The Ostrich and the Elephant

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

Tag: Love

  • 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.

  • What it’s like to be Labelled with Schizophrenia

    Or, everyone is a little bit psychotic

    First, let me get something out of the way: I don’t necessarily believe I have schizophrenia. I had a psychotic episode with schizophrenic features, but as any psychiatrist will tell you, one psychotic episode does not a schizophrenic make. In fact, according to the US National Institute of Mental Health, three out of every 100 people will experience psychosis at some point in their lives.

    Now, one of my doctors said they believed I showed psychotic symptoms at an earlier point in my life, but I disagree with that diagnosis. That was in relation to my belief in extraterrestrial life, which I supported with evidence (see my previous article, “Evidence for the Existence of Extraterrestrial Life” for more on that). Another doctor was less convinced I have schizophrenia — he was more open to the possibility of this being a one-off or a “brief psychotic episode”, the type three out of every 100 people will experience.

    Nevertheless, it’s my opinion that I had a one-off at this point. The future of my life will be more revealing as to what exactly may be going on with my mind, but I await further evidence before labelling myself as schizophrenic.

    Secondly, I have been on a spiritual path for the last 7 years where the express goal of that path is to attain “enlightenment” by transcending the limits of the human mind. This is not an easy thing. It requires you to deeply examine all your belief systems, and ultimately let go of all your belief systems so you view the world directly as it is in awareness rather than through the filtered, and often erroneous, prism of the human mind.

    I believe this second thing is the main cause of what I went through, given my psychosis happened after an intense experience during a meditation weekend. I believe I am on the path of awakening, and the path of awakening is not always easy, and can sometimes lead you down a very rocky road.

    This isn’t to downplay the severity of what I went through or the consequences of it, which you can read in my first article, “My disastrous spiritual awakening”. What I went through that evening and the weeks leading up to it was the scariest thing I’ve ever experienced, and I wouldn’t wish it on anyone. I believed — more out of uncertainty than anything else — that I may have become a target of “negative beings” in the universe, and in my ambulance trip to the hospital I thought I had finally been captured by them and was being taken to be tortured and possibly killed. I can’t really explain the terror of believing something like that was happening. The fear was paralyzing.

    But that is why I don’t necessarily believe I’m schizophrenic. I believe that what happened was directly a result of my spiritual path in which I was attempting to transcend the mind. The consequence of this is that the mind begins to break down — it has to in order to see beyond it. And I believe it just so happened that in my case my mind breaking down — while becoming more and more open minded (I am probably the most open-minded person I know! Some might say too open-minded!) led, because of some deep-seated fears of mine, to experiencing a very scary scenario.

    This leads into my next point, and the subtitle of my article, that: everyone is a little bit psychotic.

    At some point in our evolutionary history, humans started to develop language. We started to make sounds and point at things to communicate to each other what we were seeing. This was an immeasurable benefit to the development of our species. It allowed us to let others know what was happening, even if they weren’t experiencing it themselves.

    This started to become more and more detailed, to the point that we were making up *stories* about what was happening.

    This is when the trouble began, however. Stories are useful so long as they accurately reflect the details of a situation, but often they don’t. Often they are inaccurate stories based on inaccurate conclusions, and stories that can become so detached from reality that they could themselves be labelled as psychotic. This is why I think intrinsic to human language is the propensity to be somewhat “psychotic” — that is, to break from reality and become “just a story” in someone’s head.

    We humans have a lot of these stories. Stories like “I’m a good person because of A”, or “I’m a bad person because of B”. Stories like “the world is a scary place”, or stories like “the world is a good place”. These are all just stories, but they’re stories that the majority of the human population has at least some of, and usually a lot of.

    Language is an invaluable tool so long as it sticks with our actual experience, but often human stories are so detached from actual experience that there’s no real basis for them at all. Yet we believe them anyway.

    Why? Because stories are what we use to try and keep us safe. We think if we just *understand* things enough, then we can know how to navigate this life we find ourselves in.

    My contention is that no stories are ultimately true, they are simply relating a perspective of one individual to another. Some stories are at least somewhat accurate — they convey useful information that is grounded in experience. But a lot are not. A lot are so abstracted and detached from reality that there’s no basis for them at all. This is what happens when someone becomes “psychotic”. Their minds have become the sole ruler of their internal world, and has created stories within stories to the point of not being based on anything legitimately occurring in their experience.

    Most human beliefs are like this. In fact all are. In my opinion there should be no such thing as a belief. A belief is what happens when you say “I have all the relevant data and I have made this conclusion” and you stop looking at any evidence which might contradict that viewpoint. But why would you ever want to stop being open to evidence potentially countering your viewpoint? This is why the subtitle of this article is “everyone is a little bit psychotic” — because everyone has some of these beliefs rolling around their heads. It may be “I’m not good enough”, or “I’m not attractive enough”, or “I’m not likable enough”, or conversely “I’m great”, “I’m the best at this”, or “I’m the most popular person around.”

    When has nature ever looked at a flower and come to one of these conclusions about it? When has a tree ever looked at its withering leaves and thought, “I don’t deserve to be here”? So why do humans do it? Why are humans the only ones who come up with these crazy stories about themselves and about the world?

