Last year my mind exploded and now I'm in spiritual puberty again

An incomplete document of an ongoing change

Over 16 years of on-and-off spiritual and therapeutic practice, I’ve experienced a series of shocking changes, especially in the last five years. Stuff I thought you couldn’t change about a mind has been profoundly altered. For example, the perceived boundary between me and the world dropped away, my heart opened up, and my sense of identity shifted from feeling like a heavy burden to a deliciously insubstantial waveform. It’s been an unbelievable gift, and I’ve chronicled much of it in public writing.

After the last huge shift, in 2023, which I’d describe as “getting the cosmic joke,” I, naively, thought I’d been through all of the big watershed moments. Instead, last year, everything I knew was shattered. The life I once lived is very distant to me now, even though the superficial features are similar.

It happened during a pretty normal period in meditation practice. In late winter 2024, I noticed that I wasn’t living up to my stated policy of trying to accept every emotion passing through my system. There were certain shades of existential loneliness that I was pushing away. This was causing some friction. Solitude is simply part of my current life chapter, since Cate is more independent than any of my previous partners, and Berkeley is a place where I don’t feel at home socially.

As a response, I made feelings of solitude the central focus of my practice. I tried to become like a sommelier, going out of my way to appreciate all the shades of loneliness that colored my afternoons, trying to zoom in on every micro-pixel and embrace rather than reject.

Again—normal. This is what, for me, long-term practice often consists of: noticing when my reactions don’t line up with my principles, and seeing if I can bring myself into deeper alignment.

However, I noticed something odd. Dropping the resistance to loneliness allowed me to slip into deeper sensations of flow. It was almost as if the emotional resistance had been preventing the emergence of a more intuitive part of my will. There were a few memorable walks I took where the feeling of solitude felt like a portal into an exquisitely smooth parallel world. When I allowed my emotions to pierce me more deeply, I fell into a different degree of cooperation with reality. Every step felt precise and necessary, like a choreographed dance.

This loneliness-focused leg of my practice had been proceeding for a few weeks when I took a work trip to LA. As I settled in at my hotel, I listened to a dharma talk by Adyashanti. It’s a remarkable talk. The high-level gloss of it is something like:

‘Listen. You have this thing in you called a personal will. It’s what motivates you to want things in life—career advancement, affirmation, fancy cars. And it’s not bad, that’s just how people are. But sooner or later you find out it can’t be satisfied. So then your personal will gets you into spirituality, because that could be the source of some other prize you could obtain. That’s why you’re listening to me. And that goes on for a period of time, and that’s also not bad, that’s just how things go. But the spiritual life only really begins when your personal will starts giving up on this, when it starts to fall away. You’ll resist this, because it’s terrifying and unexpected. But at a certain point it’s the only way you can go forward.’

This is, by the way, exactly my story. My literary career fell apart just as I started having these profound spiritual experiences, which enriched my life in a new way. I thought: ‘oh, cool, this is my fun new interest, this is the new thing I’ll build my identity around.’ And I had developed a sense of pride around it—I’d become a consciousness explorer, this was a new type of guy, a new way I could evaluate myself, situate myself socially, earn affirmation from a different crowd.

I was stunned to hear such an exact description of my circumstances. And as I heard it, my personal will heard it, too. It was in a receptive mood.

And my personal will said, ‘ok, yeah, that seems right—I can probably relax now.’

You know those clips of an ice sheet falling into the ocean? Here is this pristine, shining structure that seems so permanent, standing proudly against the elements. And then—crack. In a single moment, the entire edifice comes apart as easily as a sheet cake. And the ocean swallows it up and it’s gone forever.

In that moment, I experienced my personal sense of self departing. The part of conscious experience I associated with ‘me’ fell away. Not only the vast majority of self-referential thought, but the ability to refer to myself like I was a real thing, the delusion that any concept could catch my underlying being.

My life was there, but my personal self was starkly not. Without it, I was something different. It’s not really that I had ‘no self.’ I’d felt that before in earlier stages of practice. That idea seemed stupid now. All of the words I’d used to describe my experience felt stupid. I was clearly something inexpressible, and everything else was, too.

Meditation is a weird fuckin’ hobby. You study every bit of your mind for years. And then one day, that mind disappears, and you don’t know anything anymore.

I looked around the hotel room, slack-jawed.

I was all wrong, about everything

I’d often heard senior meditation teachers talk about equanimity as if they were discussing something magical. And I never got what they were so excited about. Don’t get me wrong, equanimity is great. It’s empowering to be able to moderate the tyrannical judgement function in your mind. But it’s maybe not a miracle.

What I didn’t know was that there’s an entirely different form of equanimity. Regular equanimity is the laudable discipline of adding a little maturation to your judgement function—but that judgement function can also wither into the void.

Why would you want this? Well, the judging function creates a sense of incompleteness, or wrongness. Like our present circumstances are never quite right. We are drawn to the flaw, the trace of hunger or thirst approaching, the trace of menace in the happy crowd.

