Monday, January 06, 2020
Phil Williams––The Experience(s)
The Experience(s)––Phil Williams
Phil Williams, a fomer NFL consultant, lost his beloved daughter when she was in her late twenties, and was himself devastated by his loss. After two years of deep depression, he experienced sudden awakening into divine love which he describes in the following entry. I wish to thank him for allowing me to publish this account of his awakening experience here. At the time this description was written, he was living in Çosta Rica. Meg is his wife.
In the fall of 2018, something different was happening inside of me. For the first time in my life I could feel changes occurring within me, exciting new paradigms forming, ones that were unlike anything I had ever experienced as the old Phil. After learning several years earlier that the world was not as I had always thought it was, and having staggered through the most life-altering (shattering) event that a parent can, or maybe any person can, I had come to a place, I believe, where I was totally open, willing to free my mind to whatever God might reveal, regardless of what those who label themselves authorities deemed as the truth, or whatever authoritative literature, or the like, stated. I was all in, digging with all of my emotional and spiritual strength, in pursuit of whatever God might have in store for me. In pursuit of life.
Leading up to this time, as I have already explained, I had created stories from the depths of my grief and sorrow, you might say from the depths of my brain damage. Those stories had felt so real, so true, so painfully legitimate, that I had left a wake of destruction behind me. Or at least it felt (looked?) that way. Yes, I was beginning to see life differently than I ever had, bolstered by my new understanding of the spiritual realm, and was more excited than I had been in a while. More relaxed and excited.
Meg, on the other hand, was growing immensely in her own way, but edging away from me. I think she had been damaged by my stories...
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As stated earlier, I had come to strongly believe that we all create stories born from illusions instigated by our egos seeking after security. It takes a lot for us to be able to look at the root causes of these stories, built like formidable fortresses, constructed to defend our egos and our fragile territories. Of course, they never do the job we assign to them, causing a myriad of problems along the way, so we usually just concoct more stories, and round and round we go. My personal stories of pain, with Meg at times as the main culprit, had taken on a life of their own during much of the proceeding few years, mainly during Hannah’s illness and death, and had left a swath of scars along the way, in both of our hearts.
Sometimes I talk too much. I’m an outward processor, throwing words and thoughts out into the public domain probably a little more than I should. I admit it. For example, in my conception that speaking your truth was of the utmost importance, with a heart that felt like it had been severely damaged, I would occasionally spew stuff out to Meg like this:
“I feel like my heart died. I will always love you, but my heart has just been too beaten up. I hope that my heart returns, and I truly believe it will. But it has died. I just can’t seem to feel it anymore. I want more than anything for us to love each other as we once did, even more so, and I believe it will come. But, like I said, I feel like my heart died.”
I’m not sure how many times I recited this motif, or something like it, but each time Meg would softly listen, I fear little by little losing her heart along the way, my story and my words dragging her along a ragged path. As I said, losing a child is brutal on relationships, sometimes even more so when one of the partners has a big mouth. As in...yours truly. Though both of us had fought hard to get back on our feet, and perhaps stretch further than before in our quest for
reality, truth, and life, we still recognized that losing a child would almost certainly require a lifetime of healing.
Meg was reaching out for her own rock to cling to, her own needs for security. And I guess if I had been in her shoes I would have been concerned after listening to my heart dying quips. So she was doing what she needed to do, and that certainly meant that fully trusting me and my commitment to our relationship, was not part of it. At least for the time being.
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I could tell that Meg was not warm towards me, that she was pursuing her own agenda,
but I simply and naively assumed, like I always did, that things would just sort of work themselves out. Especially since I knew I was changing. In relationship, though, as I was soon to learn, watching the other person change is often fraught with challenges, certainly more so when there are so many questions afloat, some of which point to a pretty deep crack or two. Meg needed to be cautious with me. And maybe even more accurately, and acutely, her heart had been affected, too. I didn’t blame her. And yet I figured that the changes in me would be noticed, and eventually remedy all of our issues. At least I was hoping so.
In late October, Meg’s sister, Amy, flew down to Costa Rica for a week or so. I guess it was kind of later on during Amy’s visit that I began to notice that Meg was, like I said, edging away from me, enough so that I decided to address that very issue on a Saturday morning, just a few hours before both Meg and Amy were to hop on a bus for San Jose and then fly to the United States.
“So what’s up?” I asked. “I can tell something’s on your mind, something different. You want to talk about it?”
She seemed a bit nonchalant. “Yeah. But it can wait.” She shuffled her feet and thought for about one second. “I guess we can talk about it now.”
“Okay,” I said.
