Chakra 4

 Growing Self reaches a crossroads
 The self begins to move away from purely ego based desires and societal expectations
 This movement is toward the ground of pure spirit
** Guided Meditation – Chakra

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 Empathy and compassion

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 The S elf no longer needs exclusive identification with ego and begins to sense something bigger.
 Ego and Ground now locked into a battle to determine who is going to be executive functioner in the psyche
 So even though there be waves of rapture there also maybe waves of fear…

Opening the Chakra: Toward Spiritual Emergency
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 If a person’s passage through the first three chakra’s has successfully imbued him to trust his/her inner processes… she/he will integrate this infusion of higher consciousness as an benign spiritual emergence. But if their ego resists its destiny
 a spiritual emergency may take hold.

 Unforgettable
 Changes the life of the individual forever
 Begins an arduous and tumultuous journey
 Appear as regressive
 Brings to bare shadow qualities
 Mirror psychosis, but is not psychosis
(individual conscious)
 Waves of panic, anxiety, and terror present
 Rapture , joy, and peace, stillness can appear amidst the latter
 Self actively engages process (but is an in and out game)
 Last days, weeks, years,
 Out of body experiences
 Open to psychic capabilities

 After being on the ward that day I went back to my room. I was feeling a little of sorts and out of the blue the room expanded and I expanded with it… I was ripped out of my body; it felt like a huge energy rush, it floored me. I was in my body, but I was completely witnessing my body at the same time… I was in a huge panic. I actually left the room, because I thought something wasn’t right, I thought maybe I could run from the room and everything would be alright. So I opened the door and ventured down the hallway and there were these two nursing students, they asked me “Are you alright?” And I am looking at them, thinking “Something is terribly wrong”! But I wasn’t going to tell them what occurred. It was for about two hours of being there but not being there and everything was unreal. No, it was like everything was unreal… It was like I was actually formless and I remember saying to myself and I kind of wanted it to stop…

 Awakening, known through the centuries to be pursued by spiritual and religious seekers alike (Metzner, 1998), cannot be defined per se as it is intimately unique to the individual
(Adyashanti, 2004; McKenna, 2002; Renz, 2005).
 It can, however, be conceptually understood as an “opening to the mystery of consciousness itself, to the fundamental nature of our minds, and to seeing what it is that binds us and what it is that frees us” (Goldstein, 2002, p. 132).
 The transpersonal philosopher Ken Wilber (1979) equated awakening experiences with what he called “no boundary” moments where the individual’s sense of self or identity markedly expands beyond his or her usual mind/body location in time and space.

 Grof and Grof’s (1989) work on altered states of consciousness and spiritual emergencies has led them to suggest that psychological disturbances associated with sudden awakenings can occur “when the intellect is not well coordinated and developed; when the emotions and the imagination are uncontrolled; when the nervous system is too sensitive; or when the inrush of spiritual energy is overwhelming in its suddenness and intensity”.

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 Complicating these matters is the state, value, and investment that are placed on the development of the self in Western culture from birth and our preoccupation with its extension in the face of the gravest of circumstances.
 Thus, terror and aversion may be a common reaction to an awakening, especially one that is experienced by an unsuspecting Westerner .
 In contrast, Eastern culture has a vast array of spiritual traditions, religions, and schools of thought that prepare the individual for a series of awakenings while it is also well known that after having an initial awakening the practitioner is then guided to fully flower this realization by living a life in accordance with its truth .

 For Westerners then, who are not typically involved in spiritual or religious practices, stumbling upon the infinite is certainly not a chosen path (Chah,
2002; Renz, 2005; Sahn, 2006). Rather, awakening is experienced as a spontaneous, abrupt shift so intense and powerful its effect on an individual are comparable to “being hit by a bus” (McKenna, 2002).
 This statement points to a piercing truth: awakening happens without warning, and in the midst of it, our ego is brought into question, even extinction.
 Therefore, it is clear there exists a need to consider the subjective nature and essences of these experiences with an ultimate goal of comprehending how they impede personal growth or, conversely, lead to the full flowering of one’s Being.

