Before I Had A Name For It

Before I Had A Name For It

Chapter One – Before I Had A Name For It

One of the difficulties in telling this story is that I cannot honestly identify a beginning.

Most people who become interested in spirituality can point to a particular event, book, teacher, practice, or experience that changed the direction of their life.

My experience was different.

The things I would later call spiritual, energetic, intuitive, or unseen were already present in my earliest memories.

To me they were normal.

At around four years of age I would speak with a figure I called Bidia.

What I remember most clearly is not the conversations themselves.

It was his presence.

He would often sit beside the play mat near my bed.

Calm. Patient. Never imposing. Never demanding attention.

Most of the time he seemed content simply to be there.

Occasionally something felt more urgent. Those were the moments where images, ideas, or lessons seemed to arrive with a stronger sense of importance.

They were rarely explanations in the way adults explain things. They were more like demonstrations. Images. Perspectives. Ways of looking at the world. Almost as though someone was orienting me to reality rather than teaching me facts about it.

As a child I never questioned it. I never wondered whether other people could see him. I simply spoke about him in the same way a child might speak about a neighbour or family friend.

Years later my mother mentioned my imaginary friend from childhood. That was the first time I realized that what I had considered ordinary had not been ordinary for everyone else.

At the time I had no reason to think this was unusual. Children do not naturally divide reality into categories such as possible and impossible, spiritual and physical, real and unreal. Reality simply presents itself and is accepted as it is.

Years later, long after the memory itself had faded, I searched the name and came across a Buddhist teacher named Bidia Dandaron. What struck me was not merely his appearance, which felt strangely familiar, but the sense of recognition I experienced when reading about his life.

The things that interested him interested me.

The questions that occupied him occupied me.

The themes that appeared throughout his life echoed through my own.

I cannot explain that familiarity and I no longer feel a need to.

What matters is that it was not an isolated event.

Throughout childhood I experienced things that would later be grouped under many different labels.

There were moments involving deceased people.

There were moments involving intuition.

There were moments where information appeared to arrive without any obvious source.

There were moments that seemed to blur the boundary between the physical and the unseen.

Whether these experiences can be explained is less important than how they were experienced.

They never felt extraordinary to me.

They were simply part of life.

Because they felt normal, I rarely spoke about them.

Not out of fear.

Not out of secrecy.

There simply seemed little reason to discuss what felt as ordinary to me as eyesight or hearing.

As I entered my late teens, something began to change.

For most of my childhood these experiences had simply been part of life. I accepted them in much the same way I accepted anything else.

Eventually that changed.

Curiosity emerged.

What had once unfolded naturally became something I began to investigate.

That decision would take me much deeper than I could have imagined.

It would eventually lead me into the most intense period of my life.

And it would raise a question I had never thought to ask.

What if there was a cost?

Chapter Two – The Veil Opens

By the time I reached my late teens, something had changed.

The spiritual and intuitive experiences that had accompanied me since childhood were not new.

What was new was my interest in them.

For the first time I wanted to understand what was happening.

Up until then I had largely accepted things as they came. Experiences happened. Intuition happened. Strange moments happened. They were simply part of life.

But eventually curiosity took over.

I wanted to know what consciousness was.

I wanted to know what awareness was.

I wanted to know whether there were aspects of reality that existed beyond what most people normally perceived.

That curiosity led me deeper into meditation.

At first meditation was something I practiced.

Later it became something I lived.

Over time it stopped being an activity I performed for a period of the day and became a way of moving through the world.

My attention became increasingly focused on awareness itself.

I became fascinated by intention, perception, consciousness, energy, and the possibility that there were dimensions of life that most people overlooked.

As the years passed, experiences that had once appeared occasionally seemed to become more frequent.

Perception became sharper.

Intuition became more immediate.

Moments that once felt rare became commonplace.

The distinction between the physical and the unseen began to feel less clear.

Whether these experiences were spiritual, energetic, psychological, symbolic, or something else entirely was less important to me than the fact that they appeared to be occurring.

I was interested in direct experience far more than belief.

The deeper I went, the more normal these things became.

By my mid-twenties I had entered what I now recognize as the most intense period of my life.

when the Veil was Open

The strongest period occurred during my mid to late twenties.

Looking back now, I often describe it by saying the veil felt permanently open. The difficulty is that this phrase explains almost nothing.

An ordinary day felt fundamentally different.

It was like everything and everyone possessed a kind of energetic presence that could be felt before it was understood.

During those years very little effort seemed necessary.

What had once appeared occasionally now seemed present all the time.

An ordinary day could begin with meditation and end with meditation, but eventually there was no clear distinction between meditation and ordinary life. Awareness itself became the practice.

The world felt alive in a way that is difficult to communicate.

