And the origin of new beliefs: a head-on, common-sense take on cracking up
“Non-specified spiritual experience” (NSSE) was the language my chiropractor used to describe what I’d been through. See, last winter, I had an awakening. I wouldn’t have called it that at the time, but now, several months out, it’s as good of a term as anything. What I realize now, is that these experiences are common, rarely discussed in plain language, and serve as a wiping clean of previous belief systems and installation of new ones. Here I hope to lay plain what an NSSE is, and some ideas how to proceed should you have one yourself.
Awakening experiences — when going it alone— can be so distressing, that they seem to mandate the shedding of relationships, quitting jobs, even changing identities.
Maybe because belief-erasure experiences overturn our chosen roles, routines, and understanding of life so profoundly, that the resulting confusion can make us mistrust every aspect of the world we trusted before. “Dark night of the soul” is great language for this experience.
But what matters most, I think, is what you do with this kind of experience moving forward. Do you cut and run? Do you incorporate and communicate? Do you burn bridges, or do you help healers?
New beliefs can be adopted from a single source like a religion or a single teacher. And a person’s likeliness of doing this depends on where they turn for guidance, and how eagerly a given teacher snaps them up.
During this type of “world makes no sense” struggle, new beliefs can also be woven together from the inquiry of one’s own life and everything one’s learned, with the desire to make sense of life on one’s own terms.1
What can a non-specified spiritual experience look like?
The experience, for me anyway:
To others, my NSSE looked like mid-life crisis, or maybe “burnout.2” It could easily be described as a middle-aged woman so overwrought and stressed that she had seizures of sorts, flailing her arms around like the robot in Lost in Space while murmuring about the dangers of AI3. My family, rightfully concerned, brought me to the hospital, where they tried to put me to sleep with ever-increasing doses of tranquilizers. It took enough to put a horse in a coma before I fell asleep. I was in the ER for five days.
To elaborate only a little, my interior experience, was, well, an experience.4 I felt like I was enmeshed in a world where the skies looked darker (it may have just been cloudy), the birds were vanishing (I was afraid of wildlife extinction and climate change), and no one could be trusted except my husband, my dog, and the kind-eyed health care professionals who seemed genuinely concerned in keeping me alive (mistrust of people had accelerated after a dear friend dumped me by text).
So, I was like a living, breathing schism: the naming me— the part of myself that recognized things by their names and had a personal history vs. the experiencing me— the part of myself that was wildly awake and knew how this moment was the only moment that could be.
Naming and knowing
During a ‘crack up,’ everything can look the same, that is, a sandwich will still be a sandwich, and you can name everything you see, but your emotional experience of these things may feel deeply unfamiliar. You may see, hear, even taste everything anew, even knowing you’ve experienced them before. A NSSE may leave you feeling as if you have never truly understood anything, ever. And, unfortunately, depending on your world view, some of these previously familiar things, can now feel menacing (hence the “dark” in the “dark night of the soul”)5. It doesn’t mean they are, it just means you are seeing the exchange of energy more clearly and your brain doesn’t know how to process it.
My NSSE was also like being enmeshed in a singular fabric of internal+external stimuli, that included objects like TV shows and commercials, books, hospital equipment, family, bagged sandwiches (apparently, hospitals do not serve food inside the ER, so you get the equivalent of hospital doordash)6, hospital staff, sketching, and internal questioning.
And every last thread of every moment was experienced as connected to to every other thread of memory, family identity, thoughts, feelings, speculations7, theories, and the surrounding sounds, sights, and people 8. Yeah, it was a lot, and it was not fun.9
So what does one do with an NSSE? What’s the point?
I have come to wonder if every coach, every healer, every counselor, every spiritual guide, every teacher, every religion, every politician, and every friend and even, every foe, prescribes to us their belief system that helps them understand the world. That is, the beliefs we share with others as ‘true’ are our way of communicating the depth and breadth of our experience and how we found a way to cope with it’s wonder and mystery. Sometimes people congregate within the belief system of religion to feel they have a handle on things. And this can help us not feel so alone.
