Peak Experience

In early 2021 the end of the pandemic was in sight. Vaccines were being administered to healthcare workers, and the rest of us were waiting our turns. However, the imminence of relief seemed to heighten anxieties more than ever.

Within a one-week span, two of my friends told me I was “always making up stories” (i.e., making creative assumptions about their motives). After the first accusation, I brushed it off as nothing more than my most avoidantly attached friend once again avoiding any emotional discussion. When my second most avoidantly attached friend made the same accusation just a week later, I had to pause and reflect on myself. She was not acquainted with my other friend, yet she used the same exact words to characterize me.

Even as I listened to the audiobook Attached to confirm my suspicions about their attachment styles, my mind began spinning. What are the stories in my head? Which are real and which are not? As these thoughts were going through my head, by what can only be described as divine timing, I was directed to Eckhart Tolle’s A New Earth. A random blogger listed Attached as their second most life-changing book so naturally I sought out her first. Had I known it was about spirituality, I never would have read it. As an engineer, I had become strongly identified with a hyperrational mindset and turned my nose up at anything remotely “woo.” But apparently the boredom of isolation was enough motivation to listen to A New Earth without any knowledge of its subject matter.

As I walked along the beach listening to Eckhart tell me that I’m not the stories in my head, the exact subject I’d been reflecting upon for the previous week, I was momentarily taken out of “horizontal time.” It felt like a remembering of something I knew at age three—I became the awareness looking down at myself, and I was overtaken by bliss. For the next month, a more muted version of the feeling went in and out until it faded completely. My rational mind was frantic to understand what had happened to me. I even consulted a psychiatrist to make sure I hadn’t had some kind of manic episode, but I passed the initial assessment with flying colors.

For the next year, in spite of being vaccinated, I remained in relative isolation as I scoured the Internet for all things “spiritual.” During this time, the center of my chest (which I came to understand was my heart chakra) began burning as though I were in a constant state of heartbreak. I was forced to see things about myself that I did not want to see.

Full Kundalini Rising

Almost a year after the peak experience, in spite of the fact that I continued to be so isolated, four people from completely different walks of life (three from three different periods of my past) suggested I try ayahuasca within a two-week span. I decided to answer Mother Ayahuasca’s call.

In the coming months, I remained in relative isolation for months (while working from home) and attended my first and only in-person week-long silent meditation retreat at Spirit Rock just prior to the aya retreat. Even at the aya retreat, my excessive earnestness was met with some gentle teasing, but I didn’t care. I was on a quest for truth.

During the first journey, I felt some sexual energy stirring. Afraid I would orgasm in public (having read such a story online before attending), I shifted my focus elsewhere. On the second night, however, I allowed the sexual energy to be. Very, very slowly, the sexual energy moved upward in a sensual ivy-like movement toward my sacral chakra. At this point, I recognized that my kundalini had awakened. In trying to understand the peak experience from the year prior, I had read briefly about kundalini awakenings. They sounded absurd to my rational mind, and I’d quickly dismissed them as not being what had happened to me.

However, as the ivy was making its way up my chakras, I knew undoubtedly that my kundalini had awakened. It was moving so slowly upward that I dare not move lest I interrupt it. When the kundalini finally reached the top of my head, energy began shooting up rapidly from my root to and through my crown. This could have lasted for anywhere from ten to thirty minutes, gauging from how long the aya shot had lasted the night before, but I really have no idea.

Afterward I found myself filled with feminine energy, moving fluidly, and feeling like both a camera angle and projector of the universe. But later I remember thinking, “Omg chakras are real???”

Lucid Dream

After the kundalini awakening, insights and realizations about myself (still conceptual at this point) came to me at a rapid rate. I remember telling my friend how quickly I was figuring things out. On the other hand, I became so incredibly depressed that I grew terrified of my own spiritual quest. Finally, my first lucid dream was for some reason the straw that broke the camel’s back–I became terrified that they would induce more mystical experiences and turned away from all things spiritual for many months.

