The Story of a "Natural" Awakening.

[mandyjw]

I had a pretty spectacular/transformational/disruptive to day to day life awakening at the start of April. I feel like I'll spend the rest of my life integrating it, and at the same time it never happened.

For some reason, I feel the need to tell the story of it.  I don't know if that's right or wrong but if I've learned one thing it's to follow my impulses. It will probably take me several posts. 

"There are no signs. They are all signs. 

There are no sacred places. They are all sacred places. 

There is no story to write. There are no stories."

I must confess, I am a story teller. I invite you to come sit around the campfire, but only if you like stories. You see, stories are like psychedelics when you get properly lost in them. The classic books and the most beloved stories are full of pointers. Moby Dick, Humpty Dumpty, Sleeping Beauty... the stories of Jesus, Buddha, and the list goes on, all are pointers to nonduality. Your own life is just a story. It is very special because it happened on this physical plane, and you are the author of your life. Before you can see fully how special it really is, you have to disregard it as nothing. It is so meaningless that the meaning is profound beyond words. 

The stories we call fiction are downloads from Source. There is only one creative mind and so all creativity that flows through a person is a download from this mind. All tropes are from this mind. For me the duality between truth and fiction is forever lost. No biography of any person who actually lived can ever be accurate. It's only a gross account of something that happened. It's like a cop gathering witness accounts of an accident or a crime, we spin things into stories as we remember them. This is always the case. 

My awakening happened here on the forum in the journal section with the help of another member or two (an unknowingly the entire forum). I started having a lot of conversations with this member and had an insight/impulse to metaphorically offer him an apple. That was the start of my descent into the rabbit hole of fairytale, Biblical storyland. 

This is a post I saved from my now deleted journal, this post set the ball rolling. 

"I don't know. I don't know what's on the other side. AH, you're so compellingly frustrating, a book I can't put down as obligations I'm neglecting pile around me. I can't eat, I can't sleep, I don't know where this energy comes from. It drives me. I have no control. 

 I have a story of something that recently happened to me that I can't let go of. I don't know why I can't let go of it. It drives me mad. Why am I so attached? I've told it to a few people as if I'm looking for something from them but no one really has anything to say. It seems more like a story I've made up rather than something that actually happened. 

I had a business and had a lot of success at the start and bought a house almost 10 years ago. I was only 20 and I made the decision completely on emotion. It was an old house in a ghost town and I didn't have any idea how much work would be involved. I cursed myself and the decision for years until I made peace with it and then we were finally able to finish the work on it. But when I first saw this house, driving up to it I had this feeling like I was entering another world. There was something compelling about it.

Fast forward to last year and I am looking for somewhere nearby to take my kids to play. I start taking them to this spot by the river. Every single time we go I experience presence but there's this energy there too in addition. Something about the place burns itself into my mind and I keep going back and going back. Every time the river offers up something new. It is the perfect illustration to me of the saying that you cannot step into the same river twice. 

On a whim I take my daughter for a walk in the stroller through the cemetery. When I was a kid my parents caretook a cemetery and I had to spend every weekend and time after school helping them. It was on a hill overlooking a lake, incredibly beautiful. I love cemeteries and have no negative or spooky feelings from them. In this poor town, there was only one notable doctor resident who is buried there. He lived in the 1800's and was famous for his use of herbal medicines. His monument is massive and the entire lot is covered in beautiful stone with heavy granite urns. I put on the stroller brakes and go up to read inscriptions on the stone. I must have not been careful enough, even though I've done this thousands of times. My daughter goes flying down the hill and I sprint after her as fast as I can just barely catching her before she crashed into some other gravestones. I leave the cemetery slightly, just slightly spooked.

I don't go back until fall. When I do I visit there is only one plant growing on the entire stone covered lot. It's a beautiful plant with red berries, but plant nerd that I am I recognize it as poison nightshade. Why is the only thing growing on an herbal healers grave poison nightshade? I go back to visit his grave one more time, again with my daughter. This time I don't trust the stroller and I take her out and bring her up with me to read the inscriptions on his stone. My daughter gets really unhappy and I have to leave with her. After we've gone too far to go back she realizes that she threw off her mittens somewhere and screams "MY MITTENS", over and over again all the way home.

