“Great and Unsettled Difficulties”: The Progression of Symptoms

…With the false support of primal repression removed, we free-fall through the vast Ground of Being, buffeted by forces much larger than ourselves. Rudolf Otto once said that the Holy often treats us ungently. Of course this is so. The Holy is essential; it does not respond to the inessential. The inessential is what we hold most dear: our desires, our attachments, our fantasies, our fears, our pleas for “protection,” our illusory sense of self. The Holy responds to none of this. It responds to what is real. The Holy demands that we return to It, with awareness, as pure light…

…The ego has already cowered in the face of loss; now it cowers in the face of possession by a power infinitely larger than itself. Each of the world’s wisdom traditions acknowledges periods of great and unsettled difficulties that can sometimes precede, sometimes accompany, and sometimes follow the early stages of spiritual awakening. Christian tradition speaks of this as purgation. St John of the Cross called it  “the dark night of the soul.” Other traditions speak of it as Zen sickness, the desert or the wilderness, or “sickness unto death.”

… Metaphorically, there are “winds” during this free-fall, the ripples and transmutations of the Ground of Being. They can “lift one up” to the extraordinary experiences of visions, intuitive wisdom, and raptures, and then “fling one down” again as the power of the Ground of Being burns off the remaining dross of separateness.. This is the nature of the dramatic awakening and resurgence of repressed material that founded the mental ego. It is the phase during which the ego faces its own deeper, far stronger, more powerful Self, returning to the inner source of its own being.

— Kathleen Singh, The Grace in Dying

While returning to my hometown was good in the sense that I had my parents present to look after me, and I had taken myself out of the environment that had precipitated the event, things were still very precarious.  I had a strong intuition that the event was not simply a psychotic breakdown, due to the circumstances of its origin, and at least passing familiarity with the notion that not all transformative events were sweetness and light. And even in my state, having had previous encounters with the psychiatry field^[1], I was deeply distrustful of the field for an event like mine. I had experienced first-hand how casually and sloppily mental health diagnoses were slapped on patients^[2], and I knew that medical psychiatry had no place, no conceptual framework, to acknowledge and study a transformational event. I could write an exposition on the shortcomings of psychiatry in this regard^[3], but it will suffice to say that I vehemently insisted to my parents that this was a spiritual event and not simply a breakdown.  I wanted and needed to be allowed to stay in the family home and not packed off to a hospital or institution, where I would have been labeled as delusional and drugged out of my mind. I also had a strong sense that I needed to actively seek for a way through this event through spiritual application. Thus, prayer, consultations with priests and ministers, and passive meditation became critical daily adjuncts to my basic daily regimen.

For the first two weeks at home, I fought the battle alone, seeking what might work, what might give me, if not command over, then at least accommodation with the experience, having nothing but willpower to hold me together. I was waging a losing war. Those two weeks saw a rapid deterioration of my state, increasing levels of terror, and the force of the phenomenon being ratcheted up further as my resistance weakened.  My cognitive functions were rapidly degraded. With the pain and intensity of my personal suffering, I found that I could not concentrate on anything longer than an hour per day. In fact, an hour spent tending to personal business would mentally exhaust me. In bits over a period of several days, I turned over power of attorney to my parents, as I assumed I was not going to come out of the situation functionally competent. I began to feel I was a goner.

Thinking in my usual concentrated manner was, in retrospect, a narrowing down of consciousness. It was a form of contraction, a distilling of essence into a gossamer network of connections and relationships that had to be navigated sequentially and logically. The Force was simply too intense, too powerful to be constricted in this way for very long. It was like trying to screw a lawn hose gun onto the end of a gushing fire hose. Focusing on the specifics of daily life and concentrating on solving problems or hearing out disagreements brought on sensations of excessive voltage in a circuit not designed to hold it. There were sensations of resistance and overheating or meltdown. Emotional releases in the course of disagreements allayed some of the tension/resistance, but the tensions would reform in a matter of minutes at a slightly different level, and there was never enough emotion forthcoming for a lasting resolution. I found that I could no longer follow the simpleton plots of network sitcoms on TV. A presidential inauguration and a Super Bowl came and went during the course of this spiritual illness; I know that the events were played out in front of me, but I have no recollection of either, and was not even cognizant of matters beyond my personal hell for a number of weeks. I was easily disoriented and overwhelmed. I became afraid to walk alone in the neighborhood I had grown up in for fear that I would get lost and not be able to find my way back to the house. I found that most of my waking hours I had to willingly put myself into a “spaced-out” frame of mind, a free-float, sparing concentration on any matters not absolutely vital to deal with. Closing my eyes helped, as having the visual field in front of me was a standing invitation to fixate or lock attention on any of a multitude of items in the environment. Once medication was brought into the picture, I was able to sleep, and sleep was the only viable option left to me for passing time. Sleep claimed 14-15 hours a day.