 There wasn’t enough understanding for me because I thought this was something that was happening to me. That there was this other entity that was happening to me and I had to shake it off, figure it out, it was really intense. It was like…you go back in the room and things just …I thought I was a dual person, a total split … I had a sense of being a complete witness to everything but fighting it, having another side of me that was totally judging the experience. My voice, when I spoke… my mind was thinking and my voice was speaking, right? I remember looking in the bathroom mirror the next morning but I didn’t know who was looking back at me. There was no recognition of that person.
There a dead body in the mirror, right? And I’m thinking, well how can that be? But there was obviously a part of me that was still seeing this and still functioning.

 The late Joseph Campbell exposed an important element in the journey that follows an awakening, specifically the journey’s symbolic power.
 Campbell (1988) held this in highest regard, giving it numinous status and suggesting that it could connect the individual “with that mystery which” we are.
 For John, the symbolic power of awakening, although in full force, had not yet been accepted. The terror of noselfhood pointed to a mystery he was unwilling to acknowledge. Moreover, John was not prepared to accept that this
‘mystery’ was who he actually was.

 I managed to facilitate the psycho-education group that morning, but afterwards things really began to spin out of control. I had gone to coffee with my supervisor and one of the care aides. As we walked up the old hallway toward the cafeteria this rush of energy hit me… Nothing appeared to exist anymore and I am thinking this isn’t good. And for some reason I couldn’t tell them what was going on for me. I said to them, “I got to go, I have to get some book,” that was my excuse. So I walked back to my room to see if I could get things back under control. I was pretty nervous and I was trembling considerably. I was a bit messed up, but I thought “I am going to have to continue on with the day.” So I left the dorm and went back to the hospital and thought I would check in on the discussion board on WEB CT. So I sat there and interestingly enough the psychiatrist for the ward walked by… For a minute there I grabbed on to the thought about telling him what was going on for me. But then, I thought if I do that, either I am going to fail my practicum or they might put me on some meds. So the rest of the day I fought this in and out experience between being in my body and not being in my body.

 Essentially John was creating a gap between himself and the terror, and, instead of allowing the experience to float through his mind/body structure; his egoic self contracted and immediately labeled the experience “horrific”.
 John’s need to understand his experience reflects two areas of concern for the unsuspecting awakener:
1 ) the experience is profoundly raw and unique to the self-structure, thus;
2 ) its power in the psyche is so radical it cannot be ignored or completely understood thereby changing one’s self-orientation forever.

 Terror often arises within the newly awakened mind. This phenomenon of terror, elsewhere termed “the body of fear”, can, despite its abysmal intensity and horror, be transformed into fearlessness.
I managed to make it through Tuesday and Wednesday and that night I decided to go to the show. Meanwhile, I was still trying to figure out what was happening because on the way to the show, it was snowing and I could see people around, but to me the people didn’t really exist. To make matters worse, that night the theatre was completely empty. So just a total big black screen and I thought “Is this really happening” (laughing). One person eventually showed up so this made me feel a bit better, but then I thought, “I am creating everything that is going on.” And then I had these waves of thoughts, “Telling me that you are the only person that is here… You are the only person that exists.” That scared the hell out of me. I couldn’t make a connection between what the experience was revealing to me and what my mind was trying to tell what was going on. Today, I understand this more correctly… But back then I was trying to save John.

