It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the Living God.

 -Hebrews 10:31

The Undoing

I sat on the top step of the church entryway, consumed by my state and morbidly preoccupied with my circumstances. It was a beautiful cool January day around me, and the pleasantness of the day stood in sharp contrast to my personal agony. Eventually, I stood up and made my way to my truck. There was no question about going back to work. I needed to go home and rest.  And so, through the altered perception of being in the midst of a pressure-packed and burning self, I carefully made my way home, to safety and sanctuary, or so I thought.  At home, I wept freely, and placed a series of calls to people whom I felt might be able to help. I can only imagine the horror in these good people who answered the ringing phone to hear someone coming apart on the other end. I tried to sleep it off in a long afternoon nap and by retiring to bed early, but it was hard to ignore the “elephant in the room.” I awoke early the next morning on my side in bed, my arm crossed over the top of my head, as was my typical fashion. I could feel a distinct burning sensation on my arm where it crossed the crown of my head, as if it had been lightly sunburned.

The week following the opening seemed like something from an ongoing nightmare that I could not wake up from. I got up the next morning and went to work. The force of the substance in me was so intense that I was having difficulty concentrating on the various mundane tasks of the day. I found that as long as I suspended concentration and put my mind into a sort of free-float or daydream mode, I was OK, but late in the day, a co-worker spoke to me in disparaging tones of another person in the work place. Trying to focus and follow her line of discourse, and listening to the negativity in her assessment was acutely painful. It was like 12 gauge wire being forced to carry the electrical demand of the city of Phoenix. I got a pounding headache in the span of a few seconds, and had to terminate the conversation early and move away.

This was the first of many episodes to follow in the following months where I learn experientially how necessary it was to remain open and literally conductive to the force of the power now in me, and I saw and learned quickly, like a child touching a hot stove, how contraction in any of a number of forms – judgment, fear, aversion, discursive thought – caused excruciating pain. In essence, I came to a clear understanding in very short order that contraction was the primary activity of the self-created ego, an activity meant to separate out and define what was the sense of self against the sense of the other, or anything identified as “not self.” As a device employed by the ego, it was far too restrictive, dangerously so, to be employed when the forces of consciousness and spirit were ignited, and present and fully active in the individual.

The action of the Force had changed in the previous 24 hours, gradually morphing into a new horror. Now, though I felt my head was still open at the crown, and influxes continued to periodically come in, I had a new catastrophe to contend with, for the packed-in energy of the previous day had become active on its own, and was now billowing internally. I had the sense that releases of vast “clouds” of spirit were occurring, emanating from the spine and brain. These “clouds” billowed forth without restraint every few minutes, and the substance being released felt like it had all the properties of gas or air – thus, it was light and moved freely within me as it was released, but as it came up against barriers, it gathered and stopped and began to exert an evenly-spread force outwards. The pressure relentlessly built inside, pressing against subtle structures in my personality and make-up without mercy, forcing the bursting of structure after structure from the inside out. There was no off switch for this phenomenon. It was as if Old Faithful was sending forth a burst within a sealed container every few minutes. Whereas the previous day, I had the sensation that my spine and the energetic cocoon surrounding my body were becoming pressurized, now the sense of pressurization was in my very sense of self.   I felt as if I had my head and chest buried in the outflow of an artesian well uncapped and spouting freely.

At work, I was beginning to learn the value of yielding and surrender from moment to moment. The Force was simply too great to contend with, to even think of battling against. The words of Christ in the Lord’s Prayer became a reminder and a great comfort – “Thy will be done…. Thy will be done.“ I had to break away from my desk every few minutes and take slow walks around the courtyard downstairs, trying not to think about what was happening, for I felt like I had a foot caught under an advancing steam-roller and panic was not too far removed. I also learned not to move my head too much, for I seemed to carry around a nagging, pressing ache at the base of my skull that would remain with me, as it turned out, for months to come.

Somehow, I finished the day at work. As I drove home, I came to realize that in my condition, I had no patience whatsoever for the frustrations of the daily commute. It aggravated me to an unbelievable degree to be in such personal pain and distress, and to have to wait for lights to change and slower traffic to clear out of the way. And of course, this was another form of contraction that made my personal pain even worse. Sad to say, I was unsuccessful in releasing this. At home, I fretted and worried to the point of getting frantic about how to bleed off the building pressure. The thought came that I needed to attempt to ground the energy, and I stripped off my shoes and socks and took a long, slow barefooted walk around the apartment complex. The pool beckoned, and I entered the gate and sat at the edge, dangling my feet in the water. The grounding did appear to be effective to some degree, for the pain and pressure had lessened on my spine, neck, and head, but at a cost. My feet were bright red and tender to the touch after these measures. It was as if they had been burned by the Force being grounded.

