[Legally Blind: The Book] Part 1: Chapter 15 - Doors of Perception

Around this same time, at age fourteen or fifteen, my suppressed ability that had led to my earlier OOBEs came back into my life in that Jamestown Flood manner that had been building up in me for 10 years. That my physical reality was out of control should’ve been a clue that my nonphysical reality was equally, if not more so, out of control.

I’d been dabbling in the esoteric for a couple of years by then. My first exposure to such material was a thin book my mother had bought on a whim called the I Ching, an ancient Taoist Chinese philosophy for understanding how change manifests in life, and a system of divination. The Chinese characters caught my eye. When I casually scanned it, I was instantly mesmerized by its claims, history, and incredibly elegant and functional model. The I Ching may have been the first book I’d ever read cover to cover, no small task given my poor reading skills. It opened the door to a buffet of alternative, mystical, paranormal subjects I was delighted to explore: pyramids, kabbalah, crystals, Ouija boards, tarot, aliens, reincarnation, magic, witchcraft, voodoo, shamanism, and of course, more drugs. There was nothing of that ilk that didn’t fascinate me.

Another exposure factor was my parents exploring the Transcendental Meditation techniques of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. They had come a long way in only fourteen years. Although I was not particularly drawn to this practice, I participated. So did my father, who was so impressed with it he repurposed it as a practical tool for his factory workers with results so impressive it caught the attention of the Wall Street Journal.

A great deal of what I came across was, to me, obvious bullshit, but beneath that bullshit, if one dug deep enough, were diamonds. I didn’t need convincing that there were other worlds and realities out there; I remembered my out-of-body experiences from some years earlier. Now those experiences had context and meaning. I had finally found something that made sense to me, and given my natural inclination to surf the edge, it was only natural that I would get involved in magic, mysticism, and supernatural laws. Although one could say I was tampering with black magic, it didn’t seem black to me. In my foggy adolescent mind, I was merely trying to develop my untapped potential so I could open universal channels to get anything I wanted and annihilate anyone in my way. What could possibly be “black” about that? I began to withdraw into the shady world of the unknown.

Had I not had any experiences that validated my studies, I may well have dropped the whole thing. Almost overnight my OOBE abilities returns, along with a flood of other experiences, and the onslaught of this reawakening was quite destabilizing to my already precariously balanced sanity. Now, when I left my body now, it was not a smooth, peaceful transition, but rather a fight to get out. I was squeezing through a tiny hole into an infinitely large space, perhaps like the birth experience itself. Once on the outside, I experienced many different things, but nothing prepared me for what was about to happen.

Lying on the living room floor I began to slip through the “hole,” but this time I began to get sucked though as if into the vacuum of deep space and was thrown into a storm of screeching, soul-ripping energies, sounds and wild swirling colors. I immediately knew this was not a good place to be and instinctively tried to get back into my body, but it was too late. My body was nowhere to be found. I had no bearing, no sense of where I was or what was happening. I tried desperately to focus on anything, but nothing was stable. It felt like being in the middle of a tornado and anything I focused on was swept away in the storm, just as I was. There was no concept of time or space and the realization that nothing could be done was getting clearer and clearer. A terror filled me I have yet to experience since. I was a flea in a cosmic hurricane that swept through the invisible universe. All that mattered at that moment was survival, but not physical survival—survival of my soul. The screeching sounds were destroying me; the colors made me sick. If there was such a thing as perdition, this was it, far beyond the childish fantasies of fire and brimstone. Finally, I caught a glimpse of my body lying on the floor. With the concentration and focus beyond that of a man fighting for his life but of a man trying to escape the eternity of an unimaginable hell I shot back into my body.

I hit my body like a speeding car into a stone wall and scrambled frantically to reconnect. I was sweaty, shaking, and screaming unintelligible gibberish, as if the only part of my consciousness that could hold onto my body was the part that was stark raving mad. I ran out of the house and was frozen to the core when I saw the huge, swollen, full moon above the horizon. I had touched—or rather had been touched by—powers in this world we didn’t understand. Part of my being was still out there in that storm.