“Well,” she said, “when I get back from the states, I was thinking maybe in January after the holidays, that you could go somewhere for about six weeks, and then I could go somewhere for about six weeks. That would give us three months apart, time for me to better hear my voice.”
Meg and I had been around each other, day in and day out, probably more than anybody I had ever known, for over thirty-one years, so time apart actually sounded good on the one hand. But on the other...
“So you want a separation?” I asked.
She shook her head. “No. Just time alone. Time to think. Time to hear my voice.”
I’m thinking, yeah, a time of separation.
“Okay,” I said.
And that was pretty much it. I drove them to the bus stop in Puerto Viejo and hugged her
goodbye, both of us throwing out I love you’s, both sensing that we were diving into uncharted waters. Scary waters, perhaps. Sad waters. They left, and I drove home to ponder.
Over the next couple of weeks I continued to immerse myself into meditation, breathing, and A Course in Miracles. I also seemed to be receiving downloads from somewhere. Downloads? you ask. Yes, downloads, as if my mind had been pried open and a multitude of stories began to pour in. I had begun writing short stories, mainly about grief and healing and the mystical/spiritual, for a few weeks already, but now they were bursting into my mind like an angry ocean through the walls of a rickety dam. So I wrote. And wrote. And continue to do so.
A few days before Meg was due to arrive back from the states I had an extraordinary experience. Why did this happen? My best guess is that the modalities I was practicing - the meditations (guided and unguided) and breathing exercises - and the studying I was doing, were both beginning to affect me on a subconscious level. I awoke in the middle of the night and instantly a movie began to play in my mind. I was awake and I knew it, and yet, without warning, it was as if a DVD had been inserted into a slot in my brain and the video began to play. This was not thinking. It was watching.
I was transported back in time to revisit several events in my first seven or eight years.
First, I was plopped down into the nursery at my father’s church in Macon, Georgia - Hillcrest United Methodist Church. I was two or three years old. The thing is, I was sort of like old Ebenezer Scrooge in A Christmas Carol, invisible and simply observing the action. With one caveat - I could watch myself as a little boy while feeling the emotions of that little boy. I was terrified! My parents had dropped me off at the nursery and I had felt utter abandonment. I watched as that little boy - me - freaked out and began screaming in fear, once again, feeling it within my own being as I lay in my bed watching. The nursery workers had to go get my dad, the pastor, to come and calm me down.
Next I found myself jumping down off of my bicycle looking down into a large culvert, still in Macon, when I was probably six years old (yeah, we used to could ride about anywhere we wanted to back in the day, learning to ride bikes at a young age, and with parents who trusted us to somehow make it home everyday). At any rate, I had gone to the culvert to find my olderbrother, Steve, who was down next to the water with a friend. As I stood by my bicycle, he reached down, picked something up, cocked his arm, and launched whatever it was in my direction. I felt a sharp pain on my left shin and quickly looked down. Blood was spurting from my leg and a sharp piece of glass was laying on the ground beside my foot - the bottom part of an old coca-cola bottle. I looked down at my brother and he was laughing. I jumped on my bike and sped home, blood flying everywhere, stunned and upset that he could have been so mean. I still have the scar.
I could sense that I could shut the video down whenever I wanted to, but I let it keep rolling.
Next I was on a swing at elementary school in Dawson, Georgia, where we had moved after Macon. It was my first day of school in our new town, third grade, and I was scared to death. School was already let out for the day and I was waiting for my mom, my face dug into the chains that held up the swing, crying, terrified. I was somehow convinced, I think, that this new place and the new way they did school was going to be my downfall. I saw the tears erupt from my young eyes, and at the same time, felt the fear in my old heart, over five decades later.
Many more scenes began to rush through my mind, staccato style, with just enough of a visual from each one to remind me that I was a deeply wounded human being. Eventually I halted the projector.
I lay there in my bed, confused as to why the movie had begun to play. As I relaxed and processed it all, I had the sense that I knew why the movie had come to me. Though I couldn’t be sure, I believed that I was being given a significant glimpse into much of the reason that I behaved and felt as I did during many of life’s episodes. It was obvious to me, for example, that
the mere possibility of abandonment could leave me in a state of panic, especially if it was of a foundational nature.
Ahhh, a state of panic. That proverbial corner was now directly in front of me, and though I was somewhat oblivious, seeing it but not recognizing its impact, I was just about ready to make that turn.
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Over the following two weeks I experienced a phenomenon that many others have also
been confronted with, but up until then I had somehow been spared from. For those who have suffered through panic attacks, for suffering it surely is, you know how frightening and debilitating they can be. Throughout my life, as far as I knew, I had never even come close, even during Hannah’s illness and death. Delirious, fragmented, sorrowful beyond words, agonizingly distraught, and so much more, and yet no panic attacks. But in late November of 2018, I would seemingly be confronted with the gates of hell, itself.