So I keep thinking about this doctor and I remember that my friend and I discovered he had written his recipes down in a book. An impulse comes to me to look for it and it feels good. I remember sitting at my computer trying to remember what exactly the impulse was because all I could remember was having one but not what it was. It came back to me and I searched for his book. 

I find that now a library has added it as public domain and I can read it for free, right then online. It's not just some bizarre herbal recipes. It's his entire story.  He wasn't actually a doctor. He was clairvoyant. It describes his communion with nature and how his powers came about and his battle with self interest. I find the book the most compelling thing I've ever read in my life. It has so many parallels to my life and things I was thinking about. 

Out on a run I decide to go back to his grave. The ground is covered in a small amount of wet snow and as I finally read the inscriptions on the stone undistracted this time, I see that exactly where I stepped is one of my daughter's mittens. 

Later I happen upon a facebook post in an abandoned places group I'm a part of, from someone who went to see the foundation where his summer mansion once stood. I go to find it for myself and it overlooks the very spot on the river I was so drawn to. I now make a habit of sitting on the old massive granite blocks and clearing my mind. I've had three major insights there.

Last week I went back to his grave and there was my daughter's other mitten directly on his grave. I sat there in the sun and meditated on the warmth and unfailing love of peace. "

Shortly after this entry, insights started barraging me, and I continued to not sleep or eat except for the bare minimum I could function on. It felt like I was possessed.

Synchronicity started becoming intense. Every song on the radio had a message for me. I accused the other member of being like a little boy who won't eat his Easter bunny because he doesn't want to ruin it. I had an impulse to check a free library box and in it I found a half eaten Easter bunny and a book about how you create your reality. 

The duality between intuition, impulses that felt good and my obsessive compulsive impulses I had had as a child dissolved. 

"I feel better, I did something I had negative obsessive compulsive thoughts about doing, realized it was a thwarted impulse and realized I needed to take action. Pieces of the puzzle are still coming together after the fact, my previous minor fixations of the past month, pleasures and demons both all have come together. Another amazing storyline from my life that came together so beautifully for me recently was the catalyst of all this feminine energy realization. I had recorded a video and I said that I used to be obsessive compulsive when I was a child but that's not true. I've always been obsessive compulsive. Except it's not a problem I can throw away. It's my power. "

Everything I ever loved, all the symbols and my love for lions came together in beautiful realizations of nonduality. The doctor had a lion statue in front of his house. I also became conscious of the power of symbols I had paid no mind to and realized that the grave of the doctor was covered in pyramid shapes. He had been a stone mason before he awakened to his clairvoyant powers. 

Every painful and traumatic event in my life was seen through the eyes of an author who dreamed it up it for greater good and out of love for her character. 

I got reminded of the book that I always wanted to write and I realized that the idea was a prophetic analogy of my life, yet I was still learning the lessons the character was supposed to learn and so I could not actually write it.

"It's been in my head for 6+ years. But writing it always seemed like work. Until now. Now it feels like it could just happen. 

My friend and I explored the town I lived in shortly after I moved here. I'll tell you more about her later because she's really important. She has no fear about anything, I do, and at that time was absolutely controlled by it.  We drove almost all the way down a dead end road, where the river at some point stops being a river and starts being ocean and you come out to the point. As you drive the road gets narrower and less of a road and there's a sense of fear and foreboding even as you drive. There have even been more bizarre problems with domestic violence down there than you'd think for the number of people that live there. Someone got shot a few years ago. 

So me and my friend see this massive old abandoned house down a gated road on the river which this far down is part ocean and part river. I'm already spooked and she insists on driving in. We can't tell if the door is pitch black or wide open and we get closer and closer and are both afraid now but driven by curiosity. There was no door. We were looking at blackness inside the house.

We went back to the place later and went inside. 

The spirit of the place. I can't even. 

It was vandalized. But wild roses like grow by the ocean here were growing all up the wall and wildflowers of all kinds and colors up all around as grow in a neglected field in late summer. I remember that the moon was in the sky overhead. I had a photo with it all, but I lost it. 

They burned the house since. That's the place I drove back to last night, but the house is gone and now there's a no trespassing sign. 

