A Dagger to the Heart

It was 2006 and we were vacationing in the Yucatan Peninsula in the south of Mexico, with time and more to spare for the end of the world foretold by the Mayan Calendar on Dec 21, 2012.  Jokes aside, the Mayan calendar is still in use today and so precise that their 365 day Haab calendar has an error of only 1 day in 6729 years, while our “modern” calendar has an error of 1 day in 3236 years.   One of the highlights of our trip was Chichen Itza, which dates back to 600 A.D. and was one of the largest cities of the Mayan Empire and includes architectural wonders like the 100 ft high Temple of Kukulcán.  This stepped pyramid, marvel of new world engineering has a dark and gruesome side.  It was the site of human sacrifice carried out in ceremonies of colossal scale, at which upwards of 20,000 victims were sacrificed at a time in bloody offerings to the gods.  In these many day-long rituals, the still-beating heart of the victim would be cut out with a sacrificial knife made of flint and offered to the deity.  

Temple of Kukulcán or El Castillo, Chichen Itza, Mexico

Despite this terrifying history, Chichen Itza is considered to be an "energy vortex" and attracts new-agers in droves for its supposed powers of healing and rejuvenation.  When told about this by the local guides, I rolled my eyes in skepticism.  We spent the rest of the day taking in the sights and returned to our nearby motel for a well-earned night's rest.  

Mayan Obsidian Dagger

At the time, I had the habit of doing 20 minutes of yogic breathing or pranayama prior to bedtime, and had been bothered for over a year by a tight and painful catch at the base of my sternum that prevented full expansion of my lungs.  I would frequently play with this spot with my fingers trying to massage out the soreness, to no avail.  That night, pranayama complete, I nodded off to sleep.  The vivid and hyper-realistic dream that that I experienced later in the night was out of a new age playbook.  In it, I was lying on my back with my chest bared.  A bald headed female Buddhist monk in saffron robes stood next to me holding an obsidian dagger.  She gazed into my eyes intently, yet kindly, in a Tilda Swinton as The Ancient One kinda way.  "I am going to press the dagger into your chest and it will hurt", she said "but the tightness you've been experiencing will go away".  I nodded my consent.  An intense, searing pain tore through me as she pressed the blade into me just under the ribcage.  

Tilda Swinton as The Ancient One, Dr. Strange (2016)

I sat bolt upright in bed with a gasp, panting heavily.  It was pitch dark and Bhavna and Meghna were fast asleep.  What.  Was.  That.  I wondered.  I felt the spot at the base of my ribs and the tightness was gone.  In the following days and weeks, my pranayama was smooth and effortless, with not a hint of discomfort.  In disbelief, I kept waiting for the tightness to return, but it never did.   I am no more a believer in energy vortices today than I was before, but this incident from 2006 has left me a little warier of Chichen Itza, a place where the priests imposed a reign of terror and rivers of blood flowed copiously.  

Post Script:  I want to stress that many, many nations and cultures have a bloody past, not just the Mayans.  The Spanish Inquisition was cruel and vast in its scale.  Slavery and genocide were part and parcel of the colonization of North America, and its legacy lingers on.  Nazi Germany needs no introduction.  The caste system in India continuous to oppress large segments of the population.  So on and so forth.  

A Cry at Midnight

The following incident, worthy of a 1970’s supernatural thriller, occurred when I was a child.  I present it below as narrated to me by my mother. 

"When you were about two years old, you required corrective surgery on your feet for a tendon related problem.  We lived in New Delhi at this time, and the procedure was to be performed at the prestigious All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS).  Leading up to the surgery, a plaster cast was applied to your feet for a few weeks to stretch the tendons out.  By questioning whether the plaster cast had been applied correctly, I earned the wrath of the junior doctor – let’s call him Dr. J - who performed this procedure. 

 All India Institute of Medical Sciences, New Delhi

The surgery itself was eventually scheduled for early 1969 and since the senior doctor – let’s call him Dr. S - was planning to travel in April of that year, your grandparents and I didn’t go through with the usual process of looking up the almanac for an auspicious day for the surgery.  In fact, the date set by the hospital was inauspicious per traditional reckoning, but neither your grandparents nor I raised any objections given Dr. S’s calendar constraints. 

A few days prior to the procedure, I had a vivid and disturbing dream, in which Dr. S came out of the operating theater calling out in alarm “Mrs. Krishnan, Mrs. Krishnan... where is Mrs. Krishnan...?”  A voice in the dream announced, “a vein has been cut and there is bleeding….”.  I ignored this dream, putting it down to my own nervousness.  The day before the surgery, we went to a temple to seek blessings.  As the priest walked up to us with the Aarthi or divine flame, it suddenly blew out as though by a sudden gust of wind.  I dismissed this omen also. 

