My Spiritual Journey — 1 — a shaky start
Hi, nice to meet you. I’m your typical “ordinary guy”. I studied political science, work for a European NGO, and my beliefs were as ordinary as anyone. “God” doesn’t exist, this world is just a result of a Big Bang and a bunch of cause and effect events, no mystery, a logical and linear evolutionary progression ending with us humans. The meaning of life? Whatever society thought it was, that is, a slightly more sophisticated version of what animals do already: work in order to survive and reproduce. Of course, the fact that we are imbued with self-awareness allowed us to add a layer of complexity on top of these simple premises, like the concept of “beauty”, art and creativity, ethics, morality, philosophy, religion, metaphysics, etc.
Then, something literally hit me. As someone deeply concerned about the future of humanity, ecology, and plenty of philosophical questions like how to solve inequalities, how to balance individual freedom with the general interest of all, what does justice mean, what is “truth”, even starting to question our perception of reality, I binge watched hours upon hours of Youtube debates between various famous Youtube stars like Sam Harris and Jordan Peterson. I especially watched a Podcast debate where the two of them explore the concept of “truth”, and that’s when my trip down the rabbit hole started. This was back in January 2018.
I couldn’t sleep. I started to have ideas pop in my head that I could not control and which seemingly came from nowhere. Ideas which called into question much of my ordinary beliefs. I will explore some of the ideas that I had at the time in subsequent articles. This lasted for a little over a week. I couldn’t concentrate at work, I wrote over 70 pages of the random ideas and thoughts that crossed my mind, all of which I would later explain and put into perspective by becoming familiar with the kind of literature I had never touched prior to this experience: books about spirituality and esoteric experiences.
In the end, my wife really freaked out. The less I slept, the more ideas and thoughts came to me, but the more delirious I became. At the time, I thought that I was some kind of prophet, alone in a world where everyone else was asleep, and I had to “save” humanity with the “revelations” I had received. In the end, I landed in the emergency psychiatric unit in a hospital, convinced that the end of the world was near, that a nuclear attack was imminent, that I was about to die and had to leave behind a sort of summary of my revelations which would help the survivors… After an hour or so of acting crazy, they gave me two sleeping pills and I slept for 18 hours straight. When I woke up, a series of “coincidences” or synchronicities would lead me exactly where I needed to go in order to make sense of all that I had been through.
My wife decided I needed to see a psychologist and I agreed. She called a friend of mine who recommended a psychologist not far from where we lived. In normal circumstances she didn’t take in new patients but made an “exception” for me… The first time we saw each other, I explained to her everything I had lived through and she gave me a book. As I started reading it, I knew exactly what it was going to say and sure enough, it explored very similar spiritual ideas and thoughts to what I had experienced.
At that point, I knew my life would never be the same. You cannot “unsee” or “unlive” something of that magnitude. And so on top of being a father, working full time, and having a more or less regular social life, I started the long spiritual journey that eventually, all of us will have to initiate. In the following articles I will recount my experiences as a pure novice. The books that I have read, the difficulties I have encountered… I hope it may be an inspiration for some in their own spiritual journey and discovery of self.