Settling

My sense of time had been suspended. Days flowed into one another with only the faintest recognition in the back of my head of where the calendar stood. Weeks slipped past with no one day appreciably improved over the previous. With the copious amounts of time I spent in either sleep or free-float consciousness, I had only the most tenuous connection with the world inhabited by my parents and friends.

It is difficult to write of and convey the sense of how drastically my time perception had been altered. For language relating events in a narrative form assumes a continuous timeline and a logical, sequential unfolding; it assumes past and future; discrete events begun and terminated, spans of time; the assumptions are woven so tightly into the structure of language that there is no other way that would commonly be understandable to express the reality. There was a very strong sense throughout the period that as the spirit poured through me, the very fabric of time and causality were loosened and pliable. The previous statement is an expression in the terms that you or I would understand it from our everyday, rational, and verbal states of mind. But such a statement is meaningless when heard from within the transformative process. From my stance, the same understanding would be expressed: “Now. Only Now. Relentlessly, continuously Now. There is no ‘span of time‘…just the moment, born, arising, declining and dying, even as the next arose to take its place, with no appeal to any other moment.” There was no “was,” there was only “is” and “isness.” 

And while we in our usual states of consciousness cannot envision not having the possibility to simply turn our minds to memories or anticipations, such was the intensity and pressure of the spiritual force that, like an insistent and intimidating drill sergeant, it did not permit one’s attention to be diverted. Attention was entrained, so to speak. Memories, reflections, and anticipations, after all, were thoughts, and as thoughts, they were pressured out or burned up if I tried to engage them. Thoughts and memories simply did not have enough reality, enough substance, to hold their stances in the hurricane force of the spirit unleashed. They could generally not get into my personal “field” at all; if they did manage to enter, they did not last long in the environmental conditions. If one has been unlucky enough to experience some personal tragedy in one’s life, one may have noticed how time slows down after the event occurs or news is received and one’s selfhood is unceasingly present as a source of grief and misery for a period of time. There are no diversions; there is no escape from the awful fact one is forced to come to terms with. Imagine such a state raised to a high and unrelenting degree of intensity for two uninterrupted months, where each second insists that it be given your full attention. Though I was only incapacitated for two and a half months, when I became functional again, it felt as if I had slowly come out of a coma and several years had passed.

The past and the future seemed to be collapsing, falling together and consumed by the Almighty Now.  I had a vague sense of walking a narrow path bounded by these two converging and impassable walls — past and future, both funneling me into an explosive confrontation with the unavoidable present. The apocalypse was so imminent, so close, that it became necessary moment by moment to “extend the game.”… that is, to delay the apocalypse by making in turn the decision that would buy me another five minutes, another hour, another day.  In fact, this was exactly how I came to know which decisions were the right ones (by the prosaic standards of the world-field, at least) in that time. The circumstances requiring a decision evolved, the need for decision was birthed out of the Now, and the way through the terror was consistently to make the decision that would get me to the next moment — not what would be right one month or six months down the line. 

In the early days, events and turns of fortune proceeded so rapidly and profoundly that it was practically impossible to plan ahead.  Life had to be taken day-by-day, moment-by-moment in some cases.  A number of instances illustrated this. I could not make the decision to leave Phoenix with my parents until late in the weekend, the day before the flight.  Back in my hometown, discussions ensued about family friends who could be of assistance, and the timing of their entry into the problem.  One by one, they were brought in as needed, but there was no wholesale recruitment.  Father Hardin’s involvement, Father Tash’s involvement, the timing of the medication intervention, the homeopathic consultations — all had the feel of an intricately choreographed dance, not in my hands, but dictated by the present day.  This was the further boldly highlighted by the synchronicities occurring on regular basis and symbolically heralded by events such as walking into a local chapel for a confession and prayer session just as the noon bells tolled.

But in addition, the phenomenon had imposed its own subjective dictates on how time could be used. There arose a sense that it was a very great wrong in the unfolding process to make any decisions before the time was clearly right to do so.  This recognition of the wrongness carried with it an imperative sense, one of the few and perhaps the only imperative dictated to me from outside.  It was as if linear time was a construction all rolled up, and in the process of being rolled out, the events or circumstances to be dealt with would emerge from the roll at certain predetermined instants.  Then was the time to deal with the problems — not before.  I cannot emphasize the imperative and commanding quality of this enough. To go against this flow had the feeling of being a sin – a lack of trust in the evolving present.