The opposite of this experience is thoroughgoing wholeness, inner and outer. A sense that the universe is fundamentally, radiantly, self-evidently good, and that there is no contradiction between this and the presence of tragedy, ugliness, pain, and boredom. Everyone and everything is made of an excellent immaterial material—one taste, as they say in the Tibetan tradition.

It’s natural to think: “okay, but, isn’t that just naive? There is so much suffering in the world.” I am aware of this. In practice, though, you can experience wholeness and still get to work on repairing what is obviously broken here. This you can see from accounts of the lives of people who are way deeper in it than I’ll ever go. Saints are not necessarily chill people. As Tucker Peck pointed out to me, the Buddha was a busy guy.

What seems to change, when you perceive wholeness, is that you experience suffering as part of a larger picture, with the assurance that the larger picture is basically wonderful. But this might sound conceptual or philosophical, like a long series of thoughts. And that is wrong.

The feeling of wholeness is simple and immediate. It’s that the promised land is right here—nirvana and samsara are one, as they say. All of the mystics throughout history who have talked about how we are with God right now, we just don’t have eyes to see it? This is what is being discussed. And this is, in my experience, staggeringly obvious once all the obstructing bullshit is blasted away.

It is clear in every sensation. Everything shows it, bright as day. If you have this experience in a hotel room, as I did, then you will see wholeness in dingy hotel carpeting. And in water pressure, little bottles of shampoo and conditioner, the view of a parking lot from a dingy window, the groan of a giant AC unit. These will all serve as demonstrations of the primordial perfection that is experiencing itself in all of us.

I love LA. The restaurants, nature, architecture, people-watching. But I became indifferent to it, for the duration of that trip. I didn’t really leave the four-block radius around my hotel, because I didn’t need to leave paradise. The waiters at the closest restaurant were the most beautiful people I’d ever seen. I was happy to be annoyed, happy to breathe the smog off busy streets, happy to have a body that could get tired and hungry.

The frustrating thing about writing this is I know I can’t explain it. Good spiritual teachers will annoy you by telling you it’s not what you think, and now, I see the precise reason why. The experience is primarily characterized by the vanishing of one small limiting part of your mind—precisely the part that does things like, say, wanting spiritual experiences to happen so that life will be different. Thus, imagining it with a typically structured mind is like searching for darkness with a flashlight, to borrow a metaphor from Julian Jaynes.

Worse yet, knowing this doesn’t help, because—and this is important to emphasize—we can’t turn the judgment function off through conscious will, because this judging function is our everyday will. Making the judgement function angry at itself just empowers the judgement function. That’s why this is all so tricky.

You just have to practice diligently, and, one day, get lucky when a moment of surrender happens, all by itself. (Some people experience this without a decade-plus of self-exploration, such as Byron Katie, but I am not one of them.)

During the month or so afterwards, my ecstatic bliss was only punctured by the fear that it would go away, or the strain of hope that it would stay forever. Neither has happened. Instead, I have been thrust into a new sort of spiritual puberty.

Divine bliss is nice, but how is your productivity?

It feels somewhat cursed to write about an experience of divine perfection and pivot right to productivity, but I know it is what you might wonder about. Can he still accomplish tasks? Is he a crazy person now?

The total amount I get done is slightly more than I did before. In the time since this experience, I did one successful product launch, some coaching and consulting, and a lot of writing, including most of the first draft of a book. I haven’t committed any crimes, or caused any crazy social drama. In other words, I am unimpaired, this isn't mania. Unless you’d lived with me during this period, it would have been hard to see a major difference in my behavior. Occasionally someone tells me my default facial expression has changed.

What’s different is the way I get things done. When I face a challenging task, I surrender to it completely, and it feels like the momentum of the universe is getting it done, that a “me” is not responsible. Sometimes this leads to a level of output that is abnormally high.

So, it appears to be completely consistent to have had the experience I’ve had, and be entirely engaged with normal life-type stuff. What’s hard now is doing work I am not emotionally aligned with. It just doesn’t happen, and projects that aren’t aligned have fallen away from my life. In light of this, I’m lucky to have constructed a quirky professional life around my skills. If I hadn’t, then this could have been pretty disruptive.

It’s not that I don’t have the will to do things. It’s that my will is different. I feel plural, like my consciousness is an ongoing system, and that decisions arise from that system, rather than being dictated by a controlling ego. This is not so strange—it’s the loveliness of a normal flow state, when the human system is trusting itself rather than monitoring itself. But having it as the baseline—experiencing flow as your basic state, regardless of the simplicity or complexity of the task you’re engaged in—is wild.

It’s disorienting that I don’t really have the experience of “choosing” anymore. It’s also hard to even really imagine the old way of being, which involved mentally simulating some future existence I might want to have, and then mentally flailing against the present moment in a futile effort to drag myself towards that imagined future.

Overall, I find this way of navigating much preferable, and much easier. But I don’t want to sound totally unconflicted about it. The year has also involved a number of days when I thought, “okay, I want to resist this, it’s scary to just let myself go into what’s unfolding.” But I seemingly can’t. I can’t figure out how to organize my experience in the way my old mind did. The resistance progressively melts away as this continues.