As I sat at the edge of the pool, head down and fearfully contemplating my fate, a stranger passing by outside the fence at the other end of the pool noticed my demeanor and called out words of encouragement from afar. I was somewhat surprised that my personal distress had been noticed, but grateful for the interjection. I retreated to my apartment and pecked out an email to the friends I had called the previous day.

The following day, while sitting at my desk, I noticed a curious phenomenon. People were clustered around my cube and talking animatedly. This had never happened before, and I committed the observation to memory. It was as if there was a vicarious basking in the “glow” that I was putting off. A co-worker who was usually dour and negative came around the corner to relate some matter or another to me dealing with work, and I noticed that his eyes were glowing and he was smiling. There seemed to be no apparent reason that I could discern in the circumstances in the office that day that accounted for this festive atmosphere. It seemed a very strange matter, that I could be in such dire personal straits, and fearful for my sanity, while others were apparently getting a contact high off my presence.  Later that afternoon, still in acute distress, but not having divulged my condition to anyone at work, I stood in a small group with my supervisor for a conversation, and noticed that there was an emanation of heart-centered good-will from him that I could palpably feel. My personal distress was allayed while I stood close to him, and for a few minutes, though I still felt the weight in me, my fear was quelled and I had the sense that everything would turn out all right. As I moved away from him, the fear came back in force. The ability to feel what appeared to be a field effect around another person, and to have it influence my personal emotional condition was simply something that I had no previous basis for understanding. My personal worldview and the assumptions that had ruled my growth and maturation in this life were being revolutionized.

After work, I stopped in at St. Xavier’s for a session of prayer. As soon as I walked into the church, my head began to violently vibrate again.  During my praying, I worked hard at interjecting concerns and prayers for others affected by this time. I had the sense that this was much more than just about me, that this Force that had been awakened was impressionable, transpersonal in effects noted both from and on others, and could be oriented for either noble ends or base ones by the character of my aspiration or selfishness and purely personal concerns.

An email response from a friend:

Doug — good to get your e-mail.  Keep them coming — and keep us in the loop as to what is happening with you.  I know what you mean about things relaxing after going over one-half mile — sometimes it takes longer for me to open up and relax.  Hope to keep at the walking — however — I wouldn’t be brave enough to try it without a good pair of walking shoes.  Jim and I try to do two miles every day.

Do you have a doctor that you can check the physical symptoms with?  I think it is important — but obviously would be hard to start with someone you don’t know or trust.

Jim has called a local woman who is a clergy in our denomination and a spiritual director and he has asked her to look into co-workers in your area.  She is doing that but we haven’t heard back from her yet.  Our thoughts and prayers are with you every hour.  Love Jeannie

And my response:

Thank you.  Today was better.  In sleep, my unconscious resistance lessens, so the pressure eases considerably.  During the day, my control reasserts itself: these are the difficult hours.  It is a constant, physiological reminder of “Thy will be done.”  I have to yield to the influx to feel any peace.  And yet it is so much to yield to.

I was at lunch today with a co-worker who was telling me of an ongoing drama he is having with a woman he is attempting to date.  She apparently has lived a very closed and rigid life… mid-40s, schoolteacher, unmarried, no relationships for number of years.  He is getting severe whiplash from her “Come closer… Don’t!”  dynamic.  As he told the story, I sank into a deep brooding state, because I could see so clearly the she wants to feel love at one level, but is terrified at another.  …For several moments the terror opened beneath me again.  It is as if this drama is played out in counterpoint exactly complementing mine, but as an object lesson on how not to respond.  The drama teaches what is necessary to redeem the situation.  How is it that I can see this so clearly, and yet it is still necessary to fight the terror?  …

