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(New to this series? I’m so glad you’re here! Radiant Beast: The Open Workbook series announcement lays the foundation for everything that follows.)
Have you ever been somewhere for the first time that felt mysteriously familiar? I felt that way recently on a weekend trip to Pfeiffer Beach in Big Sur, California.
It was a perfect, cool, breezy, sunny day. I took off my shoes and rolled up my leggings to wade through the water pools on the shore. The sand, enhanced by streaks of iridescent purple from the manganese garnet deposits that wash down from the surrounding cliffs, a unique feature of Pfeiffer Beach, felt particularly magical between my toes.
Looking up at a breathtaking sea arch, I felt a pronounced sense of déjà vu. I later learned this famous formation is called Keyhole Arch. It is renowned because for a few weeks each year, the setting sun aligns perfectly with the tunnel carved through its center, and shoots out a bright beam of light.
Keyhole Arch, I quickly realized, bore an incredible resemblance to a portal I had visualized countless times in Quantum Jump Meditations.
I am a big fan of visualization meditations. In the past, I have written about Future Self Meditations and the transformative power of envisioning life as your ideal future self. Quantum Jump Meditations offer similar benefits, but instead of channeling your future self to enhance your present, you commune with a “twin self”: a wholly distinct version of yourself in a parallel reality.
Whether or not you take the idea of multiverses seriously, I love what this type of meditation does as a thought experiment: it challenges your creative visualization muscles in fun and fantastical ways.
There are many ways to enter a Quantum Jump Meditation, but techniques often begin with a choice presented to you: a long hallway lined with doors, which one calls to you; a sunny garden scattered with glimmering pools, which one draws you in; a towering shelf of books, which one do you open?
These choices are gateways to parallel realities, possible universes inhabited by endless variations of yourself. When you make your choice and pass through, you will embody a twin self, intimate yet foreign, novel, and exhilarating. A version of you shaped by a different world, propelled by different choices. Throughout the meditation, you experience their life with all your senses.
When you open your eyes and return to this reality, you will have gained a new perspective on your limitless raw potential. So often, it feels like who you become is entirely shaped by your culture, your environment, and circumstances beyond your control. And while this is true to a certain extent, there is also a fascinating fluidity of self: you have so much power to reinvent your identity, to choose, sometimes suddenly, to steer your life differently especially when you can nurture new beliefs about who you are capable of becoming.
A Parallel Universe: Passing Through The Portal
Standing beneath that arch, I felt the pull of the portal more strongly than ever before.
I was inspired, and the next time I did a Quantum Jump Meditation, I had a powerful experience. I would like to take you with me.
I close my eyes and envision myself back at Keyhole Arch. I follow the bright beam of light shooting through the tunnel. As I exit, the sky and ocean merge into a single, sparkling cerulean sheet that wraps luxuriously around me. I can suddenly see myself refracted to infinity, reflections of reflections of reflections, as if I have been enveloped by one of those folding department store mirrors. I have to choose which reflection to jump into, which twin self to inhabit from endless options.
I jump in. Boom.
I find myself pulling up the hood of a comfy burgundy sweatshirt as I hop out of a car. It is a crisp spring evening. My dad is with me, accompanying me down a rocky dirt path, lined with torches and deciduous trees.
The air feels alive. The trees bow inwards towards me as I move, their needles showering me with oxygen soaked in starlight. I breathe indulgently.
“Where are you taking me?” I ask my dad.
“I am taking you somewhere you will love more than anywhere you have ever been,” he says, sincerely.
I am overcome by the richness of fragrances; the dewy foliage, the mossy dirt, the smoke from a bonfire almost a mile away. My sense of smell is heightened. Have I become part beast?
As I approach, I can see a wooden octagonal building in the distance with large windows. I feel a mysterious pull towards this place I have never been.
I am drawn to the bonfire by the sound of discordant music. People are encircling the fire; some are sitting, staring at the fire transfixed, others are dancing, twirling about, singing or playing instruments: maracas, tambourines, bongos, and a couple have guitars. The closer I get, the more harmonious the music becomes. Fully immersed, I can now hear the otherworldly melody hidden beneath the raucous, a disguise that repels outsiders.
My dad is speaking with a woman in the distance. My trance is broken when they wave me over. My dad gives me a big hug, “I am leaving and will be back in a few weeks. I know you will be safe here.”
As he turns and walks away, the woman takes my hands into hers warmly, “You will be able to join them back at the bonfire again shortly.” She has golden-brown eyes, and her dangling turquoise earrings consist of strands of delicate spirals that cast shadows against her dark olive skin.
Her voice is deep, gentle yet commanding. “Welcome to the Center for Expanded Awareness,” she says as she opens the door of the octagonal building and holds it open for me.
The interior is clean and minimalist. There are plants everywhere. Emerald and magenta pillows in various shapes and sizes with silky tassels line the large oval-shaped cream sofa, where she invites me to sit beside her.
