BACKGROUND
Almost ten years ago, I had an experience that was to change my life forever. The background to this experience was a period of tremendous suffering. For four years, between the ages of fourteen and eighteen, I was lost in a state of total desolation, depression and confusion, which sometimes seemed to border on madness. From the age of fourteen onwards I was put on anti-depressants, sleeping pills, and then, later, a whole host of other drugs.
During these years, I basically stopped going to school, and was mainly confined to my bedroom with the curtains shut. I spent a lot of time playing and writing music, reading books, and watching movies. I did little else over these years. I still had a handful of close friends. We would go out and do the normal things—drink, smoke, cause trouble. My personal interests in art were always dark. I was only interested in music, literature or films that carried the scent of death, dissolution and some kind of complete transcendence of the ordinary, boring, pre-programmed experiences of life.
I was always dreaming and longing to disappear and dissolve. I wondered whether it was possible to become so lost in some kind of activity that I would just disappear into it. I attempted this with music, sometimes practising piano for up to twelve hours a day, trying to fill myself completely with something that wasn’t myself. However, nothing really worked, and my tremendous sense of misery prevailed.
Even though I was suffering greatly, for some reason I didn’t feel that anyone else that I knew, whether family, friends, or anyone else that I saw around, were in a better situation. I had a feeling that peoples’ apparent happiness was only superficial. In fact, I couldn’t even say that people looked happy at all. Rather, they seemed just to be living unconsciously, habitually running through the same basic cycles of emotional ups and downs and obtaining sensory fulfilment through the well-worn routes of eating, drinking, becoming intoxicated and having sex. I saw that there was no real intensity in the way that people lived. There was no burning desire to find anything more true or real. People were happy to accept and run with the narratives for living that society had offered to them. Even though I was myself in a very low state, I had absolutely no respect for this way of existing. I found it repulsive, nauseating and pathetic.
I always had intensity. I always had a desire to go beyond the surface-level layers of life. This was because I saw absolutely nothing for me on these surface levels. My reason for reading serious books by, for example, Beckett, Kafka, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Conrad, Nietzsche, Eliot, Krishnamurti, and others, was always to find a transmission of something higher, deeper and more authentic and real.
When I first read the works of Samuel Beckett, especially his trilogy of novels, Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable, I felt like I had found a strange kind of home. There was some kind of void at the centre of his words, which all of his work seems to spin around. Later, I realised that, especially The Unnamable, was written directly from the perspective of the void, or from an awakened perspective that is beyond the ordinary levels of self-consciousness. I resonated with all of these things, but they were not enough to pull me out of my heavy malaise.
A SUDDEN CHANGE
One day things began to change. It was in a candid moment of clearly seeing how my blackened state had negatively affected those around me. Somehow a flick switched and I knew that change had begun.
Aged eighteen, I moved out and started to live by myself. I began to take care of myself, cook, exercise, and continued to practise music for many hours a day and read literature, history, spirituality and philosophy at night. I also went back to school to get the qualifications that I needed to go to study music or philosophy at university.
I remember one month before I had this life-changing experience, I was sitting on the computer in the library at the college where I was studying. I was reading on Wikipedia about ‘ego-death’, ‘fana’ and ‘kundalini awakening’. Fana is an Arabic word used in Sufism that means ‘annihilation’, or when phrased as ‘fana fi-allah’, it means ‘passing away in God’. I thought that this sounded exactly like what I was searching for. I also thought that kundalini awakening sounded like something quite profound. Little did I know that I would have my own taste of it very soon.
I would like to add that in the year or so running up to this experience, I had experienced some strange things, like the near total disappearance of certain emotional states like anger, worry, anxiety and hate. Also, for about one year, I cried, without any particular reason, every single day. I also became very aware of my own lack of awareness. I tried to paint a relative’s shed one day and I thought that I could just do it in a peaceful state without thinking about anything at the same time. I realised at that moment that I would constantly become lost in flows of thinking for many minutes at a time. My mind was wild.
AN UNHERALDED EVENT
Soon after the day that I was doing the reading in the library, I decided to start sitting daily for meditation. I would just sit down on the floor in my bedroom and try to remain quiet. I had been practising like this for about three weeks, when one night something very strange began to happen. I began to feel a strong pulsation in the solar plexus area of my body. It felt as if I was directly feeling one of my internal organs vibrating. When I went to lie down on my bed, the pulsation moved to my third eye area, and then it began to feel like my face was pulsating. Finally, it felt like my whole body became like a single pulsation. I felt like the noises on the street outside of me were now arising from inside of me. I fell asleep.
When I woke up in the morning, my whole body was still pulsating and something very interesting had happened. Three incidents from my childhood had risen, from a state of being completely forgotten (or suppressed), right up to the surface of my mind. These incidents could perhaps be called my three ‘worst sins’ so far in this life. One of them even involved stealing money from a relative’s desk when I was about seven years old. These memories were also accompanied by a tremendous sense of guilt and the feeling that I had to confess. When I went to eat, I also noticed that my appetite and sense of taste were different. I felt like I couldn’t taste the food properly and had no desire to eat at all. When I went outside, I noticed that my vision had also changed. I perceived a lot more colour. I felt like life had gone from black and white to full colour vision.
Here I will list some of the other symptoms that emerged over the first year after having this experience.
SYMPTOMS
– I would feel tingling sensations all over the surface of my skin. When I would lay down at night, I would feel as is thousands of ants were crawling over me.
– I would feel different currents of energy moving at different times in different areas of the body.
– I used to feel pulsations in various areas of the body. Mainly, I would feel pulsations around the third eye area. Sometimes it would feel like my third eye was being magnetically pulled out from at least a foot in front of me.
