A few days after my near-death experience, triggered by an acupuncture treatment, warm rays of the sun fill the room on this cold, crisp fall day. The light reflects off the umber walls and I suddenly become aware of the consciousness in the cells in my left arm. I relax into the cozy brown velvet couch and observe what is happening. I become aware of the consciousness of each of the cells in my body.

In the next breath, my entire reality is totally transformed as a luminous bolt of energy shoots up from my tail bone, electrifies my spine, and explodes out the top of my head.

I look up and I see inside my husband’s body. The air is incandescent; colors appear brighter, fuller, having more depth and substance.

Each cell is alive, each one is conscious. Gazing out the window, all the trees have the most magnificent auras. The top of my head has exploded into outer space and my consciousness has catapulted out beyond normal reality.

Later that same day, walking down the street, I can see inside everyone’s body. There is such a plethora of information hitting all my senses that it’s hard to function. I can see all the hidden secrets that people are trying so hard to bury. It’s all right there, clearly exposed.

From one moment to the next, that infinitesimal slice of time between two breaths, my entire existence is permanently catapulted into another realm. I am forever changed. One moment and an entirely different life is switched on at the very core of my being. I look around; everything is the same, yet radically different. Out on the street, the normal sights, sounds, and smells become overwhelming.

A few days later I drive up to The Uplands in Berkeley, California and arrive at a 1901 Julia Morgan brown shingled clubhouse where my husband, Michael, and I live. I walk past the ballroom which seats hundreds of people for dinner, down the stairs past the back kitchen door, and further down to the door to our apartment. The key fits the lock; I open the door but when I walk in I am a stranger. Some part of me knows this is ‘home’, yet everything is totally foreign as if I’d never seen it before.

In the front room is my loom with the blue and purple weaving I am making my mother for Christmas. The large lace sculpture hanging near the balcony door that once hung in the lobby of the Transamerica Pyramid in San Francisco is one of my creations, yet there is no connection. I recognize everything, yet there is no link, no attachment, no ‘this is my home’ feeling.

Michael walks in from the sunroom and I have no energetic connection with him. He might as well have been a stranger with a sign stamped on his forehead that says, “I am your husband”. He is my husband, but I don’t know what that means.

I am an intruder in my body and a visitor in my world. Nothing is the same as it was before. I am seeing everything for the first time. The simple task of trying to function in the world — go to work, walk down the street — is extremely difficult. Sometimes the auras of the leaves on the trees are so dazzling and the colors have such a psychedelic iridescence that I am stunned.

When I look at people I glimpse right through their bodies into what is lurking below the surface. It is quite disturbing to view the energy blocks, stored trauma, and dysfunctional patterns in total strangers. I feel like I am intruding into their private lives. I pray to see only into people who give me permission. After a few years, that is granted, much to my relief.

City life becomes a living hell

The changes in my nervous system were readily apparent everywhere. In record stores, I hear all the music that has previously been played: rock, classical, country, pop, and jazz all clang together in the most horrific sharp jangle of vibrations assaulting my body. The cacophony of sounds creates chaos as my bombarded nervous system goes into shock and I crumple up on the floor.

In the library at UC Berkeley, thought forms oozed out of books, overflowing across the floor. Drowning in words, I faint.

I could navigate the grocery store for about five minutes. Life-sucking flickering neon lights begin the activation in my nervous system. Tightly gripping the shopping cart, moving as fast as I could, I grab a few essentials. By the time I hit the checkout stand I’m reeling. Sometimes I abandon the half-full shopping cart and bolt for the door. If there’s no line, I usually make it out of the grocery store with a few essential items.

Other days, I’m slumped on the floor like a limp bag of beans. The breakfast aisle was the worst. The subliminal messages in the cereal boxes scream ‘Buy me’ overwhelming my nervous system and I collapse.

On one visit to the store, I blacked out at the cheese counter. When I slowly open my eyes, I am in a cold room propped against a blue plastic crate with holes in it. Tentatively I look up and hanging from metal beams lining the ceiling are sharp shiny silver stainless steel hooks holding large, blood red carcasses. I was in the cold storage of the meat department. The last thing I remembered I was at the cheese counter and my body slid down the glass onto the floor like a clump of whipped butter swirling off a stack of hot pancakes.

