The Beginning of Ordeal

I sat hunched against the headboard of the bed, my heels dug into the mattress. The TV was on in order to provide a distraction.  The bathroom light provided the only illumination. The session with Ana had ended two hours previously, and I had checked into a hotel to spend the night away from the apartment. Outside, the truck was parked and ready to depart to Flagstaff early the following morning. My things were packed, and I intended to spend the entire weekend away, out in nature, trying to ground the fierce energy overtaking me. But as was becoming a clear pattern, with the descent of night, the Force was amplifying again. And a new modality of action was becoming apparent.

The Force had morphed in the last two hours from being something within trying to burst out to being something without trying to draw me onward. I felt it as strong magnetic-like pulls on areas of my body that corresponded with the centers or chakras of Hindu spirituality. In the previous four days, the Force had progressively burned deeper and deeper into my body, descending step by step, activating in varying degrees each center as it descended, and this night, with timing that could not have been worse from my personal perspective, it had arrived at the second center – the seat of sexuality. Now, every center from the second to the crown of the head seemed to be pulled. 

The Force and the pulling sensations were worse when I laid supine in bed, so when the sensations became particularly bad,, I would prop myself up against the headboard and dig in. As I closed my eyes, I concentrated on the feeling. It was remarkable how much of a pull I was feeling, and how densely packed it was. The sensation was much like standing in chest-deep water at a beach, back to the beach, and trying to resist a rip tide seeking to pull one out to sea. The pulls did not relent all night long.  With the little objectivity left to me in my condition, I studied and noted what I could about the state I was in. For the centers or areas where there was little or no emotional content, the pulls were felt strictly as a physical force. Where the centers were holding active and living emotional content, the pull was strongly felt as specific temptations. In my fear-wracked state, these temptations from without seemed the very personification of evil, of what I came to call the “tractor-beam to Hell.” My body felt as if it was one large living pole of a strong magnet brought to within millimeters of its opposite pole. Holding out against this force only seemed to intensify it as the night proceeded.

After that night, I understood in a vivid and living way Christ’s dealings with temptation in the desert and Buddha’s coaxing by the forces of Mara after his enlightenment. Richard Moss spoke of his encounters with these levels of spirit and his mentor’s (Franklin Merrell-Wolff) response to his predicament:

… When I saw her waiting for me, I was grateful, but also reluctant to admit how disturbed I felt. However, this was not a time for false pride. I walked to her and said quite simply, “Something is happening. I need help.”

Together we made the visit to Dr. Wolff. He was a wonderful man, nearly ninety years old. I found that in his presence, the sense of intense agitation calmed. He did not have much to say when I told him what was happening, but he did speak of a difficult episode in his own life. He had faced an energy that he referred to as “Mephisto.” He had found that sitting up at night allowed him to maintain the focus of will necessary to pass through this period. These words lingered and helped me face the long nights ahead.

Surrender to the Divine, the abdication of the personal will to the Will of God, has long been a tenet of orthodox religion. And the notion of surrender is commonly bandied about in New-Age formulations of the spiritual process, often with a very different meaning. Some modern conceptions of surrender are more akin to succumbing or capitulation than surrender in the true religious sense. And with this model of conception recently occupying my mind, it was quite predictable that I would experience these magnetic sensations as subjective temptations where I was actively conscious. All became distilled to Surrender vs. Resistance.  And I was confused, even in my tumult. How could this be? The surrender that was most immediately apparent to me appeared to me as nothing more than a capitulation to sin. Resistance seemed right, and in any event, since I was so consumed by fear, no other personally willed response was possible.

With the perspective of time, I have come to a different understanding of surrender. For surrender in the religious sense is not something that one does, for that is an indication that the end of oneself has not been reached. The religious surrender is something that happens to one at the end of one’s self. One is taken, so to speak. Spiritual surrender happens as an opening out and upwards to all of existence, an event that the ego cannot manipulate or orchestrate, for it is the end of the ego, or at the least, its severe chastising and humbling, a sudden usurpation of its central role in the psyche.  And so I was guided to understand in my hall of terrors, bit by bit, that as long as I had the power to personally resist what appeared to be evil, or less than the highest manifestation of what I could perceive as truth or goodness, it was my obligation to do so. That I still had power to resist meant that I was not at the end of myself. This was a curious understanding that I had come to, for it seemed to imply that there was some merit, some real benefit to holding out and holding on as long as possible.  There also seemed to be a developing understanding that spiritual resistance differed from everyday resistance in one important capacity: while everyday resistance consisted of a mere contraction away from an undesirable condition and a densification of identity around an opposite polarity (and there was still plenty of that occurring in me), spiritual resistance consisted of maintaining a stance in the force, becoming transparent and permeable to its activity, allowing the force’s passage , without succumbing to or identifying with specific content that might be stirred up.. I began to look at this implication over the subsequent months in conjunction with the sensations I had experienced and tried to draw some fresh conclusions.

