Tracy Cochran stories on the way towards awakening

“To speak of wilderness is to speak of wholeness.  Human beings came out of that wholeness.”

–Gary Snyder

We come from wilderness historically and as children.  Spring reminds me childhood.  As trite and obvious as that statement can seem, it points to something important and not-at-all obvious.   The gorgeous leafing and blooming and greening now happening in the greater New York area, the scent of fresh cut grass and lilacs, can literally take us back—back in time, back inside ourselves to the wild pure joy of being in a body, part of a vast and mysterious living world. 

Up until I was about 10 years old, I loved being a wild, indigenous child.  I remember running around the big backyard in bare feet (no deer ticks), loving the cool touch of the grass, the soft thud of my feet on the earth.     

“Ancient thought could not even conceive of the individual’s soul life apart from the soul of the world,” writes James Hillman.  Children are more soulful than many adults in the sense of living closer to the body, knowing the visible body is just the tip of the ice berg, sensing their connection to the soul of the world.

I remember climbing the Butternut tree in the backyard, loving its smooth cool bark, knowing every limb by heart, hanging by my knees from a low limb, then somersaulting around backwards and dropping to the ground.  I loved feeling being in a body, living entirely from the inside out (not caring what I looked like or what impact I had).  I was limited but I didn’t feel limited.

When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child.  Thinking like a child included imagining I was a jungle princess in a primordial forest in ancient India, traveling everywhere with a sleek, deadly, preternaturally intelligent black panther named Striker.   Sometimes Striker padding along beside me, telepathically updating me about lurking dangers, and sometimes there was no separation between Striker and me.  I was not a little girl in a backyard in Northern New York.  Sometimes, I was a panther.

In the spring and summer, all the kids in the neighborhood would play this long shapeless game we called Ghost in the Graveyard.  This is a variant on a game I think all kids or most kids play, Werewolf, Vampire, or today, possibly, “Zombie Apocalypse.”   We would take turns being ghosts or various kinds of unnatural creatures, agents of Satan, chasing one another shrieking and growling all over the neighborhood until it was dark and our mothers called us in.  It was a game about the thrill of being alive, of being healthy little animals.  But the game was also about a vaster, darker drama.  We children knew there are fates worse than death.

 Sometimes the game involved guerilla warfare and Striker was called in as a secret weapon.  When I told people Striker was present among the shrieks increased because although he was basically good and very intelligent, you could never really tame an invisible panther, only I was safe being his mother.   When I said Striker was attacking a kid, they were dead and they knew it.  I never thought of this as having an unfair advantage, because my cause felt so pressing and so just.    My cause was to serve a greater cause.  A striker is an attacker but also the clapper in a bell.  Welling up from an unconscious depth, there was this wish to resonate like a bell.

The game was a way of playing with the energies and capacities we sensed in our wild child bodies.  We could be fierce, sleek, swift, savage, animal. With Striker beside me, I stood up to the forces of darkness, fighting fire with fire.  Later in life I realized that having an imaginary black panther is a little like wearing a black leather jacket, which I did in my twenties.  Striker was a crucial accessory, covering up a secret longing to be good, to live in accord with a greater wholeness.  

When I was a child I spoke (spake) as a child, I understood as a child, I thought like a child.  I thought I was alone in my great quest, and this is important for a child.  I remember lying enclosed in a ring of lilac bushes in my backyard, experiencing the kind of fertile solitude that Rilke said was necessary to be an artist– “to be as solitary as you were when you were a child, when the grown-ups walked around involved with matters that seemed large and important because they looked so busy and because you didn’t understand a thing about what they were doing.”

Rilke pointed out that children see how grim and shabby most adult doings really are.  Children see that most adults are disconnected from their bodies, from the true vast potential of the body that connects us to the whole.  They sense we need the body to know truth, because the truth cannot be thought—it must be lived.   But children understand like children.  When I was a child, I sensed I was powerful but I didn’t know how powerful—in the sense that I didn’t know in what way I might be powerful, that true power comes from the Whole, from learning to allow ourselves to be like bells, to resonate with impressions, to be struck by life.

