Sacred Madness

Wrestling with Angels in the Age of Skepticism

A meditation or perhaps a musing on mystical experience, ancient wisdom, and the courage to trust what cannot be measured

We begin with a poetic remembrance of a dream turned to Fanāʾ فَنَاء, an event that occurred not 48 hours ago, and I am convinced will remain permanently burned into the mind and soul of this wandering soul. I can say wholeheartedly that I am forever changed.

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In the house of many doors,
I walked like a beggar
seeking the one entrance
that would not turn me away.

Each polished surface reflected
my seeking face,
but the hallways whispered:
Not yet, not yet.

Then Israel appeared
robed in silence,
standing at the far end
of my longing.

"Knock and enter," said the voice
beside me,
but the door slammed shut
like a lover's cruel game.

Ah, but this is how
the Beloved teaches!
First the rejection,
then the real invitation.

So I called out:
"Brother Jacob, show me
what I need to know!"
And suddenly—

I was the whirling itself,
no longer the one who spins.
My voice became the vowel A,
the first breath of creation
ripping through eternity.

The square of my body
dissolved into cube,
cube into mandala,
mandala into the very pattern
that weaves all things together.

I was the geometry of God
and I was terrified.

"I am not READY!"
screamed what was left of me,
like a drop of water
resisting the ocean.

But Friend, this is the price
of loving the Real:
You must be willing
to disappear completely
into what you seek.

The dream shattered
and I woke gasping,
but the mandala flowers
still bloom behind my eyes—
proof that once you taste
the wine of dissolution,
you can never again
pretend to be sober.

Fourty-Eight hours later
I am still drunk,
still spinning,
still that sacred vowel
echoing in the cavern
of what I used to call
myself.

O you who read this,
know that every door
that closes in your face
is the Beloved saying:

"Not through thinking,
not through wanting,
but through becoming
the very thing you seek."

The house still breathes around me.
Brother Jacob still waits.
And I understand now
that the door was never locked—
I was simply not yet
empty enough
to fit through.

After the dream, after the whirling,
after the geometry of light
has rearranged your atoms,
you realize:

you were never the seeker—
you were always
the door.

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I am still integrating.

Still feeling the residual tremors of what happened when I crossed a threshold I didn't know existed, when a dream became something far more than the mind's nocturnal housekeeping. The geometrical mandala patterns still bloom behind my eyelids when I close them, luminous echoes of an encounter that has left me questioning not what I experienced, but why we have become so afraid to trust such experiences as real, valid, and necessary.

We live in an age that has pathologized the mystical, that seeks to explain away the transcendent with neurochemistry, and dismisses the numinous as mere psychological projection. Yet here I sit, a modern person with bills to pay and emails to answer, still reeling from a dream that felt more real than waking life, a dream that connected me to lineages of seekers stretching back millennia, to Jacob wrestling with angels, to Sufi dervishes spinning themselves into divine ecstasy.

The House of Many Doors

The old house breathed around me, its grandeur a thin veneer over something unsettling. It was a place of polished surfaces and too many upgrades, like a plantation home trying to forget its ghosts, now masquerading as a “haunted attraction.” My family flickered at the edges of my awareness, present yet distant, as if we were all on some strange, prescribed tour. But beneath the curated experience, a disquieting energy pulsed – a sense of cultish secrets hidden behind the endless, unnecessary doors that lined the corridors, each one a silent invitation to an unknown I wasn't sure I wanted to face.

One such door, no different from the rest, drew me in. I opened it to a long, receding hallway, unnaturally still. At its distant end stood a figure robed in ceremonial attire, an enigmatic sentinel. Before I could process, another man materialized beside me at the threshold. "Knock and enter," he instructed, his voice flat, devoid of inflection. Yet, as I took a breath to comply, he gave a brief, almost dismissive glimpse towards the robed man, and then the door was closing in my face, the latch clicking with an air of finality.

Shut out, a sudden solemnity fell upon me. I found myself praying, not to any deity I knew, but to "Brother Jacob," the name forming unbidden on my lips, a desperate plea to the figure I’d only glimpsed. "Show me," I whispered, "show me that which I need to know."