I went back to the church this evening and prayed and meditated for an hour or so.  As soon as I walked in, my body started vibrating and trembling from a renewed influx.  On the drive home it became clearer to me.  I have had an ongoing throat spasm problem for a number of years, and it was particularly severe earlier today, extending to dry heaves from the stomach.  I have not been speaking the full truth for a number of years.  I swallow, say nothing, and tighten my throat when there’s something that needs to be said, but may be uncomfortable, painful, or damaging to another.  I spontaneously began to intone and repeat the words “speak the truth with malice towards none” and “aligned my words with the spirit with malice for none.”  As I did so, there was a rush, tingling, and dissolving sensation in my throat, lower and upper jaws.  At home the sensation increased, and I had to roll my head back, open my mouth, and allow the sensation full access to my jaw and throat.  Much freer now.  …

It is curious to know that for all the distress and unusual somatic reactions of the experience, I feel much better physically in the last few days.  My apathy is dissolving; my body feels more supple and not as rigid.  The pain in my feet is gone.  I feel clearer mentally.  This is a paradox.  So much distress, yet apparently healing is taking place.  With such improvements, even with the pain involved getting to them, I hesitate to involve a doctor.  If things take a decided turn for the worst, I will indeed follow-up at that time.

Thank you for the follow-up with the clergywoman.  I am grateful for your prayers and assistance.  Bless you.

One of the effects of the influx at that point was a rapid deepening and amplification of the sense of meaning and symbolism in the occurrences around me.  This inflation of the magnitude of meaning could be overwhelming at times; the incident related by my co-worker of his difficulties with the woman he was trying to date was typical of how the most mundane occurrences were suddenly fraught with lessons and reflections of my life and condition, and that those lessons were not merely storybook tales with a neat moral, but an awesome and endless living tapestry of meaning that extended as far down into the depths as I could perceive. This was no mere solipsistic self-absorption; rather, it felt more like a stunning practical joke played by the cosmos on this individual. There was a sense that I had grown very small in a wonderland that was a single, all-encompassing living organic unity, a unity that had come to life around me, and meaning was the language of the realm. At moments like the one where my friend related his story, I would sink into a brooding trance as I saw clearly far down into the depths, all the nuances, all of the correspondences, the overt and covert meanings, the corollaries, the past conditions that would likely foster arrival at that point in time, and the likely future developments. As Aldous Huxley had so excellently outlined in The Doors of Perception, I understood now where madness lay, and how it would be possible for schizophrenics to get lost in this territory. I understood why prophets of old had felt compelled to carry their symbolic messages into a world indifferent or hostile to their messages. I understood many more things at such times than I was capable of expressing. I was seeing at such times, in the sense that a seer does. And, as I had not come to terms with the fear I was still contending with, such seeing went hand-in-hand with new episodes of ballooning of the terror. Metaphorically, it was the equivalent of Christ’s disciple Peter taking a few faltering steps out on the water before looking down into the depths, losing his faith, and beginning to sink.

The other significant developments that began to appear about the same time were regular occurrences of synchronicity. This was the first of those occurrences, where a happening in a friend’s life paced alongside exactly in counterpoint to my own personal drama. Having the synchronicities appear (this was the first episode of more than a few during the succeeding six months, some profound, some relatively inconsequential) with the heightened perception of meaning in and around me was like enrollment in a living and experiential classroom where I was being shown from multiple perspectives what the implications and consequences of my actions were, and indeed that we all seemed to be part of the same living web, where as John Muir had commented in a different context over 100 years ago,  one could not pluck out any individual thing without finding it connected to everything else in the world.  The message applied equally to my current condition, and in fact, I could see it as an underlying truth of all human action.  Many of the synchronicities were observed only by me, but enough happened and in short enough time span that even outside parties whom I was to shortly be relying on  for care noticed and commented on the uncannily eerie way that the timing of events and “coincidences” were occurring.

Though I had had trouble sleeping since the opening, the problems became more significant with each passing day. Over the subsequent two weeks, I managed to snatch the equivalent of two to three nights of sleep in bits and pieces, and my physical condition began to rapidly deteriorate.

*              *              *

Day four. Once again, I made my way to work, but I made preparations at home prior to leaving to be out for the weekend, and to avoid returning to the apartment, where I was being to feel isolated and trapped for any marauding misfortune seeking to level its sights on me. I had a previously scheduled appointment that evening with a massage therapist I had been working with, and after the massage, I intended to check into a hotel for the night before heading up to Flagstaff for the weekend.

