Yes. All of that happened. Oh, and my awareness haloing out from my head. Yes. All that.
What I didn’t feel was anxiety about it. Or, not the kind of acute anxiety and exhaustion that you seem to be feeling. It was mildly taxing, only because it was new, and your system has to work harder when it can’t take normal stuff for granted anymore. You can’t just do stuff on auto-pilot.
It’s really not much different from moving to a different country where they speak a different language and you kind of speak that language but it takes effort and you’re not totally fluent. Everything is new and just getting groceries takes three times the energy and mental effort than it used to. Auto-pilot is there to save you energy and effort. Not having it means you get really tired doing simple things because you actually have to be mentally present for every part of it.
So it takes more mental/energetic effort to do the things you never even thought about or paid attention to before. It’s harder to act normal. It’s harder to feel normal. This is a problem with a spiritual cause, but it’s not a spiritual problem, in that anytime your life changes to the point where auto-pilot is wiped out, you’re going to experience similar effects of disorientation and exhaustion.
And then there’s the fact that you have no idea what you can no longer do on auto-pilot. I mean, there isn’t some kind of pamphlet that comes with this that tells you all the situations in which you can no longer count on your usual way of doing things. So there you are, sitting at a party, and suddenly you realize that you can’t perform your part of the social ritual of conversation as easily as you used to.
That inability to take simple things for granted, and never knowing what will happen when you try to do pretty ordinary things like go to a party, causes anxiety because you don’t know what you can’t do on auto-pilot anymore, you don’t know what to expect, and you kind of end up learning situation by situation, which can be stressful — when every situation is potentially going to show you what doesn’t work about you anymore.
There are a few things going on here. The primary being that you wish you could turn it off and get a break from it. In other words, you have a previous model of the world, yourself in the world, what life is supposed to be like and what you are supposed to be like. You have something called Normal, and you measure things by this. You had a life and you were this person, and you’d like to step out of this crazy fast track awakening gig for a while and experience Normal.
The sooner you lose this, the easier the process will be. This is so important. If you only really take to heart one thing from this post, please let it be this. But I know it’s not easy to do. And you will probably do it in stages rather than all at once. You’ll give up this little corner of Normal, and then some more real estate in the Normal cul de sac. Piece by piece, as you see there is no going back anyway.
It’s like you’ve ridden a bike all your life and now the bike is gone and you find yourself at the wheel of a Lambo. You are used to the physics of riding a bike, you can gauge your movement through space by the parameters, experience and limits of riding a bike. You can pick out objects as you are riding by based on how you focus at those speeds. You can automatically calculate your trajectory at those speeds. It’s effortless.
Well, a Lambo is not a bike. Nothing about a Lambo is like a bike, and you will have to learn how to do everything again. And you will. But it will not be fast, this learning, and the learning will be retarded or even arrested by the inability or unwillingness to recognize that you are not riding a bike — and accepting that you will not be riding a bike in the near future. There is no going back.
When you encounter yet another thing that doesn’t work the way it used to, can you meet it with a sense of humor? I know it’s a lot to ask, but this natural tendency of mine saved me from lots of stress and wasted time gnashing my teeth or feeling sorry for myself or feeling overly anxious about it. Humor helps you acclimate.
Assuming you can change your perspective a bit, you’ll be able to find short term solutions that make life a little less trying while you are working toward longer term adjustment. I’m not sure I can call it mastery because so many times I’ve finally got things in hand only to find myself upleveling again! And every time that happens you have a whole set of things that don’t work like they used to and so much to learn in order to stabilize your life.
So I guess the point is that I master 1) my perspective and attitude and 2) my process. Because I know there is nothing to hold on to and I know it’s very likely that I’ll burst into some other level of awareness at any moment without warning. Hence, humor and a certain sanguine approach to constantly having the rug pulled out from under you is an important tool. You can’t take this stuff too seriously. Yet, you have to be serious about dealing with it.
On a practical level, I would advise taking an experimental approach to…everything. If you go to a party because you want to have a social life, you may be disappointed. If you go without needing it to give you some specific experience and approach it as an experiment…a stage on which to observe how your system works now and practice or devise strategies that are helpful, then you’ll feel less anxious.
And if you give up any desire or expectation to be normal and instead set your mind to faking normal for the sake of having an easier life in the world of people, you’ll find simple, pragmatic ways to do that.
For instance, people regularly ask things like, “how was your weekend?” This used to freak me out because my memory is constantly purged of unnecessary information, so even if it’s Monday I have no specific recollection of what I did over the previous two days. Unless, you know, something really significant happened, like someone died or my house burned down. I would just look at people who asked me this blankly. It was awkward.
So I realized that this is a regular question (along with “how have you been”…and believe me, no one really wants to hear an authentic answer to this anyway), so I devised a plan to work around this. I trained myself to take a mental “snapshot” of two or three moments, file it in a mental space called “weekend” and then I’d just regurgitate these when asked. It got purged on Tuesday, so if someone asked on Tuesday, I would be caught empty handed! I give people the bare minimum of what they require in order for social interactions to flow smoothly. You’d be surprised at how little they actually need. They are pretty much totally mechanical, so there is a simple binary function of yes/no okay/not okay normal/not normal. Once you really grok this, it’s not so hard to get by.