Through the months of January and February, I was forced to live in the rapidly birthing / rapidly passing away present with no plans for the future and the past consumed behind me.  Coupled with the daily threat to my personal identity, it was as if my entire existence hung by a tenuous thread.  Annihilation seems certain — identity, past, future, the entire framework of all I had known and ever known in space and time.  As late as the end of February, my return to Phoenix had not been addressed or planned for.

There were two distinct harbingers that the process was beginning to settle to the point where I could resume an individual’s existence.  Sometime in late February, it occurred to me that while I still was unable to see improvement from day to day, a retrospective look might yield another perspective. And when I did look, I began to discern a clear improvement. Judging my recovery by where I stood from weekend to weekend gave me the first clear indication that I was making progress. One evening after my father returned from his day’s work, the television was turned to a news channel, and a TV roundtable editorial program began. Within a few moments, I began to verbally disagree with the statements on the program and engaged my father in informal debate about the merits of the positions presented. He took up the debate for a few moments before he stopped and said in mild surprise, “Well, I guess you’re starting to feel better if you can debate politics now.” And I realized that he was right. We shared wry smiles.

The end of my incapacitation was marked by my return to Phoenix, which occurred in mid-March of 2001. The spiritual illness had lasted ten weeks, and indeed, it was only in the final two weeks of the period that there was a rapid enough upturn and a clear functional improvement that such an option could be considered a viable choice.   In an act of faith in early March (and the first occasion of moving beyond making a decision that merely got me to the next moment), I made plane reservations and began to line up an apartment (my lease had expired in my absence, and my folks had spent a weekend in Phoenix storing my personal belongings), but even then plans were not firm until after my last visit with a doctor two days prior to departure. The effects of the opening were clearly still present and to cause adaptation problems for much of the following year.   But I had come through the worst of the process and was back on my feet, albeit with an altered consciousness.

Part of my recovery was the reappearance of a sense of humor about the entire episode. Shortly after returning to Phoenix, I sought help through an Employee’s Assistance Plan to line up medical monitoring of a remaining prescription. In speaking with a counselor of the plan for the appropriate referral, she went through the usual litany of questions about my “problem.” Depressed? No. Marital problems? No. Substance abuse? No. And on and on. So finally she asked me to describe what the problem was. As I started, I began with, “I wish it were so conventional…then maybe I’d know what to do about it.” I explained just enough so that she got the flavor of the problem, then she made her referral. While she was doing her paperwork, she handed me a list of groups that met at no cost through the Franciscan Renewal Center – Alcoholics Anonymous, Incest Survivors Support Group, basic group counseling, Tough Love for parents with troubled teens…a whole flyer of groups for one problem or another. I scanned rapidly through it, and started to chuckle. She looked at me quizzically. I said, “I don’t see my class here…where’s the group for ‘Casualties of Transformational Impulses?’”

To this day, more than two years later, the physical effects and the aftermath are still living within me. I was to find that it took about six months to learn to think again with the efficiency I had formerly; early in the period, it became necessary to employ a circuitous method of reasoning. My ears still maintain a high-pitched ringing sound more often than not, a sound that I had never made acquaintance with prior to the opening. I occasionally get recurrences of the gripping headaches at the base of my skull in the back of my head. There is still occasional sensitivity to magnetic and electrical fields. Once or twice a year, I have a full-blown eruption of all of the symptoms I experienced in 2001 for a period of 24 hours or so…including dry heaves, headache, loudly ringing ears, and alteration of consciousness. At times, these are associated with a transient and mild illness that I have picked up along the way. For reasons I don’t understand, sickness seems to antagonize the now more or less latent force living inside me, and it emerges completely at those times. Curiously, when it does emerge, it both intensifies the feeling of illness and shortens the duration of the sickness. Whereas formerly, I might have suffered at a low-grade level for three to seven days, now I suffer intensely for the span of a day, and then it rapidly passes away. But I would be misleading the reader if I neglected to mention the benefits that are now arising from the state. While the scales have not yet been balanced on the suffering/well-being scale, the trend is clearly upward. And the foundation is based on something unassailable, a sense of inner presence that I have not experienced at any earlier time in my life. I have not experienced rapture, bliss or ecstasy, but I feel the intimations of those states in the background of my being, like a horizon lit by a sun that has not yet risen into the sky. I have experienced deep Peace and Stillness, and there have been several other interesting and promising developments.

© Copyrighted Material.  All Rights Reserved.