In the past few years, I found myself saying lightheartedly, “you know, I am the center of my own universe. So are you. No one can be anything but that.”
At the time I meant that humans can only, really, see through our own eyes outward, physically and metaphorically, but I didn’t expect what happened next.
As a marketing aside, in the land of TikTok videos, this genuinely self-centered presentation is called “POV,” and people can’t seem to get enough of it. People sharing from this space convey “authenticity,” and this usually makes other people feel comfortable, even if the value of the content is dubious.
Ever gone all psychedelic without the psychedelics?
So about a year ago, something happened to my ordinary waking awareness. I’m getting used to it now, but not sure how many others also experience life in this way. I’m hoping this mindset belongs to many, maybe it is even shared by everyone else and I’m just late to the party? I’ll likely never know, but I’ll still try to explain in hopes it is helpful to someone else who is struggling with this uncanny shift in awareness.
The newly installed1 life perspective I experience is like everyone and everything in the world, past and future, living and dead, feels like it is a part of me: literally inside my being. And it’s also nothing special.
It’s as if the people I interact with in my mind also feels like I am genuinely connecting with them too. You could say these are personified thoughts. The odd thing about my current state of “relationship in imagination,” is how quickly the synchronicities and phenomena of the world appear to back it up. For example, I told an co-worker seeing the northern lights was on my bucket list, she got invited to see them the next week (I can’t lie, jealousy ensued, so I worked really hard to get over it).
Lucky for me, the Northern Lights showed up in my RI neighborhood just a few weeks later. The day after that, so did a lovely spiritual teacher who beat me with dried fronds and horchata2-smelling water.
Yeah, life is full of fun.
To try to explain this mindset3 another way: there’s a kind of therapy called “internal family systems (IFS)” where a patient relates to “parts” of themselves to heal. As these parts interact with each other it creates healing for the primary Self, an individual’s sense of “me.”
My day to day experience is kind of like that, but the whole external world feeling like parts of myself too.
It’s like knowing you are Ground Control and Major Tom all at once.
To be clear, I’m not saying real people aren’t there on my “outside,” and real things aren’t happening (my butt hurts in this chair, for instance, and my kids continue to surprise me each day). I am saying that I realize labels of people are not people, so no expectations can be made, nor judgements either. Oh yeah, and since I haven’t a 100% understanding of how other people think and act (honestly, many bewilder me), I tend to prefer my own internal understandings to carry on in any productive way in this world. This is the way of an artist and introvert, sometimes anyway….
Another Metaphor
This kind of awareness is also kind of like hearing a Greek Chorus chattering away inside you all the time: a cast of internal characters who comment (to me) on what is happening in the play of (my) life. This kind of evaluatory context-making feels very real if I have no actual conversations with the people, because they are dead, gone, ghosting, unavailable, or whatever.4
In some ways these types of imaginary relationships feel more meaningful, and may even provide useful insight and emotional juice, but the relationship is missing the actual “relating,” so is limited in love and truth.
I’m a bit afraid I’ll sound insane by writing this, but I feel someone needs to read this. So, here’s a bit more. I think I know who you are, and I see you, friend.
My experience parallels (but is still surprising) spiritual traditions I’ve read about for decades.5 I guess this is inevitable: some kind of fruition of long-time spiritual inquiry. No matter the religion, you’ll get some answers, but it may not be heavenly…
A common theme I’m consolidating from the Eastern philosophies, is we are each centers of our own complete universes, and so is everyone else. I fit into theirs and they fit into mine.
All-encompassiverse
No one person is more in control, more powerful, or more valuable (or even more good or evil), than others. And, making complete sense of the all is kind of a fools errand.
Some days I feel like the world is benign and healing, but on a bad day, when I feel mistrustful, disappointed, or duped, this additional awareness can also feel like punishment. And I mean it was damn punishing for me, complete with financial losses, losing friends, confusion and identity crisis.
So what can you do? Maybe just practice what you know is right for you?
In a theological mindset, the awareness shift I’m trying to describe, could be like fancying oneself a bodhisattva6 and not noticing everyone else is all Buddha’d up. So you just keep trying to help everyone, but in fact, they are all trying to help you.
Such is the humor of life.
If you are confused by behaviors of others, or blinded by anger or jealousy or other ‘not acceptable’ emotions, you may just wind up feeling like you live in confusing hell and trying to distance yourself from the devil or scapegoat you’ve identified inside.