Work turned out to be the most tolerable day of a long week, as we had a day-trip scheduled with fieldwork in the desert area north of Tucson. There was an acute feeling of relief as we left civilization and headed south on the interstate that morning to commence the day’s work. The day went reasonably well, considering I felt as if I had a pillar of heavy weight impaled through the crown of my head into my back and that I was being forced to learn how to displace my identity outside of the maelstrom to keep it intact.  Late that afternoon, as we drove back into Phoenix, I felt a closing in, a sense of claustrophobia from being re-immersed in the discordant energy patterns of the city.  The sensing was energetic and not emotional. I had never previously been subject to a feeling of claustrophobia. The fear and anxiety, which had lay quiescent most of the day, started up again.

The sun had set, and in a pattern that was starting to become regular, the Force was amplifying after dark. I was waiting quietly for Ana, my massage therapist, in the waiting room of her office. As I sat with nothing to occupy my mind until her arrival, the fear began to grow again.  I had not been able to share, on a face-to-face basis, what had been happening to me with anyone since it had occurred, and the strain was beginning to tell.  Ana arrived as scheduled, and my relief in her company was nearly overwhelming.  Here was my first human interaction since all hell had broken loose, my first chance to talk to a friend in person and ask for help.  I had warned her over the phone to come prepared to deal with an unusual circumstance; now was my opportunity to give her an abbreviated version of the story.  She could hear the fear in my voice as I spilled out the story, and at the conclusion, I was very direct. “I need grounding. I trust you to help me…” It was a curious mix of relief and acute need, yet a wariness and cautiousness about invoking even more dreadful consequences, since a different type of session previously with a female healer had triggered a personal apocalypse. We agreed upon a course of action; there would be no massage per se; instead, I asked her to place her fingertips under the base of my skull on the back of my neck, hold my head suspended, and mentally ground the energy. I had an intuition that something digging in at the atlas vertebra at the base  of the skull was exactly what I needed. Over the previous few days, the pain at the back of my head had grown progressively worse – my head felt uncomfortably inflated, bloated in a sense – and I had the sense that the nape of my neck in addition to the crown of my head was both a point of ingress and egress for the energetic pulses waving through me every few minutes¹. 

And so we began. Ana and I had joked in the past that I was an unusual client for her; my physical quirks and idiosyncrasies were things she had never encountered before, and they sometimes ran counter to what she might expect. She was also beginning to recognize me as a client that implicitly suggested an expansion of her boundaries and an undertaking of efforts and methods that she had not considered or done before. This evening was to indelibly etch my reputation in her mind and forge a bond between us that lasts to this day.  The room was dark, and both of us were quiet as she assumed her place sitting at my head. As she cradled my head in her hands and her fingertips found their way to the right spot at the base of my skull, I wept with relief. The pressure immediately began to siphon away. As soon as it arose in my spine and brain, it found its grounding, and as the intuition had suggested, exited the back of my head through her hands and out.

A few minutes into this routine, my head began to vibrate spontaneously as it had during the opening itself. This was not new to me, but she was so surprised by this happening that she said later she almost dropped my head back onto the table.  After a few seconds, the vibrating stopped, and the passive grounding resumed. A few minutes later, as she adjusted her finger position slightly, another wave of violent head vibrations began. This time, the vibrations felt good, since an exit was being allowed for the pent-up energy, and her fingers were providing a much-needed stimulation on a very tender spot on my head. The feeling was analogous to the relief felt when massaging one’s temples during a headache, but multiplied a hundred-fold. I asked her to dig her fingers in more deeply if possible. She went as deep as the vibrations would allow, but at this early stage, the violence and amount of movement of my head during these shakes did not permit the kind of penetration I really wished for, and that we were able to achieve in the succeeding months.

Before this night, Ana had dabbled in Therapeutic Touch, but she did not consider herself practiced in these disciplines, nor did she claim the ability to see energy that some therapists did. But after a period in the darkened room, she remarked in surprise and a touch of awe that she could see light surrounding my body and it was pulsing out of my feet every so often in a grayish-white shade. A few minutes later when she worked my upper back to release some of the deep-seated muscular tension I was now living with trying to physically ward off the weight of the Force, she commented again that she could see light streaming from my back towards her fingers where she touched the skin. To me, this was mildly interesting, but compared with the full-throttle fear I was living with around the clock, and the physical ordeal I was going through, her observations did not translate into a feeling of joy or happiness for me at the time.