    The truth is, you are fantastic just as you are. With all your faults, all your blemishes, all your past embarrassments and failures, you are fantastic just as you are. Why? Because you are living in this incredibly complex and mystifying world and you are doing your best to navigate it, while trying to manage all the crazy stories going around about who you are and what you’re worth.

    So, how does it feel to be labelled as schizophrenic? Well, it feels pretty normal. I went through a period of my stories taking over completely and losing touch with what was real and what wasn’t, but now I’m back. I don’t believe any of the stories my mind comes up with about myself or about the world, I just think to myself, “hmm, that’s an interesting perspective you have there”, and that’s about it.

    The truth is, we actually don’t need stories as much as we think we do. Some of them can be very useful to navigate the world, so long as they’re based on our direct experience, but so many of them are simply just stories. A byproduct of our species developing very sophisticated language. And along with that, a whole lot of suffering that no other animal on the planet experiences to the same degree.

    So why not just get rid of all your stories that you can’t be certain about. I’ll bet you there’s really not much left once you do that. Just the practical everyday things the mind can be useful for. e.g. I drove to the store today to pick up some food. Great. Awesome story based on direct experience. But how about all the other ones we come up with along the way? Are those really necessary? Are they based in certifiable direct evidence, or are they just a crazy story you picked up somewhere along the way?

    As always, 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!

  • We are emotional creatures before we are rational creatures

    As humans, we often like to think of ourselves as very rational, intelligent beings. We like to think that we make decisions based in rationality and observing all the facts at hand.

    I argue this is not the case, and that our emotions are actually the driving force behind most of our decision making, not the other way around.

    You can see this in day-to-day conversations where people have instantaneous negative (or positive) reactions to a given proposition, when they clearly haven’t had the time to really consider the proposition in question.

    The Scottish philosopher David Hume was one of the main proponents of this idea – that we accept or reject propositions based on how it affects us emotionally rather than whether the proposition makes sense.

    This may sound like a dreary view of humanity, but it isn’t. You see, I think our emotions are excellent guides for how to live life. The problem is when these emotions are repressed (because we try to avoid uncomfortable feelings), and are thus turned into distorted and conflicting emotions.

    In my opinion, this is why girls and women are often considered “crazy”. It’s not because emotions are inherently crazy; it’s because we’ve suppressed our emotions in society to such an extent that they are bottled up until they explode in unhealthy and irrational ways.

    But emotions can be rational. Have you ever walked into a room and suddenly felt, “I shouldn’t be here”? That’s not a rational response, it’s an emotional one, and if the person pays attention to their emotions, they’re often giving us very good advice. The “gut feelings” we have about things, so long as our emotions are not suppressed and distorted, are usually very accurate perceivers of what is going on in any situation.

    As far as I see it, emotions should be the basis for how we navigate life. We should leave the mind to doing what it does best: sorting out practical things that need to be done – not ascertaining the ultimate truth of any given situation.

    I think the reason humans live in such a conflicted state is precisely because of this avoidance of emotion. We hate experiencing negative emotions so we’ll do anything to avoid that, even if it means agreeing with propositions that are clearly untrue, just to remain comfortable in our safe small bubble of false emotion.

    I have experienced this in my own life. To take one example, a friend was talking to me about 911 once, and how she thought that the official story was bogus (a sentiment I now agree with). At the time however, I was in such a protected state of emotional avoidance that I forcefully rejected her proposition before she even got a chance to state it.

    Why? Because considering the fact that some shady things had gone down on 911 made me feel very uncomfortable. It made me question my version of reality with something quite horrible, and I wasn’t emotionally equipped to be able to deal with that.

    I can see this now in people I talk to about this. Some people are open, some people react badly and want to shut down the conversation straight away.

    In my case, this was clearly a distorted emotional response to something when it should have been a rational and intellectual discussion of a topic.

    The same goes with any difficult truths you are trying to share. I am now of the belief that extraterrestrials exist, and when talking to people about it, I can see some people are open to it, and some people shut down the conversation straight away without even hearing any of the evidence I am presenting.

    This is a very strange phenomenon. Wouldn’t we all want to listen to all perspectives and evidence in order to ascertain truth? Why shut down a debate before it has even begun?

    The reason, again, I think is simple. Our days are mostly spent trying to experience good emotions and avoid bad ones. This is what Henry David Thoreau was pointing to when he wrote: “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.”

    So, what to do with all this knowledge then?

    I think the answer is clear: We need to get more in touch with our emotions. Understand them better. Be conscious of what is happening inside us so we can make sane decisions on any given topic, rather than having a knee-jerk reaction of accept or reject based purely on not wanting to feel uncomfortable.

    The best way to do this I believe is through meditation. While meditation can be a very difficult thing to maintain – after all, we are facing up to uncomfortable emotions inside us – it is only when we are willing to do that, when we are truly willing to allow anger, fear, sadness be present in us and move with those emotions rather than running away from them, can we truly become rational creatures. Only then can we live up to our name of Homo sapiens – by definition, discerning, wise, and sensible.

    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!

  • Simultaneous Truths and the Logic of Love

    Where the mind fails, the heart reigns supreme.

    One of the reasons I find it difficult to write sometimes is not that I have writers block — there are lots of things I could write about — but instead, as I’ve moved along my spiritual path, I’ve begun to see degrees of logic and validity in what almost everyone says. I can see their point of view, even if I think it’s only a fragmented view, or missing the bigger picture, I can still see the truth in it.

