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

First Experience of God

It wasn't until about a year later that I thought to myself I had better make good on my promise and I started where most Westerners would probably start: by picking up a copy of the bible. I read the Gospels, and although I found myself drawn to a lot of the teachings of Jesus Christ, I never considered what I was reading to be any more than a book. One night I was up late reading in bed, and I came to a passage in one of the Gospels that to this day I wish I had earmarked, but I think it was either in the book of Matthew or the book of John. I found myself reading and re-reading this one piece of writing, stopping in between to try and process exactly what I was reading but drawing a complete blank. I felt as if there was something just beneath the level of my conscious perception that I was missing out on, that despite reading this particular passage multiple times I was still missing out on the real meaning contained therein, and that there was something potent lurking beneath the relatively banal surface-level layer of literal meaning. You know when you check your watch and then realise after that you didn't register the time? It was exactly like this. I decided to stop, put the book down, and say a prayer to God. "I can sense that there is something in this writing, but I cannot see what. If it is your will, if I am at all worthy, bless me with an insight to see what is really written. Amen." I turned my lights out and went to sleep.

I should add that at this stage despite praying, I was not a believer in God: I was however open to the prospect that a reality represented by the word God might actually exist, and I was offering a prayer with an open mind and an open heart and literally seeing what happened.

Sometime in the early hours I was awaken by a strange phonecall. My phone was on the table next to my bed, and I answered it almost immediately. "Hello?" I said, "Hello?" said the voice on the other end of the phone. "Who's this?" I asked, "Who's this?" was the mocking reply, imitating my tone of voice. "Yeah what?", I was now more than a little annoyed at the obvious prank caller, "yeah what?" came the reply, just managing to finish before I slammed the receiver down in a half aggrevated, half too-tired-to-care manner. I was living in student digs at the time, and prank calls of one nature or another were relatively common among the internal phones that every room had. More significant to me though, was the fact that I had been woken out of a very deep sleep in just such a way that I was aware of what I was dwelling on once I fully regained waking consciousness, something which rarely happens, to me at least (I often cannot recollect upon waking exactly what the deep levels of my mind were mulling over only a few seconds previously). Allow me to elaborate: the moment the first ring of the phone went off, I "awoke", but I awoke within my deep level of sleep, within my unconscious mind if you will. It took a few seconds and a few more rings of the phone for me to fully "ascend" out of deep unconsciousness and into a full waking state, and as I gradually ascended, I equally gradually lost my grip on whatever it was that my mind was dwelling on, so that by the time I fully awoke, I was left with only an imprint and a vague memory of the thing that I was previously fully connected with. I hope I have explained that well enough to understand.

The thing itself is something that cannot be put into words. As far as our relatively puny consciously controlled minds go, it was something so significant and meaningful and powerful as to be able to exist only in conceptual form; but in my deep levels of sleep, while my waking mind was dormant and an older more venerable part of my mind was doing the business, I was fully aware of it and fully connected with it. I only remember thinking right before I fully awoke and lost it for good, "If only I could tell people about THIS!". It was monstrously epic, and profoundly positive. Beyond that, I have no waking recollection of it to speak of.

That day marked the first day of my true believer status. I experienced something profoundly life-changing, and have walked the earth ever since with a sense of something I can't quite put my finger on.

What was it? This "thing" that can exist only as an ungraspable concept in the waking mind I am using to type this blog? I do not know, for certain, but it was something very deep and very powerful and profoundly positive and pure. Was it God? Was it the Holy Spirit? It was certainly a revelation, and it was as real as the socks on your feet, or the monitor you're looking at to read this blog.

Date experienced: Approx. Winter 2003