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I'm not sure which forum to post this in, so apologies if this is the wrong one. Apologies also for the length of this post, but I feel compelled to share what happened to me.
Having been largely skeptic of “psychic” phenomena and spiritual experiences for most of my life, I cannot help but now believe otherwise after the recent events I have experienced and have witnessed happen to other students. From what I know, myself and many other people were hospitalized displaying “psychic” and paranormal abilities in the last few days of July, and I was discharged as of a month ago. It feels impossible to believe, since I was released I cannot find any evidence anywhere in the news or media or internet about the recent events I have experienced, yet I definitely can’t deny what happened, especially with the additional evidence from the physicians and police on campus that I have gleaned from what my family has told me (yet they strangely refuse to release my records and reports).
It all started less than two months ago, during the time I was staying on campus at university for summer classes. I did not notice anything out of the ordinary occurring in my life or on campus to any other students until I began my personal solo experimentation into Zen meditation. With the help of literature I read in my university’s library, I began the habit of daily morning meditation, hoping to relieve stress and improve my mental focus in school. However, within a few weeks, I found myself falling into what Buddhists would call “the Void”. In Buddhism, there is the concept of sunyata, or inherent emptiness of all things in the universe, in contrast to our usual “false beliefs” about how everything we see and experience seems permanent and “real”. There is the implicit goal of “attaining Enlightenment” through meditation, though you are not supposed to think about the goal of Enlightenment when you practice meditation, but simply sit without thinking of attaining. This Buddhist concept of Enlightenment indicates that one will have a sudden breakthrough, smashing through the delusions of what we think of as reality, or “smashing through empty space” as one monk put it. Being largely naïve of what this “smashing through reality” Enlightenment was supposed to be, I continued to meditate and reaped the benefits of finding myself doing better and better in class, able to study less and yet score higher grades than I’d previously expected.
This sudden realization of the Void came one weekend as a total shock, a spiritual Enlightenment that I cannot describe in words. It’s difficult for me to remember what exactly happened, as the memories are hazy, but I felt like I had transcended outside the boundary of ordinary time and space and into the emptiness of Void, which was always there yet humans are unaware of due to the delusions of everyday thinking and ‘common sense’. For example, you might say you are sitting in your living room at three o’clock in the afternoon on the second Tuesday of so and so month, but you are only expressing your perceived position in “time” and “space” using human measures of time and space. I felt like I had somehow, completely unintentionally, gone outside of these superficial labels of reality into the beyond. The next few days (in Earth time) following that weekend were strange and felt very otherworldly. I couldn’t find myself able to concentrate in class, so for three days I didn’t attend. I remember wandering around campus feeling lost inside a vast Void, although my human body and mind were still present on this Earth.
For instance, while sitting at my desk in my room, I began listening to a Youtube video that played relaxing music. However, while my physical self sat there listening, I was somehow ‘taken to another place’ where many eons of time seemed to pass before me in a great expanse of space (?). I can’t describe the feeling of being there, like bliss beyond bliss. It was the feeling of diving deep below the waters of a huge sea like a fish, then able to swim back up to the surface and freely fly above in the vast sky above the great expanse of waves like a bird. I don’t know how I was able to be in two places at once, one is my physical body sitting in my room listening to a Youtube video, and the other in this otherworldly expanse of Void, beyond the ordinary boundaries of our physical universe’s time and space. It felt like I was inside there forever, passing through lifetime after lifetime (not unlike the Buddhist principle of constant wheel of birth and death). The experience was beyond describing in words and I can only remember fragments of what seemed to occur, but all this must have resulted due to my “Enlightenment”. It was like I witnessed the cycle of birth and death, and momentarily returned to the Source, to my original nature beyond this physical self (of my current earthly identity and body). This felt the utmost familiar, as if this really was the way I’d always been and I’d just forgotten. While lying in my bed, I also felt taken away to another place and was spoken to by what you might call 'God' or as IT identified itself as 'Maha Prajna Paramita'. I felt like I was within this swirling infinitely vast vortex of light for many long eons of time, being carried by this Great universal presence.
I know that what I experienced was definitely not normal, and soon after I returned from being ‘inside the Void’, I began demonstrating strange powers that I cannot explain how I obtained. I spoke in voices, an old man’s voice, a woman’s voice, although I don’t know how my vocal cords were capable of producing such sounds. I could clap my hands together and create a reverberating shock that resonated throughout the room. I wasn’t hurt by fire, and I could freely pass my fingers through a candle flame without getting burned. You can imagine how frightening and strange my new behavior must have appeared to the people around me and sure enough within two days, in the morning my apartment housemates called the police on me. I do have a clear memory of the police coming into the apartment and taking me away in a four wheel cruiser.
