Living the Aftermath 2015-2021 - Spiritual Emergence, and Archetypal Analysis

          "Anomalous" Experience restated

I've always been a skeptic when it came to anything labelled '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 conventional 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. In time, I found that reason in transpersonal and in-depth psychology, which offered language for experiences that transcend the personal psyche. For this reason I ask of you to look at the God/Devil polarity in my experience as the symbolic expression of my consciousness filtered through the cultural context of my environment, and nothing else.

The essence of my experience: In 2015 I ended up having a spiritual experience during which I felt a connection to what I only knew how to label as God at the time. A short month later, I met A. - a man I had encountered before in two dreams I had experienced as nightmares. I grew up associating A. with the Devil symbolism due to the fear I experienced in these dreams. I had had the dreams years earlier: one at the age of 12, and the other at 17. I only met A. at 28 in 2015. The encounters were uncanny. Every detail of my dream reality matched what I experienced in person: the specific setting, the people present, the unfolding events, the conversations. The second time I met him resulted in a deeply traumatic experience unfolding in an existentially charged moment of my life. This resulted in a decade of observations as I navigated the aftermath of both the spiritual emergence, and self core fragmentation. The following is a brief synopsis of the insights I felt emerge from my experience with such extreme states of consciousness in close temporal proximity.

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-cognitive progressions.

The following is a synthesis of my experience.

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Spiritual Emergence vs A. - Archetypal Analysis

Then, in 2015, the spiritual emergence happened. It was not 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. My inner world came into sharp focus, and I was starting to glimpse into one continuous pattern. 

Memories, feelings, and dreams that I had mostly treated as background noise suddenly became central, as the reality I had literally dreamt of in 2010 began to take shape around me. It felt as if reality as I knew it was shattered, and I felt compelled to try to answer the question of God's existence for myself. Completely unaware of what I was setting in motion, I aligned myself with actions that honored my innate sense of integrity of self and refused what violated it, while remaining fair to the possibility of a hypothetical loving God out of principle alone. That alignment was not intellectual or merely moral; it was existential. 

Fragments I'd carried my entire life began connecting into a coherent whole, and I found myself immersed in what I understood as God - an experience of overwhelming clarity, unity, and love, where everything seemed 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. It was the natural culmination of a practice of awareness directed toward existential honesty, where my choice of authentic selfhood over the paralysing grip of inherited fear and dogma, while remaining fair to the possibility of a loving God, spontaneously resolved the conflict between the reality I experienced as a felt state and the cultural/societal expectations around faith.

I can easily see how such an experience could turn into full-blown psychosis. Even without crossing that line, it can certainly appear that way from the outside. After my experience, my vocabulary narrowed almost entirely to three words: Love, Truth, Light. 

I saw them as both ethical and structural, and I was aware they were a compression of a more complex articulation, but short of relaying the experiential patterns in the entirety of my experience which meant pretty much my entire life, 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 that I hadn't lost touch with reality, I still faced the impossible question: how could I convince others I wasn't mad when, short of laying out all the patterns I could see in my experience, I could barely say anything beyond love, truth, light? 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 very man I had literally dreamt of a decade before, and grown up labelling the Devil. It was very easy to place the devil label onto a figure belonging to what you believe to be mere dreams. Even if I was aware that it was an assumption and not truth, my reality was that I was scared in those dreams, and he was the man from two of those dreams. 

When I met him however, I felt it would be too heavy and unfair to impose that label on someone who'd done nothing wrong. At the same time, I'd just experienced what felt like alignment with what cultures call God. In this context, encountering what cultures call the Devil no longer seemed entirely irrational.

A.'s presence lit up a cluster of patterns that I later found described in Jungian terms as archetypal ways in which consciousness organises experience - structural, affective, symbolic and relational patterns gathered around a single axis: God-Devil compressed Love-Fear, Light-Dark, Control-Trust. Jungian psychology was essential in helping me recognise experiential and archetypal structures, but from what I experienced, shadow seems to be less about repression and more about what consciousness has not yet integrated into coherence. In my experience shadow remains hidden only to the extent that awareness closes around it. When awareness stays open, the same material that appears as shadow in one becomes data for integration in another.

