It has been ten years since the events written of in this narrative, and the perspective and effects of the opening have changed in the time; yet, it is accurate to say that the events opened up in January 2001 revolutionized my life and continue to have effects to this day. I am not the same person I was prior to January of 2001.

Effects can be characterized on a number of different levels – the physical, the emotional, and the spiritual. My life in many respects has become more ordinary – I did not drop out of society and become a Trappist monk, nor did I drop everything and join the Peace Corps on far-flung international humanitarian missions. The ten years since have seen me begin a relationship with a wonderful woman to whom I am now married, and work has begun on the very practical day-to-day matters of establishing a secure household and providing for a new family. I do not have as much solitude and unstructured time as I did in 2001 to explore the uncharted extents of this event. For a couple of years immediately after the opening, I kept a journal chronicling these perceptions and developments, until the frequency and profundity of them trailed off or began to seem repetitive. At that point, I ceased to record them.

For the first two to three years afterwards, the effects of the opening remained strong and in the foreground of my being. I was not walking the same planet as my peers. Vivid and symbolic dreams continued on an almost nightly basis. Symbolic vision permeated the apprehension of the world around me, and the strange otherworldly effects of spiritual overtaking continued to be perceived and felt on a regular basis.  I would awake in the morning in my residence and hear mourning doves outside in the quiet morning, only the outside was not outside – it was inside me – I was hearing them in a clear space that was a universal stratum of being, a part of myself and their selves, and I was monitoring their calls from a core of deep stillness in much the same way and feeling the same connection as if I was monitoring an itch on my leg. I don’t know quite how to express it, only to say that as real and distinct and separate as we feel our selves to be in inner perception relative to the world, the same sense of certainty – “Of course!” – inhered in the new perceptions. My consciousness, though still anchored within my body, was not restricted to the limits demarcated by my skin. Instead, it waxed and waned like a tide, first radiating out from me to share with and imbibe of the space around me and those who came within it; other times it retreated and approached something more like the day-to-day reality we each inhabit. By far, the more preferable state was the expanded one – the nature of the spirit is freedom, and our rightful home is not one confined to these tiny, dark, and sorely-limited bodies, but one that allows free play in the limitless ether. We do not need to enter an afterlife to experience this.

In revisiting the account so many years later, one aspect seems particularly important to comment on. This pertains to the overwhelming terror and fear I felt, and the sense during the event that I was being annihilated – consumed, destroyed, and possessed by malefic forces alien and hostile to life. The occurrences of the opening were so unexpected, so sudden, so intense, and so alien to the normal consensus reality we all partake of that overwhelming fear was provoked in me. I had always conducted my life with meticulous regard for setting all the details in order, meeting all my obligations fully, and buttoning up all of my actions with as full a regard for doing good in this world as I could muster. But these attitudes and actions were undertaken from an unconsciously defensive stance, a posture meant to ward off misfortune or pain.  I took my personal boundaries against the outside world as impregnable and inviolable; the feeling of being possessed or taken over arose abruptly when my newly-perceptive consciousness was able to perceive and feel permeation taking place interiorly in ways that the old consciousness and frame of perception was too dense and bounded to apprehend. The Force appeared admitted from the outside; personal boundaries of self that had previously held were suddenly and violently breached – by an act of higher and deeper will, perhaps, or Grace (as it happened during intense prayer), but the effects were the same whether the event was surrendered to or not. I know now that permeation is happening to all of us, all the time, but we are generally unaware of its influence and action. It generally happens in imperceptible doses below the limits of our awareness. I was seeing and feeling what was being done, the tumultuous undoing and only much later, the remaking. And the process was intense and unrelenting – it unfolded rapidly and turbulently, as long-held repressions were shattered in short order. A dam had collapsed, and the flood commenced, not to abate until some new level of equilibrium was attained. As a consequence, there were repeated episodes of terror regarding possession through the process, as I allude to several times in the account, since none of my expectations or prior conditioning had even begun to prepare me for the possibility that Something Else would eventually step in and take over the reins for a period. As Richard Moss commented in one of his letters to me,” what you called evil was the feeling of dissolution of the basic finite ego. God looks like the demonic when the ego still holds the center of the identity.”

