That sea urchin lookin' thing

In 1975, I read Carlos Castaneda's A Yaqui Way of Knowledge. In the book, he describes a fundamental meditation exercise called "Silencing the internal voices." Basically what you do is turn off your mind. Sensory Deprivation studies were a fringe craze for while after the book came out, culminating in the movie Altered States in 1980.

I was 18 in 1975. I worked on the exercise for six months, about an hour each day. I eventually developed a visual tool to help me through what was becoming a very frustrating experiment. My tool was the vision of a Stop Sign. The red octagon, the word STOP. My plan was to visualize myself rolling up to the sign. I would stop, then, just as I would do in my car, drift slowly past until I could no longer see the sign.

I did this for about three weeks. On the day of my breakthrough, I was close to giving up. I came home from school that day and flopped down on my bed. The first couple of tries reverberated off into the ether, creating the usual vapor trails that foiled my darkness. On the third try, I sped up toward the sign. This time I slammed on the brakes, skidding past the sign...completely.

I could feel my body suspended in the black for just a moment, then, instantly, I was transmuted from flesh to something else. I was still in the room, but I was actually sticking out of the wall to my left, near the ceiling. I know this because my viewpoint was not looking up from bed but looking down from above. I saw my body on the bed and simultaneously could "feel" my torso sticking out of the wall. I waved my arms around in front of my face. I could see them.

The sensation seemed to last for only a few seconds, but I could have been up there for hours. Just as I was feeling pretty cool about this out-of-body experience I was having, I saw an object moving toward me from stage left. I glanced at it as it pulsated by. It looked like a giant sea urchin with millions of spikes moving in and out from the center. As it passed me I thought to myself, "That's a working model of the universe. I better remember that."

In a flash, I was back sitting up in my bed, adrenalin rushing throuh me. It took a few seconds for me to calm down. I got up, went to my desk and drew a picture of the thing. I went back to school the next day with a smile on my face. I didn't tell people. I just laughed all day.

However, if I had known at the time that I had somehow cracked my reality and opened some sort of portal to the spirit world, I would not have been laughing.

30 years later, I have decided to let the cat out of the bag.

There is a God. You can go join with it and come back to Earth. In my Blog, I want to talk about faith, understanding, obligation, charity and humilty...the things in us that are God given.