The Ostrich and the Elephant

A blog on spirituality, science, philosophy, ETs, and mental health

Tag: Awakening

  • The synchronicities I experienced

    Preface

    I was originally going to list all the synchronicities that happened to me during the time of my kundalini awakening/psychosis, but after writing the first one and seeing how long it was, then counting the rest, there was almost 80, so that would be way too long to write out, so I’ve condensed it into just a few that would make the most sense to other people without having to explain a big story behind them.

    Here we go…

    For those of you who have read some of my previous blogs, in particular “My disastrous spiritual awakening”, you will know that after a particularly profound experience at a spiritual weekend event with my teacher Isira, I slipped into psychosis.

    I was diagnosed in hospital with schizophrenia, and spent 3 months there, in mental and emotional agony.

    Now, while I agree that I had a psychosis (I’ve had 3 in total), I believe there was also something true about what I was experiencing.

    Did it go overboard? Yes. Did my mind go crazy trying to make sense of everything that was happening? Yes. But I still believe there was something else going on as well. A profound spiritual awakening which led to psychosis.

    The last seven years of my life has been trying to parse out what was psychosis and what was genuine in what I experienced.

    The American author Joseph Campbell once said: “The psychotic drowns in the same waters in which the mystic swims with delight.”

    I really agree with this. In the hospital I was in, I met more people with more spiritual insight than I ever have in the outside world. Were they also a bit crazy? Yes. But there was something true underlying it which they were trying to make sense of.

    A few years after my first psychosis, I decided to write down all the crazy synchronicities that were happening at the time. These were objective events that happened which I still find difficult to explain. A few of these happening? Sure, that could be put down to chance. But all of them, in the space of a few months? It seemed unlikely.

    So I decided to share that list here, and you can make up your own mind about whether these things seemed strange, or could just be put down to psychosis.

    A friend of mine I met through a spiritual group on Facebook once told me, “Don’t bother telling anyone your synchronicities, they won’t feel significant enough to anyone but you.” I think this is probably true, but regardless I thought I’d document them anyway, for anyone open-minded enough to consider their possibility.

    I’ve written them in no chronological order, just in the order in which I remembered them at the time I was writing them down.

    So here we go…

    1. “Maybe this is your teacher speaking to you…”

      About two months into my hospital stay, I was transferred to the less secure section of the hospital. As I mentioned in a previous blog, I spent basically three months doing nothing but pacing up and down the corridors. I don’t know what it was; maybe it was everything that had happened during my psychosis, maybe it was that the antipsychotic they put me on functions by reducing dopamine and serotonin (the two neurotransmitters that make you feel good!), maybe it was a combination of a lot of things, but I felt horrible. There was pretty much nothing to do in hospital, so pacing up and down the corridors was the most I could do to ameliorate some of the anguish. I had a lot of conversations with other patients doing this. I know they felt similarly, but I had a feeling no one was experiencing it to the degree I was. It never really left either. For the last seven years I’ve been pretty much the same; the only difference being I can now at least try to distract myself with my phone.

      Now for the synchronicity though: One day I was walking up and down the corridors talking with another patient there. It was the first time I’d spoken to him, and we started talking about spirituality. “I have a book for you,” he said. He went into his room and brought it out: “Be Here Now”, by Ram Dass. He said I could keep it, which I thought was nice of him, but he suggested I read it all in one go. It wasn’t a long book. I was standing with him in the corridor and opened the book somewhere around the middle. I read the words: “I am will I know what is.” “Whoah,” I thought to myself. What are the odds out of everything in this book I open on those specific words?

      I had at this point spent two months in hospital with everyone telling me I had schizophrenia. I disagreed with them of course. I agreed that some of the things I thought were happening weren’t happening, but I was convinced my psychosis was caused by, as my teacher said, a kundalini (energetic) awakening. This is not uncommon at all. I’ve met so many people in the last seven years who experienced psychosis as part of their awakening journey. But nonetheless being told for two straight months that you have schizophrenia starts to make you question things. Do I actually have schizophrenia? Was everything I experienced imaginary? I thought I was having a profound spiritual awakening and I ended up in a mental hospital! How the fuck did my spiritual awakening go so horribly wrong???

      So when I read these words, it really struck a chord. I did know what happened to me, and it wasn’t what the doctors were saying. Or at least, not totally.

      I read the rest of the sentence that I saw those words in: “Only when I know what I am will I know what is.”

      “I wish I had my teacher to speak to,” I said to my friend. “Maybe this is your teacher speaking to you,” he said with a smile.

      I know for an absolute fact that my teacher had spoken to me at least once before through another person. She confirmed it herself. So the possibility of her speaking to me through another person didn’t seem too unbelievable.

      My dad called to let me know what time he was coming for a visit, and I excitedly told him about the synchronicity. I was mindful to not be too excited: I was at the nurse’s station after all, and I didn’t want to seem unhinged. 😛

      All of this was rounded out by the fact that almost the last thing my teacher said to me before she said she wouldn’t be available for contact anymore is, “Your new name is “Here-Now”.”

      So that’s synchronicity number one… now for number two…

    2. “I might just bring a big bunch of buttercups.”

      One day, in the middle of all the craziness that was happening, a guy added me on Facebook. He was a young African guy from Botswana. He was in his early twenties, but he looked like a teenager. I looked at his page and it was all spiritual stuff; prose and poems he had written, and it was fantastic. His poetry was really simple, and really childlike, but in a good way. He’s still one of my favourite poets. His name was Godwill. That’s an interesting name, I thought to myself; I’ve never heard that before.

      I bought two of his books: “Gloom to Bloom”, and “Rising in Romance”. I wrote to him to tell him how much I loved his poetry, and asked: “How come you write in English so well? Is it your second language?” He said, “Well, I’d ask you not to tell anyone this, only me and my mum are aware of this at the moment, but I had a past life as a famous American poet.” (He recently gave me permission to share this story). Okay, I thought; I was interested but naturally skeptical. “Can I ask who the poet was?” I said. He replied, “e.e. cummings.” “Wow,” I said. “e.e. cummings wrote one of my favourite poems of all time!” (the poem is “[i carry your heart with me(i carry it in]”).

      This is pretty strange, I thought. This guy adds me with an interesting name, I absolutely adore his poetry, and he says he had a past life as one of my favourite poets! But that’s not even the main synchronicity.

      His profile picture was him holding a yellow flower. I was a bit transfixed by this flower for some reason, and I couldn’t tell what type it was, so I looked it up online. It was a buttercup.

      A few days later my mum was going down to Canberra for a dinner party. “I don’t want to bring wine to this dinner party,” she said, “I might just bring a big bunch of buttercups.”

      What the fuck, I thought to myself. My mum has never once mentioned the word buttercup to me, and just after this whole experience she mentions it to me for the first time. What are the chances of that???

      Another interesting thing that happened was that when I was talking to my teacher about her daughter (see my blog post “Calling Lilha”), she kind of accidentally called me Godwill. She said, “Oh no I meant “Oh my God, Will.”” But the way she said it sounded exactly like Godwill. I thought later: Is that my spiritual name? At first I didn’t really like the sound of it, I thought it sounded a bit grandiose or self-important, but I got used to it, and I quite like it now. I think there’s a very strong chance that will be my spiritual name. I asked my teacher once years earlier if she had a name for me yet, and she said: “Usually names just occur at some point, and that hasn’t happened for you yet.” “That’s okay,” I said. I wasn’t desperate for a name.

      A lot of people have a bit of an allergic reaction to someone changing their name when they embark on a spiritual journey, and I agree sometimes it can be motivated by ego, but at the same time, sometimes the spiritual path is so transformative that you no longer identify with the person you used to be. At that point, a name change can signify a profound shift in your sense of who you are.

      I’m not going with Godwill yet though, I’m waiting for my teacher to tell me what my name is, given I trust her judgement more than my own.