This is the story I had in my head. I don't have much, just a basic outline.

A girl/woman, not sure of the age yet, is raised in a fundamentalist Christian home but has a wild spiritual connection regardless of her beliefs. She is thrown out of her family for something she does (this actually happened to my husband, and that something was me) and seeks solitude in this desolate abandoned house. 

But instead of solitude, she finds a man there who is seeking enlightenment in solitude. 

And together they find what they find what they seek."

I didn't believe in chakras at the time, and I didn't know about kundalini energy but I started having strange and bizarre pains in my body. I kept going back and forth between the remains of the doctors house and home to write in my journal. I discovered a platform by his house with steps leading up to it and trees growing at the corners. 

"There's still this energy that burns through me. Then a cold that chills through my bones. We are the warmth of the sun. We are the still waters that run deep.

You give me clarity.

It's as if we were tennis players, so in the flow of the game that it would be silly to ask which one of us has the ball. It's moving back and forth so fast that no one can fixate on it. There is no ball. 

And so it is with the world of form and formless. The vibration of energy between them is moving so fast...that it stays in place because there is no time."

To Be Continued. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Edited September 29, 2019 by mandyjw

[Truth Addict]

@mandyjw

I was late for the lecture today and I couldn't attend, so your story was right on time. And it only gets more interesting with every telling.

Keep going Mandy!

❤️

Edited September 29, 2019 by Truth Addict

[mandyjw]

The first insight I got at the doctor's stone foundation was that I was afraid. It was a pretty obvious insight, I was in the middle of the woods, I didn't know who or what was around or what I would find. But the significance of it the the benefits that could be on the other side of that fear really shone through. I quit drinking coffee and saw how it fueled my anxiety. The second was that, I was still afraid, but this time it presented in the way of feeling like I was unworthy to be there, trespassing on someone's property. I was exactly where I was supposed to be. I knew from the feeling of the insights that they were important. If I went back too soon for another, I wouldn't receive it. If I returned when I felt really drawn to go back, I would. 

The third insight was from a literal tree. It was an ash tree that was one tree until it had grown into two trees at about height of my chest.  The trees were really damaged there and were splitting apart. It was a little windy and the tree actively made splitting sounds as I looked at it. Then I understand that nonduality also included duality. I've seen the same illustration from others before with the tree. I had been unconscious of how much I moralized spirituality and denied my own desires. In order to control my anger, which is the reason I found Leo's videos in the first place, I had also tried to kill the fiery passion I've always had. I had demonized and let a part of myself die. My mind had taken the present moment and made it into an ideal and a thought. 

The shadow work intensified and I lost the sense of doership. Revelations came in the middle of the night and strange connections were made between things. The best thing I can compare it to if you've ever read Harry Potter, it's like the conclusion of those books when this complicated interwoven story with at the time, seemingly insignificant clues from earlier in the book comes together and all makes sense in the end. It was like that with my entire life.

Reality is stranger than fiction.

Sometimes thinking back on my life, particularly turning points and times of major conflict, or events like how my parents met, I've thought about how it's too strange to be real. The shadow work showed me that my hunch had been right. Lots and lots of pieces came together. I realized that in a way I had always been awake. 

The things my kids and husband said to me were channeled and had deeper meaning. Everything fell together in a creepy magical nonduality. 

All this time I was just managing to hold me life together, dropping off and picking up my kids. If anyone asked why I had been crying (there was tons and tons of tears) I told them it was because my dog was dying, which was true. The dying dog was interwoven into the story. I hadn't asked for the dog, I took him as a favor for my best friend. He had always been a creepy dog, nothing like the purebreds I bought as puppies. Sometimes he would just stare and stare at me and sometimes I had the thought that he was possessed or had been human in a past life. I realized then, that he was more than just a dog. When things started getting intense he literally stared at me all day long. After the awakening, he got so sick I decided that week to have him put to sleep. I had to hire an excavator for some plumbing work, and I had the man dig a grave for me under an old apple tree. The very next morning he passed away on his own. 

