A Nerdy MIT Engineer's Spiritual Awakening

Discover the strange but true real-life story of how a dyed-in-the-wool scientist, rationalist, and agnostic MIT-trained software engineer experienced a life-changing experience of Spiritual Awakening in two parts across ten years.

Transcript

This is all about how a super nerdy,

Rational MIT engineer experienced a life-changing spiritual awakening.

My name is Brett Michael Phillips.

I'm the founder and creator of the Awakening Dynamics System of Energy Hymn in Higher Consciousness.

And I am that gigantically nerdy MIT engineer that I talked about before.

And I'm going to share a little bit about the human story of how I experienced mine when spiritual awakening.

It was really quite fascinating.

I grew up as the prototypical nerd.

I loved video games,

Dungeons and Dragons,

Star Trek,

All that stuff,

Right?

I went to college at MIT,

Discovered the internet,

And became one of the top internet programmers in the world.

I even left MIT before I got my PhD to pursue two tech startups.

And long story short,

I had my life destroyed by a health crisis.

And after just a few years,

Doctors put me on lifetime disability,

Told me there was no chance I could ever work again,

And I was suffering from some pretty horrible chronic pain.

So we fast forward five years.

My life is an absolute nightmare.

I had had a surgery that left my arm completely frozen at the elbow.

I couldn't move it at all.

It was awful.

I hadn't worked in years.

I was drowning in debt.

My parents had divorced,

So I couldn't live with them anymore.

My first wife had just told me she was leaving me.

It was really,

I was living like a nightmare country western song.

Everything was going wrong,

Right?

And I remember,

It was the weirdest thing.

I lived in West LA.

My buddy Ken lived in Santa Monica.

And I was driving over to his place,

I think we were going to play D&D or something,

Right?

And I was on the 10 freeway.

I got off at 4th Street,

Made the left,

Couple stop signs up.

The craziest thing happened.

As I'm stopping at the stop sign,

It felt like I got lifted up out of my body,

Up into the air.

And I felt like I was up on a cross.

And some being came up to me and said,

Brent,

It's almost time for you to come down off the cross.

And I was like,

What?

And I blinked,

And the next thing I know,

I'm back in my car at the stop sign.

And I'm like,

Well,

This is strange.

I haven't taken any drugs today.

Why is this happening,

Right?

But I put it out of my mind.

It didn't make a lot of sense.

And I went on about my day.

Well,

It was one or two days after that,

I met this crazy healer lady named Terry,

Had my first session of energy healing and work in subconscious blocks.

And long story short,

At the end of the session,

She did the healing on me.

And my paralyzed arm went popped,

Instantly healed,

Life changing miracle.

And I became a full-time professional energy healing practitioner.

And so we're going to skip ahead nine years,

Lots of stuff happened.

I built my healing business,

But I was really suffering again.

I had been able to make money.

I had been able to find love.

I had even started a family.

All these things I thought were never possible.

But part of me was still suffering on the inside.

And I was looking for relief through spiritual study.

And I had heard a lot about what we call non-duality or Advaita Vedanta or awakening.

But honestly,

I never really got it.

I had had several teachers,

Read a lot of books,

But it never clicked in my head.

And I had seen this advertisement in email for this class called psychology of consciousness,

Which was taught by another former engineer who had become a spiritual teacher.

And I figured,

Well,

What the heck,

It's a free class.

Let's check it out,

Right?

So I drove from West LA to Santa Monica because the class was very near where my buddy used to live.

And I took the class and it was really interesting.

And I was actually driving home that night.

It was about 11 o'clock at night.

I think it was a Wednesday.

And it was the same intersection where I'd had that weird out-of-body experience nine years before when they told me you're about to come off the cross.

And I remember I stopped at the same intersection but going the other way,

Right?

And what it felt like was this bolt of lightning ran through my body like this electric charge.

And I had one simple but crystal clear thought.

Oh my God,

I'm not Brett.

And that was the moment of what we call awakening.

And so I want to clarify that a little bit before we finish.

That by awakening,

I mean something very specific.

I'm not talking about learning about energy healing or intuition or contacting the angels or the law of attraction or any of that stuff.

That's all well and good,

Right?

By awakening,

I mean a very specific thing.

It's understanding what is you.

What is this awareness in your head that has thoughts and feelings that makes decisions and takes actions?

What exactly is that?

That's what awakening is.

And for my entire life up to that point,

I was fully identified with what we might call the ego mind.

I thought I was Brent.

There is a body,

A mind,

A soul.

Yes,

That's sort of the Brent complex.

But that is not me.

And it was the first time in my life I saw the difference.

I made a distinction between the mind,

The body,

The soul,

The separate being that is Brent,

And the awareness that is having the experience of Brent-ness.

And so,

First thing that happened was,

Again,

I felt this electricity run through my body.

And I'm like,

Oh crap,

I'm not Brent.

The second thing that happened was relief.

I was like,

Oh,

Thank God,

Right?

It's like you're having a nightmare and then you wake up and go,

Oh,

Thank God it was only a dream.

Because certainly up to that point,

Being Brent had been pretty much a nightmare.

The third thing that happened was that I started to feel nauseous.

I started to feel like someone had punched me in the gut.

Why?

I realized that I had spent my whole life,

I was in my 40s at this point,

Thinking I was something totally different than that which I actually was.

Long story short,

I had always thought I was a noun.

Now I realized I was a verb.

And the reason it felt like a punch in the gut was because I used to think I was so smart,

I was so well-educated,

I had all this knowledge,

I was such a clear thinker,

Such a genius.

And I thought,

Oh my God,

I thought I was so smart and I was totally wrong on one of the most basic,

Most fundamental things.

What are you?

And so I'm here to share this story that maybe you'll be called to this awakening too.

Or maybe you won't,

Right?

Certainly,

Please don't go drive out to Santa Monica trying to find the intersection.

I mean,

You can,

I don't care,

Right?

I just don't think it's going to create your awakening.

That was my path.

But there is a new kind of life waiting for you.

And it's not like everything changed in that moment.

No,

Everything was the same.

I had the same car,

The same wife,

The same kid,

The same condo,

Right?

But looking back,

I go,

Yeah,

That's the day where everything really started to change.

That's all I got to say for right now.

Brett Michael Phillips signing off.

Until next time,

Please take care.

And namaste.