It’s an interesting trajectory I’ve taken.  Around the age of 18 I began experiencing something resembling a pseudo “enlightenment”. You could say it came to me in waves.  There was an overwhelming sense of love, and something beyond “love”, some great mystery I’d discovered on the edges of my consciousness.  A series of strange experiences, realizations, and coincidences came to me during that time… only to be rivaled and surpassed by what I’ve undergone in the last year.

It was awe inspiring yet bizarre sort of stuff - filling my life with some great sense of meaning and connectedness… to SOMETHING… but also frightening and isolating.  I didn’t think I was losing my mind, but how could I tell people about the things I was feeling without sounding crazy?  This love I was experiencing didn’t seem to fit any of the usual categories.  I couldn’t imagine a proper outlet for it besides something akin to religious devotion.

Needless to say, this was all quite disruptive to my life, especially at that critical age.  It didn’t inspire me to great worldly ambition, instead I went looking for answers to solve the mystery of my own consciousness.  I looked just about everywhere: religion, mysticism, science, psychology.  I found bits and pieces relavent, but no definitive answers.  I settled on a kind of open ended agnosticism, and tried to proceed like a scientist - making observations and forming theories, but not hard beliefs.

I searched and wandered endlessly, often alone in the wilderness because I felt increasingly alienated from society and its agendas.  But the harder I looked for meaning, the harder I worked to maintain some grip on the blissful aspects of my condition, the farther away they got.  I gradually descended into a full existential crisis, and came to find myself a perfect shadow of my former self.  No more love in the world, only pain, death and sadness  No more meaning, only randomness.  The world at large seemed to agree with me.  9/11 and its aftermath weighed heavily in the air throughout the better part of a decade.

I became physically ill.  People around me died.  I gave up on life entirely.  I wished desperately for death to show up and arrange something for me (bolt of lightning, freak car accident?). Suicide just seemed like a messy cliche.  My body began to literally shut down. I was sure it couldn’t be long.

But you know, SOMETHING tickled the back of my mind like a reminder. There were some old, strange memories hidden back there locked away for safe keeping until the proper time.  Or perhaps locked away out of mind, out of time entirely.  My subconscious must have started to compel me forward unknowingly.  When they began to emerge into my conscious mind, all hell broke loose as I attempted to interpret what was happening.

There’s still so many questions and mysteries to be answered, but my memories, strange and fragmentary as they still are, have clear form to them now.  I’m told when everything comes together there’s going to be a party. Party like it’s 1998.  

In any case, death seems to have spared me, so if some deal’s been struck, I must assume I’m still upholding my end of the bargain.