      And number three…

    3. Lilha

      I guess the most synchronicities I experienced were in relation to my spiritual teacher’s daughter. I went over the main ones in my blog post “Calling Lilha”, but there was so much more. That post was only about a quarter of what was going on. So many little things that seemed to point in this direction that by themselves I wouldn’t have paid any attention to, but in combination they seemed hard to disregard.

      These were little things like the name of my book is going to be “The Ostrich and the Elephant”, and in reading my teacher’s autobiography, she said her daughter came to her before she was born in the form of an elephant. I identify with the ostrich (see the “About” section of my blog), which just left the elephant role to be filled. And elephants have been a big motif in my life: my mum has been buying me elephant things my whole life.

      As I wrote about in “Calling Lilha”, reading about her north node and my north node was very illuminating. It said basically she has a tendency to be a very selfish person and I have a tendency to be a very selfless person, and those two energies need to be balanced. One day I was on YouTube and a video was recommended to me: “Being In Love”, by Osho. I’m kind of interested in that topic at the moment, I thought to myself; I wonder what Osho has to say. I clicked on it, and literally the first words out of his mouth were: “I’m here to teach you to be selfish.” What the fuck? I thought. This is so weird. To understand how weird this was you probably kind of had to have been there when I was talking to my spiritual teacher about her daughter, and how this issue of selfishness and selflessness came up so much. Interesingly, when I described her daughter based on what I’d read of her, she didn’t say, “Oh no, Will, my daughter’s not like that at all.” She just laughed.

      In my manifestation book for a partner, I wrote that I wanted someone with a “strong will and a strong sense of self.” As I said in “Calling Lilha”, this was kind of interesting to me because my goal is enlightenment, why do I want someone with a strong sense of self? Reading Lilha’s north node later, a lot of what I wrote in my manifestation book reflected what was written in her north node. It said these people have a very strong sense of self – to a fault. And it said they needed someone with a weak sense of self – for example ME – to transfer that energy, and again balance it out.

      There were lots of songs I came across that really spoke to me at this time, and seemed to point in this direction. I won’t go into them here cos it would be too long to write out, but these were more things that seemed to suggest there was something to this. I usually listen to songs with pretty deep lyrics, but at this time it was SO deep. I was often thinking, “Do these people know how deep the music they’re writing is?” Often I would be say, in the shower processing something deeply emotional, and the song would match my experience perfectly. Then, just as I’d finished processing what I was, the song would end. The timing of these things was eerie.

      One of the strangest things that happened was when I started to – apparently – hear thoughts from other people. Yeah, I know. Totally nuts. But I felt like I was connecting with people on such a deep level that I heard their thoughts, and was communicating with them. I want to be clear here: I do not know that this is true. This could have just been psychosis. I haven’t been able to confirm this with anyone I was speaking to (my spiritual teacher or her daughter, for example). Although my teacher’s partner told me once to make sure I was talking to Isira in the physical, not just the mental realm, which kind of indicated they thought I was doing that as well. Bashar calls telepathy telempathy, because he said it’s really connecting with people on an emotional level, and it’s not so much that you’re “reading each other’s thoughts”, but that you’re so much on the same wavelength that you’re effectively having the same thoughts at the same time. I’ve heard couples who’ve been together for a long time say they experience this. The Swiss psychiatrist and psychologist Carl Jung spoke about this as well, and was a big believer in telepathy. I could write a whole blog post on this experience, and especially my (possible) connection with Lilha during this time, but I don’t feel the motivation to do this at this point. I don’t think it’s necessary either, as it’s just speculation at this point.

      One thing I mentioned in the “Calling Lilha” post was that I knew for certain that Isira either knew I was right, or very strongly thought I was right about the messages relating to her daughter. It’s my opinion that she knew I was right, but I can’t know this for certain. One time I was talking to her about her daughter and all the craziness that was happening at the time and I said: “That was the only thing I wasn’t confused about.” (Meaning the messages relating to her daughter). She said, “Will, the mind can -“. “I know it’s a distraction,” I interrupted her. Her partner was there, and he said, “Yeah.” What I meant by this was that any focus I had on Lilha would actually distract me from the most important task at hand – waking up. Relationships were secondary to that, and any excessive focus on them would actually be an impediment to me reaching my goal of awakening.

      It was at this point that Isira said something to me which has greatly concerned me ever since. When we were talking about her daughter, she didn’t say, “Oh, Will, you’re reading into things that aren’t there.” She said: “Will, you’re going to experience everything this universe has to offer.” I looked away, processing what this meant. “Fuck,” I said.

      This was interesting to me though, because only a couple of months earlier I was at Budhawana (my teacher’s centre) by myself and I said, “I want to know all of life. I don’t want there to be any part of life I’m saying no to.”

      And then a couple of months later my teacher said this to me, confirming what I had said to myself earlier.

      One other interesting thing was that when I was talking to my teacher about all the signs, and worrying that I was going crazy, she said I wasn’t going crazy in that sense but instead said, “Will, you’ve learnt how to manifest… big time.”

      My teacher is the most awake and insightful person I’ve ever come across, so I really trust her judgement on these sorts of things.

    I think that’s about all I’ll write on this. As I said, there were almost 80 of these events in the space of about three months, and I found it very difficult to put them all down to chance. It’s one thing to read these on a screen, it’s a whole different thing to experience them, and all the emotional and intuitive feelings that accompany them. I guess that’s why my friend told me to never bother trying to explain your synchronicities to other people: they won’t fully get them. But I just felt like sharing this to give some idea of what I was going through at the time.

    End note

    I kind of got a bit tired of writing by the time I came to the third point about Lilha, and I didn’t feel a great urge to really write about it, so I haven’t really explained it well, or really hinted at the myriad of other signals that were happening. So take point 3 with a grain of salt. This is really just a personal thing that I don’t think I need to explain to people, I just had to make a third point to fill out the blog post. I don’t actually think about Lilha that much anymore. It’s just like a possibility that’s always in the back of my mind, but I really don’t focus on it. My goal is awakening first, and whatever comes after that, I think it will be great no matter what turns out to be true or untrue of all of this.

    Thanks for reading,

    Will.

  • Ajata Vada

    A warning:

    I would probably only read this article if you are very committed to awakening. If not, it could be unnecessarily challenging for you. This teaching is about as radical as radical can get – and true spirituality is already pretty radical!

    I want to emphasise though that I do not know if this teaching is true, or if it is the full truth; however, I think something Jesus said is appropriate here if it is true:

    “Those who seek should not stop seeking until they find, and when they find they will be disturbed, and when they are disturbed they will be astonished, and will reign over the All.”

    A bit over two years ago now, I came across a video from the nonduality teacher Tom Das called “The highest truth is Ajata”. Hmm, I thought. I’d been on the spiritual path for 11 years at this point, and had never heard that word. I respect Tom as a teacher so I watched the video. (link here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6RTlr5GdZXc).

    It was radical. Like, really, really radical. World-ending radical.

    At first I was excited to hear it. My whole life had been focused on awakening for 11 years, and I was so frustrated with not making the “progress” I wanted. Not actually waking up. When I heard it, I thought to myself, “Okay, this is going to change things. This is big.”

    Ajata is a Sanskrit word which means “unborn”. “A” being the prefix “not” and “jata” being “born”. “Vada” means “view”. What this perspective states is that “there is no creation.” “Nothing ever happened.” The world is not just illusory, it never even appeared to exist!

    After my initial excitement of feeling like this could be a breakthrough for me, a bit of fear crept in. Quite a bit. “Well, this is just one teacher”, I said to myself; “he could be wrong.”

    In the following months and years however, I came across more and more teachers who were saying the same thing. Ramana Maharshi, Papaji, Rupert Spira, A Course in Miracles, some awakened friends on Facebook. The evidence started to mount up.

    I wrote to Tom, initially, when the fear crept in.

    “Is it scary?” I said.

