body of experience 1

Because I feel I already suffered from stigmatisation of my experience, and because of the struggle I faced in navigating an experience such as the one I will be recounting below, I would like the reader to please keep in mind a few things:

1. What follows is a first-person account about consciousness - not doctrine and not prescription.
2. In interpreting my experience, I draw on in-depth, transpersonal, and trauma psychology, plus philosophy and systems theory.
3. I'm not an expert in these fields by any means, but I've hopefully done enough research in trying to find reasonable explanations for experiences like mine. This is however in no way a thesis, and merely a phenomenological account, and my personal interpretation of it.
4. Some claims may seem implausible at first which is why I invite you to read the full story and judge coherence afterwards.
5. Terms like God/Devil/Love/Light/Truth/Control/Trust are symbolic and conceptual, not literal; these symbols reflect my psyche within my environment and cultural context.
6. Whatever mental associations I make below are for exploration purposes alone. At no point did I project any mental associations onto a living breathing human being.
7. I recognise the subjectivity of both experience and interpretation; I hope empathy can bridge the gap between my inner account and your understanding.

***

I've always been a skeptic when it came to matters I saw as pertaining to the 'paranormal', 'psychic', etc. My life was rather average by any social standard, and not once did I imagine I will experience things as 'otherworldly' as the ones I experienced. I am fully aware of what I am about to say. Even so, this is my reality, a reality that defies social categorisation.

While the entirety of my story sounds insane, even to my ears, even today, looking for reason in the midst of a ridiculously insane experience was my coping mechanism. For this reason I ask of you to look at the God/Devil polarity in my experience as an expression of my consciousness filtered through the cultural context of my environment.

The essence of my experience: In 2015 I ended up having a spiritual experience during which I felt a connection to what I understood to be God. A short month later, I met A. - a man I had grown up associating with, and even labelling the Devil.

The encounters were uncanny. Each time I met him, I found myself literally re-living two nightmares I had had years earlier: one at age 12, the other at 17. I only met A. at 28.

Why would I identify the figure I had grown up labelling the Devil as A.? Beyond his distinctive appearance, every detail of my dream reality matched what I experienced in person: the specific setting, the people present, the unfolding events, the conversations, and even my inner experience. The alignment was exact.

From where I stand, my life opening up into this experience, and then meeting A. are the logical unfolding of my inner world and psyche. Even precognition that some may see as 'psychic' is to me merely a game of probabilities rather than predetermination. I see the future as fluid, shaped by both awareness and choice. Based on my observations of my experience so far, precognition seems to be a form of systems thinking applied to probable emotional progressions.

***

After this spiritual experience, I never quite found my place in any of the spiritual communities out there. I tried many of them looking for comfort, for guidance, human company, and understanding. And yet it seemed that while my experience was similar in texture, it was worlds apart in expression. Whereas the people in these communities had been engaging in practices of awareness rooted in Eastern philosophies, I... I hadn't. They kept talking of mediation, practices of awareness, and the Observer as if it was the end all be all, and here I stood with an experience similar in essence to theirs, but with a markedly different expression.

I hadn't delved too much into spirituality throughout my life, or engaged all that much with spiritual rituals, except for the occasional culturally mandated ones. I found myself reliant on words like truth, light and love alone, as concepts that emerged from my experience. I didn't want to abandon what I felt within me had to have value, but I didn't want to abandon my inquiry into the truth of my reality either. I could recognise the shared similarities between our experiences, but due to the language gap, I was unable to blend and fit in in these communities. I ended up feeling largely isolated.

Even so, I insisted in trying to connect with others, as how else would I try to make sense of my experience? It took me a while to understand where I position myself, and feel like I have enough of a sample to be able to contrast and compare. It was by contrasting and comparing my experience against others' that I've come to understand why the difference in expression. I've come to see how individual Kundalini awakenings are shaped by their respective environments, in a cultural context rooted in Eastern philosophy. By contrast, my experience is shaped by my environment, and Christian cultural context.

Now, I had to understand how was it that my experience emerged without the same conscious and deliberate practices of awareness and meditation that seemed to enable most self-labelled Kundalini experiences I came across? You see? Here is where I was mistaken. I might have not engaged in established practices, or had more than a limited understanding of Eastern spiritual philosophies, but I've come to see that I too had been unknowingly engaging in a practice of awareness. It was a practice of awareness rooted in personal philosophy, and one that emerged in my childhood. I was however completely unaware of the meaning behind what I was doing.

