My grandmother died during my seventh year, my first encounter with Death. I don’t remember how my mother explained it to me, but what I took in was that “death” meant that someone no longer existed. I had never considered such a possibility, and all summer long, it obsessed me.
Each night after bedtime, I’d lie under my sheet and work at imagining Not Being. I would close my eyes and try to imagine that I was getting younger and younger, going back through time until I got to the time before I was born. So many years later, I’m not very clear about what I found then. I would see, in my mind’s eye, a sort of pale tangerine cloudiness, that seemed to be somehow swirling, although there wasn’t anything in it to swirl–no substance at all. And there was no Me in it, either. It frightened me at first, but I felt impelled to repeat the trip every night, and after a while, it was no longer frightening, just a fascinating place to be for a while before I fell asleep. Once school started up in the fall, I stopped my nightly visits to Nowhere and didn’t think about them, didn’t even remember them, for many years.
During a typically godawful Chicago winter, I walked around the Northwestern campus for about a week with pneumonia. I was Toughing it Out. The new President had famously observed that when the going got tough, the tough got going. I wasn’t going to let the President down. Or I had some other reason for acting like a damn fool. In any case, I finally wound up in the emergency room, got diagnosed, got a prescription, and went home to bed.
Lying there that night, woozy with fever, waiting for the penicillin to kick in, I was suddenly lifted, somehow, right up through the ceiling, through the roof, and soon found myself soaring on the back of something very large with wings. Bird? Angel? I didn’t know or care. I rose, on whatever it was, higher and higher above the Earth’s surface until I could look down on most of the western coast of the United States and the Pacific Ocean breaking over its edge. The beauty of the Earth overwhelmed me. I don’t remember any ending to that trip. Was it merely a fever dream? I don’t know, nor do I care. The infatuation with my home planet that flight generated in me has never abated, and it’s enriched my days beyond measure.
When I turned 30, I began studying Zen, mainly through Paul Reps’ wonderful anthology Zen Flesh, Zen Bones. One afternoon, meditating in the basement of my house, I suddenly found myself in that same swirling nowhere I’d discovered as a child. Had I attained satori? That question didn’t occur to me. I was in a place that needed no language, no further thinking–that needed nothing. I was nowhere, or everywhere. I was at peace.
I have no idea how long I remained in the place that was no place. I only know that, silently, wordlessly, but unmistakably, a question presented itself to me: Stay, or Go Back? I surely wanted to stay, whatever that meant, but in the same wordless but unmistakable fashion, the question answered itself in me: Go back. You still have work to do. (Didn’t say what it was, damn it.) And I slowly regained awareness of my basement surroundings, and of myself in them.
A couple of years later, up in the Black Hills of South Dakota, a friend introduced my to a Thai stick he’d brought back from his tour in Vietnam. I’d never experienced anything anywhere near its caliber before, and soon felt a strong need to go out in the nighttime woods. The family dog, a fine old black lab named Blue, followed me out.
I stood among the pines and stared up at the countless stars speckling the night sky. I rose up into that sky, this time without benefit of winged steed, all on my own. I traveled through the dark, sensing planets around me. Jesus was on one of them. I didn’t “see” him. I just felt his presence as I passed by whatever celestial body he was apparently inhabiting. We didn’t speak, but I knew somehow that Jesus was there as I passed by into deeper space, and I felt his love pass over me in waves. I am not a Christian. I don’t believe in any God remotely susceptible to human comprehension. Didn’t then, don’t now. Nevertheless, I’m certain I encountered Jesus that night.
After some time, I felt myself returning to Earth. I became aware of the trees again, surrounding me. I felt grateful to find Blue waiting for me, looking up with confusion in his eyes until I reached down and put my hand on his neck. And then, for the first time in my life, really, I became conscious of gravity. I felt those 32 pounds per square inch of it pushing down on my shoulders. I felt the weight of it, the weight we carry around every second of our lives. Blue licked my hand. I went back inside, and didn’t talk about where I’d been.
I have no explanation for those experiences. I have no belief system that offers any method of interpreting them. I’ve not talked about them with many people over the succeeding years, precisely because I don’t know any way to explain them. I can’t say what they “mean.” I know very well, though, that plenty of other people could find all sorts of ways to explain them away. All I know for sure is that those experiences felt as “real” as any experiences I’ve ever had.