Ana was a ministering angel that night. For the first hour since four days earlier, I felt some semblance of normalcy. Though I still felt my spine and brain putting out a continuous and potent emission of energy that still carried the ominous potential of causing my extermination, I had been given relief from pain and pressure and some degree of hope that just maybe, all would work out. The grounding was so effective that night that I began to think of ways that I could rig a grounding cushion to remain in contact with the base of my occiput and supply a continuous grounding line during the hours that I slept. And within 24 hours, I had gathered the materials necessary to do just that…purchasing a neck cushion from a back supply store, and making use of a catalog item I had purchased some months previously that consisted of two copper wires with leads attached to mesh pads. This device, born of hope and necessity that period, alleviated a great deal of pain during the next several months. But it was never as effective as the human touch that Ana provided.

Ana spent almost the entire session on my head. She was soothing and very calm, and my emotional fears subsided in her presence. As soon as she mentioned that she was starting to get a little light-headed, I stopped the session, saying, “That’s enough for now.” And I worried that maybe I was too late, that I had already hurt her or adversely affected her in some way. That termination signified the end of my respite. In the few seconds that it took her to walk out of the room and I sat up and began to dress, my head and spine fully re-pressurized. Again, I could feel the continuous oozing of the bio-plasma in my upper spine, and my condition was once again as dire as it had been before I had come in.

As I left the massage room and came into the waiting area, Ana was finishing up a phone call. She hung up, and commented, “That’s weird.” When I asked her what she was referring to, she said, “That was Eric (her husband). He felt that there was something wrong, that I was in some kind of danger, and he called to make sure I was OK. He’s never done that before.” Much later, I connected this phone call to a sudden spike in fear I felt for Ana’s safety when she mentioned she was starting to feel effects. Fear was apparently being amplified and broadcast by my state, to be received by those attuned to people in my presence. In a recent recollection, she added, “ When I got home that night, Eric could immediately tell that something was different, that something unusual had happened, but I brushed him off when he inquired about it. I didn’t want him to forbid me from doing the work again if it was needed, and as it turned out, I found I could handle it.”

Ana’s recollections two years afterwards were telling. “I remember feeling overwhelmed by what I was being asked to do,” she said. “I was not trained for this, and it was way, way beyond my league. So there was some nervousness about being up to the task.” When I asked her about the specific sensations she felt, she said, “To me, it seemed like a draw of energy, though you felt you were bursting with energy. But there was no doubt that there was a lot of energy passing through me that night. … Early on, there was a prickly, jagged quality I could feel to the field around your head. As time went on (over several months), the prickliness gradually smoothed out, and the vibrations became shorter and more subdued. They seemed to be coming from a deeper and deeper place.“ When I prompted her memory about the termination of the session, she said, ”That’s right, we had to stop it a little early because I was getting light-headed. ” In the week or two afterwards, I remained worried that somehow I had passed on a contagion of this energy-without-end, and that I might have infected her in the process of the grounding. Later, she confirmed that she had to contend with a minor version of this: “I didn’t tell you this before, and had almost forgotten it until you asked about that night, but as I drove home after the session, I felt strange – not bad or negative, per se, but as if energetic effects were persisting in me. It was like an ongoing whirlpool or vortex in me that continued to swirl. So at every red light I hit on the way home, I would take a moment to stop, meditate and mentally ground the energy. By the time I got home, I was fine. Evidently I was up to the task after all, for there were no long-term adverse effects on me.”

This episode proved important to me in the coming months in helping me to retain my faith that I was not simply going psychotic. Whatever I was in the grip of, whatever horrors I was facing internally, were being felt by others beyond myself. This was not simply a private hell, but seemed to confirm what I was feeling subjectively…that I was experiencing events in a large and powerful field that appeared to have an objective reality (in the sense that it could influence other individuals’ feelings or well-being). In conjunction with the synchronicities I was beginning to see (and would see more frequently in the coming months), this event gave me a slim reason to hope.

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¹ I discovered later that Jiddu Krishnamurti experienced this same kind of pain in the nape of his neck. From an account of his opening experience: Then, on the 17th of August, I felt acute pain at the nape of my neck and I had to cut down my meditation to fifteen minutes. The pain instead of getting better as I had hoped grew worse. The climax was reached on the 19th. I could not think, nor was I able to do anything, and I was forced by friends here to retire to bed. Then I became almost unconscious, though I was well aware of what was happening around me.

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