There was a lot of shadow work dealing with the repression of my Christian upbringing. I realized that I was figuratively a whore all along regardless of how pure I had been and I realized the significance of Mary Magdalene being a whore. Verses I had always understood were understood on an even deeper level. Matthew 5:27-28 27 “You have heard that it was said to those of old, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’ 28 But I say to you that whoever looks at a woman to lust for her has already committed adultery with her in his heart.

I had the insights of how psychedelics are themselves a trope, a thought, an element of the story and my reasons for judging them so harshly were gone. It couldn't really be possible to take something external when everything is you. How I had benefited from other's use of psychedelics! My bizarre experience of sort of tapping into Leo's "Enlightenment Experience Happening In Real Time" live video and having been in a near bliss state for hours after made sense. 

Months before this I had really started disagreeing with Leo's videos. A little part of me felt guilty coming to his forum and using his website when I so disagreed with his approach. I basically came to the forum to try to help set people straight because I was concerned that he was deluding people and I was concerned that people were ruining their lives with psychedelics. Whenever I saw his picture on the homepage I was disgusted. I finally understood how incredibly valuable and integral his work had been for me, how the forum had been. I had given Eckhart Tolle all the credit, but never fully appreciated Leo. I made the connection between Leo and the symbol of a lion. 

My shadow work started getting religious. I fully understood what the Devil was. He was truly part of me, part of my psyche, part of oneness. Leo had made me intellectually understand and accept this fact, but you can lead a horse to water but you can't make it drink. I was Voldemort, I was the White Witch in The Chronicles of Narnia, the books that made me start believing in Jesus as a lion, as a kid and helped me reconcile Christianity and my deep love of nature. 

There's something associated with me, an area code that is 666. As a Christian I was always horribly embarrassed about this. Now I understood how fitting and how funny it had been. Jesus came back into my life. If my own life and memories were just a story what was Jesus? I understood communion, "you must eat the body of Christ." The hamburger I had for lunch became a "holy cow" and the body of Christ. Nonduality and oneness gave this a whole new meaning. Other smaller revelations and synchronicity fell into place. Then, on my 666th post, I was awake. 

My third eye had opened to synchronicity and insight before the awakening. Now my heart chakra was open. It felt completely light, like it had lost its physical substance. In my sleep I felt weightless. I started manically posting on the forum, professing my love for everyone. I was literally high on life. 

My vision changed, literally. It was like a scene in a movie when everything is enchantingly bathed in light, that's how I saw. The picture on Leo's homepage changed and I saw the honest love in his eyes. I could scroll Facebook and love and see the beauty in every single face I saw as if it were my child's. 

I went to the beach where you can find fossils if you spend a lot of time looking. I would have the insight to turn a rock over and it would be covered in fossils. As a normally extremely shy person, I lost all shyness and inhibition in conversation and I became magnetic and always had the right thing to say to strangers. My balance became perfect, and I could walk across any surface without tripping as long as I was focused. I had to drive somewhere in slippery dangerous snow and spent the entire drive in a bliss state knowing that I could never die. 

My mind had been blown open. It felt like there was space between my eyes that didn't exist. If I looked at a tree or my baby niece I would feel the space expand or tingle. I understood hidden meanings in symbols and signs. Things people said to me often felt channeled. I realized the importance of my dreams and how dreams had shaped my entire life, including dictating who I fell in love with. 

Devilry set in. Everything I had been repressing for so long was coming through. I had been very tight with money for years, and I bought myself a new wardrobe, books, tarot cards, anything I wanted without a second thought. My conversations with men online weren't considerate to my husband or appropriate. I had been repressing my femininity ashamed of all the girly things I'd always loved, letting society make me think they were silly or insignificant. At the same time repressing my own feminine power. I was very confused between believing that everyone was already enlightened and just had been waiting for me to catch up to them and feeling like "the chosen one." My American patriotism I'd had as a child hit me full force and I realized that I had repressed gratitude for my country in an attempt to be politically correct. Other insights came from this. 

After the devilry played out, I had a religious revival. I did not want to live a life of devilry and didn't know what else to do. I was scared of myself. I realized that people like Charles Manson had also been awake. So I said "Jesus take the wheel."  Like with my lack of appreciation for Leo, I had not fully appreciated how far Christianity had taken me on my spiritual path. I even started praying again. 