People did not simply appear as bodies moving through space. They appeared to possess a kind of energetic presence that could be felt before words were spoken.

Sometimes I would feel emotions physically within my own body before a person spoke about them.

Sometimes I would experience sensations in parts of my body that appeared to correspond with discomfort or pain someone else was carrying.

At other times it felt as though I could perceive the direction someone was about to move before they moved, almost like a visual impression appearing in the mind before the action occurred.

Shopping centres were among the most difficult places to be.

The issue was never noise.

It was information.

Large groups of people felt overwhelming. Thoughts, intentions, emotions, worries and physical discomfort all seemed impossible to separate from the environment around me.

I often preferred quiet places because they allowed my attention to settle.

I spoke less during this period. Not because I disliked conversation, but because it often felt as though much of what people were trying to communicate had already been perceived before words were spoken.

Many of the people around me became accustomed to these experiences. Some were surprised. Some were skeptical. Others became curious.

I learned that speaking about everything I perceived was usually unhelpful. Over time I shared only the experiences that felt impossible for me to ignore.

During this period I explored many ways of strengthening perception. Meditation. Diet. Particular environments. Certain materials. Certain buildings. Certain people.

Everything seemed interconnected.

At the time I believed I was becoming more aware of reality.

Looking back, I still believe something important was occurring.

What strikes me most now is not the experiences themselves.

It is the assumption that quietly formed beneath them.

Without realizing it, I had begun to believe that more awareness was always better.

More perception was better.

More access was better.

More immersion was better.

I never stopped to ask whether there might be a point where the relationship became unbalanced.

The possibility simply never occurred to me.

Why would it?

Everything appeared to be moving in the right direction.

The experiences were becoming deeper.

The insights were becoming richer.

The sense of connection was becoming stronger.

From my perspective, there seemed little reason to question the path I was on.

What I did not realize was that another story was unfolding at the same time.

While my attention was moving further inward and further beyond the ordinary boundaries of perception, my body was beginning to ask for attention in ways I did not yet fully understand.

The signs were there.

I simply was not looking in that direction.

Not yet.

Chapter Three – The Cost

Looking back, I cannot point to a single moment where everything changed.

The realization arrived gradually.

In fact, that may be one of the reasons it took so long to see.

If something dramatic had happened overnight I would have noticed immediately.

Instead, the changes accumulated over years.

Small things at first.

Recovery seemed slower than it used to be.

Injuries lingered longer than expected.

My body appeared to require more attention than I was giving it.

At first I treated these things as unrelated to the rest of my life.

The physical belonged to one category.

The spiritual belonged to another.

There seemed no reason to connect them.

As the years passed, however, the pattern became harder to ignore.

The periods where my energetic awareness felt strongest often seemed to coincide with periods where my physical wellbeing was becoming increasingly chaotic.

At first I dismissed the idea.

I had spent years assuming that greater awareness, greater perception, and greater immersion in these states was inherently beneficial.

The deeper question was not whether the experiences were real.

The deeper question was whether my attention had become unbalanced.

That realization took much longer to arrive.

For years I continued moving in the same direction because everything I valued appeared to be found there.

Insight was there.

Meaning was there.

Connection was there.

The unseen aspects of life were there.

The physical world increasingly felt secondary by comparison.

Not unimportant.

Just secondary.

The truth is that I had become extremely skilled at directing attention toward things that interested me and far less skilled at directing attention toward things that demanded responsibility.

The warning signs accumulated.

Then came the events that forced me to stop looking away.

A coma.

A near-death experience.

Health crises that could no longer be dismissed.

Looking back, the coma did not begin on the day I overdosed.

It began months earlier.

At the time I was trying to be everything for everyone. I was working long days, often twelve to fourteen hours. When work finished, another shift began. I was helping raise children, supporting my fiancée, helping my parents during the pandemic, managing household responsibilities, and attempting to remain emotionally present for everyone around me.

The problem was that I was already fighting a battle I did not understand.

I had narcolepsy, but I did not know it yet.

My sleepiness was no longer ordinary tiredness. It was becoming something deeper and more destructive. I was falling asleep at the wheel. I was hallucinating. My ability to think clearly was deteriorating. My patience was disappearing. My impulse control was becoming weaker.

More than anything else, I wanted sleep.

Not death.

Sleep.

A deep and permanent rest from a body and mind that felt incapable of recovering.

For weeks that desire consumed me. Eventually I reached a point where I was no longer thinking clearly enough to recognise how dangerous my thinking had become.

One day I acted.

I should not have survived.

The amount I took was enough that medical staff later prepared for the possibility that I would never recover. Life support was discussed. I remained in a coma for several days.

When I eventually woke, I could not properly walk or speak.