It became evident in retrospect that I was carrying much personal negativity going into the event, and there was a heavy dose of unrecognized and unresolved emotional suppression lurking in the Shadow of my personal unconscious.  The action of the Force had the effect of amplifying every pocket of unacknowledged negativity previously suppressed, held, and forgotten. Acute guilt and shame was provoked; something appeared to be invading and taking over my personal reality, I couldn’t do a thing about it, and if I had been more vigilant and righteous, this horrendous event could have been forestalled or averted  (Never mind the ”how” – to this day, such a presumption is a head-scratcher. As if the gift of our perception and personhood is something we as individuals have any control at all in creating or maintaining the viability of). There was a sense of horrendous personal failure, a spectacular crack-up, that a part of me subconsciously felt was deserving of reprimand and judgment during the process. These negative feelings liberally ladled over the top of the phenomena of the opening made for a highly undesirable mix. Having this acute terror, fear, shame, and guilt flare up intensely in its full immediacy during the opening process was like awakening to discover a poisonous snake under my bed sheets, when I had been assured on falling asleep that I was safe and sound.

The natural and difficult-enough fear aroused by the threat of loss of sanity and personal identity during the opening, then, was needlessly amplified and aggravated by seeds of unresolved personal emotional issues banished from my normal apprehension. But this was  also aggravated by the unconscious acceptance of certain tenets, assumptions and axioms regarding the nature of life, spiritual experience, and the underpinnings of consensus reality, which will be developed shortly. Some of this is naturally attributable to my own shortcomings in critically examining the root articles of faith I had unconsciously adopted and adhered to. Some are implicit assumptions woven into the substratum of human life itself in this day and age, in a Western culture that values individuality, autonomy, self-determination, and free will above all else. Some must be attributed to the well-meaning, but blind and unconscious teachings of the orthodox faith I was raised in, which took the consensual apprehensions and axioms of subject-object consciousness as bedrock truths and projected them as a framework into the spiritual realm. The main narrative was written, even after the events were well-past, from the perspective of seeing all my formerly unconscious presumptions about spirituality and the nature of religious experience blown to pieces when genuine spiritual emergence began to unfold. In the aggregate, these axioms and tenets of faith that I had consumed and digested played a major role in turning the transformative event, which would have been difficult under the best of circumstances, into a generally nightmarish experience for more than two months, mostly due to the terror evoked when every last one of the assumed axioms was violated. When everything you have assumed to be true and unquestionable at the core of your life experience is suddenly and violently usurped, and acute and unrelenting pain, both psychic and physical, comes with the revolution, marinating in fear until events abate is a predictable state of affairs.

Now, afterwards, I can look back with some perspective and understand both the nature of what was actually happening and why I responded in the way and as acutely as I did. Richard speaks eloquently and astutely of just this type of reaction in his book The Mandala of Being:

Experiencing fundamental evolutionary transformation can be profoundly threatening to our basic sense of self. We can readily illustrate this process through the simple analogy of a sugar cube dropped into a glass of water. In this metaphor, the sugar cube is our me-consciousness and the water is pure consciousness itself: the Self or our Divine Nature. Imagine that when first immersed, the sugar cube, not appreciating the nature of what is about to occur, relaxes into this new environment. It experiences itself participating in a new reality that may seem glorious. Just as we tend to think of ourselves as beginning and ending at the boundaries of our skin and therefore we thoroughly identify with our bodies, the sugar cube is also identified with its form – its edges and sharp corners and the sense of its own solidity. Dropped into cold water, Mr. Sugar Cube will undergo a transformation so gradual that he may be able to integrate it without trauma, though also with little consciousness of the change that is happening. But if he finds himself in hot water instead – that is, where the evolutionary impulse towards self-transcendence accelerates – he can suddenly become overwhelmed and terrified as his edges begin to soften and blunt, his sense of solidity crumbles, and he melts completely. What started as a great expansion becomes an equally great disruption of his identity. His former identity as Mr. Sugar Cube, which constitutes his familiar referent for self-existence, can no longer isolate him from a much vaster level of awareness, and his me-consciousness interprets this dissolution and simultaneous expansion as annihilation or loss of self. He is becoming one with, or immanent in the water – a larger sphere of being – but can no longer “locate” the self he has known himself to be.

