Part 1: The Trojan Horse of Meditation
[Level 1: Transitional] No stack trace, just an infinite loop I'm still running
I can’t give you a stack trace. The program never crashed. It never terminated.
It’s STILL running, iterating over and over again to the point that I’m finding breadcrumbs left for me by myself without knowing 3.5 years ago.
I was going to call this The Trojan Horse of the Jungian Self.
Then I dug deeper into my very first field notes and discovered: that’s not accurate.
That was the framework for my rational mind to feel brave enough to go deeper. I was following Jung’s footsteps, I had reasoned, by engaging with the Self.
The real “Trojan Horse”? Meditation.
That’s it. Not a concept—an innocent practice . I have the literal visual evidence left by me less than 3 months into it.
And Dr. K, if you ever read this:
Thanks for everything, and also WHAT THE HELL? I didn’t see “turning into a mystic” in the list of side effects from this. 🫠
Anyway, back to the story.
The call stack
Here’s the high-level overview of what went down when, summarized from When Meditation Stops Being Stress Relief.
March / April 2022: HealthyGamer binge to “cope” with feeling lost and aimless at work, daily meditation on the HG Discord starting April 10.
Late April 2022: Self-inquiry binge (YouTube, Ramana Maharshi’s Who am I?)
May 10, 2022: First contact with the mysterious “voice from the depths” exactly one month in
June 17, 2022: The Impersonal Life found me. I recognized the “voice” to the point I physically got goosebumps. I binged it that weekend.
July 1, 2022: A “covenant” to follow bhakti yoga was made with the “voice from the depths”
July 2022: Read Jung’s Red Book, felt inspired, and started “Psychonautics” (thinking I could contain it)
Dec 25, 2022: The strange, vivid dream about burnout and God
August 2023: Containment breach
July 30, 2024: Vows were made
Present: Realizing I was told this would happen all along
What from 2022 got skipped from the earlier post? The very thing that inspired this series:
How the hell did I make a “sacred” promise to a “voice from the depths” that I somehow forgot about for 3.5 years and then realized only now that it was upheld anyway?
The answer: Jungian psychology... as a framework that took on a life of its own—just like it did for Jung.
Like Jung, I tried to hide it.
Like Jung, containment was breached. Now almost anyone can read his once secret madness.
Like Jung, I also realized the Self isn’t just an archetype. It’s God within the psyche—and I made an agreement with that Self that I was held accountable to whether I knew it or not.
But how did that “Self,” that “still, small voice,” that whatever it was arise? And how did I even know it was something other than my usual thoughts?
That wasn’t me… was it?
A month into meditation, I was hooked on Ramana Maharshi’s “self-inquiry” (a jnana yoga practice also known as atma vicharya)—the turning of awareness in on itself with the devastatingly simple question that people strive their entire lives trying to answer: “Who am I?”
For me, that answer came once all the ones my mind tried to make fell away (and caught me completely off-guard with a phrase I hadn’t heard since childhood):
“That’s for me to know and you to find out!”
An itch I couldn’t scratch
Once I “heard” the bizarre voice, I got more curious.
I tried to learn and read more, determined to get to the bottom of what this really was. It was becoming increasingly clear I was entering unfamiliar territory of my own psyche... so I looked into one of the most recent and well-known psychonauts: Ram Dass.
While not looking to take any psychedelics to launch myself prematurely into space, I was interested in reading his books such as Be Here Now and The Psychedelic Experience.
After reading both in the first half of June 2022, I started asking too many questions, the most notable being:
“Why do I keep asking questions I know the answer to deep down?”
Why would I say such a thing? And why would I claim such a thing and then act like I didn’t know on the surface?
Something wasn’t sitting right inside of me—and meditation was only making more of these questions take on more importance. They persisted day after day like a nagging itch I couldn’t scratch.
Days later, I was poking around for yet another book to read and I stumbled on this Reddit thread: Books to read after discovering Ram Dass. I looked at the top comment, saw “The Impersonal Life - free PDF here”, and said “fuck it, let’s go”.
As I started to read the first page, goosebumps prickled on my skin—in recognition.
It was the same voice that had begun arising in meditation between the few and far-between gaps like a faint radio station trying to come through.
