Member-only story
Getting through a spiritual short circuit
Pull through a spiritual crisis by transforming from container to conduit.
I moved to Portland in 2021, in the middle of COVID-19 and shortly after the Black Lives Matter protests. Downtown Portland was devastated, filled with homeless encampments. I saw people on the streets, wild-eyed and muttering to themselves. Some staggered along roads and sidewalks, raging at unseen companions and shouting obscenities. A scrawny, naked woman was sprawled out like a spider on the hood of a parked car, shouting at the frightened driver. There were folks huddled in the quiet, shadowy corners outside vacant storefronts. Several others lay prostrate or curled up in a fetal position in the sun. One young man simply stood, motionless, outside the Multnomah County Central Library, gazing at the sky.
My husband says it’s Covid and unemployment. “It’s the meth,” says a neighbor. “Schizophrenia, fentanyl, and mental illness,” my friends say. “Trauma and poverty,” my father says. All perfectly rational conclusions of course. But perhaps such extreme psychological instability masks something more mysterious at play.
My hypothesis is that the severely mentally compromised have experienced spiritual short circuit, where their senses, overloaded by forces from the world of Spirit, leave them in a state of profound disconnection with the physical…
