Chapter One

The Meltdown

"Other people have what they need, I alone possess nothing. I alone drift about, like someone without a home. I am like an idiot, my mind is so empty."

The Tao

The most crucial and profound moment in the whole of my life was when I was suddenly confronted with what I thought was about to be my own death. Was I to trust and let go into the unknown? Or was I going to fearfully hold on until the bitter end?

It was August 15, 2005, a normal working day for me in my home office. As I was hanging up the phone after speaking to a business client, suddenly, and for no apparent reason, I began to cry and could not stop. A strong sensation, similar to that of pins and needles and rushing water, began to move down through the top of my head and up through my arms and legs. I tried to shake it off but it would not leave me. Instead, it just got stronger and stronger. At first, I thought it might have been because I had been sitting in my chair for too long. Maybe my body had fallen asleep, or my circulation had been cut off. Whatever the reason, the sensation continued to build.

Within what seemed like only a few moments I felt as if I was under a massive waterfall. I was unable to move as the weight of the ‘water’ pounded my body and beat me to the ground. The experience became so intense that I ended curled up on the floor in the fetal position, terrified that I was about to die from either a heart attack or a stroke. After all I had accomplished throughout my life, I thought to myself, here I was now, about to die alone and bewildered on the floor. What had happened to my fantasy of going out in a blaze of glory?

As the fear of death consumed me, I began thinking about just how long it was going to take for the end to arrive. How painful was it going to be when I left this body? Was there a god who would judge me as having lived a good life? Was I destined for heaven, or wherever good boys go? Or had my self-centered existence sealed my fate in hell?

As I lay there on the floor, I could feel myself becoming paralyzed. Every part of me began to ache; it felt like every bone in my body was about to break. I moaned in agony as I rolled around on the floor, my arms and legs stiff and frozen from the force of the energy rushing through me. I had never really spent much time during my life thinking about what it might be like in that final moment. Now that it had arrived, I realized I was completely unprepared for it. I was at the absolute mercy of whatever was coming next.

In tears and terrified, I managed to crawl to the phone and attempt to call for help. It was almost impossible to dial the number because the pain in my hands was so intense. Eventually, however, I got through to my close friend Evan. After a few moments he told me that what was happening sounded more like a spiritual experience than a medical emergency. By now, my hands were so badly cramped that they stopped working, and the phone fell and landed next to my head. As I tried to keep speaking, I noticed that my friends voice was beginning to fade into the distance. The sensation of rushing water was now sending the noise of the normal, linear world far into the background.

While lying there overwhelmed by the fear of death, a passage from a Zen Buddhist text I had once read crossed my mind: “All fear is illusion, walk straight ahead.” In a last desperate attempt to somehow save myself, I began praying. I chanted the words: ‘In the name of the highest good, Thy will be done,’ over and over. Then, a moment of clarity came. I realized I had a choice. The first one was to hang on to my life for all it was worth, right up until the bitter end, in a desperate attempt to stay alive. The other option was to let go and trust in God and whatever was in store for me. I could see that I had no control over what was taking place. So I let go of existence itself, and trusted in the unknown.

Within moments, I felt like someone was wrapping a thick warm blanket around me on a cold night. It was like a profound presence was somehow communicating to me that everything was going to be alright, and to just let go and continue to surrender to what was taking place.

So surrender I did, and like a set of falling dominos, I let go of my attachment to everything I thought was real in my life. First my physical body, then the mind and all its thoughts, feelings, opinions, assessments and positions; my children, my business career, the house, the car, my friends, the fear and terror of the unknown and, finally, all I had accomplished during my short stay here on this beautiful planet. I was now ready to die in peace and acceptance.

Then as quickly and powerfully as the raging spiritual hurricane had battered my little shell of a body into the ground, it vanished. The voice in my head disappeared and everything went absolutely silent and utterly still. As I looked up from the floor, I could see what I can only describe as a living electromagnetic field of love, emanating from everything.

