You May Die...

Gypsy Hand Grenades, DMT and the Holy Ghost...

I found myself walking in the dead of night up the street where I used to live with my father. On all sides of the road and on the front lawns and driveways of the houses unsavoury gypsy-type characters were camped, in small tents, in sleeping bags, in small groups huddled around open fires. Their children played naughtily around the parked vehicles and with the wheely bins.

I had in my possession explosive devices, and I had apparently been planting them in opportune places whilst trying to avoid being caught by the campers. It seemed to be my mission to destroy their efforts by sneaking around and laying these bombs.

I made it to the top of the hill and out of the area where the campers were and realised for the first time that the road was wet around my feet as if from a burst water main, and the water was flowing the direction I was walking. I carried on walking around a bend in the road and took a turn down one of the side streets, just as I heard a loud and slightly distant bang which I was certain was from the explosions going off that I had set, eliminating the sinister trespassers from the lower section of road.

At the end of the road I noticed the first difference between the dream landscape and its waking-life counterpart: where the housing development finished, behind which should have been fields and trees, there was instead the vista of a huge city lit up at night with the image being reflected in a body of water sat between the houses and the cityscape.

I walked along the path through the houses taking me to the very end of the street and looked down at my feet again, this time to discover the water had become stronger and more voluminous, and was flowing along the path I had taken leading to this body of water. In fact, as I stopped at a concrete precipice overlooking the lake in front of me and taking one last look behind and down again at my feet, the water was now strong enough to move me along and push me over the edge into the lake.

The instant I plunged into the water an incredible thing happened: the dark of night lifted and was replaced in a flash by bright beaming daylight and clear blue skies; the water around me was alive and vivid and fresh to the point where I could feel the spray on my face; the old streets and houses had completely vanished and were replaced on all sides by beautiful buildings, weeping willows and the like. The entire sequence became incredibly realistic and charged with significance as if a switch had suddenly been flipped, and the whole episode was accompanied by a feeling of euphoria and "things all fitting together". It only lasted a few seconds however before I felt as if I was being pulled out of my ecstatic dream state and forced awake.



I awoke in my bedroom to a visual overlay of semi-transparent geometric forms being imposed over my regular sight. The bold shape in the middle was of a rotating circular mandala, with a cog-like centre that rotated the opposite direction at a slightly different speed, and various other minor shapes around it. I was frozen with surprise, having not experienced a psychadelic visual of this nature before, but having encountered similar experiences in literature regarding mystical visions and experiences reported by users of certain hallucinogens, particularly DMT and shamanic formulas derived from datura, peyote and other naturally occuring vegetation.

This visual display went on for 30 seconds or a minute before a faint droning noise that I had been aware of began to pick up volume and become unbearably loud and intense to the point of being highly unnerving and causing a strong fearful response in me. I was overwhelmed by the cutting of the whirring sound and felt it beginning to consume me as I started fading out of consciousness and into the noise. I violently shook myself to resist the onset of the altered state that I felt myself being pulled into such was the level of fear I was experiencing, and the noise subsided and left.

The visuals were still rotating slowly in the semi-transparent overlay that sat like a sheet of acetate over my regular vision, and in the absence of the whirring noise I became very aware of a strong presence in the room with me. The presence was that of a small child which I perceived to be at my side as I laid in bed, either as if laying next to me, or actually being a part of me, I could not discern. I can only relate the presence of the child to the Holy Spirit as the child Jesus, being that it was such a pure and holy feeling that accompanied it.

At one point I became faintly aware of a trio of presences in the room, as if standing around me, but this feeling was faint and was far over-shadowed by the presence of the small child who was a part of me/laying next to me.

I have never experienced these types of visuals before in my life, neither the whirring sound that accompanied it or the intense feeling that had I not violently resisted I would have been pulled into a full-blown vision, nor the strong and very holy presence of a small child which here I can only equate with the Holy Spirit and which was quite remarkable.

The dream and subsequent experience occurred during the first week of working a new job which is itself very much tied in with what I believe is a life-calling for me and a way in which I may contribute by helping those in need, and I took it as a sign that I had set foot on the path I was meant to be on, and that I had the blessing and presence of God as I moved forward on this new path. It was definitely one of the most varied and significant mystical experiences I have encountered and the one I can most readily and obviously associate with Jesus Christ being that it was so intensely charged with positive holy energy and revolved around the presence of a holy child. In this sense it can probably be viewed as my most spiritually positive experience, if not necessarily my most impacting or memorable.

Date experienced: Mar/Apr 2010

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

Nirvana

One evening towards the end of Summer 2007 I took myself out for a walk.

