About six months after the Big Bang, Triple Rainbow spiritual enlightenment I found myself in a Paris holiday flat looking into the mirror at someone whose face I did not recognize.

Here’s another strange possible side effect of spiritual awakening: not recognizing your own face. No, I had not developed a sudden case of prosopagnosia.  I was looking in the mirror at a woman who was completely unfamiliar to me.  I gasped and said, “Oh my god, is that what I look like?”  Not that I was comparing it to some mental image of what I should look like, or what I thought I looked like.  Actually, part of the complete brain dump and reboot process involved having much of what I had known before deleted, such as the ability to read or drive a car. Luckily most of the deletions are temporary.

If I had not been looking in a mirror and you asked me what I looked like, I could easily rattle off my driving licence deets: height, weight, hair and eye color.  But I could not have brought to mind an actual likeness of myself.  This went on for a week or so, and has popped up from time to time over the years.  It’s startling every time it happens, though in a way that makes me laugh.

Have you been surprised by how weird and how physical spiritual awakening is?  They list all the things that enlightenment cures, but not the possible side effects.  Sure, it’s a cure for your mistaken, false sense of self, but they don’t tell you that the side effect can be a sudden disappearance of any sense of self.  You’ve been warned, people!