Sheila’s Start-up – Psychic Phenomena

[Sheila]

Dragging my feet on my passion

I have always been very interested in psychic phenomena (by which I mean clairvoyance, telepathy, precognition, retrocognition, psychokinesis, amomalous healing, synchronicity, time slips, etc.), but I have always been scared of it, too. Really scared!

So, even though I had a sense in the early 1990s that I should really try to work with it more, I procrastinated. Too uncomfortable. In the late 1990s, I started to make a mild effort to desensitize myself to the fears and expand my capacity to sit with the topic. I started watching movies and reading novels that had a paranormal theme. No horror genre, but more like mystery, supernatural, sci fi, thriller. This was helpful, but apparently, I wasn’t moving fast enough…..

[Sheila]

February 2004 crisis / wake up call

In February 2004, while tapering off Paxil, but concurrently on about four serotonergic substances, I had a psychedelic serotonin syndrome episode. It was very scary for about two weeks. At one point, I made arrangements for how to handle my affairs after my death – I was sure my heart was about to stop.

I had some very strange thoughts and experiences during that episode. I don’t know if it will ever be possible to tease out what was psychic and what was psychotic. It was probably a mix of genuine psychic phenomena with an overlay of psychotic distortion and misinterpretation.

Just one ambiguous example – I could swear that many, many times I looked at the clock, saw the time, then went around the house for a significant amount of time, came back and looked at the same clock, and it would be the same time *or two minutes earlier*. Now, I can’t prove time was being different around me, but I *have* read of people having this experience when they were not being particularly psychotic or poisoned.

Another example – One night during the episode, I was scared out of my freaking mind and I said to Barbara (who was babysitting me as if I were on an LSD trip, and, no, I’ve never taken LSD) – “The worst thing that could possibly happen right now would be for the lights to go out.”

And the lights went out. There was no storm, no wind, no rain, no unusual power demand like a heat wave or Christmas lights. Zip. The power was out on my block, not just my house….

Again, this could be a coincidence (in which case, it is at least a synchronicity!) but this kind of unconscious psychokinetic action does seem to happen to people, especially when they’re very upset.

While I was tripping on my serotonin episode, sweating profusely from the feet, staggering around, vision weird, it came to me out of the blue that this was a Kundalini awakening. Now, at that time I had no conscious knowledge of what a Kundalini awakening was. I had heard the word “Kundalini” once or twice in my life, but had no idea what it was, or that one could have an awakening of it.

Now, interestingly, this is a fairly common phenomenon. People who are unwittingly having a Kundalini awakening sometimes think the word “Kundalini” out of the blue, and sometimes think other Sanskrit words, even though they have no conscious knowledge of these things. I know of one other person who had a similar experience in early antidepressant withdrawal. So, I started researching Kundalini and other forms of spiritual emergency, including shamanic initiatory illness.

A spiritual emergency is when you have a sudden, dramatic change in consciousness that may include mystical or transcendent experiences, visions, expanded states of consciousness, anomalous experiences, profound insights. It can be very scary or disturbing, especially if you live in a culture that doesn’t have a framework for understanding it. But a spiritual emergency is really a positive, evolutionary process that can be integrated if there is good support.

Anyway, I really felt that the episode was a huge wake-up call. That I was supposed to do something with psychic phenomena and I was supposed to get going on it NOW.

[Sheila]

Gaia theory

The scary episode ended after a couple of weeks. Then, I had a month or two of feeling great, like I was becoming more intuitive, and like great things were coming down the pike. Then, unfortunately, that shut down, and I sank into a grueling taper that dragged on until summer 2005.

I started to read a lot about psychic phenomena, and, although I had had some doubts before, I became utterly convinced of the reality of these phenomena. In any given instance, you can’t be sure that it’s a psychic phenomenon. But, overall, the evidence is overwhelming, and, in fact, now is a very good time to be reading in this field – there are tons of fascinating books coming out.

Some time in there, I started noticing that there seemed to be an epidemic of brain injury going on – not just from psych meds, but from chemo meds; not just from meds, but from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. I started to wonder if this epidemic was being orchestrated or enlisted by the collective unconscious, or the Earth’s consciousness, or the Tao, or somebody to force-march a bunch of us into a more rapid evolution in order to save the planet.

[Sheila]

The anxiety is the psychic signal distorted

A couple of years later, I got hit by the thought that the appalling anxiety that so many people experience in antidepressant withdrawal might be, in part, a misinterpretation of a massive psychic opening. In other words, the changes wrought by the meds, in combination with the removal of the meds, might shove us into a neurological state that is much more psychically open than we are prepared for or even able to recognize.

Lacking the psychological preparation and the stable neurological underpinnings, we misinterpret the flood of impressions (feelings, thoughts, energy from others) as danger. It’s both a question of being massively over-stimulated, and of interpreting the input from within a neuro-psychological framework that hasn’t been prepared properly for this big influx of new information.

[Sheila]

How can neurological injury and psychic opening inform each other?

Lastly, I have become hopeful that there is something to be discovered about the relationship between neurological injury and psychic opening that could be helpful to both.

It’s really interesting that many of the most famous psychics and medical intuitives had their expanded capacities develop after neurological trauma – people like Edgar Cayce, George Anderson, Peter Hurkos. How does neurological damage sometimes unlock psychic potential? There are some theories about this, but we don’t really know yet.

Is there some way that we can use psychic opening to help with neurological healing? Is there some way that we can use neurological healing to help with psychic opening?

[Sheila]

The Blob…er…I mean The Blog

So, in September 2011, I finally started a blog to explore this passion of mine. I’m still not sure what I want to do exactly, but I’m going to try to just experiment on the blog and not wait until I’m sure or clear or perfect!

I’ve written more about some of the above ideas on the blog, but others I haven’t gotten to yet. I very much welcome chatting with you all about these very speculative, still inchoate ideas – either in comments on the blog or here on IAWP!


http://neuroscienceandpsi.blogspot.com/

[stan]

The Blob…er…I mean The Blog

So, in September 2011, I finally started a blog to explore this passion of mine. I’m still not sure what I want to do exactly, but I’m going to try to just experiment on the blog and not wait until I’m sure or clear or perfect!

http://neuroscienceandpsi.blogspot.com/

Just experiment is very well, the rest will come alone...

[Sheila]

Thank you for the encouragement, Stan! And thank you for the bird -- I think it will really help.

[Luc]

Just experiment is very well, the rest will come alone...

Agreed! When we eventually wake up from this bad dream, we will look around and think to ourselves "we've bulit quite a few good things here meanwhile!" And all of it despite not using all cylinders.

[Sheila]

This ordeal is so hard on the self-confidence. But, it’s true – we are learning and growing and building the whole time we’re going through it, even while we feel impaired and bad about ourselves. And I think we will all be surprised at what has been brewing inside once we emerge. Look at Charly Groenendijk who had a horrible, long time. And now he’s working and singing professionally and seems to be doing *his* thing.