“I am Alanya, and I will be your guide while you are here. Do you know why you are here?”
I twist the tassels in my fingers. The silken material feels like liquid. I wonder, can I reshape this pillow into something else by hand? Anything I want it to be?
“I think I might be dying,” I reply.
“Many people feel that way when they arrive,” she says with a hint of a smile, “but I assure you, that is not the case. Everyone here, including you, is in a special sort of elevated energetic state. You might think of it as being partially awake and partially asleep at the same time.”
“I have never been THIS awake,” I say.
“Oh yes, of course. But it is a different type of wakefulness, a special place between dreams and reality. Not everyone gets the opportunity to enter this place. You are lucky. You will learn many things here in time.”
“Before you go back to the bonfire, I want us to see something.”
She leads me down a spiral staircase to a vast basement with polished concrete floors. She opens a glass sliding door to what looks sort of like a large infrared sauna and invites me to sit down cross-legged in the center of one of four circles on the floor.
She presses a button. The lights turn off, and all of a sudden, projected in the air in front of me, I see numerous tight waves of light that move rapidly with small peaks encircling me. The light is an almost blinding shade of bright white with streaks of violet. “Beautiful,” she says.
We both watch for a while until she pushes the button again and the lights turn back on. She smiles, grabbing my hand to help me up, “Now, you can go enjoy exploring the campus for a while.”
I am here at the Center for Expanded Awareness for I don’t know how long, in a state beyond time. My nights and days all blur together. I don’t sleep or eat. I never even think of either. I am given lots of water to drink, mixed with lemon and electrolytes.
With Alanya’s encouragement, I journal, write poetry, and make art. I roam the wooded campus. I enjoy swimming in the lake and kayaking. I join in the otherworldly music-making around the bonfire, sometimes playing the tambourine, sometimes I just dance.
We do daily yoga together outside. My body feels fluid and moves effortlessly into asanas. I feel like I am mostly made of energy and barely contained by my skin. When I move from downward dog into cobra, it feels like my energy is pouring my malleable matter into the position, no need to consciously contort.
After playing music by the bonfire, in the silence of the night, I hear clattering noises in the distance, even though no one is there. I follow the sound until I am standing by the shore of the lake. The repellent cacophony grows louder as I approach, and it seems to come from beneath the water. I know the trick: the greater the perceived discordance from a distance, the more divine the hidden music. I am drawn to the noise with immense curiosity.
I dive into the water until I am in it; the melody, more sonorous than anything I have ever heard before. I inhabit the music, living in its textures and colors. I am drenched in a profound, all-encompassing love. The sun begins to rise, and the colors of the music slowly fade from the water into the sunrise, leaving me in the deepest, peaceful silence.
I slowly emerge from the water and feel revitalized. I have experienced something sacred and ineffable that I dare not defile with words. All I know is that I am not the same person I was when I entered the lake.
Back to this reality
Opening my eyes after this Quantum Jump Meditation, I feel as if I have been baptized by the lake, and I am cradled in the same sense of peace as my twin self.
In the parallel reality, the word psychosis doesn’t exist. In this one, it defined me: my experience of involuntary hospitalizations and a diagnosis of bipolar 1 disorder couldn’t be more starkly contrasted with what my twin self experienced at The Center For Expanded Awareness.
In the hospital, I remember many murals — paintings of windows depicting scenic environments: lush forests with enchanting blue skies, tantalizing ocean views.
Staring into them in my altered state, I wondered if there was a way to pierce the veil and enter the painted scene: to jump into a realer reality and commune with nature, something that, in my elevated energetic state with heightened senses, I longed for more than anything.
Instead, I was captive in an environment that smelled putrid, reeking of disinfectant and sedation. Rather than engaging in group yoga, I remember hours spent alone, stretching and doing handstands against the wall in my room. Exhilarated by the feelings in my body, but also isolated, caged, and afraid. I was trapped, unable to go outside for a month, a horrifying way to feel when you have lost your sense of time and space, and every minute seems like eternity.
While my past was riddled with inadequate science and treatments that I believe are grounded in a fundamental misunderstanding of altered states of consciousness, my discovery of metabolic psychiatry could absolutely be seen as a type of quantum jump out of a life of suffering. It opened up new possibilities I couldn’t have imagined before, virtually reshaping me into a twin self, remade at the cellular level.
Now, after five years of stability using solely metabolic tools* to regulate my energy, I continue to reimagine my life without the confines I once knew. My past experiences, shaped by a very specific cultural context, no longer define how I interpret my physiology, my unique metabolic wiring. Radiant Beast is where I get to have fun rewriting my story: what was, what is, and what will be.
Sometimes, in the early morning between sleep and waking, I hear the music beneath the water. I think the portal is still open and that I have more to learn at the Center for Expanded Awareness.
(*Tapering medications can be dangerous and should be done gradually with provider support. Patients should also research safe practices and stay informed. Visit Metabolic Mind’s Keto and Psych Meds for more resources.)