I would wake up in the middle of the night and feel sheer panic, with no warning, my mind frozen in a state of heightened anxiety and despair, as if my entire world had fallen apart and there was nothing I could do about it. I was destined for a life of utter loneliness, abandonment, and pain. Saturday night, November 24th, was the worst.
It also preceded the most amazing experience of my life.
Earlier in the day my favorite dog, a Rottweiler that I had become very attached to, died in my arms, and in a fashion that left my body humming and my emotions gyrating all over the place. His name was Tank, and I loved him dearly. He was so full of life and such a good boy.
We had detected heart worms far too late, apparently; yet we kept hoping that he might get better, that the medications he was taking would somehow work. They did not, and I sat with him in my lap in the back of my truck outside of the veterinarian's office for maybe ten or fifteen minutes (it felt like hours) as he went through what was obviously the throes of death. I was borderline delirious, crying profusely, clearly stumbling through his last minutes while re-living, at least partially, the death of my daughter. With a high degree of certainty, I believe this trauma took me back into the memories of Hannah’s last moments, and I simply had not recovered by the time I fell asleep that night.
And so, for the third night since Meg had arrived back home from the states on the 20th, I awakened from a deep sleep with my body humming as if I had been plugged into a powerful electrical socket, accompanied by a deep sense of loneliness and loss, my mind frantic. It was so profound that I wondered how I could live this way, and then realized that I did not want to live this way, that I could not live this way. I did not feel suicidal, per se, (or perhaps I was?) but certainly felt that I could not continue this way. I was devoid of rationality, or so it seemed, nothing but fearful thoughts bouncing psychotically around within my mind. I kept trying to slow my mind down and find some relief.
I woke Meg up and told her my predicament. I lay back down on the bed, on my back, grabbed her hand, and placed it over my heart. I held it there. I then did the only thing I could think of, the only thing that had given me the slightest touch of relief during the other two panic attacks. I knew that I needed to be present, in the moment, in the now, where there is no future or past, where all of our problems exist. I began to breathe through my nose, to force my breathingto slow down. In - feel the breath in my nostrils; out - feel the breath through my nostrils. In - out. Focus on the breath. In - out - in - out - in...
What happened next is impossible to fully describe with words. Impossible to describe period. As I became present, the most profound and remarkable experience followed. Time was suspended. Honestly, to tell it right, I would have to say that time did not exist, and not only did it not exist, had not existed.
As I lay upon my bed, fresh off of an episode of Life Sucks, I Might Want to End This Thing, I found that I was swimming in a sea of the most unfathomable bliss imaginable. Meg lay beside me, half-asleep, believe it or not, as I drifted into a world of beauty indescribable. We are limited here by our need to use words and labels, so that’s what I’m going to keep throwing out, but maybe it’ll help a little if you’ll also sort of allow yourself to let go and believe that God is beyond our words and labels and beliefs and everything else we have been trained to believe in while here in our 3-D world. I had a few brief moments of what I am forced to try to label with certain words and descriptions, and as the words flow onto the screen they feel inadequate.
For starters, there was no start. As I have tried to explain, it just was. There simply was no start to my experience. I had been deposited into timelessness in such a way that it had simply always been that way (and I inherently knew that it would always be so). It was sort of like waking up from a dream and realizing that you have been dreaming, back into reality. In fact, it felt exactly like that, except that it was more real. In other words, my life on earth seemed a blurry nothing, almost, compared to the depth of reality that I was immersed in.
I knew that I needed nobody. To be clear, I was aware that I was accepted fully by all that mattered (God, Creator, Source) to such a degree that I recognized that our perceived need of
some other person or persons (to complete us), or even thing or things, is an absolute, 100%, unquestionable illusion. Never have I felt so certain of anything in my life. The Creator of the universe accepted me with perfection and nothing could take it away. Nothing! This I knew, and still know, regardless of what anyone could throw at me from a religious or anti-religious standpoint. This realization eliminated my fear of abandonment, for I knew that it was impossible. Not impossible from a physical body standpoint, from that sticky emotional body thing we have going on while in our 3-D world, perhaps, but from an ultimate reality standpoint, which is, well...reality.
The peace that enveloped me was beyond what I had ever thought possible. A stunning sea of tranquility had embraced me within its life force of love, and pulsated all around me and within me. I was cocooned inside, and yet it was also within my being.