The dream began in a house that was trying to forget its ghosts, a plantation home masquerading as a "haunted attraction," all polished surfaces and curated experiences hiding something deeper and more unsettling. How perfectly this mirrors our contemporary relationship with the sacred:

We've turned our spiritual heritage into tourist attractions, theme parks of the numinous where we can safely encounter the Other without risking genuine transformation.

But the unconscious knows better. It led me to that unremarkable door among endless corridors, the one that opened onto a long hallway where a robed figure waited. When the man beside me instructed "Knock and enter," then shut the door in my face, I found myself invoking a name I had never consciously chosen: "Brother Jacob."

This moment of rejection, of being shut out from the mystery, became the catalyst for what followed. Like Jacob at the ford of Jabbok, I was left alone with the ineffable, forced into a wrestling match I never asked for but desperately needed.

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וַיִּוָּתֵ֥ר יַעֲקֹ֖ב לְבַדּ֑וֹ וַיֵּאָבֵ֥ק אִישׁ֙ עִמּ֔וֹ עַ֖ד עֲל֥וֹת הַשָּֽׁחַר׃

Jacob was left alone. And a figure wrestled with him until the break of dawn.

וַיַּ֗רְא כִּ֣י לֹ֤א יָכֹל֙ ל֔וֹ וַיִּגַּ֖ע בְּכַף־יְרֵכ֑וֹ וַתֵּ֙קַע֙ כַּף־יֶ֣רֶךְ יַעֲקֹ֔ב בְּהֵאָֽבְק֖וֹ עִמּֽוֹ׃

When he saw that he had not prevailed against him, he wrenched Jacob’s hip at its socket, so that the socket of his hip was strained as he wrestled with him.

וַיֹּ֣אמֶר שַׁלְּחֵ֔נִי כִּ֥י עָלָ֖ה הַשָּׁ֑חַר וַיֹּ֙אמֶר֙ לֹ֣א אֲשַֽׁלֵּחֲךָ֔ כִּ֖י אִם־בֵּרַכְתָּֽנִי׃

Then he said, “Let me go, for dawn is breaking.” But he answered, “I will not let you go, unless you bless me.”

---

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The Ancient Art of Sacred Vowels

The response was not a whisper, but a vortex. Suddenly, I was no longer standing but whirling, violently, down another hallway, a dervish spun out of control. A single, high-pitched chant ripped from my throat – "AHHHHHHHHH!" – a sound that seemed to stretch into eternity. The world dissolved. I became the motion, the sound.

What happened next…

The violent whirling, the high-pitched chant of "AHHHHHHH!" stretching into eternity, seemed to connect me directly to practices that mystics have used for thousands of years. The vowel 'A'(א) is considered the primordial sound in many traditions, the first expression of the divine breath. In Kabbalah, it represents Aleph, the silent letter that contains all possibility. In Sufism, the breath-work and vocal practices (dhikr) use specific sounds to achieve states of fana—the annihilation of the ego that allows divine reality to emerge.

I have practiced these techniques in ritual work before, the deliberate use of breath and sound to alter consciousness. But to have them emerge spontaneously in a dream, to become the very mechanism of transformation, suggests something profound about how the psyche itself is aligned with these ancient technologies of transcendence.

The Sufis understand this. Rumi wrote:

"You were born with wings, why prefer to crawl through life?"

The mystical traditions have always known that we are equipped for flight, that consciousness itself is designed for these expansions beyond the ordinary boundaries of self.

At first, this experience was quite comfortable. I KNOW THIS, I said to myself.

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Becoming the Mandala

Central Mosque of St. Petersburg, Russia.

Then, form asserted itself, but not my own. I was a square, a cube, a pulsating geometry of transcendent light, a living mandala of impossible, shifting colors. The holy vowel 'A' echoed from this new core, a silent mantra fueling an infinite expansion. The square, the cube, I, stretched, thinned, expanded outwards, merging into the vast, intricate pattern of the mandala, becoming a single, resonant thread in an infinite tapestry. I wasn't me anymore. I was the sound. I didn't just see; I felt, I probed the entire, interconnected pattern of all things. It was sublime. It was terrifying.

