The Ostrich and the Elephant

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

Tag: Schizophrenia

  • 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.

  • 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! đŸ˜›

    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 clichĂ© 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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