Something similar can happen to us. Despite the fact that what we experience is a soul-driven evolutionary movement of consciousness, and it rarely occurs until we are, in a deeper sense, ready, we still begin in a stage wherein ego-identification dominates us. Even if we were brought up in a loving household, not mistreated, and our essence was generally well-mirrored, and thus we have a genuinely healthy core of self – we nonetheless have an unconscious identification with our bodies, with a familiar range of sensations, and with our basic sense of being a separate self. Suddenly that self is thrown into a process of spiritual emergence and is threatened, because initially there is no way for us to know what is happening, just as there is no way for Mr. Sugar Cube to know, at first, that soon his separate self will actually merge – become one with – all the water: a new, expanded state of consciousness. Generally, the process of spiritual opening is initially profoundly uplifting and expansive. But soon afterward, the shadow (in Jungian nomenclature) arises. These are the disowned sensations and the states of being that are buried in the unconscious, the dark, unloved (and in our collective consciousness as yet unmet) images of ourselves that are terrifying to behold….Most often, after the grandeur of the initial expansion, comes the experience of untamed sensation and emotion, the overwhelming feeling of melting into oblivion, into nonbeing. We get the sense that “I am losing my mind” or “I am going to die” or “I am being attacked by demons” and this is where the real work of integration has to be done.

The untamed emotions – whether implanted in response to poor early nurturing or arising because we are in a process of spiritual emergence – stand at the threshold of our wholeness. They are the Now we don’t know how to meet, don’t know how to accept and surrender to. The untamed emotions are the Now we are continually, unconsciously trying to avoid. When we can turn towards these feelings and learn to hold them in the present without reacting by protecting ourselves against them, when we can stop refusing these feelings because of our own negative labeling and beliefs about them, we will have obtained our freedom. No longer will we be the followers of the god of fear. The untamed emotions are like guardians at the gateway, the ultimate fears that we must face in order to begin to develop a strong sense of self. And when we have claimed that stronger sense of self, they become the guardians at the gate of self-transcendence, the awakening into a higher level of ourselves.

Richard Moss, The Mandala of Being

The characteristics of transformational impulses received by aspirants or susceptible individuals – the axioms of true spiritual emergence, as it were – include the following:

• Dynamism is the first and principal earmark. There will be dramatic change interiorly. Transformation denotes change in any facet of its consideration. This movement can be rapid, disorienting, and profound. There are two possible responses to this change by the subject – an attempt to control it and limit its extent and action, or a choice to allow it all the space needed for its action. Words to the wise: it cannot be controlled, and an attempt to do so will only heighten any fear and misery.
• A partial or complete dissolution or, at the least, softening of the boundaries of the elements of consensus reality, including elements of one’s own psyche, and some degree of spatial unification of all elements previously perceived as discrete elements. The multiplicity of selves and objects, and the absolute distinction between the observer and the perceived that predominates in subject/object consciousness, becomes both more permeable, with a spacious nature unifying all, and much less absolute and rigid than we take for granted in everyday life. Boundaries taken as given facts in subject/object consciousness as a priori forms through which we view and interact with the world are recognized as constructs with no true permanence to them in direct experience.
• Radial awareness overtakes projected focus as the primary mode of operation of consciousness. The first and primary medium through which all interactions occur with the world is the referent to one’s own Being, which is experienced and understood as everyone’s own Being. The world is no longer an image “out there,” but becomes an organic unity which includes oneself experienced intimately, interiorly, as though the world has become an extension of a larger Self that includes all of creation. Simultaneously, there is a pulling back from the formerly external world, a release of attachment, and a centering of one’s own consciousness in relation to the world; the relationship is no longer an unhealthy co-dependence, where the individual leans on the world for self-reflection and definition. This centering seems identical to the development of serenity and equanimity, and there appears to be a physical locus to it in the body centered on the spinal column.
• Atmospheres or fields ascend in importance to become primary facts in spiritual emergence experiences, in contrast to forms, action, and definition, which dominate in subject/object consciousness. Fields and their potentials are perceived to be prior to and supportive of any manifestation into material form. Furthermore the mode of action of fields operates through influence and attraction or repulsion. Direct cause and effect is seen and understood to be a gross simplification of a process of multilayered influence.  Permeability is the characteristic in the subject that permits the admission and influence of fields or atmospheres, and the process of permeation is critical to apprehend as the mode of operation of fields on the individual.
• The demonstrated and undeniable fact that control or constraint of the transformative process is not and never was in the individual’s purview.  A true transformational event cannot be subjugated by the ego. Surrender was called for, nay, demanded. While free will is in effect prior to the genesis of the event, once the event begins, there is no return.  A larger intelligent process directs events.  Individual control in the midst of the process is minuscule.