In time I put away Striker and other childish things.  I searched for and found ways and ideas beyond my childish understanding.  “’The Greek word for ‘idea,’ eidos, comes from idein, ‘to see,’ and is related to the noun, which means two things: a) something seen like a form and b) a way of seeing like a perspective,” writes James Hillman.  “We both see ideas and see by means of them.”  The strange thing is, at least it strikes me as strange right now, the greatest of the greatest of the ideas I encountered, the greatest ways of seeing– Love God and Love Your Neighbor as God, the Eight-fold Path–  drew on what I sensed as a child: the Truth cannot be thought, it must be lived in the body. 

“The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven,” writes John Milton in “Paradise Lost.”

Recent brain science and ancient spiritual practice reveal that the mind is wired to make heavens and hells moment after moment. We perceive and almost instantly we react, overlaying experience with a feeling tone—it is pleasant or unpleasant or neutral, worth grasping or pushing it away.  These almost instantaneous primal judgments, evaluating all our experience in relation to ourselves, almost always make little hells of our endlessly changing experience—there an aspect of imbalance or unease imbedded in almost everything that happens—the food isn’t quite hot enough or too hot. 

“Almost” is the key heaven.  There is a tiny but real open space—a space of possibility–between perception and reaction.  Noticing this open space—usually by turning the attention back to ourselves rather than to the object of our perception and (usually) our craving—brings a new possibility.  It offers a path towards heaven instead of our usual, habitual hell.  

It takes a long time to realize that the gate to a deeper, richer, higher, finer life—to paradise–swings inward.  The kingdom of heaven, the farthest reaches of cosmos, the beating heart of life, is not “out there” somewhere—it isn’t in the South of France or Asia or anywhere but here—it is right here, within the experience of each of us.  We don’t need special equipment to find it, no accelerator, no telescope, not even a better brain.  We need a new kind effort and intention–not aimed at something big (and most of us pine for sizable accomplishments and things, book deals, deeds of sale, wedding rings).  We need to aspire to something very small, to be willing to pause before we react, to be with our experience, to wait and see what arises.

This sounds like something an old rural person would do, not someone young and hip and urban. Decades ago, a wildly ambitious, glamorously urban college friend of mine jabbed a finger at me after a few cocktails:  “Do you know what your problem is?  You always hesitate. You always hesitate.”  This criticism stung deeply.  I wanted to be like my friend, wild and impulsive, a woman who went to Paris and Rome on a whim.  I wanted to be a woman of daring, a woman of action—surely taking risks attracted the notice of the gods, drew down life.  At last, however, I’ve come to see that hesitation can be daring.  The right kind of hesitation—not over thinking but the opposite, daring to unclench the fist of thought, relinquishing whatever object is in its sweaty, insistent grasp—is a way of being brave, of daring to be vulnerable.  Nobody can see what you are doing (this is the beauty of it) but for seconds at a time we can open up to the true wild, uncharted region of the present moment.   Hesitation can be generous.

“In the middle of the journey of our life, I came to myself, in a dark wood, where the direct way was lost. It is a hard thing to speak of, how wild, harsh and impenetrable that wood was, so that thinking of it recreates the fear.”

Dante gave us an incomparable masterpiece about what it can mean to be lost, to perish, and what it can mean to find paradise.  Yet it’s extraordinary to see how we can be lost in a moment, to be carried along passively, never guessing we miss as we went charging and lunging about.  Paradise is waiting.

How to enter? (He who hesitates may not be lost.)

Recently in London, my daughter and I watched talented film actor James McAvoy play the Scottish warrior king Macbeth as an extraordinary young man trapped in delusion.  Set in a grim post-apocalyptic Scotland (looking very much like the grungy East Village the 80’s, when I lived there, or many other places in the world today), the production hurtled along, showering the actors and those closest to the stage in fake blood. 