    “No, it’s not scary at all, Will. It’s heaven,” he said. “Ajata = total endless peace, love, and bliss.”

    Still, there were things I wanted in the world. I wanted a deep relationship with a partner. I wanted to write my book. Will that all disappear?

    I don’t know the answer to this question, and really, before I see the ultimate truth myself, what I think about it means absolutely nothing. Whether I believe or disbelieve in ajata is kind of irrelevant. The truth is the truth no matter what I think about it. It’s impossible to know what the coffee in Paris tastes like until travelling to Paris.

    This teaching would say that the world does not exist in any way, but only “God”, “the Absolute”, consciousness, beingness, the I Am exists.

    As Rupert Spira said once, “When the somethingness of the waking state starts to appear less and less like something, the nothingness of the deep sleep state starts to appear less and less like nothing.”

    There’s a tendency for the human mind to picture “nothing” as just an endless black void. But apparently that’s not what is experienced. This state is impossible for the mind to imagine, as I’ve been told. Only that it is everything we’ve always been searching for.

    One thing that makes me hesitate with this teaching is my teacher Isira. As best as I could tell, she was the most awake person I’d ever come across, and I remember her once mentioning the book, “The Disappearance of the Universe”, and dismissing the idea as not true. The world does exist, only our thoughts about it do not exist, she said.

    That was always my position on this matter until coming across the ajata teachings. But I still just don’t know. I can’t know until I experience the truth, whatever it is, for myself. All the philosophising in the world means nothing. Truth is experiential. Philosophy and spiritual teachings can lead you to water, but they can’t make you drink. At a certain point you have to dive in, even though you don’t know that it’s safe.

    This is why I think faith on the spiritual path is so important. Faith doesn’t mean belief in something without evidence, it just means that at a certain point you have to have trust and let go into the unknown.

    What are the benefits of this teaching though? Well, what do humans want more than anything? Eternal life and happiness. That is, apparently, what’s on offer with these teachings. What you truly are was never born and cannot die, and it is bliss. Eternal bliss as “God”. That is where the spiritual path ultimately leads. Yet people are running around picking up scraps of temporary happiness, mostly struggling. As the philosopher Søren Kierkegaard wrote: “People settle for a level of despair they can tolerate and call it happiness.”

    There really is so much denial going on in humans. People, on the whole, are suffering a lot. Yet we often refuse to admit it to ourselves I think because we’re scared that there is no solution. That if we faced up to how unhappy we are we would just get stuck there and it would make it worse. People think the best they can hope for is brief periods of happiness interspersed amongst long periods of struggle.

    The spiritual path says there is a solution. And it’s better than we could imagine.

    Another benefit is that this teaching really removes your attachment to the world. Regardless of whether the world exists or not, our intense focus and fascination on the vicissitudes of life can distract us from discovering our true unchanging Self (capital S indicating the ultimate Self, not the individual self or ego). This teaching is a very powerful means for shifting our attention in that way.

    One thing I have noticed, however, with most people who advocate for the ajata teachings, is that they think the world = suffering, and that it can’t be any other way.

    While I think there is both light and dark in existence, and there will always be the full array of human emotion experienced, I don’t see it this way. I believe it is possible to create “Heaven on Earth”. Will it take a while? Yes, but I do believe it’s possible. And I do wonder whether there is an emotional avoidance inherent in the ajata teachings. Maybe if you see the world as inherently just suffering, you are more likely to reject it, and stay in this “absolute” state because it is “safer”.

    I don’t know if this is true, but it is a thought that I had. Adyashanti once said, “Don’t get stuck in enlightenment.” If you get stuck in enlightenment, the world will seemingly make you aware pretty quickly of your neglect of it.

    As I said, that’s just a possibility for me. I don’t know the truth of this yet. All I know is that I’m going to keep exploring until I find the highest truth myself. Until then, I leave you with this image:

    Thanks for reading,

    Will.

    P.S. Something I’ve learnt a lot on the spiritual journey is to take the “middle way” approach. Buddha is credited with saying this, but in his case he meant it in terms of asceticism versus over-indulgence. The way I see it is that we should always plant ourselves firmly in the middle ground of any propositions and be open to the truth of each, if there is any. I’ve been surprised at how accurate the middle way generally is in this sense, and getting lost in extremes often indicates a blind spot. I don’t know if this is true of ajata, but it’s a possibility. Some teachers have often said the world is real and unreal at the same time. As I said, I will continue to investigate it either way, and even though it might take a while, I’ll get back to you with the results. 😉

  • Calling Lilha

    Okay, so this post is going to sound a bit crazy. All I can do is recount the events as they happened.

    I want to stress here that I do not know that any of this is true. I lean towards it being true, but I simply don’t know.

    This is the story of how 7 years ago I began receiving “messages from the universe” about a future partner of mine.

    That future partner was my spiritual teacher’s daughter, whom I had never met, and at the time I spoke to my teacher about this, was engaged.

    Nevertheless, here is the story…

    It all started in the beginning of 2018. At the end of year team dinner with my teacher, she gave us all a little notebook as a present. I thought I’d use it as a positive affirmation book, but never really ended up using it for that. A few weeks later, for the first and only time in my life, I decided I should try this “manifestation” thing. So I took out the notebook and started writing down the qualities I wanted in a future partner. I was 31, and had only had one half-relationship with a girl at that time, so it was a big deal, and was really the thing I longed for most, aside from awakening.

    So I started writing. At first it was all the typical stuff: “I want my future partner to be peaceful, loving, kind, fun, intelligent, attractive… etc etc”. Then I started to get more specific. “I want her to be on the same spiritual journey as me, with truth/happiness as the ultimate goal.”

    Then I said I wanted her to be “strong-willed, with a strong sense of self.”

    This one was interesting to me, because I thought, “Well, I’m interested in enlightenment (typically characterised as transcending the individual self), why do I want someone with a strong sense of self?” But I just wrote what came to me, and this was it.

    I then wrote that I wanted her to be “challenging, in a way that motivates me to grow as a person.”

    There weren’t too many more points, it was just an A5 page full, so maybe about 12 points all up.

    I put it away and largely forgot about it.

    I’m not sure how much time passed; it could have been a few weeks or a couple of months. I had just started working full time as a gardener at my teacher’s spiritual centre, and one day at home I was just scrolling through Facebook and came across a post from a spiritual centre in the city called “The Leela Centre”.

    When I read this word Leela, I just had this really strong emotional reaction to it. I was like, “Wow, what does that word mean?” I looked it up: it’s a Sanskrit word meaning “The Divine Play”. When I read the definition of it I was like, “I like it even more now, I think that might be my favourite word!”

    For the next few days at work I was just saying this word over and over in my head, “Leela, Leela, Leela.” I was listening to talks on the concept of Leela by teachers. I couldn’t get enough of it.

    After a few days of this I started to think, “Where have I heard that word before? Has a teacher mentioned it once?”

    Then a thought came to me: “Wait, wasn’t Isira’s daughter named something like that?” I had read her autobiography a couple of years earlier and remembered she mentioned she had children. So I went home and looked it up. I scoured through the pages: “Where’s the daughter…?” Then I saw it. Her daughter’s name: Lilha.

    When I read that I was like, “Lilha… how do you pronounce that? Is it Lyla or Leela?” I thought to myself, “Well if it’s Lyla I don’t really feel like I have a strong connection with that name. But maybe it’s just a variant spelling of Leela.” So I went and looked it up, and yes Lilha is a variant spelling of Leela.

    Okay, so that’s interesting, I thought to myself. I just had this really strong emotional reaction to this word, and it happens to be Isira’s daughter’s name.

    I still wasn’t blown away by this at this stage, I was just kind of curious. I said to my friend at this point I was about a 3/10 level of interest. Just curious.

