The Journey From Unconscious Scapegoat to Awakened Seer | Dealing with the Aftermath of my Near Death Experience | Part Five

In the last instalment, I wrote about how my body shut down and I crossed a line I did not know could be crossed.

What began as an unexpected illness and existential crisis became a near death experience.

I left my body and I entered a realm that felt more real than this one.

There, I encountered a love so vast it stripped away every lie I had previously believed about myself.

I saw that my life, all of it, the trauma, the failures, the endless struggle, had not been random. And then I was given a choice.

Stay.

Or come back.

I came back.

What I did not understand was this; returning would be harder than dying.

Because I did not return to the same world and I was no longer the same woman.

Instead, I was seeing realms that had always existed but had remained hidden from my sight.

Something powerful had awakened within.

“Life is a sleep, and death is an awakening.”― Herman Melville

Part Five continues my story with the next otherworldly encounter that awaited me.

What followed was a profound aftermath, one that left me searching for meaning in experiences I could scarcely wrap my mind around.

The Shadow Encounter

However, the space the spirit people had left was not empty.

It had not returned to normal.

Something was still there.

The room began to change again.

Where previously I had witnessed what felt unmistakably divine, I was now about to encounter something entirely different.

As I lay there during another shift of perception, I felt a deep sense of dread rise inside me. Slow at first. Then sudden and unmistakable. Something in the atmosphere had changed.

The air no longer felt vibrant, expansive, or filled with love.

Instead, it felt heavy.

Dense.

Menacing.

Pressing down on me.

It carried a sense of oppression and contraction, as though the space itself was closing in on me.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw them.

Giant insect like forms with distorted, unnatural faces, crawling along the walls and ceiling. They were as large as human bodies, moving slowly and deliberately, feeding on something invisible. I did not know what they were, but I knew they were there.

They appeared to be consuming something that did not belong to this world, yet was somehow being generated within it.

My body went into full panic.

Not a passing fear, but a full nervous system response.

I could not halt what was unfolding before me. Just as with my earlier experience, it made no difference whether my eyes were open or closed.

Even with my eyes shut, I could still see them. It did not stop. I just could not switch it off.

What I did not understand then was that something fundamental had shifted inside.

What some call second sight had opened in me. With it came access to a spectrum of perception beyond normal ordinary vision.

The realm I was now perceiving bore no trace of the divine presence I had encountered before. Where previously the spirit people had carried a resonance that felt deeply loving, compassionate, and alive, these beings radiated something entirely different.

There was no exchange.

No recognition.

Only extraction.

The energy they emitted spoke of a deep emptiness.

A vast, hollow hunger.

Like something that could never be filled.

They felt dead and flat, as though life itself had been stripped away from them.

They did not notice me.

I let out a slow breath that I had not realised I was holding.

They moved around the room with detached purpose, absorbed in whatever they were doing. I watched them in silence, frozen, unable to look away.

The doctor standing beside my bed looked down at me, clearly noticing my distress, and asked if I was ok.

I did not know how to answer him.

I wanted to ask if he could see them too.

Even as the thought formed, I knew what it would mean if I said it out loud. Things like this did not exist. Not in his world. Not in any world I had ever been taught about and not in my world until now.

Still, I tried.

Tentatively, needing him to confirm I was not alone in what I was seeing, I asked if he could see it too. As the question left my lips, one of the creatures stood directly behind him, towering over his body, its form passing through him as though he were not there.

He looked at me the way adults look at children when they have already decided they are wrong.

“No, there is nothing there,” he said dismissively.

That was the moment something broke inside of me.

“The psychotic drowns in the same waters in which the mystic swims with delight.”- Carl Jung

Because in that moment, I instantly believed his version of reality over my own.

I trusted his authority.

His training.

His certainty.

If he could not see what I was seeing, then the only logical conclusion was that something had gone terribly wrong inside my mind. I was no longer witnessing reality.

I must just be losing it.

So I fell into the trap I had been conditioned for all my life. I doubted myself, rejected my own perception, and turned against myself.

I told myself my nervous system was malfunctioning.

That the images were hallucinations.

That I was psychotic.

In that moment, I totally gaslit myself into safety and abandoned myself.

I surrendered both my power and my sense of reality to his certainty, just as I had done as a child when I sensed things adults dismissed or denied.

Why did I do this you may ask?