Although I had no driver’s license, as I was too young to drive, I jumped in my mother’s car and took off down the country road as fast as that beat-up Ford Maverick could go. I could barely hold the steering wheel; the car swerved all over the road. The fear of death was so minuscule compared to what I’d just experienced that I didn’t care or even think about wrapping myself around a tree or having a head-on collision at seventy miles per hour on that winding road. I caught the soft shoulder of a turn, lost control, and got stuck in the sand. By the time I’d managed to get myself unstuck from the pit hours later, I’d regained some composure. I couldn’t explain to anyone what had happened. How could I when I didn’t even know? What could I have said? “Mom, Dad, I got caught up in an astral storm that sucked me into another dimension and shredded my psyche this afternoon due to the energies magnified by the full moon.” This was the kind of stuff one heard in a mental institution, as I would soon discover firsthand.

The terrifying OOBE experience was intensely humbling. I was experiencing some kind of cosmic metaphysical storm, some power from the invisible nature of reality, much like an ant might experience a forest fire. I understood that it’s our nature to imagine that we have a destiny, meaning, and purpose, but that within the context of the universe there was no difference between myself, or any human, and an ant, and that all of us, the great and the small, the king and the flea, are subject to the same laws of both the known and the unknown worlds, regardless of our beliefs we use to convince ourselves otherwise.

There are powers beyond our perceived reality that we know nothing about, which are beyond anything we can imagine, and whose mercy we are at completely. Today we know that even the smallest particles in existence are not only entangled in dimensions that transcend time and space, but contain unimaginable energy, so much so that one cubic meter of ocean water contains more energy than all the energy consumed in the world today. Yet only years before these discoveries such concepts could never be considered, never even cross our minds. How can we even begin to think we understand the energies that move through the world, the universe, the mind? Our science can only explain the conditions that exist in the very small box we live in, a sliver of the reality spectrum that can only be measured by material instruments that must exist in that same narrow band of the spectrum. What we call “science” today is valid only for the extremely finite domain we call reality, but not so much, if at all, outside that micro-domain.

It didn’t take long before I became engrossed in exploring these energies. I would say now that I didn’t really have a choice. As transcendently frightening as my experience was, it was intense, sharp, and clear—far more real than what we call reality, which seemed thin and fake in comparison. A door had been reopened that could not be closed again.

Attempting to understand or decode other-worldly experiences is a learning process which is naturally limited by our human understanding and experiences.

Perception is passive by nature, collecting, normalizing, and filtering all the incoming data. Our understanding of anything and everything is initially limited to what we have already perceived.

This is because our categorized human experiences are stored and used for reference and as building blocks to create new combinations of input. Everything we can imagine or create as humans is made up of these building blocks.

Like a baby fresh into this world, who has no “blocks” to speak of, he eventually learns how to identify forms and symbols and adds them to his vocabulary of understanding, which are used to identify even more forms and symbols.

When we are out of our bodies, we are in a reality perhaps radically different from this one, but the only way we can remember the experience is by identifying the closest “blocks” that are representative of that reality and recombining them in a way that embodies the closest approximation of that experience. This is why when people have near-death experiences, they often recall the experience through the symbols they have been exposed to—Buddhists see Buddha, Christians see Jesus, Jews see Moses or Abraham, etc. They are all seeing the same thing—an expression of divinity—but can only remember it as whatever symbol of divinity they have access to.

Thus, when I describe being lost in a violent storm of disturbing lights and colors, what I mean to say is, my brain chose to record this experience by recombining memories of disturbing lights, colors and emotions that it already knew of and imagined based on memories.

Describing OOBEs requires an entirely new vocabulary be added to our dictionary of understanding. Eventually, with enough time and teaching, we are no longer describe these other worlds with our physical reality vocabulary, but begin to describe the physical words with our other-world vocabulary. But as we do not have a common vocabulary for such experiences yet, our attempts to express ourselves will be within a context that is unknown to shared, external reality, and that can sometimes sound a little psychotic, which is defined as “a severe mental disorder in which thought and emotions are so impaired that contact is lost with external reality.”