    I mentioned in one of my previous blogs that there’s a quote which says: “An appreciation for paradox and ambiguity are a good measure of spiritual progress.” I think this is very true. The more I delved into any topic, the more I could see the logic of both sides of most arguments. Some were better arguments than others (some are obviously totally gibberish), but in almost all of them I could still see the valid point they were making.

    Which leaves me in an interesting position, both with writing but also in social situations. I’ve always been a pretty quiet person, but now in conversation there’s so much more silence coming from my end because I find myself disagreeing with people a lot less. I may not agree 100% with what they’re saying, but I can agree with it partly.

    So when someone asks me my opinion on something, it’s always a tricky thing to answer.

    Some questions are easy, “Do you prefer apples or oranges?” Answer: oranges. Easy.

    But when the conversations become more complex, there are so many different perspectives to consider, and so many contradictory truths coming from both sides that I find myself in a very odd position of not really being able to answer concisely. I usually end up with a long response which goes something like the article I’m writing here.

    Take politics for example. I used to consider myself a left wing type of person, and I think many people would still consider me that today, but over the years I’ve gained a lot of appreciation for the opposing side of politics and the valid points they make. (they also make a lot of invalid ones in my opinion, which is why I don’t consider myself a right-winger).

    But let’s take a look at one simple example: unemployment benefits. I’m lucky enough to live in a country where these are available for those unable to work for various reasons. It provides something to fall back on when times are tough, and I think this is a great service offered by our government. However, there’s a counter-argument which also has some validity: If you hand out free money to people, they’re not going to be as motivated or proactive about getting a job and getting back into the workforce. For some people, this could actually be doing them a disservice, because a lot of our self-worth is derived from what we do for a living and what we contribute to society. It may make people lazier, thinking “Well, I’ve got enough to live on, I can just lay back and take it easy for a while.” I don’t think many people would consider this the recipe for fulfillment or happiness. So you see, one simple issue, two opposing points of view, tough love or soft love, both with their own degree of validity.

    Or how about the gender pronoun debate? Yes it’s crazy to put people into boxes and say, “You’re this gender therefore that means you must be a, b, and c.” But likewise, it is also crazy to say that there are no biological differences between the genders. So how can you really provide a concise opinion on something as multi-faceted as the gender pronoun debate when there are so many intricacies and subtleties that go into the debate?

    Or another: the question of whether humans have free will. On the one hand you could say, everything is pre-determined by physical laws governing us, therefore there’s no such thing as true free will. On the other hand, we make (relative) choices all the time. Some decisions we have a lot of choice in, some decisions we have less choice in, but it’s still what could reasonably called a “choice”.

    And this simultaneity of truth or “relative truth” perspective goes down to physics itself. Look at the double slit experiment in quantum mechanics: when not observed, the electromagnetic spectrum behaves as if it were a spread out wave of possibilities. When observed, this wave function collapses to a single point giving us a determined set of characteristics for a given particle. So in answering the question, is light a wave or a particle the answer is: both. Or one, depending on which measurement you’ve taken or chosen not to take.

    The physicist Leonard Susskind thought up a conversation which took place between Alice from Alice in Wonderland and the Mad Hatter. It went like this:

    Ever since her last science class, Alice had been deeply puzzled by something, and she hoped one of her new acquaintances might straighten out the confusion.
    Putting down her cup of tea, she asked in a timid voice, “Is light made of waves, or is it made of particles?”
    “Yes, exactly so,” replied the Mad Hatter.
    Somewhat irritated, Alice asked in a more forceful voice, “What kind of answer is that? I will repeat my question: Is light particles or is it waves?”
    “That’s right,” said the Mad Hatter.

    I see this pattern in all of human thinking and human endeavours, which is why philosophers, despite going hard at all these problems for millennia, have never come up with any good unifying theories for how to explain life or any other issue they were discussing. They’ve merely been circling around the whirlpool trying to sneak a look in at truth.

    But truth is multivariant. There are so many different layers to truth that to put in down in words — in the language of humans — is an almost impossible task.

    Right now there are many ways to discuss what’s happening here while you’re reading this. First, there are subatomic particles which were set in motion at the beginning of time and were all pre-destined to make it to this point and to having this conversation. Second, we’re having this conversation because of the cultural situation we find ourselves in. Third, there are electronics within our computers which are processing the input and transferring it to your phone, allowing for communication. Fourth, at the level of quantum mechanics, we have very little idea how this functions but it seems like an infinite wave of potential is collapsing in every moment giving us this exact experience.

    All of these are simultaneous truths, and one doesn’t discount the other, which makes it difficult to really discuss exactly what is happening. You have to first set up a premise which is never ultimately true, in order to have a conversation within defined parameters.

    I personally believe this will always remain the case. When you look at how our minds evolved, they are basically like those little labeling machines from the 80s. We think if we stick enough labels together we can come up with a coherent story to explain things. But those labels are still just labels. In Zen there is an expression: “Don’t mistake the finger pointing to the moon for the moon itself.” That’s the mistake our minds always make. In order to simplify things and find a “yes” or “no” answer to every question, we dumb down reality (and ourselves) by clinging onto these simplistic solutions.

    And us humans hate this. This “yes and no” response. We want set and defined answers we can guarantee on and thus know how to navigate this world we find ourselves in a bit better (or, just as often, to feed into our egoic self that we’re right and we’re smart).

