A strange and wonderful thing happened to me, most unexpectedly, which is how some of the most magnificent things in life seem to happen. I was coming home after having lunched out, enjoying the sun as it glistened and sparkled on the water below us, when suddenly I popped out of my body for a moment. I think this is known as an out-of-body experience, sometimes also called Astral Projection (thank goodness I wasn't driving). Without warning my soul (or spirit, it's one and the same) decided to take a jaunt and forgot to tell my body it was leaving. The last time this happened I was an innocent 16 year old, brushing my teeth and minding my own business. I had decided to look into my eyes in the mirror and see what was there (the way you first look into your lover's eyes to see their soul), when, "Pop!" I was standing alongside myself. I distinctly remember thinking, "Hey, I'm kinda pretty," and, "I'm smaller than I thought I was." It was at that moment I realized the pretty girl was in fact ME, at which point I began to panic. "Boop!" I stepped right back into my tiny 16 year old frame, and was staring back at me in the mirror. Since then I've only told a select few friends about my teenage experience, because it was extremely alarming, and I wanted to forget it had happened so it never happened again. Interestingly, every friend I've talked to about this has admitted sheepishly to me that they too have had some variation of an out-of-body experience.
Thirty-four years later my soul did a repeat performance, this time with a variation on the theme. I was standing to the right of my body, a bit above it, noticing the dark shadows under my eyes and how tired I looked. I thought about how the last time I was out of my body I was sixteen, and again, I started to panic. Immediately I was re-deposited back inside, well, ME. Once I was sure I was safe and sound, all in one piece again, the cynical, analytical left brain, the "human" reasoning part of me, seemed to slide out of the way just enough for my soul to commandeer the screen of my mind. It was like watching a movie, and I don't remember seeing or hearing anything from the outside world for about 5 minutes. The movie flashed pictures quickly across the screen in succession, pictures flipping so fast that although in the moment I understood what they meant, I can't recall them all now. It reminded me of the time I almost drowned when I was 12 years old. I was about to go unconscious, pressed down in the basin of the river by an undertow, when I watched my life pass before my eyes in a super-fast slide show (fortunately I was saved by a man's arm that dredged my sister and I from the bottom of the river, and deposited us back in the shallows, although there was no man to be found on the beach. But that's another story for another time). This movie was about who I really am, and the associated feelings were overwhelmingly melancholy.
When my soul popped out of my body, I felt instantaneously frightened...no, it was more like terrified. This wasn't supposed to be happening; my body was sitting there enjoying the view while my consciousness had casually side-stepped the confining boundaries. It's a shock to see your body somehow functioning without you. I protested vehemently and in a blink I was back, staring out through my eyes again. But the movie of my life was playing on the vast screen before me in living color, and as it did, I began to feel as if I were shrinking. Shrinking like Alice in Wonderland. I've always loved and related to Alice-a well-meaning bookworm who couldn't concentrate on her studies for all the distracting adventures outside of the norm which were summoning her. That's me, I'm an Alice. And while it's believed that Lewis Carol wrote Alice In Wonderland while smoking opium, I promise you, I was 100% sane and sober when this occurred.
I was shrinking, but shrinking in relation to the Universe's immensity-seeing my true size as compared to it. I was like a speck of dust flying through the air compared to the vastness of eternity, and to the Eternal Mind. I kept shrinking and shrinking, down, down, smaller than a dust mite on a piece of dust, smaller than the cell of a dust mite, and further down still until I sunk into black oblivion and stopped. Here I would never be noticed by anyone ever again. It seemed to me it was my soul's beginning place, a place I had known before and had returned to, completely void of color or activity, but somehow alive and entirely peaceful, like a black deep sleep. Though it was dark all around, there was an absence of fear. I still had full consciousness, a solitary entity with a personality, feelings, and the ability to reason. I was also very small as compared to eternity. The "I" I'd known, ME, my ego, had disappeared. The confounding thing about it was that while "I" was gone, it was wholly relieving to have shed the weight of my body, and the need to be anything for anyone else. I thought about life on earth, and felt heavy-hearted. As the movie screen showed me hundreds of faces, each animated and in rapid succession, it seemed that every soul there had one common characteristic: they were all suffering. These people were frail, fragile, miniscule, and so...ALONE. A desolation pervaded me as I watched humanity, and I felt tears wetting my eyes. It seemed I had been mistaken, gravely mistaken all my life.
