"Special experiences"

Now trust me, astral projection has not been a significant part of this young life of mine. I don’t aspire to it, mostly can’t even make sense of it. I tend to be fairly earthbound that way.

I had a girlfriend, Nancy, a long time ago, who claimed to have astral projected on a regular basis. This didn’t really stand out to me, because it was one of her many flights into flakedom. And for some reason, the whole picture left me finding her fascinating, even while I found some of her avocations puzzling at best.

But I have, over the years, had at least two experiences which I have never been able to explain and which I’m sure would prompt Nancy to squeal with delight, “You-u projected, nanyananyananya…”

The first of these inexplicable experiences happened at a large choral performance of Handel’s Messiah. I like this piece well enough – maybe, I don’t know, because I haven’t heard it tooo many times, especially back then. And naturally, I like the Halleluiah Chorus. And I’m sure that, on this particular occasion, having just heard that Chorus had left me very stimulated – with, perhaps, all my nerve endings more alive.

I had not heard the piece often enough to anticipate what musically came next – a very beautiful soprano solo. Well, somewhere into that solo, as I was sitting next to my friend Linda (not an astral projectionist), that soprano hit a very high note – and I shattered.

There was no question for me, in that moment, that all the atoms in my body had separated and had filled every corner of that concert hall. The experience was obviously quite new to me, and so a little scary – but more amazing and for some reason wonderful. “Liberating” doesn’t quite capture it, “spiritual” doesn’t connote the amazing energy. “Mind-blowing” is trite, but comes closer. I definitely wanted to prolong the experience as long as possible. I somehow knew that it would momentarily end (I’m sure this was a lot of why it was not just plain terrifying) and I didn’t want it to end. I tried to sit very, very still, so that my energy would not be sucked back into my body, sitting there relatively vacated. But all these shattered, exploded atoms did go back into my body, not with a sudden “whoosh”, but kind of progressively over maybe a minute.

The whole thing left me extraordinarily stimulated and feeling very alive – and just a little sad to have it end. I had no idea what had just happened. Even though this was post-Nancy, the concept of astral projection did not present itself to explain what had gone on – then or since. I definitely did not know what it was. But I liked it a lot. And I totally trusted it – I had absolutely no inclination to doubt it, to wonder if I had somehow “made it up”. And I remember it very vividly, though it was 25 years ago.

The other experience happened in roughly the same time frame. I don’t know why both such experiences happened so close together, or why nothing quite like them since. I was freshly out of a ten-year marriage and did, over all, feel scared, wide open, and facing a world of unlimited possibilities.

For my doctoral dissertation, about four years earlier, I had compared two relaxation techniques. The first, Progressive Relaxation, is a pretty standard behavioral technique, in which you tighten and then release various muscle groups. The other technique, Autogenic Training, is related in some ways to self-hypnosis and really lots more trippy than the other technique. You start by picturing and then experiencing your arms and legs getting warm – and then just get a little wilder from there.

Now, several years out from that research, I occasionally used the Progressive Relaxation Technique – and used it with groups a lot. But my personal favorite was Autogenic Training. It was no astral projection – or I probably would not have liked it. But it did seem to take me to a place which was very peaceful and in which my body seemed to have some different and pleasurable experiences.

But none of that prepared me for this experience. I was lying on my bed upstairs in the house I had continued to rent after my wife and I broke up. (I used one room for my psychotherapy practice and so could afford the rent.) I took myself deep into the “Autogenic Training state” that I had experienced many times before: arms and legs warm, forehead cool, breathing deep and relaxed, heart rate slowed down…a rarified yet familiar state. I had no idea that something really different was about to happen.

I got out of the bed, left the bedroom, went down the hall and started down the stairs – except that my body was still in the bed. The experience of going down the hall and then down the stairs was exactly as vivid as if I was physically walking there – maybe more so, since I was often preoccupied with various thoughts as I walked through the house, whereas this time these passages through the house had my entire, heightened attention. I went into the living room, looked around, saw details that I knew were there but had not paid attention to for a while – some for a long while. I observed books and magazines lying exactly where I had left them, the orange juice glass I had left on the coffee table this morning, the cockeyed picture on the wall that used to annoy me a lot but which I had not noticed for months. I went into the kitchen and the experience was likewise – I noticed details that were clearly quite recent, including dishes in the sink and crumbs on the counter, and others I had paid no recent attention, like dust on the window ledge.

The actual experience was in some ways very different from my concert hall experience. Instead of shattering to fill the entire space, a very concentrated – but not physical – part of me had taken off out of my body and gone roaming. The feeling tone of this experience was very similar to the concert hall experience – extremely surprised, a bit unnerved, but also enjoying the experience a lot. I was maybe a little scared, but not very much – and more liked it and didn’t want it to end. But – after no more than a couple of minutes, real time (it was so vivid and “memorable” that it seemed longer) – my little journey ended the way it had begun. Whatever was this part of me that had split off retraced its steps: living room, stairs, hallway, bedroom. I didn’t so much observe it come back into my body as that I suddenly knew it was there. And, like at the concert hall, I felt very, very alive, tremendously stimulated – and a bit sad to have it end.

I have had some great, memorable, wonderful – maybe even mystical - experiences since these two. I have fully surrendered to - and in some ways been transported by – experiences of music, laughter, sunsets, sex, etc. But none have had the kind of otherworldly, so-out-of-the-ordinaryness as these two.

What to call them? I don’t think that astral projection is a thing, but rather just a name people have come up with to describe some very special experiences. Were these that kind of experience? I have honestly never had the inclination to read up on or to talk with those astral projectionists. Part of me doesn’t want to put a label on these experiences – to let them stay as special as they have always seemed.

