…Until the Spirit is poured upon us from on high

Isaiah 32:15

The Opening

January 2nd, 2001 before sunup. The start of a new millennium’s work.  I had hardly slept at all the previous night, and it was rare that I was up and heading to work at this hour.  But my mind would not let me rest, and the last few days had seen an increasing sense of foreboding come over me.

I drove south on Central Avenue, worried and scattered in thought, fretting over how to contend with latent forces that seem to have awakened from a healing session two days previously, and an entangled situation with the healer who had catalyzed those forces.  A traffic light ahead of me changed from green to yellow, then red, and I slowed to a stop.  I was idling adjacent to the magnificent structure of St. Francis Xavier Catholic Church.  The significance of this location did not strike me until many months later. Now, as I sat waiting for the light to change, there was a sudden change in the atmosphere in the cab immediately over my head.  My ears began ringing loudly, my vision began to swim, and I had the sense that an invisible blanket of energy was manifesting and lowering itself down over me.  I became very afraid.

The light changed and I resumed my trip southward on Central.  The swimming vision and the ringing ears did not disappear; they persisted and deepened. I drove faster, almost on the verge of a panic.  I arrived at work a few minutes later, the fright growing steadily inside me.

I found my way to a restaurant adjacent to our office to get a cup of coffee before heading to my desk.  There, I met two of my co-workers sitting at a table, who invited me to sit and join them.  Conversation was casual on their part, but whenever I contributed, I could barely mask my apprehension and anxiety.  A feeling that I had walked into a trap that would not let me out alive compounded the anxiety. 

A few days before, I had received news that a former supervisor, three years younger than I, had been diagnosed with terminal cancer and was given less than six months to live.  Just a couple of days prior, this bad news was compounded in hearing that my sister had been diagnosed with a melanoma that would require excision.  I was concerned for my supervisor, and worried for my sister, but until a few minutes previously, I had not felt personally at risk. Now I felt squarely in the crosshairs of death. I heard the figurative sound of two massive steel doors swing irrevocably shut behind me and felt now there was no way out.

Why was this? I was in no physical danger, nor did I expect to be any time in the near future. On the face of it, the feeling appeared to be nothing more than unwarranted paranoia. But there was no denying the underlying feeling. Death and evil seemed to both be stalking close upon my heels, looking for the first opening to pounce.

Coffee concluded, we went upstairs to begin work for the day, but I was having a difficult time of it. The panic bubbled just below the surface, making concentration on the routine events of the day impossible. I found it intolerable to sit for any length of time in my cube; sitting made me feel vulnerable, as if I wasn’t doing enough to protect myself. I began to pace aimlessly around the floor, trying to piece together little errands to have some apparent reason for my increased movement. My focus deteriorated even further. I became more and more consumed by the thought that I needed help fast, that the seconds of my life were ticking away and I was watching them trickle and drop between my fingers. My thoughts returned to St. Xavier’s Catholic Church: there was my refuge; that was the place I needed to get to before all hell broke loose. I was not a member of Xavier’s. In fact, I had not attended any church for a number of years. But something was urging me to get there with all possible haste. My hearing and vision were still quite affected by the ongoing ringing and swimming sensations. About 10:00 am, I told my supervisor that I was not feeling well and departed work. The church was perhaps a mile and a half north of the workplace, and I made my way quickly there and found my way into the parish offices next to the church, where I asked to speak to the priest.

A few minutes later, the priest came out and invited me into his office. He asked what had brought me to him today, and with a  quavering voice, I shared my fears and the precarious circumstances. At the conclusion, I asked him for a protective prayer, and a blessing with Holy Water, something I had not experienced since I was baptized as an infant. In a low-key, calming, and steady voice, he prayed over me in his office as my eyes welled up, asking particularly that the blessing of discernment of motives be bestowed upon me. He concluded his prayer, and we stepped next door to a small chapel, where he retrieved a small chalice of Holy Water and performed a blessing over me with it. His concluding and comforting words were, “The church next door is open now if you wish to go over there and pray.”

It was with some reluctance that I left his presence, feeling that I really needed to be around people, particularly people who had consecrated their lives to something beyond the mire I felt I was drowning in. The main church’s side door was only a few feet from the office exit, and I stepped over to it immediately after leaving the parish office, swung open the door and stepped inside.

The huge cavernous interior of the church was dimly lit, mostly by ambient lighting originating outside and filtering through the stained glass windows. Above the altar, a large floodlit representation of Christ on the cross hung in silence. No one else was present. I slid into a pew at the back of the side alcove, and leaned forward to begin to pray. Within seconds, I was sobbing and grieving audibly, and praying in an earnestness that I had never before experienced in my life. Wordlessly, I presented my personal being, my poverty to the Source of all Goodness beyond me and asked for deliverance from the sense of evil and impending annihilation I felt so closely upon my heels.