I was told recovery could take months.

Possibly longer.

Something happened then that would remain one of the most significant experiences of my life. I returned to a form of meditation and self-healing practice I had used after an earlier overdose years before.

By the end of the day I was walking again.

By the end of the day I was talking again.

Whether others interpret that experience spiritually, psychologically, physiologically, or some combination of all three is less important than the effect it had on me.

I knew I had been given another chance.

And I knew I could not continue living the way I had before.

The coma was not the only event that reshaped the way I viewed life.

There was another experience that occurred during a period where my narcolepsy symptoms had again become overwhelming.

My thinking had deteriorated. My life felt increasingly unmanageable. More than anything, I wanted rest.

During the journey to hospital and before losing consciousness, I experienced what I can only describe as leaving my body.

I found myself in a state that felt strangely familiar despite never having consciously experienced it before. I was aware of my body below me in the hospital. I was aware of people standing beside it. My mother was there. My partner at the time was there.

What struck me most was not the visual aspect of the experience.

It was the feeling.

There was an overwhelming sense of certainty, peace, understanding, and connection. It felt as though every question I had ever carried was already answered. Every event felt connected to every other event.

I did not want to leave.

I remember communicating a desire to remain where I was.

The response I perceived was simple: it was not my time.

My attention was drawn toward my partner. The impression I received was that there was unfinished business in my life and that my purpose had not yet been completed.

Years later I would come to view that message differently than I did at the time. The unfinished business was not some grand spiritual mission. It was life itself. Relationships. Growth. Change. The events that still had to unfold.

When I returned, I again used the same meditative healing practices that had played a role in my recovery before.

What stayed with me was not certainty about what happened.

What stayed with me was the realization that life still required my participation.

Whatever the nature of the experience, I returned with a stronger sense that my story was not finished.

For the first time I was confronted by something I could not meditate my way around.

I could not perceive my way around it.

I could not philosophize my way around it.

I could not spiritually bypass it.

My body was demanding attention.

Not tomorrow.

Not eventually.

Now.

What surprised me most was not the severity of what happened.

It was the realization that followed.

I began to understand that my relationship with spirituality may not have been as balanced as I had assumed.

Not because spirituality was wrong.

Not because the experiences were false.

But because I had unconsciously treated one side of life as vastly more important than the other.

I had become extraordinarily attentive to the unseen.

At the same time I had become increasingly inattentive to the visible.

The realization hit me with a force that few insights ever have.

I had become spiritually present while becoming physically absent.

That sentence changed everything.

It explained something I had been unable to articulate for years.

I could see clearly that enormous amounts of my attention had been invested in understanding consciousness, energy, perception, and reality.

At the same time, parts of my physical life had been quietly waiting for attention that never arrived.

My health.

My body.

My circumstances.

My responsibilities.

The more honestly I looked, the harder it became to deny.

For the first time in my life I began asking a question I had never seriously considered.

What if there was a cost?

Not a punishment.

Not a consequence.

Simply a cost.

What if attention invested in one area necessarily meant less attention available somewhere else?

What if the issue was not spirituality itself, but how completely I had become absorbed by it?

The question would stay with me for years.

Eventually it would lead to one of the most difficult and important decisions of my life.

A decision that would reshape everything that followed.

Chapter Four – The Decision

Some decisions happen gradually.

Others happen in a moment.

This was one of those moments.

The realization had been building for years.

The signs had been present.

My health was deteriorating.

My body was demanding attention.

Life was becoming increasingly difficult to navigate.

Yet none of those things alone changed my direction.

What changed it was the moment I finally understood what was being asked of me.

I realized that if I genuinely wanted to improve my situation, then I could no longer continue dividing my attention in the way I had been.

Something had to change.

For the first time in my life I consciously chose the physical world.

That statement may sound strange because, technically, I had always lived in the physical world.

But that is not what I mean.

What I mean is that I consciously chose to place my body, health, circumstances, responsibilities, and practical reality at the center of my attention.

Not because they were more important than the spiritual.

But because they had been neglected.

I did not arrive at this decision through skepticism.

I did not lose faith.

I did not decide my previous experiences were false.

In many ways that would have been easier.

Instead, I still believed what I had experienced.

I still believed many of the insights I had gained.

I still believed there was more to reality than what could be immediately seen.

Yet I also knew something else.

I knew I was suffering.

I knew my body was suffering.

I knew my life required attention.

And I knew that if I continued to prioritize the same things I always had, nothing would change.

The decision felt less like a choice and more like a surrender to reality.

Reality had spoken.

My body had spoken.

My circumstances had spoken.

And eventually I was forced to listen.

The decision itself did not happen in a meditation session.

It did not happen in a temple.