Between the small town I was living in and the next village along is a road that winds for about a mile with meadows and fields on either side.

Walking along the path I caught sight of a large white bird circling in figures of eight low over the fields to my right. I knew instantly that it was either a sea-gull or a barn owl, although I had never seen barn owls hunt before and was not aware that they hunted like this. I decided to step over the wall and head out into the field to investigate.



It was a barn owl, a very large, bright white all over barn owl.

I spent what must have been two hours stood in the field, completely still, with the owl flying around my head as if I were not even there. It hovered at eye-level only a few feet away from me, circled the area I was standing in, and stopped once or twice on a branch or a fence-post.

As I was stood there I became aware of how blessed I was to be in this moment. A wild creature so beautiful and rare to see was close enough for me to reach out and pluck from the air, living its life as if I were not even there, and allowed me to stand there for so long and share in it in broad daylight. I felt priveliged to be experiencing something so natural that no amount of money could buy, that nobody else was experiencing, and started to notice a change in my internal space. I felt like I had been chosen in that moment to be blessed with that experience, and couldn't escape the feeling of being very lucky.

With each slow, elegant beat of the owl's bright white wings I felt more and more that something inside of me was falling away. All the worries, desires, plans, inhibitions, false labels of self; everything petty and illusory and negative that is just as much a part of me as my right arm was dissolving away minute by minute leaving only a blissful state in its place.

Words cannot describe the internal state I came to that evening, as I stood in that field, aware of only the owl; in that extended moment I wanted nothing that I did not have, I thought of nothing that I was not at one with, and I had no sense of tension or fear anywhere in my being. It is only when these things leave us completely, that we realise how completely they consume us the rest of the time.

I was at one with the moment in such an intense way that evening, that the past and the future simply did not exist, anywhere, ever. Never before or since have I experienced this feeling, it was more real, awake and amazing than anything else. Life bristled with boundless energy, not needing any gimmicks or false promises or bright lights, just life itself was enough, and more profoundly exciting than any thought my mind had ever created. It was a glimpse of something true and holy, the purest state of being that words cannot come close to describing, and it permeated my entire being to the point that nothing else existed.

Only in the moment can we experience life directly, in its purest and truest form. The rest is an illusion created by our minds.

Date experienced: Approx. September 2007

Anubis

I found myself in the grounds of a university, although with the distinct feeling that I was not a student like those that were congregated around me or walking by.

Behind me was a huge dome structure, almost white in colour and resembling a cathedral, in a similar style to some of the old University buildings you might see around Oxford. Groups of students were congregated around the entrance with backpacks and books and the like, relaxing between lectures.



I noticed for the first time an elegant black dog, proud and alert and most resembling a Doberman, sat just by the side of one of the groups, but not part of it. It seemed a little out of place.

All the while I was aware of the majesty of the dome building.

There were now two men talking, distinct from the students by their appearance and style, they were standing where the dog had just been sitting.

I overheard one say to the other, "Does he know this is his last time?", and was instantly struck by the realisation that they were talking about me, and that this was my last incarnation on earth.

At this moment one of the men left, and I approached the one remaining, asking him questions about who he was, how he knows about me, and what was going on.

He stood stoically with the presence of one who knows more than I ever will and refused to speak a word, only looking me in the eye as I spoke.

As I was talking he transformed before my eyes and now appeared from the neck down as the same man that he was a moment ago, but from the neck up he now had the head of the dog that I noticed earlier.

In an instant the comfort of ignorance was destroyed and I was hit with an overwhelming sense that I was standing before a supernatural being, that the dome building was something even more important than I could ever have assumed just from looking at it, and that I had just overheard a God of the underworld mentioning in conversation to someone else that I was living out what is to be my last life on earth.

I violently projectile vomited all over the being stood before me and crumpled to the ground, totally levelled by the shock and magnitude of what I had just been exposed to, and immediately woke up.



Date Experienced: Approx. Winter 2007/2008

Boomerang Theory

Note to self: boomerang it. If it's meant to be, it'll come back of its own accord. If it doesn't, you'll know it was never a proper boomerang in the first place, and you did yourself a favour by throwing it away.

This works with women. You have to flush her completely out of your system: not want her, not think about her, not wait on the next time you might see her. If you don't let go completely, you haven't boomerang'd it, and it never has that chance to come back.

One day, if it's meant to be, life will conspire to throw the two of you together, and you'll know the boomerang has just returned. Could be days, could be weeks, months or even years; time is not part of the equation: it just comes back, or it doesn't.

Until then, kick back and enjoy the ride.

Binary Star pt. 2