My Problem With Reality

The thing about other people's mystical, semi-mystical or quasi-mystical experiences is that they just don't translate anecdotally. No matter how fascinating they may be to the agent or reagent who enjoyed them, it's rather like listening to someone recounting their dreams - rarely gripping and generally not a lot of fun, unless you happen to be Sigmund Freud or Carl Jung.

My own sort-of-mystical experience is no exception to the general rule. Utterly beguiling and deeply significant as it is to me, the few poor souls who've had to sit through the complete version generally have developed glazed-over eyes and a distinct far-away look just a few sentences in. So I'll keep this version reasonably short. As to why I'm recounting it at all, well it sort of links to yesterday's entry and I felt the need to complete the story - and, I suppose, as something that is deeply significant to me I just can't resist.

The trouble is that my one and only genuine experience of the 'other' was essentially drug induced so it's not going to convince any of my secular materialist friends of its validity. I hasten to add that the drugs in question were entirely legal and of the anaesthetic variety - this is another surgical story.
It took place in June 1997, in the course of the second operation on my back. In a way it was something like a lucid dream, a dream in which you know you're dreaming and can influence the course of the dream. I was aware I was having an operation, though I didn't feel any of the physical effects of what was being done to my body. The lucidity of the experience was integral to the whole narrative of what was taking place - up to the point I became reflexively aware I had been replaying, as it were, my experience of four years earlier, recapitulating the same barren sort-of-nightmare. Suddenly I was able to transcend that and was aware of a kind of dialogue taking place between me and some kind of other not-me.

Anyway the story gets quite convoluted at this point, so I'll jump to the ending, in which something like the point of it all is embedded. I find myself back in the real world. The experience is so entirely convincing I find myself consciously testing my perceptions and I know this is the world as it is - until abruptly it freezes and the still image simply shatters, like a cracked pane of glass. I am baffled and astonished. Whoever not-me is, is simply amused. I'm not sure how I know this, but I do. Then I'm plunged back into the real world. This time it's even more convincing (don't ask how, but it is) to the point at which there is absolutely no doubt of what I'm experiencing. I have an experience of the real so total as to be impossible to deny. Then the not-me says quite distinctly You don't think this is real do you? with a distinct chuckle. The voice is not unkind, far from it, and the humour is genuine and oddly generous, almost as if I'm expected to share the joke. Again the world freezes, this time to my absolute astonishment, and reality shatters once more.

(This bit is embarrassing, so I'm keeping it in brackets. It was a few months after this that watching an episode of Star Trek, The Next Generation, one of my favourite tv programmes of the period, I saw exactly the same 'shattering effect' in a story about Ryker having his mind interfered with. Somehow you don't expect your deepest experiences to be played out on kitschy, popular tv series. I've often wondered if someone, the writer, the designer of the effect had had an experience similar to mine and decided to memorialise it.)

After that I'm granted a kind of vision of what is real, except it's not a vision but a kind of complex of feeling. It's simple and convincing. I don't feel terribly privileged as it's so obvious I know I've known it all along. And then it all stops.

Except that it has never really stopped. In the immediate aftermath of the operation I found the whole experience extraordinarily comforting. A bit like the kind of comfort those who've been involved in near-death experiences tend to report.

Years later I feel much the same. And this despite the fact (possibly because of?) that I don't have much trust in reality. The moment I let myself become aware of how I am perceiving the world (something I occasionally do in TOK lessons when I'm trying to convey to students the idea that whatever is out there is more obviously in here, in our heads) the world becomes extremely fragile, tissue-thin. If I persist I find myself becoming quite faint and am aware of a kind of trembling of everything around me. I don't stay too long in this state, I don't think it makes for good teaching, but it's kind of fun, and kind of frightening, to go there. I suppose it might be expected that I'm implying some kind of contempt for reality in all this. Far from it - I think I've enjoyed the world available to our senses far more in the last eleven or so years than ever before, well since being a child, at least. It's very fragility renders it all the more precious and astonishing somehow.