By contrast, the axioms of subject/object consciousness, our consensus reality and, by extension, of orthodox religious understanding and teachings consist of the following:

• Statis in the individual is not only assumed and held to be the only legitimate frame of reference, but is also held sacrosanct. (“God is There, and you are here, and ne’er the twain shall meet”). No deviation from this orthodoxy is permitted, either in religion or in the field of psychiatry or the conventional psychological sciences. Movement and dynamism in oneself is strongly discouraged and considered suspect if it does occur, unless it occurs in a form sanctioned by the church and in settings under its direct auspices. Furthermore, besides the suspicion, there appeared to be an implicit negative judgment that if stasis was being shaken up or altered and changes were happening to the individual, there must be something seriously awry. The person must have “sinned” at some point, and grievously so.[1]
• The focus is projected. The focus/attention of the individual is always oriented forward and outward, away from one’s locus of perception and one’s own internal experience. In essence, all the world becomes an image and the image becomes what is real (in the same way that a film becomes real to an audience when light is projected through it and onto a screen for viewing). Reverence and devotion is always directed towards the Holy Other, whether a Deity or an Avatar. Perceived form is held to be real, and beings in form are real; Being itself is poorly conceived and apprehended. The formless is generally unappreciated or underappreciated in its unconditioned essence. This fixation on and a complete entanglement of attention in objects, appearances, and surfaces is one of the biggest hurdles to overcome.
• A multiplicity of selves and objects are the basis of reality, now and forever more, and the way a “proper” cosmos is put together and maintained in structure. All is right with God’s universe, both now and in the hereafter, as long as this construction is in place.
• The individual has ultimate control of and responsibility for all that happens to her/him. This responsibility is usually assessed and strongly reiterated after misfortune has arisen – usually evaluated as the consequence of sin and leading an unrepentant or insufficiently devoted life. Even with the Christian faith’s call for adherents to surrender their will to the service of God or Christ, this surrender is commonly misunderstood as a voluntary assent and gift of the ego’s, capable of being revoked at any moment at the ego’s discretion. Individual accountability always remains in force, even with this type of superficial surrender.
• Any occurrence freighted with supernatural import outside of these tenets (which is essentially the consensus basis of reality) is alien, likely evil in nature, and well-deserving of a fearful response.

In summary, then, we have these contrasting pairs:

• Dynamism vs. assumed stasis
• Radial and centered, detached awareness vs. projected outward focus
• Spatial unification of discrete elements vs. a discontinuous multiplicity of selves and objects
• Atmospheres/fields with permeation as primary vs. forms with discrete boundaries as primary
• Transformation as beyond egoic control vs. individual having control of all transpiring  

It is my intent in itemizing and contrasting these axioms to illustrate how the limited single-dimensioned understandings of consensus reality, projected and amplified by the church as the basis of spiritual life, did not serve well in a time of rapid spiritual transition, and to warn that the potential exists for grave problems for any spiritual aspirant holding fast to these axioms when passing over the threshold into the True Life. Wider and deeper, more pliable understandings are called for. I was familiar with the alternative axioms listed previously, but mere familiarity was not enough when a personal apocalypse was suddenly at hand. Conceptual exposure to new and more appropriate paradigms is not sufficient preparation for an internal revolution.