The answer is because I had no reference point for what I was experiencing. No framework. No alternative explanation. Only the assumption that my brain had malfunctioned due to lack of oxygen during the near death experience.

A scientific explanation.

Filed.

Labelled.

Tied up and packaged neatly in an easy to explain big beautiful bow.

Only years later, through spiritual study, reflection, and direct connection to the divine, did I begin to understand that this experience did not belong to the world I had been told was the only reality.

However, in that moment, I knew none of that. All I knew was sheer, electrifying terror.

The luminous, love filled realm that had held me before had dissolved completely, replaced by something much darker, heavier, and far more sinister than my mind could process in that moment.

Here, the beings fed on suffering. On the residue of human pain and the hospital was saturated with it. They were everywhere, feeding without restraint.

To say I was petrified is an understatement. My body could not process what my mind was desperately trying to reject.

So I did the only thing I could think to do. I pulled the sheet over my head and lay there in the dark, praying silently that whatever I had seen would leave me alone.

I did not want to understand it.

I did not want to make meaning from it.

I just wanted it to go away and not exist at all.

After what felt like an eternity, as I lay there trembling beneath the sheet, exhaustion took over and I finally fell into a deep unsettled sleep.

When I woke up, the room looked normal again.

The walls were just walls.

The ceiling was just a ceiling.

The doctor was gone.

There was nothing there that did not belong to this world.

The relief I felt was overwhelming.

I told myself everything was now back to normal and whatever had happened was now behind me.

Reentering the Material World

Though I told myself they were no longer there, my eyes kept darting to every corner of the room, searching for proof before I could finally relax.

Thankfully there was no sign of what I had previously seen.

Slowly, my body began to soften.

I felt the weight of myself sinking into the mattress.

Solid.

Anchored.

Contained.

And yet something lingered at the edges of my awareness outside of this feeling of normality. A steady and persistent knowing that I had not imagined it at all.

That it was not a hallucination.

That I had not become crazy.

That what I had witnessed was indeed real. I could still feel it in my body if I became still enough to feel past the noise of my mind.

And I knew, even then, that something in me had been initiated by the experience.

That the resonance of that realm had begun a shift within me.

I was different.

I could feel it deep in my bones.

Deep in my soul.

I could feel that I had been altered, even if I could not put my finger on what it was. It was as though the experience had imprinted itself into me.

Carried into my nervous system. Settled somewhere deeper than just the physical body.

And yet my mind resisted it.

Fought it.

Tried to file it away into something explainable.

Something safe.

Something that fit inside the rules of the world I had been taught to believe.

But how could something like this be true?

“What would happen if I let my mind go there”?

A thousand questions rose up inside me, pressing so hard against my thoughts that my head began to ache from trying to force answers to things that, at that time, had no answers.

To accept that the divine realm was real, would also mean allowing for the existence of the other darker realm, and that was something I did not want to acknowledge in that moment.

If I did, it would fundamentally challenge everything I believed about how reality worked, and my place within it.

To accept both as true would force me to confront my own childhood shadows.

This was something I really did not want to do as I lay there exhausted in that bed.

As I struggled with the dilemma, my mind drifted back to memories of being a child, terrified of sleep and bedtime. I always felt there was something watching me from the corners of the room.

Something I could not name or see, but could sense clearly.

I told myself then that it was just imagination.

Surely there must be something wrong with me.

No one else seemed to experience it and they certainly did not talk about things like this.

So I lay awake night after night in terror, longing to turn the light on, knowing I would be punished if I did.

I would wake from vivid nightmares, screaming in terror, already knowing it was pointless reaching out to my parents for comfort.

So I would hide under the sheets for hours, jumping at every noise, staring into the darkness, alone.

Longing desperately to be just like everyone else.

Praying earnestly for daylight to come.

And yet, here it was again.

That same fear of the darkness.

Right before my eyes.

It brought everything I had buried back up to the surface, sharply, unmistakably, and without mercy. And lying there in that hospital bed, I realised the feeling was the same.

The same hyper alertness in my body.

The same sense of pure terror.

The same certainty that something existed just beyond what I could see.

Only now, I could no longer tell myself it was not real.

I was not a child anymore and this time, I knew I had already seen too much to continue to blame my imagination.

Lying there, I began to understand something I would only fully name years later. And if, like me, you felt something similar as a child, parts of this may feel uncomfortable to read.

It may stir fear and bring your own shadow into view, just as it did for me.

I have included it here not to shock you, and not to unsettle you, but because it is part of the reality of awakening.