    Then one day I was driving home and something occurred to me. Isira had recommended a book for me years earlier called “Astrology for the Soul”, by Jan Spiller. It’s all about what is called your “North Node”, and the qualities you need to develop in this lifetime, and the qualities you need to let go of. I’ve always been a bit iffy about astrology, but Isira said it was an “exceptional” book, and I kind of buy anything Isira recommends strongly.

    So I was driving home and I thought, “Hmm, I wonder what Isira’s daughter’s north node is… maybe that could provide some more information on her.” So I looked up her birthday in Isira’s autobiography: 23rd of August, 1995. That makes her north node a Libra.

    So I went to the astrology book to look up Libra, and at the time I was kind of having a fun little romantic fantasy: “Oh, I bet it’s going to say she’s an amazing person. Just kind and loving… even her bad qualities, they’re probably not really that bad, they’re just kind of cute.” Like I said, a fun little fantasy.

    But then I started to read the Libra north node, and it was, um… not what I was expecting… at all. The complete opposite. It basically said these people have had a lot of incarnations being a real “warrior” type of person, so they have a tendency towards selfishness, and a lack of concern for other people. I was like, “Um… I think my book must be broken or something, this is not right at all.”

    After a while of reading this I was like, “Yeah, this doesn’t sound like the person for me at all. Maybe there was a different reason I had a reaction to that name.”

    I was about to close the book, and I thought, “… Maybe I should check my north node. Maybe that would be helpful. Instead of just learning about other people I should understand a bit more about myself.”

    So I flicked back to where my north node was (Aries). I knew it was at the start of the book, so I was going to flick back to the start, but the page I landed on… it was like my eyes were stuck on a particular sentence. I kept moving to flick back the pages, but they were definitely stuck on this one sentence, and when I focused on it, it was like the sentence zoomed out to my face. It looked, on a physical level, like it got about 3 times bigger.

    I read it, and it said, “What these people really need to learn in this lifetime is selfishness.” I was like, “Uh… what the fuck is going on?” I had just been reading the Libra north node, and literally the first sentence of the Libra north node is “What these people need to learn to deal with is their tendency towards selfishness.” And then I flick back to mine and it says, “You need to learn selfishness.”

    Because of the way it happened, flicking back to that page, my eyes being stuck on it, and then it zooming out to my face, I was like, “What the hell is going on, this is so surreal.”

    So I flicked back to the start of my north node and it said basically that I’ve spent a lot of incarnations being a really helpful type of person, Mr and Mrs Nice. “Debilitatingly selfless,” it said. Yeah, that’s me.

    So I started reading through the Libra and Aries north nodes, and everything the Libra north node has is what I need to develop in this lifetime, and everything that I have is what the Libra north node needs to develop. They were complete mirror images of each other.

    Okay, this is really strange, I thought. After reading a bit of the Libra north node I was convinced this was not the person for me, and this book is now telling me, “THIS. You need THIS!”

    My level of interest then went to, “Okay, this doesn’t seem like a coincidence.”

    I wasn’t satisfied with that, however, so I asked “the universe” for more evidence, and there were lots of little other signs that seemed to point in this direction. By themselves I wouldn’t have paid them any attention, but in combination it seemed unlikely they could all be just chance.

    I didn’t speak to anyone about this for a while, I wanted to make sure it was a real possibility before I spoke about it, especially to my spiritual teacher – it was her daughter after all!

    A lot of other weird things started happening too. I started seeing double numbers *everywhere*. I’d heard people on the spiritual path talk about this before, and always thought that’s interesting but remained skeptical. It had never happened to me, so I didn’t know what to make of it. But it just started to happen to such a degree that again I found it difficult to put down to chance. It was happening sometimes up to about 90% of the day when I looked at my phone and I thought, “this can’t be happening!” I remember one time I went to a cafe for lunch, and the guy said, “That’ll be $33.” Then he handed me my table number – number 33. “Whoah,” he said. In my head I was like, “Oh dude, you have *no* idea. This is like 0.01% of what’s been going on for me lately.” It started to feel like synchronicities were just happening all around me during this time. I still didn’t talk to anyone about it yet though. I still wanted to make sure this was a real possibility before I did.

    Then in May of 2018, Isira held a weekend event called The Presence. I went into what happened here in my first blog post, “My disastrous spiritual awakening”, so I won’t go over it again, but basically, Isira told me that I had had a “partial kundalini awakening”. That’s another way of saying an “energetic” awakening.

    After a few days of *intense* energy in the body, and meditating on this question of Lilha, I went to my teacher.

    “Hey, um, Isira… I need to speak to you about something. It’s about a relationship.” “Oh… you’ve got me kind of interested now,” she said. “It kind of has to do with you,” I said. She smiled. Does she know? I thought to myself. Can she read my mind?

    It turns out she didn’t know. I’m pretty sure at this point she thought that I was talking about her. That I’d had this intense emotional experience at her event and that I’d developed feelings for her as a result. Needless to say, that wasn’t it.

    Later that afternoon, we went to sit in the little cottage at her centre to talk about what was happening. Again, I’m almost certain that at this point she was thinking I was going to say, “Yeah, I had this emotional experience and I’ve developed feelings for you.” Instead I said, “So… I have a feeling that… there’s a possibility that… my future partner… may be…………… your daughter.” I looked up at her, “If your daughter’s name is Lilha.”

    She didn’t say anything. I think she was a bit shocked. “Let me just explain,” I said, holding up my hand so she didn’t stop me before I got it all out.

    I went through everything that had happened up until that point. Well, almost everything. I didn’t get to finish before Isira said, “Okay Will, stop.” “I’m not finished,” I said. Then she said more forcefully, “Will, listen to me.”

    She then went on to basically play down the events and said, “Will, my daughter’s name is not Lilha,” she paused before continuing… “If she had a spiritual name that’s what it would be… she is engaged.” Afterwards in my head I thought, “I don’t care if she has 5 kids, I’m talking about the messages.”

    We ended our brief chat and I said, “This is just annoying.” I can’t remember exactly what Isira said at this point, but it was something along the lines of, “Yeah, well, you know we can use these experiences to understand more about ourselves.”

    I went back to work.

    After about half an hour of mulling over our conversation, I got angry. “This is bullshit,” I thought to myself. “I wasn’t making this up. These are objective events that happened.”

    I wrote to Isira and said I needed to go home. I said, “Look, either I’m completely insane, or something or someone is messing with me, and I don’t like either of those options.”

    She wrote back and said, “Will, as your teacher, wouldn’t it be best to trust an enlightened perspective on these things rather than your negative thoughts towards this and yourself?”

    This was the first time in the 3 years I’d been with Isira that what she said made absolutely no sense. Negative thoughts about this and myself? What the fuck is she talking about? There are no negative thoughts about this, I just want to know what the truth is.

    At this point a massive thunderstorm rolled in. I thought later it was kind of fitting because my internal state was quite thunderous.

    I wrote back to her, “I trust you as much as I’m able to trust anything, but I’m not making this up. This sequence of events were very misleading if not true, and that makes me angry. But I’m also thinking, maybe you are not telling me the truth. Maybe you are only telling me what I need to hear so I don’t get caught up in attachment about this or anything else.”

    She didn’t reply. I drove home.

    I messaged her the next day and said, “Isira, I can’t come back to work at the moment. I’m not sure if I can ever come back to Living Awareness now (her organisation’s name). I don’t want to live being crazy, and if this is not true then that’s the only other option.”

    Again, she didn’t reply.

    The next few days I kept meditating on this even more. I went really deep and tried to be as honest as I possibly could. Every time I tried to consider what Isira said I was like, “No, these messages are objective facts. It referenced a specific person. There was no reason me coming across that message had to involve Isira’s daughter. I didn’t need that part. I could have been given the message about needing to develop selfishness, and the possibility that my future partner would need to be a Libra north node… I could have received that message in any number of ways. But it included someone. It referenced someone specifically.”