– I would sometimes have wild rushes of energy that I could only exhaust by going and running many miles. I remember one night, I went and ran across my whole city for hours and hours without stopping. When I returned home I still had a ton of energy and was unable to sleep.
– When I would sit down to meditate, my body would begin to move by itself and assume various postures. Sometimes my head would tilt right back or to either side, or sometimes my chin would press down against my sternum. At other times the whole torso would either arch forward so that my head would touch the ground, or it would arch backwards so that I ended up in the bow posture. Sometimes the body would rock side to side or revolve in a clockwise or anti-clockwise manner.
– My tongue began to automatically rise and rest at the roof of the mouth.
– I would have spontaneous popping sounds in the sinus area above my upper palette.
– When sitting to meditate, it felt like my breathing had a mind of its own. Various different breath patterns would arise and eventually move towards becoming shallower and subtler.
– My spine would heat up from the base in a gradual upwards movement until the point where it would feel like my whole back was on fire.
– I had a number of strange illnesses come and go out of nowhere. On one occasion, I had urinary retention, where it would feel like I could never fully empty my bladder. I also developed gallstones, which would give me a tremendous stabbing pain if I ate fatty foods. I saw these gallstones on an ultrasound when I went to doctors, but a few weeks after this, they had miraculously disappeared along with the symptomatic pain.
– An overload of energy in the head, which would then make it impossible to sleep.
As well all of these physical and energetic symptoms, if felt like everything within me had been amplified. Insecurities, negative emotions and past traumatic memories all began to come up to surface in an amplified form. Somehow, my awareness had increased, and now instead of living out all of my complexes unconsciously, I was clearly able to perceive them as they were triggered to the surface during life scenarios.
REFLECTIONS
One of the main things that I felt after this awakening happened was a massive sense of relief. It was a tangible display that there was actually something more to life than meets the eye. When these things started happening to me, it felt like I had entered another kind of supernatural reality.
In hindsight, it actually felt like another version of myself was being born from within my own limited body and mind. The karmic body and personality was like a shell that was being broken to allow something else to emerge through it. So what I was dealing with was essentially a birth—the birth of a totally new kind of life within the old one. The difficulty with this is that it is not like the old life disappears all of a sudden. On this path, we have to transition from the old to the new whilst the old still continues to exist.
It really feels like I am came into this life with the seed of another type of existence within me. From around the age of fourteen, this existence started to make itself known through its displeasure with the bullshit world around it, and also through some other energetic symptoms that made themselves known at that time.
Six years later, this existence began to make itself known through this first significant awakening. This was the time where I had to learn how to bring this existence into the world. It was not like I had to try or put any effort into it. This existence had a mind and a will of its own. It was coming, it was moving, whether I liked it or not. Many times I felt a great sense of fear of totally losing control. However, really, I had simply to learn to let go and allow this new existence to manifest in its own way. This meant many times having to go with my heart and make decisions that made no sense on the surface level of safely manufactured living.
As long as I lived in alignment with this new emerging existence within me, I felt safe and protected. Once I went on a short holiday with a friend of mine. It was a kind of a stupid, pointless and unnecessary idea, but I kind of went along with it despite not really feeling it. Basically, I was going against my instincts. Anyway, this week was the darkest, and most unlucky week I have ever had. It felt like for duration of one week, I had lost my protective shield that was always with me. I had felt a terrible, dark energy hanging over me. I fell flat on my face after drinking most of a bottle of red wine. I got a crazy sunburn. One night, I even felt the presence of a demon in my bedroom, and I had to run down to reception and listen to some music to calm myself down. This was a lesson to me about what happens when I act against my intuition. Luckily, I have never repeated that mistake in the last ten years.
Many aspects of this initial awakening I can only see now clearly in hindsight. Now I feel that this body and the attached karmic structure were created like an egg to a transport a different kind of frequency into this world. As time passed after this awakening, I began to totally lose my identification with my karmic personality and its attached body. I went through the stages of being solely identified with this karmic shell, to be absolutely disillusioned with it, to activating the birth of a new existence within me, to living with both the shell and the emerging existence simultaneously, to finally shedding the shell completely and only standing in my own real nature.
SO WHAT IS KUNDALINI AWAKENING?
At the beginning of this narration, I labelled what happened as a kundalini awakening. So what is kundalini awakening exactly? Kundalini is the coiling/uncoiling function of shakti, which is the power, energy and consciousness of pure existence. Shakti can exist in two modes: maya-shakti and chit-shakti. Maya-shakti is the condition of consciousness not knowing itself. A human being who thinks that he is just his individual body, personality and name, is a living manifestation of maya-shakti. The condition of consciousness when it knows itself, and yet still manifests through a form, is an example of chit-shakti in operation. This is the state of sages. Between these two modes of shakti is kundalini-shakti, which is the movement of shakti as it wakes up and begins to expand out of its veiled mode of maya-shakti.
What I experienced in the above story as ‘kundalini-awakening’ is a clear example of chit-shakti waking up and coming alive within the world of maya-shakti. As the process goes on, the body, mind, energetic structure, and the projected world that has been formed as a result of maya-shakti, is gradually dismantled and dissolved. One is gradually transformed into a luminous being, a siddha or an avadhuta, who exists within the body whilst knowing themselves as the whole universe and the substratum of pure existence that empowers this dream-like, universal appearance.
WHAT HAPPENED NEXT?
This experience was not the end. In fact, it was only the very beginning. In the next part of this series of autobiographical writings, I will speak about the next significant awakening, which occurred six years after this first one.
Also, about two years after this first awakening, I went to India, which I have documented in this article.