This is, as far as I’ve been able to determine, extremely, almost absurdly common. When I started to have conversations with other people about spirituality, it very much struck me that spiritual experiences aren’t even remotely rare.
And young men in particular, with their thirst for knowledge and drive for understanding, are exceedingly prone to think about spirituality as some sort of life-changing thing. Their awakening becomes this monumentally heavy thing that they just don’t know what to do with.
With that said, let me go over a few aspects of spirituality and the spiritual world that should be borne in mind as one explores this space.
The first one is that spirituality probably won’t make you a superman. Spiritual reality is (relatively) easy to see, but hard to manipulate. It takes years and years of practice before things start actually ‘working’. Until you obtain that ability, your growth proceeds through cycles that get ever-tighter.
You see an ability, learn how to manipulate it, gain the appearance of mastery, then it’s seemingly “taken away” from you and because you had to invest a lot of blood, sweat and tears learning it, the taking away plunges you into what’s called the Dark Night.
The Dark Night is where the real spiritual work is done, it’s unconscious and subtle. It sucks, and cannot be manipulated or even defined. It will lift of its own accord when the being is ready, and self and ego build up again until you’re ready for another spiritual journey.
Throughout this process, spirituality becomes smaller and you become bigger. Eventually they equalize and this is the true meaning of enlightenment. There’s nothing unnatural about spirituality, it’s merely the awareness that the space we exist in has more dimension than we can directly perceive. The spiritual journey you have on Earth is the same one you’ll have in the afterlife, you just managed to start early.
The other thing I want to mention is that spirituality, by itself, won’t make you self-aware. You have to work on that separately if you want it. I highly recommend regular therapeutic counseling and taking your emotional health seriously. Spirituality can threaten it just as much as it can bolster it.
If you’re not careful then you’ll lose the ability to relate to people. You’ll start speaking in this weird language that you picked up “from the other side” and forget how to keep your words and communications plain so that others can understand you. You’ll discover the ability to manipulate your mood and mistake that ability for real emotional health. You’ll be blissed-out and that makes it really hard to have authentic conversations.
In short, spirituality is a hall of mirrors that you have to learn how to navigate. Everything has a shadow side, especially yourself. If you don’t remember from time to time to go look at what’s behind those mirrors, you could wake up one day, not to another spiritual reality, but the fact that you’ve created a monster, and that monster will be you.
The correspondences are fun, the abilities are fun. But the person you help most with them is yourself, and it’s not through acquisition of power and ability. It’s through the discovery of better and quicker forms of emotional healing. The second you lose sight of that is the second the Dark Night starts beckoning.