Process entry 21st March 2015

After a long period of intense struggle Ken Wilber has saved the day. Stuck in a cycle of non-stop meditation experiencing an extreme kind of spiritual emotional pain that was rendering my body unusable I turned back to Ken Wilber for help (through video form). One particular video he has on youtube about state pathologies with reference to spiritual emergence has been of immeasurable use. Indeed after a serious bout of psychosis last September (a typical seasonal time for that to happen thopugh it had been about two years), I  was struggling alot to come back down from the experience and was trying to integrate and embody a new found connection I had with God in personal form - this attempt to hold onto that connection proved very difficult however and it has taken me about 7 months to stabalise the relationship to God in refence to that state and finally come down from the experience into what (with reference to Ken Wilber) I am calling my finate self. I actually had a second bout of psychosis not too long after the first one but the second was less severe. In a humourous but slightly cruel irony the first psychosis was brought about in an honest attempt to integrate my preivous psychotic experiences into a functional ego. The basic idea was to categorise all the various 'trips' into one narrative that kind of tied all the experiences together. I was doing this in a fictionalised form making all the trips into a master work fictional tale about a character who has a relationship with the feminine of God. However the attempt to internalise and integrate such a vast amount of content proved mentally fatal as by the time I was ready to write the story having structured it I began to trip on the content all over again. This lead to a two week full-blown psychosis where I psychically wrote the entire story and even went to the extent of acting out various parts in real life and then carried the story on with a sequel that lead me into ecstatic states of spiritual ecstacy that I just couldn't come down from. Primarily this involved the ecstatic symptom of ecstatic laughter (as mentioned in Nectar of Devotion (Prabhupada)), sometimes so intense that I was rolling on the floor and actually physically hurting my stomach. Although I came out of the psychosis eventually I continued to experience ecstatic symptoms which grew in intensity (crying, bliss etc) as I explored an intimate relationship with the feminine aspect of God (going right back to the book). This proved to be both amazing and exciting and completely terrifying and damaging to my finate self. Eventually I was stuck in a state of continual meditative chanting that I couldn't seem to stop myself from and experiencing something which I indentified as separation (ecstatic symptom nectar of devotion) I was on the brink of suicide. Examing my chakra points for answers I noticed that a major problem was occuring somewhere between the third and fourth chakras - right where Ken Wilber says psychosis effects one (or bipolar). I seem to be exerting an excessive force of repression on the lower three chakras - I was stuck in a dual state, I was either operat6ing completely from the lower three chakras - in which case I was sociable, happy, basically a normal state of consciousness, or I was stuck up in the upper three or four chakras experiencing intense intuitions and psychic activity. I seem to be able to get one or the other but the bridge in between has some kind of damage (presumably the psychosis) in it. What really saved me was looking at this video of Ken Wilber where he discusses the need to develop BOTH the infinate and the finate self. Although I had made great progress in developing and developing a relationshipship WITH the infinate self I had grossly left out my finate self and failed to deal with remaining aspects of the false self (leading to things like projection, fear, paranoia) out. What Ken explains so clearly is the need for therapeuitic process to get at the relationship between the false self and FINATE self, stabalising the finate self at whatever chakra it is situated at (structures of consciousness) and then also using meditation techniques in order to develop the INFINATE self (or/and ones relationship with it). Having this information I finally managed to come down out of my meditaion into the finate self and could actually observe it to be relatively finate and then look at ways of healing and recooparating after the long trip. On an up note I seem to have advanced in my meditation through a stage into what Ken refers to as deep formless meditation which began happening spontaneously as a response to the intense pain. Being stuck meditatating and in intense pain I found a deeper form of meditation that I could enter into which the pain ceased and I could sit for long periods of time, so although I am excited to explore this new meditative domain I am mostly going to focus on my finate self for a while and see if I can root out some of these more psychological areas with more theurapeutic methods. Have Ken Wilbers 'Integral Psychology' next to me ready to read, looking forwards to it THANKS KEN.