It did not happen while reading a spiritual text.

It happened in a car.

By that point my life had largely collapsed.

I had been diagnosed with narcolepsy. I could no longer work. I was living in my car. Much of what I had built over the previous years had disappeared. My health was poor. My future felt uncertain.

Not long beforehand I had said what felt like a final goodbye to my mother.

I remember sitting alone and realizing I had reached a crossroads that felt strangely familiar. Part of me wanted to give up. I already knew where that path led because I had walked toward it before.

Another part of me knew there was still one thing I had never truly tried.

I asked myself a simple question.

What haven't I tried?

Not spiritually.

Not energetically.

Not philosophically.

What have I genuinely not tried?

The answer arrived immediately.

I had never fully committed myself to the physical reality of my situation.

I had explored consciousness.

I had explored perception.

I had explored spirituality.

I had explored meaning.

But I had never fully surrendered my attention to the body, the illness, the suffering, the limitations, and the practical reality sitting directly in front of me.

I remember thinking:

Mate, you've just basically said goodbye to your mother.

You can't let all this be for nothing.

You can't keep repeating the same lesson.

You can't keep looking somewhere else when the thing demanding your attention is right in front of you.

In that moment I made a deal with myself.

I would take the full weight of the situation.

The full suffering.

The full uncertainty.

The full responsibility.

I would stop turning away from the physical reality of my life and meet it directly.

Not because I knew it would work.

Because it was the only thing left that I had not genuinely tried.

I remember understanding something very clearly.

This would hurt.

Not physically.

At least not only physically.

Spiritually.

Emotionally.

Psychologically.

I knew I was about to walk away from something that had been central to my life for many years.

I knew my perception would narrow.

I knew many experiences would become less frequent.

I knew I would feel disconnected from parts of myself that had become familiar.

I knew there would be loneliness.

I knew there would be uncertainty.

Most importantly, I knew there would be suffering.

For years I had possessed ways of understanding difficult experiences that softened their impact.

When pain appeared, I could often view it through a wider lens.

When life became difficult, there was usually a larger framework available to place it within.

Now I was choosing to remain much closer to the physical reality itself.

The pain would no longer be buffered by the same perspectives.

The uncertainty would no longer be softened by the same experiences.

The suffering would be more immediate.

I understood all of this before making the decision.

And I made it anyway.

Looking back, that is probably why I regard it as one of the most significant moments of my life.

Not because it was dramatic.

Not because it was mystical.

But because it required me to move toward something I knew would be difficult.

For the first time, I was not moving toward greater perception.

I was moving toward greater responsibility.

I was choosing embodiment.

I was choosing limitation.

I was choosing reality exactly as it appeared in front of me.

Without looking away.

Without escaping into larger explanations.

Without reaching beyond it.

Just this body.

Just this life.

Just this moment.

And so began the most difficult period of my life.

Not because I had lost something.

But because I had chosen to stop turning away from what needed my attention.

I did not know how long that choice would last.

I only knew it was necessary.

Chapter Five – Walking Through Hell

When people hear the phrase “walking through hell,” they often imagine a dramatic event.

A single catastrophe.

A single loss.

A single moment where everything falls apart.

My experience was different.

It was slower.

Much slower.

It arrived one day at a time.

One decision at a time.

One difficult reality at a time.

The suffering was not created by a single event.

It was created by remaining present with things I would previously have approached differently.

For years I had developed ways of understanding life that extended beyond the physical.

Now I was deliberately placing much of my attention back into the physical world.

At first I underestimated how difficult that would be.

The physical world is heavy.

The body is heavy.

Responsibility is heavy.

Illness is heavy.

When those things can no longer be placed within a larger framework, they become even heavier.

Narcolepsy became one of my greatest teachers during this period.

Not because I wanted it.

Not because I was grateful for it.

But because it refused to allow me to ignore reality.

Every day there were limits.

Every day there were consequences.

Every day there were things I wanted to do that I could not do.

Every day there were reminders that intention alone was not enough.

The body had its own rules.

Reality had its own rules.

Neither cared about my preferences.

That was a difficult lesson.

For years I had spent enormous effort understanding consciousness.

Now I was being asked to understand limitation.

For years I had explored possibility.

Now I was being asked to explore constraint.

For years I had looked beyond the visible.

Now I was being asked to remain with what was directly in front of me.

Some days felt unbearable.

There were periods of loneliness that are difficult to describe.

Periods where hope felt fragile.

Periods where it seemed easier to return to old ways of seeing than to continue walking forward.

Yet something important was happening.

Although my world had become narrower in some ways, it was also becoming more grounded.

The problems I had once viewed conceptually became personal.

The body was no longer an abstract idea.

Health was no longer an abstract idea.