Why Me? Reflections on Contributory Factors

Why me? What alignments of influence, circumstance, or causative factors brought about such a revolution? Some reading this account may wish to know as a basis or orientation for their own spiritual seeking; others may wish to know solely to steer clear of any possibility in their lives of encountering any similar events.  Having experienced both the trials and the beatitudes resulting from the opening, I well understand both perspectives.

I was raised with a conventional Christian upbringing in the Episcopalian Church. After high school, I left it (or more accurately, simply stopped attending) for reasons relating to my church specifically, and though I still considered myself a Christian in name, I made no serious attempt to find another church home, either within the Episcopalian faith or outside it. Partially, this was due to my unstable emotional state in those years, my general discomfort in social settings I was not familiar with, and the transient lifestyle of my young adult years. But in addition, I was beginning to discover the church’s conventional religious prescriptions for the human condition were sorely superficial, inadequate, and lacking, at least when considered for my life and circumstances. I had been deeply traumatized by the abrupt loss of innocence and the painful warping and fragmenting of my mental health (eventually resulting in a series of hospitalizations) that occurred as a result of my brief time at the U.S. Naval Academy, compounded in short order by the tragic deaths of two of my close high school friends. The traumas and my pain in response were current, living, and immediate, and the answer was not to be found in historical stories from 2000 years ago that were somehow payment for some purported wrong I had done. I say this not to disparage the Christian faith, but only to say that its ordinary orthodox prescriptions were irrelevant to my daily suffering and acute mental anguish. The central and pressing dilemma of my life was not intentionally and selfishly doing wrong to others and subsequently needing atonement, forgiveness, and redemption as a result, but rather contending daily with acute mental pain and fragmentation as a result of the crushing and mangling my psyche sustained from the world-field in my early adult years. My inner pain was driving me to find answers, and the “answers” offered by orthodox faith were simply insufficient. No more and no less than that. I could profess and believe the right things from dawn until dusk (and in fact I tried that for some time), but that would not (and did not) make a whit of difference to my everyday state. 

However, my interest in spirituality, particularly spirituality pursued in solitude, ramped up in the years afterwards, as I began a wide-ranging, informal study of comparative religion, and supplemented it with readings of various mystical and spiritual accounts. My searching was largely intellectual for much of this time, but the intensity of the search was quite high for close to a decade after high school. My studies led me to the conclusion that an authentic path, at least for me, entailed the necessity of making my own effort and exploring and aspiring to elevate the subjectivity that was mine to care take. Passive acceptance of circumstance and hope, as the church was ultimately prescribing, did not appear to be enough. It was apparent to me that some distinct occurrence of Grace or some action that revolutionized my state was called for. Beginning in the mid-80s, the focus began to shift from the intellect to the entire life expression as I began to seek through my own personal experience to question and test the boundaries of my life and being. There began to arise interiorly a deep and wordless yearning, which burned consistently in the background for most of this time, and moved front and center during a six month desert sojourn in 1986. This time of my life was well-captured in a narrative written soon after the period:

My late teens and early twenties were not years I would care to repeat. After years of excelling at the routines that had been set in front of me - school, athletics, social life - I had abruptly run into a quagmire after high school. An aborted enrollment at the U.S. Naval Academy had severely shaken my confidence. I suffered from the first of two major depressions. I switched from school to school almost as often as I changed majors. Personal problems, family problems, a demoralizing streak of bad luck in the courtship games, you name it. A few years earlier, my response to such trials would have been to climb grimly back into the saddle, resolved to beat my circumstances into submission even if it cost me every last lick of joy in my life. But times had changed, and in my early twenties, these misfortunes did nothing more than awaken me to a persistent hollowness and sense of absurdity. I began to feel as if I had been sleepwalking for every bit of the last twenty years; the goals that had guided me had not been my goals - they were not goals I had consciously chosen and consciously pursued. I began to see my past as nothing more than a treadmill. The prospect of looking back on a life from old age and being unable to say anything more for it than I had done what was expected of me began to haunt me. It was no longer nearly enough. And in that season of disillusionment, different dreams began to claim me - inchoate, transitory flashes of vision that danced just out of grasp, and a vague yearning for something I couldn't even articulate. By the time I extended my hand to Jim [Ed.- my college roommate who introduced me to the western deserts] for the first time, I was alienated, a little angry, and hungry; hungry for what, I wasn't quite sure. I thought I might know it when I found it. At any rate, I was ready to look for new ways…  