         

The Fault in Our Stars

The next day, we were admitted into a general ward in AIIMS, a dormitory-like space that we shared with multiple other patients.  In the evening, who should come on his rounds but our old “friend” Dr. J.  You beamed at him, upon which he remarked “Now he's smiling at me. He doesn't know that tomorrow, I'm going to be the devil in the theater.”  I ignored even this chilling comment, putting it down to a tasteless attempt at humor. 

As evening came, you started crying for no particular reason and wouldn’t stop.  The patients around us tried to cheer you up, but to no avail. Eventually, night arrived and we both fell asleep, with you sandwiched between me and the wall against which our bed was set.  Suddenly, in the middle of the night, you woke the entire ward up with a piercing scream.  The lights came on and what should everyone see, but a copious amount of blood splattered all over the front of my white sari.  I examined you closely, but you showed no sign of pain and no trace of any injury, not even so much as a scratch.  There was simply no explanation for your scream and all this blood. 

Surgery preparations would start by 8 a.m. At 7 a.m., I met Dr. S in his office, shared the incident of previous the night to him, and said I wanted to call off the surgery.   He was very understanding and readily agreed.  We drove home and the family, grandparents included, were all relieved that the surgery had been put on hold.  Now home, you played around as though nothing had happened.   We eventually had the procedure done in Madras at a different hospital."

We pride ourselves on living in scientific and rational times, but this would have been one omen too many for most folks.  And you, dear reader, can credit this post that you are reading to a series of portents from more than a half-century ago.

Spirits in the Material World

I know a lawyer who sees dead people - all the time - just like the character played by Haley Joel Osment in the 1999 M Night Shyamalan thriller, The Sixth Sense.  What makes it a little surprising is that he's not a person given to esoteric interests.  Another lawyer friend in Seattle saw a man and his dog walk through her apartment in the early hours of the morning.  The dog even put its paws on her bed hoping to receive a pat.  After they disappeared into the thin air, she sat in bed wondering what it was that she'd just seen.  While there's a certain satisfaction in knowing that lawyers are haunted by spectral apparitions, such experiences are relatively common and upwards of one in five people worldwide have a similar story to share. 

Haley Joel Osment in The Sixth Sense (1999)

When I was about 11 years old, I saw not one but two spirits.  At the time, I used to live with my grandparents, uncle, aunt and cousins in Poes Garden in the city of Madras.  At night, my grandmother, cousin and I would sleep on mattresses on the floor of the living room.  It was my habit to wake up every night around 1 am, make a trip to the bathroom, and then lie wide awake in the dark for close to an hour before falling back asleep.  Some nights I would walk up to the mottai madi, the open terrace at the top of the house, and enjoy the cool air and stillness for some time before coming back down to bed.  Most such nights were uneventful, except this one.  I woke up in the middle of the night to see two figures of light standing at the foot of my mattress, looking at me.  They were both the size of children, vaguely but definitely human in outline, but otherwise featureless.  Inexplicably, I felt no fear.  After perhaps 20 seconds or so, the two spirits started gliding (not walking!) towards the dining room and disappeared into the darkness towards the kitchen.  Bursting with curiosity, I got up and followed them into the dining room, but they were not to be seen.  I searched the kitchen, the pantry room behind it and the closed verandah to the side of the house, but no luck.  They had vanished into the thin air.  

What my ghostly visitors looked like, minus the arms

I never thought to share this experience with anyone until many years later.  I was now 27 and living in Oakhurst, California.  Amma was visiting from India.  Appa and my brother Raghu were due to arrive a few days later.  "You know", I said, "I saw ghosts one night as a kid in Poes Garden".  I described the entire incident to her.  Amma rolled her eyes.  "It must have been the play of light and shadow from the street lights" she scoffed, "or maybe your overactive imagination".  We let it got at that.  When Appa and Raghu arrived, I opened with the same line.  Raghu immediately interjected "Me too" he said, "I also remember seeing ghosts there one night".  This was now getting interesting.  Without sharing any further details of my experience, I asked him to describe what he saw.  He'd come over for a sleepover one night to our grandparents', and was duly allocated a mattress on the floor of the living room for the night.  He'd woken up in the middle of the night, and seen not two but three figures of light standing at the foot of the mattress.  After a few seconds, the three figures glided towards the front of the house, passed right through the two inch thick teak wood of the locked door, and disappeared.  Like me, it had not occurred to Raghu to share this event with anyone till now.

Lyrics from Spirits in the Material World, The Police (1981)

Needless to say, this unexpected corroboration of details almost two decades after the original events did nothing to quell Amma's skepticism.  A good ghost story is perhaps meant to be enjoyed, not believed. While I have not had a similar experience since, I can't help believing that we live among spirits in this material world, each going about our business for the most part unaware of each other.  Unless you are like my lawyer friend, which is a whole another story.