Not the polished version.

The real one.

I am sharing the experience as it happened, without editing out the parts that don’t fit a “love-and-light, fluffy-unicorn” spiritual narrative.

Therefore I cannot soften it.

I will not deny it.

Why?

Because I know what it is to have your reality dismissed.

I will not do that here and I will not do it to you.

I will not gaslight you.

With me, you get the whole of it.

Nothing edited out.

Warts and all.

Because when lived reality is repeatedly dismissed, people fracture from themselves.

They begin to doubt what they know is true. They become isolated inside their own perception while everyone else looks away and pretends nothing is happening.

“The unconscious wants truth. It ceases to speak to those who want something else more than truth.”― Marion Woodman

They are labelled unstable.

Difficult.

Wrong.

They often become the silenced scapegoat, the “other,” for a version of the collective reality that cannot tolerate what sits outside of its comfort zone.

In my experience, that does not lead to awakening.

It leads to a deeper sleep, and to becoming even more unconscious within yourself.

And to allow yourself to see something, name it and call it out for what it is, is to step into your power.

Therefore I am committed to naming what is true, including the parts that are uncomfortable, because truth is where consciousness expands, and where the gifts hidden inside it begin to emerge.

And that is one of the core functions of the scapegoat archetype in this life.

To tell the truth others are afraid to speak and name.

This is vitally important to comprehend, especially for scapegoats who are intuitive and who carry the potential to become Seers.

Awakening is therefore not ascent.

It is opening the inner sight fully, without cherry picking what you want to see or what feels safe and comfortable to believe.

It is perceiving reality exactly as it is, without fear or manipulating it to fit a comforting narrative.

It is allowing the truth of all spectrums within the cosmological universe, while dismantling the illusions and programming in the mind that cloud this true sight.

And this is where I return to my story, as I reveal how I tried to merge fully back into the land of the living and to do just that.

The Dismantling of The False Self

I would love to say that when I returned into this world after being in the afterlife, I emerged as some kind of ascended being.

All knowing.

All powerful.

Having reached enlightenment.

But that is not what unfolded next.

What I now understand to be true is that I was experiencing a spiritual awakening, triggered when I was shown the true potential of my soul.

Not who I thought I was.

Not who I had been told I was.

But the true divine self that is eternal.

“I must lose myself in order to find myself.”― Hermann Hesse

However, when I returned to my body, my ego returned with me.

As a result, I did not float through the world having reached enlightenment.

That state is effortless when the ego has fallen away, as it had for me previously.

Here, it was back, carrying with it the need for safety and the full range of feelings and emotions bound up with survival.

Why did it reinstall itself after I had reached a state of pure consciousness?

I believe it returned because it is an essential component for navigating the physical world. In my opinion, and as I came to understand later, in contrast to many new age philosophies, it is not an enemy to be slaughtered, but an essential and necessary part of the experience here on Earth.

It is what keeps human life on the material plane intact.

Without it, there is no will.

No boundary.

No ground to stand on.

The issue therefore is not its existence, but its dominance.

Awakening is not its annihilation, but its integration. The ego must be brought into alignment and merged with our highest awareness.

It must be anchored in service to something greater than just the self.

It cannot be allowed to rule from the shadows, hidden from the conscious mind while covertly trying to control everything around it.

Therefore, we must learn to release the programming and amnesia that cause us to forget our true divine nature.

Otherwise, we will continue sleepwalking through life on autopilot, blind to what truly matters.

It is about learning to live beyond fear, beyond the constant activation of fight or flight survival instincts.

And here, the awakening was forcing me to do exactly that.

Everything that was not aligned had to be faced and released.

I was being asked to meet everything I had previously avoided.

No more escape.

No more dissociation.

No more numbing.

No more distraction.

Just feeling what I had spent a lifetime trying not to feel.

In essence, fully embodying my spirit into physical form.

To bring the potential I had glimpsed in the other world fully into my body and into the world of matter.

To become conscious of the unconscious and to birth the Seer within me.

And as I allowed that transformation to begin, it felt as though all hell broke loose.

The Dawn of Seeing

When I left the hospital and stepped back into what was supposed to be normal life, I knew almost immediately that something fundamental had changed within me.

Yes, I could move, see, and speak again.

My body had been irrevocably changed, carrying a lifelong disability.

The person I had once been within it was gone as well.

