten to a point that I can build it up and trigger the loop for a short time before doubt sets in and brings me back to 'reality'. Once I test and refine this method thoroughly I will probably have a long post to share on the forum. It is very much how you explain though. I think the most important part of this exercise is to understand that when we ask ourselves a question, we tend to state the conclusion first, then go backwards and work our way to that conclusion. For example, someone asks you if you believe in evolution, you respond "of course I do!" and then work backwards through the concept to try to justify the belief. In that moment after the question is asked, you have no idea why evolution is true, all you know is that you identify with this conclusion because it made sense to you in the past. We have to be purely creative with this process in a way that we are only moving forward toward more questions without identifying with presumptions. I found that if I lost focus in this process, it was my brain trying to do the backward reasoning I mentioned because I did not truly understand what I was asking, and the line of thought needed to be dropped immediately in order to move forward. Everything you ask you already know through direct experience, you are simply using reason to make connections in real-time. Let intuition fuel your logic: follow that "AHA!" moment until it becomes continuous.

@Hamilcar Existential crisis, craziness, spiritual experience... Here we have a philosophical, psychological, and spiritual interpretation of the same phenomenon. The difference being two of them have negative connotations that run deep in our psyche and society, the third positive. You felt this feeling of wrongness deep in your heart, but your rational functions quickly covered this feeling of doubting what you think you know with something you "know" you know: that questioning reality is "crazy". Is it possible that the concept of crazy was created by ourselves to doubt and fear the explainable, especially in our science-centered culture? I feel like spirituality can ease our doubts of the unknown and bridge the gap between what we think we know with science and these completely normal feelings of existential doubt, giving us the opportunity to accept these feelings and learn more about their origin.   

@Nahm "Rather than create doubt and reject it, see how you’re creating it." Throughout my intense self-inquiry work the past few days I've come back to your post with renewed meaning. As much progress I think I am making I will never truly get anywhere if I do not face the doubt, and understand its true source as it applies conceptually and personally. I've found that essentially, my doubts arise through a duality between logic and emotion. I've been able to access the non-duel state a few times this week and I've found that I can only comfortably get there when my emotional intuition and logical reasoning are reinforcing each other every step of the way. When I reach the nondual state, the duality is gone and I am in a state of absolute equilibrium and acceptance of my new reality. This lasts a while, but then one of two things eventually happen as I progress further into the state: The ego's emotions exceed its ability to logically explain this new reality (e.g. colors/feeling become so vivid that logic starts to doubt this is possible), or the ego's logic exceeds its ability to feel emotionally comfortable with reality (e.g. people's movements begin to seem automatic and simulated like a computer, I get a feeling of coldness toward this deterministic reality.) The moment I start thinking to try to explain these discrepancies I go into a period of decoherence: I am trying to explain the dualistic reality with my nondualistic understanding and for a while language simply makes no sense to me and I become profoundly confused until I return to baseline. The good news is that I am finding that each time I go through this process I return at a point slightly higher than baseline and am able to reconcile emotion and logic into a sincere 'belief' of my progressing concept of reality, but it is extremely important that I try to calm myself down and meditate before panic sets in. Like you say, 'slow and steady wins the race'. The first time I entered this stage I tried to take it as far as I could, disregarding what my emotions and logic were telling me until I was in a dark hole of utter panic and disbelief. I need to find a responsible balance: use the non duel state to find insight, and then step back a little to conceptually reinforce reality.

[Barna]

I had this "understanding loop" on psychedelics, the understanding "AHA" moments came faster and faster, but when it reached into infinity the final conclusion was that I don't know anything. It just is. I just am. 

Since you are already working with emotions, did you try to love everything? Try to love the panic when it's arising. Or if you cannot love the panic then love the part of yourself who panics.

[Nahm]

6 hours ago, RolandM said:

I've been able to access the non-duel state a few times this week and I've found that I can only comfortably get there when my emotional intuition and logical reasoning are reinforcing each other every step of the way.

