| | I suppose I already know the answer to this question, but I wanted to type it out anyway and get some feedback from a group of people I've come to trust with this kind of thing. This is my first post here, by the way, and the first time I'll have described this experience in writing.
As a kid, I'd lay in bed in the dark before falling asleep and watch innumerable, colorful little dots dance around my room. It wasn't till I was about 8 or 9 that I realized these dots were part of my visual apparatus, that they were there when I closed my eyes, and were also there and in basically the same orientation when I moved my eyes around. I didn't have to follow them with my eyes, they'd just flow around and do their own thing. So it's like, what am I really looking at? It's more like these things are somehow "behind" my vision or part of the visual field itself than an object of vision. It was fascinating and fun. The more I focused, the smaller dots I'd see, and the more they'd take on a definite color: a violet hue, with red and bluish hints.
In my room, in the dark, about 10 years old and following the dots, I start thinking about God stuff, which was something I thought about often. Specifically the hereafter, and how long we would be there. It was an eternity we're talking about, after all. I thought, Wow that's a long time: after a million years, you'd have an eternity left. After a billion billion years, you'd still be sitting there singing or whatever and you'd still have forever to go. The time frame kept expanding, and suddenly something changed. Now it felt REAL. I had been pondering this question intellectually till then, keeping myself at a safe distance from the truth of my situation, which now presented itself. The situation is that this very world I was in is endless, that I'm in it, that I have never not been in it, and can't escape it in sleep, in forgetfulness, or even in death. That was the weird part: I knew somehow that death was no escape. I don't know why this was such a big deal, since I hadn't truly believed in an afterlife, but I began to feel a fear that I had never known till then, with a set of feelings that I can only describe as crushing and blasting, and a sense of being imprisoned in the universe with nowhere to go, just wanting to forget. I was wimpering pitifully, in pain, eyes wide with recognition, just wishing this would go away. If you've seen Michelangelo's painting of The Condemned Man at the Sistine Chapel, you'll have a perfect portrait. Strangely enough, I had been thinking about heaven.
The only way I felt I could calm down and deal with this prospect of eternity would be if the universe were to wink out and die, but without ever having known that it had already been reborn infinitely many times. Total memory wipe. Maybe we could figure it out while we were alive, but since it's too crushing to know this and too much of a burden to live forever, we could just forget, and could wake up fresh and naive.
The fear passed, and all I wanted was to hear human voices and see a television and artificial lights for the distraction, so I stumbled downstairs to the kitchen. My mom took one look and asked me if I was alright. I answered that I was just thinking about things I didn't want to think about.
Since then, I've often felt kind of like an alien. It' s just so hard to describe, and obviously you can't give someone a taste of your inner life. I'd say my dominant attitudes toward this experience have been continued shock, overweening pride at having glimpsed The Truth!, combined with worry that it would come back, but with a desperate, almost masochistic need to re-experience it. Not the content of the experience itself, but the associated crushing, blasting, REALNESS feelings, which I seem to have incorporated into my criteria for the "truth" of an experience. I've had them return a couple times since then, and each time, when I'm in the midst of it, I wonder why the hell I ever wanted to feel them again. Funny, never thought much about this fact, but I never really looked at the colorful, tiny, innumerable dots after that.
There've been others, but the first one feels like a pivotal moment in my life, and I definitely haven't gotten over it, and have felt alternately proud, embittered, and confused by it for like 20 years now. I feel like I saw too much too soon, and I'm afraid sometimes it fucked with my development as a person. Again, I'm probably answering my own question just by the fact that I ended up finding Daniel's work and joining DhO, but I'd really love to hear from someone with some perspective on all this. I'm really grateful to anyone who's read this whole thing. |