In the dream itself, I became aware that I was dreaming. Since I knew that all the characters in the dream were mere projections from my own mind, I attempted to communicate with them telepathically, but I was unsuccessful. Waking up from that dream gave me some insight that my “real life” character was also a mere vantage point in the matrix, that all the characters were simply projections of a higher consciousness.

First Awakening

Some months after the lucid dream had scared me away from all things spiritual, the YouTuber ZDoggMD, whom I’d discovered maybe some time before the kundalini awakening, published a video about his wife’s awakening. Even after all the mystical experiences I had been through, ever the skeptic, I called major bullshit and was certain that she’d simply grown tired of being a doctor and wanted to become a YouTuber as well. But when I subscribed to his supporter group in order to watch the full video, which included footage of his wife, her quiet demeanor made it evident that she had no interest in becoming a YouTuber.

For the next two months, I watched videos from Suzanne Chang and some from Angelo Dilullo nonstop until one evening it just happened. Angelo mentioned the “feminine aspect” of awakening, and I was drawn back to one of Lisa Cairns’ videos. After watching her describe how the awareness separates from the ego in a “pop,” I looked into the mirror, and everything popped.

I was taken back to the peak experience, when I had become the awareness rather than the ego (i.e., the story of “me”), but this time it did not close down. My resting gaze became wider, almost like a panoramic, slightly more 2D view. (In retrospect I’m unclear why my first awakening came with a large nondual shift–possibly because Sam Harris’s guided meditations had pointed to the absence of self, and I’d already had some nondual foretastes in my visual field.) My head became filled with pressurized energy, like a big cloud puff. I felt like I was shrooming except without the visuals (i.e., hallucinations). Kundalini surged through my body, and I was once again in bliss.

I spent the rest of the evening staring into the corner of my room lest it all shut down in the morning. Eventually I had to go to sleep, but the next morning I was still high as a kite. A week later, when I realized that I was never coming down from this high, I panicked slightly. Little did I realize that the dark night of the soul was already commencing.

Post-Awakening Retreat

A month after first awakening, as the dark night of the soul was already commencing, I joined Angelo Dilullo’s online meditation retreat in mid-2023. For those who have never tried an online retreat, personally I would never go back to an in-person retreat. Besides being cheaper, I find them far less distracting. Also, in the case of Angelo’s retreat, at least in the state I was in immediately after awakening, I found it powerfully energetic.

On the second day of the retreat, I “found” the “me sense,” which I believe was the entire self structure. Again (as with my peak experience), I was taken back to the approximate age of three. I was with my father, whom I loved dearly, but I was already sitting safely within the cocoon of my “me sense.” I let out a scream as I realized that this was what I was being called to let go, the very thing that had been my safe hiding place for all these years.

That evening Violet Synergy’s sound meditation loosened so much energy that I felt like I had worms squirming around in my belly. The next day the energy was released as the hypnic jerks that began just before awakening turned into massive seizures in each of my chakras. It felt like someone had put electrodes directly onto my chakras and cranked up the voltage.

My visual field became even flatter than before. I was so upset that I stared intensely at the corner of my hand towel until I was briefly able to recreate the 3D image that had been my reality prior to awakening. I ended the retreat early because it was just too much for me already. As I went for a walk, I noticed how the bushes seemed to pop out at me, like jewels in a video game that might become larger and shinier as you approach to indicate that they are ripe for the picking.

On one of the subsequent nights, the existential terror became so great that my hair stood on end the entire night. In the morning I gave into some primal urge to suck my thumb. Then, upon returning to work, the humans appeared empty of substance. At the company gym, I felt like I was watching TV on fast forward, when the characters become empty of their human qualities. They appeared to be nothing more than a very elaborate synchronized show. On the drive home, I cried heavily. 

Although I had found the origins of the “me sense,” I was unable to let it go for another full year. For me the ego, perhaps fortunately based on horror stories I’ve heard, kept re-forming around the shadow material.