Was I dreaming? Had I died and gone to heaven? And if so, was someone coming to meet me at the gates? Did I pass the test?

I then noticed there was no separation between me and everything else in the room. The table, the chairs, the rug, even what I thought was my body... everything seemed to be part of the same unified thing; part of this field of love that I had been catapulted into. I was overwhelmed with a peace beyond anything one could ever imagine, ‘a peace which passeth all understanding.’ In the presence of such indescribably exquisite bliss, all I could do was cry.

The world of duality, time and location had disappeared unannounced. What seemed like movement, stopped. It became clear that nothing had any more – or less – importance than anything else. There was no longer any hierarchy or labels to the form of life. I could see myself in everything and everything shone back to me with equal power and radiance; everything vibrated with the energy of life itself. All things were in a state of absolute perfection.

It then occurred to me that a lifetime of desire, and the need for achievement and success, had disappeared too. The identity I had created over a lifetime of thinking had simply vanished. Who I thought I was, how I related to life, all my accomplishments, were now gone. Although I was aware I had a body, looking at it was just like looking at a piece of furniture; or at a toy that now moved under some kind of guiding force. Rather than identify with my body, I now simply observed it walking, talking and moving around the apartment.

There was no longer a personal ‘I.’ No longer a ‘me’ looking at a ‘you.’ Doing had been replaced by ‘being.’ The noise of life faded into the background and was replaced by an utterly profound, infinite peace, stillness and silence. This new dimension became my new reality.

The beauty of this state was so intense that I continued to cry almost every day for the next year.

Being catapulted so dramatically and unexpectedly into this profound stillness made it very hard for me to function, or, indeed, do anything at all. Even the smallest of tasks became cumbersome and difficult. There were long periods when I could not eat, wash, move – or even speak. I became unshaven, pale and lost so much weight; my clothes began to hang off me. I remember passing the mirror one day and wondering who this skinny person was in the apartment with me. It took a few moments to recognize what I was  looking at – one might say it was the body formerly known as me that was now walking around the apartment.

Leaving the apartment became almost impossible. I found myself just sitting for hours on end, catatonic. During this time, my son once paid me a visit, just to then point out to me that I was actually drooling. My reply was: “Son, get used to it.”

You could say I was in a state of exquisite shock. A whole lifetime of endless thoughts, opinions, self-criticism, evaluation and assessment of myself and my place in the world, no longer existed. It was extraordinary to realize how much stress this relentless internal monologue creates – and how it separates us from life itself.

After almost a year of being in this blissfully mindless state, I tried to get back into the world by taking walks. I would manage to make my way to the local shops where I would sit for hours on end, watching people going about their daily business. One day, while walking through the bread section in my local supermarket, I noticed yet again that everything was in a profound state of perfection. All things (form) became utterly sacred. The bread aisle of Sainsbury’s had suddenly transformed into a temple of divine eternal beauty. The experience was so overwhelming that all I could do was stand there, stunned, as tears of gratitude streamed down my face.

I must have looked like one of those disheveled old men who shuffle around in their slippers to the shops, looking completely lost. The kind of person many of us silently laugh at as a ‘care in the community’ case, living on government welfare. Goodness knows what the other shoppers thought of this scruffy, middle-aged man in floods of tears, while they cautiously reached over me for a French stick and bag of rolls. Eventually the manager appeared and gently escorted me out of the store. (Life’s embarrassing, then you die).

***

One day I managed to make it out of the apartment to the communal garbage bins. The area was fenced off and as I opened the gate and walked in, I was struck by the beauty of the waste all around me. I stood there just soaking up the radiance of everything in view. A visit to the bin area was just another opportunity to experience the perfection of all things.

As I wandered around in this state of ‘oneness,’ feeling overwhelmed with the radiant beauty of life, I would often see people moving along the streets as if they were in some kind of trance, like half-dead zombies in a bad B movie. I could see the internal dialogue on their faces and how lifetimes of thought had literally shaped their bodies and the circumstances of their lives.