    So what should we do in a world that’s so contradictory and holds so many valid but opposing points of view? Well, this for me is where the logic of love comes into play. I believe we are all really on a search for love; a search for unity and connection. So why not just start there, where we’re all aiming to reach anyway? Why not just love the person or situation as they are without the need to label them as good or bad, useful or useless, right or wrong.

    I have found in my own journey, as my mind’s fixed positions began to crumble more and more, I experienced more empathy and compassion for those around me, and I also funnily enough became smarter. I became smarter because I was looking at each situation with an open mind, and considering whatever the proposition was entirely on its own merits, not relying on my mind’s previous conclusions about the subject in question.

    And this is still happening to me today. My mind is still crumbling and crumbling, but I’m getting smarter all the time. I’m definitely not the smartest person in most rooms, but I can seem like it because I have such an open mind and can see things from a bigger picture than I used to be able to.

    That’s why I think love is not just an ideal to hope we run into, but one we cultivate through expanding our awareness and understanding those with different points of view.

    As one of my idols Helen Keller said, “The highest result of education is tolerance.”

    Imagine the world we would live in if people everywhere started to consider all possibilities when having discussions, rather than doggedly arguing for their set point of view, with all its inherent limitations and contradictions.

    At the end of the day, when the mind begins to break down, and you can see people who are still totally enslaved by their own mind, compassion arises. Love arises. This is why I consider love not just an emotion but the most logical position given the circumstances we find ourselves in.

    So, as always, and to the best of my ability, 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!

  • On Pedophilia and Oneness

    Content warning: This post contains references to pedophilia, which may be upsetting for some people. Apologies if so. ❤️

    This post was inspired by a conversation I had with a friend about the spiritual teacher Fred Davis, who – about 40 years ago when he was a teenager – indecently assaulted some of his younger nieces. This created a bit of a storm within the spiritual community: some coming to Fred’s defence; others lambasting him and saying he shouldn’t be allowed to teach spirituality.

    Well, Fred, after spending much of his life as an alcoholic, and at times being homeless or in mental institutions because of this, finally joined Alcoholics Anonymous to try and fix his drinking problem. He did fix it, and ended up becoming a much-in-demand AA guide for others who were trying to do the same.

    As part of the 12-step program in AA, one of the steps is that you need to connect with and apologise to all the people you have wronged in your life. Fred did this, and obviously one of these things was writing to his nieces to apologise for his actions. He offered to talk to them too, if they wanted to. Four years later, a couple of them did, and they recorded the conversation and gave it to the police. Despite this being some 30 years in the past at the time, the state where Fred lived, South Carolina, had no statute of limitations for sexual offences, so he was brought before a judge and convicted of the crimes. The judge took into account his recovery from alcoholism and the good work he was doing being a guide for others to do the same, and sentenced him to weekend incarceration for a period of 90 days in jail, registration as a sex offender, and some other strict provisions for five years. Some may say this was too lenient, but I’ll let others be the judge of that. Fred wrote a blog post about this back in 2014 when it all came out, which can be found here, and it is an interesting insight into the nature of what happened. I recommend reading it:
    https://awakeningclaritynow.com/glass-houses/

    Which brings me to the topic of this post, and WHOAH, what a heavy topic it is. Probably the heaviest topic you could possibly discuss: An adult taking advantage of a young, innocent child for their own gratification, thereby causing untold grief and trauma to the victim. Like I said… heavy.

    So where to start with such a topic? How to start with such a topic?

    I have always found myself in a peculiar situation whenever the topic of pedophilia comes up. I obviously feel great remorse for the victims and the amount of suffering they must have endured as a result of their experiences, but I always also felt something else simultaneously: compassion for the perpetrators. I always felt, wow, this is considered the most reprehensible crime you can commit in society, and this person just committed it. That must be a horrible thing to experience, regardless of their guilt.

    This is not to say it’s not a horrible thing that they did – it is. It’s just to say: these people were so mentally unwell that they committed what is considered to be one of the worst crimes in society. And pedophilia, it must be said, IS a mental illness: There is no biological reason why an adult should be attracted to a pre-pubescent child, it makes no evolutionary sense. Therefore, the cause must be a psychological illness which has made them act in this way.

    Which leaves us in an interesting position. Most people who are mentally unwell are usually treated with compassion, even those who commit crimes. I myself committed a crime during a psychotic episode (assault), and I was treated (mostly) with compassion and understanding. But not pedophiles. Oh no, their crimes are just too egregious to have any compassion for whatsoever.

    I think this is wrong. I think every person deserves compassion and understanding regardless of the crimes they have committed. And yes, this too includes Hitler, the one person who is often singled out as the example for the most evil man in history.

    The reason being: I consider all life as one, you see. Not just as an idea, but as a fact. So I consider anything anyone does to another person that is harmful to the other person as a sign of a kind of mental illness on their part, a misperception about the nature of reality. If they saw clearly, I argue – if they saw truly that life was all one, then they would not have done it. But they weren’t seeing clearly, therefore they had some degree of mental illness.