McAvoy’s lithe, muscular Macbeth charges on stage, machete in one hand, axe in the other, in rags, bloody—in the words of a Time Out London critic “he has the damaged glare of a man who has been fighting all his life.” Today, I can’t help thinking of the grainy photos of the killers at large, and about each of us watching this violent story unfolds.  With our thoughts we make our worlds.  As I write this, the police go door to door in Watertown, Massachusetts.  I think of Macbeth charging headlong towards his fate, showing us how our helpless way of imagining—not just our thinking but our instantaneous envisioning, our preconscious assumptions–create the worlds we inhabit, create hells, create us.

The critic Harold Bloom describes the terrible power of Macbeth’s imagination. “He scarcely is conscious of an ambition, desire, or wish before he sees himself on the other side or shore, already having performed the crime that equivocally fulfills ambition.”   The minute the three witches (who wear gas masks in the London production we saw) tell Macbeth he will be king, he pictures slaughter.  He doesn’t have the space inside to question the prophesy and his inner reaction to it–his fellow warrior Banquo does.  And for all his savage skill in battle, Macbeth lacks the inner confidence that allows Banquo to to bid the weird witched peak to him, “who neither beg nor fear/Your favors nor your hate.”  Macbeth is paralyzed, transfixed.

Banquo seems to have a notion of happiness based on something higher than its most primitive meaning–the ancient root of “happiness” is “hap,”as in “happenstance,” literally what happens to us.  For Banquo living a happy life means being in alignment with a higher order.  Indeed, Macbeth ultimately has him murdered because he fear Banquo’s inner freedom, his nobility of nature. 

Isn’t it interesting that this mighty man lacks confidence, lacks will?  At the start, he is terribly ambivalent—his wife goads him into committing murder.  Unlike other Shakespeare villains who delight in their wickedness, Macbeth suffers horribly from knowing that he does evil: Methought I heard a voice cry, “Sleep no more!

Macbeth does murder sleep” –the innocent sleep,

Sleep that knits up the raveled sleave of care….”

With every horrible deed he commits, Macbeth grows less ambivalent—he grows less.  Because he is larger than life, his diminishment is truly horrible to behold. What is confidence based on?  The word breaks down to mean “with faith,” but faith in what?   

Driven by his fearful and terrible delusions, Macbeth can’t know the source of Banquo’s confidence—that maybe we are meant to participate in a greater reality—that possibly our happiness in the primitive sense of always getting what was want.   The mother root of all our delusions—the root of all evil—is the tendency to enthrone ourselves at the center of the universe.    

“Macbeth” is awe-inspiring proof that humans are not just nouns but verbs, as we think, imagine, assume, so we become.  Here is Bloom:  “So rapid and foreshortened is [the] play…that we are given no leisure to confront their descent into hell as it happens.  Something vital in us is bewildered by the evanescence of their better natures…”  Macbeth is like someone acting out of night terrors, except that he knows what he is doing, and for a time he seems to know what it is doing to him.

But in the end, he is dead inside: “I have almost forgot the taste of fears…I have supped full with horrors…”  The news that his queen is dead unleashes no wail of sorrow or regret (and he was deeply in love with this woman, he followed her to ruin!), just this chilling immortal statement of nihilism:  

 “Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,

Creeps in this petty pace from day to day.

To the last syllable of recorded time,

And all our yesterdays have lighted fools

The way to dusty death.  Out, out, brief candle!

Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage

And then is heard no more.  It is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury.

Signifying nothing.”

McAvoy stretched out “no…thing,”  staring off into the distance, unseeing, unfeeling.   We have stunning proof that living a life with meaning requires feeling.  By the end of the play, under siege (the only state that feels familiar to him) Macbeth has become fully a robot, a killing machine, his heart drained of every last drop of humanity.   Life means nothing to him. 