The headaches and the bloated, inflated feelings in the cranium continued to plague me on a daily basis, more hours than not. I awoke with them, and I went to bed with them. They were so persistent that we began to fear a tumor or some other growth in the brain.  I was subjected to a thorough physical and medical history evaluation, including blood work and lab tests, by our family physician.  These evaluations returned nothing but a high cholesterol reading. The headaches continued. One day, Norman, a family friend came by on a pre-arranged visit to take me out for a drive. My condition had deteriorated in the brief two hours between the setting of the outing and Norman’s arrival. By the time he pulled up in our driveway, I wasn’t feeling well and expressed reservations that I should go. Norman was very accommodating, and said we could suspend the drive and simply go to a local bookstore. I suggested we try the outing instead, but within the first block of driving and at a slow speed, Norman crossed a gutter dip draining water at an intersection. It was almost too much. I felt as if my head was going to pop. My consciousness began to swim, and I felt some portion of my identity slip away from my tightly marshaled control. I grimaced, groaned, and closed my eyes. “This isn’t going to work,” I told him, “Perhaps we should go to the bookstore after all.” And so we did.

Upon arriving at the bookstore (what an amusing thought! If I had been feeling better, I would have laughed at the absurdity of it. I was so far from being able to read anything that I might as well have been a kid without a nickel at the candy store), Norman and I split up and began to browse the shelves. Within a few minutes, I was exhausted, and reduced to simply walking very slowly up and down the aisles, trying not to lose consciousness. We had only been there a few minutes, and I did not wish to disrupt Norman’s visit, so I found my way outside, where I sat against a window ledge on the side of the building, closed my eyes, and tried to focus on my breathing. I was having an increasingly difficult time of it. Something was worse about this headache…they were all bad, but this one seemed to have an intensity and pressure to it that threatened to cause me to forget who I was. After a half hour or so, with the headache showing no sign of abating, I went inside and found Norman, where I told him I was not feeling well and needed to get home.

Returning home, I found the pain so intense that I needed absolute quiet, absolute oblivion, and complete release of my personal identity. I couldn’t think, remember, or talk. My mother helped me into an easy chair in the living room – I didn’t think I could make it back to the bed –

and covered me with a blanket. For two to three hours, I hung in some nether world, neither fully an individual with an identity, nor fully given over to diffuse states of being. I was somewhere in between, and my whole existence was nothing but the pain in my head. Events occurring in the household around me sounded as if they were coming from far away. There was nothing I could do but observe, not a detached and clinical observation, but seeing while immersed in a cauldron or vortex.

I watched / felt as the headache split into two centers of mass of opposing polarity somewhere near the top of my brain. I felt these centers of mass rotate down over a few seconds, each on its respective side of the head. There seemed to be some of my identity caught in a magnetic field effect between the two masses. Then, as I watched, the masses began to pull apart. The field between the masses, and all caught in between them, began to pull apart like taffy.  The masses continued to pull until they passed out of my awareness, and I felt the entire field and all that had been caught in it (thoughts? Feelings? Conceptions? Unconscious bits of self?) dissolve into the ground of being. I was horrified. I felt I had just participated in the process of death. This is how it had to happen. This was how it did happen. Part of what I had formerly thought if as myself was gone into the ocean of existence. It was a ghastly and sobering event. There was no sense of beatitude or joyous release. There was only shock and a sense that a part of me had just died, and I had witnessed it. This did nothing to allay my broader fears about what was happening to me. I feared that the rest of my sanity would soon pass away in the same way.

Other disturbing symptoms appeared once I had left Phoenix. I began to notice a diurnal “tide” or reversal in direction in the Force. For the active part of the day and into the evening, the flow was into me, as it had been during the opening. Upon awakening in the mornings, though, the flow was reversed, and I could feel the top of my head fissioning or venting energy in great pulses. This venting would invariably bring on violent bouts of retching and dry-heaves. Most mornings for a period of two to three weeks would find me forced out of bed and on the floor of the bathroom hanging over the toilet bowl, retching from the fullness that was in me. Much later, these digestive convulsions would recur at semiannual intervals.  I came to regard them as a sign that the Force had come out of a period of dormancy with renewed action. They were unmistakable and unforgettable confirmations that would appear out of the blue every six to eight months or so.