I lay there, still with Meg’s hand on my heart, floating in a sea of the most amazing combination of peace and love and acceptance that I could have ever even dreamed possible. And that would have been more than enough to make it the highlight of my life. But there was one more attribute to this experience that I have to share; in fact, the one attribute which coaxed out the only words that I spoke audibly during this time of absolute presence.
I’ve been around for a pretty good while on this earth, long enough to have raised four amazing children, remain married to a beautiful soul for more than three decades, as well as experience gazillions of things in life that make me grateful to be alive. All of them, every single one, lumped together and packaged, couldn’t begin to touch the beauty that I touched (or that dropped down and touched me). I began to speak audibly, into the ears of God, as it were, saying, “Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you...” On and on I went, a heart overflowing
with gratitude that exceeded what I thought gratitude could even elevate to, by a number that probably doesn’t exist. For the first time in my life, I truly understood what a thankful heart really was, what gratitude meant. I’m not sure how many times I spoke it, maybe ten or so, maybe fifty. But I wasn’t counting, and time wasn’t really happening anyway.
As I lay there after orally expressing my deep gratitude to my Creator I was certain that I would experience this bliss for as long as I remained awake. I somehow knew. I rested for a few minutes (though I’m not sure how long) in that spirit of love and peace and knowing, soaking it up, but I also instinctively knew that it would be gone once I fell back asleep, and would subsequently rise from my slumber. As I lay there I softly recalled a story that I had read of someone who had more than likely had the same thing happen to them, and that it had lasted for months afterward. I didn’t envy that person, but I knew that it would not be the same for me.
I figured that there was a significant purpose for me, a compelling reason that I had been immersed in such Love. I was humbled, not the slightest bit proud. Quite the opposite, in fact, marveling at the love of God that I could be allowed to receive such a taste of, what I have now come to believe is our eternal destiny. Why did I experience this? And why did it come seemingly attached to such a painful, humbling event - the panic attack? I can only speculate. But I believe that God was touching me, embracing me, enveloping me in love, because it is what I needed, and because this is happening with more regularity across the spectrum of humanity during these interesting days that we live in. And potentially because I was on such a desperate journey spurred on by my beautiful daughter. Or...well, I just don’t know why. But I do know that this experience has given me an anchor, an understanding that this world we see with our body’s eyes is illusionary and not to be trusted.
I have tried to share the story of what happened that night with a few people, to encourage others, mainly to be met with a change of subject. I understand. It’s not normal, difficult to process for many and alien to others. I get it.
Before I leave this, I would like to say one more thing about it. I am as close to certain as I can be that this place of being, this experience of joy and peace and love and acceptance and gratitude and more, more, more, awaits all of the Creator’s children. All of us! I realize that many of our beliefs, religions and otherwise, suggest something different to many, but I personally believe differently at this point. This experience only confirmed for me what I was beginning to see as our destiny, that the creations of a loving Creator would share a timeless bliss with this very Creator.
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Oh, how the beautiful, the mystical, the real seems to slip through our (mental) fingers as
if it is a mist that dissipates when the sun’s rays become intense enough. When I woke the next morning, the tingle of excitement was still with me, it’s true, and the desire to shout it from the mountain top was also there, and yet the beautiful experience itself had departed (though I sensed a remnant lurking), a forever memory that I knew I would never forget, but I no longer felt the intensity of at that moment. In other words, I knew what had happened and that it could not be stolen from me, yet the consuming bliss had softly faded away.
In fact, I had one more panic attack, the very next night, even.
Then, little by little, I began to settle back into what I will call a place of growth. Morning and evening meditations (guided and unguided), breathing modalities, and deeper into A Course in Miracles and other writings.
At this point in my journey, I had become certain of one thing - things are not as we see them. I had been allowed to peak behind the veil and steal a glimpse of what I now see as reality. Of the workings of the universe, as it were. This peek (peak?) alone opens the mind to a world far beyond the dream world of life on earth as most of us experience it, of the way that I have experienced it for almost all of my time here.
Undoubtedly, we have all asked those questions, haven’t we? The ones like why am I here? what is my purpose? is there really any meaning to all of this? and a million more. But because we are so busy, so educated, so propagandized, so saturated with beliefs that we have learned somewhere along the way and have honed to razor’s edge to protect our psyches, so fearful of losing our foundation, we trudge forward trying to squeeze as much pleasure as we can out of our years, and protect ourselves from the pains.
As I found out, no matter how hard you try, you simply do not have that type of control (in fact, I see the belief that we can control anything as an illusion). It is a forever losing game, one that we keep fighting in hopes that the tides will change, that fortune will smile on us with a life of at least some modicum of peace.