Responsibility was no longer an abstract idea.

I was living them.

For the first time in my life I began learning things that could only be learned through direct engagement with physical reality.

Not through insight.

Not through perception.

Not through intuition.

Through experience.

Through repetition.

Through failure.

Through persistence.

Through suffering.

There were no shortcuts.

There was only the work itself.

For a long time I described this period as walking through hell.

The problem was that the phrase explained very little.

Hell was not one event.

It was waking up every day with narcolepsy and realizing that the world expected me to function as though I did not have it.

It was losing my ability to work and watching a future I had spent years building disappear.

It was living in my car and trying to work out what came next.

It was attending appointments while exhausted and trying to explain symptoms that often sounded unbelievable even to me.

It was realizing that effort alone could not overcome the limits my body was imposing.

There were days where a simple task felt impossible.

Days where I could not trust my own alertness.

Days where sleep attacks arrived regardless of how determined I was to push through them.

Days where I questioned whether my life would ever improve.

There was loneliness too.

Not because people did not care.

Because much of what I was experiencing was difficult to communicate.

Most people understand being tired.

Very few understand what it is like to feel your ability to remain awake slipping away while you are still trying to participate in life.

There were periods where progress seemed invisible.

Months where I felt as though I was fighting for inches rather than miles.

Yet those years forced me to learn things I had never learned before.

Patience.

Acceptance.

Persistence.

Humility.

I stopped looking for dramatic breakthroughs and began paying attention to small improvements.

A better day.

A better week.

A small increase in function.

A new piece of understanding.

The suffering remained real.

But slowly I began building a life around reality rather than around who I wished I could be.

That may have been one of the hardest lessons of all.

What surprised me most was that many of the things I feared would disappear never truly disappeared.

They became quieter.

More distant.

Less immediate.

But they did not vanish completely.

The spiritual world I had known for so many years moved into the background rather than disappearing altogether.

At the time I did not fully understand the significance of that.

I only knew that my attention belonged elsewhere.

Years passed.

Slowly.

Painfully.

Sometimes beautifully.

Sometimes not.

And although I could not see it at the time, something else was happening beneath the surface.

I was learning how to live in the world I had previously overlooked.

Not the unseen world.

The seen one.

The body.

The practical.

The ordinary.

The everyday.

The world that many spiritual traditions spend so much time trying to return people to.

I did not know it then.

But years later that realization would become important.

Because eventually a question would emerge that I had not expected.

What if the path I believed I had discovered alone had already been walked by others?

And what if the period I had spent viewing as a detour was not a detour at all?

What if it was part of the path?

Chapter Six – The Mirror

One of the unexpected things about this period of my life was that although I had largely redirected my attention away from spirituality, spirituality did not disappear from my life entirely.

It simply changed form.

For many years I had explored these questions largely through direct experience.

My observations had emerged from meditation, perception, suffering, curiosity, and countless hours of reflection.

Most of the conclusions I reached felt independently arrived at.

Not because I believed they were unique.

Simply because I had not learned them from anyone else.

Then I met someone who would quietly play an important role in the next stage of my life.

Not as a teacher.

Not as a guru.

Not as an authority.

As a mirror.

This distinction is important.

A teacher gives answers.

A mirror reflects what is already present.

Over time I noticed something unusual.

Many of the conclusions I had reached through my own experiences seemed familiar to him.

Concepts that had taken me years to articulate were often immediately understood.

Observations that had emerged from my own life appeared to have parallels within traditions he already knew well.

The experience was both reassuring and unsettling.

Reassuring because it suggested I was not completely alone in what I had discovered.

Unsettling because it challenged my assumption that these observations were entirely my own.

For years I had been focused on physical reality.

Health.

Responsibility.

Narcolepsy.

Survival.

Yet through conversations I slowly became aware that many of the themes emerging from my life had existed within spiritual traditions for centuries.

Not identical.

Not word for word.

But close enough to make me stop and pay attention.

The relationship between perception and attachment.

The importance of embodiment.

The necessity of balance.

The danger of becoming absorbed by one aspect of life at the expense of another.

The possibility that development is not always expansion.

Sometimes it is return.

At first I viewed these similarities as coincidences.

Then they became harder to dismiss.

Again and again I would find myself arriving at an insight through direct experience only to discover that similar ideas existed elsewhere.

This did not make my experiences more valid.

Nor did it make the traditions correct.

What it did was introduce a question.

How many people had walked a path similar to mine?

That question remained mostly dormant for years.

A seed had been planted.

A quiet possibility.

Perhaps the path I believed was uniquely my own was not entirely unique.

Perhaps other people had encountered similar problems.

Perhaps other people had wrestled with similar trade-offs.