I realized that nothing was actually ‘happening.’ Whatever did emerge was only as a result of a certain set of conditions. Just like when it rains it can only do so when all the conditions needed for rain to happen are in place. Then we witness what the conceptual mind calls and experiences as rain.

I needed very little food or sleep and could go for days at a time without any of it. One morning after a light rest, I got up and sat on the edge of the bed. I then suddenly realized that it was dark outside. The whole day had slipped away without any realization of time whatsoever. All I could do was climb back into bed and lay there in the timeless bliss of reality. With the illusion of time and location now shattered, everything was emerging without sequence, beginnings or ends.

When I did get up, walking was difficult. It felt like my body had aged a hundred years. Some days all I could do was make it from the sofa to the hallway. I would find myself standing there in a timeless dimension, gazing at the beauty of the woodwork, or marveling at some other small detail. I had the sense that all objects could actually communicate to me, and that they were aware of my presence.

No matter what I was witnessing, whether it was the stunning architecture of an old cathedral or the town dump, it all radiated the beauty of life with the same vitality. You see, the mind can only function within certain rules and parameters. It needs to label things, put things into time and space, and see life in terms of opposites and from a perspective of separation (a ‘you’ and a ‘me’). When the mind disappears, then the way it operates disappears along with it.

***

Then, about thirteen months into this blissful unity with all things, I began to notice the return of thoughts, judgments and opinions. The more they filled my head, the darker my world became. The still silent awareness that had overtaken my life now started to move into the background once again. As it did, the beautiful, radiant color and profound peace of God went with it.

Looking back, I can clearly see that this was the ego-mind returning, trying to reclaim authorship of my life. The trouble is, when the ego senses its own annihilation, it generates fear, huge amounts of fear. It marked the beginning of what I can only describe as a journey into the deepest depths of hell; an endless pit of terror. Why had I been abandoned by God, hung out to dry and slung back into the realm of mental suffering? What had I done to deserve such a fate? I felt completely and utterly alone.

I would awake crying at five in the morning, gripped with unknown terror, desperately clutching my six-year-old daughter’s teddy bear. This descent into darkness continued to deepen day after day for what seemed like forever. Every morning I would awake into the same terrifying fear and mental isolation until death began to look like a viable option; a way to put an end to all this suffering. It felt like some evil black force that was driving me insane. (The Jedi in me was now losing out to the dark side.) I had been tested many times throughout my life but nothing that could match the power of this place.

I believe it was Dante who wrote the phrase: ‘Abandon hope all ye who enter here.’ During my darkest days I often wondered if he had been to the same place, whether he had managed to get out – and, if so, how on earth did he do it. I was convinced the darkness was permanent. All my cries for help and prayers for salvation seemed to be falling on deaf ears. This to me was hell at its very worst.

I was alone, lost in the deepest recesses of my mind. I realized my ego would rather throw me off a bridge than surrender to God again.

In desperation I would call out to the one or two people I knew who had some understanding of what I was going through; who had been through spiritual crises of their own. I would weep down the phone to them for hours at a time, terrified to hang up and be left alone with myself once again. When I finally did end the call I would crawl back into bed for another night of terror. I would often awake in the night with what felt like bolts of lightning shooting up my arms. Then that sense of rushing water and pins and needles would begin crashing down upon me again. I was so frightened by this point that I would jump out of bed and shake my limbs in a vain attempt to make it all go away. Not that it ever worked. When I got back into bed the rushing sensation would just slowly begin moving through my body again.

It meant that I went for days at a time without sleep. It was like being electrocuted all the time. The power surges would pound my body relentlessly, seemingly with no concern for me at all. What was left of my mind just could not accept what was happening.

If you do happen to find that one day all thought vanishes forever, then God bless you. Please, enjoy the ride. But if your mind does happen to come back, then good luck. When the ego-self realizes that its days are numbered, it tends to fight back – viciously in my case – and will do anything to hold onto its domain. What it doesn’t understand is that it can still keep its job. But the new deal is that it gets demoted from being the C.E.O. of the corporation to the floor sweeper. In my ego’s case, that new position was totally unacceptable.

