Right – I’ll try and keep this simple. Almost exactly 10 years ago, I encountered Derrida and Deconstruction/post-structuralism at Berkeley for the first time (I may well have not properly understood it, but took it as what I now understand to be quite ‘eastern’ – interpenetration of binary opposites – the idea of ‘black’ person ‘creates’ white person etc.) I started to realise that my stable sense of ‘self’ was constructed by language in precisely this way, in opposition to a ‘shadow’ that i created of ‘other’. I got quite freaked out somehow. I realised that my clothes didn’t reflect any stable inner ‘identity,’ but were just like dressing up in costume. I couldn’t sleep.
I was wandering about the campus obsessing over ‘all the world’s a stage, and the men and women merely players’. Weird coincidences stared happening. Things started getting very ‘symbolic’. I’d be thinking about Alice in wonderland, and then someone dressed up as the Mad Hatter would hand me a flyer for some party. Got pretty scared.
Gradually, my sense of being a seperate ‘ego’ started to disolve. ‘God’ started to rush in. I thought ‘I’ was dying (which, in a sense, ‘I’ was?) Time stood still. All is one. Heaven. All i could think of was the Blake line about ‘the world in a grain of sand, and eternity in an hour’... I’d stumbled on the consciousness which was the obvious root of all religion, and was what Everyone Was Always Looking For. I stayed in ‘paradise’ for about 2 hours?
When i realised I couldn’t stay here, but had to re-enter time and my ‘life’ it started to warp into ‘hell’. I spent time (in a model I’ve only made sense of this recently from Shinzen Young) having a bad time in the ‘realms of power’[?] Ghosts of dead slaves, paranoia, archetypes, black helicopter type stuff – all the ‘new age’ David Icke conspiracy weirdness. But bad. I knew enough to know something was very wrong and made it to a psychatric unit (by which time I was extremely agitated but effectively mute) and was diagnosed as ‘bipolar.’
I’ve basically had clincal depression ever since for the past 10 years. Read a lot of Robert Anton Wilson in an attempt to try and understand what had happened – virtually everything he talks about was present in my experience (and he used to live near where I did in Berkeley of course..) but never really got anywhere.
Recently I was sent on a mindfulness meditation course by my doctor. Have had some success with what I think is the first Jhana (and not just access concentration). But also some slightly scary feelings – like, my bodymind just isn’t used to being that calm. I had assumed that I wasn’t even on the ‘path’ yet, having just started. But having lurked here for a bit, I get the impression that this expereince above (satori?!) might have some bearing on things. Have I been in the ‘dark night’ for 10 years without knowing it? I just can’t get any consolation from the pleasures of the normal world after this experience and can’t take the various status games (money, doing ‘cool’ things) that seriously. Does this direct, prolonged experience of ‘The Source’ have any irreversible bearing on my position on the insight ‘path’? Or am I JUST MENTAL?

The strange thing was – vis a vis the bipolar ‘diagnosis’ – that my ‘ego’ never inflated, but disappeared.