Perhaps other people had discovered that spirituality and embodiment were not opposites but partners.

I did not pursue those questions immediately.

There was still too much work to do.

Too much life to live.

Too much reality demanding attention.

So the questions remained in the background.

Waiting.

It would take an unexpected event years later to bring them back into the foreground.

An event so simple that I nearly dismissed it entirely.

A wedding.

A photographer.

A feeling I had not experienced strongly in years.

And a question that refused to go away.

Chapter Seven – The Wedding

By the time the wedding took place, nearly five years had passed since I made the decision to redirect my attention toward the physical world.

In many ways I had become accustomed to the change.

The experiences that had once occupied so much of my awareness had become quieter.

Not gone.

Just quieter.

The questions that had once consumed me no longer demanded answers.

Life itself demanded most of my attention.

Health.

Responsibility.

Reality.

That was where my focus remained.

The wedding was not meant to be significant.

Had everything unfolded differently, I might not be writing about it at all.

At some point during the wedding, a photographer stepped in front of me to take photographs.

The moment was ordinary.

What happened next was not.

As she crouched down in front of me, I became aware of an intense warmth around her.

Not touching me.

Not physical contact.

Just warmth.

The sensation was so familiar that it immediately caught my attention.

Years earlier I would have thought very little of it.

Experiences like this had once been common.

What surprised me was not the sensation itself.

What surprised me was how long it had been since I had experienced anything similar so strongly.

My first instinct was skepticism.

The day was cold.

Perhaps warm air had drifted through.

Perhaps I was imagining it.

Perhaps there was a simple explanation.

I checked.

The surrounding air felt cold.

The warmth appeared localized.

As the day continued I noticed the same thing repeatedly whenever I was near her.

Again and again.

Each time I found myself returning to the same question.

Why does this feel so familiar?

What made the experience particularly strange was that there were many people at the wedding who openly identified as energy workers or spiritual practitioners.

Yet none of them produced the same impression.

Only this woman.

I largely ignored it.

Or at least I tried to.

Years of focusing on physical reality had trained me not to become immediately absorbed by experiences like this.

Life had taught me caution.

So I let it go.

Or at least I thought I had.

A week later the subject resurfaced during a conversation.

Without describing the woman in detail, I mentioned the person at the wedding who had stood out to me energetically.

What happened next surprised me.

The same individual was immediately identified.

No detailed description.

No prompting.

No process of elimination.

Just recognition.

That moment changed something.

Not because it proved anything.

It didn't.

Not because it answered any questions.

It didn't do that either.

What it did was prevent me from dismissing the experience entirely.

Had I been alone, I suspect I would have eventually forgotten about it.

Filed it away as an interesting moment and moved on.

Instead, the experience remained.

A small question sitting quietly in the background of my mind.

The question was not:

Was I right?

The question was not:

What exactly happened?

The question was much simpler.

Why had something I thought I had largely set aside appeared so clearly after all these years?

That question remained with me.

Weeks became months.

Months became longer reflections.

Eventually it led me somewhere unexpected.

Not back into energetic practices.

Not back into the pursuit of extraordinary experiences.

Back toward something far simpler.

Curiosity.

For the first time in years I found myself looking again at the path I had walked.

Not to return to it.

Not to reclaim it.

But to understand it.

And the more I looked, the more another question emerged.

What if the story I had been living was not unique?

What if other people had walked similar paths?

What if the traditions I had largely ignored for years had already been wrestling with the same questions?

That question would eventually lead me into an investigation that surprised me far more than the wedding itself.

Because what I discovered was not confirmation.

It was something far more unsettling.

The possibility that people had been describing pieces of this story for centuries.

Chapter Eight – Rediscovering The Ancients

The wedding did not answer any questions.

If anything, it created more of them.

For a long time I resisted the temptation to investigate further.

Partly because I had spent years learning not to become overly fascinated by unusual experiences.

Partly because I had learned through experience that a single event rarely proves anything.

Yet the question remained.

Not the question of what happened.

The question of whether the path itself had been walked before.

For most of my life I had assumed my experiences were largely my own.

Not unique in the sense that nobody else had ever experienced them, but unique in the sense that they had emerged through my own observations rather than through a formal tradition.

The conclusions I reached had not been taught to me.

They had been lived.

That distinction mattered.

I was not looking for a tradition to join.

I was not looking for a belief system to adopt.

I was not looking for someone to tell me what my experiences meant.

I was looking for patterns.

And so I began reading.

What surprised me was not the differences.

The differences were obvious.

Different cultures.

Different languages.

Different symbols.

Different explanations.

Those were expected.

What surprised me were the similarities.

Again and again I found myself encountering themes that felt strangely familiar.

Yoga spoke of extraordinary perception while warning against becoming attached to it.