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These experiences would increase in intensity over the next months steadily pushing John toward an acceptance that awakening had a clear purpose and direction over which the ego bound John had little influence.
Four days after my initial awakening experience I drove back home, but this where it got more intense. I thought that maybe at home, where my family was, might make me more grounded. But it acted in reverse….I recall coming to the door, I still remember where everybody was that evening…Haley was on the stairs, she was about seventeen months old. My wife was on the couch and my older daughter and son were on the sofa watching television. I remember them saying hello to me and all of sudden I felt this emptiness hit me and it was like they didn’t exist nor I. Actually, in that moment, they were perfect strangers to me. I intuitively realized that nothing was holding me anymore and then I got even more freaked out. My wife and I went to bed that evening and I remember waking up in the middle of the night not really knowing where I was… I didn’t know my name; I couldn’t remember my wife’s name… I remember running into the bathroom and looking into the mirror. I knew who I was but I didn’t… And for a split second there, I thought maybe if I killed myself I could end my suffering. But I didn’t, for whatever reason, I managed to climb back into bed, but I knew that this formlessness feeling wasn’t going to go away and I didn’t how long I could handle such torment.

 For John the reality of no-selfhood would become a matter of accepting his extinction thereby allowing the noumenon to reign as the phenomenal manifestation in his psyche.
 Balsekar (1992) affords this transition to the awakening process and further adds “the absolute has become the relative, the potential has become the actual”.
 And yet despite the actual surfacing,
John continued to require a logical understanding for his experiences, not prepared to comprehend that the truth of the matter had already found him.

 A month following my awakening experience I had gone to the library at the college…I don’t know why this even happened. I was in the library looking around, because I had read some of
Guntrip’s work in reference to schizoid states and I was trying to make a link between his theories and clinical experience in regards to what I was experiencing. So for whatever reason, I had come across a book by Soygal Rinpoche, his further contribution to the Tibetan Book of the Dead. I can still remember flipping thru the first thirty pages and coming across a passage that I felt was similar to my recent experiences and saying, “Well, this is what happened to me!” At that time I had not read anything
Eastern, nothing! And after reading that I felt I was given a glimmer of hope… I wasn’t going crazy, somebody else has experienced this. And yet, the underlying fear was there, so it was helpful, but at the same time I was terrified of never being me again.

 Awakening, a timeless experience and also a living phenomena, has roots in the oldest of wisdom traditions on the planet. It is a paradox, a truth only brought into inquiry because of the un-pure mind (Chah, 2002).
 In John’s case particularly, the inquiry masqueraded as his savior as it kept him from surrendering to the infinite while his questions and quest to escape the ego’s defeat intensified his emotional turmoil and led to great suffering.
 And yet, in order to break free of bondage to the ego, a certain level of understanding and desire for freedom is necessary. Then again, when this struggle for freedom – ridding oneself of oneself
– is imposed upon an unwitting, reluctant individual, madness is sometimes a bi-product.

I began to actually see the idea of the no-self thing was actually true; it was becoming clearer that I could not deny the truth of my experiences. When I started to accept and surrender a little peace would arise while other times I wasn’t okay with it and I fought it. For example, I went and got a job doing security. You don’t start until
10:00 at night and you work until 5:00 in the morning. Meanwhile, I wasn’t sleeping, because I was battling my mind tooth and nail and then things would get even sketchier… I remember one night driving to the industrial area where I had to secure a large business. I guess I must have been tired and took the wrong road after leaving…I don’t know where I ended up, I was just frazzled. I shed a few tears, punched the windshield a few times, screamed at existence, and then I just stopped the car and said, “This is pretty crazy”? I really thought I was going mad because I couldn’t even figure out where I was and didn’t know more or less who I was. Yes, so that comes back to the … out in the desert phenomena that was a real dark night of soul period for me.

 Included in John’s madness, self-torture and mental collapse, a mysterious and uncanny development grew within his body.
 An enormous amount of emotion began to build in his self-structure influenced partly by the fear of noselfhood along with the discovery that his body was an energy system which was intimately connected to a universal consciousness.

I remember pulling up the moving van, vividly walking up…we had a little hedge…vividly walking up by the hedge to the back door and just before I opened that door…it was like an ocean of energy…it was like a cord was shoved into my belly where it was just vacant, vacant space that hit my belly and it was like…you know, your belly is only this big but the immeasurable emptiness that I felt at that moment, which lasted for a couple of months…It included panic and terror and deep, deep, sadness but also… I don’t even know how to describe it. It was actually August 1 st , it would have been in
19**. The hole continued to be there and then I started having weird pains … not pains…something in the back of my neck. I called them energy cysts. It took about six months to release and it was here that I began to connect the hole and energy in my stomach to my neck. I don’t know if I was all that attentive to my own emotions previous to my awakening experiences or at least the connection to my body.