At least where it relates to this world we see with our body’s eyes.
Phil Williams, a fomer NFL consultant, lost his beloved daughter when she was in her late twenties, and was himself devastated by his loss. After two years of deep depression, he experienced sudden awakening into divine love which he describes in the following entry. I wish to thank him for allowing me to publish this account of his awakening experience here. At the time this description was written, he was living in Çosta Rica. Meg is his wife.
In the fall of 2018, something different was happening inside of me. For the first time in my life I could feel changes occurring within me, exciting new paradigms forming, ones that were unlike anything I had ever experienced as the old Phil. After learning several years earlier that the world was not as I had always thought it was, and having staggered through the most life-altering (shattering) event that a parent can, or maybe any person can, I had come to a place, I believe, where I was totally open, willing to free my mind to whatever God might reveal, regardless of what those who label themselves authorities deemed as the truth, or whatever authoritative literature, or the like, stated. I was all in, digging with all of my emotional and spiritual strength, in pursuit of whatever God might have in store for me. In pursuit of life.
Leading up to this time, as I have already explained, I had created stories from the depths of my grief and sorrow, you might say from the depths of my brain damage. Those stories had felt so real, so true, so painfully legitimate, that I had left a wake of destruction behind me. Or at least it felt (looked?) that way. Yes, I was beginning to see life differently than I ever had, bolstered by my new understanding of the spiritual realm, and was more excited than I had been in a while. More relaxed and excited.
Meg, on the other hand, was growing immensely in her own way, but edging away from me. I think she had been damaged by my stories...
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As stated earlier, I had come to strongly believe that we all create stories born from illusions instigated by our egos seeking after security. It takes a lot for us to be able to look at the root causes of these stories, built like formidable fortresses, constructed to defend our egos and our fragile territories. Of course, they never do the job we assign to them, causing a myriad of problems along the way, so we usually just concoct more stories, and round and round we go. My personal stories of pain, with Meg at times as the main culprit, had taken on a life of their own during much of the proceeding few years, mainly during Hannah’s illness and death, and had left a swath of scars along the way, in both of our hearts.
Sometimes I talk too much. I’m an outward processor, throwing words and thoughts out into the public domain probably a little more than I should. I admit it. For example, in my conception that speaking your truth was of the utmost importance, with a heart that felt like it had been severely damaged, I would occasionally spew stuff out to Meg like this:
“I feel like my heart died. I will always love you, but my heart has just been too beaten up. I hope that my heart returns, and I truly believe it will. But it has died. I just can’t seem to feel it anymore. I want more than anything for us to love each other as we once did, even more so, and I believe it will come. But, like I said, I feel like my heart died.”
I’m not sure how many times I recited this motif, or something like it, but each time Meg would softly listen, I fear little by little losing her heart along the way, my story and my words dragging her along a ragged path. As I said, losing a child is brutal on relationships, sometimes even more so when one of the partners has a big mouth. As in...yours truly. Though both of us had fought hard to get back on our feet, and perhaps stretch further than before in our quest for
reality, truth, and life, we still recognized that losing a child would almost certainly require a lifetime of healing.
Meg was reaching out for her own rock to cling to, her own needs for security. And I guess if I had been in her shoes I would have been concerned after listening to my heart dying quips. So she was doing what she needed to do, and that certainly meant that fully trusting me and my commitment to our relationship, was not part of it. At least for the time being.
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I could tell that Meg was not warm towards me, that she was pursuing her own agenda,
but I simply and naively assumed, like I always did, that things would just sort of work themselves out. Especially since I knew I was changing. In relationship, though, as I was soon to learn, watching the other person change is often fraught with challenges, certainly more so when there are so many questions afloat, some of which point to a pretty deep crack or two. Meg needed to be cautious with me. And maybe even more accurately, and acutely, her heart had been affected, too. I didn’t blame her. And yet I figured that the changes in me would be noticed, and eventually remedy all of our issues. At least I was hoping so.
In late October, Meg’s sister, Amy, flew down to Costa Rica for a week or so. I guess it was kind of later on during Amy’s visit that I began to notice that Meg was, like I said, edging away from me, enough so that I decided to address that very issue on a Saturday morning, just a few hours before both Meg and Amy were to hop on a bus for San Jose and then fly to the United States.
“So what’s up?” I asked. “I can tell something’s on your mind, something different. You want to talk about it?”
She seemed a bit nonchalant. “Yeah. But it can wait.” She shuffled her feet and thought for about one second. “I guess we can talk about it now.”
“Okay,” I said.
