Re: Welcome to The Pub At the End of the Universe.
Posted by Dennis Leahy (here)
My one and only NDE and OBE experience came to me at that time, and it has taken me 30+ years to even have a sense of what it was about.
Brother, we share a lot in common in that regard. Since we're gathered here around the Pub hearth, here's another little tale that relates:
It was about 10 PM, and I was commuting from Boston to New York in late September of 1984. It had been a bumpy year, so to speak, and I was on the brink of a rather complex career turning point.
Earlier that afternoon, I had just retrieved my car from a Boston body shop after an unenviable encounter with a runaway bus in Cuban Harlem. This had been my second visit to that particular sheet metal doctor, who was kind enough to remind me, as I drove away, that "the third time is the charm". In retrospect, I must admit that these little clichés, floating around in the vast collective consciousness, have an odd way of validating themselves.
I was overly familiar with the stretch of highway that I was currently navigating, and mind had slipped into semi-automatic, entertaining the random road musings about God and mortgage payments, love and marriage, pasts and futures vying for attention, even as the breathless present was rushing to itself with arms wildly waving.
Glancing up, I noticed that I was approaching my designated exit along the Saw Mill Parkway. It had come up sooner than expected, punctuating my reveries. I checked the rear view mirror to see if I could move into the right lane to exit, and saw a pair of headlights in what seemed a good bit of distance behind me in the right lane. I felt comfortable about the lane switch, but as I began to cross over, I was rear-ended by the oncoming car, which had been moving at much faster speed than I had calculated. I was pushed into the guardrail to the right, then lost control and swerved through the rail on the left, plunging over the side of the mountain.
As I plummeted down the hillside, my visibility was thwarted by the darkness and the strobe-like streaks from my headlight beams as they bounced wildly off the onrushing landscape. The mind knew with complete certainty that "this was it." Not only was I about to die, but it was actually going to be really gruesome, with mangled crispy body parts and all the attendant horrors now swarming back from the 60's cautionary "Drivers Ed" films we had to sit through back in high school. An enormous fear raced through me on the wings of adrenaline – the primal survival response crushing up against sure knowledge of sheer ruin.
Suddenly I hit the bottom of the hill, but unlike the movie finale, I did not explode in a blazing fireball. Rather, my car catapulted up through the air, flipping over and over as it crossed the oncoming 2-lane highway. It continued air-borne across the service road, finally slamming into the side of the hill on the other side, where it proceeded to roll down a bit until it hung, teetering, on the edge of an embankment.
It must have been while I was in mid-air (although my recollected sense was that time itself had truly stopped) that the fear was swallowed up by a great silence. I had somehow been lifted out of the accident and into an infinite dark. This ebony silence was deeper than I had ever known and certainly beyond my feeble adjectives, and yet curiously "familiar", as if it had always been here, just behind the chitchat of everyday mind and presumed identity.
Spontaneously, there was a direct "knowing" that there was no death, but more to the point – it was self-evidently obvious that there had never been, nor could there ever be, the person I had taken myself to be. All that had been like a brief restless dream. There was no car, no accident, no trace of any reference point. There was no narrative or story line of "my life", any life, any world, any personal or collective history, any future. There was nothing to remember, nothing to forget, nothing to hope for. Alone, yet with no sense of lack or feeling of incompleteness -- nothing to be desired or avoided, accepted or rejected. A self-illuminating consciousness without object. Awareness -- boundless and inexpressible, vastness with no center, motionless, serenity with no opposite, and thus not even serenity – such words and phrases don't even touch it, and it went on forever, yet without even any sense of time.
Suddenly “I” was back in the crushed driver's seat, my left foot had pierced through the floor board of the car, and was dangling shoeless in the air over the embankment, shattered. People were milling about, sharing their disbelief that someone could have survived such a disaster! I was barely aware of them, just in shock from having entered into time and form once more – what a strange and bizarre experience: body, mind, self-sense! The only comparable events had happened to me early in life, at the ages of two and then again at 8, but nothing as dramatic as this.
I was engulfed in tears, but these tears had nothing to do with the accident, or survival, or relief to be essentially in one piece. I hardly cared about any of that at this point, like last night’s dream. These tears were tears of gratitude, and yet I didn’t even know what I was grateful for – just an endless gratitude for what I had been shown, but also tinged with a bit of grief at having been shrunk back down to this ridiculous human level.
An interesting postscript to that event was brought to my attention later by friends. Several reported intense experiences of Presence timed to that very night. Another, who was sitting hospital vigil with her husband in the final stages of his terminal illness, reported that -- at around 10 PM that night -- she was overwhelmed by a brilliant streak of light which shone through her heart and into and around her husband for several minutes. By the next day he had recovered completely from his illness, much to the bewilderment of the medical staff.
After the incident, however, I found that my interest in spirituality in general had fundamentally dissolved. I went through the motions for several months, but had a hard time raising any enthusiasm for that game any longer. Moreover, it seemed as if I had even fallen into a semi-amnesia about the experience itself. Coming back into the body was such a step down in awareness that I felt as if I had gone through a lobotomy just to be human again. It would take many years to process the experience and its implications.
Thus began a long period in my life (about 15 years) where I just totally got into the ordinary world (although I did continue zen meditation), focusing on career, spending time travelling around the globe, just soaking up other cultures and exploring the human experience in all its variety, enjoying all that incarnated life had to offer. That period came to an end with a big bang when I was out for a walk one day during a lunch break, and out of nowhere was suddenly knocked down to my knees and pierced at the heart by the Divine Mother.
This was to be the beginning of an emotional opening that paved the way for meeting my Beloved again, and that’s when things got really interesting!
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