Except this was an entire broadcast in a 43 page PDF.
I don’t think I slept that night. I read the entire thing.
I mulled over it for the days that followed. I got (well, made as a small coding side project with TTS, but also bought) the audiobook.
At this point, I knew there was something MUCH deeper. I was only at the very tip of the iceberg, and I was getting ready to plunge into the frigid depths.
The promise I made without understanding
My notes were still fairly sparse, partially because it felt like insanity to record an “internal dialogue”, as I was labeling it in my journals. Who does that? Diaries and journals are one thing, but a dialogue? That would imply TWO.
Unless… there was the logical, skeptical “me” and this deeper “I Am” awareness within that could be accessed like this book and meditation were both leading me to believe.
There was one particular day that felt meaningful enough to record anyway in more detail: the day that I made a promise to follow a particular branch of yoga called bhakti yoga:
“Also learned from my Self that if I do bhakti yoga I will automatically do the other 3 mentioned in the HealthyGamer meditation module (jnana, raja, karma). The other methods are somewhat to largely egocentric in some regard. The way to do them properly would be to do them via the bhakti path. Formed a ‘divine covenant’ or more accurately worded a “promise to my Self” to pursue this path.” — Journal Entry, July 1, 2022
What’s interesting to see is that I tried to sanitize it immediately as if I didn’t believe what I was even writing. I didn't even really understand what I was signing up for. As I would discover 3 years later, bhakti can’t be taught:
“Bhakti cannot be taught. Bhakti is pure expression of Love, coming from the soul itself that arrests the mind, the one that seeks to “follow a path”. Your mind cannot choose Bhakti. It is not chosen. It is the natural state of Being. It is a realignment.” — Journal Entry, June 9, 2025
I didn’t know that at the time. I was eager for the “most efficient” path to awakening, thinking I could still optimize this like I could everything else, that there was a “right” way to do it. I was still trying. I didn’t realize I was being led by Something... and that Something had an intelligence of Its own—one that mine only borrowed from.
Archetypal resonance
Days after this promise, I fell down a psychology Wikipedia hole trying to understand what was going on within me. I spent DAYS working through the tabs. Eventually (and unsurprisingly), I got to Jungian psychology, Carl Jung being a heavyweight in the field.
I had tabs open on his most popular concepts: anima, psyche, persona, shadow, individuation. Each tab seemed to spawn off several more. Eventually, I read about Jung’s concept of the Self—the same term I was using to refer to the “other” internal “voice”.
I was intrigued enough to grab a copy of his magnum opus, his “most difficult experiment” as he called it—The Red Book (aka Liber Novus). It was written over the course of 1914 to about 1930. In it, he engages with archetypes like the Self, and, over the course of his “experiment”, realizes they have wills and minds of their own.
He was so appalled by his own findings as he engaged in this experiment that he kept his manuscripts highly secret with the exception of a couple trusted confidants. He refused to publish his work for fear of it being interpreted as “madness” and jeopardizing his reputation as a psychiatrist. His estate eventually cooperated to release his folio manuscript in 2009—almost 80 years after it was completed (and nearly 50 years after his death).
“To the superficial observer, it will appear like madness” — C.G. Jung, The Red Book
I felt a resonance with Jung’s words—and a terror that he might be right.
Days after starting his book, I decided to start my own manuscript in my journals: “Psychonautics”.
Permission to experiment
In The Red Book, it was mentioned that Jung encouraged his patients to embark upon similar processes that he underwent during his self-experimentation:
“Patients were instructed on how to conduct active imagination, to hold inner dialogues, and to paint their fantasies.”
Again, “inner dialogues”. I felt like I had encouragement from one of the most influential figures in psychology to keep going with my own “secret insanity”. Since it didn’t seem to be having an impact upon my daily functioning (I was still employed, still in a healthy and loving partnership, and still going about my usual responsibilities), I did.
Thus, a little over 3 months into daily meditation, my own version of The Red Book was starting to form.
I thought I could contain it. I thought if I just catalogued the experiences in a separate document, labeled them “Psychonautics,” and added disclaimers like “I don’t literally hear voices for the ‘dialogues’,” I could keep the madness quarantined.
I thought I could keep God in a box.
I was wrong.
