Tag Archives: kundalini

Spirituality, Madness and Valis

  By Eleni | June 19, 2013 - 09:11 | , ,
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I became intrigued by Philip K. Dick after hearing Dr. Jeff Kripal discuss his book Mutants and Mystics: Science Fiction, Superhero Comics, and the Paranormal. It inspired a post and my fascination with finding other creatives who’ve had mystical experiences. I recently completed reading Philip K. Dick’s book, Valis, a semi-autobiographical account of his own spiritual experience. Dick’s terminology is different, but our experiences were similar. While reading the book, I felt as if  I were having a conversation with someone who understood me.

In Valis, we follow Horselover Fat, Dick’s alter ego that he calls his theophany. He describes it as being struck by a pink beam of light that downloaded information into his brain. He came to the realization that the entirety of the universe is, in essence, information. Afterward, he experiences a precognitive awareness about his son being sick, and it turns out to be true. PKD spends most of the book attempting to figure out the meaning of what had happened to him. Further complicating matters is that he has difficulty comprehending why he can save his son but can do nothing to save a friend who has terminal cancer. During his quest towards enlightenment, friends view him as having gone mad.

Spiritual insights pepper the story and flow through both the narration and entries in Horselover Fat’s exegesis. PDK’s use of both first and third-person narrative gives the narrator distance, allowing a more objective view about his spiritual experience. The inner dialogue between the two voices creates a Socratic feel, an odyssey about self-inquiry that forces out questions about previously held beliefs.

Birds of a Feather

Like Philip K. Dick, I spent years trying to understand what had happened to me. At times, I felt as though I were going crazy. After my kundalini awakening, a psychological torrent of fears and past hurts flooded my consciousness, forcing me to deal with them. I had to eventually accept that everything I held as truth my whole life was a myth. I then wondered what the point of life was.

Here are some of the questions I asked:

What does it mean? 

Was it God?

What is God? 

Are we living in a live organism?

Am I plugged into a giant hologram?

Is what I see every day reality?

Is this part of some clandestine psychological operation?

I had my kundalini awakening when I was thirty. I’m now forty-six. I haven’t answered any of the above questions with any certainty. This self-inquiry eventually led me to becoming a spiritual agnostic. Getting caught up in trying to find absolute answers to questions can drive you insane if you let it!

At first, Philip K. Dick believed that what had happened to him resulted from medication he’d taken for an impacted wisdom tooth. However, when his visions persisted, he knew the explanation was implausible. I don’t take drugs, and my experience happened while I was meditating, so I knew my experience wasn’t a reaction to any drug!

“I experienced an invasion of my mind by a transcendentally rational mind, as if I had been insane all my life and suddenly I had become sane.” Philip K. Dick

Looking back, it seems as though I’d lived my first thirty years in a delusional state. I now have clarity of mind, something I never had before as I suffered from clinical depression and a host of other psychological disturbances. Today, I’m no longer depressed and those other conditions that have plagued me have also faded. Meditation keeps me in balance.

“Alike and equal are not the same thing, you have to find your own beat.” Meg from Wrinkle In Time

I would’ve either been dead or on antidepressants if it weren’t for seeing the proverbial light. So dealing with a little madness along the way to spiritual recovery was worth it!

“Many claim to speak for god, but there is only one god and that god is man himself.” Phillip K. Dick

We can all connect to a greater reality without a guru to assist us. U.G. Krishnamurti made similar statements, which is why he referred to himself as an anti-guru. Through my own journey, I’ve reached a similar state of mind and don’t follow any gurus or religion.

“You are the authority.” Philip K. Dick

Being a skeptic is actually the safest way to experience life as I’m not easily led astray or manipulated. I emerged as a stronger person from my experience and that’s one statement I can make absolutely.

Love and light,

Eleni

Spiritual Objectivism – Part 4

  By Eleni | June 1, 2013 - 10:06 | ,
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The topic of spiritual objectivism has blossomed into something that seems to keep evolving. In my previous post, I explained where I’d separated from a purely objectivist stance. However, I still resonate with the objectivist philosophy. From a surface perspective, it allows us to grow spiritually by championing ourselves as individuals.  It also frees us to be true visionaries where we can  nurture our talents without apology or guilt.

I’m now going to focus more on the spiritual angle of this series. This helps keep me grounded and humble. I’ll also demonstrate how a spiritual objectivist mindset keeps me free from forming new conditionings.