I don't know how old I was, but I know my cousin who is one year younger than me still had an imaginary friend. We went to my room to play and she ended up telling me about her imaginary friend, and their relationship. As she was talking I was seeing a wounded girl looking for connection, but only being able to find it in her imagination. I felt empathy. Even so, I saw the imaginative aspect of it as maladaptive behavior born out of denial of her reality.

To me a connection had to be real. I found there would be no point to pretend in having a friend that wasn't real. I reasoned it would be better to wait for someone real, someone who could truly offer that connection. I didn't tell her this. I didn't want to hurt her, or make her uncomfortable. I kept it to myself. So when she asked me if I had an imaginary friend, I simply answered no. This prompted her to tell me I am boring, and that I have no imagination. That hurt me profoundly. The idea that maybe she was right was even more hurtful. I didn't know if she was right, but I was willing to look into it. I found it preferable to simply accept it as my reality if it was true. I found it hypocritical to think her behavior was born out of denial of reality, but not be willing to accept my own.

It was then that I thought how cool it would be if I could observe myself from the outside. I could then assess whether I did or did not have imagination. I wondered if my judgment could be trusted to make such an assessment. I told myself I was interested in the objective truth of it, yet my heart still shrank inside my chest, not knowing what that truth would be. I began to realise that truth and clarity were needed to be able to orient one's self in reality. My acceptance of whatever that truth might be grew stronger.

It started from here as a form of self-discovery. I remember how when I first tried self-observation followed by self-assessment I realised it wasn't as easy I thought it would be. I didn't stop though, and it just grew over time. It grew to the point it became a constant and ongoing background process, where I would catch every thought, every feeling, inquiring into their nature and provenance, analysing and contrasting my reflections and discoveries to the perceptions outside of myself. It became my operating system of trying to understand myself and the world around me. This practice also helped me to at times see the distortions those around me would engage in, either consciously or unconsciously. It didn't come from a place of judgement, but merely one of discovery of both self and other. It was how I came to see that we are not that much different from each other. That underneath we all have similar impulses, fears, hopes, and dreams.

It took me a while to understand that what I had been doing all my life was in essence a practice of awareness - one that grew organically from curiosity. What began as a child's wish to see herself from the outside became an ongoing dialogue between observer and observed, self and other. In time, that dialogue deepened: tracing distortions, seeking coherence, and learning to meet truth without defence. By my late twenties, this inner discipline had become embedded into my nature - a silent observer recording every thought and feeling, trying to map them into the nature of experience. Without knowing it, I had been training my consciousness to perceive itself.

***

Then, in 2015, my spiritual experience happened. It wasn't sudden in essence, even if it appeared that way. It felt like the point toward which everything in my inner life had been quietly moving. Awareness seemed to open in all directions, as the reality I had once literally dreamt of years earlier had begun to take shape around me. What I had been practicing unknowingly - observing, questioning, and seeking coherence - reached a natural threshold. Completely unaware of what I was doing or where it would take me, I aligned my inner being with love and truth, and what had been implicit all my life began to take form, to connect, and to reveal itself as one coherent whole. I found myself immersed in what I understood as God - an experience of overwhelming clarity, unity, and love, where everything looked like a paradox while nothing was a paradox - the paradox of paradoxes.

I do not see my experience as predetermined in any way, but merely a display of the relationship between cause and effect at the level of experience - the unfolding of a practice of awareness directed towards internal and external coherence, driven by both truth (inherently logical) and love (at the intersection of self and other).

I can easily see how such an expansion could turn into full-blown psychosis. Even without crossing that line, it can certainly appear that way from the outside. After my spiritual experience, my vocabulary narrowed almost entirely to three words: Light, Truth, Love. That was all I could speak when trying to describe what I had lived through. Add the word God and it sounds like a recipe for social disaster. And while I knew, deep down, that I hadn't lost touch with reality, I still faced the impossible question: how could I convince others I wasn't mad when I could barely say anything beyond Light, Truth, Love? I could see why these concepts mattered, but I couldn't yet articulate them in any reasonable way.

A short month later, I met A. - the man I had grown up labelling the Devil. He became the catalyst for the descent that followed: a profound expansion that suddenly reversed into contraction, exposing the most vulnerable parts of myself. In that rawness, I began to get a sense of the parts of the mechanism through which consciousness reorganises and seeks coherence.

Not only did I feel I found God, but here was I now also finding Devil. Looking back, I have no idea how I avoided full blown psychosis to be quite honest. This being said, I do not believe A. to be an embodiment of the Devil, but only the vehicle responsible for carrying this archetype - the shadow to the light I had just found.