Ironically, when faced with the irrational it is the rationalists that exhibit signs of psychosis. An example of this is Prahlad Jani, a 78-year-old man who lives as a hermit in a cave, and who claims he has lived without food and water for the past sixty years. The fact that he has been examined and taken seriously by eminent doctors is irrelevant to this point. What is relevant is that the Secretary General of the Indian Rationalist Association, Sanal Edamaruku, demanded that he be considered and treated as a criminal for simply making such a claim.[i]

Within the rational world of accepted knowledge we can find many examples of sensory inputs that would have a radical effect on how reality is perceived and understood. Imagine how the following abilities would alter your view of reality?

• Buzzards can see small rodents from three miles away.

• Bees have a ring of iron oxide in the belly to feel magnetic fields and have eyes that see polarized light.

• A cockroach can detect movement 2,000 times the diameter of a hydrogen atom.

• Elephants have a hearing range of 1 to 20,000 hertz, and can also hear with their nose and feet.

• The shark has special eyes that can see electricity.

• When you look at the sidewalk, you see cement and dirt, but that same sidewalk tells a bloodhound who walked there eight hours ago, what the soles of their shoes were made of, and what brand of cigarettes they smoked.

• Dolphins see sound waves as 3D images.

Lesser-known applications of our sensory-processing skills, such as the ability to smell personalities and emotions[ii],[iii] or if you’re a woman ovulating, your superhero-like ability to immediately recognize otherwise hidden snakes[iv] (the elongated, legless, carnivorous reptile type of snake, not the metaphorical type, although I suspect research would show interesting results for the later as well) and gay men. Some humans can even see a hundred times as many colors as a normal person.[v] And what of the extensive intrinsic nervous system in the heart comprised of clusters of neurons sufficiently sophisticated to qualify as a “heartbrain”? Certainly that must contain some sorts of sensory organs.

Perhaps the most overlooked, yet strongest sense we have is what we call our “gut sense.” Considering that our gastrointestinal tracts contain 95 percent of our body’s serotonin, has its own nervous system, and is filled with trillions of microbes sending terabytes of information to the brain every millisecond, microbes that are 100 times in number than that of the cells in the body and ten times the number of cells in the brain, all of which having a significant impact on the brain,[vi],[vii] one would have to consider the “gut” as a sense in its own right.[viii] Even more significant is how and what microbes we are exposed to at birth that so dramatically affect our brain growth. We are exposed to microbes during vaginal birth, followed by environmental exposure. Indigenous people are therefore exposed to the microbes of their natural surroundings. How do C-section births and exposure to microbes of hospitals, urban dwellings, and processed food alter our brain development?

When we add whatever sense it is that allows blind people to detect the emotions of a person in a photo,[ix] or the nine-year-old Indian girl, Yogamata, who demonstrated at the 2015 Business Advocacy summit at Capitol Hill in Washington DC that she could read blindfolded using only her third eye,[x] or the six additional senses identified by those clever folks over at Harvard Medical School,[xi] we see how our current model of five senses is quaint, at best. After all, that model was proposed over two thousand years ago by the same philosopher—Aristotle—who held back physics for centuries with some of his completely inaccurate ideas about such things as gravity, that were proven wrong sixteen hundred years later by Galileo, and atoms, which were theorized by Leucippus and Democritus one hundred years before Aristotle declared the idea as nonsense. Why do we persist in holding on to such antiquated ideas about something so fundamental to our understanding of ourselves, society, and reality?

The above doesn’t even begin to touch on the new type of extra-senses and the new theories they are spawning, such Cambridge biologist Dr. Rupert Sheldrake’s idea of a morphogenetic field. These fields are briefly explained as:

…located invisibly in and around organisms, and may account for such hitherto unexplainable phenomena as the regeneration of severed limbs by worms and salamanders, phantom limbs, the holographic properties of memory, telepathy, and the increasing ease with which new skills are learned as greater quantities of a population acquire them.[xii] (Rupert Sheldrake)

I was, and am, left with the undeniable conclusion that the spectrum of what we are capable of perceiving is far greater than what we have programmed ourselves to accept.

But when it comes to how we perceive our reality, perhaps the most significant contribution is the relationship between the senses and emotions, or, one might say, between the brain and the heart. It is this relationship that gives weight to our perceptions, for without some sort of judgment belief (“that’s good”) or emotion (“I love that”), perceptions would be meaningless. The significance is that these emotions and beliefs we assign to our perceptions are within our power to create in any way we prefer, and by doing so we can choose how we want reality to appear to us.