Years ago, I was with a very meditative and highly mystical friend. He was explaining a complicated topic to me, and in the middle of a long discourse, I literally saw him shift shapes. He was younger… then older… then weaker… then stronger. This kept happening, like a match flickering back and forth, for perhaps 20 or 25 seconds.
During this entire interlude, I blinked a few times but never said a word to him. Until now, I only mentioned this experience to a few close friends.
Why? Because we tend to blink away this sort of “disconnect” with reality. Most of us think that reality is what we see when we are being logical and responsible.
What if we are wrong?
There’s a condition known as terminal lucidity, which The Guardian describes in this way: a phenomenon in which people whose brains have not functioned properly for significant periods of time – often many years, and mostly because of neurodegenerative diseases such as dementia – suddenly regain cognition and interact with coherence. Responses might range from wordless but emotional exchanges to substantial memory recovery.
As is typical in our society, researchers explain this in terms of the brain working again for a very brief period of time. But what if the opposite is true? What if when we shut down enough human systems, we tap into a larger intelligence?
I am ever so slowly moving in the direction of seeking out experiences I used to blink away.
The reason for “ever so slowly” is because 99.99% of of my life has been in the mainstream, where we don’t see things like a person shifting shapes.
Remember that friend I mentioned up top? He argues that if you are truly coherent and take meditation and connections with nature SERIOUSLY, then you can become a receiver of universal intelligence.
This doesn’t mean that if you meditate 15 minutes a day for three weeks, you will suddenly be a genius.
It means that if you open yourself up to the universe in every way possible, again and again and again—with determination and courage—you will tap into true intelligence.
Why courage? Because it takes courage to ask the floor to fall out from under you and the walls to disappear.
The problem, of course, is that almost no one does this. Case in point: me. Since 2006, I have been carrying around instructions for how to do this.
What makes us human is not that we follow the rules and live by the clock. What makes us human is that tiny voice in the back of our minds that whispers every now and then, “Maybe there is more to life than this?”
Perhaps it is because we dislike getting rid of what we are familiar with,