Have you ever had an epiphany?

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What brought it about and how did it change your perception of the world?

Psychiatric medicine helped me slightly to where I "woke up" and radically altered my thinking.

Others are the problem, changed to the problem is me.

it is better to fail at moving forward, than to succeed at moving backward. after over one year of the current counselor, realized that sitting around talking about the past will get me nowhere. the current counselor did not push me to plan for the future or live in the present. but after so many "unfortunate thing that happened", and Doctor Spock psychobabble, i realized that counseling was ending in two months, and i am now even less prepared for the future, than i was when counseling started two years ago.


Gender Identity Disorder

I'd say throughout the course of my life there've been different kinds.

One straight-forward example is with music. My awareness of what was humanly possible with sound was something I was catching up to from the time I was in elementary school and there were plenty of times where I'd sideline a band or a musician at a given moment because I wasn't syncing with where they were coming from only to have a profound respect for where they were coming from because I was ready to feel it properly.

At 19 I had a paritularly powerful life experience. Up to that point I'd been diagnosed with PDD-NOS with Asperger's traits at age 11, had been made fun of since I was in maybe second or third grade, felt like I'd had a medical grade insult added to the stack, I was told that I was in such rare bad luck that only 1/500,000 people were anything like me, and I ended up lashing out at the world plenty in my early teens and in that processes treated a lot of people in ways I'm not proud of. Add to that I was on some pretty strong psychiatric medication, some cocktail of antipsychotics from age 11 thru 19, and into my mid teen years I was starting to get akasthesia (ie. something like full restless-body syndrome all day long) from the antipsychotics. I was trying to work on myself but it seemed like I was collapsing in other ways and was deeply concerned that I'd be in assisted living by the time I graduated highschool. It was fall of 1998 when I was out of state for a three day electronic music event when I was talking to some of my friend's friends who lived out there about some of what I was going through, one of them handed me an article a guy wrote about the problems and side-effects of antipsychotics, and from there I spent maybe six weeks pulling myself off the medications incrementally and going through withdrawl. I think part of what empowered me was some of the conspiratorial thinking in the article, ie. I was starting to wonder whether I really had autism at all, whether my parents had just been gullible and that I'd been cornered into some scam where the medications created their own problem and necessity for their own side effects. For about five or six months after that I started reassessing everything I'd previously believed about myself, did unfortunately find out over the next three or four years that I couldn't just 'tough my way' out of whatever aspects of autism I had (and believe me - I would have given any amount of effort) although I'd add that I was also still somewhat under the illusion that people hadn't liked me mainly because my conversation or disposition didn't make a lot of sense at the time, I'd have that illusion broken later.

The other big awakening came sort of as a process across 2012 and 2013. At that point I'd gone from being very much a reductive materialist atheist (something I was increasingly reaching between 2009 and 2011) and having my life sort of fold up as I'd been in unfortunately something of a scammy job and my music production had hit a wall after a really wonderful spring and summer in 2010. Someone had said something that clicked about consciousness received rather than originated in the brain, I started reading across the spectrum everything I could get my hands on, that lead me through the whole spread of NDE, then medium, then Seth books, then the Theosophic literature, and it was June of 2013 where I was reading Secret Teachings of All Ages where I read about the Bembine/Isiac Tablet and felt overcome by a female presence that I'd felt off and on through my life, sometimes in dreams and other times when I was going through one thing or another and felt as though there was a presence smiling over my shoulder. That presence came out in gale force and I can't say I've had anything hit me as hard when I read anything either before or since, except that I had a similarly although maybe 2/3 as strong reaction when I got to the section on Thoth, in that same two or three hour span maybe a chapter later. I had several of what might be well described as Mary/Isis encounters, some that June but one or two stretching into early winter of 2014. All of this stuff is still blurry and archetypal in that I tend to want to think about things scientifically and apprehend what they are or where they leave fingerprints on natural processes and for as much as I wanted to I didn't get that sense as well as I would have liked. The concept I have heard more often than not recently is Shekinah and that may very well be what I encountered. Whatever it was I had to refactor the way I considered what had previously been the dead-matter world around me and consider the likelihood that we are in a more panpsychist situation which may indeed amount to something like the old adage 'There is no part of me that is not of the gods'.

There have been a lot of other small revelations, not all of them pleasant, and some of them - like the night where the true nastiness and cannibalism of the human condition hit me - did shake me to the core. I'll leave it there because i've probably written enough already that no one's going to read this.

I had a severe mental breakdown a few years ago, and it was like my mind broke open.
From that time I could see that nothing was real.
I could see that everyone is acting a part, and that I myself had been acting out the story of me and believing that I was real.
It felt like I finally woke up from a dream.

Either this was some kind of an epiphany, of I'm fantastically mentally ill.

i had a big one about a month ago

I love reading all of this, thank you.

The epiphany that

Not everyone that is successful is a skinny smart handsome cisgender white man

"Life" goes on

Whatever you do, someone will reject you for

"Life" is not fair. Dwelling on the injustice makes your life go nowhere. Unless you publish a book about it

Precious lil "people" are only receptive to the things that they like

You do not always get the apologies that you deserve


But "sorry" is just a word


"Actions speak louder than words".


Unity and diversity sometimes are too idealistic. Plenty of precious lil "people" socially interact only with people that are similar to them. So maybe I ought to perform likewise. Except that as a minority, that is inconvenient


My personality is not fit for the military

Autism

Homophobia




Plenty of people live worse lives than me. Medically, longevity, financially, socially, emotionally. Some five year olds drop dead of cancer. Some children starve to death. Some defendants get framed for felonies and wrongfully sent to jail.

Gratitude

Perspective










Live in the moment


Not everyones life is as great as it appears

Are these realisations that came to you in a moment shortfatbalduglyman, or have they become apparent over time? Or both?

Trigger Warning - Death and Guilt
I have had a few but one stands out. It was pretty much forced on me and I felt extremely uncomfortable - but it was incredibly important. I was about 45 at the time and I realised that a belief I had held onto for 40 years was in fact wrong. I had believed that I was responsible for my sister's death. I never wanted to talk to anyone about this horrendous thing as the guilt I carried was overwhelming to begin with. Gradually I began to tel myself it was an accident, but the words seemed hollow. Still it made it easier to cope. Anyway one day this nosy old woman over lunch asked me a series of questions that unmasked this things. I have a compulsion to answer questions when asked, and she probed until the terrible confession came out. She then asked me to described the circumstances - which I did, and she - like a courtroom lawyer - took apart the event and showed me I had no part in my sister's death, accidental or not. This epiphany was the strangest thing. For days I went about like a robot feeling like a big hole was inside me. This huge part of me had been removed. I didn't feel happy - I was pretty annoyed about her intrusion, it was completely inappropriate.

I believe it broke down a barrier that enabled me to get further help and healing for a whole bunch of things.

So that's what my epiphany was like. A complete change in belief about something.

Sorry if this is triggering but I do see other people baring their souls here - yes I read and appreciate techstepgenr8tion's sharing and the others.

It's interesting to me that she was trying to unburden you, you feel unburdened and yet you would wish to avoid her.
(I feel the same way towards certain people who have given me good council but repelled me with their demeanour)

I've thought about it and no. I over think and over analyze everything, so it takes me weeks, months or years to come to any conclusion. Even if I had an epiphany, I'd probably analyze it for 6 months before deciding it was an epiphany.