Dark Night of the Soul

Although I’d read many websites about “spiritual awakening,” I really didn’t find “nonduality” or other claims of a definitive awakening or enlightenment (except for Eckhart Tolle’s book, of course) until just before my first awakening. Possibly because the former websites/channels label anything from a bad mood to a divorce as a spiritual awakening. Possibly because the latter websites/channels drop the “spiritual” or “awakening” labels all together. Either way, although I’d heard that the “dark night of the soul” came after the bliss phase, I convinced myself that I’d already gone through it after my peak experience.

A week after first awakening, aside from the panic that I was never going to come down from my “high,” my bliss phase ended. With no real knowledge about awakening, in spite of all my spiritual research, I had no idea that the worst was yet to come. I was surprised to find feelings of unsatisfactoriness sneak up again. And what I called “grievy feelings” at the time began to arise as I experienced my first feelings of existential grief. At work I became more reactive than ever–one day I simply could not stop bawling while speaking with key company leaders.

Turns out that every attachment ever formed (whether “positive” or “negative”) and emotion ever suppressed (including heavy trauma) had been stored in my body. My chakras were like little containers of compressed energy. If you’ve ever been surprised by how much helium comes out of a compressed helium tank, you’ll never believe how much energy is stored in these chakras. With the throat chakra already having been cleared (as I came to know during the kundalini awakening), roughly my purging started with the heart chakra after the peak experience and ending with the root chakra, but there was a lot of overlap between chakras as well.

Seems like it goes differently for different people, but after first awakening it no longer felt like I was “doing shadow work.” Sometimes insights about myself would come to me, but they were coming at such a rapid rate that I could not take credit for figuring things out. Within the energy being released were mired the thoughts, attachments, false beliefs, memories, etc. This is often called “shadow material,” but my experience was that even “positive” attachments were stored inside the body. I would go so far as to call what was being purged out as “self energy,” even though a large majority of it was in the form of suppressed emotions, which are usually “negative.”

Aside from a few sticky beliefs, I rarely had to examine or meditate or inquire about any of this in a conscious manner. Also, for me the self structures seemed to drop in conjunction with shadow material being released. As each layer of the illusion of self was seen through, shadow material would come up at a more rapid rate. Conversely, as shadow material was released through purges (mostly a strange primal screaming crying for me and many others I’ve talked to), I would experience micro-shifts in perception. After each micro-shift, I would almost always experience some existential grief, which just felt like more purging.

Sometimes purging would feel like relief, but often it was physically debilitating. Throughout my first year of awakening, I was bedrotting and struggled to get out of bed let alone exercise or socialize. In spite of that, my appetite was often ravenous, and I craved a lot of unhealthy foods. I decided to take online advice to let my body gain weight if it needed to. When I eventually went for my annual checkup, I found that I’d gained about twelve pounds, which I shedded only after the worst of the dark night was over.

It’s unclear why my awakening was so rapid and my dark night so brutal. Possibly the full kundalini rising accelerated the process. Possibly seeing through the entire illusion of self very early in my awakening accelerated the purging. Possibly living alone and being fairly isolated gave me the room to purge freely without fear of upsetting loved ones. And most certainly the fear of bawling at work again drove me to purge as much as possible during the evenings and weekends. But really all this is just spitballing–there are no “laws of awakening physics” that dictate any of this.

Third Eye Opening

Just before first awakening, I had begun noticing that I was getting frequent hypnic jerks, like the twitches you get in your legs just before you fall asleep. After awakening, while they continued to happen primarily during the liminal phase of sleep or whenever I was very relaxed, the frequency and magnitude increased dramatically. Initially the jerks were primarily in my hips and legs, but eventually, during and after my first online retreat with Angelo Dilullo, I was often getting them right in the centers of my major chakras. If someone were lying next to me in bed, they would have witnessed a comical solo fight in which I was kicking an imaginary opponent and taking punches right to the gut.

Eventually I began to notice some correlation between the hypnic jerks and the chakras being cleared. Each subsequent chakra jerked more and more, and often they jerked right after more “self energy” had been purged out.

