Crucial childhood experiences that pushed me deeper inwards — part 1

Welcome to the Inner Plane!

It’s nice to have you here. I thought that it would be fitting that the introductory article for this blog will be a mix of a few details about myself and, to make it valuable for the reader, some practical insights I had when I was a kid. We’ll end with some practical contemplations that you can play with.

The following inquiry is directing the rest of the article — What have been the most important factors in initiating and moving me along the trajectory of deepening my self-awareness?

I have named those experiences as follows:

#1 — “Pure contemplation”

#2 — “Shed the tears to find the way”

#3 — “The invisible prison”

#4 — “All models are wrong, but some are useful — becoming a generalist”

#5 — “Creative perspective-shifting”

#6 — “In the hands of the few”

Now let’s dive into the first three and leave the rest for next week, OK?

#1 — “Pure contemplation”

One day I was standing in front of a mirror and I had an experience that left a deep imprint on me.

Here is what I remember from it — I was probably around 9–11 years old and I went to the kitchen to get something. I stopped in front of a mirror and started to gaze into my own eyes. After a short while, suddenly I felt as if I was transported above my body. Upon entering the body again, I experienced something quite bizarre that I will try to explain as best as words will allow me.

I got a sudden very peculiar awareness of the fact of existing (we can call it pure existing), and I was struck by how weird it was to even exist. I could not comprehend how is it even possible to be and how it is to “not be”, how did this awareness arose from nothing and how will it dissolve into nothing and more importantly why. After a short moment, I discovered that this feeling that I have is so overwhelming that I cannot really put it into words. It was clear to me that I wanted to encapsulate this feeling that I was experiencing and boil it down into some neat and manageable question to give it some form and that I was failing miserably at it. I will describe it as follows:

Poetically I can describe it as ‘tasting the infinity’ as it was a strange contemplation of infinity mixed with being instinctively and acutely aware of a natural human curiosity and our infinitesimal role here and lack of capacity of truly grasping the phenomenon of life.

Later on in life, I had a gmail inbox which was questionmarek (not my actual email now) and I also wrote “q?m”, “QM” or “question?mark” (sometimes it was simply “peace”) in the txt files whenever I uploaded something to the internet for people to download — it was to honor this experience.

I cannot remember whether this experience initiated a bigger period of questioning in my life or that it was supplementary to the already-established flow of questioning. I also cannot truly remember whether I had the feeling of leaving the body due to real OOBE or I simply “floated” in my thoughts and later arrived back in my body. That part seems foggy to me but it’s rather irrelevant in the context of the whole experience.

#2 — “Shed the tears to clear the way”

Another very influential aspect of my path and a double-edged sword was childhood suffering in the form of both the trauma of omission and commission. I was bullied in primary school and I felt not loved at home and was privy to inhuman (in my eyes) experiences on a practically daily basis and that really pushed me inwards and made me question myself and the world around me.

• Why are people behaving this way?
• Why is there evil in the world?
• Is there any force that is governing this world outside of the chaotic, and mostly subconscious, human collective mind?

I became a silent observer looking at humans from the safe corner of the classroom.

Unfortunately, I’ve also internalized a few destructive beliefs (while true on some level, they did not allow me to develop in a healthy way because I really resisted living here for a long while):

• This is a hostile, dog-eat-dog and every-man-for-himself world unfit for a sensitive soul to live in
• People are not much more different than animals and often worse — the way they govern the world is horrible and they are not really better than nasty kids that were bullying me — some authorities were even worse e.g. a couple of teachers also bullied me by throwing stuff at me. One was a priest and one threw a glass bottle at me and broke my glasses and was later fired. Some other teachers implied I was stupid and a school psychologist did not take my side when I argued with a teacher in the secondary school which made me really depressed and I felt the world is unfair when you don’t have “power”. Unfortunately, I could not make a joke out of it or treat it like Osho and it moved me deeper into my sadness.
• It’s no use to speak or act because all my efforts will go to waste because people won’t understand — this I later understood was one of the primary reasons for my depression. I had proof of the pudding in my daily life and I really dreaded swallowing the bitter pill in its smaller and larger form:

- Smaller — usually meaningless in the grand scheme of things — I remember a class party in the primary school when I told one girl to not put the glass near the edge of the table because something may happen and she refused and YOLO’d away only to discover 10 minutes later that someone indeed bumped into the glass and broke it.