As the pressure had first manifested bearing down on my head and neck in the first days of the opening and had worked its way deep into my spine, and the burning continued through the days, there now developed a strange inner sensation of strongly-polarized magnetic fields bearing in on me, leading to a feeling of always living in the middle of a pressure-cooker. I became newly aware of the energetic cocoon I had first experienced on the day of the undoing, but now instead of experiencing it as a ball of fire, I felt it as strongly fluxing and warping magnetic force fields that played over me at close range, bearing in on me and always threatening to break through and dissolve the subtle boundaries of self. A vise-like compression had seized me and progressively began to work down the body and this newly sensed body template (for I now knew through intimate experience that what was now my self did not stop at the boundaries of my body, but extended into this energetic cocoon). Over a period of weeks, the burning and pressure made several transits from the crown of my head to the genitals and back up. With each transit, I had the sense that another layer of my self (or was it merely my conditioning?) had been burned to distilled essence and collapsed into a core running through my spine. Each successively collapsed layer seemed to have a polarity the opposite of the one that preceded it, thus leading to a sense of very densely-packed, yet extensive in range, thin core of substance impaled from the crown of my head to midway down my back. The heaviness was sufficient that not maintaining my orientation could lead to spells of dizziness. And with each completed transit, the burning and pressure seemed to move further “out” a level.  It is impossible to adequately explain the sensation.

One image of the symptom that came to mind some months later was an astronomical description of the process of stars collapsing into black holes. This seemed to fit for a number of layers of meaning at once. For, not only did there appear to be physical magnetic fields (black holes and magnetic fields have been demonstrated to have a close affiliation) at work on me in an objective sense,^[4]  but the inner sensation was one of being caught and slowly dragged into a wormhole that would annihilate me. Nights became particularly bad periods, for with the relaxation of a particular kind of unfocused vigilance, the process of being sucked into the vortex accelerated. Several times during the first two weeks I would wake from terrifying nightmares to even more terrifying realities, where the field around me was so powerfully strong and charged that it led to a sense of heavy oppression and menace at very close quarters. I began to hold fervent prayer sessions in the middle of the night hours, praying for strength, for deliverance, for the will of God to manifest, to be able to surrender in the proper way. But most of all, I wept in fear and self-centered beseeching. And thus I experientially came to see that all fear at its root is the fear of personal annihilation, of non-being. And that the construct of the personal self is ultimately rooted in nothing but fear; indeed, fear is the very stuff of which a “self” is made.

In retrospect, one of the remarkable abilities of the Force was its tendency to morph freely and at irregular intervals from physical to emotion to energetic/spiritual planes, then cycle back through. No level was left untouched by its action; no mode of action was ill-fitted to the plane it was working on. While the physical sensations after the first few days of the body and body template were ones of compression from all sides towards a center, attempts to build mental structures to hold on to my identity caused a morphing of one portion of the Force into an energetic equivalent of the crushing and bearing down sensations I had experienced physically in the first day or two. One evening in particular, I tried to visualize the Kabalistic “Tree of Life” structure and picture my personal identity as inhabiting this structure. This visualization proved to be a serious mistake, for the Force was instantly on top of this mental structure that I was trying to take refuge in and ruthlessly breaking it down joint by joint. I felt like a weightlifter that had gotten under a weight that he could not hold; the question became how to get out of it without damage. Eventually, there was nothing left to do but to jump back “outside” into the hurricane of the power and watch the rest of the thought-form structure be obliterated.

Over a period of several months, this crushing mental force gradually changed into an evenly toned weighing force that seemed more forgiving and somewhat more permeable. Eventually, I became aware of this weight as not only inhabiting my body, but sensed all around me. It was much like lying on the bottom of a swimming pool and feeling a constant weight of water pressing down evenly as a unified and consistent field. The increased permeability seemed related to an observation many months later that there was a subtle type of equalization that was beginning to transpire, like swallowing to clear the ears in flight. It was and remains unclear to me whether this was a subtle ability that I had conscious control over or whether it was simply an aspect of the Force that began to play in me as it worked more deeply into my being. To this day, the most consistent reminder that I am still in an ongoing process is always announced, not as light, not as spiritus (breath or inner movement), but as pressure or weighing sensations, either on this locus working inwards, or from this locus pressing outwards.  “Upon this rock will I build my Church.” were the words of Christ, and we believed he was speaking of his disciple Peter. But another possibility is that he was referring to the rock-like quality of consciousness beginning to come forth collectively from Him and his disciples. For such weight and heft can indeed prove to be unassailable as a base from which spirit can grow.