Taoism spoke of balance and the dangers of excess.

Buddhism spoke of returning to ordinary life.

Mystical traditions described periods where spiritual experiences became quiet while another form of development unfolded.

None of these traditions described my life.

Yet none of them felt entirely foreign either.

The similarities became difficult to ignore.

One tradition would describe a problem using one language.

Another tradition would describe what appeared to be the same problem using completely different language.

Yet beneath the surface the pattern often seemed remarkably similar.

A person becomes absorbed by a particular aspect of development.

Imbalance emerges.

A correction occurs.

Attention returns to neglected aspects of life.

Integration becomes more important than expansion.

The first time I encountered these themes I felt intrigued.

The tenth time I encountered them I felt unsettled.

The hundredth time I encountered them I could no longer dismiss them.

The most surprising discovery was not that these traditions acknowledged extraordinary experiences.

It was that many of them appeared far less interested in the experiences themselves than I expected.

Again and again the focus returned to something else.

Balance.

Embodiment.

Responsibility.

Integration.

Return.

The language changed.

The principle remained.

This forced me to reconsider my own story.

For years I had viewed my decision primarily through the lens of necessity.

My health required it.

My circumstances required it.

My body required it.

What I had never seriously considered was whether the decision itself reflected a developmental pattern larger than my own life.

Not because the traditions validated me.

Not because I validated the traditions.

But because independent paths appeared to be converging on similar observations.

That possibility fascinated me.

For years I had assumed the most important part of my story involved the unusual experiences.

The visions.

The perceptions.

The intuitions.

The moments that seemed impossible to explain.

The more I studied these traditions, the less certain I became.

Increasingly I found myself drawn toward a different possibility.

What if the most important part of the story was not what I experienced?

What if the most important part was the decision I made in response to those experiences?

What if the turning point was not the opening of the veil?

What if the turning point was choosing to step away from it?

That question changed the way I viewed my entire life.

Not because it provided answers.

Because it provided context.

For the first time I could see my story as part of a larger human conversation.

A conversation that appeared to have been unfolding for centuries.

People exploring consciousness.

People exploring perception.

People pursuing transcendence.

People discovering imbalance.

People returning to ordinary life.

People attempting to reconcile the spiritual and the physical.

The details differed.

The themes remained.

And as I looked more closely, another realization slowly began to emerge.

The question I had been asking all along may have been the wrong one.

I had spent years asking whether spirituality and physical reality were competing demands.

What if they were not?

What if the deeper challenge was learning how to give both the attention they deserved without sacrificing either?

That question remains unanswered.

But by this point I had stopped looking for conclusions.

I had become far more interested in understanding what had actually happened.

Not what should have happened.

Not what a tradition claimed should happen.

Not what I wished had happened.

What happened.

And the more honestly I looked, the more one realization continued to stand above all others.

The most significant insight of my life had never come from an extraordinary experience.

It came from recognizing something I had spent years overlooking.

The insight was simple.

I had become spiritually present while becoming physically absent.

Chapter Eight and a Half – Attention

For years I believed the central subject of my life was spirituality.

Then I believed the central subject was health.

Then I believed the central subject was narcolepsy.

Then I believed the central subject was balance.

Each explanation felt complete until it wasn't.

Eventually I began wondering whether all of these were expressions of the same thing.

Attention.

That realization arrived slowly.

Not through a meditation.

Not through a teacher.

Not through a spiritual experience.

It emerged from looking backwards.

The further back I looked, the more I noticed the same pattern appearing over and over again.

The child who spoke to Bidia.

The young man immersed in meditation.

The person who experienced the veil as permanently open.

The man living in a car after losing almost everything.

The person years later investigating spiritual traditions and rediscovering old questions.

All of them were me.

The more I reflected on that fact, the less convinced I became that I had fundamentally changed.

What changed was not who I was.

What changed was where attention was being directed.

That distinction would eventually change the way I understood everything that had happened.

As a child, attention naturally gravitated toward things most adults ignored.

In my twenties, attention became increasingly absorbed by perception, awareness, meditation, energy, and the unseen dimensions of experience.

As those areas expanded, they occupied more and more of my available attention.

At the time I saw this as growth.

What I failed to recognize was that growth in one area does not eliminate the need for attention elsewhere.

The body still required attention.

Health still required attention.

Relationships still required attention.

Practical reality still required attention.

Eventually reality became impossible to ignore.

The body demanded attention.

Illness demanded attention.

Circumstances demanded attention.

And for the first time in my life I made a conscious decision to redirect attention away from one area and toward another.

I did not abandon the spiritual.

I did not reject it.

I simply stopped feeding it.

The difference matters.

Years later, standing at a wedding, a familiar sensation returned.

