Why was my awakening negative?

[Inception]

I’m trying to understand an experience I had that I interpreted as a possible awakening or mystical opening, but unlike the peaceful or blissful awakening experiences I often hear about, mine eventually became extremely frightening.

I had been studying spirituality, nonduality, and consciousness for around five years, so I had a substantial theoretical background before this happened. I was already familiar with ideas like ego death, surrender, the illusion of separation, and the possibility that consciousness is fundamental.

Then I went through a period where reality started feeling radically different. Perception became extremely vivid and unusual. Ordinary things could look strange or almost unreal, and I experienced an intense sense of love and unity. I also became deeply focused on another person, whom I experienced as the Beloved or as somehow representing Reality itself.

At one point, it felt as though I was getting extraordinarily close to something fundamental. The usual sense of separation seemed to be dissolving. But then fear became overwhelming. I began to feel almost like prey being hunted, as though something was coming after me.

It felt almost like I was approaching a point where the self itself would disappear. Instead of surrendering, I retreated. In the metaphor I've been using since then, it felt like a moth approaching a flame: the moth is drawn toward the flame, but eventually realizes that getting too close may mean its own destruction, so it flies away.

Why do some awakening experiences seem profoundly peaceful while others become terrifying?

Edited 5 hours ago by Inception

[Carl-Richard]

3 hours ago, Inception said:

Why do some awakening experiences seem profoundly peaceful while others become terrifying?

It's that you're at an advanced level of awakening where you start integrating it into your baseline state and its nature becomes abundantly clear to you. Many people simply have short glimpses and their egos react very strongly with perhaps a short glimpse of fear and then "ahhh how profound, how magnificent, I have awoken to truth, I am so awake". Their state might be affected for a while after that as well, but their ego is still strongly intact, just relatively less. When the baseline state starts to become increasingly more non-dual, you eventually have to truly face that fear, you can't retreat and marvel at how profound it is/was from the perspective of your ego.

If it's a true awakening (a proper dose of ego dissolution), there is always an element of fear and amazement. It's just many people are good at repressing the fact that they experienced fear, retracting back to the ego and focusing on the amazement. And of course, there are some that surrender and start going down the road of proper enlightenment. And there might even be people who think they have surrendered but they just suppress the fact that they haven't, because they are in a relatively heightened state (which can be experienced as very profound) from the awakening. Nevertheless, the fact that you're experiencing fear is not something unnormal or something that is only happening to you. It can be quite integral part of the experience (or of the transition rather).

Rupert Spira also talked about the moth and the flame analogy. He said that eventually you get tired of going back and forth and then you just surrender. You have to find out what that point is for you and whether you think there is anything in the way for you getting there. Simply ask yourself: "What do I want?". Pursue that. If you want to come to a place where you want to surrender, you should pursue what you want.

Edited 1 hour ago by Carl-Richard