It took a bit longer for my third eye chakra (between the eyebrows) to begin twitching, but when it eventually did, I discovered that I had visions. Whereas I’ve always had an active visual imagination and dreams due to a bit of hyperphantasia, these visions appeared literally to be in my room when larger and further away or on my eyelids when smaller and closer. The first time I saw a tiny lighted happy face in front of my face just before falling asleep–it was so small that it was easy to dismiss.

The next time, however, I woke up from a completely unrelated dream. I saw a flash of green light, and then a portal opened up in my room. I saw the corner of an old Chinese-style wooden frame on a wall with a single kanji character. The portal began opening up to reveal a second character. Although I don’t read Chinese and have no idea what it said, I became so terrified of having any kind of vision, no matter how mild, that the portal closed completely. I stayed up the rest of the night in sheer terror. In retrospect I’m not sure why I was so afraid given that I’d already had many mystical experiences up to this point, but somehow these visions crossed a line for me.

I’ve since had several more visions. A couple were too blurry to make out completely, but one of these cleared up for long enough to reveal a bunch of kanji characters that blurred up again quickly. A couple others actually scrolled through several images, some of them repeating at random. Eventually I concluded that they were basically nonsensical, somewhat like an unrealistic dream, and stopped trying to interpret them.

I’ve also begun having auditory hallucinations. Both auditory hallucinations sounded like my upstairs and/or downstairs neighbors were being way too loud … except that I don’t actually have upstairs or downstairs neighbors. Again, since the sounds I heard, people rushing out due to an earthquake and people coming over for a football game, were somewhat nonsensical, I can’t really claim clairvoyance or clairaudience just yet.

No-self

Whereas first awakening was an unmistakably dramatic shift for me, the no-self shift was far more subtle. Also, I suspect the no-self shift looks very different for people who have cleared their shadow material by the time it comes. After awakening, the no-self foretastes often lasted for hours or even days, but they generally felt very unstable, as though they were being held up temporarily by kundalini energy. After the no-self shift, the insight stabilized, but me-ing would still happen when shadow material would “build up” in the body prior to release. Paradoxically, therefore, even with the “I am” sense gone, suffering would continue for some time as egoic tendencies would rise up again and again.

With that in mind, although I had found the origins of the “me sense” at my first post-awakening online retreat, I was unable to let it go for another full year. For me the ego, perhaps fortunately based on horror stories I’ve heard, kept re-forming around the shadow material. Only as I purged more and more shadow material did subject and object gradually disappear. With some shifts it felt like I was disappearing, and with others it felt like the world was disappearing. At some point the floor seemed to float in mid-air as my mind was no longer creating the world beyond its direct visual field. Eventually everything began to appear flatter, more dreamlike, and more porous.

Over time the feeling of self in the body moved from behind my eyes to the back of my head then down my body until it disappeared forever. Simultaneously the shadow material seemed to be released first from the heart chakra (after the peak experience) then each subsequent chakra below it. Eventually it seemed that the sacral chakra had cleared as the root chakra began jerking more and more.

At that point, again a full year after my first online retreat with Angelo, I once again found myself at his online retreat. This time I was hardly as dedicated and even watched some awakening videos during the retreat. As I was watching one of them and reading a comment, there was a small flicker in my mind where I visualized something that made me understand on a deep visceral level that birth and death are one and don’t really exist. I’ll never quite remember exactly what I visualized, but for me that was the last of the “I am” thought that lingers even after the body loses the sense of self within it. The feeling of being “the awareness” or any derivation of it was no more. Whereas previous experiments with “I exist” were always met with “I’m right here” as Kevin Schanilec predicted it would be prior to the dropping of the eighth fetter, this time there was no response.

Liberation

To be clear, I don’t think there’s truly a moment that can be called “liberation.” It’s obvious to me now that awakening will always be deepening, unfolding, and clarifying. I don’t think a bright line exists between ego and “true nature” because, now that I’m more empty, I can detect ego in even the most “deeply realized” of the spiritual teachers. I’m pretty convinced that some ego will always remain as long as the body is alive. That being said, there does come a time when the awakening journey appears to wind down significantly.

