How A Computer Raised Spiritual Awareness (part 1)

I don’t claim to be enlightened. And If I *am*, well, the bulb sure does flicker on and off, like an aging florescent. (Maybe the ballast needs replacing? An upgrade to the modern CFLs, perhaps, mercury be damned?)

Still, I *have*experienced the temporary insanity of expanded, exploding perceptions, and the bizarre aftermath of adjustment that never leaves anything quite the same.

I’ve come to understand those experiences from a number of perspectives less as a spiritual make over, more as an experience of neurogenesis - the brain creating new pathways, rerouting and rewiring itself to adapt to new demands and perceptions.

Here’s the story. Make what you will of it.

A year or two before the spiritualizing of my brain, I’d already rewired a few neural connections as I learned about my my hand-me-down Tandy computer and it’s DOS organizational structures. ( I wrote about that bit of weirdness in “I Was A Teenage Neuro-plasticity Junkie“. I mention it here, because it likely primed me for subsequent brain-branching.)

Before long, I traded up from the DOS monster to a build-your-own, screamingly-fast 386sx, complete with Windows, a 1200 baud modem, and a copy of AOL (which was anything but free in those days). I got online, joined a forum or two, started wandering the chat rooms.

And things started changing.

Synchronicities appeared at rates that challenged the idea of coincidence. My dreams were more intense, more powerful, and seemed to demand attention. I felt deeply, spookily connected to people I met online; we joked about sending each other IM’s and emails in our dreams, but they were only half jokes. I seemed increasingly, almost freakishly aware of my body, my thoughts, and the thoughts and feelings of other people**

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** Please note that I don’t say I “felt their “energy” - I don’t know what it was. Maybe it was some unknown energy field, maybe I interpreting subtle cues movements/voices. Maybe it was all illusion and nuttiness. But until I *know* that what I felt is measurable as “energy”, I refuse to invoke the layman’s bleeping mysteries of quantum physics. ________________________________________

Reading (especially non-fiction) became difficult; sometimes I seemed to have almost no ability to focus. My hands, my face, sometimes my back and my feet would tingle. and I started to have sort of waking-dreams: not hallucinations (they stayed obediently inside my head) but powerful spontaneous and often insightful imagery, many having to do with an overwhelming sense of inter-connectivity, impending changes, and that this was all somehow very, very important.

Learning DOS directory structure had dramatically changed how I organized information, but this … it changed how I understood and related to myself and the world.

My belief structures couldn’t support these experiences. I’d like to say they changed, or simply faded away, but it was more sudden and painful and disorienting than that - the sensation was more of my worldview being shredded, leaving me floating in an unfamiliar and sometimes painful void. Paradoxically, there was an underlying sense of structured purposefulness and peace.

I spent the next few years sorting it all out. Seeking answers, making connections with more knowledgeable people, gathering information and ideas from a variety of sources. I slowly developed a new, more flexible worldview that allowed for the new experiences, and (hopefully) allowed for any further revelations without shredding my concept of reality again.

I worked hard to stay grounded and reasonably sane. I might have been distinctly *weird* through parts of this process, but I think I did a good job with the sanity - good enough that when I came out of it all a wee bit more stable than when I started, and without a single tinfoil pyramid in sight.

As an alternative to pyramids, I learned to approach my perception of the world as an internally manufactured illusion: a projection that allowed me to interact in the world: sort of a Graphical User Interface for existence. (Windows Infinity, coming soon to a mind near you!)

Unlike a lot of enlightenment junkies, I didn’t seem to debate the nature of “me” all that much (outside of being pretty sure I wasn’t the next savior of the world) Still, it was obvious that whoever “I” was, I was not my identity, my thoughts, my feelings, my beliefs. I couldn’t be those things, because I still existed when they fell away.

For me, one of the most important insights was that existence/reality did not care what I thought about it. Whether I thought of “Existence” on a personal or universal scale, I could think whatever I liked, about it whatever helped me relate. Whatever I came up with wouldn’t impact or limit reality itself, just my understanding of reality.

Eventually, I stopped thinking in terms of “personal or universal” except where it seemed practical and helpful to make that distinction. There’s a lot more to it, of course, including my conceptions of God, religion, morality, spirits, and the really weird esoteric stuff.

But that’s the essence.

And it sounds remarkably similar to Enlightenment, doesn’t it?

So, what really happened?

That depends on perspective.

It might have been considered a psychotic break (though I never lost touch with reality, just questioned its definition and nature. A lot).

A particularly savvy shrink might have labeled it “Spiritual Emergence”. The same year that I underwent these changes, spiritual issues had just been given their own category in the DSM IV (The Great Big Diagnostic Book of Mental Disorders) and were beginning to be viewed as a self-resolving transformational experience that called for guidance, rather than treatment.

Spiritually speaking, it would be considered an awakening. A Christian friend called it an anointing. In the shamanic jargon I eventually adopted, it’s called an initiation. Many Eastern systems would considered it the first steps towards enlightenment, while Western Esoteric and New Age traditions might say it was enlightenment itself.

But it’s the neurological bits that really fascinate me these days. Advances in neuroscience reveal that not only does the brain shape thought, but thoughts help shape the brain.

Did my online explorations cause a chain reaction in my mind and brain? A change in thought-processes, which led to changes in the brain, which allowed for further changes in thought processes? Was this explosion of thought and perception related to changes in my neurological system, and vice versa?

Next up? More on the exact thoughts and experiences that might have brought on a burst of neural re-organization, and why I think this is a viable hypothesis.

(Oh. Look at me. Using science words like a big girl! Bear with me please. This is all a wee bit nerve wracking to write, for someone with a privacy fetish.)