“Well,” she said, “when I get back from the states, I was thinking maybe in January after the holidays, that you could go somewhere for about six weeks, and then I could go somewhere for about six weeks. That would give us three months apart, time for me to better hear my voice.”
Meg and I had been around each other, day in and day out, probably more than anybody I had ever known, for over thirty-one years, so time apart actually sounded good on the one hand. But on the other...
“So you want a separation?” I asked.
She shook her head. “No. Just time alone. Time to think. Time to hear my voice.”
I’m thinking, yeah, a time of separation.
“Okay,” I said.
And that was pretty much it. I drove them to the bus stop in Puerto Viejo and hugged her
goodbye, both of us throwing out I love you’s, both sensing that we were diving into uncharted waters. Scary waters, perhaps. Sad waters. They left, and I drove home to ponder.
Over the next couple of weeks I continued to immerse myself into meditation, breathing, and A Course in Miracles. I also seemed to be receiving downloads from somewhere. Downloads? you ask. Yes, downloads, as if my mind had been pried open and a multitude of stories began to pour in. I had begun writing short stories, mainly about grief and healing and the mystical/spiritual, for a few weeks already, but now they were bursting into my mind like an angry ocean through the walls of a rickety dam. So I wrote. And wrote. And continue to do so.
A few days before Meg was due to arrive back from the states I had an extraordinary experience. Why did this happen? My best guess is that the modalities I was practicing - the meditations (guided and unguided) and breathing exercises - and the studying I was doing, were both beginning to affect me on a subconscious level. I awoke in the middle of the night and instantly a movie began to play in my mind. I was awake and I knew it, and yet, without warning, it was as if a DVD had been inserted into a slot in my brain and the video began to play. This was not thinking. It was watching.
I was transported back in time to revisit several events in my first seven or eight years.
First, I was plopped down into the nursery at my father’s church in Macon, Georgia - Hillcrest United Methodist Church. I was two or three years old. The thing is, I was sort of like old Ebenezer Scrooge in A Christmas Carol, invisible and simply observing the action. With one caveat - I could watch myself as a little boy while feeling the emotions of that little boy. I was terrified! My parents had dropped me off at the nursery and I had felt utter abandonment. I watched as that little boy - me - freaked out and began screaming in fear, once again, feeling it within my own being as I lay in my bed watching. The nursery workers had to go get my dad, the pastor, to come and calm me down.
Next I found myself jumping down off of my bicycle looking down into a large culvert, still in Macon, when I was probably six years old (yeah, we used to could ride about anywhere we wanted to back in the day, learning to ride bikes at a young age, and with parents who trusted us to somehow make it home everyday). At any rate, I had gone to the culvert to find my olderbrother, Steve, who was down next to the water with a friend. As I stood by my bicycle, he reached down, picked something up, cocked his arm, and launched whatever it was in my direction. I felt a sharp pain on my left shin and quickly looked down. Blood was spurting from my leg and a sharp piece of glass was laying on the ground beside my foot - the bottom part of an old coca-cola bottle. I looked down at my brother and he was laughing. I jumped on my bike and sped home, blood flying everywhere, stunned and upset that he could have been so mean. I still have the scar.
I could sense that I could shut the video down whenever I wanted to, but I let it keep rolling.
Next I was on a swing at elementary school in Dawson, Georgia, where we had moved after Macon. It was my first day of school in our new town, third grade, and I was scared to death. School was already let out for the day and I was waiting for my mom, my face dug into the chains that held up the swing, crying, terrified. I was somehow convinced, I think, that this new place and the new way they did school was going to be my downfall. I saw the tears erupt from my young eyes, and at the same time, felt the fear in my old heart, over five decades later.
Many more scenes began to rush through my mind, staccato style, with just enough of a visual from each one to remind me that I was a deeply wounded human being. Eventually I halted the projector.
I lay there in my bed, confused as to why the movie had begun to play. As I relaxed and processed it all, I had the sense that I knew why the movie had come to me. Though I couldn’t be sure, I believed that I was being given a significant glimpse into much of the reason that I behaved and felt as I did during many of life’s episodes. It was obvious to me, for example, that
the mere possibility of abandonment could leave me in a state of panic, especially if it was of a foundational nature.
Ahhh, a state of panic. That proverbial corner was now directly in front of me, and though I was somewhat oblivious, seeing it but not recognizing its impact, I was just about ready to make that turn.
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Over the following two weeks I experienced a phenomenon that many others have also
been confronted with, but up until then I had somehow been spared from. For those who have suffered through panic attacks, for suffering it surely is, you know how frightening and debilitating they can be. Throughout my life, as far as I knew, I had never even come close, even during Hannah’s illness and death. Delirious, fragmented, sorrowful beyond words, agonizingly distraught, and so much more, and yet no panic attacks. But in late November of 2018, I would seemingly be confronted with the gates of hell, itself.
