The IWALLK Essays - 5. Why the Ghost Returned to the Machine

I've been studying up on the psychological shit that happens after open heart surgery. What I'm going through is subtle, in a way, but bizarre in many more ways. Latest stats indicate that 20-40% of people recovering during this kind of post surgical experience face anxiety, and/or depression, and/or fragile emotional states and/or dementia. I apparently am one of them. But I hope this essay causes folks to think before cutting a pigeon hole for me to stick my head into. 

There are a MILLION different post surgical experiences out there, recorded in great detail. Some match mine. Some have only certain aspects that match mine, and others just don't, and I wonder about the fitness of the minds of those folks before they even got heart disease. Anyhow...

So far, in the statistical medical research of post surgery like mine, it appears that changes in so-called "personality" seem to be either temporary or non-existent. But there are other explanations for behavior and “feelings” that skip over personality and go straight to emotional and chemical changes that have largely left the personality in tact, while also leaving the FEELINGS in tatters. (Please recall that "personality" is probably the most vague concept in all of psychology, besides the presence - or not - of a non-material mind {consciousness/soul}, separate from the brain.)

The first factor that seems to determine whether someone faces psychological difficulties is the pre-surgery state of mind. In this regard, I am an outlier. As is written in great detail here at my Facebook profile page (scroll down and see for yourself), I was feeling quite good about everything right before the surgery. Never had I felt such love and support from both my family AND friends, but also I felt as though I had wrapped up my life and tied it with a little golden bow—thence, ready to literally die and move on into the Golden Light. It would only take one cut in the wrong direction. No surgeon is perfect! I was NOT depressed, probably for the first significant amount of time since my childhood! Up to that point, I had never been a happy person. I'm a damn good faker though. As a child I had a smile that could melt the Washington off a quarter. But I have flirted with suicide and enjoyed suicidal ideation for all of my adult life. I've pretty much hated myself and felt that the Universe would be far better without me in it, every single day, since about my 8th birthday. This should not shock anyone who really knows me or has read my "stuff." And if it does I can't blame you. Wishful thinking is not a crime on your part.

But before the surgery, I was so sure that I was going to die (and would probably be in the process of dying on this very day, without surgery), that I was almost giddy about it! 

I was primed and ready to go. I know what's on the other side. I was more than happy to die now. My whole life seemed designed to make sense because of it. And, I've been waiting for my life to add up to something...well, something more than nothing. This was my opportunity to make the story into...a legend. People didn't respect all that I had done. But you can be goddamn fucking sure that people DO respect a martyr. It's the oldest game for being part of history since there have been games, or history. Just ask Jesus, Gandhi, or John Lennon. 

This seemed like my big chance to be free. And, as you will someday learn, I WAS freed from a terrible choice I made over 30 years ago, but even that profound spiritual liberation just pales compared to the general feeling of disappointment for not either reaching the Mansion Worlds of Light, or fading into the blackness of nothingness; both of which I was well-prepared for by the time tunnel vision was pulling me out of myself in the operating room.

I am pretty sure that waking up with a breathing tube in my deflated lungs, a catheter up my dick and a balloon in my sore bladder, an IV in my neck, my arm AND my wrist (just in case), a wired up breast bone that had been sawed in half (can you smell the spattering heated blood from the saw?), and a pacemaker sewed onto the skin of my belly, delivering painful electrical pulses into my poor, worn-out heart (none of this - by the way - was explained to me before surgery) was a pretty sharp reminder that I was back in the shitty human world of whales choking on plastic and reality TV presidents! There's no hell greater in its brutality and excruciation than this world. I know that for an absolute certainty now. 

The fading vestiges of my experiences in the place where my soul went during surgery were so poisoned and debauched by the extreme discomfort of the breathing tube once consciousness was returning that it ruined a once in a life/death-time experience. The medical staff refused to remove the tube as I begged and gestured to do so. I could have told my sister who watched all of this, about the vision of that Place that faded away as I was forced to pull myself back into the “machine” of my animal body. 

My life as a “whatever I am,” was coming back like a rerun of the worst Friends episode you've seen a hundred times and hate the station for replaying. And, there was a stupefying, yet sickening, satisfaction to the “been there and done that already” reality that was bringing me back here to do that shit all over again, in front of a bunch of people who are barely half awake and don't give two fucks about my existential crises, here, now that I'm back back in hell. So I thought.

Through the false lens of Hydromorphone, Oxycodone, and Lorazepam, I had a brief couple days of optimism. But the tired out blabbing of people who have never experienced what I was going through, telling me to “breath in through the nose and out through the mouth” whenever I literally screamed because couldn't lie in a bed to sleep, nor wipe my ass without feeling like my ribcage was being slowly ripped apart and wired back together over and over again, was supposed to comfort and calm me? All it did was remind me that I am ultimately just a heart-broken, tear-stained, worn out, piece of Universal detritus who couldn't even die successfully! Fuck, can't I do anything right?

Okay, that was perhaps unnecessarily intense. But that is the point I'm trying to make. The intensity of all regret, pain and suffering, is couched next to a man who has been given the miracle of a “second chance” (honestly, it was my forth chance) to fulfill a life self-designed before I was ever even a twinkle in either of my parents' eyes.

I know now (basically) what happened while I was away from my body. Besides being liberated from a deal with the devil, I knew that I was lying to myself before surgery. I knew somehow that I would survive, but was hoping not to. And, before any of you think I was just trying to “escape the realities of the human condition,” let me point out, that I deserved it. I've paid my fucking dues and a little bit extra for a bunch of other people too. 

I AGREED to come back. It is my fault that I am alive. It is the reciprocal event to the fact that it is/was my fault that I almost died! Do you see? It changes one of the stupidest and redundant sayings of my father into something amazingly profound: “The job isn't done until it's done.” I am the living metaphor for that statement.

And, as I heal my body for the next ten years or less (that's the statistical period before I begin to have problems again), I'll tell it far and wide... I was alive as a child, wanted to die as an adult, almost made it there, but was talked into being spiritually responsible for myself, and now I'm back. In the process my soul migrated a little more toward the outside. While, the Spark is much deeper within me, much more fundamentally controlling my thoughts than ever before.

Yet, with all of this complaining, I still can't escape the Truth: It was me all along! I planned it all out before the earth was even formed--as we have all done with our lives. Should I be so surprised that the day has finally come to publicly reflect on that—to finally grow up? I am back in order to finish my self-assignment. Pretty simple concept! I couldn't kill myself, since my Universe IS myself.

There is nothing else more important for ME to do. I want to spend the rest of my days here talking to you about why we are ALL here. 

But I will tell you, to each of your individual souls... WE are ONE thing. You are not separate from my story. The wet eyes that gaze upon this very sentence – YOUR eyes – are meant to see through mine and you are meant to express yourself through the typing of my fingertips. It is the end of history. And you can judge me by my experience all you want. But afterward all that, I am not here for you and never have been. Don't you see how you have been me? I am your mirror. And no intelligent person walks FORWARD using only a mirror. 

It is OUR story now. When I finally allow myself to find Paradise—the Center of Infinity, it will be with your hand in mine.