In my experience, although I no longer had energetic or perceptual shifts after the no-self shift, paradoxically I still had a lot of shadow material and therefore plenty of ego related to making new friends to replace the ones I’d lost during this journey, getting back into shape after having been knocked down over and over again by the energy moving through me, and reaching a prior level of financial comfort through a promotion.

In attempting to fulfill these remaining desires, further shadow was triggered and released. Eventually, as these more concrete desires were dropped, it became obvious that I will still grasping at the abstract concepts of happiness and stability. I remember a very distinct moment as I was waiting for the train to depart from Oslo, Norway, when it became obvious that, in my life-long search for happiness, I had been chasing a mere ghost.

In spite of that experience, I continued to chase the ghost of financial stability in the form of a promotion for several more months. While I did get the promotion after all, something happened in the weeks prior to it that triggered my deepest fears of instability and insecurity. I was bedridden for almost two months as I purged it all out in epic screams. In the wake of the last major fear-driven attachments, needs, and desires having fallen away, my root chakra finally stopped twitching.

These days conditioning continues to fall, but life is lived with ease. I’m generally happy without any friends, but I also don’t shy away from meaningful connections as they arise. I no longer have intense fears about living on the streets, but I would feel zero discomfort or self-doubt accepting a well-paying gig. Finally, without having to weigh all the different egoic desires against one another, I find that decisions are just made (arguably through intuition but really it feels more like it’s just happening) rather than heavy contemplation. As my friend says, “The Universe is never wrong.”

Losing Friends along the Path

I feel that it would be remiss of me not to touch on this topic that affects so many people on the spiritual path as it can be extremely confusing and distressing.

A lot of people lose friends with age. People go their separate ways for a variety of reasons. In addition to the typical changes in relationship/family status, relocation, financial incompatibility, etc., we are living in times of unprecedented personal and spiritual growth. For related reasons, these days the Internet is filled with listicles about which “toxic friends” to let go, building enough self-worth to raise your expectations of others, setting boundaries, etc. Conversely, the Internet and social media have provided many resources to connect with new people. So it’s no wonder that people regularly rotate through friends.

During the pandemic, many people realized that they could do without so much socializing. Even extraverts relished their many new Covid-related excuses to turn down invitations. With time to reflect, many people decided to be more selective in their friendships. So it’s no wonder that the year that preceded my peak experience and the years that followed it resulted in the loss of many friendships.

For me, however, this filtering process started many years before the pandemic and continued throughout my awakening journey. Although I had yet to read Martha Beck’s The Way of Integrity, I had been making “one-degree turns toward the truth” for many years by the time the pandemic began. Each of these turns resulted in the loss of one or two or more friends. In some cases I legitimately made lifestyle or career changes (or they did) that resulted in too much incompatibility. However, in many cases I was simply admitting that some people had never really been friends at all, either because I had been pretending to be someone I was not (ironically in a misguided attempt to “live in the present” as per Taoist wisdom) or because my self-worth was so low that I simply did not expect anything from anyone. In the latter cases, I sometimes attempted to establish expectations for reciprocation or consideration (perhaps not so smoothly), and my so-called friends declined to clear the new bar. In still other cases, I became more reactive than ever after my peak experience because, unbeknownst to me, it had already loosened up shadow material (i.e., a lifetime of suppressed emotions that are stored in the body) that was coming up to be seen.

For a while, I was extremely self-conscious about being the walking red flag who had zero friends from childhood (due to abandonment by a fundamentalist religion, frequent relocation as an army brat before the days of social media, and Asian tiger parenting) and now had very few friends remaining in my adult life. At this point, with the relational self and the needs of a separate individual gone, I simply do not care at all whether I have any “friends” or not. I have made some new friends through awakening, but it’s not necessary for me to label them as such. I never thought it possible, but I have developed a deep trust in life and an attunement to its ebbs and flows.