I was used to thinking of myself being alone in the world, separate from everything in my own struggle for survival, an existential island in the universe. As I sat in this den of nothingness, in the movie theater's comforting darkness, I understood that I was never alone. I was never separate or apart. I realized I'd been living in a dream, that life itself is a dream, and most of us are sleepwalking through it. This less-than-a speck person swamped in primordial darkness was in fact vitally connected to all of humanity, an interwoven thread that couldn't possibly be separate from it. I was both connected to the darkness, a part of it, and connected to all of humanity by my suffering. I saw how I was one ray of light among countless rays of light which combined to form the color black. I was a pixel, one speck among countless specs that combined to make a giant black canvass which our souls had originally been plucked from. Yet I had mistakenly thought that I had been plunked down on earth, separated from my source, damned to a life of misery, an Alice lost in an insane Wonderland. What I was being shown was quite opposite of everything my mind believed was true. I wasn't indispensably important as my ego would have me believe, and yet I was a vital part of the fabric of life. Without my thread the grand design would begin to come unraveled. I sat staring into the depth of the blackness for what seemed like years, or at least a very long time. Then I heard my fiancée's voice break in with, "Are you alright?" I didn't want to leave the movie theater yet, the show wasn't over. I mumbled, "Ya." I felt the familiar and comfortingly human ooze of tears on my cheeks. I couldn't find words to describe the connectedness, or the smallness I was feeling.
I remembered hearing a "Pop!" ring in my ears when my soul tethered loose from my body. I thought how like a champagne bottle we are. In death the soul shoots out and the tension of life is finally relieved. I was that cork, spinning through space. I thought how we make such a big deal of death when it is as easy and effortless as uncorking a bottle of champagne. I understood what author and psychic Sylvia Browne meant when she said that birth is much more difficult than death-it is much harder to be born than to die. I thought then about how my daughter who passed of suicide must have been baffled when she learned how important her life actually was, and how taken aback when she saw how essential to life, how indispensable she was, a link in the chain of life not made to be broken. I flashed to the multitudes of souls toiling here on earth-how ill and tired, how fearful and jealous, how hurt, bruised and broken, until I could hardly stand to watch anymore. Tears were falling hard for all of us-for me, for my lost daughter, for every lonely and confused person who has every come to this planet chasing redemption and purification. I understood then that earth is the only, and one true Hell in the cosmos.
And then I saw my daughter, center stage on the screen of my mind, looking radiantly healthy and whole, joyously alive. She led me to a festival, as if she blinked us there. I was standing on the steps of a huge white alabaster marbled building, with great columns and a dome. I was standing with many other people who had returned, back from earth. We were like the refugees who'd finally arrived on the shore-tired, gaunt and weary, but triumphant, the hems of our robes flapping in the refreshingly cool wind. They, the citizens below, were waving colorful flags and throwing what I can only describe as many-colored glitter into the breeze. There was loud celebratory trumpeted music. The crowds were cheering in a thunderous roar. Dressed in white robes with wreaths on our heads, we stood awed at the reception. The whole scene reminded me of ancient Rome. Our return was being decorated and celebrated. My daughter was in the audience below looking up at us with such awe and admiration twinkling in her eyes. Remembering this scene still gives me a lump in my throat. To them, the people who had never chosen to come to earth, or to the suicides who had come home too early, we were heroes. Hero's so great, like the mighty Gods and Goddesses of antiquity, Zeus and Apollo and Athena and their children. I understood what Jesus had meant when he said, "Ye are Gods" (John 10:34). We are eternal souls on an incredible journey through time and space. I saw my daughter marveling at the God-like status of this eternal dust mite. Then my fiancée called me again, her voice dragging me out of the this epic adventure, and "Boop!" I was average Alice again, back in my boringly normal life with its predictably strange and fragile creatures. But in the time it took me to go down the rabbit hole, I had been a part of it all, and had witnessed for myself the oneness that spiritual teachers speak about, the fabric we are all a part of.
Twice now I've stood outside my preconceived notions of who I am. I've seen only a glimpse of what's behind the black curtain leading to the next rabbit hole, but of one thing I'm convinced-we are all headed there together.
To see all of Nina's books: http://www.amazon.com/Nina-Bingham/e/B008XEX2Z0
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