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…
- “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… - “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… - 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.