I felt a weight gather over my head, and some dimly-remembered but now clearly sensate subtle partition at the crown of my head was haltingly, yet forcibly, swung open – whether from my yearnings and efforts, from the weight or a combination, I still do not know – and an onslaught of Substance and Force poured in through the crown of my head. My head shook from the force, and my body trembled on the pew kneeler. With a weight reminiscent of water and the feeling of standing directly under a waterfall, the spirit poured into me without check of any kind.

The opening in my head grew wider, and the Force rushed in more and more powerfully. The energy burned as it packed itself down into my body. It flowed in torrents down my spine, and gave the sensation of pressurizing it to a painful degree. I felt I was burning on the inside, from the core outwards. I was dreadfully frightened.  What was happening? What was this Force – was it evil, was it good? Why does this appear to be getting worse instead of better? I knew how to do nothing but to continue to pray, and to pray more fervently. I sought release from the phenomenon, and felt I was being sucked away down a maelstrom drain, my hand outstretched towards God, but out of reach. As my fervent prayers continued, the shaking of my head, which had initially been from side-to-side, gradually changed to a slight up-and-down nodding, which then rapidly amplified to the verge of violence. My fright was overwhelming. Every fear that was still held in check was at once ripped free from its moorings and inflated to full-blown terror. I felt more and more uncomfortably, even painfully, expanded, inflated, as if I was about to burst out of the sheath of my self. I was feeling acute pain in subtle faculties, organs, and systems that I did not even know I had, that had been previously hidden and unknown to me. It was analogous to having acid injected into the bloodstream. Something that had always been present, but unnoticed because it blended so well in the background of my being, was suddenly writhing and acutely on fire.

Some time later, feeling impregnated in a sense, I pulled myself unsteadily to my feet and walked out the side door I had entered, where I collapsed to a seat on the top step of the entry. By the clock, I had been in the church for two hours. By my perception, there was an abrupt discontinuity of time, as if the perception that tracked time was not even sure it was the same perception any longer. When I had walked in, I had been one person. Now, walking out, I was no longer that person. A birth, perhaps a mutant birth, was underway, and there was no way to stop or reverse the process that was unfolding in me. I felt drunk and heavy with the weight of the influx, like a water balloon filled to the point of bursting.  As I sat in stillness, and moved my head periodically, I could feel a huge, heavy, burning energetic weight stretched perhaps ten feet over my head move over me, mimicking my head movements. It felt as if I had grown a massive cobra’s hood, and I could feel the extension of this weight coming down through my head and extending well down into my spine. The spine itself continued to be painfully pressurized, and burning. I could also feel a cocoon of energy enveloping my entire body that radiated heat and fire and seemed to be alive.

Every so often, I would burst into short crying jags. Though the active influx I had experienced inside the church had ceased, there was no doubt that my crown was still wide open and the process was only in a temporary and precarious abeyance. Every time I burst into tears, there was a strong sensation that the emotional release acted as a signal for the cocoon to take in more energy around me. More than just a signal, in fact, there appeared to be a kind of energetic respiration of some sort, that the exhalation of held emotions was simultaneous to the inhalation of the radiant cocoon, and served to pressurize the entire cocoon even further. Gradually, I became aware that even my basic respiration was aggravating the situation…each breath served to pump more and more spirit into my overloaded cocoon, like a bellows on a fire, and the exhalations were doing nothing to relieve the pressure. There was no end in sight for this process. My fear intensified. I worried about possession, about damnation. I worried about the weight hanging over my head…the image of a cobra had occurred to me even then, with all of the negative connotations that go along with snakes, and I fretted that I was turning into a demiurge or demon walking the face of the planet. My mind ran amuck with horrifying ideas…that somehow I had been betrayed and my soul bought in an exchange I had not even been aware of.. Words I had recently heard floated around my mind, mocking me…”divine madness”…”the gift has been given.”

The ordeal had begun.

Many months later, reading excerpts of letters from Sri Aurobindo, an Indian sage and philosopher of the early 20^th century, I ran across the following accounts, the first markers I encountered that affirmed that the path I had been swept down had been trod before:

It is the universal experience of sadhaks that force or consciousness or Ananda like this first come from above – or around – and presses on or surrounds the head, then it pierces the skull as it were and fills first the brain and forehead and then the whole head and descends occupying each center till the whole system is full and replete. Of course, there are, or can be, preliminary rushes occupying the whole body for a time or some part of the system most open and least resistant to the influence.

Quiet, quiet, and more quiet, calm strength, calm gladness are what is needed in mind and nerves and body as a basis for the siddhi – precisely because the Force, the Light, the Ananda that come down are extremely intense and need a great stillness in the body to bear and support.

And further:

That [shaking of the head] sometimes happens when the force is coming down. It must be allowed to pass off as the body becomes more quiet and assimilative. 

But, as noted, this confirmation was several months in the future. At the time, I feared I was losing my mind and the annihilation was underway.

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