    In fact, I consider 99.99% of the population to be to some degree mentally unwell. If you look into your own life, I’m sure you can find examples where you’ve acted a bit crazy or a bit irrationally. Sure, you may not be as mentally unwell as some people, but it’s still a sign of mental illness. In this sense, I consider everyone who doesn’t clearly see the oneness and interconnectedness of all life as, to varying degrees, mentally ill. This includes myself. I haven’t yet reached a point where I see life as all one all the time. I have had glimpses of it, which is how I am able to write this, but I don’t walk around all day seeing oneness. There’s still too much mental activity clouding my seeing of this simple fact.

    And it is a fact, even just from a logical point of view. When you think about it logically, life has to be all one, ultimately speaking, because it all comes from the same source. It is a logical impossibility that there could be more than one source for existence. Why? Because if there was more than one source, then it wouldn’t be the ultimate source, it would only be a relative source. If there was more than one, then there would have to be another source from which those two sources sprung. You can’t have a split at the base of existence. This is where the philosophy of nondualism is so accurate and so valuable. It is not the only truth, there are still other relative truths – but it is the truth. This is why it is called in Hinduism: advaita vedanta – which translates to “not-two”, and “the end of the vedas”, indicating this is the highest teaching.

    But please don’t take offence to what I’m saying either. I’m not labelling you personally as mentally ill, I’m just saying it is the nature of the mind, because of the way it evolved, to often misunderstand things. You see, as I’ve mentioned numerous times in my blogs, our minds really did only evolve for basic biological functions and to survive in the apparently physical world we inhabit. It didn’t evolve to understand reality, only to survive and reproduce in it. There’s some great work done by the cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman, where he computer-modeled evolutionary scenarios to see which conditions would win out. To his surprise, the one determining factor in evolutionary success was survival – i.e. passing on your genes – not perceiving reality as it really is. Here is his Ted talk on the subject (20 minutes), called “Do we see reality as it is?” – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oYp5XuGYqqY He ends the talk with the quote: “Dare to recognize that perception is not about seeing truth; it’s about having kids.”

    So how does all this relate back to pedophilia, you might ask? Well, as I mentioned, I think we are all, to some degree, mentally ill, because we do not see reality accurately. Some of us function well in this survival-oriented paradigm, others function less well, but in neither case are they seeing reality accurately. And this I believe is where all harm stems from: not seeing things clearly. If Fred Davis, or Hitler, or anyone else you want to mention, saw clearly at the times they were committing their crimes, they would not have done them. Why? Because they would see that it was really just another aspect of themselves they were harming. As the nonduality teacher Gary Weber once said, “It would be like cutting off your own hand – it just wouldn’t make sense so you wouldn’t do it.”

    So I believe everyone deserves compassion and forgiveness. Not because their crimes don’t matter or the victims suffering doesn’t matter – it does, and people should still be sent to prison if they commit these acts in order to protect others and to act as a deterrent for others. But everyone deserves compassion and forgiveness, because when we harm another it is only ever because we are not seeing clearly. We are acting from a deluded perspective, and thus are deserving of sympathy, not hatred and judgment.

    What a world we would live in if people saw those who committed heinous acts as deserving of understanding and compassion rather than hatred and derision? A much nicer one, I think.

    Something else came up when I was talking to my friend about this, and that is the idea of “what you resist persists”. Eckhart Tolle – another great spiritual teacher – once said that he thinks a big part of the reason there is so much pedophilia in the Catholic church is because of their demonization of sexuality. If you demonize something, you often, in a strange way, make it somehow more appealing. Just like the illegalization of drugs. If someone says you can’t do something, you kind of want to say, “Oh yeah? Why not?” Tolle noted that the suppression of sexuality in the Catholic church often led to it becoming distorted and manifesting in perverse ways. I agree with his judgment on this (although I accept there are most likely other factors too, but I don’t want to make this post any longer than it already is). [Important note: I just want to be clear here: I am *not* saying that we should accept pedophilia and then it might go away; we should *always* as a society say that pedophilia is wrong and immoral, I am only talking here about the demonization of sexuality in the Catholic church (and, to a lesser extent, society as a whole) which has led to sexuality manifesting in perverse ways.]

    The spiritual teacher Adyashanti once said this too: “Whatever you resist you become. If you resist anger, you are always angry. If you resist sadness, you are always sad. If you resist suffering, you are always suffering. If you resist confusion, you are always confused. We think that we resist certain states because they are there, but actually they are there because we resist them.”

    I think the same goes for things like pedophilia. In the case of the Catholic church, they have resisted human sexuality to such a point that it has become a taboo perversion for them, rather than a natural expression of love and unity (or whatever else you want it to be, so long as it’s done with mutual respect and consent).

    But it’s not just the Catholic church who do this: we do this all over society. Imagine a society where instead of demonizing and hating pedophiles, we treated them with understanding and compassion. Imagine the effect that would have on the pedophiles themselves? If you’re told by society that you are the lowest of the low, beyond forgiveness, you are more likely to act in that way. If society instead treated them with understanding and compassion, the would-be pedophile might instead think, “oh, I am just mentally unwell, it’s not that I’m an evil person”, and they would be much less likely to commit the act in the first place – they would seek help and feel supported.

    This is not to say it is wrong to feel anger, or wrong to feel sadness when things like this happen. That is a misunderstanding of what I’m saying. Anger and sadness are legitimate responses to bad or unwanted situations. So I’m not saying don’t feel anger when things like this happen. I’m just saying, look to see if you can’t also find the part of you that contains forgiveness. The part that has understanding and compassion. The part that knows this person acted out of their own illness, not out of a conscious decision to harm another person for no reason.