What happened with A. was in no way me projecting the Devil onto him, nor do I see A. as evil - not then, and not now.

I'd been aware and working through my relationship with the Devil archetype long before we met. I was able to do so because of one particular contrast I'd observed. I'd never had a physical type when it came to men - except for one very specific aesthetic: a particular combination of features A. fit into. I noticed how when I'd encounter men who closely resembled this particular configuration, I'd feel an instinctive physical aversion that struck me as odd. My attraction had never been based on physical characteristics, so such strong feelings based solely on appearance seemed unusual for me given my consistent pattern of behavior when it came to attraction towards men.

It took me some time to unpack what these feelings were about: attraction combined with shame. The shame was a defense against acknowledging this attraction - which, through years of dreams featuring this type around whom I felt fear, I'd learned to associate with something dark and dangerous. I'd even resolved the shame and part of my fear by the time I met him. Shortly before we met I nearly got involved with someone the same type. It didn't end up happening, although for completely unrelated reasons. 

When I met A., the pattern didn't activate because I projected it onto him. I did not impose the archetype onto him, but merely recognised it as a possibility. Projection would mean I made him into something he wasn't, and that projection never happened. I simply encountered in reality a person I'd dreamt of years before onto whom I had applied the Devil label. The activation wasn't arbitrary - it was structural, existential. He wasn't simply someone who resembled an internal pattern; he was the actual figure from two dreams that came true in precise detail years later, dreams I grew up labelling with this archetype.

When I met him, before having any awareness of our interactions in the dream, or even that I'd labelled him the Devil, I actually didn't see the Devil. We connected over shared values, which sparked an attraction. Then, when the memory of the dream, and associated fear arose, it seemed too on the nose for me. I'd just experienced what felt like alignment with fundamental coherence, and now someone was triggering my oldest fear pattern? It seemed too convenient. Too narratively neat. I thought: what are the odds I'd "find God" and then immediately encounter "the Devil" - a figure I didn't even believe in? The timing made me skeptical. I didn't dismiss the possibility, but I wasn't going to project it onto him, because the symmetry itself seemed too suspicious to me. I allowed it to co-exist with the other hypothesis - the devil existed alongside the self hypothesis. Both hypotheses emerged from the structure of the 2003 dream where I'd gone back and forth between these two poles.

The night before the dream in 2003, I'd been searching for information on tantric sex and could only find relevant material in an article about twin flames. I thought the twin soul concept was lovely but dismissed it as myth, and held the same view throughout my life about all concepts aligned with soulmate theories, until I met him. That same night, I dreamt the first encounter with A., twelve years before it happened in eerie detail. In the dream, I'd gone back and forth: is he the other half of my soul, or is he the devil? 

Then, when I first met him in 2015, certain details felt too specific to dismiss. I saw someone whose values, language, and way of being appeared to mirror my own, so I held both as possibilities without committing to either. The Self hypothesis was based on actual observable data, and not out of denial that he could be the Devil. I considered that whichever was true would hold equal value to me. 

The first thing we connected over was our view on stereotypes - something I felt strongly about, and his statements shared the same conviction. Then, his unprompted use of words like 'unfair' and 'freedom' also struck me. They appeared to carry the same moral weight and the same existential charge they held in my own vocabulary. When I invited him to correct my grammar after complementing my English, and his vocabulary had me see the same relationship with language as I had - precise, careful, weighted. Even his relationship with the very concept of reality, and authenticity resonated with my own. He seemed to engage with the world through the same philosophical lens. People had also independently described our temperaments using virtually identical phrases: him as 'very chill,' 'living on a cloud'; me as 'so calm I'll live to a hundred', 'living on a cloud'. Without me sharing my observations, he even remarked that we are very similar. Then there was the experience of synergetic movement between our consciousnesses which was entirely new to me and not something I'd ever considered to look for, or even that I could encounter. It felt structural, like two awareness systems recognising similar patterning in each other, bouncing off of each other where even the silent moments felt intense yet comfortable.

