Dear
I hope you are well. Here in the UK, the lockdown has been underway for about 10 weeks, and I’ve relished it in some ways. I’ve enjoyed the slowness and quietness, and the extra time with my family. We’ve been on some fantastic bike rides and walks, exploring green areas of our city
and its surroundings that we never knew existed. Although we live in a city, there is a large green space nearby, which connects with a lot of other green spaces, so my overriding impression of the lockdown is ‘greenness.’ I also feel as if I’ve also connected more deeply with the sky and the moon (hence my ‘moon poem’ in the last newsletter).
At the same time, the lockdown has been a little challenging, as our three boys have had school and college work and I’ve had to help out in a ‘home tutor’ role. (My wife is a health worker so has been working all the way through.) It has been a multi-tasking exercise to
keep up with my work at my university, and also the writing of my new book, Extraordinary Awakenings. Hopefully some new neural networks are forming in my brain! (As you may know, the concept of ‘neuroplasticity’ explains how the brain keeps developing and re-organising itself according to how we use it.)
On the subject of which, thanks to all of your comments about the title of the book. It seems as though ‘Extraordinary Awakenings’ is the most popular, so I’ll probably stick with that. I have written 7 chapters of the book now (out of 10) and am very excited about it. I’ve probably done about 15 interviews with ‘shifters’ over the last
few weeks and have spoken to some incredibly inspiring people.
I’ve become aware of a couple of different phenomena through these interviews. One is how long term addicts can become free of addiction in a sudden ‘identity shift.’ I recently spoke to one woman who had been an alcoholic for 30 years and made a suicide attempt, after hitting rock bottom. In the aftermath of the
attempt, she became free of her craving for alcohol. After her suicide attempt, the police took her to her mother’s house, and her mum felt as though she had to give to her a drink to alleviate her withdrawal symptoms. Bizarrely, she found herself picking up the drink with one movement and then immediately putting it down, as if she had become two people. Then she looked at herself in the mirror and didn’t recognise herself – literally, she felt no connection with the person staring back at her. A doctor gave her some medication to help her cope with withdrawal, and
when she came to, the addiction had disappeared, for no apparent reason. She told me that when she went to AA meetings and heard about other people’s struggles staying sober she felt a little guilty, as for her there was no struggle. I have found several other examples of the same phenomenon. To me, it suggests that in these moments, a completely new identity emerges. The old self which carried the addiction dissolves away.
Another interesting thing is how physical ailments can sometimes suddenly disappear in an awakening. Since we know that a lot of
ailments are psychosomatic, it makes sense that as the ego dissolves away, some illness should dissolve away too. Another interesting phenomenon is that (as
in the above example) spiritual transformation sometimes happens directly after a suicide attempt, or at least the serious contemplation of suicide. I think this is may be because contemplating (or attempting) suicide means reaching a point of complete desolation, where the ego crumbles away, leaving a space for a new spiritual self to emerge.