Authenticity

I strive for authenticity. For me, being truly authentic means to outwardly express my true nature, as opposed to compromising myself to appease someone else’s ideology or belief. It sounds simple, but it took me years to reach this point.

Through my own spiritual practice, I’d recognized that Ayn Rand was correct: morals come from within us when we make decisions based on reason. While religion may work for some people, it doesn’t for me. It tied me down and kept me form learning. I had to let it go to grow. We all have our own paths to follow. Mine is the rebel’s path; sometimes frightening, sometimes weird, oftentimes both, but always fulfilling.

“Each man must live as an end in himself.” Ayn Rand

Most individuals throughout history are remembered because they dared to set their own path.

“No one saves us but ourselves. No one can and no one may. We ourselves must walk the path.” The Buddha

Buddha was a Spiritual Objectivist!

The Buddha is a prime example of what it means to be an objectivist. He was quite the rebel! He found enlightenment only after he’d dared to break away from the religions of his time. He put himself through a lot of anguish to attain enlightenment, including depriving himself of food. In the end, he had some rice pudding, sat under the Bodhi tree and became enlightened. He had to detach from everything he was told to believe in to get there.

A Parallel Journey

I view my kundalini awakening as the beginning of my spiritual journey.  I only use the term because it’s faster than saying, “A fountain of light exploded inside my head and plugged me into something vast and seemingly borderless!” Being Greek, I’d like to mention that the Greeks call the light experience, Hesychasm. Whatever name you want to call the light experience, it has nothing to do with what happened to the Buddha under the Bodhi tree. In fact, he had transcendental experiences and never tied them to any greater knowledge.

Like Gopi Krishna, I see kundalini as part of a biological/evolutionary process, but since it’s nothing I can prove, I don’t commit to any theory. What I can say is that it did dump a lot of data into my brain. I started to have a lot of visions. Some were of geometric shapes, which were hard for me to understand. It was up to me to learn how to utilize what I was receiving and why I was receiving it. How I thought and perceived the world had become even more critical during this time in my life. It’s so easy to get swept up in visions and mystical experiences, and I kept myself grounded by not making any judgements about what I was seeing.

Kundalini forced me to ask questions and confront issues I’d refused to deal with in the past. It was as if something switched on inside me that refused to shut off. During the process, I felt that following an ideology—any ideology, kept me from growing spiritually. This happened when I realized gurus and spiritual masters merely stated opinions. They interpret their experiences subjectively. And politicians were mortals who were no better or smarter than myself. It moved beyond ideology when I realized I’d created belief systems about myself and the people in my life, all of which were mere opinions. It was an epidemic! I gave up all forms of belief. It was the act of belief, as opposed to the ideology, that kept me from traveling forward.

I should mention here that I read about the Buddha’s journey after I had gone through my ideological data dump. This had further demonstrated to me that the genuine truth is learned from within, irrespective of our location in either place or time. The truth is literally universal, and we can all be Buddhas if we so desire.

The Surreal Years

The early years after I gave up belief was surreal. The world my personal dogmatism created was so different from the reality I was waking up to. In a sense, I was deprogramming myself from many years of conditioning. With that came a lot of releasing of pain, the healing of emotional scars and a bout with cancer, which happened during the time I’d brushed aside my spiritual practice.  They were also years of learning. I read many books, even ones that would be considered blasphemous. At firs I was scared but then soon realized the topics were also ideologies. Today, I can read any topic without fear of damnation.

I was finally free from belief, or so I thought. Seeing how everything I ever believed in had been written by a subjective interpretation, stated by a subjective mindset and taught by a subjective individuals, I had become an atheist for a while…until I realized atheism was another form of belief. Belief will try to snag me every time!

And after all that, I was free from ideology. I could finally live free, as nature intended for us…as individuals that are born with an innate morality.

“It’s not about being right or wrong.  It’s all about the experience.”

I bring this phrase up again because it liberated me. It keeps me objective and allows me to take in and enjoy every experience. And for those experiences that are painful or difficult, I still immerse myself in them fully as all experiences in life teach us about ourselves. We can choose to ignore them or learn from them and evolve. The day I heard this phrase in my meditation is as important to me as my kundalini awakening and another event, which I’ll bring up in my next post. It goes to show you…the path to enlightenment is ongoing.

Part 1  Part 2  Part 3

Love and light,

Eleni