My disastrous spiritual awakening

Preface

This is one of the most difficult things I’ve ever had to share publicly, and those of you who read it might understand why once you’ve read it.

Nine months ago I was just about to start what I thought would be a writing career about my story of spiritual awakening, extraterrestrials, and any other topic that interested me.

Then some things happened. Some not very good things. And I wondered whether it was really what I should be doing.

But, I still feel like this is what I am most passionate about, so I decided to still write, and be completely honest about my experience, warts and all.

So here I am… This is my story, and these are the things I am passionate about. Despite the horrible twists and turns my life took over the last nine months, I still feel like this is what I should be doing, and I still believe honesty is always the best medicine, so I’ve included it all.

For those of you who do read it, there is another post on my blog which may give some context to this one — it’s called, “Evidence for the Existence of Extraterrestrial Life”, which might help explain why I believed what I was experiencing to be true.

And for those of you who think spirituality is all just mumbo-jumbo woo-woo talk, I wrote a blog called “What the hell is spirituality anyway?” which you might also find interesting.

I have made these posts public, so feel free to share them if you find any of them interesting.

I hope some of my posts resonate with you.

Will.

The Story

My story – a bit like the story of humanity as a whole – is not always a pretty one. In fact, sometimes it was downright horrendous. But – also as I see it like the story of humanity as a whole – it contains within it a great hope and redemption. This is the story of my life’s struggle with mental illness, and how I recovered and eventually found awakening through my spiritual path.

I was always a pretty quiet and reflective kid. My mum likes to tell a story about how I was staring out the window in a car one day daydreaming, and she looked back and thought, “I wonder what he’s thinking about?”

Eventually her curiosity got the better of her: “What are you thinking about, Will?”

“I know who Jesus was, Mummy,” I replied.

“Oh do you?” She asked.

“Jesus was God.”

And I still agree with my child self back then. Now, I don’t believe in God the way a lot of people believe in God. I don’t think there’s some magical heavenly being that is orchestrating events. I use the word God as a way to describe the ultimate nature of reality itself, which I believe is beyond the capacity of the human mind to comprehend, given that our brains really only evolved to pick berries, have sex, and navigate what we perceive of as the “physical world”.

And I believe – based on what I have read of him – that Jesus was a person who achieved this realization of his “God self”. What some people have called enlightenment, awakening, or self-realization – the realization that ultimately what we are is not separate from what reality is. As Alan Watts once said: “What you are deep deep down, far far in, is simply the fabric and structure of existence itself.” And I believe it is possible for humans to realize this directly, not as just a belief, but to see as plain as the nose on your face, that you are that reality, that everything is that reality. As the old spiritual cliché goes, life is ultimately all one.

Most of my life on the surface has been pretty boring, so I won’t go into a lot of detail on that. Given my quiet and reflective nature, I always found it difficult to fit in a lot of the time, and this led to me experiencing a lot of depression and loneliness through most of my early life and through to my 20s. As a result of this depression and loneliness, I had a great longing for a romantic partner that I thought would cure me of these feelings, and just before my 20^th birthday, I met one of these things called a girl. As David Bowie wrote in his song “Boys Keep Swinging”, when you’re a boy, these are your favourite things. And it certainly was my favourite thing.

Despite seeming to start out really well, a combination of this girl’s shyness and my intense depression and anxiety, it ended before it had even really begun, and I was d.e.v.a.s.t.a.t.e.d. I went from being someone who struggled a lot with depression and anxiety to someone who was completely crippled by it. It was what I felt was the first really good thing to happen in my life, but it ended up being the worst, and it took me years to recover from. During this time, I managed to complete a degree in biological science, but the intense depression I had never lifted, and I struggled with it on a daily basis. This led to me becoming very introspective and always reflecting on the ultimate nature of life, trying to find some sort of meaning to live for.

I never found this meaning until I was 25 years old, when I read an article by one of my favourite science writers called Robert Wright. He had just completed a 10 day silent meditation retreat and wrote about his experience there. He said it was a profound experience, and he came home with a great appreciation for all life. Looking at the weeds in his garden, he saw their inherent beauty without the label of “weed”. A lizard crossed his back porch and he said, “I kind of loved that lizard.” When I read this article, and subsequently watched an interview he did with Gary Weber, a “nonduality” or enlightenment teacher, something switched in my head. I suddenly knew this was what I had to do. I had to meditate, and I had to get enlightened. I somehow knew it was the only way I would ever be truly free of my suffering.

And so I started meditating. I started listening to teachers who had realized what I was trying to realize. From Eckhart Tolle to Byron Katie to Adyashanti, I devoured endless hours of youtube videos from all the teachers I could find on this subject. My entire life became focused on this single goal of attaining enlightenment. This continued for a number of years until I found a teacher in my hometown of Sydney, Australia who was teaching the same thing.

