2 - The Face in the Sky

In my first (and previous) post, I described briefly my worldview. The foundational part of that worldview is that there are dimensions beyond the four we normally experience. At some point I'd like to make a whole post about "the case for the existence of Divine dimensions." But regardless of what other evidence or mathematical justification there may be for the existence of such things, that isn't why I know at the core of my being that they really exist.

I realize that claiming to "know" such a thing is a bit outrageous coming from someone who is also a scientist. I don't expect anyone else to be convinced that there is such a thing. But I have had three distinct and intense experiences that were glimpses of More, that felt more real than anything I have otherwise experienced. Science has no explanation for these experiences as of yet, but that only indicates that science is always an exploration of what we don't yet understand.

Here is the story of the first of those three experiences of More:

It was in 2002, when I was 38 years old. I was driving down a rural highway in southern Minnesota, in my big old white Dodge cargo van, filled with all my professional gardener gear. I was on my way to do some work in the yard of one of my gardening clients. It was mid-morning in mid-summer, and the roadside must have been green with trees and cornfields, but I don't remember that part. It all feels grey in comparison to what appeared in the clouds above the trees on the horizon.

It's not that what appeared through the clouds was bright in a visual sense. I don't actually know how to describe it, because it was not perceived by my ordinary senses in the ordinary way, but here's my best attempt to describe it with the English language.

I could "see" what felt like the veil of ordinary reality parting, and a Smile appeared. This smile was in, but also beyond, and also in front of, the clouds above the trees slightly to the left of straight ahead. It was a broad smile with two eyes set close above it. They didn't have much visual detail, other than the clear proportions of a smiling mouth and eyes.

The powerful part was the Love that radiated from this smile. It was radiating in all directions, but also directed at me; a palpable, all-encompassing and deeply penetrating warm Love that immediately imparted the knowledge that I, including every particle and aspect of my being, was completely accepted by this Being who was smiling at me. My self-doubt, my anxiety, my frustration at the world, my feelings of failure and of powerlessness, my desire to save the world... all of it, all at once, was felt to be completely beautiful and perfect and unquestionably deserving of, and engulfed in, and infused with, the Love flowing from this Being.

This revelation was astonishing and beautiful and unbelievable to my stunned mind, but there was more... I also could feel that everything that was going on, and everything that had ever gone on, in this world, including all the things that I felt were so horrific and sad, all the wars and ecological destruction, were all proceeding EXACTLY the way they were supposed to be proceeding, and that this immense beneficent Smiling Being was infinitely pleased and satisfied and delighted, and filled with a deep, warm, compassionate mirth at ALL the proceedings, and that all of it was in Divine order and all of it would eventually show itself, at the right time, to be to the Glory of this Being..

And then the veil that had parted closed again and regular reality resumed...

This whole episode must have lasted only a few seconds in regular time. I continued driving down the road. I don't remember crying. The regular part of me felt stunned and confused and in disbelief, especially at the part about everything in the world going exactly the way it was supposed to be going. "WHAT?! How can that be?"

At the same time, a deeper, hitherto forgotten part of me felt like I had just been reminded of things that I had, on some level, always known. This glimpse that I got of a dimension beyond our regular experience had felt more Real than anything I had ever felt. My normal reality felt like watching a dull, flat, black and white movie through a grey fog, compared to the vivid immediacy and all-pervading depth and intensity of this Face and the Love it emanated.

The truth of these revelations was simply and purely embedded in my body in a way that was beyond the reach of my conditioned mind-scape. Part of this download-of-knowing that I was given in that brief moment was that all my discontent with the way things were proceeding was just as much an integral part of the proceedings as all the rest.. there was no paradox that wasn't included in the absolute acceptable-ness of all of Reality.

 Much of the rest of my story since that experience 20 years ago is the story of learning how to integrate that download into my life and understanding of the world. It came at a time in my life when I was struggling in a very dysfunctional marriage, deeply unsatisfied with my progress towards doing something meaningful in my life, feeling like a miserable failure as the mother of our 6-year-old son, depressed, highly stressed and overwhelmed with juggling three jobs, housework, yardwork, arguments with my husband, constant financial anxiety, intense social awkwardness, trying to pretend I was good at being an adult, when the mess of our house and our finances and our parenting and our relationship and my job performance was clear evidence that I wasn't, and I was constantly ashamed about it. In short, I felt like I was in a dark distressing maze with no map for a way out.