Post Script:  While it tells well as a ghost story, in hindsight, I think what Raghu and I really saw was astral bodies engaged in a nightly out-of-body (OBE) adventure, as described by Robert Monroe.  I saw my cousins; Raghu saw my cousins and me.  As Indian spiritual guru Sri M describes it in his book Apprenticed to a Himalayan Master: A Yogi's Autobiography, all humans and even animals engage in this activity nightly, mostly without a recollection of it the next morning.  

Nootropic Journey

I was soaring over city streets, free as a bird, dodging light poles and oncoming trucks.  I wondered at my own miraculous ability to fly.  How is it, thought I, do I possess this ability?  Is this for real?  I felt a surge of energy course upwards from my toes into my upper torso.  Aha, that's where this power arises, I thought to myself.  Wait a minute, interjected another voice in my head - you're dreaming.  This is all a dream experience and that's why you are able to fly, realistic as it might seem.  The realization dawned in a flash that I was in bed, asleep and dreaming.  However, I was now awake within the dream.  

[Picture credit and "how to" tips: How To Have Lucid Dreams]

Excited by the prospect of actively controlling my dream from here on, I "took charge" of my flight trajectory and started exploring my environment consciously.  Unfortunately, I was perhaps too awake, and could not sustain the lucid dream state - in a few seconds, the dream world collapsed and I found myself in bed, eyes open, with the early dawn light making its appearance outside.  

Prior to falling asleep the previous night, I'd been thinking about lucid dreaming and if there was a way to induce the state.  As with my prior and only other lucid dream experience (see Bali Ha'i: Awake within the Dream), some subconscious mechanism appears to have triggered the experience in response to my wanting it.   It is also possible that the Tulsi, Kava and Ashwagandha nootropic supplements I took prior to bedtime may have contributed to the state of relaxed alertness that is conducive to lucid dreaming.  See Ashwagandha and lucid dreaming and Kava and Dreaming.  Enjoy your own flights, of fancy or otherwise, and be sure to let me know if you awaken in the dream!

P.S.: Children have the ability to lucid dream at will.  We all did.  We just lose this ability as we “grow up”.

Waking Up Can Be Hard To Do

There was an unfathomable, eternal void in which there raged an enormous, rushing sound.  Imagine being in the center of a hurricane and listening to the rumble of each flurry and squall...except that there was no listener, no one listening to this cacophony.  There then arose an awareness of the sound.  This was followed by an awareness of being aware.  Next arose the questions "Who is this who is aware?" and "What is this sound?", accompanied by growing curiosity and puzzlement.  Realization dawned - the questioner was myself and the raging storm was the sound of my own breathing.  I was a tiny atom floating deep inside the physical body I normally identify with, aware of every thunderous nuance and fluctuation of my breath as it rushed in through my nose, windpipe and bronchioles, and then out again.  

The mysterious ending from 2001: A Space Odyssey directed by Stanley Kubrick (1968)

A sense of the passage of time slowly returned.  There was a slow transition from atomic existence to everyday "normal" awareness, that fuzzy sense of existing somewhere in our heads.  In parallel, the hurricane subsided slowly until I could barely hear my breath even if I paid close attention.  

Rewind about an hour.  It was late one night at home in the quiet suburb of Redmond, Washington sometime in 2008.  At about 10:30 pm, I'd sat down on the carpet of our bedroom to enter a deep meditative trance...and fallen asleep!  Waking up is typically characterized by a groggy, clouded and abrupt emergence from deep sleep.  On this occasion, aided no doubt by my attempts at trance induction, I was treated to the high-fidelity, slow motion version of the experience with the intermediate stages clearly discernible.  In the framework of yoga, our everyday waking consciousness emerges from a deeper impersonal Awareness where there is no distinction between subject and object, or a-dvaita.   As the Neil Sedaka song goes, Waking Up is Hard to Do, but each of us has the ability to experience this everyday, at will, should we chose to do so.  

Sleep and his Half-brother Death by John William Waterhouse (1874)

The Nasadiya Sukta, or the Rigvedic Hymn of Creation, offers interesting parallels:



नासदासीन्नो सदासीत्तदानीं नासीद्रजो नो व्योमा परो यत् |

किमावरीवः कुह कस्य शर्मन्नम्भः किमासीद्गहनं गभीरम् ॥ १॥

1. Then even nothingness was not, nor existence,
There was no air then, nor the heavens beyond it.
What covered it? Where was it? In whose keeping?
Was there then cosmic water, in depths unfathomed?