Yet Shakespeare’s heroic villain ultimately achieves a terrible gravity and ferocity, a horrific majesty — many great critics have explored the depths and stature of Macbeth and his play far better than this lowly blogger.  But I know the horror is that he is no longer really alive.  I came away from the play in London—and from the news in Boston today—knowing that humanity is something that is practiced, or not, day by day.

“Watch your thoughts; they become words,” teaches Lao Tse. “Watch your words; they become actions. Watch your actions; they become habit. Watch your habits; they become character. Watch your character; it becomes your destiny.”

 “You would run for your life,” said my daughter Alex. “You would grab a few precious objects and run.” We were travelling from London to Scotland by train.  The sun was glinting on the North Sea and we were imagining what it would be like to see Viking ships on the horizon. Edinburgh, our destination, is pretty much parallel to Denmark, my maternal homeland.  Vikings came up because I recently learned I am the direct descendent of Danish lord who established a vast estate in the 11^th Century.

“He was definitely a Viking,” said Alex, who is earning a Masters in Medieval Studies, reminded me.

 “In 11^th Century Denmark that’s how you amassed a large estate.”  For awhile, I liked referring to myself as “Tracy the Terrible” and to her as “Alex the Awful.”  But Alex reminded me the Viking raids were no joke.  

Once in Edinburgh, I bought a little tartan booklet about the Scottish side of ancestry–only to discover the Cochrane Clan (my grandfather dropped the “e”) was founded by a Norseman.  “That’s it, you’re Viking on both sides,” said Alex.   I was under the assumption that I was, like most humans, a blend of oppressor and oppressed.  Edinburgh opened a raft of questions about identity and character.   In the first place, did I think I would find my identity in a booklet…or even a real book…or even the leather-bound book that affirmed my membership in the Viking club? 

Robert Frost (and probably others) called America the loneliest of places.  We seek roots.  But did I really think a deeper identity could be found “out there”—not necessarily in a gift shop but even in that gorgeous wild land?  Alex and I climbed to the top of Arthur’s Seat, the main peak in a group of hills surrounding Edinburgh.  “Do you feel anything?”  Alex asked, meaning a deeper resonance.  And I did.  I felt my heart lift as we walked, for the craggy beauty, for the spectacular views.   But it was a human feeling, we decided, nothing particularly Scottish…or Scottish-American…or conquering Viking-turned-Scottish- American.

But under this silly-seeming search for an ethnic identity, there was a deeper question about ingrained character—about how we respond to life.  Can a Viking change his (or her) spots, learn to be open, to enter peacefully, not just slashing away, grabbing what they want?  Can the heart learn to take off its armor, to want peace rather than victory?  The answer is yes, but it isn’t easy.  And it can’t be done swiftly and dramatically, a blow with the sword.  It is the long slow path of changing habits of thoughts and reactivity.  How?  For starters, by daring to see and sense ourselves from the inside, focusing not on what we’re doing but on what and how we are. 

  “People ought not to consider so much what they are to do as what they are; let them but be good and their ways and deeds will shine brightly,” writes Meister Eckhart.  “If you are just, your actions will be just too. Do not think that saintliness comes from occupation; it depends rather on what one is. The kind of work we do does not make us holy but we may make it holy.” 

In a sense, the spiritual path is a path towards appropriate response—it is a way out of blind reactivity, out of fight-or-flight, towards inner spaciousness, inner sanctuary, so that our inner world and outer world come together.  It is the search for an inner Arthur’s Seat, a vantage point for the noble one in each of us.  I have a hunch that each of us harbors a secret, innermost wish to take off our armor, put down our swords, to be at peace with the world.

Here is Vaclav Havel, from an article by Roger Lipsey in Parabola Magazine’s “Spirit in the World:”

Whenever I encounter any problem of today’s civilization, inevitably, I always arrive at one principal theme: the theme of human responsibility. This does not mean merely the responsibility of a human being towards his or her own life or survival; towards his or her family; towards his or her company or any other community. It also means responsibility before the infinite and before eternity; in a word, responsibility for the world. Indeed, it seems to me that the most important thing that we should seek to advance in the era of globalization is a sense of global responsibility.