And then this glimpse came, of a dimension of real love and acceptance and peace at the proceedings of the world. This glimpse was planted viscerally like a small seed deep in my being, and was immediately covered over by the rest of the reality of my life. It would take several years before I felt any sort of roots sprouting out of this seed into the rest of my life. But I would never be the same, and would never feel the same sense of hopelessness. I had been graced with the gift of a teeny but powerful lifeline now, to a Dimension of Love that was undeniable.

   --------------------

I think it's important at this juncture to give a brief prequel to what happened that day.

As I said, I was up to my ears in a dysfunctional marriage. (We have since divorced, and that is a big part of my story, to be told later..) We had been together for about 8 years, and had been unable to have a conversation that didn't turn into an argument for most of those years. We were at an impasse, and both of us wanted some understanding FROM the other person, but were incapable of giving any understanding TO the other person. We were both encased in a hard shell of defenses protecting our tender vulnerable hearts and trying to feel better by believing all our conflicts were the other person's fault.

So in the midst of this, my husband decided that maybe we could get in a more compassionate frame of mind together by taking some MDMA, also known as Ecstasy. Somehow he had heard that it had been used in the past as a marriage counseling aid. This was before the current resurgence of interest and scientific inquiry into using psychedelics therapeutically in the mental health field, but he got a couple doses of MDMA from a friend whom he trusted, and I trusted his trust in his friend, and though I had never done any sort of mind-altering substance other than occasional alcohol, and even more occasional cannabis, also at the suggestion of my husband, and had always been reluctant to do anything "harder" than those two, I was willing to try, with some trepidation, because things were really not working between us the way we were going about it.

So we both took a day off of work, I brought our son to daycare anyways, and we each took half a pill sometime in mid-morning. We didn't really have a plan or agenda, but I sat in our back yard next to a bonfire of brush that he was feeding. I could feel the MDMA infusing me with a warmth and comfort that made me want to talk freely.

I started thinking about one of the constant themes of our arguments, which was that he wanted a five-year plan for our lives, which included some plan for financial security, whereas I had grown up with a dad who was an artist and always believed that if he did what he loved, the universe would support him, and it always did. I had this sort of intuitive trust in the universe in my bones from my upbringing, but could never get this across to my husband. My mom called my dad a "lilies of the field" artist, referring to one of Jesus's sayings in his Sermon on the Mount.*

So as I was feeling the safety and warmth of the MDMA infusing my body, I went and got my bible so that I could see that passage. I sat next to the bonfire and read the entire Sermon on the Mount out loud. Each sentence struck a deep chord of recognition in my heart and I felt like these teachings of Jesus were The Thing that the world needed to hear and follow, to heal all our problems.

My husband wasn't all that interested in what I was so enthralled with. I don't remember much else specific about the day, other than that the MDMA had worn off by mid-afternoon and my husband had felt like the whole experiment was not successful, and by the evening we both felt the same as we always did. If anything, we felt worse, because we had failed to feel any sense of deeper connection with each other and had stayed in our own private worlds, and the hopes we had of getting somewhere different had been dashed.

It was the day following this little MDMA experiment that I got the glimpse of the Face of God in the sky.

I don't feel that this glimpse was in any way a drug-induced "hallucination". For one thing, I felt like the effects of the Ecstasy had fully dissipated by the previous evening. That isn't to say that there wasn't some residual chemical in my body. But the Glimpse was very brief and clear and extra-real and any experiences I had prior to that, while under the influence of some mind-altering substance, had ended up feeling vague and foggy in retrospect. This glimpse, on the other hand, remained vivid and profound.

The way I understand this now is that the MDMA probably did indeed impact my ability to get this glimpse, but not directly. I feel like it did some clearing or re-wiring of some circuits in my brain or nervous system that made it possible for the veils to part, and what came through those parted veils was indeed Real. If someone feels inclined to dismiss my experience because of the relative proximity in time to the intake of a drug, that is understandable, but anyone else's analysis is irrelevant to me because it doesn't change the impact that experience has had on the rest of my life. 

Furthermore, the two following experiences I had of similar parting-of-the-veils to reveal the Divine dimensions were far removed in time from any intake of mind-altering substances. I will be telling those two stories next.

*What's known as Jesus's Sermon on the Mount starts at chapter 5 of the book of Matthew. The part about "lilies of the field" is Matthew 6:28. I highly recommend reading the entire Sermon on the Mount, if you haven't recently. Google it, if you don't have a Bible handy.