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.

Shamanic Trance: Epilogue

Death and Rebirth
The Shamanic journey is a journey of ego death and rebirth - at least, that's the best word for what I experienced.  As I shifted into trance, there was a strong sense of unease and anxiety which manifested as nausea.  Some deep-rooted instinct took over and my breathing automatically took on a chaotic rhythm to work through the nausea.  (Later on, Eduardo would conjecture that this chaotic breathing was a response to deep rooted emotions surfacing in the trance, see this reference on nihdotgov)   I felt myself "squeezed until all that was left was the very essence of existence", and I imagine the closest comparable sensation would be that of being born (!!!)  While the experience was very, very visceral, intense and just a little scary, it also felt completely natural and familiar at another level.  As the nausea wore off, the trance deepened and this where I had the sense of reliving many, many lives before emerging on the other side, reborn.

This article Breathe Like a Baby: The Miracle of Pranayama that I found as I write this post expresses it well:

No one teaches us to breathe. The compression of the fetal chest in the birth canal may cause the urge the breath. We are compressed, we are trapped, we need space—so our innate instinct is to breathe.

We need the space—the expansion—that breathing creates.

It helps us to continue creating space, to become devoid of conditioning to continue unlearning the fear, anxiety, and stress that we have learned, the stories that we’ve held on to for dear life, even though they were no longer serving us

Breath: The Umbilical Cord
The trance state is a state of expanded consciousness.  While the finite, limited sense of everyday self almost completely dissolves into infinity, a shred of individuality remains.  As I lay awash in bliss, the question arose as to what the relationship is between Unitary Awareness and the limited self and physical body of my everyday experience.  The answer that came was that breath is the umbilical cord that connects the finite body and mind to the infinite - stop breathing, and you merge into the infinite.





Gender and Identity
Once I was established in trance, all gender identification seemed meaningless and inconsequential.  Pure awareness or consciousness transcends such limited concepts.   I've already touched upon this in my previous post, but my sense of separate identity vanished.  In turn, I transformed into my wife, children, parents, uncles and aunts - in the sense of completely forgetting I was myself and becoming them.  I experienced what it was like to be each of them, sharing their emotions, hopes and fears - in other words, empathy to the point of complete identification with the other person. This line from the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali describing the steps to the experience of Samyama or oneness with an object of meditation, best captures the experience:

तद् एवार्थमात्रनिर्भासं स्वरूपशून्यम् इव समाधिः ॥ ३॥
tad evārthamātranirbhāsaṃ svarūpaśūnyam iva samādhiḥ .. 3..
When the object of meditation engulfs the meditator, appearing as the subject, self-awareness is lost. This is samādhi.


Salvation and the Time before Death
Expanded consciousness exists all around us at this very moment.  The effort is in staying in that expanded state instead of contracting into the day to day experience of limited self.  Quoting from The Time before Death by the 15th century mystic and poet Kabir.

What you call "salvation" belongs to the time 
            before death.
.....
What is found now is found then.
If you find nothing now,
you will simply end up with an apartment in the
          City of Death.
If you make love with the divine now, in the next 
life you will have the face of satisfied desire.

Pacific Northwest Shamanic Trance

"All including the world seen by you and yourself, the seer of the world, is one only." 

- ch.1, verse 1, All is One, the booklet recommended by Sri Ramana Maharshi

Many mystic traditions describe this state of Oneness as the true or ground state of all being.  While I'd experienced various interesting states of the mind, the experience of Oneness was foreign to me.  I could of course intellectualize and rationalize it, but that is hardly a substitute for the real thing.  

That then was the situation prior my session in the forests of Washington State with my shaman friend, Eduardo.  The shaman helps one shift into an altered state of consciousness through techniques that include rhythmic breathing, drumming and music, whereupon one can viscerally experience mystic truths and insights.  