I would wake up in the middle of the night and feel sheer panic, with no warning, my mind frozen in a state of heightened anxiety and despair, as if my entire world had fallen apart and there was nothing I could do about it. I was destined for a life of utter loneliness, abandonment, and pain. Saturday night, November 24th, was the worst.
It also preceded the most amazing experience of my life.
Earlier in the day my favorite dog, a Rottweiler that I had become very attached to, died in my arms, and in a fashion that left my body humming and my emotions gyrating all over the place. His name was Tank, and I loved him dearly. He was so full of life and such a good boy.
We had detected heart worms far too late, apparently; yet we kept hoping that he might get better, that the medications he was taking would somehow work. They did not, and I sat with him in my lap in the back of my truck outside of the veterinarian's office for maybe ten or fifteen minutes (it felt like hours) as he went through what was obviously the throes of death. I was borderline delirious, crying profusely, clearly stumbling through his last minutes while re-living, at least partially, the death of my daughter. With a high degree of certainty, I believe this trauma took me back into the memories of Hannah’s last moments, and I simply had not recovered by the time I fell asleep that night.
And so, for the third night since Meg had arrived back home from the states on the 20th, I awakened from a deep sleep with my body humming as if I had been plugged into a powerful electrical socket, accompanied by a deep sense of loneliness and loss, my mind frantic. It was so profound that I wondered how I could live this way, and then realized that I did not want to live this way, that I could not live this way. I did not feel suicidal, per se, (or perhaps I was?) but certainly felt that I could not continue this way. I was devoid of rationality, or so it seemed, nothing but fearful thoughts bouncing psychotically around within my mind. I kept trying to slow my mind down and find some relief.
I woke Meg up and told her my predicament. I lay back down on the bed, on my back, grabbed her hand, and placed it over my heart. I held it there. I then did the only thing I could think of, the only thing that had given me the slightest touch of relief during the other two panic attacks. I knew that I needed to be present, in the moment, in the now, where there is no future or past, where all of our problems exist. I began to breathe through my nose, to force my breathingto slow down. In - feel the breath in my nostrils; out - feel the breath through my nostrils. In - out. Focus on the breath. In - out - in - out - in...
What happened next is impossible to fully describe with words. Impossible to describe period. As I became present, the most profound and remarkable experience followed. Time was suspended. Honestly, to tell it right, I would have to say that time did not exist, and not only did it not exist, had not existed.
As I lay upon my bed, fresh off of an episode of Life Sucks, I Might Want to End This Thing, I found that I was swimming in a sea of the most unfathomable bliss imaginable. Meg lay beside me, half-asleep, believe it or not, as I drifted into a world of beauty indescribable. We are limited here by our need to use words and labels, so that’s what I’m going to keep throwing out, but maybe it’ll help a little if you’ll also sort of allow yourself to let go and believe that God is beyond our words and labels and beliefs and everything else we have been trained to believe in while here in our 3-D world. I had a few brief moments of what I am forced to try to label with certain words and descriptions, and as the words flow onto the screen they feel inadequate.
For starters, there was no start. As I have tried to explain, it just was. There simply was no start to my experience. I had been deposited into timelessness in such a way that it had simply always been that way (and I inherently knew that it would always be so). It was sort of like waking up from a dream and realizing that you have been dreaming, back into reality. In fact, it felt exactly like that, except that it was more real. In other words, my life on earth seemed a blurry nothing, almost, compared to the depth of reality that I was immersed in.
I knew that I needed nobody. To be clear, I was aware that I was accepted fully by all that mattered (God, Creator, Source) to such a degree that I recognized that our perceived need of
some other person or persons (to complete us), or even thing or things, is an absolute, 100%, unquestionable illusion. Never have I felt so certain of anything in my life. The Creator of the universe accepted me with perfection and nothing could take it away. Nothing! This I knew, and still know, regardless of what anyone could throw at me from a religious or anti-religious standpoint. This realization eliminated my fear of abandonment, for I knew that it was impossible. Not impossible from a physical body standpoint, from that sticky emotional body thing we have going on while in our 3-D world, perhaps, but from an ultimate reality standpoint, which is, well...reality.
The peace that enveloped me was beyond what I had ever thought possible. A stunning sea of tranquility had embraced me within its life force of love, and pulsated all around me and within me. I was cocooned inside, and yet it was also within my being.