Meanwhile, I’ve also experienced very normal problems, and challenging relational and professional situations. I think I’ve navigated them with a more charitable, patient attitude than I would have had previously, but I’m not totally sure. I’m still a jerk sometimes, but it hurts me more, so I try to avoid it. Emerging conflicts seem like opportunities to continue refining my understanding of this new life.

As for my mood, I would say it’s been “unbelievably good with a side of horribly painful.”

A little bit of self is an awkward amount to have

I’m actually relieved that the intense bliss hasn’t remained. It’s 11/10 positive, but also 10/10 vivid, and it just keeps going and going, for days.

Eventually, this feeling mellowed out into a background sense of exquisite peace. Currently, my resting state, when my nervous system is regulated and there’s nothing disturbing me, is something like “the gentle happiness of knowing God.” I smile easily and laugh a lot, and feel an amount of love for people that is socially awkward. Recently I was told that I come off as standoffish sometimes—this is on purpose. It’s not interpersonally sensible to let people know how beautiful I now think they are.

But what about when I’m not regulated? This is the tricky part. My conditioning wasn’t all blasted away. Instead, something like 70% of my ego structure exploded, and the rest was left around in mangled hunks. What’s left is bits of raw emotion and reactivity, which apparently need to be re-encountered through the new perspective before leaving the system. So, maybe for a week I will feel a constant, delicious flow. But then I’ll encounter some situation that brings up a developmentally important and difficult emotion. Suddenly I’ll feel like an overwhelmed teenager again—in this new consciousness, there’s no choice but to confront it, I am unable to dissociate.

When this is your day-to-day experience, it’s weird to participate in normal conversations. “Hi, Sasha, how was your week?” “Oh, well, I was awash in Fundamental Nature before being snapped out of it by an hour of unprocessed grief, and I’m coming back up now. How about you?” I don’t actually say this, I instead try to approximate how a person talks, insofar as I can do that without lying. Sometimes I vocally dwell on passing irritations in a Seinfeldian way so I don’t ramble about the glory of God.

I would like to publicly offer my wife credit for dealing with me in this state—my emotional life has been unusual, and she has been consistently supportive, as well as a source of excellent spiritual guidance.

After a year of this, things are smoother than at the outset, and getting smoother all the time. I’m told by people who have navigated this territory that this cleanup of your historical core wounds is a finite process, and that life gets even better, and stranger, after its conclusion—the level of flow and participation deepens. I simply can’t imagine?

Some final notes

This experience made me understand missionary religion for the first time in a deep, intuitive way. It is staggering to imagine that this is somewhere in the consciousness of all the billions of people who have lived. It’s tragic to see your friends and loved ones experiencing a sense of incompleteness, of worthlessness, when you understand the fundamental error of this, when you see what they are really made of, but know there’s no way to convey this that would be understood.

I am also, like, me? I feel two contradictory things in superposition: I couldn’t possibly deserve this, and I do because everyone does, without exception.

I feel this now every day, a sense of awkward gratitude, and a pull towards wanting to share it. But at the same time, I know the spiritual path just isn’t for everybody, and I don’t like to feel like I’m nagging people about what to do.

I don’t really know what to do about this. I will keep blogging, I suppose. Maybe my friends in neurotech will invent a meditation-accelerating implant, and then this will get a little easier.

The possibility that some people miss this, period, is hurtful for me to contemplate. I comfort myself with the intuition that everyone glimpses wholeness at the end of their mortal life, that this is what’s going on with near-death experiences—the reason why, for example, Steve Jobs started exclaiming, “oh wow, oh wow,” in his final moments.

If you want it to happen before you die, through the meditative path, it typically takes time. As previously mentioned, it’s been 16 years for me. I started taking meditation seriously at 20, and I’m 36 now. It’s worth noting that my practice hasn’t been constant at all since 20. I took a big break in my mid-20s and declared myself anti-meditation after some rough early experiences, before eventually returning when I’d stabilized myself. But I have been a near-constant investigator of experience and my psyche throughout, and now I see that this was an important piece of the puzzle.

I have no idea what comes next. I am done with thinking I’ve had the last dramatic experience. (I’m sort of done with having fixed views about anything.) But I’m also fine if things slow down a bit on that front. Just practicing being a better person is a reasonable lifelong task from here on out; I am a slow learner.

What’s actually important to me is that you really understand that this is a real possibility, for you, in your life. If you practice with honest diligence, with tenderness and patience and determination, one day you will understand that you were completely wrong about everything. And you will be so, so happy about that.

PS

Thank you to all of the dharma friends who have helped me, and who continue to help me. You know who you are; I cannot repay the debt.

If you read this whole thing and you’re like, cool, where do I start, the best general meditation book on the market is currently Original Love, and I’ve also heard great things about his app, The Way. Some people seem to find this blog post I wrote helpful. If you have more concrete questions I’d be happy to answer them via email; if I’m not qualified, I will pass you to someone more qualified.

Thank you to Cate Hall and Carly Valancy for editorial help.