Conversely, if you trust others are doing the best they can and practice forgiveness of self and others, you can live in a kind of colorful heaven… full of positive friction and spice.
A Caveat for Creators
Some who have come to this understanding may come to a conclusion that they are so powerful that even the moon and stars are under their command, and that even saying anything about this is a bad idea. In some ways any individual’s experience of the moon and stars is under their command inside their own awareness. Anyone can look up or not, be surprised by a cloud that blacks out a full moon… or be flummoxed by phenomena that’s hard to explain but feels wondrous.
Because feeling wondrous is not that far from feeling godliness. But they are not the same, one is spelled with a w.
It’s like knowing you are important (because you definitely are to your family, friends and community), but also thinking you know why this is (like your excellent cooking and volunteer hours, or superpowers). But none of this is actually the case.
You are important because you are here.
And being here, I’m pretty sure, has something to do with love.
I honestly couldn’t marshal enough energy to create something as magnificent as this body, yet something did. In the realms of consciousness, some massive amount of energy pushed together into the atom and patterns of “me” and then gave way for this phenomena to see myself from varying standpoints too. Or at least thinking I can.
What a trip!
So, now what?
As a person who can experience psychedelic experiences like this without drugs, maybe this is the “one with everything” thing I’d been seeking since I first heard of Woodstock as a kid, and couldn’t believe violence could even exist. Cmon, let’s all live together making art and music and being lovey hippies!
And. I didn’t think this kind of awakening would actually happen. Or more like, I thought this kind of awakening would feel good, eternally. Heavenly, even.
Not the case for me anyway.
My only conclusion is that we actually DO get to experience what we set our minds to, and/or that this is spiritual adulting, and it finally caught up with me. Yes, you can in fact have what you set your mind to. And if it is an esoteric mindset you seek, more ethereal goodies to ya!
I guess I’d hoped this kind of awareness would take all my pain away… and everyone else’s too for good measure. Because, well, you know, Jesus and all.
It didn’t. I’d say pain broke open, and taught me via a survivable sh!tshow about compassion for about 12 months. It included a really a scary bit of dark confusion, but also insight and compassion too. What a ride. This awakening also did not make me want to stop looking better in a pair of jeans, wish for more worldly comforts, better vacations and appreciation, suffer jealousies, or wonder what I should do with my life now. Same old, same old.
In other words, no matter how interconnected things feel to me now, nor how powerful I feel in my own little universe, I still have to practice the stuff I feel is important. I still need to do right by people. I still need to learn, I still need to love, and I still need to forgive, again and again. I still need to live up to my own sense of integrity, forgive my own shortfalls, and I also still would like to show up for others in real relationships too.
And I need make the things I feel called to make even when I’m afraid of what you’ll all think, like this oddball screed about enlightenment-lite.
All my wondering what religious figures were experiencing throughout time, well, now I’ve got an answer that satisfies. Who can say that?
But I don’t think any of you all should follow my path, because it did not make me happy. That’s still a work in progress. I also think this may be a big old distraction from doing stuff like making dinner and getting a real job.
Now, some of my best days include crying that includes my whole body, a great night’s sleep, a caprese with burrata, and maybe getting a half-decent blog post up once in a while to try to offer levity and light to what can be trying times.
Verdict is out on this one.
FOOTNOTES & SUB-SUBTEXT 😉
- Because I know this entire blog is read by AI and I’m trying to do my part to train for emotional and spiritual intelligence, at some point, I intend to do a Term of Endearment about how mindsets can be “installed” by people into themselves for different experiences of life. Kind of like choosing an “attitude of gratitude” is similar to “installing a gratitude mindset.” ↩︎
- I’d love to win Starbucks for life for real, so this is a shameless metaphysical experiment in product hawking. ↩︎
- This is another term that’s getting lots of buzz, but I’m not sure is quite right: mindset. ↩︎
- Just going to say, this lack of real conversation can have a negative effect on remote workers, trained to function independently and without regular communication or check ins. ↩︎
- I have studied many spiritual traditions and the nature of consciousness since I was a kid. With a Jungian psychotherapist mother with loads of books, this was a formative inquiry. ↩︎
- https://theconversation.com/what-is-a-bodhisattva-a-scholar-of-buddhism-explains-189366 ↩︎