I had heard of this woman called Isira in passing before and watched a video of hers on youtube, but I didn’t feel any great attraction to her at that stage. I thought, “she seems like a nice lady,” but that was about it. There was no deeper recognition. Then, about a year later a friend mentioned her again to me and I decided to go along to one of her satsangs (a Sanskrit term meaning “association in truth”), where there is a meditation and talk followed by questions and answers. This time, I felt her presence. This time I got where she was coming from. It was almost as if when I first watched her she was on a different plane to me and I couldn’t understand her, but this time I did. As Eckhart Tolle wrote in his book “The Power of Now”, this book will either change your life, or it will be meaningless to you. I believe this is also what Jesus meant when he said, “those who have the ears to hear, let them hear.” This time it changed my life.

I began volunteering for the organization surrounding Isira called “Living Awareness”, and it was great to find a community of people who were interested in the same thing I was interested in. I wasn’t always the best student: I found maintaining a daily meditation practise very difficult with the intensity of emotion I was always going through, but I was completely committed to the goal of awakening, and I loved being a part of a group committed to that goal.

I was volunteering with Isira for 2 years before a big event happened.

In May of 2018 Isira held a weekend event called The Presence. I was one of the cameramen. I was working late nights at my job so I was always pretty tired at these things, and I knew I’d struggle with concentration and getting into the zone of meditation. At the start of each event, Isira gets us to write down an “I am” intention, to get in touch with the deeper reasons we are there. My intention was a big one: “I am here to commit to walking my highest path at all times.” Talk about asking a lot of yourself. But it felt right to me at the time.

The event was going smoothly enough, and I enjoyed working with the camera. On the second day, however, after struggling with tiredness and an inability to get centred, I made a prayer: “I am too tired to get into this properly, so please, anything that needs to happen, let it happen.”

In order to get prepared for meditation, Isira has an exercise she calls the “shakti shake”. Shakti is another Sanskrit term which refers to the primordial energy that runs through the entire universe. We do this shake to let off all the excess energies in our body before we sit down to meditate. Nothing much had really happened the previous times I had done this, but this time something big shifted. I was doing the exercise, bouncing up and down on my heels, swaying my arms, and breathing in rhythm, and suddenly something else took over. It felt like the universe suddenly went, “my turn”, and picked me up and shook me really intensely. I was gone from the equation. It only lasted a few seconds, but the shock of it was enough to send me falling backwards against the wall behind me. Isira saw this and came over to ask if everything was okay. “Yeah, I’m fine,” I stammered, still not sure what had happened.

The shakti shake had come to an end, and Isira instructed us to put our hands on our lower abdomen, a place called “tantien”, also known as the hara – the centre moderating point of energy in our body. When I did this, a flood of tears came through me, and I sat crying in a room full of 30 people for about half an hour. I’m not usually a public crier, so this was very out of character for me. But I was still only half there, so I couldn’t have stopped it even if I wanted to. This, I would later learn from Isira, was a partial kundalini awakening. Kundalini is another Sanskrit term which refers to a usually dormant coil of energy located at the base of the spine. In humans it is often suppressed by all our thoughts and bodily conditions, but when it opens and flows, it is a very powerful force. And, I later discovered, anywhere you still have energetic blockages or repressions, it will come up against these and put tremendous pressure on them. This is why a kundalini awakening, while always a significant stage in a person’s awakening, is not always an easy thing to deal with. I experienced this, and experienced what is commonly known as “kundalini syndrome” – a result of the person, with all their mental and emotional resistance, struggling against the force of this energy. For about 3 days after this energy started to move inside me, the only word I was able to say was “fuck”. Over and over and over again, “fuck, fuck, fuck.” It was intense.

The next two months were filled with magic and horror. As my body tried to cope with the energy that was moving through it, my mind went into panic mode, fearing that it was losing control. An analogy that is often used for kundalini energy is like shaking up a coke bottle: when you lift the lid off, everything spurts out. I started to experience a lot of synchronicities, feeling more love, bliss, and connection (the magic), but my mind was also throwing up very scary visions of what would happen to me if I let go of my mind (the horror). I was working as a gardener at the time but ended up having to leave my job because I started to experience psychosis as a result of my mind feeling like it was losing control. The fear was overwhelming at times, and I started to develop a lot of paranoia because of it.

The next part of the story I will need to backtrack a bit to give it some context.

During the period when I was listening to teachers on youtube, and about a year before I met Isira, I was following an interview program called “Buddha at the Gas Pump”, where the host Rick Archer interviews people who have had various stages of awakening. It’s a great show, and in my opinion Rick is the best interviewer out there for this type of thing. One day I decided to have a look at who the most watched interviews were, and found one with a guy called Darryl Anka, who claims to channel an extraterrestrial being called “Bashar”. At first I was pretty skeptical to say the least; I went in thinking, “I wonder how crazy this guy is.” But I was interested to see why so many people had watched it, so I sat down and listened. To my surprise, he seemed normal, sane, and had a lot of insight on spiritual matters. I couldn’t fault him on that. So I decided to go and watch some of his channeling sessions.