- Larger and more complex e.g. I repeatedly told my mother that each argument in the house is like a needle to my heart and I don’t want to hear her and my aunt to go at each other’s throats daily but alas, to no avail.

What really hurt me was not the event themselves but the reality of the recognition that people are stuck in their own unconscious tendencies and I have no influence over that and they continue to hurt themselves and others. It is said that stupidity is like death it only hurts people around them, but it also hurts them, however, they are often incapable of registering it.

• I am invisible to the world and nobody cares about me / I am alone

Those beliefs damaged me severely and for example it took me some years to be able to truly speak with another person “normally” (without being in fight or flight mode) and have some healthy relationship with normal life matters like “making money” etc. At the same time all of this suffering pushed me to question life and people around me and put me on the path of self-knowledge, which in itself is incredibly positive and I am insanely grateful for it. If I had a choice to not have these experiences and, as a result, not be who I am now, I would definitely not erase them.

#3 — “The invisible prison”

When I was older (about 13–14) I participated in a math IQ competition and I remember vividly trying to tackle one of the remaining problems and after thinking about it for 15–20 minutes which was a lot because the competition I believe had a time limit of 60 minutes I got an insight and I was sure I solved it. When I started to write the answer out however, I noticed after a while that something doesn’t add up. I realized that when I was thinking for a long time about the solution to the problem and then received the insight, my mind automatically assumed that this is the final solution because I’ve spent some time and energy trying to figure this out. The reality, however, was that it may have been for example only a stepping stone, a ground for a new revelation to come through, or simply the best shot of my mind to solve it for that particular “now”. I realized that I should have an open attitude and work with what comes to me and not assume anything because each assumption is a prison that can be hard to escape from. So I said to myself that a correct way to approach the task would be to take what my intuition gave me at that point and simply try it out with no assumption and simply learn from that and carry on. As the saying goes “Never assume because you make an ASS out of U and ME”

This was a first insight about the limitations we can build around ourselves using some assumptions which lead us astray, but the rabbit hole went much deeper. We carry not only assumptions about reality and ourselves, we carry a whole conceptual prison around us and can see only a limited part of the world and ourselves because of that. I became a student of myself and of the automatic assumptions I held, trying to lessen their impact on my perception of the world.

There was a quote that came a bit later, that have also been fairly important in motivating me and deepening my contemplations about this.

- The biggest prison you can be in, is an invisible one…because you are not aware that you are in it (this is a paraphrase)— still to this day, I don’t know which philosopher said that but later on I’ve heard it somewhere outside philosophy as well, so I guess it’s not a rare insight, but it was profound for me and drew me constantly to itself. From my observations it was clear that unconsciousness is such a prison and we cannot be free until we realize that and work on becoming truly conscious. I started to look deeply into the conceptual penitentiary walls that I have built around myself and tried to look for a way out. It’s like Nisargadatta Maharaj said “See how you function, watch the motives and results of your actions. Study the prison you have built around yourself, by inadvertence”…and so I did, as often as I could.

Our vision of the world should evolve and we should evolve with it. On the other hand, we should evolve and our vision of the world should evolve with us.

Contemplations for this week:

• Do I know the motives of my actions?
• Am I engaged in self-observation?
• To what extent I react automatically and to what extent I react consciously?
• To what extent I am free and to what extent I am a prisoner of my conditioning?
• What methods are available to me, which can free me from my conceptual prison and how can I verify their validity? (very, very important question)