The Ostrich and the Elephant

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

Tag: Mental Health

  • 7 Year Update

    Oh man.

    Oh man.

    Oh man.

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

    There are 3 causes for this.

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

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

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

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

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

    Thanks for reading,

    Will.

  • My first 10 day silent meditation retreat

    Preface

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

    Here it is…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Time will tell…

    In love and light!

    Will

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

  • 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!

  • The “Voices” I Was Hearing

    Preface

    I was going to delete this post because I thought it made me sound a bit “crazy”. There were a lot of crazy things happening at the time of my kundalini awakening/psychosis, and at this point 2 years later I still haven’t found out the exact truth of what happened to me. Nevertheless, I have decided to keep this post up because it at least displays some of what happened to me and the process I went through trying to work out the truth of it. I feel I will work out the truth of it in the coming years, but as of this moment I still haven’t. As always, thanks for reading. 🙂

    The post

    As some of you may be aware if you have read some of my previous blog entries (in particular “My disastrous spiritual awakening”), I had a spiritual awakening event with some very unfortunate consequences which landed me in a mental hospital for three months.

    Part of what I will be discussing in this blog is my diagnosis there, and part of it will be my first-hand experience of the symptoms. Some of it may be repetitive where necessary for those who haven’t read my previous blogs.

    First, let me get my version of the events out of the way. I believe, based on my reading of other people’s experiences, and my spiritual teacher also telling me this is what happened — I had what they call a “kundalini” awakening. Kundalini is a Sanskrit term which refers to a usually dormant coil of energy located at the base of the human spine. In most humans this is coil of energy is usually suppressed by all our bodily conditions and thoughts (as emotion and thought are interlinked). In some people, and for various reasons — some out of intention, some out of types of yoga practise, some seemingly out of the blue, and some, like mine not consciously intended, but as a result of a particular yogic exercise I was doing while at a meditation weekend event — this energy can become activated or released.

    This energy is known as “Shakti” energy — what is often termed the “Divine Feminine” energy that moves through the entire universe (and therefore, by inclusion, all humans).

    When this energy wakes up, lots of things can happen. If you have a very light karmic load and are a very easy-going person, it may be a relatively smooth experience for you. If you do not have a light karmic load, or have a lot of resistance to life, as I did, it can be (and still is to this day for me — nine months later) a very challenging experience. To this day I find it difficult to sit still. I have to take anti-agitation pills and drink a beer or two just to be able to sit down and write this. I’m smoking about 20 cigarettes a day just to calm the nerves (stupid I know but what can you do). It’s an energy that I’m still trying to integrate properly, and, judging by other people’s experiences, this can take a number of years. In some circles this is known as “kundalini syndrome”, in others it is known as “kundalini psychosis” — these are just labels for the types of experiences people can have while going through this experience. Here’s an article by a guy who does great work especially with sexual energy called Mantak Chia on “kundalini psychosis” and the importance of grounding your energy so it doesn’t get stuck up in the head and cause these symptoms such as voices or hallucinations: https://realization.org/p/mantak-chia/most-effective-cure-for-kundalini-psychosis.html

    I highly recommend his work on harnessing sexual energy — something I was working on (also called “no fap” on the internet) before this big shift happened in me. The two may have been related — i.e. the buildup of sexual energy may have resulted in my kundalini being awoken. I haven’t been able to maintain my no fapping trial because the energy in me has been too intense I’ve just needed to get everything out, but I highly recommend doing no fap as a spiritual practise, the benefits are tremendous. I may make a post on that later, but I don’t feel I am an expert on it just yet so I would suggest listening to Mantak Chia for that stuff, or there’s a great guy on the internet called “Gabe Dawg” who’s a kind of spiritual motivational person. Great guy and very much on the path of awakening, so I highly recommend him.

    Anyway, some of the symptoms that can be experienced with kundalini syndrome are: physical symptoms, such as spasms of the body due to the energy movement; some can relive past traumas that have been unresolved; some can have visions (real or imaginary); some can hear voices. I had all of these, as well as a near constant agitation in the body, so that I couldn’t sit still properly.

    My teacher told me that I had a lot of resistance, but also that I was moving through it all very quickly (likely as a result of the previous seven years of studying and practising techniques for spiritual awakening). But even then it was, and still is, intense for me. It’s a daily struggle to cope with the energy, and I’m not exactly a poster boy for a spiritual person at the moment. Meditating for an hour only to get straight up and have a cigarette and a coffee isn’t exactly the image you see at yoga camps, hehehe. But even meditation for the most part has been too intense for me to do, it seems to amplify the agitation. I’m mostly just drinking a heap of coffee, smoking a heap of cigarettes, drinking a bit, and taking a lot of anti-agitation pills. I think my local chemist is concerned, but my situation is a bit hard to explain to her: I can’t exactly say, “You see, there’s this Divine Feminine energy that runs through the entire universe, including me and including you… etc etc…” I imagine that would be met with a blank stare and a concerned call to my parents. (Note: some may say my agitation is linked to my high coffee consumption, but it isn’t. We weren’t allowed coffee in hospital and the energy was just as bad while I was there.)

    But anyway look, even to call this the “Divine Feminine” energy is just label, but it’s the same reason we call “Mother Nature” *Mother* Nature — because this energy can be tremendously life-giving and nourishing, but it can also be very brutal and uncompromising (ever heard the term “hell hath no fury like a woman scorned?” Yeah. That kind of hell.) It’s the play of duality. For there to be light there must be its opposite: dark. This is what the Sanskrit word “Leela” refers to: The Divine Play.

