For most of my life, I sought to survive, a quest to find answers. I have gained some critical life insights in the past years. I was taking part in some spiritual awakening process was an experience of a far different order that sometimes cannot be explained. I knew that I was going through a profound spiritual experience; no one could convince me otherwise; this was the key that saved my sanity. I was having trouble “keeping it together,” and my whole personality structure was melting and disintegrating. Often my actions looked from the outside like typical psychotic behavior. It was, I’m sure, a challenging and problematic situation for those closest to me, as they couldn’t understand what I was going through, as it was so far off their map of reality. I was bought into the doctor’s diagnosis that I had a mental illness, or the church calls it demon-possessed, as this was their way of “explaining” what was happening to me that fit into their minimal, comfortable view of the world. From my point of view, I was realizing, or should I say, it was being revealed to me, that every moment was the unmediated expression of God. During these experiences, I met and intimately connected with some of the nicest enlightened people. True miracles, completely impossible experiences, and stuff that could only happen in dreams began happening. This is the difference between someone who is genuinely mentally ill, who could be said to be drowning in the stormy ocean of the unconscious, compared to an accomplished mystic, who is nurtured and nourished by swimming in the healing waters of their psyche. I wonder how many cases of mental illness are spiritual emergencies gone sour. I need to recognize the existence of genuine spiritual emergences and learn to differentiate them from experiences of psychosis. Of course, another great danger I can talk about from personal experience is to wind up in the clutches of and be diagnosed and medicated by the medical and psychiatric community, who typically have no understanding of phenomena such as spiritual emergencies. I now understand that all the trials God put me through were an aspect of the spiritual awakening; they were part of my journey to the supernatural world. There is a sense of accepting and embracing whatever has happened in my life, realizing it is all an initiation into the more profound mystery of my infinite and magical being.
Why am I the way I am?
