A Short Introduction to Everything that Follows

The following pages provide the data that led me to my understanding of consciousness, experience, and reality. 

After my experience I felt excluded from any rational conversation, as short of laying out the entirety of my story, I only had symbolic language to articulate the structure of my experience. Not only was my story incredibly long since it was basically covering my entire life, but laying out the entirety of it wasn't a guarantee that people would see the patterns. 

My experience was a lot to process, and difficult to navigate, as it involved what transpersonal psychology defines as a spiritual emergence, followed by a traumatic event that resulted in severe memory loss, and dissociation for the following decade. 

My experience was existentially defining and I found myself unable to talk about it adequately which translated into an inability to connect with people. While my experience was similar in texture with other experiences of its kind - Kundalini awakenings for example - the difference in symbolic language, as result of the experiences being filtered through different cultural contexts, made me feel excluded even from these communities. So, basically, my experience was too irrational sounding for mainstream society, but I had the wrong kind of symbolic language for spiritual communities. 

I was left completely alone in that gap with no support system of any kind having to navigate an existentially charged experience while completely disconnected from myself due to the effects of the trauma. I constantly found myself analysing and trying to understand it from various perspectives, as I looked for frameworks that could help explain it. 

The first moment I felt that maybe my experience wasn't doomed to earn me the 'mentally unstable' label, was the moment I discovered a thesis on spiritual emergency, which introduced me to the concept of spiritual emergence as well. This was when I learned that spiritual emergence is recognised human phenomena.

While Jungian theories, archetypal activation, and the process of individuation explained the symbolic part of my experience, I also felt it was insufficient. I always understood I could see a structure and dynamic as a result of my experience, but I didn't yet know how to articulate it beyond the symbolic language. 

The following is the account of my lived experience with spiritual emergence, spiritual emergency, and the ways in which it shattered and shaped my understanding of reality, and my navigation of the aftermath from an utterly dissociated state of consciousness. 

Disclaimer: This website reflects my personal memories, perceptions, and interpretations of past events. All ideas are my own, and names and identifying details have been changed.