I treaded carefully and didn't let go of the Devil hypothesis as I felt it would be premature to do so, but I also couldn't help but observe what to me was an unusual high degree of structural resonance - similar natural orientations, similar values, temperaments, interests, similar ways of organising experience. Later, learning he explicitly identified with human rights values, his training in philosophy and politics, his love of words and wordplay, confirmed that my perception of him, at least in these respects seemed to have been accurate.

And then there was the polarity itself the second time we met. His reality was a complete inversion of mine. His was filtered through fear where mine was filtered through love. My attempts at inclusion, filtered through his fear, seemed to register to him as othering. I'd try to talk about my spiritual experience as a way to provide context for my reasoning, and wanting to show him why I believed we may share the same soul, and he'd hear religious prejudice. Because I was far from having processed my experience, short of laying out the patterns and structure in my experience I didn't know how to express what I needed from him in order to feel safe without offending him, or to explain why I believed we share the same consciousness. The more I tried to express inclusion, the more he seemed to perceive exclusion. It seemed like the archetypes had taken over our communication - Love and Fear unable to recognise each other. I understood Love and Fear as two sides of the same coin during my spiritual emergence, but it was much later that I would get to see them as two poles of the same underlying field of reality, and consciousness - consciousness positioned at the poles of one experiential axis experiencing the full spectrum of reality.

I was always aware of what the Devil symbolised - control, deception and manipulation through obstruction of reality/truth. While I was aware of the meaning/feelings behind the symbolism, I had yet to understand its exact roots and map it onto my reality. 

I used to assign the Devil symbol in my experience to individual agency rather than see it as a systemic pattern, even if it was the systemic pattern I feared most. It is only now that I can see it as a representation that aligns with gendered power dynamics, one I've been much too familiar with my entire life, and one that sees the experience come full circle from his core wound around othering to mine. 

I never feared A.'s Muslimness. I feared the ways in which the patriarchy had shaped him. Until the pattern emerged, I constantly hoped for different, kinder, more generous explanations. I hadn't even considered the asymmetry of power given by our age gap, or thought that he might instrumentalise his visible philosophical knowledge. 

For a very long time, I thought he was having equal difficulty wrapping his mind around what had happened but after all this time I can't help but feel that his choices maximised my discomfort while minimising his cost. It wasn't one behavior alone, but the cumulation that made the gendered dysfunction visible as a pattern. 

His treatment of me that second night, not only left me traumatised enough for it to result in memory loss but was a complete inversion of my reality as I felt my inner world was defined with no genuine attempt to understand it. This, followed by ambiguity, and then silence would have me question my reality for the following decade.

I can't help but see his words and actions that second night as psychological projection. He mocked and ridiculed my spiritual experience while implying I was engaging in religious prejudice. He made comments consistent with Eastern European cultural stereotypes while implying I was stereotyping his culture. His blindness and the lack of compassion when faced with my distress: the verbal assault registered so severely that I nearly lost my consciousness, and his cousin needed to intervene to alert him. My state was visibly severe enough that a member of his family, Muslim man himself, and someone I can only assume was biased towards his kin and had witnessed him accuse me of Islamophobia, felt to intervene.

His words suggested that my pattern recognition skills were evidence of pathology, while his are an asset he earns his living from. He made sure to state his analytical skills as if to point out my lack of them.

While it was consensual, the moment he became angry with me, making me feel like a sex object seemed to have become acceptable, all while I was in a vulnerable condition, desperate for repair. 

In 2017, despite telling him it all went beyond the romantic implications, his words, and subsequent actions reflect I was being reduced to just that: the woman whose only needs could be romantic - a transactional role women are often reduced to. And this was so when he never offered repair, or closure for an experience and dynamic he was equally responsible for creating. 

His sustained vagueness, and subsequent silence bear the markers of emotional avoidance. It was the vagueness and silence, that took the experience from existential charge to existential crisis for me. He externalised the intensity and discomfort onto me, when in 2018 he was telling me 'Let's keep in touch without the intensity' as if I was responsible for it, as if the significant role he played in that intensity was invisible. He lit the match, and blamed me for the smoke.