One day I came home very disoriented and put the ice cream in the cupboard with the plates and the peanut butter in the freezer. Michael came home and opened the cupboard to ice cream dripping down the shelf. I have no idea everything that my dear husband went through during this time.

Massive sensory overload

The awakening is so intense, I’m walking in multiple dimensions at every moment.

I sense the atomic structures, DNA, molecular, cellular, physical, mental, astral, etheric, angelic, archangelic, and other planetary dimensions and realities all at the same time. I experience massive sensory overload, as many of these territories are totally unknown to me.

All of my senses are rarified and intensified. A conglomeration of sensual input shifts throughout the day. At one moment, my vision changes, and the trees shimmer iridescent colors and are surrounded by golden halos; the colors of the grass become intensified like the psychedelic paintings of the late 1960s and early 1970s.

At other moments, I am able to hear sounds blocks away. The voices of women who have been sexually abused have an undercurrent of screaming terror. It’s shocking to me that other people can’t hear their shrieking bone-chilling horror.

There are times when all the words on a line of a book run together and become one word. In other moments, my sense of touch is so profound that as my fingertips move across the dark, smooth, warm pebbles on a beach, I experience full body orgasm.

Ripped veils between dimensions

During the explosion out the top of my head, a rearrangement took place. It was impossible for me to return to the state I was in previously. Radically, permanently changed. No going back. Catapulted into other realms, with one foot still in 3-D reality.

The eruption ruptured through the dimensions, bursting the boundaries, causing multiple realities to collapse and continuously cascade into my body, brain, and nervous system. Multiple layers of stratum all jumbled together in one big unknown mess.

With the rupture of the divisions between layers of reality, there is free access to multiple dimensions at all times. This was extremely confusing. Each layer or dimension has a distinct twist on how things work.

It is like being thrown in twelve foreign countries at the same time, each with different languages, currencies, customs, mores, laws, and not knowing which is which. Sorting my way through, with no map or guide takes years to unravel the dimensions, like fitting together a cosmic multidimensional jigsaw puzzle.

Most of my attention and energy goes to figuring out how to traverse these foreign dimensions that I inhabit. I navigate multiple dimensions simultaneously with each moment, each earthly task. A small portion of me is available for getting food, eating, earning a living, cooking, cleaning the house.

Inner knowing

Deep in my bones, I know what I am experiencing is known in other cultures. I remember the temple carvings in India and somehow they bring me peace. Whether my certainty emanates from ancient temple carvings or from some remote memories, I know I am not crazy. I knew if I was a man living in a different culture, whatever I was experiencing would be revered and honored.

Some shift in consciousness has taken place in me that is not recognized in American culture in 1974. I am so thankful that I have lived around the world and know that different cultures see reality in different ways. Memories from India waft through my consciousness leaving a small trail of sanity.

The one thing I know for sure was to keep quiet. I know, living in America, if I spoke up I’d be locked up.

Spontaneous Kundalini Awakening

About four years after this experience a friend kept saying every time she read the book titled Kundalini by Gopi Krishna, she thought of me. That was enough for me to track down the book and buy it. Laid out in print, right before my eyes, I read about everything I was experiencing. Such a relief to have a name for what happened.

Years later I met a woman who also had a similar experience, only not as intense as mine. She told her children what she was experiencing. They got scared and had her locked up in a mental institution. She was tied up in a straight-jacket, given electroshock, drugged up, and put on prescription narcotics. When I met the dear woman, she was barely functioning. My heart went out to her. Her children were taking care of her and making sure they kept her under control. She didn’t have the support she needed, or the inner knowing, to keep quiet, so her life became a living hell.

I’ve chosen to use my inner seeing and multidimensional awareness to help others transform and to discover how to alchemically transmute my own body. Over the years I’ve learned how to refine my nervous system and transform on different dimensions.

I’ve healed my PTSD, panic attacks, hypoglycemia, and trigeminal neuralgia. The massive pain I’ve lived with from weapons-grade plutonium used to create nuclear warfare is mostly transmuted. The years of waking in the night screaming in terror have disappeared. For decades the radiation felt like a cattle prod continually zapping the back of my neck. It’s now just a memory, not a moment-to-moment occurrence.

An excerpt from my memoir, Unseen Connections: A Memoir from Pain and Violence to Joy.