 Spiritual literature suggests that John’s latter experience was not other-worldly but actually a communion with the world’s suffering, past and present.
 Kornfield (2002) stated, “There are times in spiritual life when it feels as if all the barriers we have erected to shield ourselves from the pains of the world have crumbled. Our hearts become tender and raw and we feel a natural kinship with all that lives” (p.65).
 The truth of no-selfhood was again knocking at John’s door; however for John, dismissing its insistent call was now impossible because the embers of freedom had given way to an open flame.

A couple months later we were in the process of moving to a new city so I could finish my degree, and I remember picking up the Power of Now, by
Eckhart Tolle. And I began reading it and was totally engrossed in minutes while my wife drove us back home. There were some passages that I really resonated with, the fear wasn’t gone and the formless energy still freaked me out, but a drive to understand it had genuinely begun. I knew I could no longer escape what was happening and there was a piece of me that kind of knew what I would have to give up to be free.

 In the aftermath of John’s first and subsequent awakening experiences the phenomena discussed thus far indicates that one’s understanding of the self and world becomes radically altered.
 Subsequently compelling an individual to analyze the experience and to also eradicate the self-torture brought about by realizing that one’s self is an illusion of sorts, is impermanent, and does not have any substance of its own (Chah, 2002).
 For John the fear of letting go of his former self had now become a
‘fearful-willing’ pursuit, whereas the first six months following his initial experience was fraught with psychological upheaval due to John’s commitment to remain sane and time bound (Adyashanti, 2004).
 It was here that John was now beginning to realize that the pain of trying to deny what was occurring only brought about more psychic upheaval, which eventually led to the birth of the seeker.

I think what initially helped to calm my fears, besides stumbling on the Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, was a further introduction into non-duality and
Buddhism, by way of a book given to me by an acquaintance. It was a book written by Rajneesh, at the outset of the book there was this statement: “ The creator cannot follow the well-trodden path. He has to search out his own way; he has to inquire into the jungles of life. He has to go alone .” So I started to read it further, and I said to myself “Well, these are the thoughts that I have had since I was six years old,” and again came some confidence that maybe I wasn’t crazy, maybe there is a bigger piece to what is going on here.

 For John, this fearfulwilling directed him to seek out and follow many different paths as he struggled to live an awakened life.
 While he still experienced free floating anxiety and cosmic panic, he was learning to accept that those familiar to him could no longer provide security or give him a reference for his newly adopted existence nor would the conventional world be able to offer guidance through the territories he now knew existed.

 So now it was September… October, 6 months or more since the initially awakening experience and I had come to the conclusion that my wife wouldn’t be able to understand me, my kids won’t be able to understand, her parents, my parents, no one. So I began to look at it from ancient Zen perspective, you know that saying, “ At the beginning mountains are mountains and rivers are rivers and then mountains are no longer mountains and rivers are no longer rivers …” So here I was, utterly convinced that I stumbled upon something ineffable and ungraspable and I thought, “Well if there is no place to go I might as well start tapping into Zen and figure out how to make the mountains and rivers mountains and rivers again.”

 This juncture of John’s awakening journey allows transpersonal phenomenology to cast significant light into the shadows of what it means to awaken, that being the intention of the seeker.
 The seeker or quester or Bhikkhu or Bhakta can be said to represent the individual who wishes to taste the divine, know god, reach nirvana, or be the one who knows (Balsekar, 1992; Chah, 2002; Satprem, 2000).
 In Western culture, a seeker and quester is best described as the individual who has stumbled upon awakening; while in Eastern society, the Bhikkhu, an ordained Buddhist monk (Hahn, 1974) and the Bhakta, a
Hindu practitioner, are life-long devoted to the path of God (Baleskar,
1992).
 And yet, despite the language we use to delineate their affiliations and their geographical location, at the root of their desires lies the search for absolute truth.