I was guilty and responsible for my and his discomfort. I didn't start in agreement with it, but his vagueness and silence had me eventually internalise it. 

His words and actions read as the standard operating procedure of a dysfunctional system that threatens women's integrity, be it psychological or physical. I believe it was this gendered dysfunction that became the catalyst for the descent that followed. Profound coherence suddenly reversed into fragmentation that left me with no memory of the traumatic event, no explanation, and difficulty aligning myself with the actual reality of an existentially charged experience, in the aftermath of our meeting. 

While this is anecdotal, someone I had once spoken with about spirituality, to whom I had recounted my experience, told me that many women have dreams in which they encounter a figure they call the Devil. If this were true, and if my experience of the Devil archetype encodes gendered power dynamics, then, it is possible for this to be true of other women's experience. If this were true, it would imply that the Devil symbol is the collective feminine consciousness experience of patriarchy which threatens women's survival either physically or psychologically, rendered symbolically. 

It took me a while to see how the fear in these dreams with the Devil figure mapped to the constant threat of violence - mental, emotional or physical - girls live in from a young age. 

If your mind is tempted to go there, there was no sexual abuse in my childhood. This is something I actually considered due to the heaviness of the symbol. I went down the memory lane and found all kinds of memories I had forgotten about, but no trace of s. abuse. S. abuse wasn't necessary, because not only did I absorb the normalised language surrounding women, but I was subjected to gendered power dynamics from birth, because the world I lived in defined me by my sex. 

In my particular case, and my archetypal journey, the Devil figure never harmed me physically, only psychologically. In the reality I shared with A., my experience started with intense intimacy followed by fear based accusations that reversed my reality and resulted in his withdrawal from a relational space he helped create. This was then compounded by years of unaddressed and unacknowledged reality, ambiguity, emotional whiplash with polite words like 'lovely', and 'sweet', and then complete silence and lack of accountability in the face of my visible distress. 

His ambiguity and silence acted as distortion and obstruction of reality, preventing reality and patterns in an experience that held existential weight for me to stabilise. Coherence was prevented as Integration could not perform its movement because Differentiation was blocked in my case, leaving me unable to settle my relation to any of the axes of contrast involved - love vs fear, safe vs unsafe, fair vs unfair, light vs dark, justice vs injustice, belonging vs erasure, seen vs unseen. 

The symbols of Love/Truth and their presence or absence on any axis became the tool for both the articulation of the structure of consciousness and for regaining coherence. By articulating what I was experiencing structurally - naming the absence of differentiation, recognising the obstruction, understanding why integration was failing - I could begin restoring coherence. It was slower, harder, and lonely, but differentiating/articulating from within, trying to generate data in darkness, pressing patterns to stabilise meant I wasn't completely lost, and I could regain some control over my experience. I could see what was broken and why, and work on restoring continuity of self and coherence.

While I am aware that Jung is often dismissed in modern psychology, it is hard for me to ignore how textbook Jungian the God–Devil polarity looks. Given my experience, and observations I am tempted to diverge from his emphasis on projection and on integration through suffering, but I can recognise the core insight. 

In my view, projection happens when we lack awareness of the pattern's existence which wasn't my case. In regards to suffering being a condition for integration, from my perspective what we sometimes call suffering is simply the discomfort of old patterns releasing and reorganising. I believe the pain belongs to a survival relevant axis where contrasting poles became tangled, or inversed and constellated into a archetypal symbolic representation. 

The act of integration is the act of releasing the pain held in the archetype's symbol, and restoring the relation to the poles of contrast. I think that clarity over the pattern condensed by the symbolism is what gives way to the process of archetypal integration. I believe the restoration of my relation to the poles, and the healing process implicitly, could have been a much more positive experience than the one I had. I already had some awareness of the tangle and saw the possible meaning behind the archetypal symbolism. What I didn't have was a stable reality, but one that kept shifting from one pole to another. The suffering was a consequence of the disorientation and my lack of awareness of actual reality, something that the trauma's memory loss, and then his silence prevented access to.

I also believe that whatever I integrated was despite the silence which was what caused the suffering, and not because of it. 

