Application of Impossible Things: A Near Death Experience in Iraq (15 page)

How do they respond, for example, when someone says something so simple as “Well, we only have one life to live!” Do they laugh and say (dork alert!),
“Actually, we may live an infinity of lives all within a moment—or outside of time if you prefer, and by infinity I
mean it—
infinity
! Every choice, every decision you’ve ever thought about for even an instant has been created and follows its own path and may actually cross and join back up with your own. Or not!”

Of course, they or I don’t say that, but that sort of thing will run through my mind. Sometimes I tie myself in mental knots trying
to figure out what a culturally appropriate response might be to a companion’s casual remark, especially if I’ve been drifting off on my own, exploring an application of expanded awareness to some stray situation that has popped into my mind: laundry, war in Afghanistan, a mosquito bite, the politics of South Africa, siblings, tsunamis, or volcanoes . . . Something as innocuous as a stranger asking where I’m from can toss me into whirlpools of confusion. Collective reality can seem as completely alien and bizarre to me as the paranormal—or quantum physics—must seem to most people.

This world as we know it through daily life, the media, shared experiences, cultural rules and mores, religious doctrine, political power, all our tiny and broad beliefs—this is the collective cooperative reality
for the moment.
In order to interact without being tossed into a mental institution, it’s often necessary to negotiate with myself, choosing when and where it’s appropriate to focus down to the pinpoint of physical life as it is and when it might serve to expand my awareness. Intriguing as all this conceptual perception-shifting is, grounding myself in physical life, in the practical, in the version of reality that’s collectively agreed upon at the present time,
is
important to me. I chose a physical life in this focus and this time-frame, so it seems logical to participate.

In fact, a friend recently asked what I consider to be the most practically useful knowledge gained through this entire experience of being blown up and having an OBE. Among all the potentially mind-blowing (bad pun intended) and perception-altering concepts that I’ve encountered, what I most value is that which is applicable daily within the physical focus of what we collectively agree to call our world.

The most broadly practical and useful way in which expanded awareness has influenced my experience has to do with emotions. Although the quiet mayhem described in my version of the incident and its resulting aftermath may sound like a traumatic experience, I’ve never felt traumatized by it or by the following months of stitches, drugs, needles, surgeries, x-rays, therapies, or even bureaucracy (it’s really best to be a soldier, not a civilian
GS-government service-employee, if you’re going to be treated in a military hospital!). I recall m
oments of disappointment that I’d created and agreed to maintain a strange and inconvenient effect on vision and some hours of worry and effort, resisting the worst case scenario, when the state of my eye was still unknown, and then again when it was known and weirder than I’d have liked (a variation on double vision). I had a few days (okay, weeks … well, yes, months) of excruciating pain in my arm that I would have traded off quite cheerfully. Yet a sense of suffering was and is entirely absent from the experience.

From the physical world perspective, getting
excited
a
bout the possibility of being blind in one eye is certainly a novel and possibly mentally deranged way to think about what could be a very inconvenient loss. Yet sitting in the scorched Land Cruiser, that’s honestly what I felt: excited about the prospect in a moment of pure joy untainted by how I
should
feel
and devoid of fear. This would not have been my normal way of thinking prior to being blown up. Although I’ve always reacted to emergency situations with unusual calm, “glass half full” wasn’t really my thing. This was a physical world moment informed by a clear shot of expanded awareness and its eager curiosity for the possibilities in
any
experience
. Remembering the lucid dream with my grandmother was the trigger, a reminder of the playful beauty of new things. “You don’t need eyes to see” was also a reminder of what is real. What is enduring and real is the Whole Self, which is not dependent upon the physical body for sight—or hearing, feeling, taste, or scent. Nor is it dependent upon the ability to think logically, do math, fit into a cultural norm, write a complete sentence, or any other perceived necessity. With or without any one or more of our valued senses or abilities, we are still whole, complete personalities living full and meaningful lives within a physical focus.

Lying in the hospital after my retina had been tacked back on and the implications of that surgery described to me, I couldn’t find that same thrill in contemplating a one-eyed existence. Yet I felt an amused indifference.
If I can only see out of one eye,
I
thought,
It doesn’t matter. It’s not for that long.

Not for that long!
It could be another fifty years!

That thought seems at least as seriously deranged as having felt excited about losing sight in one eye. The thought certainly surprised me as soon as it popped into my head. I’m a visual artist, primarily a visual person, and would have predicted that if I lost sight in one eye I’d be half panicked, angry, depressed. In fact, later I’d be momentarily unable to find this connection to expanded awareness and would cry when talking to my retinal surgeon about the possibility that I wouldn’t be able to see out of that eye.
I’m an artist—I really want both eyes!

How do I describe the strange double awareness that seemed to unfold inside me while I was crying? I was fully engaged in the frustration and fear at the same time that a deeper part of me was
observing
my participation in the physical and amused by my choosing to believe in that perspective.

These moments are now always accessible to me, immediately arresting occasional freefalls into frustration or fear. “It’s not that long. This is different—it could be fun.
”
Four months, four years, forty or fifty years … it’s just a blink. I’d never been blown up before, and I find an obscene number of things to laugh about within it. In the aftermath, with a sort of double vision and touchy right wrist, everything that I used to do without thought is new, and I choose to find that interesting. A wonder and curiosity about the nature of my experience within physical
reality—as
I
create and
maintain it—is an immovable foundation to even the most ridiculous and dire moments. A sense of humor is appropriate to every situation.