 So then I started piecing stuff together a little bit and then in pieces, it has taken a long time, there is no question. I think the biggest turning point for me…I would get things, things would come to me and I would have a good two weeks of clarity, and then
I would react to experiences or perceive them as being a threat to my supposed new understanding. I remember one time heading to this lake and my wife was driving and all of a sudden, I would be out in the middle of the field. Everything would be me; I would be the wind, everything… On another occasion I remember driving to the golf course and as I turned down a bend and descended down the hill my consciousness suddenly expanded through the windshield, it was hard to drive. That would freak me out a little bit, it was hard to contain. There were lots of periods where I would start to understand things but there was still a John trying to figure this all out…and I was going to solve it and then things were going to be okay. So one part of me wanted to get back prior to the first awakening experience, but I started to learn that I didn’t want to be that person anymore…and that’s when things started to change a little because I realized how my existence was pretty self-serving, fearful and ego-based.

 Here we learn something about John and the ignorance of the new seeker: the quest for absolute truth was not yet his intended goal.
 When he openly discussed how he was beginning to see the ego as the obstacle to freedom, the ego’s most obdurate secret was out. “I was
going to solve it and then things were going to be okay.”
 Despite intense suffering, the seeker’s fate was sealed: every remark about awakening, every understanding, every piece of information about no-self/true nature would require consideration. John was drawing his own map and missing the territory.
 McKenna (2002) acknowledges that awakening is “a fish in the ocean trying to find water” (p.139), and while seeking appears to be inextricably tied to the awakening journey, it is sheer courage that allows one to become who he/she truly is.

I began to realize that I was vaster than I could ever imagine, but that vastness can be scary as our inner and outer boundaries begin to shift. There’s a big resistance…when Almaas talks about the tearing away of the ego and tears away, tears away, tears away. For me I was always reading to get the understanding. I could get the understandings at a certain level but I always thought there had to be a certain moment, or a certain understanding that was going to make me okay.

 In our final theme, John makes a subtle but important shift: acquiescence of the reality that his mind is not the ground of being.
 Through his sudden awakening experiences, John came to understand the timeless insight that no-self is always the natural state of being and that his reluctance to embrace this truth was responsible for the terror he felt.

I started realizing that when a person is in that place of spaciousness, the place of no-self, which always is, I was giving my ego credit for that. I actually thought that I was creating that, but that is actually available to us all the time, but I never could understand that. I always thought we created that, right? So I couldn’t trust it. So then the whole basic trust concept really became a significant teaching for me and then I started to realize that in those places of panic and terror my mind was creating all that movement and content, because it is no different than what I am experiencing with you, right here and now! There is no difference between the panic state… It is all self created, but in the background, there is no change.

 John reflected on the teachings of A.H. Almaas, and stated that Almaas was the initial influence who helped him to begin to sit, peacefully, in his own emptiness.
When I started reading Almaas’s Point of Existence [I devoured that book in about two days] it was a revelation.
That was the biggest turning point for me… I could sit and cry with that book, I could sit and understand it and then I realized, well this was just me…The black chasm made a lot of sense and after reading about the tearing of the ego I had finally found something that spoke to the depth of my experiences… I started being okay with sitting in the abyss and began to be okay with letting John go.