The God/Devil pattern compressed the Light/Dark, Trust/Control, Love/Fear in my psyche since childhood, because it threatened my survival as an individual - my psychological survival. Based on my observations Jung's insight that such patterns don't originate in personal psychology alone, but arise from deeper structural levels of consciousness aligns with what I experienced.

The Devil in my experience was not a metaphysical figure to fight. It seems to be a recurring axis in collective consciousness: coherence of self on one side, and reality distortion sustained by fear based mechanisms on the other. The Devil is defined by fear, and this concentration of fear gives rise to dysfunction. In this sense the Devil is mere socially normalised dysfunctional gender power dynamic given symbolic form. The pattern lives in families, in institutions, in cultures, anywhere truth is bent by fear in order to preserve comfort or dominance. The Devil is the patriarchy.

A. being the vehicle through which the Devil archetype manifested does not exclude the Self hypothesis. It's not like I want this to be this to be it, and yet, it is a hypothesis I cannot in good conscience deny for more reasons than what is currently presented on this site. 

Exploring the full extent in writing, however, requires inner resources I do not yet have to either face potential stigma, or to engage in the intellectual labour needed to present it stripped from what society condemns as 'woo'. From my perspective a truth doesn't cancel another no matter how uncomfortable, because reality doesn't care about personal preference or ego. 

***

The Bizarro World of Post Spiritual Emergence

It was only after I met A. that believe it or not, I felt I had actually entered bizarro world. Bizarre is the only way I know to describe it.

On one hand I was still high as a kite on love. On the other hand, I had become completely disconnected from myself, and I was completely unaware of it. The high of my state completely obliterated the effects of the traumatic event, because I had no memory of it. I had been left with mere emotional impressions of his accusations which combined with the empathy I had had for his fear. This made it seem like nothing that bad had happened. Because I didn't remember, I couldn't observe its effects until years later when I was triggered to remember parts of my experience that night, and could then observe patterns consistent with dissociative states in my behavior. 

The dissociation was invisible to me for a long time. I thought I was fine, still riding the high of my experience, just trying to integrate what I thought was an intense but ultimately manageable experience. The spiritual emergence, and everything that surrounded it naturally became the focus, because everything else in my life seemed average at the time.

I remember how, in those days, it seemed as if there was an unmistakable flow between me and the way the world responded to me. It felt bizarre to me, because the shift happened over night. There was nothing extreme, but there was a visible shift compared to before. Had this shift not been so sudden I would not have been able to observe it as a flow.

People, at least the people I would interact with, seemed different. Kinder, more careful with each other, as if the social atmosphere had softened. This was most observable at work. At times, it was so pronounced that it was as if people, my colleagues, clients, all had a similar shift to mine, and I thought I just wasn't aware of it. I didn't remember them being like that, and there were plenty of moments when it felt like uncanny valley to me. This was a small town in Eastern Europe where rudeness, gossip, friction, aggressiveness were a cultural staple. 

Because I had just moved back home, at first, I dismissed it as the usual politeness of a new working relationship, but that did not account for the length or depth of the change. My directness, or firmness wouldn't trigger the usual defenses, and the everyday frictions I expected barely activated around me. Gossip was the clearest marker. In a setting where it normally circulates, it largely stopped in my presence. It wasn't that people's conditioning lifted, but it wasn't performance either, because it was sustained for too long for that to be a plausible explanation. I wasn't observing 'perfect harmony'. Friction didn't vanish completely but it was much less frequent than I would expect it, didn't escalate and repaired quickly without amplifying into gossip-grudge cycles. I was aware that in theory the field should react to my inner state and ripple my coherence outwards, but it was so uncanny that I would end up panicking a little inside. When I would start panicking I would also start scanning my environment, and I would eventually catch glimpses of their cynical baseline although never in my immediate presence. 