What do these two extraordinary experiences have to do with the topic of this blog – Life Lived More Deeply? It seems like I did drop down into – or get transported above, words really don’t do it here – my ordinary reality, and so discovered that there are realms of reality I didn’t know of before. I experienced that there is something in me that resides in my body, but is not limited by it. Life Lived More Deeply has a lot to do with filling in the spaces that keep us feeling separated from the rest of life. Each of these experiences had to do with moving into what I would have thought was empty space. Each of them left me very clear that my conceptual notions about myself and about the world around me are very inadequate – they by no means explain these experiences, and I have come to trust less these ideas about myself or the world. I don’t think that they do capture or point to all that is real around me. Words themselves break down and feel less reliable and less complete.

It now seems to me that Life Lived More Deeply has to include these experiences, the fairly extraordinarily high and or deep – but less trippy – experiences I have had since, and all manner of experiences that I have not yet had, but that I now believe must be out there to be had. Life Lived More Deeply means that none of my concepts can truly capture the nature of life, or of me. I truly do not know fully who I am.

Why I’m not “New Age” anymore

Once upon a time, I was enamored of everything New Age, completely fascinated by all its “alternative” therapies. I thought we were entering a Brave New World of freedom from the “old paradigms” of health and healing.

The other day, I went to an “Expo” of New Age modalities. There was booth after booth after booth, each offering its own form of healing or “personal growth”. I couldn’t get out of there soon enough – I practically ran out the door.

I’m sure that all these practitioners were very sincere. And many of them probably “help” people in some fashion.

One element that almost all these “healers” had in common was that they start with some form of diagnosis: your chakras are out of balance, your soul needs to be retrieved, you have too many minerals in your hair, you’re ignorant of your past lives, your electrons need to be tuned up, etc., etc.

Then, of course, each of these booths offered some kind of treatment that was appropriate to their particular diagnosis. You can get your charkas balanced, your meridians humming, your akashic records expunged. You can use crystals, pendula, activators, tuners and potions of every sort.

What virtually all of these modalities have in common, hype notwithstanding, is that they promote “healing from without”. Many of them would argue with this. They are promoting inner healing with these crystals, etc., they would declare. I’m unmoved by these declarations. If you need these rocks to trigger your healing, then it is not inner healing. Wearing crystals in a bag around your neck may be less invasive than drugs or surgery, but I’m sorry, there’s still some mumbo-jumbo going on here. The drugs, for all their running roughshod over our natural healing mechanisms, may still largely be operating from placebo effect – and so too, I suspect, for the negative-air-ion-charged jojoba oil. The thing all of them have in common is the message they send to our conscious and unconscious mind that 1) you need healing and 2) you can’t do it by yourself.

Oh, and one more message is imbedded in most of New Age thinking: some people are more in tune with this New Age than others. I like to think of this as the track and field model of personal growth – some souls are just more athletic than others, have more personal or spiritual prowess. It is fundamentally a competitive model. Some people are just further down the road. Maybe all of us can be placed somewhere on this continuum of realization – and these folks are farther ahead. We may call them old souls, healers, more evolved or – the real kicker – enlightened. And mostly here, “enlightened” typically does not mean that we take ourselves lightly – no, in most cases we are taking ourselves or these other “enlightened ones” kind of serious.

And what if we don’t need healing? What if the symptoms we are currently experiencing are part of our path as much as our “peak experiences”? What if the message we most need to integrate is not that the New Age cavalry are on their way, but that we are just perfect right now and that our symptoms will shift exactly when they are meant to – and that there is just nothing we can do to slow this down or speed it up. What we can do is to add on one more layer of mystification: not only do we have X wrong with us, but now we need Y to make us better.

And, worst of all, we are left comparing ourselves with others. It’s you over there and me over here. And we are not only essentially separate, but more than separate, we are competing with each other – one of us is closer to the goal line than the other.

Now, how, when these various symptoms genuinely make us feel like crap, can I possibly say that they are just right? Because most of them emanate from already believing that there is something wrong with us or with our life or with life period. The real source of our suffering is dualism – the belief that there are good feelings or bad ones (symptoms), that we are better sometimes than others, that some people are more healthy or enlightened than others. Our current symptoms are just right because they are the game – they are what keeps us busy here, what we get to, little by little, see through.

If there is actually something like enlightenment, I bet it has to do with seeing through all this mystification. The more enlightened we become, the more we genuinely take our “self” lightly. We may celebrate the idea that each of us has our own unique path up the mountain. But, if each is unique, then comparing those paths becomes utter nonsense. There is no valid way to say that one soul is “further up”. In fact, there is no meaning to saying that you or I are “further up” than we were before.

Our whole path is but one unbroken thread. To value one part of the thread more than another puts the whole business in a knot. If I am to fully value or accept myself at this particular point in my story, I’ve got to love the whole story, because that’s what got me here. So a “realized” being, if there is such a thing, has simply realized that – for all our separate fingerprints – we are all equally valid, equally whole, and, in fact, inextricably woven into each other. Thinking of me as self and you as other is just the big comical game of this life. When we really see through this separation mystification, we almost always wink, smile, chuckle, belly laugh or absolutely roll on the floor with hilarity. What an amazing relief! What a big, sly, tricky joke this whole drama has been. What’s not to laugh?

If to become enlightened means to get over the notion that I am separate from you, then there is no me left to be enlightened. Enlightenment is just one wonderful wave of relief sweeping through all of creation, a rising tide that truly does lift all boats and is happening to tickle my little dock of the bay – giving me a momentary or longer glimpse that your boat and mine are made of the same fundamental stuff, that life has just cast us in different molds to make it more fun and interesting to get it that the stuff under our surfaces is both the same and totally connected.