न मृत्युरासीदमृतं न तर्हि न रात्र्या अह्न आसीत्प्रकेतः |

आनीदवातं स्वधया तदेकं तस्माद्धान्यन्न परः किञ्चनास ॥२॥

2. Then there was neither death nor immortality
nor was there then the torch of night and day.
The One breathed windlessly and self-sustaining.
There was that One then, and there was no other.

Nasadiya Sukta, 129th hymn of the 10th mandala of the Rigveda (10:129)

I had a reprise of the above experience a few weeks later.  The sequence of events was more or less identical, with one exception: instead of hurricane-like sounds of my own breathing, I was treated to the enormous rumbling sounds of my heartbeat and the blood rushing through it.  Once again, the vividness and acuity with which experience unfolded gradually faded as I emerged into everyday awareness.  On both occasions, given the gradual cessation of the experience, my heightened auditory awareness was clearly not imagined.  The limits of the human senses are clearly an unplumbed ocean awaiting our exploration. 

Drawing a Wolf from the Pack

Our dinner guests yesterday were a typical Seattle-area couple: she ran a successful health care business, and he worked as a technology executive.   The conversation was mundane, revolving around the merits of various movies we'd seen, before it veered towards our families and childhood experiences.  Mary, it turned out, had grown up on a Native American reservation as a child, and had quite a story to share.

When Mary was about six years old, she would have to walk alone to school through a desolate landscape overgrown with bushes and scrub.  It was a distance of a few hundred yards to the school and there was an aggressive pack of wild dogs in the area that she was terrified of.  To avoid them, Mary would stick close to the brush.  On one such day, her luck seemed to run out - she was cornered by two dogs in the bush.  As the dogs advanced on her menacingly, the seemingly miraculous happened.  A wolf appeared out of nowhere and attacked he dogs, chasing them away.  The wolf then escorted Mary all the way to her school, stopping at the edge of the bush and keeping watch on her until she made it to the school building.  At the end of the school day, it was there waiting to escort her all the way back home.

We thought this was remarkable enough, but Mary added "This was no one time occurrence - the wolf was my companion to and from school for the rest of the school year."  I asked her if she had felt afraid of the wolf, to which she said "How could I be afraid of it, when it had saved me from those stray dogs?"

The Native Americans believe in power or spirit animals, which appear in visions during trance, often carrying a symbolic message relevant to your current situation in the real world.  The spirit animal is ephemeral, and you have to draw inspiration and courage from it to solve for yourself the problem at hand.  Mary isn't Native American and doesn't know if the wolf was her spirit animal; in her case, not only did the wolf appear in this reality, it stayed around for nearly a year to protect her through a difficult and vulnerable time.

The story has a sad ending.  The reservation would periodically cull the population of wild dogs, and that summer, the wolf was among the casualties.

Of Bill Gates and Windows: An Open and Shut Case

I'd joined Microsoft in 1994 with just a few years left on my H1 visa, which was due to expire in April 1997.  The company applied for my green card in July of 1995, and as per the process followed by the Immigration and Naturalization Service, my case would be processed when my application date became "current".  On the 10th of each month, the INS would announce which dates they were currently processing, and come January of 1997, it was about five years behind, still processing applications from 1990. 

Bill Gates was at that time actively lobbying Congress to ease up restrictions on H1 visas.  Worried that I was just months away from having to leave the US, I dropped him an email asking if he could do anything to help.  I didn't hear back directly from Bill, but within a week, I got a call from a lawyer at Microsoft, asking to meet.  We discovered that we could extend my H1 visa by 100 days to July 31 1997, which the INS granted.  However, we didn't think this would make a difference, and on June 10, the INS was still processing applications filed in 1990. 


Microsoft began making plans to transfer me to the Vancouver, B.C., office in Canada, just across the border.  On July 10 1997, with 20 days left before I would have to leave the US, the INS released its monthly update, disclosing that it was now processing applications filed in July 1995.  Magically, the so-called "current" date had jumped forward by five years, by just exactly enough for my green card application to now be processed.  Had the "current" date moved by even a month less, this would not have been possible. 

I breathed a huge sigh of relief, secure that my life would now not be turned upside down.  The INS issued me an EAD (Employment Authorization Document), which permitted me to stay in the US indefinitely until my green card was issued. 

If the story ended right there, I might have written it off as a remarkable coincidence and nothing more.  What happened next was strange:  on Aug 10 1997, the INS release its next update and the "current" date had moved back to 1990!  A window had opened, as if only for me, enabling my green card process to move forward by a hair's breadth, and then closed shut just as abruptly.  Whether it was the Universe doing me a personal favor, or just the Blind Watchmaker momentarily losing the plot, it's the reason I am still here in the USA.