NOTE: I am posting this installment separately and in sequence in the last blogpost so that you can read it here or in context below. References to the Threshold and Expanded Consciousness are explained in Parts One and Two.
THREE:
EXPANDED VIEWS OF REALITY
My mother was not yet twenty years old when I was
born, and like any mother and child, we lived through several crises together
before I was even one year old. A particularly traumatic situation occurred one
day, when my mother was preparing a meal in my grandfather Close’s house. She
was holding me in the crook of her left arm while moving food from the stove to
the kitchen table with her right hand. Being held at a level where I could
reach the table as my mother turned from the table to go back to the stove, I
grabbed a bite of food, popped it into my mouth, and promptly choked on it. I
was only about three months old, and the food was a piece of a tuna patty. It
smelled so good to me that I literally tried to inhale it, and it completely blocked
my air intake.
I remember a ladle clattering on the floor as my
mother turned her full attention to me, shaking me and sticking her fingers
into my mouth trying to see what was causing me to gasp for breath. When my
mother’s frantic attempts to dislodge the food in my throat failed and I
started turning blue, she panicked, ran out the back door, clasping me to her
breast, heading for the service station next door, where my father was working.
The bouncing up and down as she ran dislodged the bit of food. I spit it out,
screaming in pain, and before she reached the service station, I was crying,
but breathing normally again. I mention this incident in this context because
it was probably my first NDE in this life, and during that brief period of time
that I was forced out of the body, I saw things from an expanded consciousness point
of view.
Because I was out of my body, I remember this
incident vividly even though most people, including my mom, dismissed my claim of
remembering it, thinking that I probably just remembered her talking about it
and about how much it frightened her, some years later. I know it is a real memory
however, because I have other memories from events both before and after that,
with visual images of my surroundings. One of those events occurred a few
months later, when we moved into my parents’ first home of their own. When, as
a teenager, I mentioned that I remembered the move, my mother said: “You can’t
remember that Eddie. You were only a few months old!” When I proceeded to describe
details of my visual memory of things that happened, and things that were only
there on that particular day, my mom had to admit that I really did remember it.
I experienced several less traumatic out-of-body events after that, but, as a
child, I didn’t have reason to think that they were unusual, at least not at
first.
Pilot Knob Missouri, the town of my birth, was a
mining town. In the hills around the valley, there were veins of iron, silver,
and other rare metals along geologic contact zones, capped by quartz crystals, that
the miners called “ore blossom”. It was this rare crystalline structure of the
San Francois Mountains that drew me to my birth like a magnetic bullseye. It
was a bullseye made of pre-Cambrian basaltic and granitic intrusions,
surrounded by rings of rhyolites, dolomites, and Ordovician-age limestones. I
can still remember descending from the open end of the marble hall Threshold,
through a starry night toward that geologic bullseye sometime in the Earth-year
1936.
In the summer of 1946, I was nine years old. One
afternoon, I was swimming in a small branch of spring water called Kuhn’s Creek
about a quarter mile from where I was born. The water in the creek, coming from
a number of small springs, one of which was located on my maternal grandparents’
farm, was highly mineralized, containing dissolved elements and compounds from
the contact zones between the igneous intrusive rhyolites and metamorphic
dolomites, marble, and limestone. I had walked across the field alone that
afternoon to fish in the creek, as I often did, but in the heat of the
afternoon, I had decided to cool off by wading into the cool spring water.
A sudden summer thunderstorm came over the
mountains and before I could get out of the water, there was a lightning strike
on the creek, just upstream of the swimming hole where I was standing up to my
neck in the water. I saw the lightning strike, heard the thunderclap, and felt
the electricity surge through the water, and through my body. Surprisingly, I
felt no pain. Instead, I felt my consciousness expanding. I became momentarily
aware of the fish in the water, a snake in a hole in the bank nearby, and the
roots of the grass and trees reaching into the soil on the creek bank. When the
expanded vision faded, I climbed out of the water, retrieved the stringer of
fish I had caught before the storm, got dressed, and went home.
In the Fall of 1947, I was eleven years old.
Sitting in a classroom during a study period, I had a significant spontaneous
expanded consciousness experience. I was looking straight ahead at the big
clock on the wall at the front of the room and the teacher
standing behind her desk between me and the clock. Suddenly, as I breathed in,
the clock, wall, and the teacher’s face expanded like balloons to the point where
they filled my entire field of vision. I could see into the pores of the skin
on the teacher’s face, and the second hand of the clock slowed and until it
stopped moving.
Then, as the air started to flow out of my lungs,
the Clock, the wall, and the teacher began to recede, slowly at first, but they
continued to shrink faster and faster, until they were mere dots in the
distance, and the hands of the clock moved rapidly into the future. Sounds in
the room also expanded and receded in sync with the visual changes. The
clicking of the second hand on the clock, for example, went from its normal volume
and frequency, to slow, booming sledge-hammer-like reverberations as I breathed
in, came to a complete stop, and then reversed the process as I breathed out, all
the way to a rapid, faint tinkling sound, as the clock shrank, approaching a
single point in the distance, when my breath was completely expelled.
This experience seemed to last only a few
seconds, and I could have dismissed it as meaningless “day-dreaming”, except
for the fact that it happened more than once. And at night when I was going to
sleep, I experienced the same thing - a basic expansion of consciousness - in a
slightly different way. With my eyes closed, I became aware that my other
senses were being slowly enhanced to the point where I could feel and hear even
the tiniest movements and sounds, anywhere in the house. I could hear my
father’s pocket watch, an heirloom that had been handed down to him from my
grandfather, ticking three rooms away. When I moved, even a little bit, the
rustling of the bedsheets sounded like an avalanche.
As a natural reflex, I turned my attention inward
to escape the horrendous sounds that made it impossible to sleep, and I began
to hear music that seemed to be pre-existing, behind the other, outer sounds. By
focusing, I could hear the individual instruments contributing to complex
melodies and subtle counterpoint harmonies within beautiful symphonies! And
sometimes there were marches, or sometimes soaring spiritually elevating
melodies. Because these experiences were disruptive, I mentioned them to my
dad, and he told me that they were like hiccups, evidence that I was growing, -
nothing to worry about. It wasn’t until much later in life that I realized that
these experiences were related to, and a natural part of being on the
Threshold, the edge of Infinity.
After my earliest memories of the Threshold,
described above, I have experienced this kind of consciousness-expansion many
times during this lifetime. My life has been punctuated with numerous
experiences of spontaneous expansions of consciousness from birth until the present
day. I have described a few of these experiences before, but for context in
this discussion, I will continue to share my memories of some of them here.
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