FUKKATSU: RESURRECTION
One evening some years ago I found myself in a state of passing depression. It was Easter time (which I have never before considered to be significant, and have only just noticed how it ties in with the experience I am about to relay) and I was on a work placement year during my 3rd year of university. Due to the holiday period most students had left to visit home and a lot of student nights out and activities etc. had ceased for the duration of the holiday, but because I was working I stuck around.
I had been having some woman trouble which had related to other personal issues I had been grappling with for many years (I won’t even begin to go into these) which when combined with the imposed period of relative isolation and loneliness had made me feel all around very, very sh*tty to the point where I was experiencing physical symptoms of depression, and my whole mind and body combo just felt incredibly negative. I had been like this for between two and three weeks, non-stop, pure grind.
One evening I decided to take myself off for a walk. The house I lived in at the time was a row of converted slum buildings in a kind of no-man’s land between the town centre and the start of the residential districts. I decided to walk a loop of between one and two miles that took me over a small bridge, past a group of shops and a pub, a load of boarded-up houses and businesses, large advertising billboards, the casino/nightclub complex where I was a regular, the edge of the town centre and back around to the street where I lived.
Whilst walking, I was chomping the bit in a very big way; basically mulling everything over in my head, churning all the negativity around, trying to work things out internally, feeling pretty awful etc. I had just reached a straight piece of road lined by vacant car-parks and advertising billboards when I noticed a shift in my internal awareness. A new energy had emerged and was starting to change how I felt. I had an epiphany, which can best be summed up as “Your current state of depression is an illusion perpetuated by yourself. You can be free of your affliction anytime you like, simply by realising that you are free, and nothing you could ever do would change that, save for creating the illusion that you are not and buying into it. Believe the fallacy or see the truth and be free, it is infinitely your choice.” It was a real breakthrough.
In that precise instant my entire being changed. After two or three weeks of feeling soooo depressed to the point of experiencing physical symptoms, my entire internal state changed so completely and literally in the blink of an eye, to the point where nothing negative existed inside of me, my whole mind and body felt like they had been replaced by new ones, words really cannot describe this experience. It was so incredible, I have never taken an ecstasy pill but I imagine it gives a similar high, my whole body was buzzing with ecstasy in a very physical way, like someone had injected a fluid into my blood and I could feel it spreading through my body, lighting everything up with ecstatic pleasure and joy as it went. This was a very physical and physiological experience, not just a mental one. It was holistic. It was profoundly impacting.
In the very same moment I was experiencing this rush that had set me free of my bonds, I felt a sudden urge to look upward, and a huge pale bird swooped over my head by only a few feet, just low enough so as to be visible in the darkness of the night. I kid you not this happened in the very same instant that I describe in the paragraph above, and only sent me into an even bigger high.
The bird glided off over a patch of land where a public housing estate was being demolished, and soaring over the ruins of the monolithic blocks of flats, I realised that the patch of land I was looking at represented the last five or six years of my life. For you to understand why, I would literally have to tell you my life story, but believe me it related in a very specific way to a mental prison of sorts that I had been living in since I was a teenager (I had gone through some quite bad times) and that related directly to the problems I was currently experiencing and that in this very instant was being demolished as I emerged reborn into a new way of life, represented by this giant white bird, a symbol of spiritual freedom no doubt. I had time enough to work out also that the bird was a grey heron, which after over three years of living in the area and walking everywhere due to not owning a car, I had only just seen for literally the first time, but would see plenty of times since.
My depression lifted completely and irreversibly, and a whole host of major internal issues that I had been grappling with for years and that were heavily entrenched and still obviously affecting me at the time left never to return. It’s not that they weren’t there anymore, it’s just that for the first time I was able to leave them fully in the past and they could no longer affect me. I was freed completely from them, and the giant white bird soaring over the ruins of that housing estate was more perfect a symbol than I ever could have contrived.
A couple of years later, I was at a museum in Cambridge that was displaying a large collection of Egyptian papyri of the book of the dead, a kind of esoteric instruction manual for journeys into the spiritual worlds, and I noticed among the beautiful hieroglyphs a frequent and highly intriguing symbol: a grey heron. As clear as day was this a grey heron, not a purple heron, or a duck, or an ambiguous creature, but a grey heron, identical to the one that had soared over my head. I decided to read the information panel at the side of the display case: the symbol was indeed a grey heron, known to the Egyptian occultists as a bennu bird, it was their spiritual phoenix, a bird rising from the ashes of destruction and bringing with it new spiritual life: the esoteric symbol of spiritual resurrection.