Much later, I noticed that certain environments rapidly deepened and thickened the sense of a field weight or mass bearing down or in on me. Being outdoors among living vegetation in the sunlight did it; so, too, did entry into churches, chapels, or temples for sessions of prayer. There was a densification of the field around me,  easily sensed (this did not have the feel of simply a local sensation centered strictly on my personal being, but rather of an atmospheric phenomenon, surrounding and enveloping anyone in its range of influence). The feeling that I was being stalked and hunted down by the crushing Force in the first days over time dissipated to be replaced by mere acute discomfort accompanied by an extended sense of a unified field and self when the pressure sensations came forth. I began to read my states over time; when pressure remained as pressure, I knew that I was still being worked on, and that in a subtle way, I had retreated back into the construct of my self (sometimes involuntarily, as I still have trouble finding the levers of this movement).  When the pressure suffuses into a sense of comforting Presence, then I knew that I was approaching home. And even in the midst of the Presence, there is an intensity (which is another form of pressure) to the feeling that evokes the association of heft and weight for me.

In addition to the head vibrations I experienced, the early weeks of the event brought on intense vibrations of other parts of the body, generally while I was resting in bed at night, but also occurring in prayer sessions and sometimes spontaneously on the street or while driving. The vibrations were not of an epileptic nature, as I could stop them with a specific effort of will, but I never intentionally willed them to start. Legs, arms, hands, jaw and teeth – all were subject to bouts of violent and rapid shaking. In these vibrations, the sensation was as if a potent and directed force occupied the stationary part of the body and pressed hard into parts of the body not yet occupied. Resistance or unconscious blocks in these parts would cause rapid involuntary oscillations or tremors, like a flag or streamer caught on an obstacle in the wind and beating helplessly against the force. All vibrations seemed to require a fulcrum point to launch from – for the legs, it was the sacral region of the lower back and hindquarters; for the arms, it was the shoulders or elbows, for head, neck, and facial vibrations from the back, upper spine and shoulder blades.  In the first two or three weeks, the leg vibrations in bed were particularly disturbing, for they were so violent that they whipped and entrained my lower torso into the action for spells of up to half a minute at a time.

The vibrations seemed to have two causes. Purely physical vibrations for the extremities would occur when I would roll into or inadvertently place my body in a position that would allow activation (i.e. a fulcrum point was brought into place). Otherwise, these tremors would not occur. Vibrations of the head and hands seemed to be related to an influx of substance tied to a new understanding or a new idea.  These insights seemed to expose previously unconscious blocks in my thinking to the action of the Force, which would take immediate advantage of the exposure to rush in and begin work. Invariably, the thoughts that would renew the vibrations were thoughts relating to surrender, to opening wider, to more inclusive interpretations and understandings, and to aspiring to understand the Divine motives at work – essentially thoughts of becoming more selfless, or thoughts and understandings that expressed elements of selflessness. I began to use the occurrences of vibrations as indicators of right thinking.

Late in the appearance and progression of new symptoms, a new one developed – flooding. In a sense, the flooding was a consolidation of many of the previously mentioned symptoms: there was included a sensation of onrushing spirit as in the first days, but now originating from somewhere  “behind” me (i.e. it felt as if the onrush met my spine from the dorsal side first, but it also felt “behind” in the sense that it was coming from the past and ushering me toward a future; additionally, I felt as if it was coming from the subconscious and flowing towards the superconscious) and flowing through to somewhere “ahead” of me. My personal identity was like a thin and permeable membrane stretched across this flood. The association of weightiness, and water, was carried with this flooding, and there was the sense that my unconscious resistance was making the sensation more difficult to bear. The sensation was similar to the intense pulls I had felt in the hotel room during the first week of the Undoing, except that there was no sense of being pulled towards or tempted into situations I wanted no part of. The emotional content was gone. Early in the process, I was less aware of the feeling outside of my personal body boundaries…only that I found it necessary to find some “other place” to hang my personal identity within my head (for this was where I felt the hurricane-force winds exclusively originally). It is difficult to even begin to convey what this felt like, to have the personal identity no longer central in the psyche, but hunkered down in some protected corner while cosmic forces ripped through me and had free reign over the body and mind. Later, as my sensitivity and awareness of fields grew, I began to feel the sensations originating some distance away from the body, as well as in the body. It was as if I was at once a part of the flooding force in my vicinity and the membrane through which it was passing. Holding my personal identity seemed to require a spiritual type of treading to keep from being churned under in the rip-tide phenomenon that could have swallowed me. The sensation was later still centered in my head, but I also began to feel it in my heart region, again with the extended feeling perception both “behind” and “ahead” of the heart.