Not strongly.

Not dramatically.

Just enough to make me pause.

Enough to make me wonder whether the door had ever been closed at all.

Perhaps I had not lost something.

Perhaps I had simply been attending to something else.

Because if that is true, then this story is not really about spirituality, perception, energy, or even narcolepsy.

It is about attention.

Where it goes.

What it nourishes.

What it neglects.

What it reveals.

And what happens when life refuses to let us place it anywhere else.

Chapter Nine – Spiritually Present, Physically Absent

For a long time I believed the most important events of my life were the extraordinary ones.

The experiences that could not be easily explained.

The moments that challenged my assumptions.

The perceptions that seemed to reach beyond ordinary awareness.

Those experiences occupied so much of my attention that I naturally assumed they were the center of the story.

Now I am no longer certain.

Looking back across my life, the event that changed me most may not have been an experience at all.

It may have been a realization.

A realization so simple that I almost missed it.

I had become spiritually present while becoming physically absent.

Everything changed once I saw that clearly.

Not because it invalidated anything that came before.

Not because it proved anything wrong.

But because it revealed something I had failed to notice.

Attention is finite.

Every moment spent attending to one thing is a moment not spent attending to something else.

For years I believed my story was about spirituality.

Then I believed it was about illness.

Then I believed it was about survival.

Today I see something different.

I see a life repeatedly shaped by where attention was directed.

Sometimes toward the unseen.

Sometimes toward the body.

Sometimes toward meaning.

Sometimes toward necessity.

The circumstances changed.

The principle remained.

What I once viewed as stepping away may have been stepping toward.

Toward the body.

Toward reality.

Toward responsibility.

Toward aspects of life that had been waiting patiently for my attention.

Perhaps that is why the years I once viewed as interruptions no longer feel like interruptions.

They feel like part of the path.

Not a detour from the journey.

The journey itself.

This understanding did not arrive all at once.

It continues to evolve.

There are still questions I cannot answer.

There are still experiences I do not fully understand.

There are still mysteries I suspect may remain mysteries for the rest of my life.

I am increasingly comfortable with that.

The honest account of what happened.

The honest account of what it cost.

The honest account of what it taught me.

And if there is one thing I know with confidence after all these years, it is this:

The most important lesson of my life did not come from seeing beyond the world.

It came from finally learning how to remain present within it.

Chapter Ten – The Open Question

For most of my life I believed understanding was the goal.

If something happened, I wanted to understand it.

If an experience appeared unusual, I wanted to understand it.

If reality seemed larger than I previously imagined, I wanted to understand it.

Understanding felt like progress.

Questions felt temporary.

Answers felt permanent.

Age has changed that.

Not because I have fewer questions.

If anything, I have more.

What has changed is my relationship with them.

There was a time when I wanted certainty.

A time when I wanted to know exactly what was happening.

A time when I wanted clear explanations for experiences that often resisted explanation.

Today I find myself far less interested in certainty.

Certainty closes doors.

Curiosity leaves them open.

The older I become, the more valuable that distinction appears.

This book began with a child speaking to a figure named Bidia.

It passed through years of exploration, perception, meditation, intuition, illness, responsibility, suffering, and change.

It led me through experiences I once believed were the center of the story.

It eventually led me somewhere much simpler.

A deeper appreciation for questions.

Whether the experiences themselves were spiritual, energetic, psychological, symbolic, neurological, or some combination of things remains an open question.

Whether the traditions describe objective truths or recurring human patterns remains an open question.

Whether the path I walked was unique or universal remains an open question.

I am comfortable leaving those questions open.

My purpose was never to prove my experiences.

My purpose was never to prove spiritual traditions.

My purpose was simply to understand my own life more honestly.

To understand what happened.

To understand what changed.

To understand why.

There are still questions I cannot answer.

There are still experiences I do not fully understand.

There are still mysteries I suspect may remain mysteries for the rest of my life.

I am increasingly comfortable with that.

The honest account of what happened.

The honest account of what it cost.

The honest account of what it taught me.

I do not know what the future holds.

I do not know whether experiences that once felt commonplace will become more prominent again.

I do not know whether the questions that returned after the wedding will eventually lead somewhere unexpected.

I do not know whether there are chapters still waiting to be written.

What I do know is this.

The story I once believed was about extraordinary experiences turned out to be about something far more ordinary.

A human being attempting to understand his life.

And perhaps that is why I no longer feel the need to reach a conclusion.

Because the conclusion was never the point.

The point was paying attention.

The point was learning.

The point was living.

The point was being willing to follow a question honestly, even when it led somewhere completely different than expected.

This story began with certainty.

It ends with curiosity.

And for the first time in my life, that feels enough.