CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Three Mysteries

No matter what activity we engage in, the vast majority of our efforts are tied to the body. So much so that we, in Western culture, tend to equate body with life.

Of all our bodily experiences, the themes of birth, death, and sex seem to capture our imagination the most. It is because we know instinctively that they are portals to transcendence, intimate reminders of the fact that we both enter and exit this physical form.

And if we come and go from this bodily existence, then it's a short jump to consider that there must be some nonphysical existence from which we come and to which we return. Birth, death, and sex, then, draw us into the mystery of the unseen world, for they lead us beyond ourselves.

ADDY AND EVE

I am the son of an engineer. Despite my best efforts, from time to time, my father's structured ways of seeing the world ooze to the surface.

When we were kids, my siblings and I wanted a puppy. No matter how many times we pleaded, my dad's reasons always won the day: “What would we do with the dog on vacation?…Dogs need to be fed…They need to be cleaned up after…There will be veterinarian bills…It's just too expensive…They're a nuisance.” We never got our dog.

So when Jacquie mentioned to me one day the idea of our getting a puppy, the sound, rational, studied arguments of my father spewed forth. Common sense would tell any dear-thinking, dispassionate observer that it was not the least bit prudent.

Jacquie listened to all of my thoughtful objections and then proceeded to ignore them entirely. She didn't even give me the benefit of an argument. It was as if I were totally inconsequential to the decision.

Besides, she had that look of Eve in her eye—one I'd seen before. It was the look of the “mother of all life,” the queen bee, bent on bringing little bee-lets into this world, with or without the cooperation of her drone.

I had first seen that look when she decided that we needed to have three children instead of the two boys we already had. Any sane, reasonable person would be content with two children.

At that time, too, I had an abundance of rational arguments against a third addition—arguments ranging from the expenses of braces and college educations to global overpopulation.

None of that mattered. Eve was going to give birth, and nothing would stop her.

Give the queen bee credit—she knew the weaknesses of her drone. She was well aware that I'm allergic to pain.

So she offered a bargain: “Either we have no more children, in which case you get a v-a-s-e-c-t-o-m-y”—she stretched the word out in long sinister tones—“or we have one more baby, after which I'll have my tubes tied.”

Our bargain's name is Stacy.

But what amazed me was the vehemence of her intent once that bargain was struck. In the past, I had always been the one who wanted to have sex—coaxing and coddling, offering back rubs to gain her favor. But after the bargain, suddenly I was married to an insatiable vixen! Night after night after night of coitus continuous.

At first, like a dullard drone, I thought it was because she found me suddenly irresistible. Gradually, though, I realized that she was on a mission. Eve had a timetable. I was but a small ingredient in her recipe of creation.

It hurt. I felt cheap and used, loved only for my body. A mere plaything.

Slowly, it became clear: my lot in life was always going to put me on the losing end in disagreements over expanding our family—with human or not-quite-human additions. This was Jacquie's domain.

Against my best wishes, she brought home a rabbit one day. Over my dead body, she presented our family with a kitten. And the coup de grâce— even though I had strictly forbidden it—she persisted in bringing home library books about dogs. She would leave the books open in strategic places and invite our children to think up names.

The list of possible species gradually narrowed to poodles. And then to toy poodles. It was a conspiracy, and I was a drone outnumbered.

The poodle was named Addy, which was short for adenocarcinoma. Jacquie chose the name in a fit of gallows humor after the doctors had discovered cervical cancer on her womb. In a few days, my Eve would have a hysterectomy.

In Hebrew, the name Eve is derived from the verb “to live.” True to her mission, my Eve has, indeed, taught me how to live.

If left to my own structured ways, my life would have been one of convenience. No more uncontrollable beings would have been part of it than were absolutely necessary.

Expenses would have been low in order to save for early retirement. There would have been an abundance of free time for Jacquie and me to chase after the world's fascinations together, unfettered by demands of home fires burning.

But her womb changed all that. I came to know the orthodontist on a first-name basis. Our tires were perpetually balding from swim practice car-pooling. The house always needed a paint job that I could never seem to find the time to do. My life has been one of perpetual disrepair and debt.

But it has also been a life of unexpected joy. Against my better judgment, these beings Jacquie has hatched into my world have made me rich beyond imagination. Amid the constant distractions and inconveniences, life has wriggled its way into my heart.

But, inevitably, there comes a symbolic end to birthing. As such, it signals a time for bidding farewell to the wonder of carrying creation in the belly, stepping aside so that those more youthful might discover Eve's message for themselves.

That is why I was a beaten man from the moment she started talking about getting a dog. I played my dutiful role of the curmudgeon, dragging my feet for heightened dramatic effect.

But there was no real desire to win this argument, even if I could. It must end with a tiny fur ball being placed on my chest, a tongue licking my earlobe, and this strange pain in my heart. Eve would have it no other way. It was her swan song.

The first night Addy stayed with us, my sixteen-year-old son came home late, screeching the tires, revving the engine before shutting it down. He slammed the car door shut and ambled into the kitchen, adrenaline and testosterone coursing through his veins.

Throwing the keys on the counter with a flourish, he suddenly discovered the cardboard box that was Addy's temporary den. With tough-as-nails hands, he reached down to cup the trembling fur ball.

Jacquie and I had long since retired for the evening when Jesse burst through our bedroom door. His voice echoed the breathless whisper of wonder reserved for those who gather newborns into their arms for the first time. Another drone-in-the-making stopped dead in his tracks. He gasped, “She's so fragile!”

It's true. Life is fragile, so delicate, so helpless. And so we cling to it in an attempt to grasp its fleeting wonder.

As I considered Jacquie's upcoming surgery, that fragility haunted me. What if something happened to her? What if they discovered contaminated lymph nodes? What if I had to face the future without my Eve?

Such is the nature of this unpredictable, inconvenient life.

A WICKED LANDING

In the end, we were fortunate. The surgery was a success and, some twelve years later, there has been no reoccurrence of cancer.

But the lesson has not been lost. We stand at a very mysterious threshold. The themes of birth, death, and sex have a way of bringing us to the edge of awe. Like children drawn to the railing overlooking Niagara Falls or the Grand Canyon, we are captivated by something of immensity, and we feel dwarfed by comparison. These themes invite us to peer beyond the confines of the physical body, and the view is both mesmerizing and terrifying.

Yet we do it all the time without noticing. When we enter domains of the imagination, our attention leaves the body and drifts into realms that have no material existence. The extent of that shift can be, at times, astonishing:

While waiting for my plane to New York City one day, I had picked up a copy of Wicked, by Gregory Maguire. It is the story of The Wizard of Oz, told from the point of view of the Wicked Witch of the West. It is a brilliant tale that casts the usual heroes as villains and, so, turns all our assumptions about the characters and their motivations upside down.

When it came time for boarding, I clumsily wrestled with my baggage and ticket while staying glued to the book. I barely noticed the flight attendant droning on about flotation devices and oxygen masks and, before I knew it, we were airborne.

After an hour, or a week, or a month (I really had no idea, because time had stopped in this head that was so firmly planted in the Land of Oz), the attendant came on the speaker to point out that the Statute of Liberty could be seen out the left side of the aircraft. Good, we'll be landing at LaGuardia soon, I thought.

But after another long stretch of time (a decade perhaps?), I glanced out the window to see, not New York City, but pasture land. A lady across the aisle had her head in her hands as if in distress. Must be airsick, I thought. Poor baby.

Chapter after chapter, the story of Wicked unfolded, to the point where even I began wondering why we had not yet landed. Finally, I could feel us beginning our descent. The plane touched down with the pilot leaning on the brakes in an oddly aggressive manner.

When we came to a stop, the entire cabin erupted into cheers. And then…I kid you not…the flight attendant came on the intercom and said, “Welcome to Oz.”

I tapped the person in front of me, asking, “Where are we?”

“We're at JFK.”

“What in the world are we doing here? We're supposed to land at LaGuardia.”

“Didn't you hear? They couldn't get the flaps down and had to go to the longer runway at JFK. We've been flying around for hours trying to burn off jet fuel in case we crashed. Didn't you see all the fire trucks lined up when we came in?”

All that time, I had been in the middle of a life-or-death drama without any awareness whatsoever. Where had I been? Though my body was present, this thing I call “me” was nowhere to be found.

SENSORY DEPRIVATION

What is the nature of this “me” when it is not defined by the physical body? That has been the domain of philosophy from time immemorial.

Mystery schools from Egypt, Greece, and Tibet, to name just a few, researched and taught methods for separating the soul from the body so that these mysterious domains hinted at by birth, death, and sex might be explored firsthand. It was a method of inquiry that seems to have been fairly well accepted throughout the ancient world.

Even the Apostle Paul indicated a familiarity with this type of initiation. In II Corinthians, he recounts a remarkable experience, attributed to an unnamed third person (though most commentators suspect he is really speaking of himself):

I know a person in Christ who fourteen years ago was caught up to the third heaven—whether in the body or out of the body I do not know; God knows. And I know that such a person—whether in the body or out of the body I do not know; God knows—was caught up into paradise and heard things that are not to be told, that no mortal is permitted to repeat.⁸⁵

Contemporary readers gloss over this passage. Yet it is startling that Paul so casually speaks of being “in the body or out of the body.” There is no attempt to explain what he means by the phrase, as if this were common knowledge to the recipients of his letter.

Because this concept is utterly foreign to most twenty-first century Christians, few people are ever motivated to try and understand what Paul is speaking about.

But if it is possible to move beyond the confines of the physical body, are there methods that can work today? Are we limited only to the faint mysteries of birth, death, and sex to inform us? Or is there more?

There is a memory I have from the 1960s. It was a TV documentary that showed a very unusual scene:

A woman lies in a white box. Her arms and legs are covered with gauze. On her head is something that looks like a football helmet with a translucent shield over her eyes. Her ears are plugged to deaden all ambient noise. The air has been filtered to eliminate any lingering odors. She lies motionless for hours at a time, and all she can see is a world of white haze.

As I remember it, this vignette was from a university experiment in psychology. At that time, people were beginning to investigate very odd things. The woman was lying in what was called a sensory deprivation chamber. The purpose of the study was to investigate what happens to people when the normal stimuli of life have been dramatically reduced.

When I saw that, a feeling of revulsion swept over me. Being trapped in a noiseless, gauze-covered, white-fog environment seemed like a prison. I was sure I would have died from boredom, or at least have been driven mad by the urge to itch. The closest thing I could compare it to would be confinement in a full body cast.

What they discovered in this strange experiment was this: when deprived of sensory input, human beings begin to hallucinate.

Back then, hallucinating wasn't considered to be a good thing. That was what people did when they were on drugs.

And how did they know that the test subjects were hallucinating? Because they were seeing and hearing things that sane, rational people didn't see or hear. Therefore, what they were reporting couldn't possibly be real.

While viewing that scene as a child, it never occurred to me that such isolation could lead to anything but misery. Beyond that, it was just flat-out bizarre.

But in fact, we go through a similar process of sensory deprivation every night: sleep.

ZOMBIES

When my boys were teenagers, every morning was like waking the dead. There was no point in talking to the zombies as they slithered out of bed and stumbled about while getting ready for school. They would look at us as if we were from another planet.

Indeed, we were! Only moments before, these semiconscious bipeds had been cavorting in realms that were absolutely enthralling. Without warning, they had been jerked out of their “dream” world and dumped into this one by an alarm clock with the tone of a circular saw cutting up an aluminum ladder. And a “good morning” to you too!

