Over the year I found myself on the floor, I was engaging in all of the aforementioned actions. Sometimes I am contemplating what lies beyond my current reality. On other occasions I am engulfed by the sheer intensity of it all. This, along with the conventional diagnosis I’ve received, which posits one-in-fifty-billion odds on the reasons for my incapacitation, unfolds some bigger realities.

This is hard and theory is not much help. Knowing things analytically is a far cry from feeling it and the sensations in me are right out there—it truly feels like the entire universe is rushing through me.

Analysis helps?

If you like, try this for yourself right now. Rate the following possibilities out of ten:

1. Global warming will be reversed by 2035.
2. Over 10% of people worldwide prioritise inner development.
3. You risk a friendship by challenging your friend to use their resources for good.
4. You’ll achieve a dream within a year.
5. Five minutes from now you will be in an out-of-body experience in another realm.

Interpretive spoilers in the footnote.1

Now feel it

Now, feel what it is like for each statement to be a 10 out of 10? Feel the statement as an absolute certainty:

• Which one(s) are easiest for you?
• Which ones are most difficult?
• What does a somatic marker, a felt sense of absolute certainty in you, feel like?

Loop back and feel the five points individually again. Notice what changes, if something changes. Where do you feel it in your body? If something feels new or different what is it, what does it feel like?

Feeling the bigger realities, being confronted with absolute certainty, is part of what is happening to me on the floor.2

Even in the depths of the difficult places, I am aware of bizarre silver linings. My body-boundaries are porous. Sensations extend far beyond my skin and the geographies around me. In connection with others, where I begin and end is fuzzy: am I, are you-I-we, is our world-universe, learning something here? Co-teaching each other?

Am I really suggesting that wildly gyrating and plunging, CVST and seizures if those are appropriate labels, have upsides? What is this doing for me?

And then the question gets taken over by the moment. The absolute feeling of the entire universe rushing through me.

After about three months of feeling that, I realise the whole universe rushing through me is myself too: I’m the universe that is rushing through me. I can feel and accept the weirdness. I can feel it as a witnessing, all the change and all that is all life, all streaming within me.

This is taking me to the gift. As I am able to be with more reality my personal and collective worlds shift. That is important.

For example, cognitively comprehending what you and I can do about our big crisis—climate change, species extinction or the exponential growth of AI—is like trying to determine the shape of an iceberg by staring at its tip from a boat. The part that’s visible—like extreme weather, polar bears in videos or exponential technological advances—both captures our attention and freezes us in cognitive difficulties.

Fortuitously, it’s not just about what I ‘see’ directly. It’s about my ability to navigate, interpret and make sense of what lies beneath the surface.3

That mirrors some of my year on the floor. I can call it a series of out-of-body experiences that throw me into an awareness of other realms, unfolding realities. As a person trained in western scientific method that’s very hard to accept. The floor is a year long teaching in differentiating my physical body from my subtle bodies. Hell, even writing that word ‘subtle’ is strange.

And that’s far from the whole of it. My boundaries are permanently fuzzy in the depths of these experiences. What is inside me and outside dissolves into one. Time and space, the it, gets all tangled up. I am non-local and local.

I’m entangled in a wildness I am totally un-used to. And used to. Slowly over many more months my experiences of analogous phenomena, things I’ve dismissed and forgotten as anomalous and irrelevant throughout my life, return.

It’s where I choose to work too. When I am taking all of this really seriously everything changes. It becomes what I make of my life, the greatest use of it. There is no going back to the old stuff, older inadequate frames and formats. At the same time it is a process of progressively answering how I can best support such unfolding, how I can better answer the emergence of my life meaning. What’s my purpose in the eternal realities? What is my path here?

This is anything but overwhelming. It feels like I am lifting off the floor. Honestly, I need to remind myself to stay grounded while in these spaces too. More on that and its usefulness in the next part:

Taking the red pill, coming soon.