I am constantly training myself to perform enough of the human rituals adequately enough to pass as human. Is it tiring? Yes. And I need to limit these interactions. I go into them intentionally and also keep them short. I pull my awareness in, so that it doesn’t roam the room in a party, I keep my awareness within my physical body as much as possible…to prevent myself from penetrating others, which happens for me quite naturally. I inhabit my Synthetic Self as much as possible. Because Souls don’t go to parties (normal parties, anyway). Ego-personas do. So if you show up as a Soul (or spirit or whatever you want to call it), well…you’re not going to fit in. Remember this.
These events, these interactions, are just gatherings and interactions between Personas, or mechanical, synthetic selves. Nothing wrong with that, and it can be entertaining. But that’s what’s going on. You have to be able to wear a mask in social situations. Does that sound horrible? It shouldn’t! Sometimes this is fun — after all, how much of your childhood did you spend doing this, playing make-believe with your pals? It was fun. But you can’t take this seriously!
It’s a long learning process, how to shove the enormity of what you are (which you are now just barely becoming aware of) into a Synthetic Self, or Avatar. And of course, you’d only be doing this for short periods for specific purposes. But this is the crux of it. You’ve always been too enormous, vast, powerful (energetically speaking) to be contained in a False Self, within some five sense vehicle. The fact that you ever did it, ever believed you were that, ever moved through the world primarily as that — is really quite a feat of magic!
You can’t go back. And it’s only terrible because the whole world of people is made for and run by Synthetic Selves.
However, things will settle down, and they will do so faster and more gracefully if you stop reaching for an experience no longer available to you, stop being overly upset by changes in your vision, etc. (can’t bear the thought of you getting nauseated after staring at your keyboard), and meet your new, unfolding condition with humor and inquiry. Get curious.
I can’t advise meditation. I’m not saying you shouldn’t, because everyone is different, but in my experience, this only makes you expand and go further “out”. What you need is a way back into the body, even if it will never be the way it used to be. You need to be able to incorporate your body into your overall awareness.
I used to go to yoga class, which always ended with mantra, but I never participated because it would activate all kinds of weird things for me. The only “meditation” I did after awakening is doing the dream yoga, and I only did that once. And it was in my throat and in the middle of my forehead which, as you noted, is something you can definitely still feel! It’s a very active spot, and also places out around the head. So unless you want to explore these things, I would not put my attention toward expansion of any kind.
I do not need to meditate. Normally, momentum is downward, so people are engrossed in their physical and emotional experience and they need to expend a lot of energy, intention and practices to elevate out of that, even temporarily. But once you wake up (or even if you haven’t woken up, but had a massive Kundalini Blowout), the momentum is reversed and it can be hard as hell to anchor your awareness into the five sense + emotional system of the normal human body.
With time and observation and experimentation, you may find there is a second human body that you can inhabit that is more comfortable. It’s like we come with our basic kit and if we never move beyond that, the body only functions a certain way. This is what people think is normal, which is only to say it is common. There is what you might think of as Human 2.0 (and higher), but it runs on totally different fuel, etc. Not important for you now, but just file that away for later.
I was amazed at one point that I could not feel my internal organs at all. Then I went through a period where all I could hear were my internal organs! Quite distracting. What can one do but laugh? You can’t get too freaked out about this stuff.
As for focus, this is still hard for me sometimes. I’m sure I seem spacey sometimes, but I’m constantly working on being able to bring myself to the specific when my awareness is drawn so powerfully to everything-at-once-everywhere. I’m totally hanging out in the Meta, but I continue to train myself to focus in closer.
It’s hard, because the Meta contains no friction, no linear time, it’s not mechanical. Whereas everything is so mechanical at the normal human level. It’s all just a bunch of moving parts and gears and switches…even people are this way. That means there is all this friction, and that’s tiring. I bring my own gear lube so to speak, and you will learn to do this too. In time.
So first, change your perspective. Accept that the bike has been retired and it’s the Lambo or nothing. Then get really pragmatic. Don’t go to social situations to have a good time (this will come later), rather look at them as a chance to practice.
Resist frustration. You only get frustrated when you feel you should be able to do it, and in that case you are refusing to fully embrace how NEW you are to the world. No one gets frustrated with a 3 month old baby because they don’t know how to navigate the world. You are new. Accept this and act accordingly. Don’t plan to be at a party for 3 hours. Make sure you have your own transportation so you can leave whenever you need to (or hopefully, just before you need to). It’s all practical stuff, but it’s hard to grasp if you haven’t first accepted your condition.
A lot of what you are talking about here is not being able to distinguish between signal and noise. It’s gain control. These are terms from audio engineering. The world is filled with so much information. Humans are very good at filtering out almost all of it, and we pick out a few patterns that seem significant and that’s all we see and experience. You will learn to do this again, but it will never be the same and it will take effort, trial and error.
And I must add that there are practical benefits to being able to perceive everything all at once, and not be a slave to this pattern-driven selective focus, there are huge benefits to hanging out in the Meta. It’s not all downside, so in time, once this calms down, you can investigate what’s awesome about this ability. You’re still in the WTF!? phase.
If you read enough of this website, you will see how many weird things I went through. Some of them were perplexing, some inconvenient and some were downright terrifying (losing my automatic body memory of driving…while on the freeway). In my experience, things ramp up, you adjust, they settle down, you adjust, then things ramp up again as you once again uplevel…unless you totally arrest your development, this is likely how things will go. This is the new normal for me, and it does continue to pose some challenges, yet it’s not some huge problem or crisis.
This is a Sponsored Post. To learn how you can ask a question and have it answered in a post, go here.
Try these on for size:
