A Spiritual Evolution

More than ever I believe in this notion of evolution throughout a lifetime, that we actually develop into new selves as we progress.  When I read the posts I published on this blog almost a year and a half ago, they seem written by an entirely different person.  In December of 2012, I had recently finished my book and was filled with an excited optimism about publicizing it.  Today I smile at a naïve sort of confidence in that voice – a childish sort of “Look at ME!” that I’ve since lost.  I had no idea that within a week of that last post, a lifequake would strike and take out many structures by which I knew my world.

I’d already told my mom that addiction memoirs were best left unread by parents.  But when I told my siblings about the book, they downloaded it within hours and read the entirety within days – sadly, not to support me, but to confirm their conviction that I was a self-aggrandizing twit.  I had know my family’s perspectives differ greatly from mine on the nature of alcoholism, the worth of Twelve Step programs, and the plausibility of paranormal experiences.  What I did not know was that their perspective condones war on any transgressor who breaks from what they feel to be right.  Two family members posted a mocking Facebook queue ridiculing the book’s typos, followed by multiple condemning “reviews” on the book’s website: “This was a straight-up 570 page masturbation session.”  A series of emailed flamers landed in my inbox like burning crosses, capped off by demands for individual apologies.  I was a liar, a narcissist, a sadist, pathetically in need of approval, and willing to make up lies about deaths in the family in hopes of selling books.

Now, if you knew me, you would know I lack a thick skin.  In fact, I battle with self-worth as it is, so aggressive accusations cut me to the quick.  I knew no way to defend myself.  At an intellectual level, I understood that my siblings were acting out in patterns classic for adult children of alcoholics.  I also sensed that the very fact that we couldn’t talk to one another directly – all the attacks being online – supported what my book maintained: that our family was dysfunctional due to a history of alcoholism.  Yet I still felt overwhelmed with shame, apologized all over myself, and rewrote many portions of the book to please them.  I am a pacifist.  I believed in treating others with only loving kindness.

But in the midst of this mess, I got diagnosed with breast cancer.  Weirdly, a part of me was relieved that now my family would have to back off and quit the e-attacks.  They didn’t.  They “reported” the book as spurious, and my brother, posing as a reader in recovery, posted another mocking Amazon review during my last week of radiation treatment.  But by then, I’d been given the gift of not caring.  I even called him directly and told him to write his own fucking book.

In two days, it will be one year since I wrapped up radiation.  I’ve been cancer-free since.  But my view of life is altered.  Where I used to look forward to a lot of cool things I was going to do, I now focus on enjoying what’s here now.  Where I used to hope I could “make” my family see who I am, now I leave them to find their own paths while I focus on taking care of myself.   And where I used to harbor high hopes that one day this book would “take off,” sell like hotcakes, and be eagerly accepted by some publisher,  I now smile at such dreams.  My ambitions today are far simpler.  I want to live, and I want to help others.  That’s it.  I will write with discipline, posting weekly or biweekly from a sense of service.   If one person learns something helpful from reading this blog or my book, if they are able to move any closer to god and healing because of what’s in these posts or the book that tells my story in a 555 page share, then I’ve been useful.

I will tell my story because it’s mine to tell.  Take what you like and leave the rest.  And I wish you lots of happiness.

Here’s a passage from later in the book – Weird Thing #10.  At the time I was unaware, as are most people, that having had a Near Death Experience often entails after-effects of a psychic nature.  I didn’t learn this until I started attending a NDE group (Seattle IANDS).  So when this happened, I could only wonder what the heck was up with me….

WEIRD THING #10

In the fall of 2004, I landed my dream job directing the English Department Writing Center at the University of Washington.  If I thought you were interested, I’d write pages on the joys of working with brilliant, gifted students with a natural philanthropic bent toward their peers and the world in general – but I doubt you are.  Briefly, I got to choose my tutoring staff based on writing samples and the capacity for empathy I detected in interviews, then teach them via my own class to conduct writing center work, and finally mentor them for years as they tutored in the center.  I learned so much from these students, who wanted to be of service to others, even though their lives didn’t depend on it.  I was “out” in the Writing Center as both an alcoholic and former lesbian, and from my desk I offered an “ask me anything” service something like Lucy’s psychiatry in Peanuts.  They claim, to this day, to have learned as much from me as I did from them.

So… more about overcoming fear and sickness, but first, here comes a Writing Center Weird Thing.

Before I developed the online sign-up system, students used stop by in person to reserve tutoring appointments, which we scheduled on an ordinary clipboard.  One day a girl came in requesting an appointment.

“Your name?” I asked, hovering my pen over the time slot.

“Wendy…” she said, and then paused for me to write it.

I wanted to write ‘Wendy,’ except something jammed up in my brain.  I felt her waiting, but for the life of me, I couldn’t remember how to make a ‘W’!   I tried, and pushed, but nothing came out.  I did know how to make an ‘L,’ however, because my name began with that, so I just went ahead and wrote, ‘Lee.’

The girl pulled back a bit.  In an alarmed voice she demanded: “How did you do that?!”

“Oops!” I said, reflexively crossing it out.  “I don’t know why I wrote that!”

“No!  That’s my last name,” said the girl, her voice flat, “but I hadn’t said it yet.”  She stared at me accusingly.

I felt embarrassed, confused.  “I’m sorry!” was all I could think to say.  “Lucky guess!”  My primary feeling was not amazement that I’d just read this girl’s thoughts, but embarrassment that I’d been caught doing so.

She pointed insistently at the crossed out ‘Lee.’  “That’s how you spell it, too, with double E.  I’ve never been here in my life!  How do you know my name?!”

“I don’t know…. I couldn’t think how to make an ‘W,’” I faltered, now writing ‘Wendy’ after a comma and tracing over the crossed out letters, “so I just wrote ‘Lee’ instead.”  I laughed uneasily as if to say, ‘you know how it is!’ and imagined if I could just get her appointment set, she’d let it go.

“That makes no sense!”  She stared at me, irate, as though I took her for a fool.  I suppose she was thinking I’d been spying on her somehow.

“I’m sorry!  My mind just must have just picked it up because you were about to say it!”

That answer – the truth – did not satisfy Wendy Lee.  She left visibly angry.  I told some of the tutors what had just happened and showed them the clipboard, but we could only laugh and shake our heads at my rude telepathy.  When Wendy came in for her appointment a few days later, she stared at me across the room as though I were either a witch or a spy.  I felt amused that someone could not accept a simple case of telepathy, though, at Wendy’s age, I’d have been equally insistent that I must be hiding some logical explanation.

Though I still had no idea why so many Weird Things happened to me, I was beginning to feel comfortable with the fact that they regularly did.  It was just my lot.

~

Book available at:  http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0093NPHYO

At today’s meeting of Seattle IANDS (International Association of Near Death Studies), we heard from a guy named John, a laser show artist, about a Near Death Experience he had over a decade ago.  John is a no bullshit, non-religious guy.  He remains non-religious today, because he feels no religion adequately captures the nature or intensity of the spiritual experience he had while dying.

In short form, John had been ill with flu for a week before he took a trip to California to attend a fancy catered party.  His appetite had just come back, so he ate a ton of the fancy food without realizing there were slivered walnuts in almost everything, to which he was violently allergic.  The party was at a house near Big Sur, right on the ocean, so after eating, he and his girlfriend went down to check out the beach.  There he began to have trouble breathing and to sense his muscles “locking up.”  He told his girlfriend to go for help and, just before she was out of earshot, added with some of his last breath, “run.”

He sat on a rock and hunched over with his head down – the way he had been taught as an asthmatic was the best way to draw breath.  But he could breathe less and less.  He got scared.  He shut out all else but his efforts to inhale.  Then he “heard” a message to look up.  He ignored it.  It came back more insistently: “LOOK UP.”

He raised his head reluctantly and saw the sunset had transformed to something of overwhelming beauty.  The light was brighter, the colors more intense than he had ever seen, and there was an emotional power to these colors and forms.  He loved them profoundly, and he forgot his pain and fear.   He saw someone far down the beach coming toward him.  As the figure got closer, which happened very quickly, he saw the guy had on his same shoes, his same pants, shirt and – it was himself.   And yet when he looked into the man’s face, he realized it also looked like his mom’s.  And his sister’s.  And his best friend’s.  Until it began to look like “everyone I’ve ever loved or felt for, all in one.  And then I knew it was god.”

He felt toward god as if the two of them were the best friends ever and had missed each other so much.  There was incredible love.  God showed him his life, not just scenes, not just sights, but the emotional flares and highlights of his life, the moments he had connected, had helped or hurt,  hoped or suffered.  Yet none of these things felt sad now.  They were his life, and both he and god were glad about them.  He could express any thought, feeling, or question to god without words, and understand huge amounts of complex response from god in the same way.

But then god shifted the ‘conversation’ to something serious, something grave.  He thought to John, “I know you’re having a great time, but there’s something really crucial going on right now.”  John realized he had to choose whether he wanted to go back to living or not.  God showed him all the possible lives ahead of him.  He said it was like a — I forget the name — but like that contraption they have at the Seattle Science Center where a ball dropped from the top can bounce off pegs either way to go right or left again and again; but it was also like looking down the “tube’ of a tree branch that bifurcates again and again — the impact of every decision that would create different courses for his life.  He understood then that his life to date was the totality of all the choices he had made in the past, and that to alter even one of them would alter his whole life.

He could choose one of those ‘paths,’ or he could choose death.  He sensed – and this is controversial for religious people – that god was equally fine with any choice he made, and any way he lived his life.  He thought of all the people who would be inconvenienced by his death.  He saw ripple effects around the globe to people who didn’t even know him, but also worried about ruining the party.  He told god, “I don’t know why you even offered me this choice, because I am so not choosing death!  In fact, I’m going back to that beach trail right now.”  He stood up, turned from god, looked back once at the amazing beauty of the sunset that was still there, took two steps, and fell on his face.  There he vomited into the sand under him and sucked this vomit-mud back into his windpipe.  He  aspirated.  He died – he knows this now.   BUT what he experienced at the time was “like when you sort of almost black out, but you just keep sending signals to your legs to go on walking or whatever until it passes and you can see again,” except that this time he stayed in total blackness.  To his left and above, a light began to dilate brighter and brighter, but he assumed it was the party and kept “walking.”

Then he heard people arguing to his right.  He thought he was back in the room where he and his girlfriend had been staying, looking down from a balcony to the living room below where his girlfriend and her step mother were arguing loudly.  He realized it was about him.  The step mother was a CPR instructor but was refusing to do CPR on him because of the amount of sand-vomit in his mouth and throat.  There was no balcony, though.  They were actually on the beach beside some lump on the sand.  He dropped to their level and tried to tell them not to worry about him, that there was really no need to do CPR – he just wanted them both to be happy.   At first he thought they were ignoring him, but gradually he realized they didn’t see or hear him.  He recognized his body on the beach and began to realize he was outside it; yet he didn’t care much either way, so long as others were happy.  Eventually the step mother caved.  She scooped as much barf-sand out of the body’s mouth as she could.  He watched her get ready, breathe in, and lower her mouth to his.  Then SLAM!  “It was like a car crash” – he was thrown back into his body.

After a while, he could see again.  He knew the people above him were asking him what his name was and how many fingers, but her heard no sound.  Instead he heard the pounding of the waves incredibly clearly.  And he saw “people behind them who were helping the people that were helping me.  Lots of them.  And I know this sounds incredibly far out, but I don’t have any other name for them but angels.  And yet, it wasn’t about me.  They weren’t helping to ‘save’ me specifically, but a part of what we’re all doing here — all of those people, me, the world, all of us.”

It’s about love, he says.  It’s about connecting, it’s about feeling those intense emotions of life.  John says about love in every form,  wistful love, sad love, love of beauty,  love of loved ones,  love of strangers: “That’s what life is; that’s what we’re here to do.”

He experienced episodes of clairvoyance for years to come that really “freaked me out,” because he had tried to shut down his memories of the experience.  “It’s like you’ve been to Mars and met the Martians, but you have no evidence, you have no proof.  Even my best friends said, ‘Must’ve been a dream…'”

Until the day he found IANDS, where telling his story gradually became safe.