I simply believe that some part of the human Self or Soul is not subject to the laws of space and time. ~Carl Jung
An experience I had in my adult life that solidified my knowledge that I wasn’t just a physical being was during a sleep paralysis episode. I opened my eyes to the sunshine pouring into the bedroom. The walls and window coverings were white except for one dark wooden and deeply painted accent wall. I couldn’t move. I was breathing, I could move my eyes but try as hard as I might I could not rise. In that moment I recalled learning about REM sleep in high school AP Psychology class. If we didn’t have a part of us, or chemicals in us, that made us paralyzed during dreams we’d be flailing all over the place. When you wake up and your body hasn’t come out of the paralysis it’s called Sleep paralysis. I was excited to just lay there and experience it.
I didn’t know any stories of sleep paralysis but now there’s so much folklore around them. I know now that people, including friends and other experiences i’ve had, have seen demons, ghosts, frightening things and have felt them, too. I’ve heard sleep paralysis and night terrors used interchangeably but they’re different… I’m going off on a tangent here somewhat…
I was excited to just lay there and experience it. I could feel the sheets against my skin, see the breeze from the fan blowing the curtain gently, and then I saw a figure. Looking down to the left of the foot of the bed a white, somewhat translucent figure was slowly gliding across the floor. So beautiful white, a soft white that didn’t glow but was just there..and with the blackest opaque non reflecting non shiny no depth at all hair i’ve ever seen. I didn’t see a face, just a blur. The edges of this white and black figure were blurred. My eyes glued to it as it glided from the left side of the room to the right and into the bathroom. I knew part of me was still in a dream but I had to get up. I closed my eyes and tried to force myself to not be paralyzed. Get up and go look in that bathroom! GET UP, GET UP GET UP and SWOOSH I got up really quickly, felt the wooden floor under my bare feet and saw myself laying in the bed. As soon as I saw myself, SWOOSH!! it felt like my soul was gently sucked back into myself and I was staring at the ceiling again.
Even though I know the whole experience could very well be hypnagogic hallucinations, it could’ve all been just a big funky ass dream, I say it was real. Coincidentally enough the next week my friend said she had been having a panic attack in the shower and as she tried to count slowly to get her heart rate down she felt herself rise out of her body. She saw her self leaning against the wall from up above, looked around and stayed there for a few seconds and then was back in her body. My husband woke once to see his own face below his perspective. Like my friend he stayed there for a few seconds, looked around and that was that. People I know have seen ghosts. Children talk to ghosts and have uncanny descriptions of people they’ve never seen. It can happen. We aren’t only physical, we are spiritual.
You don’t have a soul. You are a Soul. You have a body. ~C.S. Lewis
We are born into this world, whatever time the soul enters the physical realm of our little baby bodies, and have to acclimate to them. The nurture of ourselves from outside forces definitely shapes us. The nature of our true selves, the heart and soul of us, comes out to other people as our personality, in our actions, whatever. You feel yourself, your consciousness, your being every second of every day. What we experience as infants into childhood is, for the most part, long forgotten but the way we were brought up effects what we do as adults, how we think, how we speak, how we eat…
Once I saw myself as a fetus in my mother. A light shone in the heart of me and a voice spoke, “This is you before the world got to you. Find it and be it.” Although I haven’t done psychedelics in years, and I didn’t do them but maybe 5 times, that hallucination has stuck with me since. The tears that followed were for the knowing that voice was true. We can only let the physical effect our soul so much. Maybe that’s one reason why the prophets, in particularly Jesus (I was raised in the church and still call myself a Jesus believer) taught so much of casting the physical aside. How easily it is to become rooted in all the physical around us. It’s natural to do so! I may not, in the strictest of terms, be trapped in the physical. It is a part of the experience of life here. But to let the physical be the only focus is to ignore me. I am trapped, i cannot exit, i do NOT WANT to exit this body until I’m 102 but I want to know more of the spiritual, more of my soul separate from the physical, but i must accept the physical, make it cozy, make it not rule over me.
Assess the physical, assess the changes it has made. Embrace the lessons and learn from them. Consciously work at becoming the person I know I am and can be. Apply the lessons learned to real life. Cognitive behavioral changes even if I have to tattoo the lessons learned onto my skin to keep it at the surface of thought. Show the love I know I have in the best ways I can. So (for example) I dislike when my children touch me and sometimes it feels like spiders crawling. I should make them touch my arms and take deep breaths, think happy thoughts.. at some point my brain will comply with my greater will and i can train myself to love their touches as a mother should. *my son looooooves rubbing and touching people, so i wouldn’t be forcing him to cuddle. He would greatly love it and would probably pretend to pass out if I asked him specifically to rub my arms.*
trapped in the physical 