So, one spectacular summer's morning in the Pacific Northwest, Eduardo and I hiked up to a nice secluded clearing in the forest and settled down for the day.  About an hour in, I felt it - subtle at first, then a big, big shift.  For the next 4-5 hours, I was like Alice in Wonderland, having fallen down a rabbit hole to a place where time and space as I knew it seemingly ceased to exist. 


I was plunged deep into a subjective experience that I can now barely recall and describe.  Physically, my body had turned mostly to jelly; I would lay spread-eagled face upwards on the forest floor, in the shape of Leonardo da Vinci's Vitruvian Man, or mustering all my will-power, roll around into a foetal shape, and then plant my face into the ground below me. 

I have the barest hint of recollection of reliving hundreds or even thousands of lives all at the same time.  I recall a little more clearly reliving every moment of this life all at once.  My self as I knew it had dissolved into near nothingness and in its place there was this vast expanse of consciousness - and in this field of being, I became everyone I'd known in my life, and they became me.  Especially with my family, it was impossible to tell where I ended and they began, or to even think of these personalities as distinct. 

"All that you consider as I, you, he, she and it, is one only."
- ch.1, verse 2, All is One

All separation gone, I felt my true nature as Joy: I repeatedly exploded in gales of ecstatic laughter, before lapsing back into trance where all possibilities - past, present and future - floated like a matrix in consciousness, and any path was seemingly there for the taking (more on this later). 

During the trance, there were extended periods where I was "lost", with interludes where some lucidity and ability to reflect would return.  Upon one such return to the present, I awoke to hear Eduardo singing "Suddhosi bhuddhosi", the lullaby of Jnana or self-knowledge that Queen Madalasa sang soothe to her infant son Vikrant as narrated in the ancient Indian religious text, the Markandeya Purana.   As the words rolled off his lips first in Sanskrit and then in English, I wept uncontrollably like a child, wracked by emotions that I cannot quite describe:

You are forever pure, you are forever true

And the dream of this world can never touch you

So give up your attachment & give up your confusion

And fly to that space that’s beyond all illusion

A question that came to mind was how to think of the various unpleasant and unlikable people I'd encountered in life with this expanded notion of Self without boundaries.  The answer came unbidden "Expand!  Expand to include all, pleasant and unpleasant, in the experience of Self."  Even in the trance state, this psychic expansion and embrace of negatives required enormous effort on my part.  I could discern that this was my homework to take away from the day. 

"He who sees "I am separate," "you are separate," "he is separate" and so on, acts one way to himself and another way to others. He cannot help doing so. The thought "I am separate, others are separate" is the seed from which grows the tree of differing actions in relation to different persons..."
- ch.1, verse 6, All is One

As late afternoon arrived, I emerged from trance to the peace and quiet of the forest.  Eduardo packed up his musical instruments and we walked back to our car in silence to head back home.

That night, as I sat at home reflecting on the day's events, a book in my collection caught my eye "The Book of Ho'oponopono: The Hawaiian Practice of Forgiveness and Healing".  It's message of healing negative relationships by "dissolving the negative patterns in one's field" had never made sense to me, until now.  I could now see that all experiences exist in the unitary field of Consciousness.  I was now open to the possibility that by becoming aware of and accepting even negative experiences from this perspective, a different path might open up moving forward. 

"There is nothing but yourself. All good will be yours. Yea, you become the good itself. All that others gain from you will be good only."
- ch.1, verse 10, All is One

Can one eliminate all negative experiences from one's life by "dissolving negative patterns"?  Is the work to unconditionally accept all negative experiences as part of the Self?  As I write this post from the limited perspective of my everyday self, either alternative seems daunting, if not outright impossible.  But that day in the forest, the possibility was dangled tantalizingly in front of me.

"Who is God? He is grace. What is Grace? Awareness without the fragmentary ego....In fact, there are no states besides this. They appear in the state of ignorance. For him who knows, there is one state only. You are that."
- ch.2, verse 10, All is One