Warning: this is a long post!!! (How can it not be with such a question…?!.)
Okay, this is without a doubt by far my favorite thread I have read so far. There is such a paucity of discussion and thought in our daily lives (or at least in my daily life) about these sorts of things; I think it is so important to really stop at times and think about these big picture questions, and then, after or during thinking, try somehow, somewhat to articulate what these thoughts are saying, what they mean to us, etc. Make the thoughts about our personal vision of the big picture conscious, in other words.
When I read the question, “WHO ARE WE,” (and the capital letters make it definitely more intense; they remind me of the various spirits who speak in capital letters in James Merrill’s “The Book of Ephraim”), I tend to turn the direction inwards, and my answer is therefore a way I look at my own subjectivity, my interior, and is along the lines of “WHO AM I?” Or, for a different valence, “WHO AM I?” This is something that @fmdolan mentioned in his post, i.e. the turn towards the subjective; I think it’s a sensible move, and can lead later to larger circles.
When I ask this question to myself, the first thing that comes to my mind is some mental health issues I struggled with in my twenties, and then for a shorter period of time in my early thirties. Quick autobio summary: I grew up in a fairly wealthy household and family in suburbia, and although I was very lucky to be provided for, my family really rarely discussed feelings, or too much revolving around the inner life or inner world. Over time, especially by the time I entered high school, I carried around this strange feeling that something about me was wrong or damaged, but I didn’t know how or why, and I did not have the awareness (emotional, verbal, cognitive, what have you) to talk about this consciously. This feeling that something was wrong, but I didn’t know how to talk about it or what it meant, lasted at least until my sophomore or junior year in college, when I started meditating.
The system under which I meditated - and which I still do today, after taking a break of almost ten years - utilizes pranahuti, or divine yogic transmission, to help the practicant meditate and grow spiritually. Pranahuti can calm the mind; it also produces a feeling in the heart that I cannot call anything except love. (The gurus of the system have called it a “forceless force.”) My point about this is that, before I started meditating under this system, as a child and adolescent, I took things like time and space very seriously. By “seriously” I don’t mean “consciously” - I rarely said to myself, “let’s think rigorously about time and space” or whatever, but I assumed so many things about time and space and my place within these…things, concepts, ideas, spaces, etc., and these assumptions, expectations, beliefs, what you will, were the framework around which I developed my intuitive understandings about reality, what it was, what it meant. How I thought about reality shaped how I experienced or saw reality, even if much of this thinking was largely unconscious.
Practicing meditation under this system, which today is called “Heartfulness,” changed all that, because pranahuti seemed to transcend time and space. When a trainer transmitted this divine energy, which I could immediately sense and feel, it was (it was said, I had no reason to doubt this) coming from the teacher/guru/master of the meditation practice, even if this teacher was far away, in another country (and I’d probably say that the energy ultimately comes not from the Guru but from the divine source, to which the guru is connected, or which the guru has realized).
But then things started to get weird. If you’ve ever read Rudolph Steiner, I’m sure you’ve come across his repeated emphasis on the need for a strong character, a developmental maturity, in order to undertake practice in the great mysteries. When I was meditating in my early twenties, I don’t think I was ready for such a powerful spiritual practice - I didn’t have the maturity or character yet. What I needed, more than anything, was therapy (which I did start around then), from all those years living with my tight-lipped, zipped-up family. So what happened after meditating for awhile is that I started to experience psychotic symptoms. I was occasionally hallucinating, and spending way too much time alone, i.e. isolating.
The climax of all this was that, in 2008, I had to be hospitalized. I was really not well. I spent a week in the hospital, started taking some meds. (I don’t take psych medication anymore, although that’s probably a different story - I think it’s really in many ways an individual choice.)
Why do I tell this story about meditation and psychosis? For two reasons. One, my experience receiving divine transmission, and my experience with psychosis, were so utterly different, for lack of a better term - different from each other, sure, but also different from what is experienced, I’d think, by most, or at least many, people who walk on this earth. (Maybe many people do have these experiences but are just not letting on?) Since many people either have not, or do not talk about, 1. experiencing psychosis, or 2. experiencing pranahuti, they often do not seem to be able to talk about them with a deeper understanding. I remember in 2008 when I came home from the hospital, and my older brother, who I love dearly, sat next to me on the bed and said “we are going to get through this” (that part was fine), but then asked me to put headphones in my ears and listen to an inspiring song he had on his i-pod. It was like, there did not seem to be an awareness on his part, in any way, shape or form, what it had been like living with aforementioned psychotic stuff, and therefore he did not know (understandably, there is no judgment here) how to talk about with me, or even how to ask about it.
When I ask “Who am I” in the context of these experiences, the best I can answer is, “I am really not who I think I am.” In other words, both of these experiences seemed to stretch my understanding of my self, push open the boundaries of my self sense (one in a positive or pleasurable way, one in a more negative and painful way). If you’ve ever read the Seth books, maybe this feeling is familiar, in terms of the pleasurable way. I can honestly say, after experiencing psychosis, but also after experiencing God or Spirit or whatever through meditation (and the exercises in A Course in Miracles, which have changed my life), I feel certain that reality is far more malleable and rich and strange than we give it credit for, not to mention that our relationship to reality seems so utterly intertwined and connected, participatory in the largest sense. I mean by this that when I was sick, the world was sick. When I am happy, the world is happy. I think Wittgenstein said something along these lines. So who I am is in many ways how I think about myself, and how I think about myself is based in large part on the experiences I’ve had that contribute to my interior world, my soul. Those experiences, whether and/or how they happen, in many ways seem to pivot around qualities like open-mindedness and curiosity, that allow for such events to happen in the first place - well, at least in terms of meditation and pranahuti; psychosis is something different.
Okay, this has been a very rambly post. I’m not even sure I said what I wanted to say, or set out to say! Oh well. Thank you for reading, and thanks for such a great discussion.