    Thanks for reading, and as always,

    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!

  • I’ve Been Accused of Being in a Cult

    Cults are an interesting phenomenon, and they definitely do exist. From Charles Manson to Jim Jones, there’s no shortage of examples of these charismatic yet deluded figures leading their followers, desperate to believe in something, off the proverbial cliff.

    But the word cult gets bandied around a lot, and often in a very casual manner.

    So what really defines a cult? Well, for me, the defining aspect is when the teacher becomes more important than the teaching, and the teachings are defended blindly against the weight of evidence against them.

    Now, just to get my side of the story out of the way first – I’m definitely not in a cult (said every cult member ever). As a former science student, the idea of any type of belief, scientific or otherwise, is anathema to me. Beliefs, I believe (hehe), are the opposite of the scientific and true spiritual method of making observations based on direct experience. And direct experience is ALL we ever have access to in determining truth, so using something other than direct experience to guide our lives seems pretty silly to me.

    Which is why it is so strange to me that I, of all people I think the least cultish person I know, have been accused of being in a cult.

    The cult I’ve been accused of being a part of is the one surrounding my spiritual teacher, Isira, and the organization supporting her teaching, Living Awareness.

    It seems that any time two or more people gather around a common spiritual cause, it’s automatically labelled a cult. But what did Jesus say? (another person who was accused of running a spiritual cult) – “Wherever there are two or three gathered in my name, I am there.” This is also probably why Buddhists hold sangha (spiritual community) to be the most important aspect of spirituality – because we learn more from our interactions with others than we ever could just going it alone.

    The irony is, I’m only ever accused of being in a cult by people who have never heard my spiritual teacher give a talk. Their knee-jerk reaction is: “Someone’s teaching you something that is not (yet) the norm in society?” – CULT! Anything that is the norm in society – science, politics, medicine, etc – they’re all fine to have teachers for, but nothing esoteric, nothing that isn’t easy to understand. This really is ironic because there is so much more cultish behaviour in these fields than in any spiritual field I have personally encountered. Although I do consider myself lucky in that sense – I had a good, skeptical, scientific training before ever becoming interested in spirituality, so I was always quite cognizant to never believe stuff just for the sake of believing in something.

    Which is what I think all cults, spiritual or otherwise, really boil down to: belief. In my opinion beliefs should not exist. From a scientific perspective, a belief is something you form when you say, “Okay, we’ve had this result, we’ve seen the evidence, we can make a conclusion now and stop any further investigation into the matter.” Why would anyone ever want to do that? In that sense I think beliefs have no place not only in science but in society as a whole. They are just psychological crutches people use because the world is so complex and the psychological need for humans to have some guiding principles is so great that we’re quick to latch onto anything that we feel gives us security.

    People think we NEED beliefs of some kind in order to function, but we really don’t. Casual beliefs, like the belief in time and space (they don’t really exist the way we think they do, so yes, these too, are beliefs), are fine to have and to use in everyday situations. So long as we acknowledge that they are indeed beliefs, and don’t actually represent the true nature of reality.

    I realise I’m asking a lot. Letting go of beliefs is a TOUGH road. The reason being is that our thoughts are so tied in with our emotions. They are inextricably linked to them. So to let go of a belief is not just to let go of a belief, it’s to let go of the feeling attached to that belief. And to do that, we need to experience that feeling in its raw state. Hence the resistance. We often think, “If we could just make sense of the world… if we could just finally get that last puzzle piece that fits everything into place then we’d have a full picture of how the world worked and we’d be *secure*.” We could finally relax.

    Well, I don’t think it’s ever going to work like that. As I’ve mentioned in previous blogs, I don’t think our minds really evolved to understand the true nature of reality. They evolved for relatively mundane tasks like picking berries, having sex, spotting predators, etc etc. We’ve done pretty tremendous things with this very limited brain of ours, don’t get me wrong, but in terms of understanding absolute reality – not a chance. As I mentioned in one of my previous blogs, it’s a logical impossibility for a system that operates within a system to fully understand the system it operates within. This is what Einstein’s theories of relativity were all about – it is all relative to the particular observer, at their particular reference point in space-time.

    But this principle applies just as much to our regular lives as it does to what we could call “Einsteinian post-modernism”. I’m not arguing that we completely throw out tradition and culture – a lot of things are here because they do, more or less, work, and serve a function.

    Just don’t fall into the trap of thinking you’ve discovered the ultimate answer to something, because, you know, around the corner there’s always something waiting to say, “nah, that doesn’t describe me.” It’s a little bit like women – if you try to figure them out you’ll come up against a LOT of problems, and they will certainly let you know about them.

    So what to do in a world we can never understand fully? Well, the same thing we do with women I think. To borrow a quote from the legendary Oscar Wilde: “Women are meant to be loved, not understood.”

    Love in the face of not understanding is the key that unlocks all the doors in my estimation. Because when you think about it, love is really the end goal of everything we are aiming for anyway. Everything we do, ultimately, is to find and experience more love. So why not just skip the whole process and start with love itself, the place we’re all really aiming for anyway?

    In conclusion, keep using your ideas so long as they are useful, just be careful about turning them into beliefs of “that’s just the way things are”, because sooner or later in this incredibly complex world of ours, you’re going to run into a situation where it doesn’t fit.