I look back on that spring and summer of 1986 as one of the clearest and deepest times of my life. Month after month, the precious images and impressions piled in on top of one another: the 700 ft. high Eureka Valley sand dunes glowing silver-blue in the moonlight; Jim pulling up short in a remote canyon and pointing as one, then two mountain lions exploded from camouflaged stillness 200 yards from us and vanished just as abruptly; our arrival at a knife-edged ridge-top at 11,000 feet at sunset after a grueling day's slog through a 5000 ft. elevation gain with 70 pound packs, and wondering where we'd sleep; awakening on the floor of a backside canyon in the midst of a magnitude 6.1 earthquake, 10 miles from the epicenter. It was a deeply-needed time for me, a time of endless still desert light, vistas of dozens of miles, silence, more silence, and a measure of peace. And, over time, all of the fragmented images and impressions had coalesced into a seamless and constant vision.

It is only now, looking back, that I can say what it was that sated my hunger. Six months out, under the Great Basin sun, in the Mojave winds, standing in valleys so vast and silent that the crunch of my boots seemed sacrilege. Watching the cycle of the days, the seasons, thinking of - of what? God knows what. Thinking desert thoughts, fierce and uncompromising and pure. Becoming a native for a while, a savage with none of the soul-leeching worries of civilization. Exploring, inside and out. Moving and watching. At the end of those six months, there was something alive in me that wasn't before, something hard to describe, like the silent smokeless flame of a steadily-burning candle.

The transcendent aspiration evident in this account may well have been the seed for the experience that broke forth unexpectedly 15 years later.

In reflecting on the prerequisites for a sudden spiritual shift like this, I finally settle on a few characteristics as tending to lead to such an event, at least as manifested in my case. These have been touched on previously in these pages, or the account itself, but are here summarized:

• A certain implied threshold of individual development, capacity, and maturity. The normal stages of human growth have achieved “ripeness” or competence in the individual. This competence is not necessarily broadcast across all facets of a human incarnation, but a sufficient base exists in one or more of these facets that will support spiritual emergence when the time is right.
• Either a strong and well-supported suspicion or actual self-experiential knowledge that the subject/object consciousness of the human race (“consensus reality”) is not a static condition of terminal development, and it therefore need not be reified in day-to-day life as an absolute and foregone state. A clear understanding develops from this knowledge that transcendence is possible.
• Understanding that transcendence is possible, aspiration for that transcendence, directed towards the Goal as the individual may understand it.
• Personal suffering motivating actions oriented towards transcending the base of reference. Suffering stokes the intensity of the desire for transcendence of the current state. Coupled with this is frequently a strong intuition that the world as commonly seen and experienced is not sufficient.

---

[1] During the opening experience, and in selective talks with pastors afterwards, I was astonished at the pervasive lack of understanding of mysticism, even of the inherent mystic core of their own faiths. It was quite surprising to encounter the levels of superstitious fear (one pastor clearly reacted fearfully and began a prayer for protection in my presence after I described the sensations of the opening) and outright ignorance of genuine spiritual experience on such a regular basis. These clergymen were like doctors ignorant of elementary human physiology in many respects. Perhaps this should not have been surprising, as I myself did not understand fully what was happening at the time and I, too, was in the grip of much superstitious fear. But as representatives of and spokesmen for the Larger Life, should they not at the least have been familiar with the elements of mystical experience and been able to recognize the earmarks of spiritual emergence/experience? While I was offered some willingness to help and guidance from pastors during the time (and I was grateful for what was offered and what proved to be actually helpful), on the whole, the clergy and the Church failed me. The most helpful assistance I had during that time was from a Catholic priest who refused to ascribe any fearful metaphysical interpretation to my event, but instead very practically analyzed it from a psychological point of view and referred me to a psychiatrist of his acquaintance. While this approach was insufficient in the end, at least this man did not add to my fear levels concerning what was happening to me. As the first tenet of the medical Hippocratic Oath directs, this man of the cloth at least “did no harm.”