Buddhists have said, “Pain is inevitable; suffering is optional.” Understanding that I designed my experience from start to finish and being assured through my experiences out-of-body that my
life
as it is
has
meaning and value,
suffering
is impossible
. Even coming to consciousness in a charred truck sprayed with blood, or lying in a hospital bed curled up in a fetal position in excruciating pain, or puking my guts out from an anesthesia hangover (the worst!), or contemplating fifty years of double vision, I’ve been reminded of the underlying
joy of being
that I experienced most vividly out-of-body. This is not happiness, which seems to me
to be more a response to environment and circumstance than a constant interior state. I can be depressed, fearful, worried, irritated, angry—in other words, unhappy, with my circumstances or environment
while
feeling interested, curious, and even excited about the circumstances or environment, my own creation of it, and my own actions and emotions within it. I don’t always enjoy the fact that I’m in
this world
, or
enjoy
being in
this
particular circumstance,
but I always
feel the foundational joy of being a conscious, creative, expansive personality exploring experience, and enjoy the humor inherent in that.

Physical existence is unique in offering an amazing array of sensory and emotional experience that is made wildly more intense by being in such clear focus within a physical body. Yet we curtail the passion and vibrancy of that experience in many ways and
teach ourselves
out of believing that our lives have meaning and value. We’re taught that only
these
emot
ions are healthy or appropriate while those others are signs of flaws. Only
these
personalities
are healthy and functional while those others need fixing. Only
these
things
are of value (money, objects, acts) while those other things are for the less worthy and less valuable beings. Only
these
things
(individuals, objects, or acts) are meaningful while overall life is random and meaningless. Religion insists we’re born flawed and must remain ever vigilant to save ourselves. Science seems to imply that we’re random beings without value beyond that which we can wrest from the indifferent world in the course of our short and brutish lives. Nature is something to fight and control—it will dispassionately destroy us if we don’t pay attention. But my experience insists that these assumptions are incorrect.

In trying to curtail, control, and circumscribe the wide array of creativity available, we steal from ourselves. Making everyone comply with an idea of perfection (personally, politically, religiously, or socially) we admit our own fear of ourselves, a distrust that isn’t true. We are not, at heart, evil and flawed. If we expressed only curiosity and admiration for each other’s different creative lives instead of trying to fix or save those who are different from us, we might find ourselves in a fascinating world. If we understood that we are deliberate co-creators of the world and all experience within it, relatives of and co-creators with the rocks and grass, trees and tigers, wind and storms and tsunamis, the world might be a very different place. If we understood that we each contribute to the creation of so-called disasters and wars, we might quit creating a “war on this” and a “war on that” and instead imagine a cooperative world, the first step to its creation. We might each find profound meaning in what we now think of as small and insignificant lives, thereby letting go of the desire to impose ourselves on others; we might dispose of the need to impose meaning and value in our lives through the deviance of misapplied competition and violence, instead finding it through harmony.

We’re each deliberate beings with detailed cooperative plans for our lives. All free emotions that grow within an awareness of the Whole Self are healthy and appropriate, and all personalities are perfect in their unique expression. If we do nothing but enjoy a day, no matter how small and petty it may seem, we’ve accomplished something valuable. Everything we do, everything we imagine has value and purpose. Every existence has meaning.

Visiting expanded environments didn’t solve all my problems or make me a saint. I still get irritated, angry, disgusted, cranky, melancholy, heartbroken, and fearful. I’m sometimes lazy, scatter-brained, mouthy and impatient. But within or beneath how I feel or how I act, I’m also content in an awareness of the goodness and value of my enduring
Whole Self.
Every experience contains the potential for joy.

This joy is a universal, I think. A prime number in the equation of life. I don’t think that my experiences out-of-body imply that these environments are places that others do or will visit should they have an out-of-body experience. After all, the possibilities of environments are literally infinite, and each of us is unique. We may choose collectively created and maintained environments, or, like beautiful dreams, we may each create transition environments that are private and perfect for ourselves.

What I suspect is universal in the out-of-body experience is discovering and knowing the Self as an enduring being, remembering the overwhelmingly complete reality of joy and love that exists, and the intimate connection each consciousness has with every other consciousness, with creation—All That Is.

Love and joy: those words really are completely inadequate to the experience
. In order to be accurate, the words must be understood to be bottomlessly deep and thrillingly effortless
, both heavy and feather-light, infinitely complex and stunningly simple. They must be understood to be all-inclusive, not defined within belief systems of good and bad, divine and evil,
kind and mean, polite and rude. Joy and love from expanded awareness allows for every being and every
experience, affirming
that every creation is good and beautiful because we are perpetually and effortlessly and infinitely
good
.

I believe people have the capacity to figure out how to live together even if we disagree, to share even when resources are scarce, and to handle our own fears without taking them out on one another
.
If we each
acted fro
m that
understanding of who we really are, what would the world be like?

I used to believe that one person’s efforts were too small to make a difference in anything large like war or racism or poverty. Now I’m convinced that each and every consciousness makes a valuable contribution to the world and beyond, no matter how insignificant that person might seem from within our belief structures.

One person changes the world just by
imagining
a
more harmonious one. Let’s try it.