    And as for my “teacher”? Well, if she suddenly started to not make sense or act a bit cuckoo, I’d be out of there in a jiffy. So far, that hasn’t even been close to happening, so I’m quite happy with hearing her wisdom for the time being.

    As always, 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!

  • The Best Spiritual Teacher on the Planet!

    As I’ve mentioned in previous blogs, I’ve listened to countless spiritual teachers on my seven year journey into spirituality. The number of hours spent listening to teachers on youtube would be easily in the thousands. But one still stands out head and shoulders above the rest: my teacher of the last three years, Isira.

    Now, that is saying something! Some other spiritual teachers I’ve listened to I have absolutely loved; the main other one being the American teacher Adyashanti. I used to tell my friends he was the first man I ever loved. Kiran Trace (from Mystic Girl in the City) once called him “the shit”, and it’s hard to really top that description of him. He is an incredibly good teacher.

    But, as he says himself, he’s very much a “wake up” guy – he’s not a “how to live your life better guy”. And he describes his teaching method as being very “broad strokes”. Which is fine. Wake up guys are great – they wake you up! It’s also fine being a broad strokes teacher: there’s no use getting into all the nitty-gritty of spirituality when you’re just coming onto the scene; you need someone who can lay it out in general terms so you get an overall picture of what spirituality is all about.

    My gratitude to Adyashanti is out of this world. If I saw him in person I have no doubt I would have tears in my eyes. He helped me along the way SO much.

    But, and even though it pains me to say this because of how much I love Adyashanti, I still found someone better. Someone deeper. Someone with more breadth of understanding. Someone who could talk to anyone and offer them advice for exactly where they were at, and exactly what they needed to hear.

    That teacher is a woman called Isira.

    Now, I’ve mentioned this in a previous blog before, but for those who haven’t read that: When I first came across a video of Isira, I didn’t really “get it”. I came away thinking “she seems like a nice lady”, but that was about it. There was no deeper recognition. Then, about a year later, a friend recommended her to me again so I went along to one of her satsangs (a Sanskrit term meaning “association in truth”). This time I got it. This time I felt her presence, and it was powerful.

    I remember walking into this room with all these people seated facing an empty chair at the front of the room. Then Isira came in, dressed all in white (“what’s with the white?” I thought to myself), and sat down in the chair. She scanned the room in silence, welcoming everyone. Then she got to awkward, little me, at the farthest side of the room, as far away from the centre of the action as I could get (this was always my preferred place in all situations). She looked me in the eyes and I instinctively looked away, embarrassed. After a few moments I looked back up to see if she had moved on, but she was still looking at me, with the same warm, welcoming face I originally saw. She wasn’t going to let me get away with my shyness.

    The satsang was a success, I guess you could say. This time I got a glimpse into what she was about. I felt her presence and was uplifted all the way home.

    There was an announcement that the organization was looking for volunteers, and almost immediately I began volunteering. I was the technical equipment storage and transport guy, and eventually became the tea-maker for Isira’s one-on-one consultations on Saturday mornings. I sort of fancied myself a bit like the kung-fu master who guards the Oracle in the Matrix, albeit much less skilled in martial arts. All I really did was mix tea.

    I was fascinated by this woman, as many who meet Isira are. I had never met a truly enlightened person in person before, so I watched all her actions, analysed all her movements, looked at her through squinted eyes trying to figure her out. Trying to see if she really was as enlightened as she seemed.

    The difficulty was, you see, she wasn’t your typical mountain-top, rag-wearing guru. She lived life. She enjoyed food. She had preferences. “Do enlightened people have preferences?” I thought to myself. Well, I guess it makes sense. She is human after all, and she’d much rather I hand her a cup of dandelion tea than a cup of dirt.

    You see, the idea of spirituality has become so disconnected from everyday life we think there are only two options: you either choose the world, or you choose enlightenment. You can’t have both. Isira seemed to have both, which raised a lot of questions for me. Does she still like nice things? Does she still have relationships? Does she still have sex?? I found out the answer to all these questions was yes, which gave my mind more things to ponder.

    Hmm, so it’s possible to be enlightened, and still live a completely full life in the world. That sounded pretty good to me. Most of the previous teachers I had listened to had been mostly male, and mostly just spoke about the importance of “waking up to absolute reality”. Isira talks about that too, but in equal measure she talked about issues in the world. I found that really exciting. Enlightenment didn’t mean you became just a nobody, it meant you became even more fully your natural self. Sure, the natural self was seen from a perspective of absolute oneness, but it didn’t discount the relevance of the manifest world – it celebrated it. To me it appeared she had achieved the goal I came to think true spirituality stood for: to become both fully human and fully divine.

    Now, I didn’t always like Isira – in fact, sometimes I hated her!! I was so enraptured by this woman’s presence and energy that my ego wanted her attention and love to be focused on me as much as possible. Obviously this is not only an unreasonable demand on anyone, but Isira would never let us get away with these silly ego trips. She always kept herself at a slight distance because of this. Sometimes I interpreted this as her not liking or not loving me enough, but really it was just her way of making sure she wasn’t pandering to our egos, thus making the problem worse. When you spend any amount of time around Isira, your ego gets some harsh lessons. In fact, it is sometimes even hard to be around her because of this. Some people really can’t take it and react negatively to it, projecting all their blame onto her: e.g. “she’s a fake teacher!”; “she doesn’t really care!”; “she’s only interested in herself!”; etc, etc, etc. (all these examples are examples which came from myself 🙂 ). Because you see, the thing is, when an ego comes up against someone whose ego has been thoroughly removed, it can turn pretty nasty. I remember at a retreat once a woman said: “I thought I was a nice person, but I wanted to kill you! And you just responded with the same love you always did.”