It didn’t take long before I realized this person was sharing very high spiritual wisdom. I was blown away by his clarity and understanding of spiritual concepts and concepts in modern physics, which I think is something very hard to fake, though some people try. I felt so drawn to this work, but my mind was having a hard time accepting it. My mind was thinking, “What? This can’t be real… aliens don’t exist… or if they exist I’m quite sure they’ve never contacted us, and I’m quite sure channeling is not a real thing!!” But still I felt drawn. This created a bit of a split between my deeper intelligence and my mind. My deeper self was so drawn to this, but my mind was reeling backwards saying “this can’t be true!” Luckily I had already established a meditation practise which allowed me some witnessing of my mind’s reaction, so I wasn’t completely caught in it, but it resulted in a very scary night where my mind realized it could never know anything for certain. In that time I became convinced this was real, which also brought on its own paranoia. “Do I have reason to be worried?” “Who are these beings? What do they want?” “Are we in any danger from them?” I didn’t know the answers to those questions. For the next 3 months my mind went through a radical change. It felt, even on a physical level, that my brain was being wrenched open, making room for this bigger reality I felt I had plunged into.

I started to do some groundwork research on this, and soon found out – despite what a lot of the public thinks – governments and military personnel have been VERY interested in UFOs for a very long time. I looked into the work of Richard Dolan, who I think is the best researcher around on this topic today. I looked at Dr Steven Greer’s work with the disclosure project. In a period of 3 years of looking into this, I came to the conclusion that it was real. Yes, aliens do exist, and yes, they also know that we exist.

This realization played a role in what happened next with my awakening.

As I mentioned, I started to develop a lot of fear and paranoia. I felt like I had just woken up to this bigger reality, and I didn’t know what was real or not. My fear and paranoia turned to the subject of extraterrestrials and the possibility of so-called “negative beings”, and I started to feel a lot of fear about this. I thought, “I’ve just woken up to this bigger reality, what if they know this? What if it means I’ve become a target of some kind?” Maybe not a very rational thought, but the uncertainty made me extremely anxious.

This fear all culminated in one night when, after hallucinating that my housemate turned into one of these negative beings, I attacked her out of fear.

At the time I was deeply psychotic. I was convinced that these beings were coming to get me, and I was trying to get my housemate’s help so she could stay with me and help keep me safe. But, in the middle of trying to convince her of this, because of my own deep fear, I suddenly saw her face change, her eyes became dark, and I suddenly didn’t know who she was anymore. At the time, it looked like she turned into a demon, and I lashed out in fear.

This was one of the most difficult things I’ve ever had to come to terms with. My housemate was a beautiful person and the last person in the world I would have wanted to hurt. But I did. The police came and took me to the station, but I was still in a deep psychosis, so the next morning they took me in an ambulance to a mental hospital where I stayed for 3 months. I tried to explain everything that was going on for me to the doctors – the kundalini experience, the extraterrestrials, the fear associated with this – but their diagnosis was clear: “William, you have paranoid schizophrenia. This is an incurable condition, and you will likely need to be on medication for the rest of your life.” Well, that was one doctor’s opinion at least, the other doctor said he couldn’t be certain, but the one thing we all agreed on was that I had had a severe psychotic episode. (Pro tip: if you’re trying to get out of a mental hospital, don’t tell them you think aliens exist.)

Where I am at now.

Well I’m still not completely enlightened (damn!), but I had a significant partial awakening, and it seems to me the process now is one of calibration – aligning my body and mind more and more to the energy that is now moving through me. It hasn’t been an easy path, but then, no one said awakening was always easy. In a way, despite the horribleness of everything that transpired, it showed me clearly just how insane the human mind can be, and I now know that, whatever awakening has in store for me in the future, it can’t be worse than continuing to let the mind rule the show. So, going through something so extreme helped me see the nature of the mind more clearly, and helped me see that the mind really is only useful for practical things – the stories it comes up with lead to a very confused and sometimes disastrous destination.

A zen monk was once asked, “How’s your enlightenment going?” And he replied, “Fine. My body is having a hard time keeping up with it though.” This I think gets to the point that awakening largely happens through the body. As Adyashanti would say, it really begins from the neck down. If it’s not from the neck down, it remains just another largely superficial game of the mind with no change in your actual behaviour, which at the end of the day is the only thing that really matters about awakening.

Thank you for reading my story,

In love and light,

Will.

For more stories like this, including mental health, extraterrestrials, and spirituality, please subscribe to my blog, follow my Facebook page “The Ostrich and the Elephant”, or find me on Twitter @willkenway, Medium @willkenway, or Instagram @will.kenway. Thanks!