The IWALLK Essays - 7. Meaning in a Faraway Place

Across the rolling etherial void, Sparks still fly out in every direction. As the great First Source and Center makes contact with the human-minded surface of expanding spacetime, the infinite welding rod melts down and bead-bonds the relevant aspects of incomplete evolution to the inevitability of Universal completion. 

But it isn't happening just to allow my word-salad observations. For those of us who contemplate such things, this tension between process and finality seems paradoxical, since, in so many ways, it really isn't happening at all. On absolute levels it never needed to. You'd kind of have to “be there” to know either way. This cycle of eternity is not meant to be enigmatic. It just IS enigmatic. It is a mystery and it will never cease to remain mysterious to we human beings, as long as we beings remain human. So, why even mention any of this? Well, let me come back to that a little later.

First, as best I can, I need to recount what it was like for me in the Faraway Place that I visited while the beeping of heart monitors chased the flashing, graphic waveforms displayed on breathing machines. 

Once below a time...

Gentle winds swept over my face, although my face had seemingly gone extinct. Except for the quantum tunneling of my vision, I wasn't there in any substantive way. And, maybe the shifting of my own shadow was the wind? Whatever the case, I was quite comfortable in the colorful liquid gardens flourishing all around me. When I'd look at the flowers they'd bloom from only my attention. Everything was in superpostitional waves and my mind was collapsing them into shapes. When flowers did bloom, their edges appeared to become unstable, squeezing parts of themselves off into the air. The separated pieces would turn into other shapes and then faded back into invisibility. I was synesthetic—seeing the fragrances of these flowers, tasting their beauty. 

There was no floor, no ground, no foundation, but I was in an open room of some kind. I had seen it before—a little over 30 years ago. But, until now, the details had steadily faded into the uncertainty of my memory. There was no sky other than a Golden Orange Light and its sunset-like luminescence needed nothing more, as rays were coming in from every direction at once.

Most significantly, at rest in front of me, upon a simple throne of fruiting vines, sat the most beautiful person I'd ever seen. His skin had no lesser features (no freckles, no pores...actually, no marks at all) yet it was soft and radiated a rosy, visible warmth, especially when he smiled. I despair that I don't have the words to paint a more detailed portrait. There is nothing in my pre-surgical experience, nor in the experiences of anyone I've ever spoken with that rises to the level of comparison needed to describe this guy. He was incomparable. But he was not special in that place. He and I talked at great length about the things that had happened in my life. He was a counselor of some kind.

In this Faraway Place my mind was so clear that I could easily – sometimes uncomfortably – recall the fine details of long-ago and forgotten concerns. I came to grips with just how many times I had passionately fought for things that would have very little meaning in my now-present. 

Slowly the light level began to dim and straight shards of brilliant violet rays streamed in from the otherwise-arching horizon. Looking back on it now, there are big patches of time that I can't recall from this vision. Yet, I want to clarify how I experienced it in a bit more detail...

It was obvious to me that I was in a place I had been before. Yet, when I looked down to see parts of my body, it wasn't there. I was definitely able to view the scene around me in great detail. I remember it well and have contemplated painting it some how. The overarching feeling was one of familiarity. It was like the kind of dream where you recognize all the characters—know their entire backstories, despite never having met them in the waking world. When you awaken from such a dream all of that information is suddenly hidden. The good friends of your superconsciousness have yet to friend you at Facebook. That is how I felt about this place. The man to whom I spoke was familiar as the “kind” of person I had interacted with before, but I'd never met him personally. He was not human, but he was made out of visible matter and appeared voluntarily able to make himself visible to me. The last time I had been there it was to meet another kind of person...someone much grander.

This was different from a lucid dream, in that, I'd forgotten that my body was being worked on in a hospital somewhere else in the Universe, but I was fully conscious in the Faraway Place. I knew that where I was was more real than everyday life. I still feel that way.

It appears that the soul (or some kind of conscious quantum waveform) is able to entangle its sense of location to more than one place at once. In this way the soul can experience a Faraway Place via the Spark pulling a thread of consciousness to that place, while the rest of the semi-material parts of the evolving soul remain trapped within the confines of the fleshy, material life vehicle we call a “body,” no matter what is happening to that body. 