Somewhere in the primeval foundations of the world’s religions we find, basically, the same set of underlying moral imperatives. It is in this set of thoughts that we should look for the source, the energy and the ethos for global renewal of a truly responsible attitude towards our Earth and all its inhabitants, as well as towards future generations.

―Václav Havel, “Millennium Summit of the United Nations, New York, September 8, 2000,” as quoted in Roger Lipsey’s article: A NEW SENSE OF RESPONSIBILITY: Václav Havel’s Ideas from the latest Spring issue of Parabola: “Spirit in the World.”

“Of all the pitfalls in our paths and the tremendous delays and wanderings off the track I want to say that they are not what they seem to be,” writes the artist Agnes Martin.  “I want to say that all that seems like fantastic mistakes are not mistakes, all that seems like error is not error; and it all has to be done. That which seems like a false step is the next step.”

I walked back to my ex-boy friend’s apartment, shaking with sobs.   I wasn’t harmed.  Settled at the long dining room table in my ex-boyfriend’s book-lined loft, tears streaming down, I choked out the story, insisting that I wasn’t harmed.  Never mind the weeping, I told him.  I am fine, really, perfectly calm at center of the storm you see.  My ex-boyfriend looked miserable.   The crying went on and on.  He pushed a twenty dollar bill across the table towards me, repaying me for the groceries.  I brushed it away and he pushed it back.  Just take it.

We aren’t in control in the way we think we are, I told him.  Things happens, even terrible things, but they are not what they seem to be.  And we aren’t alone.  There is a light, a luminosity behind the appearances of this world. There is a luminous, loving intelligence above us, watching over us, caring for us.   I knew how this sounded.  Religious, mystical, unbelievable.  Do you believe me, not about the mugging but about the light?  He shook his head no, scowling softly, sorry for me.  He just could not.

In the weeks and years that followed, I learned this is how it goes with personal revelation. I was an unreliable narrator, no more so than any other ordinary human, but still very limited, subject to dreams, to the wheels and levers of conditioning.  But the experience never grew dim.  I told it to people I trusted, or the dying.  I told it to my father in his last days, and to another dear old friend near his end.  I sure hope you’re right, he said.

What we really have to share with one another, I learned, isn’t any precious spiritual treasure but our common poverty, our inability to hold anything in reality, our crazy minds that can’t stop thinking, substituting thoughts and dreams and memories for reality, our vanity, our stubborn insistence on ourselves, our capacity at times to give all this up, to be still and not know.  Over time, the experience became a crash course in our common human situation.

In a sense we are drifting through Hell’s Kitchen, lost in thought, and all the while there is a great force of love, a light of awareness, a great Presence above us, waiting to be received.  The highest reaches of the Cosmos, the highest Heaven, Truth, is right here, right now, seeing us, forgiving us for not seeing, accepting us, waiting to deliver us from darkness, our littleness, our striving separateness.  I learned that we are meant to be part of a greater whole.  Along with these tricky little conditioned brains and sensory systems, I learned, we inherited other capacities, other possible postures and attitudes— giving up and receiving, surrendering.

"Never give up, for that is just the place and time that the tide will turn" wrote Harriet Beecher Stowe.   There are many versions of this truth.  Here is Rumi:

“When you go through a hard period,
When everything seems to oppose you,
When you feel you can’t bear even one minute,
never give up
Because it is the time and place that the course will divert.”

The night I was mugged on a street in Hell’s Kitchen, the tide turned, the course diverted, a great shift happened just when it was clear there was no way out.   I was trapped. I couldn’t breathe.  I couldn’t talk.  The screen of my thinking mind went white.

It was then that I saw the light, just a glow at first, but growing brighter, dazzling, welling up in the darkness to fill my whole body and mind, gaining a force and direction unknown to me.  I remember marveling at the building intensity and intention, wondering where it had come from in me, and then it became a column of white light that shot out of the top of my head, arching high into the night sky.

