Ep 2. I woke up in love - with everyone and everything...and I thought I was losing my mind. ('The Myth of Reality' Book 1 'Into the Light'))

"The Myth of Reality" Episode 2 - A personal tale of awakening, synchronicity, and the revelation of the deeper nature of reality - and why it matters now more than ever.

What does it mean to wake up in love? Not for a new found lover or a new born baby but for everything and everyone. An all encompassing love that has no specific object. An intensity that doesn’t ebb and flow with the presence and absence of the loved ‘one’ but takes over every waking moment. That relentlessly fills your every thought. That makes your chest physically ache and your eyes brim with tears…constantly.

When I went to bed that night everything was as it had always been. Up was up and down was down. I’d been taught the colours of the spectrum since finger painting as a toddler. I knew or thought I knew what was possible and what wasnt. Little did I know that something else was waiting in the wings. A new colour in the spectrum, a new object in the familiar landscape. Something that simply wasn’t known in my world when I headed to bed. Ever since I have called it simply ‘something else’. Something that couldn’t and still can’t be described or explained but was felt by my heart, mind and body as an overwhelming state of love.

It should have been a great gift and perhaps it was. But the intensity was far too much to hold. If you have ever felt the momentary jolt of love that passes through you when you glimpse a lover sleeping or a child smiling you will know that it literally hits you. It hurts. Thankfully it is usually fleeting. Imagine that intensity morning, noon and night. It was overwhelming, exhausting and at the back of my mind it was deeply concerning. What on earth was going on where did it come from and why and what could I do with it?

Was this the first extraordinary event in the journey I now call the Myth of Reality?No, it was actually the second. A few years earlier, aged 19, whilst studying Psychology at Swansea University, I’d experienced what I now call the Groundhog Day. That morning in the little cottage in Mumbles I shared with a few friends I’d woken up again and again into the same day - a little further into the same day each time. Not once or twice, but perhaps hundreds of ever extending awakenings. Strangely I didn’t point it out to the other people I encountered that morning I just allowed the same conversations to repeat. Until eventually…it stopped. I stopped waking up. Or perhaps I actually did wake up in a different way. Who can say. But I was undoubtedly never the same again. The certainty that dreaming and waking were/are quantitatively different states never again returned to me. A door was opened that has never shut.

Weirdly over the years I’d come to believe that I had named my experience after the film ‘Groundhog Day’ in which the main character also lives out the same days events over and over again. A few years ago I looked up the date of the movie only to find my own experience pre-dated its release by a number of years. I’d had a groundhog day before Groundhog Day…how very fitting.

So waking up in love a few years later - The early 1990s - no internet to search, no one to ask, nowhere to go with it. What to do? For someone like me that hated religion and began to fear that this was perhaps a ‘religious calling.’ Since childhood I’d actively rejected religion, at least Catholicism the only religion I knew. Sitting on the stairs as a child listening to the Nuns attempt to persuade my mum to return to the family home we had fled the day before. The bruising on my mothers face acting as no contradiction to their belief that she should do the ‘right thing’ and return with her small children to her marital home and the man that terrorised us there.

Ever after I was terrified of Nuns. Would get off a bus if one got on. I couldn’t be in a confined space with them. At 12 my mum had tried to send both my sister and I to her old convent, Nun taught school. I cried for 2 weeks often claiming that if she took me there they would kill me. Their religion and the beliefs it led to had made me see them as a very real existential threat.

So where do you go, with a sudden, all encompassing love that can only signify the most unacceptable possibility of all…a religious calling. You walk around and around outside Churches, staring at stained glass windows and hoping that the resistance will subside long enough for you to walk inside and share what you are experiencing. That someone inside there will understand and there will be a place for you, an open armed welcome into the family. But the resistance didn’t subside and nor did the love. As the weeks passed it only intensified and with the church door firmly closed I did what anyone would do three months into a state of complete unconditional love for all things and all people….I went to the pub…and I stayed there until it went away.

Or at least I thought it had gone away…

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