A break now for some metaphysics: The seat of consciousness (the “identity” or “self”) migrates from the material child brain of the animal body, to the semi material mind of the soul throughout a lifetime; this migration being proportional to the amount of wisdom gained. In an oversimplification (and something I will be returning to in a future essay): Wisdom (W) = Knowledge (K) + Experience (E). It is my sense that, for nearly everyone, a soul develops that is able to take over full consciousness upon material death of the body. No one is ever lost, unless he/she chooses not to exist anymore. 

The Spark presents the world to each of us as it was preplanned and co-planned by YOU and ME, from the so-called, “future.” 

Again, preplanned from the future. All that is left in order to turn these potentials into actuals is to allow the individual consciousness to experience the results of will-decisions offered by the Spark in its formal presentation of daily life. In this way wisdom becomes permanent when events “undergo the formality of actually occurring” [Alfred North Whitehead] and move the soul forward progressively in its quest to overcome the material body and thence, the material world. When I talk about wearing our souls on the outside, I'm not being figurative. I believe that in the rare case where a Spark (which is the highest form of non-personal “spirit”) has broken through most of the barriers to unity in the human mind, the soul can literally free itself from the body by fusing with said Spark. In this way death may actually be avoided, since there is now a new form of being. 

I learned, while in the Faraway Place, and by about the time that my unconscious body was being wheeled out of the operating room, that I still had the will power to stay there or return here. I was given the choice. It was the stereotypical near-death choice, except that I just wasn't dead yet. 

It was obvious to me though that I had to go back and finish living here in what I considered to be a duct-taped, discount-rack reality, called “21st Century Earth.” I knew I was going back, but couldn't remember exactly where I'd end up, until I opened my eyes while the breathing tube was still down my throat. At just that moment, an elaborate golden picture frame surrounded the frozen face of my beautiful counselor. Then it split like a cell over and over again, filling my whole field of vision with millions of variously sized picture frames. I knew these frames were metaphors, as my mind futilely attempted to save as much as possible from what I had just done and where I had just been. Then it was over.

I tried again and again to have the breathing tube removed, so that I might tell this strange tale. My sister watched me and tried several times to have the tube removed, to no avail. The pain of the tube and the inability to breath the air around me made me claustrophobic, and I continued to pass out. There was no consciousness during this time. My body was stretched to the point of desperation, so much so, that it needed to shut off the consciousness in order to save energy. I'd made my choice, though I was still dubious about it. I was **back** for what would be my third chance at completing my life. It couldn't have happened without my approval. I've come to believe (but am not sure) that my counselor in the Faraway Place, was assigned to turning me back.

That is all fine and good. And – as you've read in prior essays – I'm not overjoyed with my decision. But, I will learn to do what is necessary to finish whatever I have started here in the corporeal world—the world of the flesh. 

Now let me draw you back to the current moment. I'm not going to talk about my physical situation anymore, except to say that I have been given about ten more years—which is good! (I would be ashes on the ground somewhere if I had not decided on surgery. By the time you read this it will be exactly three months since my bypass procedure.)

Despite not healing perfectly in my sternum, I am still strong. My heart functions at about 35% efficiency, but it is well oxygenated now. I have been battling a mental bombardment of stupidity. In other words, I am pulling myself back from the momentum of WANTING to die. I begin counseling on the 9th of January for this.

I'm alone right now, except for a kitty named, Bridget. My mother has gone down to Florida for two months and I am looking after her house and kitty. The cat is all over me all day. And I don't mind the company. I love her. She is my constant companion.

UPDATE: I have a lot of music to do now. My first song, one from the viewpoint of my Mom and myself (“Herx Sing”), is going to be done soon. I encourage people to learn more about dementia and amnesia. It is both an irony and an important lesson to me that the psychic settling down from my own apparent problems with post general anesthesia (in which I myself experienced dementia), influences my reporting on the subject. But I can't do anything else.