 

6 hours ago, RolandM said:

as I progress further into the state: The ego's emotions

 

6 hours ago, RolandM said:

ego's logic exceeds its ability

 

6 hours ago, RolandM said:

I get a feeling of coldness toward this deterministic reality

Go into that. Reality is not cold & deterministic. There’s a denial of reality there, and a freedom revealed for facing it. 

6 hours ago, RolandM said:

) The moment I start thinking to try to explain these discrepancies I go into a period of decoherence: I am trying to explain the dualistic reality with my nondualistic understanding and for a while language simply makes no sense to me and I become profoundly confused

Thought is sneaky. There are no discrepancies. There is thought being tricky. An a priori “ I “ is required first for there to then be decoherence and confusion. 

6 hours ago, RolandM said:

The good news is that I am finding that each time I go through this process I return at a point slightly higher than baseline and am able to reconcile emotion and logic into a sincere 'belief' of my progressing concept of reality, but it is extremely important that I try to calm myself down and meditate before panic sets in

Deconstruct beliefs, they aren’t true, they’re belief.       Freedom. 

6 hours ago, RolandM said:

disregarding what my emotions and logic were telling me until I was in a dark hole of utter panic and disbelief.

Go into it, decipher the messages of sensations. Disregarding is the panic, disregarding fragments. Awareness can not by divided, thinking creates an appearance of this, then there’s more “work to do” in the fragmentation from having disregarded. The root of disregarding any of the logic and emotion, is fear. Any fear present and there is no nonduality. 

6 hours ago, RolandM said:

I need to find a responsible balance: use the non duel state to find insight, and then step back a little to conceptually reinforce reality.

Nonduality is not a state. The importance of that is seeing the tendency of mind to separate and segregate “states”, which is a denial of the totality, the actuality, of nonduality. If “you” are “using the nondual state” then there is a segmented, separated “you” via thought. Then there is the apparent need to “conceptually reinforce reality” which is thinking, deeply tricky thinking. Reality can not be conceptually reinforced, because you can not actually be separated from it to begin with. 

You are doing some great introspection, some great work man. Thinking is very very tricky. Nonduality is without it. Monkey mind is thought always attempting to justify “I am separate from the toaster”.  Awareness of just how deep and long thinking goes, in terms of falsity, this “ I “  is a facinating proccess. I way to put it is, the mind creates a separate “ I “ as the “holder of intelligence”, but you are everything and nothing, not a part which holds anything. You are intelligence itself, not a partitioned piece of it. Same with love, which is typically discovered after all thoughts and roots are inspected and rooted out in the light of awareness. 

[RolandM]

@Nahm You speak some truth. Maybe seeing nonduality as a state delegitimizes the overarching truth of it all, as if nonduality was a subset of the unquestionable ego. I can not help but distinguish however, that there are moments when the ego is present, and when it is not. This is a distinction that needs to be deconstructed with time. You say there are no beliefs, and I agree that when the ego is absent there are no need for beliefs, but the ego needs belief in order to feel safe in the vast unknown without fear. I know I eventually need to be at a place where I can simply 'let go', but the ego is not ready to let go, and I shouldn't ignore that feeling. There are loose ends that need to be tied up for the ego to accept that it is no longer needed to protect me like a worried mother, and make sure I don't make the same mistakes as last time and end up in a mental hospital or homeless. It needs to know that if life were a dream of my own creation, I would love it and everything in it, never harm it. And if the time came that the ego took hold again, I need to know that everything will be okay and there is no need for depression; that I will make it back in time. I cannot simply cut off the ego cold turkey, instead respect it as if it were another person, love it, and accept it until it can let go consensually.

[Nahm]

@RolandM

Damn-it that is beautiful. I hear you, some like to rip it off and some favor the slow peel.  

[who chit]

Great thread. Great contributions.