The point is that every night our awareness goes through a natural process of separating from the physical body. We then go on extraordinary journeys, and our only memory is something we call a dream.

The difference between this separation of our awareness and the ancient mystery schools is that, in sleep, we cease to be conscious, at least of the physical world. It's as if one movie ends and another movie begins. There is no continuity between them, and no memory of having viewed the first movie while watching the second one.

But in ancient rituals of initiation, the intent was to move into nonphysical environments while still retaining normal waking consciousness. When understood from this perspective, mystery schools can be viewed as merely enhancing an already quite natural human ability. It's simply a process of extending the range of normal human awareness. The trick is to remember the continuity of this physical life, while simultaneously hitching a ride into the ether.

Is such a thing possible?

During my years as a pastor, I kept wondering why only extreme experiences brought the experience of heaven close to daily life. Did we have to come perilously near to physical death before the heavens would reveal their secrets? My own first glimpse had come after I fell off the roof. Since then, those secret realms had been revealed in experiences that came about through being close to someone's death, like Freddie's, or through experiences of childbirth, or through meditations that were spectacular in their healing effects, like meeting Abigail.

Yet how could I sustain these visions on a daily basis? I read book upon book, practiced meditation, took workshops, kept a journal of my dreams, and bought audiotapes and videos.

I wanted so much, yet I couldn't decide on any one thing. By nature, I was far too undisciplined to engage any particular practice for an extended period. No sooner would I seize upon one approach than my attention would dart to another, more tantalizing possibility.

Making my efforts even more sporadic were the pressures of day-to-day life. Aside from the necessity of making a living, having children was also a built-in assurance that any attempts to meditate would be shattered by sibling fights, questions about homework, or someone knocking on the bedroom door because “it was quiet in there.”

If I tried to meditate at night, I fell asleep. If I tried to meditate after lunch, I fell asleep. If I even thought about meditating, I fell asleep.

If I did manage to get into a meditation, the phone would ring, the dog next door would bark, or the furnace would blow up. Caroline Myss's assertion that we are entering a time when we are called to be “mystics without monasteries” seemed like a nice idea, but, in practice, it failed miserably.

During the child-rearing years, Jacquie and I considered it a victory if we were able to hang on to a modicum of sanity. Moving into ethereal realms was out of the question.

The most brilliant thing we did as parents was to buy a dehumidifier. It wasn't that the air in our house was humid. In fact, it generally was quite dry. We ran the dehumidifier in our bedroom because the droning compressor would drown out the noise from our children.

It was a lifesaver. Our nasal passages were blocked and bleeding from the dryness, but it was a small price to pay for an island in the storm.

But even the dehumidifier couldn't preserve my meditation time. Time itself was in short supply, as every waking moment was spoken for. Sporting events, school plays, carpooling, and awards banquets kept us on the run constantly. My work was loaded with committee meetings, appointments, and gatherings. All I could catch during those years were fleeting glimpses of the world beyond. It was frustrating and disheartening. The thing I wanted most in life was slipping through my fingers.

ANOTHER BOOK

In 1987, Jacquie and I had borrowed a camper and made a tour of New England, Cape Cod, and Canada. In Toronto at that time, there was something called The World's Biggest Bookstore. Nowadays, it would be considered average in size, but back then, it was like a gold mine. Everywhere there were stacks upon stacks as far as the eye could see.

We had been inside for just a few minutes when one book practically grabbed me by the scruff of my neck. I picked it up, and my hands started shaking. I couldn't put it down.

It was titled Far Journeys.⁸⁶ It was the story of Robert Monroe, who, when he was in his forties, began having spontaneous out-of-body experiences, or, as they later became known, OBEs.

I had never heard of such a thing, but after reading what he wrote, it made perfect sense. Here was one writer who could connect with my personal experience.

After reading that book, if I could have gone to The Monroe Institute at that very moment, I would have done it. It would, however, be ten years before I would get the chance.