 Phenomenologically, our final theme focuses primarily on a priori; awakening itself; that which already is
(Wilber, 1997) with translogic or essence components as peripheral concerns.
 Adding clarity to this reality Wilber
(1997) stated: “The realization of the
Non-dual traditions is uncomprising: there is only spirit, there is only God, there is only emptiness…This realization undoes the Great Search that is at the heart of the separate-self sense” (p. 281). For John, his Great
Search had now matured as he was beginning to perceive emptiness through the eyes of being empty:
**Non-dual Clip

 Heading toward 2003, I was beginning to adjust to this new level of consciousness and I didn’t have the knots in the back of my neck and the hole in my belly was also healing. That’s when I started to read Stephen Levine. There was a little bit of a shift there because then I started to have to admit to myself that I didn’t have the answers. This provided a good place for me to work on dealing with my ego centered existence toward opening to a more reflexive way of being. I began to confront the fear and panic that continued to come up. This enabled me to close the gap between experiencing
Being directly and the splitting...The minds resistance to accept the demise of a separate ego... I know that now, but I don’t think I really understood that then. Thus self and noself, there wasn’t a divide, the paranoid split was dissolving…

 Utilizing this transpersonal phenomenological insight, it is apparent John has not yet fully integrated his awakening experiences.
 Specifically, his experiences and life-text render a large split related to cosmic engulfment and identity integration resistance, which at times drained his psychic energy, but more importantly created an unnecessary division between his self and the world of spirit (Wilber, 1997).
 As things continued to move on I get larger moments of peace… We talked about the Heart Sutra… and the whole emptiness and the form concepts…
Well I got half-way through the book and I remember one evening laying on the floor reading and this joy washed over me for about ten minutes…
Everything was perfectly still. For me, I guess I am searching for peace, self, no-self, it doesn’t matter whether I exist or not anymore, freedom, it’s about freedom.

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 For John, the not so subtle shift would require trusting in a ground not born of the mind but one that gave birth to the mind (Almaas, 2004). As such, the term sudden awakening /spiritual emergency carries a definitive and ego annihilating shrill, which speaks to the You that is beyond concepts revealing an emptiness that is so primordial that even the word primordial cannot illuminate its essence.

 It is here where one’s basic trust must reside; where peace in the truest sense can arise; where a mature spirituality is born by inviting awakening into the heart.
 Such a journey remains for John…
His journey was filled with great terror and trepidation but also with beauty and eventual equanimity.
 John is beckoned by the spirit of awakening to, in the words of
Wilber (2001), “let the search wind down; let the self-contradiction uncoil in the immediateness of present awareness; let the entire
Kosmos rush into your being…”
(p.57).

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 Muscle twitches, cramps or spasms.
 Energy rushes or immense electricity circulating the body
Intense heat or cold
Involuntary bodily movements (occur more often during meditation, rest or sleep): jerking, tremors, shaking; feeling an inner force pushing one into postures or moving one's body in unusual ways.
 Episodes of extreme hyperactivity or, conversely, overwhelming fatigue
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Headaches, pressures within the skull
Racing heartbeat, pains in the chest
 Pains and blockages anywhere; often in the back and neck

 Emotional outbursts; rapid mood shifts; seemingly unprovoked or excessive episodes of grief, fear, rage, depression
 Spontaneous vocalizations (including laughing and weeping) -- are as unintentional and uncontrollable as hiccoughs
 Hearing an inner sound or sounds
 Heat, strange activity, and/or blissful sensations in the head, particularly in the crown area.
 Ecstasy, bliss and intervals of tremendous joy, love, peace and compassion
 Psychic experiences: extrasensory perception; out-of-body experiences; pastlife memories.
 Intensified understanding and sensitivity: insight into one's own essence; deeper understanding of spiritual truths; exquisite awareness of one's environment (including
"vibes" from others)

 Emotional outbursts; rapid mood shifts; seemingly unprovoked or excessive episodes of grief, fear, rage, depression
 Spontaneous vocalizations (including laughing and weeping) -- are as unintentional and uncontrollable as hiccoughs
 Hearing an inner sound or sounds
 Heat, strange activity, and/or blissful sensations in the head, particularly in the crown area.
 Ecstasy, bliss and intervals of tremendous joy, love, peace and compassion
 Psychic experiences: extrasensory perception; out-of-body experiences; pastlife memories.
 Intensified understanding and sensitivity: insight into one's own essence; deeper understanding of spiritual truths; exquisite awareness of one's environment (including
"vibes" from others)