How It Began

The earliest I remember being interested in anything remotely esoteric is around 16. I started reading weird books like the ones from H. P. Lovecraft and consequently got interested in the nature of dreams and imagination. While researching dreams I stumbled upon various psychology forums and people there mentioned the books of Carlos Castaneda. The young impressionable mind was instantly fascinated by the plots and ideas presented in his books.

At the same time, I discovered various online forums and communities dedicated to the topics Castaneda wrote about. Many of them talked about certain aspects of what he wrote about as if it were something real. That is when I learned about lucid dreams and various related traditions/paths. The community around Castaneda had its own lore, additional prominent authors in the space, techniques and methods developed for various purposes of interaction with different levels of reality. I got curious about some of them and decided to try them out as a sort of fun experiment.

This launched me into the first attempts to step outside of my regularly conditioned state of mind. I experimented with sleep deprivation, food and water fasting, body coordination, diets, you name it. At the same time reading everything I could get my hands on regarding the surrounding topics. I did read a few notable contemporary works on lucid dreaming as well as Tibetan dream yoga. I stumbled upon an emerging community of dream hackers online that was building out its lore and techniques around lucid dreaming at the time. I started trying various techniques from these traditions which took a good amount of focus and effort in both wakeful awareness and during nights.

After months of trying and not getting any results that I read about, I was ready to throw in the towel thinking that these are just some fantasies or jokes other people are propagating for some reason. But then several times I did have experiences of becoming conscious in dreams and one time even having an experience akin to what was described in the astral projection literature. It did seem quite difficult though and did require a lot of effort and energy so I wasn’t able to keep it up for long.

Shortly after that, I had a depressive episode that coincided with some big life-changing events as well as exhaustion from all the practices and experiments that I had been running. After a few months, it got pretty bad to the point of suicidal thoughts. It did get resolved eventually but I’m not sure exactly how. I remember feeling the acceptance of my inability to see the purpose in living at the time but understanding that it is just something one must suffer through and accept to move forward. Soon after those realizations I stopped feeling depressed and went about my life.

Then I stumbled upon entheogens and explored them for several years. They effected significant changes in my worldview and revealed states of consciousness I had never conceived of before. I learned to better process emotions, my creativity increased, mindfulness increased, and I generally felt more capable and smart from then on. Eventually, my yearning to learn and understand this reality came back in full force as I started asking unanswerable questions again.

The common insight I started getting from my experiences with entheogens was meditation. At that point, I’d never had a meditation practice and only tried doing some yoga now and then. I felt resistance to picking up meditation as it seemed very abstract, and difficult, and its purpose wasn’t clear to me. Eventually, it got to the point where I couldn’t ignore this insight anymore because it kept being given to me as the next pointer to concentrate on and I understood that whatever answers I am looking for are not going to be learned through words and thoughts. I decided that I had to commit to learning and practising meditation.

That is when I consider my spiritual path truly began as with the exploration and practice of meditation and yoga I changed in ways I can’t properly describe without writing a book(which I eventually plan to do). Specifics about how my practice and exploration of meditation unfolded can be found in initial posts on my blog. This site is dedicated to documenting my further progress on the path to awakening, what I learn along the way, and writing about all the crazy ideas one encounters during this journey.