As odd as it sounds those glimpses would comfort me, as it meant I hadn't lost touch with reality. In that high coherence state, my presence seemed to make coherence more available in the people around me, as if their better tendencies had more room to surface and their cynical baseline had less room to express itself. The odd part was that I was used to these kinds of environments and it would usually end up with being shamed for not participating in the cultural baseline, but not this time. It was as if the entire field re organised around me. It felt every ounce of magical-bizarre, but I believe it sounds more magical than the logical structural explanation for it. My inner state had tilted quite sharply over night and people naturally react differently depending on another's inner state. What made it so uncanny for me was that the shift was abrupt, and despite understanding the mechanism and expecting it to happen, it still felt unreal. 

This contrast became a source of internal panic. It felt like the world refused to push back in the way I was used to, and the lack of counter-force felt unreal. My old world returned most visibly when I began to panic and doubt entered my system, and I started scanning for evidence of incoherence as if trying to verify the reality I remembered. Those moments confirmed that the old baseline still existed behind the softened surface of this new, unresisting relational space. From the outside it looked ordinary social interaction, but from within, it was jarring. 

Something seemed markedly different about the way the world was responding to me. 

Then there was the money thing at work, a practice that started innocently and got a life of its own. Where I worked it was acceptable to allow some clients to pay later. My colleague L. and my boss engaged with it mainly as social transaction. Me...high as a kite on love, started doing it out of kindness. I thought that if necessary I'd cover the costs myself. I was doing it for people without homes, or anyone who needed it. Every single person came back with the money. I'm not exaggerating - every single one, regardless of their social or economic status. My colleague, An. who was hired after me found it so strange that she mentioned it multiple times. She'd never seen anything like it and she found the 100% return rate, even for larger sums of money, lasting for years very unusual. This was a smallish town in Eastern Europe, where unconditional social trust wasn't the norm, and this had become standard practice at that workplace. My boss, my colleagues, all started doing it. It had gotten to the point where everyone who was unable to pay then and there could get what they needed, and come back with the money later. It just...got a life of its own. My boss changed it many years later, not because clients wouldn't return to pay, but because it had become that ridiculous and it resembled more like a market than a business.

I was oftentimes struck by how I was having this inner experience that seemed qualitatively different from the experiences of those around me, and yet I blended in perfectly fine. If anything I felt invisible. Here I was going through the most unusual experience, yet no one seemed to notice. 

Even time felt weird. I distinctly remember this feeling of having no awareness of time flowing. Another instance of bizarre. It felt surreal at times.  

I do remember registering a minor deterioration in my state around the 5th year. I remember it because I thought that it is how children's inner states deteriorate and start blending in more into their social environments. From the 6th year onwards my state started to gradually, yet exponentially deteriorate, and by mid 2021 I had almost returned to my social baseline from before my experience. This correlated with some of my memories returning, and starting to register the emotional disconnect. Time also seemed to take back its shape. 

Before I knew it, I had become a recluse. I wasn't intending for it. I always looked for people to connect with, but connection just didn't happen. I felt I didn't fit in anywhere, not even in the spiritual communities where I thought I would.

Spirituality and Spiritual Communities

I was all alone, not knowing what to make of my experience. I needed help to make sense of it all, and I didn't know where to turn. The spiritual communities were helpful only to a point. I wasn't sure if I wasn't understanding what they were telling me, if they hadn't actually had a spiritual experience as I understood one, or if I misinterpreted what I had experienced. It seemed like everyone was speaking another language than I did, but I was willing to question myself, and inquire into my perceptions.

I, however, was never able to get on board with many of the ideas I encountered. Oftentimes it felt like I was asked to embrace a new kind of dogma. Everyone seemed to speak in quotes from texts I hadn't read, and they talked about meditation, mindfulness, presence, and yoga as if they were the end all be all while I was clueless. I got it, it was the way they reached their experience, and it seemed like that was the right way to them. What bugged me though is that I was constantly left feeling that if I wasn't engaging in the same rituals, it must have meant I wasn't doing it right. I was someone who didn't even know the difference between awakening and enlightenment, and I was always left feeling inadequate.

It wasn't that I didn't try to see what they meant, but every time I went online, and tried to follow a video asking me to empty my mind I felt offended. Why would anyone want to do that? Just empty your mind, as if the mind is there as decoration. It's never why is that thought there? What does it tell me? Just will it away.