I was silently touched by what I had read. In some ways it lent an authenticity to my experience, but in others, I needed no authenticity, it was incredibly real and raw and already hugely significant to me anyway.
Date experienced: Easter 2006
I had been having some woman trouble which had related to other personal issues I had been grappling with for many years (I won’t even begin to go into these) which when combined with the imposed period of relative isolation and loneliness had made me feel all around very, very sh*tty to the point where I was experiencing physical symptoms of depression, and my whole mind and body combo just felt incredibly negative. I had been like this for between two and three weeks, non-stop, pure grind.
One evening I decided to take myself off for a walk. The house I lived in at the time was a row of converted slum buildings in a kind of no-man’s land between the town centre and the start of the residential districts. I decided to walk a loop of between one and two miles that took me over a small bridge, past a group of shops and a pub, a load of boarded-up houses and businesses, large advertising billboards, the casino/nightclub complex where I was a regular, the edge of the town centre and back around to the street where I lived.
Whilst walking, I was chomping the bit in a very big way; basically mulling everything over in my head, churning all the negativity around, trying to work things out internally, feeling pretty awful etc. I had just reached a straight piece of road lined by vacant car-parks and advertising billboards when I noticed a shift in my internal awareness. A new energy had emerged and was starting to change how I felt. I had an epiphany, which can best be summed up as “Your current state of depression is an illusion perpetuated by yourself. You can be free of your affliction anytime you like, simply by realising that you are free, and nothing you could ever do would change that, save for creating the illusion that you are not and buying into it. Believe the fallacy or see the truth and be free, it is infinitely your choice.” It was a real breakthrough.
In that precise instant my entire being changed. After two or three weeks of feeling soooo depressed to the point of experiencing physical symptoms, my entire internal state changed so completely and literally in the blink of an eye, to the point where nothing negative existed inside of me, my whole mind and body felt like they had been replaced by new ones, words really cannot describe this experience. It was so incredible, I have never taken an ecstasy pill but I imagine it gives a similar high, my whole body was buzzing with ecstasy in a very physical way, like someone had injected a fluid into my blood and I could feel it spreading through my body, lighting everything up with ecstatic pleasure and joy as it went. This was a very physical and physiological experience, not just a mental one. It was holistic. It was profoundly impacting.
In the very same moment I was experiencing this rush that had set me free of my bonds, I felt a sudden urge to look upward, and a huge pale bird swooped over my head by only a few feet, just low enough so as to be visible in the darkness of the night. I kid you not this happened in the very same instant that I describe in the paragraph above, and only sent me into an even bigger high.
The bird glided off over a patch of land where a public housing estate was being demolished, and soaring over the ruins of the monolithic blocks of flats, I realised that the patch of land I was looking at represented the last five or six years of my life. For you to understand why, I would literally have to tell you my life story, but believe me it related in a very specific way to a mental prison of sorts that I had been living in since I was a teenager (I had gone through some quite bad times) and that related directly to the problems I was currently experiencing and that in this very instant was being demolished as I emerged reborn into a new way of life, represented by this giant white bird, a symbol of spiritual freedom no doubt. I had time enough to work out also that the bird was a grey heron, which after over three years of living in the area and walking everywhere due to not owning a car, I had only just seen for literally the first time, but would see plenty of times since.
My depression lifted completely and irreversibly, and a whole host of major internal issues that I had been grappling with for years and that were heavily entrenched and still obviously affecting me at the time left never to return. It’s not that they weren’t there anymore, it’s just that for the first time I was able to leave them fully in the past and they could no longer affect me. I was freed completely from them, and the giant white bird soaring over the ruins of that housing estate was more perfect a symbol than I ever could have contrived.
A couple of years later, I was at a museum in Cambridge that was displaying a large collection of Egyptian papyri of the book of the dead, a kind of esoteric instruction manual for journeys into the spiritual worlds, and I noticed among the beautiful hieroglyphs a frequent and highly intriguing symbol: a grey heron. As clear as day was this a grey heron, not a purple heron, or a duck, or an ambiguous creature, but a grey heron, identical to the one that had soared over my head. I decided to read the information panel at the side of the display case: the symbol was indeed a grey heron, known to the Egyptian occultists as a bennu bird, it was their spiritual phoenix, a bird rising from the ashes of destruction and bringing with it new spiritual life: the esoteric symbol of spiritual resurrection.
I was silently touched by what I had read. In some ways it lent an authenticity to my experience, but in others, I needed no authenticity, it was incredibly real and raw and already hugely significant to me anyway.
Date experienced: Easter 2006
Labels: bennu bird, fukkatsu, heron, mysticism, phoenix, resurrection, revelation
posted by The Blogging Mystic at
09:09
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