    Whenever I tried to consider Isira’s words, I felt uneasy, uncomfortable, like it was a lie. Whenever I considered the opposite perspective I felt at peace, comfortable, like everything made sense.

    A few days later Isira’s assistant Leelani called me. “Will, would you like to talk about what’s been going on for you lately?” “Yes,” I said, “that would be good.”

    “Would you like to do it over the phone or come over to my place?” She asked. “I think in person would be better,” I said.

    So one afternoon I went to Leelani’s place. We sat down and she told me to record the conversation on my phone so I could listen back to it later. We spoke for 2 hours. I went into detail about everything that had been and was happening.

    At the end, she said, “Okay, so does it all make sense now?” I said, “No, nothing makes sense but that’s probably -“. “Good,” she said, “I’m glad that nothing makes sense, because that’s the mind, and you are not to answer questions via the mind.”

    I got in my car and put the recording on and went for a drive. For the first 20 minutes I was like, “Man, Leelani is on fire today! I had no idea she was so insightful!” Then, about 20 minutes in, I realised… “This is not Leelani talking to me, this is Isira.” At one point in the conversation, when she said the word Leela, I actually heard Isira’s voice, as if it were physically her I was talking to. I was parked by a beach at this point listening, and when she said the word Leela, it just took up my whole consciousness, and then at that exact moment a rainbow appeared. I was like, “What the hell is going on.” From that point on I couldn’t hear or say the word Leela without my body having a physical reaction to it, often convulsing and spasming.

    I thought to myself, “Man, I need to go home and have a cigarette,” but instead I drove to my teacher’s centre. I didn’t think anyone would be there, I just wanted to go and sit in the garden and contemplate everything that was happening.

    Isira was there though. I knocked on the door and her partner answered, Isira standing behind him.

    “You were there today with Leelani, weren’t you?” I said.

    “I was in presence,” she said. This was basically her way of saying yes.

    “I’m right, aren’t I?” I said.

    “What do you mean right? She asked.

    “I heard your voice,” I said.

    Then she asked me to come inside and talk over a bit more what was happening.

    I said to her… “I’d never heard myself say it out loud before (everything that was happening). And when I listened back to the recording, it was like… I only heard truth.”

    Truth has a particular frequency to it. This is something that everyone senses to some degree, but especially when you’ve been on the spiritual path for a while, you get a heightened sense of when something is true versus when it’s false. It’s like those kinesiology exercises. When you ask someone to hold out their arm and instruct them to resist you pushing it down, and then tell them to state something that is a lie, even something as simple as what their name is, when they lie you can easily push down their arm. When they tell the truth you can’t. There’s a strength that comes along with truth, and that’s what I experienced listening back to the recording.

    Isira was silent and just looked at me.

    We finished talking after another 40 minutes or so, and I said to her, “You have the best poker face ever.” Her partner in the next room laughed, but she still gave nothing away.

    “I think I’m more awake than you give me credit for,” I said.

    “Awakeness only sees awakeness, Will,” she said.

    “Bye,” I said, as I walked out and went to sit in the garden.

    Her partner came out to speak to me, but again I’m sure it was Isira’s voice coming through him.

    “It’s like what the Oracle said in The Matrix,” I said to him. “When Neo asked who Agent Smith was, she said, “He is you, your opposite. A result of the equation trying to balance itself out.” He laughed. “I don’t need to date other women,” I said (something Isira had suggested I do initially). “No,” he said. “But if I have a belief that I do then I do,” I said. “Yeah, but that’s just a belief,” he said.

    It was clear to me based on my talk with her, that Isira either knew I was right, or very strongly thought I was right.

    I drove home and was just processing all that had happened. At this point, I was convinced. This was true.

    I won’t go into the full story of what followed – I’ve got to save something for my book! – but it was both incredible and terrifying.

    It’s now been 7 years since this all happened, and as I said in the beginning, I still don’t fully know the truth. I’m still just in the same position I was in right in the middle of all this while meditating on the truth of it: When I think it’s true, I feel calm, at peace, relaxed. When I think it’s not true, I’m utterly confused, uncomfortable, and have no idea how to make sense of everything that happened.

    Isira told me she would no longer be available for contact soon after this. I knew why – I think she saw that I didn’t really need her help anymore, and that relying on her for guidance would actually prevent me from finding my own guidance – so it didn’t bother me, but I think once I reach my goal of awakening, she will again speak to me.

    One thing she kind of intimated to me at the time was: Your attachment to this is the problem. Regardless of the truth of it. If it’s not true, obviously your attachment to it is a problem. If it is true, your attachment to it is still a problem.

    Attachment is always a problem. There is no positive benefit to attachment whatsoever, in any context.

    So where I am at now with this is: If this turns out to be true, great! If it turns out to not be true, that’s also fine, and I’ll just find another woman to have a deep connection with.

    I’m a big believer that when you sort yourself out, the universe responds to this and provides things that are genuinely in alignment with who you are.

    Either way, I think I have a great future coming.

    Thanks for reading,

    Will.

  • 7 Year Update

    Oh man.

    Oh man.

    Oh man.

    The last 7 years have been tough. That’s an incredibly big understatement. The level of pain and anxiety I’ve experienced has been crippling. I still can’t leave the house without taking a Valium at the moment because of the risk of my mind taking me down a very scary path which could lead to a panic attack.

    There are 3 causes for this.

    1. My health concerns. I’ve gained 50kgs (110 pounds) in the last 7 years because the antipsychotic I’m on causes massive weight gain, and this has led to a few health issues. Sleep apnoea, high blood pressure, and I recently found out I’m in the early stages of pre-diabetes. Since finding that out I’ve radically changed my diet, and lost 3 kilos in the last 2 weeks. It may end up being a blessing in disguise because I have so little strength left I’m not sure anything else would have been enough to change the way I was living. I’ve also been experiencing heart pains on and off for the past year which has been really scary, but I went to a cardiologist and they said my heart’s fine, so that assuaged my concerns a little bit. It’s been tough though. January and February of this year I experienced anxiety over an extended period like I never have before. I was beside myself. Luckily now my anxiety only gets really bad when I leave the house, so I do that as little as possible. Just enough to go for an hour walk a few times a week. My doctors said I could come off my antipsychotic and just continue to take lithium while keeping the antipsychotic on hand in case I notice myself going into psychosis again, but I just have SO much fear about experiencing psychosis again I’m terrified of this. Which leads me into my next point…

    2. Fear of having another psychosis. I haven’t had a psychosis, or even any psychotic symptoms, for 3 years and 3 months. However, my fear of having another psychosis absolutely terrifies me. It’s the scariest thing in the world to know that your mind can turn on you at some point and make you experience something that can be paralyzingly terrifying. Especially after what happened during my first psychosis in 2018. I read a study that said a lot of people in psychosis show raised levels of dimethyltryptamine (DMT) in their blood, an endogenous compound known to be one of if not the most powerful psychedelics known to humans. I thought, great, my biggest fear is losing grip on reality, and now I might be having non-consensual psychedelic trips, which yes, can be great, but can also be horrifying. My first psychosis was equal parts incredible and terrifying, but the terrifying parts were so terrifying I want to do everything I can to make sure it never comes back. That’s why I continue to take medication today, despite it still being my choice whether I want to or not. And the third point…

    3. My spiritual path. My spiritual path is NOT EASY. You have to face up to everything: your pain, your anxiety, your fear of death, your fear of going crazy. The last thing the mind wants is enlightenment. It is the end of the ego. So it will say it wants enlightenment, but is actually doing everything it can to sabotage your efforts. But this transcendence of the mind thing is not easy. If we are identified with our minds, as almost all humans are, then this process of letting the mind go can feel very much like death. Or, as I mentioned, a fear of going insane. And there’s absolutely no way to know that things will work out okay on the other side. This is why I think the spiritual path requires quite a lot of faith. Faith doesn’t mean belief in something, but rather something more like trust that even though you don’t – and can’t – know for certain, you let go in the face of that unknown anyway. It’s not totally blind faith; most people usually have a lot of evidence pointing in this direction, but you can’t know what’s going to happen until you see it for yourself. All the spiritual teachers in the world could tell you, “Don’t worry about it, it’s heaven,” but until you see it for yourself you’ll never know for certain.