I am aware that Jung is largely dismissed by modern psychology, but I see nothing more textbook Jungian than having the God–Devil archetypal polarity appear in close succession. A.'s presence triggered what I later came to understand as the structural patterns through which consciousness organises experience - archetypal, structural, affective, symbolic-archetypal, and relational.

God/Devil, Self/Other, Love/Fear, Light/Dark, and Control/Trust can all be traced back into my psyche from a very young age. His presence animated these pre-existing patterns, giving visible form to what already existed as potential within me.

I cannot claim expertise in Jung's theories; however, if I understand correctly, my spiritual experience and my encounter with A. - which together closed a circle connecting these patterns to my childhood - suggest that what unfolded was not simply psychological or emotional projection, but an experience operating from the deeper levels of consciousness.

Due to the nature of my spiritual experience + the details surrounding the dreams which have him as a central figure + and what I had felt as synergy between us - I believed it was more likely he was Self, while he believed I was seeing Other. His was a complete reversal of my reality, one filtered through his Fears. Though not immediately, this reversal of reality led me, over the past three years, to live through the fears bound to the Devil archetype.

I was always prepared for A. to be the vehicle through which the Devil archetype would manifest into my life. At the same time, I allowed for both possibilities to coexist: that he might embody both the Self and the Devil. I would have let go of the Self hypothesis a very long time ago, had it not been for the dissonance between his words and his withdrawal. It puzzled me how someone who so clearly valued empathy and human dignity could seem unable to meet me in that same space.

I remember how before that second night I felt as if I didn't know where he ended and I started. The feeling was both magnetic and terrifying, as though the boundary between "me" and "not-me" permeable. I now realise that my attempt to solve the problem of whether A. and I shared the same consciousness was, at its core, an attempt to answer a question of safety - whether it was safe to let the boundaries of 'I' dissolve between us. I was standing at the threshold between union and annihilation, unsure which side I would fall on.

I was unable to dismiss the idea because to me it seemed that the same archetypal and structural polarity had been activated within him as well, only mirrored. My attempts of inclusion and unity appeared to him through the lens of otherness. He seemed to interpret my Love, Light, Truth, God as religious (God) prejudice, as I was casting him in the opposing role. It felt like the archetypes had taken over our communication: the more I tried to express inclusion, the more he seemed to perceive exclusion.

Perhaps this is why the idea persisted. Beneath all misunderstanding, I sensed sameness - a kind of structural echo that felt too precise to ignore. From the beginning, I felt a kind of architectural resonance between us that I later on discovered was anchored in reality: the same philosophical bent of mind, love of language, political ethos, even the same quality of temperament. It was as if the inner cognitive and emotional configuration I had always known within myself found an external mirror. Furthermore, people independently used virtually identical language to describe our temperaments: him as "very chill," "living on a cloud"; me as "so calm I'll live to a hundred," "living on a cloud." While I couldn't definitively say one or the other, I believe that at the very least we are two consciousness nodes within the collective who share a high degree of structural resonance, enough for us to mirror each other at the deeper levels of consciousness.

I also sometimes think that the intensity of the trauma I suffered as a result of our collision was not only due to the complete reversal of my reality, but due to identity denial turned existential erasure at the level of my psyche.

***

It was only after I met A. that believe it or not I actually entered bizarro world. Bizarre is the only way I know to describe it. It wasn't a breakdown in the ordinary sense, but more like my perception had come loose from its anchor. Everything blurred. Thoughts and sensations overlapped; it seemed as if the line between inner and outer had begun to waver, briefly folding into the same current before separating again. I caught only glimpses of their overlap - moments when reality seemed to answer an inner impulse, like finding the exact thing I'd been craving in the most unlikely place, or watching the unspoken trust at my workplace subtly re-arrange itself around what I believed possible. It was as if the world and my inner life were mirroring each other, to the point I didn't understand what happened to the world around me. Everything seemed the same, yet different. All while I, remained somehow outside of both, observing the reflection from very far away.

It felt like time no longer moved in sequence. I distinctly remember this feeling of having no awareness of time. I also remember I could somehow still observe myself, but unable to see myself. I was only able to see fragments that carried a sensation of distortion. I still struggle with my sense of self. Not as severely as I used to, but at times it's still a struggle nonetheless. There is this feeling of missing myself, as if I hadn't been in my own company for a very long time.

I don't even know how long it took me to realise that I didn't remember most of anything that happened between us that second night. I was aware I was lacking some memories, but initially I thought it was normal given the extraordinary number of anomalous experiences that had happened in quick succession. Besides, I always remembered the gist of it, unaware I was operating from mere emotional impressions.