Eventually, I came to see that the temptations I was experiencing subjectively were from another perspective the early byproducts of a (Higher) willful release of attachment to many of the contents of consciousness. I did not personally attempt this renunciation, but the force of the spirit in me was blowing loose the previously-unknown bindings, and what belonged to one realm was rushing out to that kinetic realm, while what belonged to the spiritual destiny was cut loose and pulled free into a realm of comparative living stasis. It was analogous to the reentry of a spacecraft into the atmosphere. All types of buffeting will be encountered in the process, but in another frame of reference, what is actually occurring is that the vehicle is incrementally coming to rest. It was the Christian notion of the sword cutting asunder the nature. The strong pulls were indications that the bindings had only recently been cut, and the weight of all of those attachments was rushing away from my locus of consciousness, out into the physical world, threatening to sweep me away with it. As John Weir Perry stated,

It  [spirit] “bloweth where it listeth” the Gospel says, suggesting that it has a will of its own.  In short, spirit is a strongly moving dynamism free of material structure.

…We find spirit tending constantly to seek release from its entrapment and habitual, routine, or conventional mental structures.  Spiritual work is one of liberating this dynamic energy, which must break free of its suffocation in old forms: old emotional patterns, such as the complexes engendered in the family systems; assumptions about the nature of the world and human life; values that need revision from time to time as conditions change; and cultural forms derived from family, subculture, or dominant cultural conditionings that must change with the times.  Again there are ancient traditions expressing this work of liberating spirit, such as the emotionally painful labors of the nature philosophers of medieval times dedicated to freeing nous from physis, spirit from imprisonment and matter — in the natural world and in the body.

The night in the hotel room was very long, and there was no sleep at all. At the gray light of dawn, I placed a call to my parents, intending only to tell them of my plans to be gone for the weekend. When they heard my exhausted voice, and I broke down on the phone, they immediately made plans to come to Phoenix that afternoon. I cancelled my plans for Flagstaff and returned to my apartment mid-morning to wait for them.

*              *              *

I came awake in a hotel room two days later, haggard from the unrelenting personal stress and reluctant to face another day. But my support had arrived: my mother was up and quietly moving around the room, and my father was out tending to some local errands. The previous two nights had been adventures in themselves, but for the moment, with the sun up outside, I stole a few moments of rest and peace. And then, as I laid on my side in bed, periodically opening and closing my eyes, I saw it.

Moving up and down in tandem with and no lower than my eyelids was a curtain or cap of intensely white light that extended up from my head out of the range of my sight. It was not a visible light, for I knew that my mother could not see it. Instead, there seemed to be a new sense beginning to operate in me – an internal sight, and the cap of white light was visible with the new sight. It did not matter whether my eyes were open or closed – I could see the light, sharply delineated and ceasing at my eye level laid over my normal visual sense when the eyes were open, or against a backdrop of black when my eyes were closed. Furthermore, I could feel this cap sitting in a slightly constricting band around my head, where it felt slightly uncomfortable, for both its intensity and the radiance. I experimented with the light for a few minutes, noticing that the curtain raised a modicum when I opened my eyes, then dropped a little as I closed my eyes. Back and forth, for several minutes, I watched the display, before I finally just accepted its presence and drifted off to sleep for a few more minutes. When I got up later in the morning and became active, the internal sight disappeared.

This episode marked the first and last time that I saw any light around me. But it was not the last time that I saw otherworldly light around other people or objects.  In the succeeding months, when I would go into a chapel to meditate and pray, I would notice that items in the vicinity of or on the altar would glow around the edges. First I would see the glow around the cross itself; then, the longer I watched it passively and in a detached state of mind, the brighter the glow would grow, as other objects in the vicinity would also begin to glow.  The glow seemed to wax and wane and mirrored my state of diffuse observation. It appeared to be a living light, a light that had its own rhythm of respiration.

Several months later, in isolated and intermittent episodes, I began to notice auras around the head and shoulders of individuals. Generally, the light I was seeing was some version of white with a colored tinge to it, most strongly visible directly over the head of the individual. One episode in particular stayed in my memory. I was participating in a class when I noticed that the speaker had an aura that was present, but dim and colored off-white to tan. It did not stand out very much at all. But as I was studying the phenomenon, a much brighter light distracted me over the head of one of the class members sitting just in front of me. Her aura was pure white mixed with what appeared to be a violet tongue of flame directly over the crown of her head. It was a stunning and gorgeous sight.

By the end of the weekend, it had become apparent to both my parents and me that I was in no condition to be living alone and carrying on with my daily life. We made the decision at dinner on Sunday evening that I would return to my hometown with them the next morning for an undetermined length of time to recuperate. Early the next morning, I stopped by the apartment, threw a few clothes into a duffle bag, and we headed to the airport. I expected to be gone only a few days, back perhaps within a week. Little did I know that I would not return to Phoenix for 10 weeks. The journey was about to become much more rocky.

© Copyrighted Material.  All Rights Reserved.