Something core had fallen away, and I found myself moving through the world with a growing awareness that I did not recognise who I was anymore.

Everything I had once relied on to understand reality and my place in the world had been dismantled. Not just spiritually, but physically, emotionally, and mentally.

The basic structures that had once allowed me to navigate life fell away and I no longer knew what was real anymore. I was back in the world, but nothing in me knew how to live in it anymore.

The confusion was constant.

The part of my psyche that had once been decisive, rational, and action oriented had shut down completely. The part of me that could plan, problem solve, and push through life on willpower alone was simply gone.

In its place, I found I was operating through something entirely different.

I felt open.

Exposed.

Emotionally unprotected.

My system became hypersensitive to everything:

Sound.

Light.

Smells.

People.

Toxins.

Chemicals.

Frequencies.

Environments.

I could barely make decisions at all.

The simplest choices felt overwhelming, as though my nervous system could no longer hold or process them. All sensory sensation felt excruciating.

For the woman who had always relied on sheer force of will to push through, being in that place was unbearably painful.

My ego screamed for safety and normality.

I felt vulnerable.

Raw.

Helpless.

Having to ask for help with even the most mundane things was a difficult pill to swallow, as I had always been fiercely independent and hated relying on others.

Pride certainly comes before a fall.

However, to survive this, I was not going to get by on my own.

Not this time and I would have to swallow that big fat pride.

Soon after, I had to ask my estranged mother for help buying new sheets.

My old ones were too painful to sleep in, and even simple tasks had become impossible for me.

I remember standing in front of the shelves at the store, trying to decide between the options, and becoming so overwhelmed that I just cried like a baby for everyone to see.

I could not decide between the rows of items.

It was just too much to handle.

I just stood there in the shop, tears streaming down my face, feeling completely helpless. I must have looked like a complete mess, standing there like a little girl, while my mother did not know how to help me.

She brushed it under the carpet, as she always did with anything she could not deal with, and we left in silence.

No sheets were purchased.

We both pretended everything was normal, as though nothing out of the ordinary had happened as we climbed into the car.

But things were not normal and I definitely was not normal.

This was the first of many panic attacks that would follow through a large portion of this period of my life.

Looking back now, I recognise it as severe PTSD, a nervous system locked in survival mode, unable to distinguish between past threat and present reality.

Through the lens of Alchemy and Hermetic principles, what was happening was clear.

I had shifted from a purely masculine mode of consciousness into the feminine aspect of my being.

As a child, I had navigated the world largely through this feminine current. I was creative, imaginative, artistic and intuitive. But very early on, I absorbed the message that there was little value in this way of being.

What was rewarded was ambition.

Rationality.

Scientific thinking.

Power.

To be soft, kind, loving, or gentle was to be vulnerable.

To be weak.

To live that way was to invite being trodden on.

To be taken advantage of.

I became deeply ashamed of this part of myself.

So I learned to hide those qualities, forcing them down deep inside me in order to succeed and be approved of in the eyes of others.

I learned how to function differently.

Over time, that part of me receded.

Eventually, I forgot she had ever been there.

All that was left was a numbness that kept me from experiencing joy or any sense of connection.

It was not living.

It was just existence.

Until now.

What I was experiencing marked the start of the alchemical marriage, the merging of the masculine and feminine within the psyche. Through this union, the soul moves toward wholeness and the journey of individuation.

This dismantling and integration was the doorway for this to occur.

What followed was learning how to live on the other side of this transformation, and how to step out of my own way so the process could do its work.

And in doing so, the moment I stepped across that threshold, the buried feminine began to surface.

“The wild woman carries the cure for everything. But she is not tame, and she will not come when called politely.”-Clarissa Pinkola

And when that part of me returned, she did not do so quietly.

She came back with a great bloody wallop, and chaos followed.

Coming Next in Part Six: The Seer Awakens

In the next instalment of The Journey from Unconscious Scapegoat to Awakened Seer, I continue unfolding what came next as the divine feminine rose fully into awareness.

The trials she brought.

The gifts she revealed.

And the way perception continued to rupture the boundaries of what I thought was real.

This is where extrasensory seeing and sensing moved beyond the inner world and into everyday life. Where the ego, no longer in control, struggled to cope as the solidity of material boundaries began to dissolve.

And where learning to walk between two worlds now became unavoidable.

Part Six is where the search for answers begins in earnest and where the Seer is no longer dormant.

Join me in the next chapter of my journey.

See you there