How Was Your 2021? Time for Analysis & Reflection.

[BipolarGrowth]

work/study: My hours at work were reduced to part time at the very beginning of 2021 due to many severe manic episodes and one severe depressive episode in the months before. I cut my foot while mowing my lawn in the mid/late spring which resulted in me having to work from home for a couple months at even less hours than the 20/week I had been reduced to earlier in the year. I had more manic episodes in the early summer that resulted in me leaving my job. I didn’t work at all from around June to December. I now have a new job which makes about 10-15% less per hour but is much better for me overall than the previous job. My real estate investing business has grown steadily while all of this was going on although my relationship with my business partner is weaker. 

emotional intelligence: I have learned to relate to emotions in ways I would’ve never really predicted were possible. Old sensations of emotional suffering are recontextualized and at least 90% easier to palate as well as even being quite enjoyable at times. I’m far more aware of emotions and how they work on a sensate level. I have become much more loving and selfless than I used to be. 

social life: I lost a lot of friends due to my chaotic mental health in 2020, but this year has given me several high-quality friends who relate to me on very deep spiritual, intellectual, and emotional levels. I also have been blessed to be able to start spiritual coaching to a number of individuals which is incredibly rewarding and a great social activity for me. Most of my closest friends are online now as the type of people I can connect with at meaningful levels has become more rare as I have developed spiritually. I ended up rekindling a friendship which was lost at the end of 2020 with someone who I love and appreciate although we cannot connect on my deepest interests. I had to leave my weekly Dungeons & Dragons game due to my instability in the summer. I have now started having online talks with a couple spiritual masters which has been quite amazing. 

relationships/sex life: I have been single most of the year. There is a beautiful woman from Iraq who is very interested in me who I do care about, but there are many things making that difficult to even try in person. I’ve had a far lower amount of sexual encounters compared to previous years. I’m not too worried about that, but of course regular sex would be nice. 

family: The mental instability has strained my relationship with my parents and one sibling at points, but overall I have become far closer to my family this year. In many ways my dad and mom are some of my best friends. I hang out with my dad quite frequently. Some of my favorite times are going for drives with my parents (they are divorced, so they are not both with me at the same time) where they drive and I usually end up feeling a large pooling of energy come into my third eye area mostly. It’s a great bonding time for us. I’ve really started to enjoy a lot of my dad’s favorite bands and my mom’s modern Christian gospel music. I got to become a lot closer to my oldest brother who has been debilitated by his schizoaffective disorder while him, my dad, and I played through the Dark Souls series of games together over the course of a few months. It was very hard to connect with him before as he is a very fundamentalist Christian and his mental illness sapped him of enthusiasm and energy, but playing those games with him and seeing him actually a bit happier at times was very special to me. I got to go to Las Vegas to see my sister and nephew which was great. I hardly get to see them. On Christmas Eve I was able to bond with my uncle in Catholic mass which that side of my family has gone to for years as I had finally reduced my judgment to Christians. He was so thoughtful in the way he guided me through all of the traditions of the mass so I could understand what was going on in his spiritual tradition. It was really heart warming to see him give that simple but selfless extra attention to me so I would hopefully see the beauty and love which he has been able to experience through his Catholic faith. Afterward, that whole side of our family gathered at his house, and I had a long conversation with one of my aunts about my mental illness and spirituality which was the first time her and I had ever deeply connected. 

self-development/spirituality: I really didn’t focus on much self-development other than in the spiritual sphere of things besides starting to improve my fitness in the past few weeks. My spirituality has grown exponentially. The past seven years of spiritual development which was quite engaged and serious is not even 1% of my spiritual development compared to what happened this year. I “experienced” cessation for the first time on May 28th. My life has never been the same since. What happened that day was so beyond my various 5 gram+ mushroom trips or my 10 tab LSD trip that there is no just way to describe the level of increased significance and power of the event compared to those lower awakenings. 
 

If I wrote about my spiritual experiences from this year in a comprehensive way, it would take at least hundreds of pages. I’ll just list some of the highlights. 
 

-Incredibly deep Bhakti yoga, thousands of times

-Giving my entire being to a spiritual entity/guru resulting in my first cessation

-Absolute Selfhood (being both the Self and self in a completely embodied way)

-Five cessations in 30 minutes

-Having a cessation triggered by my mind being obliterated the Infinite Beauty and Divinity of Jesus Christ

-Spiritually transferring heat from a stone to my body in below freezing temperatures while acting in accordance with the Holy Spirit

-Accessing Absolute Madness

-Accessing Absolute Hatred

-Accessing Absolute Divinity. This is in many ways still the most significant moment of my life. I only say in many ways because I’ve had so many intense awakenings since that it’s hard to even compare one to another, but this really does take the cake. If I had to just throw a number on it, it was at least 10 or 100 times greater than any of my cessation events which I already stated were indescribably more profound and intense than heroic dose mushroom trips or the 10 tab LSD trip which happened pre-stream entry. 

-Accessing Absolute Love through an angel crying a benevolent tear into my heart. This happened roughly a minute before I accessed Absolute Divinity. A few minutes afterward, this completely indescribably beautiful entity did the same thing again. 
 

