1978 Awakening – Waking Up to Myself

This was written in 1995 to a friend—the same friend to whom I wrote most of the letters on the 1995 Letters page. It’s really something that can stand on its own, so I’ve broken it out from the other letters.

As far back as I can remember I’ve had out of body experiences, but have never been interested in them enough to want to try to control them. For a while I would generate a second body (in the image of my physical), but now I usually just find myself expanding—I don’t mean my physical body, or any body, expands—I mean my awareness expands, so that I feel like I’m looking in all directions at once, or else I just see scenes of other places, times, etc., without going anywhere at all. It’s like the places come to me, instead of my going to them—this holds true for all planes. Back in June of 1978 I was living with some people on a farm in Alberta when I thought I was coming down with the flu or something—I felt nauseous, lightheaded, etc., so I went to my place to lay down and started to relax my body—I thought I might as well try to do a conscious out of body experience, since I was lying down and going nowhere—I must have done it for about 15-20 minutes or so when this blast of energy went through me from below my toes and up out the top of my head and I went into a complete bliss state for I don’t know how long—if the best sex imaginable were a ‘1’, this was off the scale at the other end. Some time later I felt the energy ‘turn’, for want of a better word, and head downward. After that all I can remember is this huge vortex of energy point-down over my sternum/mid-section, and my being drawn up into it and disappearing—I can remember starting up, and I can remember coming back, but nothing in between. I can remember lying on my bed and doing nothing but laughing—just laughing and laughing, for God knows how long afterward. When I finally looked at the clock something like four hours had passed. I finally got up and went outside and the whole world had changed—it was like everything was transparent—like holding a 35mm slide up to the sun and looking through it—except that the physical sun, the one in the sky, was also transparent, and there was this huge, intensely bright “sun” that I could see shining through everything (like looking through a slide at the sun). People, trees, dogs, cats, horses, sun, stars, clouds,—I was looking at this huge intense sun through everything. My body had no weight—I wasn’t floating, but I couldn’t tell when I sat on something whether I was on it or above/around it. People said I was glowing, said they could see it even in the sunlight (I couldn’t see it, but I could feel it). I remember a couple of days later it started to rain—I had no sense of cold or warm so I just sat out in it to see it—I remember sitting there and the rain was just pouring down, and I was looking at the raindrops as they fell and there was this tiny blue Buddha in each one—each raindrop. I remember sitting out in the rain watching this and just laughing my head off. I remember sitting and doing what I’ve come to call ‘watching the world being made’—looking up in the sky and seeing an outline of a huge tree, and then there are successively smaller trees ‘cascading’ down to finally arrive at the physical tree on the ground. This state of affairs lasted until about mid September of that year, and slowly things returned to ‘normal’, but not really. I started pursuing a crash course in Eastern philosophy, which I had before that basically dismissed—I needed to find new or at least different ways of thinking and new models for things, but mostly I just wanted to compare notes—compare with the authors of the books, but also find some common ground so I could share with other people—I had many private maps that worked fine for me, but I couldn’t give them to someone else.

So, I did the Eastern spiritual thing, meditated, which I’d never done before and which now was mostly spontaneous and highly desirable as far as I was concerned. Learned a lot. Two years and a bit later, I moved back to BC, lived in a small cabin up in the mountains outside Nelson, and meditated a lot—got up one morning, went down the path the visit my dogs (had two huskies at the time), looked out over the meadow and found I could change my vision to see anything I wanted—I could look at the distant mountains, think that I could see them up close, and suddenly I could see every detail, and they appeared to be right in front of me. I thought this was neat, then I looked around and found I was looking through my body at the world, like my body was a view-port to the world, like my body was one of those rubber gloves that are attached to the sides of a sterile box, and you put your hand into the glove and into the box, only my body belonged to the world, was a part of it, and not just attached to the side. Next thing I knew I was aware of being a bright ‘sun’ in a field of bright suns, and we were maintaining the field of the world, creating the world, in the ‘space’ between us, like a hologram floats in space, and we were all in perfect instantaneous telepathic linkup.

Other stuff happened, I moved to the west coast, other stuff happened. One that stands out: I wake up in the middle of the night for some reason, and I’m drifting back to sleep, but only my body, I’m wide awake. I start expanding, no big deal, done that before, but this time it’s different. I go to a point where I’m seeing millions, billions of blue stars, blue pearls—like grains of sand on the beach. I look into them to see what’s in them, and they’re like zillions of polarities—on one end, call it the top, of each blue pearl, were the highest forms like saints, gurus, buddhas, etc, and on the other end were the polar opposites of them, the Hitlers, worse. What struck me most was my reaction to the polarities—from my point of view they seemed of equal value—Jesus and Hitler, no difference. Diamonds and dog shit, no difference. Then I found myself moving again, this time becoming this tremendously huge figure, looking in all directions at once, and out of my mouth was pouring all of these blue stars, these blue pearls, like a river, an ocean. I’d been there before, so I wasn’t too surprised at that (but I hadn’t noticed the river of blue, and hadn’t looked into them). Next, I found myself moving again, going back to the blue stars, and I was breathing into them, like blowing into them, and they were vibrating—like blowing on violin strings—and they started to hum and to produce sounds and the energies in them started to flow between the polarities, and they made life on all planes in all universes. Then I moved back up to the big blue figure and found that I was breathing into it and it was vibrating also, and producing the blue ocean of stars. And then I realized that what it meant to be the life of the world, and also the life of the life of the world.

Now, when I sometimes look out at the rain, sometimes I only see rain, sometimes I see little blue buddhas, and sometimes I see my own face in the raindrops.