Then I discovered Ramji and his understanding of levels of enlightenment. This explained so much, it explained the stages I went through, the devilry I fell into, and it fully explained my religious revival. "if you meet Buddha on the road, kill him." It's very easy to misinterpret realizations and how they should be embodied after the fact.

As the effects of the awakening died down I started meditating and found that it grounded me. I continued to return to the place where the doctor's house had been and I dug deeply into his history. His house had burned down when my Grammie was 20. He died a few months before she was born. She died days after I found the remains of his house, a month before the awakening. Visiting her had always made me incredibly sleepy. I always thought that it was because she was boring but it was uncanny how strong the effect was.

Her parents were buried two lots away from his grave, not one had ever told me that they buried in that cemetery. I found a piece of glass that had been part of the highest window in his house and made it into a tear shaped necklace. To this day I find little signs there and I enter states and places where everything is channeled and fits into place of a greater story. Over the months I made many connections between his history and symbolism.

I met a woman at the place by the river and she had a very old pug dog that my daughter played with. A week or so later someone donated a photo album to the historical society and it had lots of pictures of the doctor's pug. 

There are several old apple trees on his property and just about every old abandoned place I go around town. Years ago when I first moved here, there was an active graffiti artist around. On a telephone pole they painted the word forever and right before the telephone pole was an apple tree that had been broken off by a storm. That summer the apple tree flowered and bore apples as if nothing had ever happened to it with the word "forever" in the background.

In the winter before I discovered the remains of the doctor's house, a small fox ran across my path while I was running right by there. I discovered fox holes in the woods by the cemetery later. This summer I went up the steps to the platform and on the other side feet from me was the fox. We both ran away from each other. Later, when I went back I found the remains of a white rabbit, a huge pile of fur and just one foot. The white rabbit from Alice in Wonderland comes to mind. There have been too many signs and strange connections like this to mention, strange apple trees, mushrooms, trees with eyes. 

Time in nature has become like a psychedelic trip for me. If I get the inclination to go somewhere, I do. I looked a lot into the history of witchcraft and the use of poisonous plants including nightshade as a hallucinogens. The nightshade plant that the crows planted on the doctor's grave was purely symbolic. To me psychedelics and poison are a trope, a symbol, a pointer. Death without physical death. The color red became very symbolic and kept coming up again and again and again since the awakening. The story "The Scarlet Ibis" that I had loved from highschool came to mind. I read it again, understanding the allegory and symbolism and in the end was stunned that Doodle's body is found under a red nightshade bush. 

Elements of stories that I grew up with like the poison apple in Snow White, living in the forest, falling asleep and being woken up, all came alive in my own life. 

Everything is channeled. There are pointers everywhere. Just examine what you really love and have always loved or have feared. Write down your deepest desires and fears. Dig up childhood memories, dreams that you haven't forgotten. Write your own story. Hone your intuition and sensitivity. 

That's how you enter the rabbit hole. It's all up to you, how far do you want to go?

We have free will, we ate from the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil and were kicked out of paradise. It's not just a story. 

We were split between male and female, God and the Devil, good and bad, past and future. We gained the ability to intellectually understand, remember and plan. We gained the ability to tell stories. Instead of living life with the heart we lived split between the heart and the mind. By opening the heart, you open your mind. Open your eyes and ears and understanding to the love that makes up this phenomenon of us. 

We are all born with unique gifts. Some are born with hearts open and some with sharp minds. Enlightenment is about combining the potential and duality of the two. The power of love was always fully awake and alive but I didn't have wisdom and I didn't know how to control or channel it for good. I read Proverbs as a kid and ever since I always prayed to God for wisdom.

Passion and wisdom are the perfect match made in heaven. But one without the other creates a sort of hell. 

We live and write a story that never ends. There's no rising above the drama, only seeing it in a different light. It's not personal, it's not OUR story, it's OUR story. The show must go on. Embrace it, enjoy it, become it, savor it. It's beautiful, delicious and a tiny bit poisonous. 

Take the apple. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Edited September 29, 2019 by mandyjw

[seeking_brilliance]

Beautiful share.... So great to hear personal accounts

[DrewNows]

lots of energy, get comfortable, plenty of good feels ?

 

 

Edited September 29, 2019 by DrewNows