The geometric transformation that followed, becoming a square, a cube, a pulsating mandala of impossible colors, called to mind echoes of both Sufi and Kabbalistic imagery. The whirling dervishes of the Mevlevi order spin not merely as physical exercise but as a method of becoming the cosmic dance itself, of aligning their rotation with the movement of the spheres. As Rumi said,

"Dance, when you're broken open. Dance, if you've torn the bandage off. Dance in the middle of the fighting. Dance in your blood. Dance when you're perfectly free."

In my dream, I became that dance and the dancer. The square and cube speak to the material world being transformed, elevated into higher dimensionality. The mandala patterning at the edges of my awareness—the sacred circle that appears across cultures as a symbol of wholeness and cosmic order—wasn't something I observed but something I became. This is the ultimate goal of mystical practice: not to have visions of the divine, but to realize one's fundamental identity with it.

Yet with this realization came terror. "I AM NOT READY!" my dissolving consciousness screamed. This resistance is perhaps the most honest part of the experience. A genuine mystical encounter is not the blissful escapism our culture often imagines. It is the complete dissolution of everything we think we are. It is beautiful and terrible in equal measure.And in this movement my resistance to it proved I still have much more learning and growing to do.

Jacob's Wrestling Match

Alexander Louis Leloir (1865)

"I AM NOT READY" The thought screamed through my dissolving consciousness, a primal terror erupting from the core of what was once my self. My body, my mind – or what was left of them – recoiled. I began to resist, to fight against the overwhelming, beautiful, horrifying expansion. The dream fractured. I was waking, or so I thought, thrashing, desperate to escape the crushing weight of understanding. But the waking was a lie, another layer of the dream. I needed to be woken in real life. And I was. My own screams, the guttural intoning of that vowel, the "wigging out" – it had woken the entire damn house.

I gasped for air, heart hammering against my ribs like a trapped bird. My nervous system was a live wire, thrumming with raw panic. For a moment, I was convinced I would cry and puke simultaneously, a complete system overload. Later, after the adrenaline subsided enough for a trip to the bathroom, sleep remained elusive. For nearly an hour, every time I closed my eyes, the mental screen behind my eyelids bloomed anew with flowing, twisting, psychedelic mandala patterns. They played just beyond my focus, a silent, luminous echo of the abyss I had touched, a persistent, nauseating reminder of the wild, ecstatic, terrifying vision that had claimed me. It was an out-of-body flight, a DMT trip without the substance, a raw, unfiltered glimpse into something vast and utterly consuming. And I, the unwilling voyager, was left shaken, wondering what hidden door I had truly opened.

The biblical account of Jacob wrestling with the angel (Genesis 32:22-32) provides the perfect framework for understanding this type of encounter. Jacob, alone at the ford of Jabbok, wrestles all night with a mysterious figure—angel, man, or God himself, depending on interpretation. He emerges wounded but blessed, his name changed to Israel, "he who wrestles with God."

What strikes me about this story is its physicality. This is not a gentle vision or peaceful meditation. It is a violent, desperate struggle that leaves Jacob limping. Yet he refuses to let go until he receives a blessing. "I will not let you go unless you bless me," he declares.

It is no wonder Brother Jacob shut the door in my face. I was not up to the task of wrestling all night, I tapped out rather quickly. Despite the seeming infinite expanse I experienced, when it came down to it, I tapped the mat.

This captures something essential about authentic mystical experience. It is not passive reception but active engagement, even resistance. The divine doesn't simply “download” into consciousness; it must be wrestled with, integrated, and earned through the willingness to be fundamentally changed.

What I can attest, is that through this experience, I feel wholly impacted and irreversibly changed.

My own screaming awakening, the thrashing, the desperation to escape the crushing weight of understanding, mirrored Jacob's struggle, and I found myself returning to Genesis immediately. The integration period that follows, the ongoing sense of being changed at a cellular level, reflects his limp, the permanent mark left by divine encounter.

Angels in the Architecture

I have had previous encounters with what I can only call angelic presences, experiences that share the same overwhelming quality as the geometric mandala in my dream. There is something about these encounters that feels utterly foreign to ordinary consciousness yet strangely familiar, as if we carry templates for such meetings in the deepest layers of the psyche.

The angels of mystical experience are not the sanitized beings of popular spirituality. They are forces of transformation that appear when consciousness is ready to be reorganized at a fundamental level. They come not with comfort but with challenge, not with answers but with a reorganization of the questions we thought we were asking.