Then it was the presence thing. Be present, just not with your thoughts, or actual feelings for that matter. To this day I find the interpretation of presence I kept stumbling upon to be bothersome, and all I hear in it is pretend. Pretend everything is great. Pretend you are enjoying something even when you don't. Pretend your world is magnificent. Pretend things are not as they are. I haven't read the texts still, but I am tempted to believe it is not what they try to say about presence. From where I am standing presence means being present with what is, and sometimes 'what is' isn't peace, and that is valid. Sometimes 'what is' lives in the past still, or in the future. 

I can't help but find pop-culture spirituality a gross misunderstanding. And that it's a misunderstanding is not even an issue - it only becomes one when everyone insists on wisdom about a perception I can't help but find to be unwise.

My drive for answers didn't help connection either. I wanted to dissect everything, contrast and compare, but it seemed like few wanted that too. For the most part, my need to dig deeper meant that I hadn't arrived, and it made me and my experience lesser. I was supposed to feel blissful 100% of the time. No anger. No frustration. No desire.

Plenty of times when I tried to connect, someone would start wanting to teach me. They didn't want to share, to exchange - they would end up wanting to become my teacher. I had never asked for that. I wanted exchange. I wanted human to human, and they wanted to position themselves as my teacher. And when I resisted the dynamic, I clearly didn't get it, or I was being difficult.

I kept running into the kind of mindset that insisted suffering meant failure. The kind of thinking that implied that if I was in pain, confused, or angry, then my experience was somehow lesser. Maybe it was, and they had all arrived but me. And yet, I couldn't shake how the advice felt as though I was being asked to deny my feelings rather than move with them, and to replace honest emotion with a performance of serenity. 

It felt as if no one was hearing me, and I had no plans to pretend my experience was any different than it was. 

The context of this entire circumstance made it easy for me to withdraw from social life with no one really noticing. I had just moved back home, so I think most people I used to know here thought I had maybe found new friends, and it was just a case of having lost touch. I was functional. I was going to work. My life seemed average from the outside. 

 I didn't purposefully withdraw. It just happened. I kept trying to connect with people, only to be left feeling more isolated.

I only started noticing my isolation when I started feeling people's silent judgements. All of a sudden it became noticeable to both them and me that I had spent years by myself. 

Reality-Testing and Sanity: Dreams & Memory

As time went by I only became more confused. I tried to understand, to process, but what was I supposed to process exactly? My reality around A. remained suspended, and he was a key figure in the structure of my experience. I had only fragments - emotional impressions, vague memories, and a cluster of observations I didn't know what to make of. 

I was always prepared for A. to be the vehicle through which that archetype would manifest. I allowed both possibilities to coexist: that he might represent Self and Devil simultaneously. I would have let go of the Self hypothesis early on, but I couldn't reconcile what I observed as a great degree of similarities in our core identity, and the contradictions between his apparent values and his actions. 

I didn't know what to make of his short, and vague replies. His vagueness prevented patterns in an existentially charged experience to stabilise, leaving me unable to orient in reality. 

His abrupt withdrawal after intense intimacy, and subsequent vagueness had me consider he was feeling hurt coupled with a quiet no evidence yet. If I feared disappearing into him without knowing what I might dissolve into, I thought it was possible he might have felt the same. The contradiction between his apparent values and the gendered nature his silence might have betrayed was the most dissonant for me. 

My reality remained suspended, and I thought maybe he hadn't yet managed to wrap his mind around what happened. I thought he probably needed space; anyone would after something like that I told myself. I could imagine how I must have appeared to him: this strange woman suddenly entering his life, claiming she'd dreamt of him as a child and teenager, that she had grown up labelling him the Devil, and that she believed they shared a soul. 

It took me years 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 that at least in regards to the second night, I was operating solely from mere emotional impressions. 

I had no sense of time, so the length of time that had passed didn't jump out at me. I cognitively understood the amount of time, but had no emotional relation to it. For a long time, I believed that maybe I hadn't expressed myself clearly enough, and that if I managed to do so, the logic behind it all would become visible. I thought he might understand if I mapped it all out. I had to do that anyway, as whomever he was, he was a reflection of my social reality. I felt that if he who had been there and witnessed it all didn't get me, then no one would. 