They took me to a local hospital, where I remained in the emergency room for most of the day, slipping in and out of consciousness. I was not totally out of this Void, you see, and even though time passed normally for the hospital staff and everyone else, I felt like eons of time passed as my physical body lay in that hospital bed. It was an indescribable experience and I felt so frightened and alone at times as I lay there feeling like I’ve regressed back to being born again, back to being just a baby emerging out of the womb. What was going on outside my body and mind felt like I was beyond this physical universe, trapped and freefalling through the vacuum of empty, infinite space. I was still aware of what was going on around me, the nurses tending to me, the dialogue of the staff and security guards. I was also suddenly very physically aware of all the processes in my body: my heartbeat, the blood pounding and coursing through all my veins and arteries, my nerves, my digestion. These body processes came in me very loudly in sudden clarity, as if I myself was somehow able to travel down my own bloodstream, explore my own heart beating, my body processes working.
Now maybe all this that I experienced could be dismissed as some kind of schizophrenia or hallucinations, if it wasn’t for the other patients that began arriving into the ER around the same time I did. I was one of the first, I am sure of that, because when the police took me to the hospital, the doctors and nurses were baffled as to what was wrong with me. I remember them taking urine samples, dressing me in a hospital gown, and hooking me up to an IV drip and EKG sensors. As I lay there, other patients, fellow college students by the looks of them, began to arrive in the emergency room and some of there were led past my bed, so that’s how I knew. I overheard doctors’ voices saying things to describe symptoms like, “They all display that pupil-darting movement,” so I could guess that somehow all these patients like me were all part of this common affliction? Hallucination? Psychic event? I also kept having these constant thoughts or impressions (I don’t know where they came from, but it didn’t feel like my own mind) about us being the ‘star-children’ and we were to take part in something called the Ascension. Again, I have no idea what this means, they were just strange words that popped into my mind from nowhere?
The hospital was in a state of panic, I remember people constantly rushing past my bed, the noises of the workers and police and other people talking, an alarm light on the wall across from me was flashing white. It felt like the apocalypse had come or something, like it was something from a movie. After a while, a psychiatrist lady came over to talk to me, and I did my best to tell her everything I could about what happened to me. She appeared a bit confused and flustered by the mess that was happening, and I asked her, “What’s going on?” She looked at me, wide-eyed, and replied in her best trying-to-be-calm professional voice, “That’s what we’re trying to figure out.” Everybody looked frightened and panicked. I also remember at one point being able to telepathically communicate with the nurse. When she was hovering over my vision as I was lying down, I looked at her straight in the eyes and thought, “The universe is so big! I’m scared!” She nodded back understandably and audibly replied, “I know it’s big. I know you’re scared, it’s going to be ok.” WTF? How did she immediately know what I thought? After a while, I closed my eyes and went back to the blackness of the Void. I don’t know how long I must have been lost in there, but in Earth time it was probably just a few hours.
Many, many other things happened afterwards (the events after the ER, the weeks I spent being cared for and possibly covertly studied at a psychiatric facility where I experienced OBEs among a myriad of other things, the weeks after finally being released) but that’s another story entirely.
It’s quite possible that perhaps most of what I remember might have all been hallucinations or delusions of some sort if it were not for details that say otherwise. Even if we were to ignore everything I just said from my own personal observations, how can we possibly account for the other things outside of what I experienced? For example, (as the doctors later informed me) my housemates reported that they saw me set my own hair on fire, which was what led them to call the police. I don’t remember ever doing this, and even if it were so, my hair was not singed or burned in the slightest when I was admitted to the ER. I do remember passing my fingers through a candle flame, because I was so surprised that I wasn’t getting burned by it. The facility psychiatrist officially diagnosed me as having bipolar disorder, and made no reference to my supposed “hallucinations/delusions” in the medical papers they gave my parents. I also know for a fact, from information gleaned from the doctors and my school counselor, that I’m definitely not the only student in town who was admitted to the ER on that day for similar ‘symptoms’. I don’t personally know or met anyone else who went through what I went through, but I’m sure they exist. Also, the doctors never sat me down and told me anything about what happened, or why they won’t release any information to me or my family. The whole thing is shrouded with secrecy as if just trying to discuss it is off-limits and forbidden. I never considered myself a spiritual person or a strong believer in paranormal phenomena before any of this happened to me. I don’t consider myself an easily gullible person, and was previously a fairly fact-based skeptic who trusted only what empirical evidence and science can provide. If anyone else has recently noticed or experienced anything strange and/or similar to my experience, please feel free to contact me.
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