I would like to share my story, which consists of three awakening experiences so far. I do not intend to keep a journal and I would like to invite discussion and ask for directions. Due to nature of my self-inquiry I am not committed to any spiritual tradition and know basics of very few ones, but I'm open to suggestions to what pursue next. This thread will contain three posts, as I would like to go in depth on each one and they may not be digestible in a one go. Currently, I'm intuitively feeling that a fourth awakening is coming and I think that remembering details of my previous ones will help it come along. For now, let's talk about my first awakening that happened 3 years ago, and some background. I was always smart. First, as a kid that did as little as possible to not get in trouble with parents and play videogames for the rest of the time. Then, as a teenager that would get hooked up on science and computing, pursuing career in mechanical engineering. I was raised in a reasonably wealthy family and by the time I was finishing my master's degree I had everything most people have by the time they are in their mid-40. A house, a car, a cat, and a reasonably well-paid job thanks to my family. And, of course - feeling absolutely crushed by life's miseries, barely holding it all together. I was having something of a year-off in which I was supposed to write my thesis, but instead of doing that I decided to check out philosophy. I was always admiring authorities in science, and philosophy was like its big daddy so of course I would get interested in that. Being a youtube junkie that I still am, I found The School of life channel and ran a crash course in art and philosophy. What got me really fascinated was existential philosophy, especially Martin Heidegger. He was advertised as the most obscure philosopher that talks about the most mundane things, and boy, how did I love riddles. My first awakening had two stages. First stage was while reading about existentialism as a whole on Stanford's encyclopedia of philosophy, and the second one was while reading Martin Heidegger's "Being and Time". Facts that I injected were not important in my awakening by themselves, but the process of opening myself to possibility. Transcending the point of view I had at the time. What is important is that I did not really try to grasp the logic this philosophy provides, but to accept it as it was given to me, and try to view "the real world" through its lens. A logical/rational person like me could do that only because I trusted that those philosophers were wiser than me and I was trying to connect with feelings I knew I had inside. I was trying to prove to myself that I am a human being, and not a robot which I saw as a root cause of unhappiness in my life. In the first stage, while reading broadly about existentialism, it induced severe feelings of loneliness, sadness and compassion towards other human beings. I remember looking at people focused on their business and feeling sorry for them for being "lost" in their "roles". I suddenly started cherishing simple things, like sunshine, or the wind. Breathing. At the same time, I started to doubt my material paradigm as I believed that I cannot simply be summed up as a story. I started seriously thinking about death, and having walks to the cemetery every few days to contemplate it. When I saw that something was going on with this existentialism thing, I finally decided to wrestle with Heidegger and thought to myself: "Damn, I read tensor calculus for fun, how hard can this whole "Being and Time" be?". Well, the book gave me a good fight and then knocked my Ego out for two weeks. The mainstream advice for anyone interested in the book is that you don't try to read it unless you have a Ph.D. in Philosophy. I was too determined to care at that point, so I read it in two languages to account for mistranslations, while watching Hubert Dreyfus' lectures on youtube. It took me several months to get through one third of the book, when my first awakening happened. It was a gradual process in which I saw how I construct reality. The book highlights the method of self-inquiry called Phenomenology that is used to map the inner territory of a being called Dasein. The being is defined as one that asks the question "What is being?", which is what the book tries to answer. I have been doing that out of pure curiosity for months, each day, every free minute until it hit me: "None of this is real, everything is me". It was a very nauseating feeling, very strange and profoundly beautiful. In everything I saw, I saw how I was in it. Everything was a reflection of myself - a book wouldn't be a book without me. I saw how "I" was constructed out of a "book", and the "book" was constructed out of "I". How "I" was dispersed in everything I saw, felt, smelled and touched. It was absolutely fascinating. Until, of course I understood that I can take ownership of the construction and I started to deconstruct what "I" didn't like. Funnily enough it was things I was the most proud of, like how I was attached to my house, but felt miserable for not earning it. How I loved my car, but felt fear of losing it. To disassociate from my body that I thought was too fat and didn't like. It felt so freeing that I cried. I got so carried away with this deconstruction that at one point I realized that once I knew how to do it, there was no coming back. I could not forget how to and I was in total control of everything. I could go all the way down into nothingness. And then it hit me: "A human is literally nothing and it is terrifying".
"We run away from it and shove things into this bottomless pit without realizing it cannot be filled."
"This is the misery of the human condition.". After days of fear, nausea, crying, laughter, ecstasy and love - the remnants of "I" decided that we cannot live this way. That this is too unsustainable and we have to close the pit. So it happened. In the midst of things, I reached out to my parents for help. First, they tried to fix me physically, when that showed not to be the problem - they sent me to therapy. Very pragmatic people, but hey - good call. I stayed with the therapist till this day and I'm very glad. What happened next is that I lost 16 kg over the next few years, changed my job to a better one, met my soon-to-be wife and graduated school at the top of my class. Ego at its best, trying to keep the pit closed. Overall: great ride - 10/10, would ride again So, what technically happened?
What I learned a few years later is that I probably did a very intense Neti-Neti inquiry while being totally clueless. Ended up, probably, in the dark night of the soul and let the Ego take the wheel again to leave it. It grew back strong, but I knew that I could open the pit someday, which I did in the second awakening. I will report on it soon.