    I’ve got to be honest – as I’m obviously not completely free of the ego myself, there’s still a part of me that desires this attention. This can still make my ego very annoyed, and I think that will remain until I am completely free of my egoic attachment to her.

    To this day it still surprises me that Isira is not more well-known than she is, but I think there are a couple of reasons for this: firstly, she has not had much of an online or youtube presence until just recently; and secondly, and maybe more significantly, I think that as in my case the old saying holds true: “When the student is ready, the teacher will appear.” When I first came across Isira, I wasn’t “ready” for her. I wasn’t resonating on a wavelength that was close enough to be able to really get her. That changed for me in the year between seeing her video for the first time and then attending one of her satsangs. And I think this will happen on a collective level as well. I think humanity may be getting nearer and nearer to be ready to be able to hear Isira, and to be ready for the message and energy she is here to contribute.

    All I can say finally is, I can’t wait! I’m greatly looking forward to a time when people en masse start to see who Isira really is, and what she is here to do.

    As always, in love and light,

    Will.

    For more information on Isira, check her out on youtube, or visit her website at www.isira.com

    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!

  • The Difficulty I Have Sharing My Story

    A lot of the time I would prefer to be this cat.

    I’ve always been a very private and quiet person. That is just my nature. I think most of my friends would say I’m pretty entertaining when you get to know me (if sometimes annoying), but in most unfamiliar situations I am often painfully shy. To give you an example, once I was asked to read something at high school, and another student yelled out “speak!” – because I just very rarely said a word, ever. I would just hang around and listen – or in my later years when things got worse, hide away in any place I could find. This would often be sitting eating my lunch in the toilets at lunch-time. It was that bad.

    So, writing my story publicly is not something that comes easily to me at all. I’m not even a well-known writer and it is already causing me a great deal of anxiety just to share my story on Facebook and Medium. So it was always going to be difficult for me to write what I wanted to write. But this became much worse when the story I was going to tell became much worse.

    You see, I had just quit my job as a gardener to pursue what I thought would be a career in writing because for some reason it felt like it was what I was meant to do. I had no idea whether it would work out or not, but I felt like I had a lot to say, and I felt that it was important that I share it.

    Then, as any of you who have read my first blog post, “My disastrous spiritual awakening” will know, my story suddenly became much worse.

    I was no longer – as I had anticipated – just going to be writing about science and spiritual awakening and the extraterrestrial reality – I was now going to be writing about a horrible event that happened in my life.

    This made me question whether I could even be a writer. It took me nine months after the event to finally put my fingers to the keyboard and start typing. The ironic thing was, I was just about to sit down and start writing when the event happened nine months ago, so it really wasn’t something I was expecting at all.

    I spent a long time in hospital with nothing to do but ruminate over what had happened and question everything about what I was doing and what led me to that point in my life. I initially thought my blog would be a hopeful, inspirational blog – a tale of suffering to triumph over suffering through spiritual awakening – but now my story contained this very ugly episode. I thought, “I was meant to be on a path of greater understanding and bliss and wonder, and I ended up assaulting my housemate and spending three months in a mental hospital – how did my “spiritual awakening” go so horribly wrong??”

    My story is difficult to share in a number of ways. Firstly, as I mentioned, I’m a painfully shy person. I hate being the centre of attention, and if the attention is negative attention that’s twice as bad. Secondly, my story now contains something horrible, which, if I’m going to be an open and honest writer as I intended then I have to share it. Thirdly, my story contains weird stuff that a lot of people won’t understand and will likely judge me for. Hell, I would have judged me for it five years ago. And lastly, a lot of people are going to think I’m just some crazy loon.

    That’s a lot to deal with, especially for someone like me. It’s why I’ve been smoking, drinking, and taking anti-anxiety pills like there’s no tomorrow in order to cope with the angst of it all. I guess I’m just going to have to get over that and get used to it.

    But I’m still going to write, even though I’m terrified of it, because I still feel it is what I am meant to be doing. Nothing else in my life makes sense except to write and tell my story as openly and as honestly as possible.

    I still believe that spiritual awakening – and by spiritual awakening I mean recognizing the oneness and interconnectedness of all things – is the most important thing in the world, and probably the only thing that will save humanity from itself. So that’s enough of a reason for me to get over my own internal fears and keep writing. Because I believe this to be true.

    It’s not going to be easy, but I’m still going to do it. All I can hope is that people see my intention is always positive – that I am doing this because I believe it’s the best way I can contribute to society, and that all I’ve ever wanted is a more open, more loving, more connected world to live in for everyone. A world based in understanding and compassion instead of division and hatred. One based in love instead of fear. And I believe it is possible. I’m not even there yet myself – it is still a challenge for me to always try to maintain that state, but I truly believe, to end with the words of Arundhati Roy: “Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.”

    As always, with love,

    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!

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