    I’m getting a bit sidetracked here because there’s lots to talk about, but back to my original point – when this energy woke up in me it was *intense*(!!!). There was a time I was walking down the street with a friend and my body suddenly did a 90 degree spasm so my whole top half was horizontal, and he was like, “dude, what the hell is wrong with you?” I tried to explain it to him and he has a bit of knowledge of the area so he kind of got it. But that degree of intensity lasted weeks. Before this all happened I also thought I was getting messages — in particular relating to a future partner of mine which I won’t go into much detail on because I don’t know if it’s true and it involves someone else so I’d prefer to keep them out of this story at this point.

    During this period though, is when I started “hearing voices”, although “hearing voices” doesn’t really describe it well, it was more like I was receiving thoughts that weren’t my own. It wasn’t an audible hallucination; they were just thought forms that appeared to come from someone other than myself. Some I knew — my spiritual teacher for example — and some I didn’t — this future partner person for example. At one point it also felt like I was connecting with what I would call “cosmic consciousness”, as if I was talking directly to “God”. And I don’t really believe in God as an entity type thing, but more as the innate intelligence of the universe. The innate intelligence that lives inside each one of us. As Jesus said on the cross: “Is it not written in the Scripture I have said ye are all gods?” You don’t hear that quote coming from Christians too often do you… they like to keep godhood only for Jesus. *eyeroll*

    But anyway, because of these symptoms I was diagnosed by one doctor with schizophrenia, another doctor said he couldn’t be sure, but we all agreed that what I had was a psychotic episode, we just disagreed on the cause. I tried to do a lot of research on schizophrenia and listen to other people’s experiences but mine never seemed to really match up to theirs very well. I never felt like I was being bombarded with thoughts — it felt like a normal conversation. And the only time it was ever “negative” was when I would come into contact with certain people who had very dense, negative egos, and I felt like I could feel their energy, which came to me in these thought forms as well. That only happened three times though, the rest was entirely positive or neutral, just like a conversation with a friend except they weren’t physically there, although I could also *feel* the energy of the person while these conversations were taking place, which is how I “knew” who it was coming from.

    Now, I really don’t know what to make of all of that. I don’t know if I have schizophrenia — I don’t really believe I have — but I also don’t know if it was psychic communication — I haven’t been able to verify that yet with the people I felt I was communicating with. I am also open to the possibility that this kundalini awakening opened up aspects of my subconscious that needed to be integrated, so these “other thoughts” were in effect re-integrating disconnected parts of myself that I had previously closed off. I really don’t know the answer to these questions, all I can say is that I don’t really feel that I have schizophrenia. And my gut feeling is that a lot of people are in the same boat as me — having had a significant spiritual awakening (albeit sometimes with very unfortunate consequences as in my case) they have been labelled as schizoprenic or psychotic. The interesting thing was,   in the hospital I was in   I met more people I would say were spiritually switched on than I ever have in the outside world. Maybe that was because it was a place we could have deeper conversations, but I don’t think that was all it was, I think there is a link between spiritual awakening and having what some people would call psychotic breaks. Just look at Suzanne Segal’s story — she “lost her self” getting on a bus one day and was terrified and had no idea what had happened for 10 years! Counselor after counselor couldn’t help her out. All she’d had was a spiritual awakening with no one to guide her through it. It must have been terrifying for her. Her book is called “Collision with the Infinite” if you’re interested in reading it.

    As a side note, I also believe there is a great awakening taking place on earth at this time, and I think that it would be very wise for governments to invest a lot in mental health care because I think things like this are going to be happening more and more. Hopefully it won’t be as bad as mine, but that’s my prediction.

    I’m not sure if there’s a whole lot more I can say on this topic, as it sort of depends on what happens in the future — i.e. if my future predictions about this partner comes true, then I’m inclined to think it was psychic communication with her; if not, I’m inclined to think it was either kundalini psychosis, schizophrenia, or aspects of myself that I was re-integrating.

    Just as a last note, I was also experiencing *crazy* levels of synchronicity at this time. I was seeing double numbers everywhere, even other people around me were like “whoah that’s weird”. And I was like, “yeah it is fucking weird!!!!” I did a science degree at university so I’ve always been a very skeptical person, but it was happening some days up to 90% of the time and I was thinking “this can’t be real!” Others have described similar things. One time I was at lunch with a friend talking about how I was seeing double numbers everywhere, and the three times I looked at my phone to check the time it was on a double number. I said, “Dude, check this out, it’s just happened three more times, what are the chances of that happening while we’re talking about it!” I did the calculation: 1/10 x 1/10 x 1/10 = it’s a 1/1,000 chance that it could be coincidence, but the fact we were also *talking* about it at the same time — what are the odds of that??? Stuff like this was happening *all the time*.

    There have only been two times since hospital that I’ve heard the glimmer of a voice — they died down around the time I went into hospital. One was when I was worrying about my hair falling out from stress so it looked like I was going bald and the voice (which seemed to come from this future partner) said, “Oh Will, I don’t care about that”. The second time was also seemingly from this future partner where it asked if I would marry her. The connection I felt I had with this person in conversations before made my reply: “I would marry the fuck out of you.” So again, I may be crazy, but I’m also just going to wait and see.

    In conclusion, this whole area is something I don’t really feel I’ll have much more clarity on until time unfolds and whether the messages I felt I was receiving come true or not.

    Only time will tell.

    And I promise I’ll let you know either 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!

  • My disastrous spiritual awakening

    Preface

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    I hope some of my posts resonate with you.

    Will.

    The Story

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

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

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

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

    “Oh do you?” She asked.

    “Jesus was God.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Where I am at now.

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

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

    Thank you for reading my story,

    In love and light,

    Will.

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

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