I lay there, still with Meg’s hand on my heart, floating in a sea of the most amazing combination of peace and love and acceptance that I could have ever even dreamed possible. And that would have been more than enough to make it the highlight of my life. But there was one more attribute to this experience that I have to share; in fact, the one attribute which coaxed out the only words that I spoke audibly during this time of absolute presence.
I’ve been around for a pretty good while on this earth, long enough to have raised four amazing children, remain married to a beautiful soul for more than three decades, as well as experience gazillions of things in life that make me grateful to be alive. All of them, every single one, lumped together and packaged, couldn’t begin to touch the beauty that I touched (or that dropped down and touched me). I began to speak audibly, into the ears of God, as it were, saying, “Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you...” On and on I went, a heart overflowing
with gratitude that exceeded what I thought gratitude could even elevate to, by a number that probably doesn’t exist. For the first time in my life, I truly understood what a thankful heart really was, what gratitude meant. I’m not sure how many times I spoke it, maybe ten or so, maybe fifty. But I wasn’t counting, and time wasn’t really happening anyway.
As I lay there after orally expressing my deep gratitude to my Creator I was certain that I would experience this bliss for as long as I remained awake. I somehow knew. I rested for a few minutes (though I’m not sure how long) in that spirit of love and peace and knowing, soaking it up, but I also instinctively knew that it would be gone once I fell back asleep, and would subsequently rise from my slumber. As I lay there I softly recalled a story that I had read of someone who had more than likely had the same thing happen to them, and that it had lasted for months afterward. I didn’t envy that person, but I knew that it would not be the same for me.
I figured that there was a significant purpose for me, a compelling reason that I had been immersed in such Love. I was humbled, not the slightest bit proud. Quite the opposite, in fact, marveling at the love of God that I could be allowed to receive such a taste of, what I have now come to believe is our eternal destiny. Why did I experience this? And why did it come seemingly attached to such a painful, humbling event - the panic attack? I can only speculate. But I believe that God was touching me, embracing me, enveloping me in love, because it is what I needed, and because this is happening with more regularity across the spectrum of humanity during these interesting days that we live in. And potentially because I was on such a desperate journey spurred on by my beautiful daughter. Or...well, I just don’t know why. But I do know that this experience has given me an anchor, an understanding that this world we see with our body’s eyes is illusionary and not to be trusted.
I have tried to share the story of what happened that night with a few people, to encourage others, mainly to be met with a change of subject. I understand. It’s not normal, difficult to process for many and alien to others. I get it.
Before I leave this, I would like to say one more thing about it. I am as close to certain as I can be that this place of being, this experience of joy and peace and love and acceptance and gratitude and more, more, more, awaits all of the Creator’s children. All of us! I realize that many of our beliefs, religions and otherwise, suggest something different to many, but I personally believe differently at this point. This experience only confirmed for me what I was beginning to see as our destiny, that the creations of a loving Creator would share a timeless bliss with this very Creator.
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Oh, how the beautiful, the mystical, the real seems to slip through our (mental) fingers as
if it is a mist that dissipates when the sun’s rays become intense enough. When I woke the next morning, the tingle of excitement was still with me, it’s true, and the desire to shout it from the mountain top was also there, and yet the beautiful experience itself had departed (though I sensed a remnant lurking), a forever memory that I knew I would never forget, but I no longer felt the intensity of at that moment. In other words, I knew what had happened and that it could not be stolen from me, yet the consuming bliss had softly faded away.
In fact, I had one more panic attack, the very next night, even.
Then, little by little, I began to settle back into what I will call a place of growth. Morning and evening meditations (guided and unguided), breathing modalities, and deeper into A Course in Miracles and other writings.
At this point in my journey, I had become certain of one thing - things are not as we see them. I had been allowed to peak behind the veil and steal a glimpse of what I now see as reality. Of the workings of the universe, as it were. This peek (peak?) alone opens the mind to a world far beyond the dream world of life on earth as most of us experience it, of the way that I have experienced it for almost all of my time here.
Undoubtedly, we have all asked those questions, haven’t we? The ones like why am I here? what is my purpose? is there really any meaning to all of this? and a million more. But because we are so busy, so educated, so propagandized, so saturated with beliefs that we have learned somewhere along the way and have honed to razor’s edge to protect our psyches, so fearful of losing our foundation, we trudge forward trying to squeeze as much pleasure as we can out of our years, and protect ourselves from the pains.
As I found out, no matter how hard you try, you simply do not have that type of control (in fact, I see the belief that we can control anything as an illusion). It is a forever losing game, one that we keep fighting in hopes that the tides will change, that fortune will smile on us with a life of at least some modicum of peace.
At least where it relates to this world we see with our body’s eyes.
