Epiphany

My career path after college was checkered to say the least. But you already know that and how I quit the corporate world in 1970 to be a writer. "You have to be happy with your work", I said by way of explanation, “or else you spend too much of your time looking for other work where you will be happy.” At least I’ve been consistent in my search for the ultimate.

I wrote freelance, articles, poetry, and fiction, selling the occasional piece occasionally enough to keep me motivated, also becoming the editor of a regional magazine which folded after several years because the owner was inept, as did a silk screen printing business which I started. I did substitute teaching in local high schools but that didn’t bring in enough income to keep the family fed and I was forced to take the only jobs I could get to support our growing family, commission sales. I was not happy as a salesman, I knew it was not "why I was here", but no income at all would have been worse. I continued to write at nights. This checkered pattern of semi-survival ebbed and flowed for about six years.

In the mid 1970's my sister, whose husband had died tragically several years previously, began attending meetings of a Hindu spiritual group. She claimed it gave her a certain comfort and peace of mind that she needed in her life.

My mother, the athiest, called me on the phone. "Will you find out what your crazy sister is doing?", she asked, and I immediately called my sister who sent material on meditation and the practice of yoga. It was my first exposure to either of these subjects and though I took it all with a large grain of salt, I could see how practice of what it taught could produce the beneficial effects my sister was experiencing.

In 1977, another death in the family caused me to read Raymond Moody's, Life After Life, a book describing the experiences of over a hundred-fifty people who had been declared clinically dead and then ressuscitated. They brought back with them stories of tunnels, lights, and consciousness outside of the body and the similarity of their reports piqued my intellectual interest. Logically and rationally, if the stories were pure fiction, there was no reason why they should have been so consistent.

"What if the body and mind really are separate?", I asked myself in the only leap of faith I have ever taken.

I began to reread the material from my sister, which seemed to be saying a lot of what was being described by Dr. Moody's patients. The connection was too close to deny. And, although I did not realize it at the time, in the same manner that one can walk up one side of a see-saw and upon reaching the fulcrum tilt the entire apparatus with only the slightest shift of weight, so did my one tiny question lead me into a whole new area of inquiry that was to set a completely new direction for my life.

I began meditating and found that yoga seemed to come easily for me. One evening as I focused on a candle flame with the breath forcefully expelled, I suddenly experienced a beautiful melodic ringing beteen my ears and found myself looking down at the top of my head from just under the ceiling. I was astounded, though completely lucid and unafraid.

My mind was racing. "If I am up here then who is that down there? Or, if that is me down there, who is this up here?" The sensation lasted only a second or two before I gulped in air and reentered the body seated on the floor. But, as with the flashing red and green lights of so many years before, I knew what I had experienced.

Reasoning that the experience had occurred because of oxygen deprivation, I figured that if I could keep air out of my lungs for a longer period, I would experience even more. The following Sunday, April 16th, 1978, I decided to repeat the experiment. It was almost nine months to the day from the time I first questioned the separation of body and mind.

Lying on my stomach on the bed, propped on my elbows, I vowed not to breathe until I separated from my body, knowing that should I become unconscious I would involuntary take in air. I did not do anything stupid, such as taping my mouth or nose.

I took three deep breaths, forcibly exhaled, and waited to see what would happen. The second hand on the clock made a full circuit, then another one. My rib cage began to ache but I refused to breathe. Two minutes and forty-five seconds was the last timing I saw on the clock as the pain became unbearable.

I rolled on my back, shaking uncontrollably, then perspiring, then burning up, the first three sensations in the dying process I was to learn later upon reading The Tibetan Book of the Dead. Yet even without that knowledge I knew I was dying and a terrible fear gripped me. "NO!", I screamed in my mind, "God will not let me die while I am searching for Him!".

At that moment three things happened at once. I began gulping air, I fell off the bed, and a pinpoint of light appeared at the crown of my head. Anyone looking at me writhing on the floor would have seen what appeared to be an epileptic fit. The fact that my mother and uncle had both experienced their first seizures at age thirty-nine, and I was at the time thirty-seven, would have lent credibility to that assumption.

Though my body was flailing about uncontrollably, inside I was experiencing a state of ecstasy and peace and perfect and absolute lucidity. The pinpoint of light was getting larger and I remember thinking, "This is what the people whom Dr. Moody interviewed must have described as going through a tunnel." Closer and closer it came, larger and larger it grew, finally exploding within my brain as a clear white light, more brilliant and more powerful than anything I could have ever conceived of. I also felt wires in my brain being pulled from their sockets much as telephone operators used to disconnect callers on old manual switchboards.

During the thirty minutes or so that I remained in this state, enveloped by the light, I never lost the sense of my body or awareness of my individuality, never lost the sense of "me", and the feeling that everything that was happening was taking place within my skull, within my brain. Yet I knew beyond the shadow of a doubt, for no shadow of any kind could have withstood the brilliance of that light, that what I was experiencing was, indeed, the Absolute.

The Divine was making a house call, so to speak. And with the conviction that can only come from from knowing something directly and personally, I knew that the ultimate question of the existence of God would no longer be a question for me, quite an amazing conclusion considering my history.

The light inside began to dim and I saw myself lifted off the ground and zooming out into space. Back and back Earth receded, a blue-green ball that became a huge yin-yang symbol and just as suddenly became Earth again as I hurtled back towards its surface, the nature of the duality of material existence becoming indelibly impressed upon me in the process. My body functions were returning and I found I could play with them. Lean to the left and I was in my room, lean to the right and I went off into space... left/right, in/out, Earth/space, back/forth. There was zero fear. I was having fun.

Eventually the wires that had been pulled began to be reconnected, but I could tell they were going back into different locations than they had come from, that I was being rewired as a changed person from who I had been.

When all physical functions returned and my mind and body snapped together once more into a functioning unit, I found myself on the floor on my knees hands clasped in prayerful supplication speaking the words, "I am reborn. I am reborn in God." While I knew that what I was saying was true, I still remember a part of me feeling totally embarrased by the words coming out of my mouth.

Since that day I have never doubted the existence of God nor been afraid of what I might meet in inner space.

* * *