    So that’s a sort of brief summary of where I’ve been the last 7 years, and most especially the last 2 years, where it ramped up in intensity. The best I can do is just cope, and try to allow this process to unfold as it will without me getting in the way too much.

    I’ve got a couple of more blog posts to write which I’m more excited about – this one was just a catch up seeing as I haven’t written here in a few years.

    Thanks for reading,

    Will.

  • My first 10 day silent meditation retreat

    Preface

    I wrote this article about three years ago, when I was planning on attending another retreat. I didn’t end up going as I still had concerns about my mental health and the possibility of slipping into psychosis again, so I didn’t post this either. But I just found it again and thought it was a good summary of my first experience.

    Here it is…

    I’ve recently booked in for another 10-day silent retreat through the S. N. Goenka school of vipassana, so I thought it would be a good time to reflect on and write about my first experience at one of these retreats, dating back about 6 years now.

    I’ve spoken about this in my first blog post, “My disastrous spiritual awakening”, but I had first heard about these type of retreats through a favourite writer of mine, Robert Wright, who writes a lot on science and religion. He said he had a profound experience at one he attended and came home with a radically changed outlook and appreciation for life. When I read the article he wrote on this, it was as if something hit a switch in my head, and I immediately thought, “that’s what I have to do” (meaning I have to meditate, and I have to get enlightened).

    At the time of attending, I thought I had found my true path. I was a 100% dedicated meditator, and I was going to go at it gung-ho until I got enlightened. Everything else in my life took a back seat – career, relationships, everything. I just knew that my path was one where I had to get enlightened, and that I’d do whatever it took to get there.

    So I went in pretty seriously. Not the ideal way to go into a meditation retreat, but it was where I was at at the time.

    The retreat was held in the beautiful Blue Mountains of New South Wales in Australia, with views over the treed canyons below.

    I knew it was going to be difficult, but I was prepared. I meditated in the days and months leading up to the retreat in order to get myself ready for it, and attended every session without fail from 4:30 in the morning until 6pm at supper time.

    At this point, I had so much faith in meditation being the true way to enlightenment that even though it was tough, I pushed on through the pain and mental anguish I experienced at times.

    Sometimes this pain and mental anguish was almost unbearable. Now I know why they’ve done studies and people have reported preferring to be given electric shocks rather than sit alone with their thoughts for 10 minutes.

    The first few days were tough. Trying to focus your attention solely on the breath is a very difficult challenge, and one everyone is bound to fail at to a large degree.

    Not only that, I had someone next to me who was constantly cracking his knuckles, and someone on the other side of me with a very bad cold who was sniffling non-stop through almost the entire retreat.

    “Great,” I thought. “I’ve put in so much effort into making this a good meditation retreat and they stuck me next to Tweedledum and Tweedledee!!!”

    I started to feel intense amounts of anger about this. I felt this was my one good shot to really make some progress, and I couldn’t concentrate because of these people beside me.

    The anger welled up inside of me like a hot furnace, ready to boil over.

    Then suddenly, it did. A massive explosion happened within me. It felt like the whole top of my body was ripped open and all the pent up anger and rage surged upwards out of my body. My heart was beating a million times per second, I was breathing very heavily, my body was losing control of itself – or I was losing control of it. I saw with my mind’s eye a coloured spiral of emotion which began flowing out the top half of my body. I saw this. It obviously wasn’t in physical reality, but it wasn’t just imagination either. It was somewhere in-between.

    And then it died down. I was completely relaxed, albeit a bit shaken. Then a bit of embarrassment crept in. “Far out, how much noise was I making? I hope I didn’t disturb the other people around me.”

    Over the next two days I began to experience states of intense euphoria. But it still didn’t feel quite right. It felt like, yes, there’s a lot of euphoria here, but I still felt like I was grasping at it, hoping it will last, wondering if I could make it even more euphoric. And this grasping led to unpleasant feelings in the body. I knew there was more to this than just euphoria.

    I kept trying to re-induce these euphoric states for a while, because it was what I felt was the most profound thing that had happened so far, but the harder I pushed, the further it eluded me. It got to the point where I was actually trying to cause pain to my body by overstretching my legs, because I felt somehow the pain had been a catalyst for the euphoria in the first place. I still have pain in my hip sometimes from doing that 6 years later.

    I was devastated that I couldn’t make these experiences last. It seemed like they were there just to tease me.

    This led to me one night walking off by myself into the bush and sitting there, crying, totally dejected and totally despairing. I saw what Buddhists call the “wheel of samsara” or the wheel of illusion.

    I thought, “What the hell is the point of all this? What’s the point of trying to get to a happy state if it’s just going to be followed by an unhappy state sooner or later? For 15 minutes, I sat in total and utter despair, as though there was nothing I could do to change this. It was the most hopeless I had ever felt.

    Then a realization came to me: Enlightenment is not about states of consciousness, enlightenment is about getting off the wheel of samsara and seeing it for what it is – ultimately a play of illusion, of duality. This was met with great relief – I didn’t need to spend the rest of my life on this pointless rollercoaster ride if I didn’t choose to. I could just get off. So that’s what I did at that retreat. I got off. Not entirely, I later found out, but to a degree. I had at least unbuckled my seatbelt.

    This led to the rest of the retreat being one of great calm and peace. Peace, I found, was the biggest surprise. Most people would think they’d prefer to experience euphoria rather than peace, but the ironic thing is that the peace actually felt better than the euphoria. With the euphoria there was grasping and “wanting more”. With peace, there was utter contentment, no pulling, no pushing, just a total and deep relaxation into the moment without desiring anything to change. No desire = pure bliss.

    To this day, I describe the happiest moment of my life as being when I was doing my laundry there, washing my clothes by hand in a bucket outside. Not something someone usually equates to ultimate joy, but that’s what I experienced.

    I’m now going on my second one of these retreats, a full 6 years later, and I’m not sure what to expect. The only thing I’m expecting is that it probably won’t be like what I expect.

    Time will tell…

    In love and light!

    Will

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

  • Everything is Inside Your “Head”

    The type of spirituality I have mostly followed over the last 8 years is called “nonduality”, from the Hindu word advaita, which translates to “not two”.

    As you may have guessed by the name, this philosophy suggests that there is no such thing as separation – there are not “two things”. Everything, this philosophy suggests, is fundamentally the same. Made out of the same stuff. That stuff could be called consciousness. Pure awareness.

    A lot of people struggle with these ideas. The world around them seems so real and physical. It seems like there really is separation between things. But there’s a very simple way of showing that – even if the materialist paradigm of the universe is correct (which it isn’t 😉 ) – our direct experience can only ever be of pure consciousness and no separation.

    That is because, like the title of this post, everything you experience is actually inside your “head”. Now, even this isn’t true. Saying everything appears inside your head is making a concession to the materialist paradigm, where heads are real physical things themselves. And that’s not true. Your head, just like everything else, is just an appearance in and of consciousness.

    But for the sake of this post, I’ll make a concession to the materialist paradigm, in order to show that even if it is true, everything we experience is only, and can only ever be consciousness itself, without any separation.

    This is because of the way our brains work. A lot of people have an unconscious assumption that their eyes are portals that look out at the world. But this isn’t the way it works. Our eyes are receptors, which take in information, and transmit that information to our brain where images are produced. This is true for all our senses.

    Our eyes do not “look out” at the butterfly, they receive information which is then transferred to the vision processing area of the brain, where an image is produced (again, using the materialist paradigm).