-Feeling millions of bodily sensations in roughly a six inch radius area in my legs

-Experiencing roughly 10 different hubs of seemingly infinite minds simultaneously 

-Locking in non-locality, the Boundless Space aspect of the fifth jhana, the Boundless Consciousness aspect of the sixth jhana, nondoership, removing the sensation of gravity pulling me downward, and popping the 360° bubble of vision to where they are all consistently accessible aspects of my moment-to-moment experience completely sober, at all times 

-Accessing jhanas 1-8 and potentially jhana 9/nirodha samapatti (depending on whose rules and interpretations of the 9th jhana you’re looking at) 

-Two nuclear-grade heart chakra energetic explosions

-Two nuclear-grade crown chakra explosions

-Learning how to channel energy to/manipulate/“turn on” the heart chakra, third eye chakra, and crown chakra at will. I’ve learned how to do this with other chakras including one beyond the basic seven, but those three are the ones I’m most skilled with so far. The crown chakra is by far the easiest for odd reasons I won’t get into due to limited time to write. Also, when I say turn on, I’m aware that chakras can’t be completely closed. It’s simply a fitting way to describe what’s happening in a way heavily limited by language. 
 

-While I was having an allergic reaction to lidocaine in my foot as it had severely lost circulation which was the most painful event of my life (far worse than having  my foot cut open by a lawnmower) that felt like my foot was simultaneously on fire and being soaked in acid, I surrendered completely to death. When I did this, all pain immediately left my body and was replaced by the full body bliss of the Holy Spirit. 
 

-My suffering is now reduced by roughly 90-99%. Every day is a magical ride. Not a day goes by without a number of significant and positive spiritual experiences. I can reach states beyond my old heroic dose trips completely sober at times. The states I can reach from one hit of THC or weed often blow those old trips completely out of the water. I can’t even bring myself to smoke dabs anymore as the levels of intensity it brings are so absolutely ridiculous. 
 

-Accessing Absolute Time

And the list goes on and on, but I don’t see much of a point to adding any more right now.

finances: Due to working limited hours, leaving my job, not working for several months, and overspending which occurred during a couple manic episodes, I gained a considerable amount of credit card debt. My credit has also been ruined for now. My finances were sacrificed this year for spiritual development. Without the time off to focus on spirituality, I would’ve been nowhere near where I am today in that regard. I’m not really too worried about it. The spiritual gains were worth it thousands of times over. I still own my own house and business at 26. I haven’t had to go without a single necessity. My parents did help a good amount though to make sure nothing got too bad on this front, so I’m quite thankful and lucky for that. 

physical activity/eating: My diet has improved a lot in the past month. I’ve started going to the gym and cycling regularly. I had a big aversion to physical activity in the past which has been helped a lot by the spiritual progress. During a few months as I was really starting to change spiritually at a rapid rate, my body started to do a sort of automatic fasting. It actually became really hard work to eat during that period. My appetite went to almost nothing. I had to entice myself with the tastiest junk food just to eat solid things. I relied a lot on meal replacement shakes. Luckily this problem has gone away. I’ve gotten away from eating fast food quite a bit compared to what I used to. 

hobbies/habits: In the past couple months, I’ve started playing darts and doing photography again. This year I’ve released a lot more hours of video content than ever before. Cycling is also a hobby at times too when I’m not doing it specifically for exercise or transportation. I like to go outside in nature more often now that my physical aversion is reduced. I’m just waiting on better weather in the spring and summer to start camping and doing more outdoors. 

 

how would you rate it 1-10? 10/10 or more honestly I’d say ♾/10

[kag101]

On 28/12/2021 at 3:22 AM, BipolarGrowth said:

family: The mental instability has strained my relationship with my parents and one sibling at points, but overall I have become far closer to my family this year. In many ways my dad and mom are some of my best friends. I hang out with my dad quite frequently. Some of my favorite times are going for drives with my parents (they are divorced, so they are not both with me at the same time) where they drive and I usually end up feeling a large pooling of energy come into my third eye area mostly. It’s a great bonding time for us. I’ve really started to enjoy a lot of my dad’s favorite bands and my mom’s modern Christian gospel music. I got to become a lot closer to my oldest brother who has been debilitated by his schizoaffective disorder while him, my dad, and I played through the Dark Souls series of games together over the course of a few months. It was very hard to connect with him before as he is a very fundamentalist Christian and his mental illness sapped him of enthusiasm and energy, but playing those games with him and seeing him actually a bit happier at times was very special to me. I got to go to Las Vegas to see my sister and nephew which was great. I hardly get to see them. On Christmas Eve I was able to bond with my uncle in Catholic mass which that side of my family has gone to for years as I had finally reduced my judgment to Christians. He was so thoughtful in the way he guided me through all of the traditions of the mass so I could understand what was going on in his spiritual tradition. It was really heart warming to see him give that simple but selfless extra attention to me so I would hopefully see the beauty and love which he has been able to experience through his Catholic faith. Afterward, that whole side of our family gathered at his house, and I had a long conversation with one of my aunts about my mental illness and spirituality which was the first time her and I had ever deeply connected. 

wow, so nice to read that you're being able to bond with your family!

 

btw - do you take any meds to prevent maniac episodes?