I had unbelievable cravings. I would eat bags of sweets followed by buckets of strong coffee, in an attempt to try and make contact with my body again. None of it ever worked though. I had become an ‘it’ with no location in time or space, all of which contributed to my ego-mind’s sense of complete alienation from life. I could see that this ego was not going to give up so easily. It was putting up the fight of a lifetime, terrified of being obliterated completely.

Many people ask me how I eventually managed to integrate my mind and spirit back into a functioning unity. To tell you the truth, I am not sure myself. I do know, however, that it included every grain of wisdom that I had gleaned from a life of hard knocks and over twenty-five years of personal development and transformational work. This, along with a stint in the army, the training of some of the world’s top spiritual and life mentors and the blessing of many of my great friends, helped pull me through during my darkest moments. The path to enlightenment requires true self-leadership.

Today I can see that one needs to be physically, mentally and emotionally fit to even attempt major shifts in consciousness like this. The intensity is such that I would not be surprised to hear that it has killed many people already. As for the support needed afterwards, well, here in the West there isn’t really any. There may be in India and places like that but I still believe that, wherever you are, finding the right people to support you can be a difficult and lengthy process. For the most part, you are on your own.

Conventional medicine has very little to offer cases like myself, apart from being medicated, hospitalized, and committed to a psychiatric ward. I have nothing against the numerous benefits of modern medicine but this approach could lead to much bigger problems later on. The one thing that kept me going was knowing that what was happening to me was spiritual not medical, and that it required a spiritual solution.

Financially things had become bleak. I had by now not been able to work at full capacity in almost two years. I had children, a mortgage, a failed marriage to support plus the rent on my apartment, food, school bills and all the other overheads it takes to function in today’s Western world. To this day, I have no idea how some of those costs got paid.

I do remember that at one point my landlady actually lent me two months’ rent so she wouldn’t have to evict me. I honestly never thought I would work again. For someone who had previously been so relentless at chasing and living the dream, and earning top whack to boot, the sense of hopelessness about my ability to provide just exacerbated my feeling of despair.

***

It was during this period that a miracle happened. I got a call offering me the first piece of work I had been given in a long time. Incapable as I had become, I pulled myself together and headed into town to meet a new client. It was a hot August London day. The Underground trains were jam-packed with tourists and people from all walks of life making their journeys across town. As I was jostled onto the train, I could feel the fear and terror descending upon me again. Panic rose in my chest, and all I could think about was how the hell I was going to get out of the carriage so I could breathe again.

Then suddenly I felt the warm touch of someone’s hand in mine. Startled, I looked down to see a beautiful little girl, about seven years old. She had mistaken my hand for that of her father’s, the man standing next to me. She never looked up but the feel of that hand in mine was like a blessing from an angel, one who had come down from heaven to let me know that everything was going to be alright; and even though this was my darkest hour, I was being carried. It was as if God was saying: “I know I am kicking your ass here JC, but trust me. Surrender to it all, and I will carry you.”

This was the turning point. A new sense of power and confidence came over me; and things began to change for the better. Bit by bit, with every day that passed, the sense of fear and despair began to lift. Slowly, I began to feel human again. I started getting out more and telling people about my experience. I scoured the internet, asking if anyone knew of other people who had been through the same kind of experience as mine. I visited spiritual communities looking for anyone who I could relate to. Anyone who could sit with me and say: ‘Yes. I have been there. This is what you can expect; and this is what you can do to manage your way to wholeness again.’

It took me over four years to find a balance between the world of form and the formless bliss of divinity. It is only now many years later that I can look back in clarity and bring you my experience in a way that I hope deepens your sense of peace and serenity in life.

I am told that there are no mistakes in God’s world. My journey has been my journey. Yours, I am certain, will be different. I wish you a gentle and empowering transition into the light.

JCMac

jcmacmail@gmail.com
youtube: jcstacimac 

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