Whoa! That was Weird

For some of us it just doesn’t cut the muster to suggest that life and this thing we experience as consciousness is nothing more than a trick of electro-chemical machinations of the physical brain. Admittedly, there are a lot of charlatans out there that do a disservice to those of us that have had legitimate experiences that point to the strong possibility, to the point of being a high probability, that all things conscious are more than the sum of their physical parts.

Based on my interior, subjective experiences that are personally empirical to me, I know that there is something afoot, cosmically speaking. Life and existence are synonymous with mystery.

Let me tell you someone else’s story, less you should think that I have lost my mind and taken flight with a low flying flock of loons.

A friend of mine accidentally poisoned herself, a direct cause of eating some bad oysters. She was rushed to the hospital where she narrowly avoided being delivered D.O.A. Personnel from the ambulance rushed her into the emergency room. She was wheeled into a room where she was quickly hooked up to IV’s, a catheter, and other machines.

The worst part of it for my friend was witnessing, as she hovered about the ceiling, the hospital staff cutting her favorite designer jeans off of her. Watching the whole event taking place, outside of her own body, she tried to yell, “Not the jeans–they cost a fortune!” No one listened.

Dying from botulism, she described the feeling of approaching death like being enveloped in a heavy black velvet. The veil of death lifted, and she experienced a buoyancy and lightness of being like she had never before.

“I knew I had been out of my body, hovering over myself, watching the ER folks strip me down to apply electro shock and start liquids and oh gosh… just all this stuff they do. I knew that the nurse who was taking my pulse (It was gone!) was going to have a new baby and that she would not loose it like she had lost one before. That was the big ‘thing’ I got.”

Oh, what the hell…here is one of my “weird” experiences. On a Saturday afternoon a few years back, I laid down to take a nap. Somewhere between being awake and asleep a vivid image popped into my mind.

It was like a photo–a freeze frame of my nephew. He was lying on the ground, his eyes huge with pain, and his mouth wide open like he was yelling. He was holding his left arm with his right hand. The image was so pronounced and defined, I couldn’t shake it for the rest of the day. Later that evening I learned from my wife that the little punk had fallen off a jungle jim and broke his arm.

I laughed. My wife admonished me that it was not really a laughing matter. I started to explain, but thought better of it, less she should suspect I had taken flight with a low flying flock of loons vigorously flapping my arms, soaring over the horizon into whacky-land.

Just from that one experience, remotely viewing my nephew lying on the ground with a broken arm, I know that consciousness is not inextricably bound to one’s physical location. If that hypothesis is incorrect, then that was one hell of a coincidental hallucination created by the misfiring of bio-electro-chemical operations, in an ultimately non-conscious brain in a non-conscious universe, at the exact same moment wherein what I imagined was happening WAS happening, miles away. Go figure.

It’s from this perspective that I look upon the all-or-nothing debate between religious-fundamentalist and atheist.

If I am completely nuts, at least I am functionally insane like everyone else.

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