In short, if you are to encounter one of these beings, be very careful what you ask for.

The robed figure at the end of the hallway, "Brother Jacob," represents this angelic function, he is the mysterious teacher who appears at the threshold of transformation. He doesn't speak or teach in conventional ways; his very presence reorganizes reality around him.

Trusting the Process in an Age of Doubt

Perhaps the greatest challenge for the modern mystic is learning to trust these experiences in a culture that demands material proof for spiritual realities. We live in a time that can map the neural correlates of mystical states but struggles to accept their validity as anything more than interesting brain chemistry.

Yet the mystics have always known what neuroscience is just beginning to discover: consciousness is far more plastic and expansive than our normal waking state suggests. The Sufis speak of seven levels of the nafs (soul), each representing a different relationship to divine reality. The Kabbalists map ten sefirot, spheres of divine emanation that consciousness can learn to navigate.

These are not metaphors but maps, tested over centuries by practitioners willing to explore the furthest reaches of human awareness. My dream experience, frightening as it was, fits perfectly within these frameworks. It was not pathology but initiation, not breakdown but breakthrough.

The Whirling Path

The practice of whirling—sohbet in Turkish, developed by the Mevlevi Sufis, serves as both a metaphor and a method for this type of consciousness transformation. The dervish begins in stillness, then gradually increases rotation until the spinning becomes effortless, a surrender to forces beyond personal will.

In my dream, I became that whirling, the motion itself rather than the one who moves. This represents a crucial shift from subject-object consciousness to participatory awareness. I was not observing the mystical state; I had become it.

I believe this is what Rumi meant when he wrote:

"Let yourself be silently drawn by the strange pull of what you really love. It will not lead you astray."

The pull toward transcendence is not separate from us; it is our deepest nature calling itself home. I have been following it with vigor for the better part of the last fifteen years and it has led me to some very interesting places, but all these roads lead back to LOVE.

Integration and Ongoing Journey

Forty-Eight hours later, I am still processing the implications of this encounter, I will probably reflect on this experience for the rest of my life. The mandala patterns continue to bloom behind closed eyelids, reminders that something fundamental has shifted. This is the real work of mysticism: not the dramatic peak experiences but the slow, often difficult process of integrating expanded awareness into daily life. The event is but the portal, what happens after is the mark of the mystic, in the grit and the dirt accumulated as you walk the untrudged paths of love.

The Jewish tradition speaks of tzaddik, the righteous one who serves as a bridge between ordinary and divine consciousness. The Sufis describe the wali, the friend of God who has learned to navigate multiple levels of reality simultaneously. These are not supernatural beings but humans who have completed the work of integration, who can function in consensus reality while maintaining access to expanded states.

This integration requires what Rumi called "beautiful patience"—the willingness to trust the process even when it doesn't make sense to the rational mind. It requires holding a paradox: being deeply practical while remaining open to the impossible, maintaining healthy skepticism while honoring the validity of direct spiritual experience.

Reclaiming Sacred Madness

In the end, what my dream experience offers is an invitation to reclaim what our ancestors understood: that consciousness is not confined to the narrow bandwidth of ordinary waking awareness, that reality is far stranger and more wonderful than our materialist assumptions allow.

The "sacred madness" that Plato wrote about, the divine intoxication that Hafez celebrated, the mystic's willingness to be a "fool for God", these point to a type of sanity that transcends conventional definitions of mental health. They represent the courage to trust experiences that cannot be measured, to value transformation over comfort, to wrestle with angels even when we emerge limping.

As I continue to integrate this latest descent into the rabbit hole of mystical experience, I am reminded that such encounters are not rare anomalies but expressions of consciousness fulfilling its deepest potential. In a world increasingly disconnected from mystery, perhaps our greatest act of rebellion is the simple willingness to trust what we cannot prove, to honor what we cannot control, and to remain open to doorways that appear in the most unexpected places—even in our dreams.

The house with too many doors was not a haunted attraction after all. It was a training ground, a place where consciousness learns to navigate realities beyond the material. And Brother Jacob, that enigmatic figure at the threshold, continues to wait patiently for all of us bold enough to knock, enter, and discover what lies beyond the boundaries of who we think we are.

As always I remain in eternal service to HER mysteries…