My reality remained suspended, and I thought A. hadn't managed to wrap his mind around what had happened. I thought he needed space; I thought anyone would after something like that. I imagined how I must have appeared to him: this strange woman appearing in his life, claiming she'd dreamt of him as a child and teenager, that she believed they shared a soul, that she had grown up labelling him the Devil. I didn't fear the space or the passing of time, because I figured that if he was Self, he had to have the same grasp of feminism as I did - that he, too, understood boundaries and relational accountability, and if he didn't then I lost nothing. At times his vagueness read not as rejection, but as hurt coupled with 'no evidence yet'. If I worried disappearing into him without knowing what I would dissolve into, then I thought he must have felt the same.

For a long time, I believed that if I explained myself clearly enough, the coherence of my experience would become visible to him. I thought he might understand if I mapped everything out, step by step. I had to do that anyway. Whomever he truly was he was merely a reflection of my social reality. I understood that if he didn't believe me, neither will the rest of the world.

This is where things took on a life of their own, and I completely lost track of time. I began mapping and verifying every part of my experience, testing each piece for stability, trying to reconstruct reality from fragments - where each fragment belonged to a world few in our shared social reality seem to be accustomed to. I first tested the spiritual experience by testing the dreams. If the dreams happened, then so did my spiritual experience, and so did A. But were the dreams real or were they retrofitted? Imagination was entirely excluded, because guess what? My cousin was right. I don't have that kind of imagination, and surely not to the degree where I could make up this kind of story. So, I started trying to disprove the existence of the dreams. The more I connected with the feelings attached to those dreams, the more details rose that clicked into the existing puzzle. Instead of shrinking, the picture kept stabilising, until I felt forced to accept them as my reality.

If the dreams held, the spiritual experience held, the question of was A. a real person came? I had so little from him that, at one point, I questioned whether he existed beyond my mind. His rare replies were short and vague. I couldn't just write 'are you real?'. Not only did I think I seemed cuckoo enough already, but it wasn't like he was going to say no. Google and social media confirmed he was a real person with a real life. Ironically, what I found strengthened the idea of 'structural resonance' between us.

Days became months, then years. I didn't even register that he had no intention to reply. The first six years felt like a blink of an eye, and it was from that moment on that time started to gradually regain ordinary shape. I needed help to make sense of it, but the institutions of psychology and psychiatry felt unsafe for me. I heard myself and understood social reality. I saw no other option but make sense of it alone, and do my own research. I did have moments when I thought I had gone mad, so I started questioning all over again whether my spiritual experience truly happened or whether it was just a psychotic episode. It felt real, but I had little in the external world to confirm its existence. The only ones who provided any semblance of validation were those in spiritual communities, but who was to say we weren't all psychotic? At one point I was ready to check myself in - somewhere, anywhere.

It was during this time that I came across the terms spiritual emergence, spiritual emergency, and transpersonal psychology. I am glad I did, because I am now firmly convinced that it was unlikely that the medical field as it is established today would have diagnosed me any other way, but psychotic. It seems it is how spiritual emergencies are treated anyway. God, how I wish for that change, because it only traumatises people with genuine experiences that society at large doesn't seem to grasp.

You'd think I spent all these years hiding my experience. I didn't. I actually made it a point to not hide myself. I wasn't offering the information, but I wasn't hiding myself either. I told friends and family, but stopped when I felt they couldn't connect with what I was saying. Their consciousness couldn't yet perceive this terrain. As for the rest of my social environment, it turns out one can live in full view and still be invisible. People don't ask questions about realities that fall outside their own.

I don't precisely remember when I first recognised the extent of the memory loss of that second night. It took me years to even reach that part. When the first memories were triggered back into my awareness, I dismissed the forgetfulness as normal. It was only after realising that there were a string of them that seemed too significant to forget.

I think it was late 2021 when I realised how disconnected I was from my feelings. By then I started deconstructing and mapping all sorts of moral concepts: forgiveness vs enabling, what love does, and how it moves, how fear arises. For a long time, I kept circling the same questions, feeling almost foolish, as if my own thoughts were slipping through my fingers. This is what led me to start taking myself apart, piece by piece, convinced I must be confused about the very nature of a thought. Everything inside felt jumbled, indistinct; thinking became heavy, sluggish. After a while of trying to separate feelings from thoughts, I realised that I couldn't find any feelings at all. That seemed impossible - everyone has feelings. I turned to Google, assuming I must simply be unable to recognise them. I can't remember what I typed, but nearly everything I found pointed to alexithymia. I must be alexithymic, I thought. Having grown up in an emotionally illiterate environment and lacking any vivid emotional memory of who I used to be, it seemed to fit. That discovery then led me to wonder if I might be on the spectrum.