Overall, the most fear-inducing aspect of the entire phenomenon, present in one guise or another in every one of the modalities, was its seizing aspect. There was the feeling of being caught in the death-grip of Something that would not under any circumstances let me go, was painful to bear, and fearful to behold. Nothing I could do could induce release, though eventually a homeopathic remedy and medication sedated the process just enough that the personal resources could regroup. The phenomenon was much larger than any individual, more powerful by far than my ability to mobilize against. It took many forms, but it never encouraged perception of anything but ultimate and complete possession. My intense fear in the first several weeks mobilized enough strength to arrest the process for minutes or sometimes the span of an hour or so, but the arrest was simply that – the Force did not retreat and give back any territory. And intense fear cannot be sustained around the clock. Relaxation of the will or falling asleep would cause an immediate amplification and renewed strength of the process. There were sensations of being pinioned or weighted to the bed or furniture as something from “below” swam over me and consumed me from within. Many nights, I started awake from nightmares only to find myself in waking nightmares. The pressure and compression sensations, the crushing and weighing down sensations, the burning, the relentless expansion, the flooding…all appeared malevolent in the early weeks and bent solely on my destruction. All contributed to the perception of seizure. My terror was increased by the suddenness, relentlessness, and violence of the phenomenon. The early weeks seemed entirely destructive, and my fear was aggravated by not knowing what the ultimate end, if any, would be.

But there was an intuition of what was actually happening that, though it did not have the strength to override my fear, persisted with me throughout the process. Though I was paying a heavy physical, mental, and emotional price for the process, and my personal self seemed to be consumed, a witnessing part of me could see that the process, though brutal and relentless, was in its essential character neutral – neither good, nor evil. Simply a force of being capable of being either resisted or assimilated and subject to imprinting by the frame of mind I carried into the experience. It was ultimately beyond my judgment, beyond moral categories in the same way that a hurricane or firestorm was. After a few weeks, I was able to conceive that perhaps its intent was not merely destruction, but purification for some end beyond the turmoil. There were isolated moments of exhilaration, and events sometimes opened brief portals on a larger dimension. Synchronicities and heavily symbolic occurrences hinted that the process was far larger than the individual self. Guides and teachers along the way were soon to appear.  For all of the storminess and turbulence, there were indications of something large and potentially magnificent waiting to unfold.

One of these occurred one day, as I lay quiescent on a friend’s couch. Some four or five weeks after the opening, I was at the end of my personal resources. I was too tired to maintain my level of vigilance. I was beyond fear as a motivation for action any longer, and no other motive power was sufficient to prevent further progression of the Force. The Force suddenly blew through and seized complete possession of the last two chakras (the root and sexual), and in the still point between two breaths, all resistance left at any level in my body, turned simultaneously from “NO” to “YES.” There was assent at all levels, complete acceptance of what had happened, what would happen, what is.

In retrospect, from that point on, though still in a difficult transit, I began to slowly and steadily gain strength and vigor. Through Grace, I had turned the corner.

© Copyrighted Material.  All Rights Reserved.

---

^[1] A history of depression (two severe episodes in the 80s) requiring hospitalization.

^[2] When I was finally forced to seek some medical help due to a lack of sleep, I was initially “diagnosed” as having a severe depressive episode!

^[3] The weakness of psychiatry that was most glaringly evident in my limited interactions with it during this time was its unspoken, unproven and ultimately mistaken axioms that human subject/object consciousness (our day-to-day mindsets) dominated by  thinking constituted the limit of human development and the only proper sphere of residence and stabilization. Any deviation from this constituted pathology, to be reined in as quickly and forcefully as possible. I shudder to think what today’s psychiatrists would do to some of the historic spiritual lights of the human race in an active growth process.

^[4] I found the presence of computers and certain electrical appliances very hard to bear within two to three weeks; they threatened to dissolve the last and flimsiest boundary of self I had left, and I could not stand to be in the presence of such fields for more than a few minutes to a half-hour, depending on the strength and proximity of the field. Furthermore, I found that in some cases, appliances, electrical equipment, and light bulbs would blow out or malfunction on me in tandem with escalations of the Force. Computers would lock up on me during my brief work stints on them (for a period of time, this happened every time I attempted to get personal business tended to on the computer), and printers would fail to operate at a frequency that was far above normal. In another case, I was breathing hard and trying to maintain focus on holding a personal identity during a flare-up of the Force when a television across the room suddenly went haywire – the screen first turning solid red, followed by solid green, and the picture was lost for a few moments. Several months later, after the worst had settled down, I could still feel the presence of electrical fields on the crown of my head when driving under transmission lines.