SURPRISE!
Our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different. We may go through life without suspecting their existence; but apply the requisite stimulus, and at a touch they are there in all their completeness.
~ William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience
There have been many surprises along my path of 73 years, some of which I’ve commented on, but there’s been only one bold-caps SURPRISE! -- an unforeseen, astonishing, MAJOR, life-altering event to be sure.
I’ll attempt to describe it, even though words will likely miss the mark.
As a junior in college, age 20, I awoke from sleep one night to the certain reality of my floating horizontally in space – levitated and calmly facing down, about six feet above the physical me – my physical body – which was lying supine, face up with eyes closed, breathing peacefully, sleeping peacefully in the bedroom’s dim light…
Utter weirdness!! Nothing like this had ever happened to me before, and I responded first with fear. This is TOTALLY weird! Am I hallucinating? Am I crazy? Dead? No way can this be real! But it… keeps… being… real! And that body down there just keeps breathing and sleeping peacefully as if nothing’s going on up here!...
So I chose to trust, to let it be real, to notice and allow rather than resist this wondrous experience. And as fear dissipated, the following unfolded, over the course of what could have been mere microseconds or many hours of clock time:
(But first, for the record: I was not mind-altered by alcohol or any other substance that night; I was not experiencing any major life stress – academic, social, religious, or otherwise – at the time; I was not and am not a vivid dreamer by nature, and I don’t normally recall my dreams on awakening the next morning. And, prior to that night, I had never experienced a so-called “lucid dream” – where a person dreaming becomes conscious of dreaming while dreaming.)
Having read about lucid dreaming, my first suspicion during the experience was that it was simply a vivid dream during which I had become conscious. But it was altogether unlike any dream I’d ever had. It was just… unswervingly REAL – like your experience, Reader, of reading these words is REAL. It feels real to you that you’re reading these words, right? You know it’s not a dream, right? So, yeah, that’s how the floating experience felt to me: vividly REAL, not a dream.
Immersed in the experience, I had no sense of time or space, as strange but real “now-ness” and “here-ness” infused all, including my being. It was easy to feel at home with this. I was getting used to it!
No religious figures or deceased family relatives appeared to me, and my life did not pass before me. It was just me and IT. IT was warm, comforting light illuminating infinity and filling me and all other beings with profound acceptance, peace and awe. If love is a feeling of being at one with someone or something, then I felt deeply, unconditionally loved and loving… I was unalterably aware of this, and I was aware that I was aware. I wanted it to last forever.
Then out of the infinite silent stillness echoed these audible words first uttered by the 14th century English mystic, Julian of Norwich: “All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.” And in that moment, I knew it to be true: there was a Purpose to our human existence, and it was ultimately good, despite humanity’s frequent displays of evidence to the contrary.
Then came these words made famous by Shakespeare in As You Like it…
All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts…
…then these from Shakespeare’s Macbeth:
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
And in that moment, I knew that to be true as well. The worldly life that had so absorbed my attention for 20 years was just a staged, ephemeral play, acted out by spiritual beings disguised as persons. I saw that life as I had understood it was but a trivial tale, sometimes full of sound and fury, and signifying nothing relative to the majesty of what I was experiencing now in this ocean of warm light and love.
And in that moment, the last shred of belief in me in a conditionally loving, punitive God – the deity my parents had taught me to fear as real – evaporated like a dream on awakening. God is love! Thank God!
Whereupon the experience abruptly terminated, thrusting me back into my now-quite-awake physical body, wide-eyed, breathing high and shallow, mouthing over and over “What the??” And my human brain! It couldn’t stop bullhorn ranting about how all that I’d just experienced was “bullshit!,” “just a dream!,” etc.
But I chose just to notice and allow that noise, which eventually abated. Deep down, I knew better. And half a century later, I still do.
Some materialistic scientists believe that awakening experiences are just ‘tricks of the mind’ caused by abnormal brain functioning. As a result, they claim they have no more validity than a hallucination or a dream and the vision of the world they give us is an illusion.
But I believe that the reverse is true: these experiences are more real than our normal state. It’s more accurate to see them as a kind of ‘waking up’ from the sleep of our normal state.
Our normal consciousness is narrow and restricted and gives us a false and limited experience of reality. That’s why, in awakening experiences, there is a sense that our consciousness has become wider and clearer and that we have gained access to a deeper and truer level of reality which is normally hidden from us.
~ Steve Taylor, Waking from Sleep
