The Ostrich and the Elephant

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

Tag: Signs

  • 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.

  • Calling Lilha

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

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

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

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

    Nevertheless, here is the story…

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

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

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

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

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

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

    I put it away and largely forgot about it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    I went back to work.

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

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

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

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

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

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

    She didn’t reply. I drove home.

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

    Again, she didn’t reply.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    “I’m right, aren’t I?” I said.

    “What do you mean right? She asked.

    “I heard your voice,” I said.

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

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

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

    Isira was silent and just looked at me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Thanks for reading,

    Will.

  • 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!

Pin It on Pinterest