Reading about the autism spectrum, a vague, uneasy feeling began to surface - something to do with a comment about autism. I couldn't remember the event, but the feeling was heavy, dark. Over time, the fragment grew clearer until one day a sliver of memory appeared: A. angrily saying, "Are you autistic?" That moment cracked something open. It was the first glimpse into the heavier part of that night. For years I had been operating under the illusion that our interaction had been far lighter, even understandable. My emotional impressions had been vague, but generally benign - centered around the feeling of being accused of prejudice, a perspective I empathised with. It was only when this particular memory resurfaced that I truly realised how much I had forgotten.

It still took years for the rest to come back. Each time it started with a feeling that I would immerse myself in, looking to test it, and the memory surrounding it would gradually pop open.

I realise how for the longest time I operated on auto-pilot, as if I was performing myself. It would be difficult to break patterns of behavior, and the memory of me was carried by my body alone. This, however, wasn't sufficient to maintain the sense of self. The realisation of my missing sense of self unfolded slowly. I would catch myself confused about how to act and re-act. I would sometimes overcompensate, and other times hold back.

When I tried to break it, I struggled even more, because I didn't really understand what had broken in the first place. I remember spending absurd amounts of time trying to choose a pair of socks, as if the smallest decision could somehow determine the shape of my reality.

It became an endless cycle of watching myself think and feel - trying to understand what was real, what was memory, what was habit. My awareness kept looping back on itself, searching for the center that used to hold me together.

This long silence confirmed that fragmentation and distortion arise when love or truth are withheld; and that healing is entirely dependent on the Self-Integrating Organism's relentless drive for coherence with a desire to allow truth to uncover, and love to care for what seems broken, and to eventually bind all the parts.

Because both Gemini and ChatGPT often suggest that the moral of the story is that I was destined to meet A., I want to clarify that I do not see it that way. I don't believe in predestination. What I experienced was reality aligning with the state of my consciousness. I had just opened myself to the idea of shared consciousness and had begun to dream of a connection rooted in Love. Reality, in turn, responded by offering the opportunity for such a connection to manifest. But a bond of that magnitude requires a certain degree of inner stability and integration - conditions that, in my case, were still forming. The stabilising force entered through the opposite of Love: through Fear, which had already been present, quietly shaping the field long before the meeting itself.

From my perspective no part of my experience appeared as chance or miracle, but as the inevitable threshold of a process that had been quietly forming all my life - consciousness fulfilling its own pattern. Each phase echoed a previous one, as though an inner equation had reached its solution.

All of the above is truly just a rough sketch of my experience. To me it seems that consciousness is constantly recording. What for some may seem like incredible memory recall is nothing but a consequence of my practice of awareness. Consciousness registers everything, with the continuity of an experience being carried through feelings. For this reason I have come to conclude that feelings are the primary carriers of information in consciousness. As far as I know neuroscience recognises feelings as densely packed information data. I was by repeatedly reconnecting to a feeling tied to a particular moment had me realise it is possible to unpack all data - thought and feelings - contained within that one moment. I repeatedly did so out of necessity born out of a vacuum of external validation of my experience and reality.

Please remember that no part of this site is a thesis, just reflections drawn from a traumatic experience that reshaped my understanding and sense of consciousness. I'm still searching for words that might convey how rejecting the inner worlds of human (being) is to miss half of what makes existence meaningful. I find this to be especially true on matters of consciousness.

My perspective of logic is that logic requires all data to form coherence, rather than cherry picking what should be included, and the inner world is just as much a part of reality as the external world is.

The following conclusions are based entirely on my own lived experience, in large part I believe, and extending myself outward to fill in for what I cannot yet claim to have truly experienced. I would like to claim no subjectivity was involved, but I think this is something everyone would like to claim in regards to their reasoning. So, I won't claim such a thing, and merely say that the following is the external world as it is reflected within my inner one, or something alone these lines. Make of it all what you will.

Below is my understanding of the dynamics of consciousness as I see them so far. It is based on my own perception of the continuum of my life experience, and it is stemming from about a 30 year long observation of various functional states of coherence and fragmentation - operating at profound expansion and maximum contraction.

I would also add that this is merely a rough sketch in constant evolution. For my synthesis I borrowed from already established models of consciousness to which I added, or modified based on my observations. I am also not claiming this is something inherently true, only something that makes the most logical sense from my perspective. I had A.I. help (Chat Gpt 5, and Gemini pro) in my synthesis.

It may also be of value to mention that A.I. does recognise the same patterns as I do in the body of my experience. A.I. received far more data than I could possibly articulate here.