I began by verifying every part of my experience, testing each piece for stability, attempting to reconstruct reality from fragments. A reality whose form I felt wasn't welcome in spiritual communities, and one that seemed to belong to a world few within our shared social reality seemed to be able to relate to.

I first tested the spiritual experience by testing the existence of the dreams. If the dreams happened, then so did my spiritual experience, and it must have meant A. also existed as a real flesh and bones human being; it was all so blurry and overwhelming that I wasn't sure he actually existed as a human on this earth. 

I had to verify if the dreams were real or if my memory was playing tricks on me. Ironically, I was able to exclude imagination early on, because guess what? My cousin was right. I don't have that kind of imagination, and surely not to the degree where I could have invented this kind of story. What started as a childhood wound of being told I lacked imagination, became the very thing that helped me confirm my reality decades later. The same orientation toward truth over fiction that made me boring as a child made fabrication structurally implausible as an adult right when I most needed it.

I started trying to downright question the existence of the dreams by looking for any inconsistencies, only to end up unable to shake the amount of memories I had around them. The more I tried to question the existence of the memories and the 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 at first I was scared that no one would believe me because of how wild it all sounded, I now became scared that no one would believe me because I could not possibly remember mere dreams in this much detail. My consistent questioning made it harder for me to dismiss them, but also bigger, more detailed. It was much later that I was able to confidently point to their memory being carried by the emotional vividness, but how each time I connected with the affective sensations surrounding the memory, more details would gradually open. This observation was part of what that eventually led me to posit that affect is the first registration of coherence in consciousness.

Once I could no longer easily dismiss the dreams, another question arose: was A. an actual real person? I had so little from him that, at one point, I genuinely questioned whether he existed beyond my mind. His rare replies were short and vague. I could not exactly write "are you a real person?", not only because I already thought I seemed strange enough to him, but also because I couldn't fully rule out any possibility when it came to a man I had spent my childhood labelling the Devil. I still feared a worst case scenario, even if I was aware of the irrationality of my fear. In that scenario it was not as if he would say no. Google and social media confirmed he was a real person with a real life. Ironically, what I found strengthened the idea of a shared structural identity between us.    

After confirming it was unlikely for the elements of my experience to be mere fabrications of my mind, reality hit me. Confirming the dreams, the spiritual experience, A. were real made reality feel more unreal. If the dreams were real then everything else was real and that felt scarier than fabrication. I started worrying I had gone mad, so I started questioning everything all over again, wondering whether my spiritual experience had truly happened or whether it had just been a psychotic episode. It all seemed real, but I had little in the external world to confirm its existence. The only people who offered me 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.

By then, I would have sought help for depression at least, but the institutions of psychology and psychiatry didn't spell safety for me. I heard myself and understood social reality. I saw no other option but to make sense of it alone and do my own research. 

In the midst of that fear, I came across the terms spiritual emergence, spiritual emergency, and transpersonal psychology. I remember the feeling of relief when I discovered a body of research that made me feel somewhat normal, and didn't pathologise my experience. It was the first time I truly stopped questioning my sanity, as I understood that spiritual emergence, and spiritual emergencies are recognised human phenomena. I am glad I came across the terms, because after some more research, I became convinced that it was unlikely for 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 even when recognised for what they are. I can only imagine the trauma that results in. 

Learning these terms brought relief, but not yet a sense of normality. I didn't want to retreat from the world, but I didn't seem to know how to exist within it either. 

You'd think I spent all those years hiding my experience from those around me. I didn't. I actually made it a point to not hide myself, but it still ended up feeling like hiding. I wasn't offering the information, but I wasn't trying to hide myself either. I told friends and family, but stopped talking about it when I felt they couldn't connect with what I was saying. I believe their consciousness couldn't perceive this kind of reality, let alone connect or relate to it. 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.

It was during this long period of quiet invisiblity that I began to notice the memory gaps. 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 that I became more alert.

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. Its purpose is healing, coherence, and self-expression.