    But if this is true, this means that everything you have ever experienced has been “inside your head”. There’s no room for the world to fit inside your head, so all you have ever experienced is your conscious representation of the world, never the actual physical world itself (which… there isn’t one 😉 ). There’s no room for space inside your head, therefore there’s no room for separation. Your brain just creates the perception of space and separation, but that isn’t your actual experience.

    Go outside at night and look up at the stars. Those stars are appearing inside your head. If the materialist paradigm is correct, your skull should be on the other side of those stars. Your whole world in fact, is surrounded by bone. Again, that is assuming the materialist paradigm is correct, which I maintain it isn’t, but it is still a useful example to show how the world we actually experience can only ever be pure consciousness without any separation.

    The American essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote: “We have learned that we do not see directly, but mediately, and that we have no means of correcting these colored and distorting lenses which we are, or of computing the amount of their errors. Perhaps these subject-lenses have a creative power; perhaps there are no objects.”

    What the materialist paradigm suggests isn’t that the world you experience is real and physical, because we know it can’t be – it suggests that there is the world you experience, plus the real world beyond what we experience. An outside, external world in addition to the one we experience.

    You’re sitting there reading this on your phone or computer. That phone or computer is “inside your head”. The materialist paradigm suggests there is *another* real phone or computer that exists beyond the one in your direct experience. There has never been any direct evidence for this real external world, because how could there be? It is just an assumption we have made because things really seem physical and separate. But it’s just not the case.

    We are still living in an outdated physicalist paradigm though. We have taken the world at face value without really questioning its nature. A little bit of investigation reveals that the world is very different to how we thought it was.

    Some people might find these ideas challenging, and they are. Waking up to reality is challenging. It dismantles all our beliefs, and that can be destabilising. As Jesus said: “Those who seek should not stop seeking until they find. When they find, they will be disturbed. When they are disturbed, they will be astounded, and will reign over all.”

    It takes a little courage to wake up from the dream of mind.

    And remember, even your “head” is just in your head. 😉

    Much love,

    Will.

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

  • Embodying the Divine Feminine

    In some spiritual circles, there is often a distinction made between what is called “The Divine Masculine” and “The Divine Feminine”. In Hinduism these are called Shiva and Shakti respectively.

    There is a lot written about these two principles, and I’m not here to write an intellectual rundown on these two ideas, not least of all because I’m not an expert in this field. Instead, I want to give a very simple rundown of how I see these two ideas relate to spiritual awakening.

    Shiva, the divine masculine, is often said to represent the absolute reality or consciousness; that which is beyond all form. Shakti, on the other hand, is often said to represent the manifest world, the life-giving energy of the universe, in all her beauty and horror.

    The type of spirituality I have mostly followed since my spiritual journey began 8 years ago is called “nonduality”, from the Hindu word advaita, literally meaning “not-two”.

    The basic premise of this school of thought is that all is ultimately consciousness, there is no true separation, and thus the separate self is ultimately illusory too.

    These teachings are really fantastic for those interested in ultimate truth and enlightenment. However, like all teachings relating to the nature of reality, they have their limitations. As far as I see it, the world is much more nuanced than can be simplistically put down into absolute statements about its nature, and too much emphasis on these teachings can lead to someone rejecting or neglecting the phenomenal world as merely “illusory”.

    As I see it, the world is only illusory in one sense – that is, its nature is very different than how most humans usually think it is. But that doesn’t mean it’s “not real”. If a magician performs an illusion, we don’t afterwards say “nothing happened”, we say “what we thought was happening was not what was actually happening.”

    This is the sense in which I see the world as illusory: It is made out of consciousness, not matter. The world is very much real as consciousness, but very much unreal as matter.

    That’s not to say we should disregard the idea of matter altogether – it is still the way consciousness is appearing so should still be taken seriously. I wouldn’t step in front of a bus just because I think matter is ultimately illusory. Illusory me would still die, and all the spiritual excuses in the world wouldn’t change that.

    So to just dismiss the world as illusory is to neglect the relative reality of the world, and often leaves people in an intellectual framework without embodying their awakening, or otherwise engaging in “spiritual bypassing”, which is using spiritual teachings as a way to avoid dealing with their issues.

    I recently came across a great spiritual teacher called Louise Kay, who I think embodies the balance between “masculine” and “feminine” perfectly. She is in part a nondual teacher, and simultaneously helps people come to terms with and embrace their emotions.

    A lot of nondual teachers reject the usefulness of meditation practise. They say, “you already are what you seek, all you need to do is recognise this.” And this is true at an absolute level, and in my opinion can even be a useful teaching at a relative level, but it often leaves people sitting around “waiting for enlightenment”, with no change in their everyday life.

    It is a paradox as far as I see it. Yes, you already are what you seek, and yes all you need to do is recognise this, but at the same time practises may be useful in helping you see this. I say “may be” because in my estimation there are no rules for awakening. Eckhart Tolle and Byron Katie both woke up in the midst of severe depression, without any previous spiritual path.

    The way I approach it now is to keep reminding myself that I already am what I seek, but at the same time, I’m going to do the practises because I feel they help my relative life, and who am I to say that helping my relative life won’t help wake me up? Anybody who says they have a simple answer to that question I think is deceiving themselves.

    I had some sessions with Louise and she actually told me that I’m already awake, just that it hadn’t sunk in fully yet, which was great to hear. I still struggle with a lot of depression and anxiety, largely related to my experiences over the past couple of years, so it’s a bit hard to be excited about while I’m still suffering so much, but it’s nice to think that my path is paying off.

    In conclusion, I think the Buddha’s teaching of “the middle way” is most appropriate here. Don’t get stuck in absolutes, and don’t get stuck in relativity – embrace both and see where it leads you.

    I’m personally excited to see where this path of opening up to my emotions will lead me. I’m only a beginner on this path but I feel it’s perfect for me, as my emotions were what so often made meditation difficult to maintain. A meditation practise that specifically focuses on embracing your emotions in unconditional love feels perfect for me.

    I’ll see how it unfolds from here…

    Much love,

    Will.

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

  • So… something happened to me

    So… something happened to me.

    About 3 weeks ago, something changed for me. Or didn’t change. Or, the change was that I was no longer looking for a change.

    I realised that what I am – consciousness itself – is already awake.

    The “shift” I have been trying to achieve for 8 years finally happened. Or, again, didn’t happen.

    It’s tough to talk about.

    Around 8 years ago I came across some “enlightenment” teachers, and since then I have been ardently striving to achieve this myself. I’ve been obsessively fixated on achieving this realisation, even to the point of it being detrimental to my regular life.

    Over the past few months, certain teachings had been hitting me more deeply. Then I started to look into the notion of time, and this is what apparently changed things for me. Or, again, didn’t change them.

    I realised that notions of future and past are merely concepts in the mind which occur in the present moment. There is no real “future”. And so my whole house of cards of “I’m going to get enlightened in the future” collapsed. I realised there was only now, and there was only ever going to be now. The “enlightenment in the future” bubble totally popped.

    I didn’t realise it at the time, but things were different after that.

    I went to listen to a meditation recording and despondently thought to myself, “hmm, maybe this will wake me up.” Then I paused, reflected on consciousness, and thought, “What? Wake me up? How could I be any more awake than I am now? How could awakeness be any more itself than it already is?”

    And I suddenly realised, “Oh my God, I’ve stopped seeking.” Consciousness was already conscious. Awakeness was already awake.

    The “shift” I had been striving toward for almost a decade had finally “not occurred”. It was instead to see that there was never going to be any “shift”. That… this was it.

    It no longer feels like I’m trapped inside my mind. It feels much more like I am consciousness itself, and the mind is merely an appearance in this consciousness, made out of this consciousness.

    This is why in Buddhism they often call enlightenment “the gateless gate”. You have an image of this event that will happen to you in the future, some sort of transformation that will occur, but once it “occurs” you realise there was never anything to occur. There was no gate.

    Rumi put it more poetically:

    “I have lived on the lip of insanity,
    wanting to know reasons,
    knocking on a door.
    The door opens.
    I’ve been knocking from the inside.”