For example, a politician may say we must be “tough” as a nation, because that’s what helped that person cope with mystery, or a teacher may say we must be “compassionate” because that’s what helped them through a confusing experience with some grace.
It’s important to remember, if we relate to someone for real, we relate to the entirety of them, including their coping mechanisms.
Good Will
When relating to someone, if all concerned possess good will, the process could feel benign, or at least civil. This is perhaps where compassion comes in as a particularly ‘good’ quality to cultivate. It is kind and keeps people from cruelty as a method of self-protection.
Stand back, stand back
In the middle of my room, I did not hear from you
It’s alright, it’s alright
To be standing in a line. Standing in a line.
To be standing in a line.
I would cry
I feel I need a little sympathy.
~Stevie Nicks
Belief systems that address this
The Tao8 seems to me to be the closest way of explaining how we are creating our worlds and reality every moment of every day. And, just to plug it, science uses common measurement to validate common beliefs with empirical data (like the earth is round – it really friggin’ is people).
I find Nature to be a loving, wondrous, and occasionally frightful guide10, while I find people to be either helpful in gaining freedom and insight, or hindrances by binding one to their unhelpful belief systems. Nature is full of empirical data if you need to clear up what is real vs. what is not: and we all know nature is stronger than us, except that we are also a part of nature, so maybe not.
Free will
No matter what you do, it’s up to you. And if you possess good will, I wish you well in your journey.
P.S. It’s not your fault
- This ‘installation of the new beliefs’ can come from a new weaving together of conceptions one may have picked up from teachers, media, art, experiences, reading, etc. Because our brains need to create a new mesh to explain the unexplainable, it will reach into past bodily experience and empirical memories to FABRICATE a belief system to help explain one’s world to oneself. If I had been around a church, or a guru, I probably would have adopted what they taught me and become a zealot. Instead, I kept my eyes and ears open and trusted the process, even though it was very hard. ‘Very hard’ being code for wildly embarrassing, exhausting, downright terrifying, and sometimes even heroic.
. ↩︎ - In my work, I create an enormous amount of content, which is the “giving of energy.” While I love my work, the “receiving” of energy is usually limited to money. So, my marketing job was a net loss of energy. My friends, while lovely, are all busy and did not know what I needed at that time, so few showed up (I also forgot to reach out for help). My family, I’d been over-serving to for a long time, partially out of necessity: my son and husband had car accidents, there were cancers, elder falls, death, dementia, kid’s mental health crises and day-to-day soccer-momming all taking their toll, plus my job.
↩︎ - For what it is worth, I deal with AI in my work at a level where I see how AI is gleaning knowledge from knowledge workers, which I find problematic, and have written about that here. ↩︎
- All religions (AKA belief systems) are based upon this class of experience. Experience that is internal, epic, and usually requires some kind of super-natural or poetic language to relay it to others. Examples include; “virgin birth,” “son of god” or “suffering arises,” “heroes journey,” “reincarnation” and “40 days in wilderness,” etc. ↩︎
- I’m glad I was cordoned off for a while, otherwise, I probably would have got on a soapbox and shouted “the end is nigh!” ruining any reputation I had as a reasonable human. ↩︎
- Had I been of another socio-economic class, I could have had this experience in a spa, or a private island and the building blocks of my new beliefs would have been quite different. ↩︎
- I spend lots of time reading and thinking about things like the power of art, quantum physics, spirituality and how it relates to matter, and plain old medical science, so I find myself “out in space” in my thinking more often than not. ↩︎
- Without having done enough research yet, I surmise my experience may be most closely related to the Tao ↩︎
- If I had consumed hallucinogens, this experience could perhaps be described as a “bad trip.” ↩︎
- My SymbolWorks touch upon this in ways words cannot explain
↩︎