    Or, to illustrate the point somewhat humorously: Two Zen monks are standing on either side of a river. The first monk says to the second, “How do I get to the other side?” The second monk yells back, “You are on the other side!”

    This is a humorous little joke, but it also illustrates the point perfectly. In terms of awareness, you already are what you’re seeking. What you’re looking for is what is looking.

    Now, I don’t think I’m totally enlightened. There’s still a hell of a lot of clearing up to do. There’s still suffering, there’s still a lot of mind activity. The only difference is I no longer feel trapped inside of those things. I feel much more now like I am awareness rather than my mind.

    For most of my life, it’s felt like there was an energetic contraction in my head. This fuzziness. This lack of clarity. This blurriness to life.

    I was so much asleep to life that for the majority of my life I didn’t even know there was this contraction – until I started to meditate and began to “wake up” a little.

    But it finally feels like I’m no longer caught.

    I don’t know what’s going to happen from here. “Time” will tell as far as that is concerned. There’s definitely still a lot more to unfold. But this feels like the biggest shift that has occurred since I began this journey 8 years ago.

    I spoke to a friend about this realisation, and he said, “Oh, it’s like you’re finally out of the prison of Will.” And I said, “No, it’s more like someone came and opened the door to my cell, but I’m still just sitting in the same cell, only now just looking around going, “well this is different…”

    I think the process from here on out will be me gradually coming out of my cell. I have no idea how long it will take until I feel like I’m out, but it feels like the door is definitely open now. 🙂

    Thanks for reading,

    In love and light,

    Will.

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

  • Enlightenment is an Illusion Too

    Eternity is in love with the productions of time

    William Blake

    I had quite a deep realization a few days ago regarding the nature of “enlightenment”. That is, enlightenment never happens in the future.

    I had heard this type of teaching from many teachers in the past, but this time it struck me more deeply.

    Enlightenment is a useful word in one way because it suggests to us that there is a very different way of perceiving the world than the way most humans generally do.

    This is very useful because it’s true. There is a very different way to perceive the world.

    The word becomes a double-edged sword though, because it then suggests to people that enlightenment is an “event” that may happen to “me” in “the future”.

    This is where it becomes problematic, because the future doesn’t actually exist, it is just a collection of thoughts that occur in the present moment.

    We have learned from Einstein’s theories of special and general relativity that the nature of time is very different to how we usually conceive of it. It fluctuates depending on the observer and their particular reference point.

    Time literally slows down as gravity increases. As an object increases its speed, time runs slower relative to objects moving slower. This was exemplified in the movie Interstellar, where, upon returning to Earth, the inhabitants there had aged significantly quicker than those who travelled at high speeds through space.

    Usually this effect is so small we don’t notice it. You need to be travelling very fast for it to become obvious. But it still exists in our world too. Walk from your room to the living room while someone is sitting on the couch watching TV. You have aged less in that time than the stationary person, only so minutely you haven’t noticed it.

    Of course, in our universe, nothing is ever truly “stationary” – the person sitting on the couch is spinning around the axis of the Earth at roughly 1,600 kilometres per hour at the equator, which is rotating around the sun at roughly 107,000 kilometres per hour, and our solar system is moving through our galaxy, which is moving through space itself. This is why Einstein’s theories were called “relativity” and not “absolutivity”. Everything is dependent upon the observer and their particular reference point in space-time.

    Do you live in an apartment block on the second floor? Because of the (very slightly) reduced gravitational field of Earth where you are, the people living below you age slower than you. Again, so minutely you can’t perceive it except with the most accurate clocks available. And don’t worry about trying to get the ground floor – to you it won’t seem as though you’ve aged quicker, time will appear to you as having gone on at the same rate. It will only be in comparison to the person living below that time will have appeared to go slower. A total mind-job I know.

    So, we have learned from Einstein’s equations that time is not a static construct, moving along at a fixed rate, but instead a perspective that changes relative to the person observing.

    At the very least, we have learned that time is not what we usually think it is.

    Many philosophers, and any enlightened person worth their salt, go further. They suggest time is not actually real at all, it is merely a construct created in the mind of the conscious observer in order to, in a sense, categorise our experiences.

    But there is no real evidence for it in our universe. As the scientist Robert Lanza stated, “you can’t put it in a bottle like milk.”

    The only evidence we think we have of it is that we have a memory – in the present moment – of something having been one way, and now being a different way, and we surmise that this supposed change that occurred has occurred in “time”.

    But as the Greek philosopher Parmenides once annoyingly said to a friend of his, “just because my hand was over here and now it’s over here doesn’t mean that anything has changed.”

    This is something that on initial inspection can sound completely ridiculous, but to illustrate this point, I’ll give an example philosophers often use as a model to explain this called the “block universe”. This is the type of universe many philosophers believe we live in (pictured below), where the past and the future both simultaneously exist as set constructs. From this perspective it’s easy to see how someone could claim that “nothing ever changes”.

    The block universe theory, where the past and future are set in stone and each slice of the block constitutes a present moment experience

    In my opinion the block universe is an incorrect model of our universe because quantum mechanics still leaves open every possible future state, and even, mind-bogglingly, past states, from the present moment. But it is a useful model to illustrate how it’s possible that time doesn’t actually exist as an independent entity, it is merely created from a perspective in the present moment.

    Have you ever experienced this thing you call “the future”? Have you even ever experienced this thing called “the past”? Or have you only ever experienced *thoughts* about these things in the present moment? Have you ever been anywhere else but the present? So why believe in something you have never experienced? In other words, why believe in something there is no evidence for?

    This is why enlightenment can never be an event that happens in the future. There is no real future, there is only now. Believing enlightenment may happen in the future will actually prevent you from waking up to the now, which is what enlightenment is.

    Enlightenment happens now or never. Because there is only now. Literally.

    In love and light,

    Will.

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

  • There Are No Others

    I’ve been reflecting on this a lot lately. One of the greatest enlightened sages to ever live, Ramana Maharshi, was once asked, “How should we treat others?”

    He replied, “There are no others.”

    To a lot of people, this won’t make any sense. But when you look closer, what he’s pointing to is that what you really are deep down – consciousness itself – is not different for any person.

    The consciousness that is shining out of my eyes is exactly the same consciousness that is shining out of your eyes.

    It is all one. Literally.

    The reason most people don’t see this, apart from the enlightened few, is because we have been taught from the time we were little babies to regard ourselves as separate and distinct from everything around us.

    But this isn’t how we start out.

    When a baby is born, they have no sense of me vs other. Their experience is just a whole bunch of sights, sounds, tastes, smells and touch.

    They’re hard-wired to have preferences. They like the sound of their mother’s voice and dislike loud noises. But they don’t see themselves as separate from these experiences.

    Then people start pointing at them and saying this weird sound that they eventually come to know as “my name”.

    A mental construct of them as a distinct and separate self then starts to build.

    This is very convincing. The mind is extremely powerful at clouding over the blatantly obvious fact that everything is one.

    And this is reinforced and reinforced by society to the point that it really feels like we’re a separate self, distinct from everything around us.

    Then some people start to question this through various means.

    Maybe they see that it doesn’t make much sense from the point of view of neuroscience that there’s a special place in the brain where our “self” resides.

    Maybe they come across the teachings of an enlightened person and start to examine what experiential evidence there is for this self.

    Maybe they have a spontaneous awakening where they see this clearly with no clear “path” to this realization.

    Whatever the case, these awakenings are taking place in greater and greater number all around the world. There really is a great rise in both the realization and discussion of this topic.

    So what about you? How would your life change if you were to see clearly that everything is one and there is no true separation? How would the world look if a great mass of people started to realize this?

    As the late comedian Bill Hicks once famously said, “What’s going to happen to the arms industry when we realize we’re all one?”

    In love and light,

    Will.

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

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