Decades later, a Tibetan Buddhist told me about a Vajrayana Buddhist practice called “phowa,” (He also explained that Vajrayana  means “diamond” or “thunderbolt” vehicle, which felt right to me because everything about the experience dazzled, was charged with force).   Phowa is described as “the practice of conscious dying”,  “transference of consciousness at the time of death,”   or even “enlightenment without meditation.”  I heard stories of Tibetan lamas imprisoned by the Chinese leaving their bodies this way voluntarily—even a story of a great Tibetan master who sought to teach this practice to Thomas Merton shortly before his accidental death.

But this amazing event—happening to someone who couldn’t sit still for a twenty minute meditation, who had a black sheep status in her meditation group–didn’t amaze me as much as what unfolded next  The column of light reached up to join a much greater light  that drew down to meet it. It was as if a curtain was drawn back and all around me there was light– behind the abandoned tenements around me, behind all the forms in this world, there was a luminosity—this light was an energy or vibrancy that wasn’t separate from love.  It was this light was the force that holds up the world, into which all separation dissolves.

Suddenly, I realized that I could see myself and my attacker from behind and above. I could see the top and back of my own head as well as his massive back and head.  I watched myself gasping, watched my knees buckled, watched myself sink to my knees on the dirty street, watched myself looking up at the light.  And then I was embraced by that light

People in all cultures and all ages have reported near death experiences, trips to heaven and hell when the spirit leaves the body.  But science argues that while these experiences feel real they are simply fantasies or hallucinations caused by a brain under severe stress, and certainly my brain was under stress that night.  A choke hold can kill in 20-30 seconds. Someone skilled in martial arts can knock someone out within 8 seconds using such a hold, and brain damage can happen after about 15 seconds because stopping blood flow to and from the brain can lead to brain hemorrhage, and/or the pressure on the heart can cause it to stop.  If only the airway is constricted, someone (me) could reasonably last minutes before death occurs.

But science can’t account for the intimacy—for the extraordinary presence—of the experience.  I didn’t just see the light, I was seen, and not in part but in whole.   I knelt on the sidewalk, looking up at the light that descended to meet me, as if heaven descended.  Although I wasn’t raised in a religious home, I remembered a phrase I read or heard without knowing what it meant exactly, a “community of saints,” an echo of the presence I sensed of many beings, of ranks of beings, of a great witnessing consciousness that was layered, a multitude, an ascending order, all of it greater than my own.

A particular being seemed to draw very close, gazing at me with a grave intelligence and caring that was unlike the love I had known on earth.  I was being searched by the being, and that everything I knew myself by was being brushed aside like clouds–my name, my education, all my labels insubstantial and unimportant.  I once came up with an awkward metaphor for the experience– fire fighters descending a staircase, shining a light through smoke, urgently looking for life— was trying and failing to capture the feeling of concern in this searching light of awareness. It bypassed my brain (no surprise, since it had gotten me in this particular pickle and its analysis hadn’t help get me out) descending to seek something that was unknown to me, unnoticed under all the thoughts and attributes I thought I was.

Finally, the searching stopped.  The light poured through a particular spot in the center of my chest.  I saw that what was real and alive and valuable in me what not what I thought—it was some deep and hidden corner of my being that I didn’t even know.  I was held in the grave and loving gaze of this higher being, this angel of awareness—I had the sensation that my whole life, lived and as yet unlived, was literally being held and weighed in the palm of a giant hand.   Years later, I heard a line in a psalm about every tear being counted.  It was as if I was I was being shown that everything we do and suffer is seen and cared about–that we humans and all beings are loved in a personal way.  That I didn’t “believe” in any of this—that I was too cool, too skeptical, if not exactly scientific—that didn’t count.  What I believed or didn’t believe was a wisp of cloud to be brushed away.

After this “weighing” or reading, I was lifted up into this field of light and love.  It was a bit like lifting off in a plane, rising above the clouds into bright sunlight, except that I was surrounded by an otherworldly kind of radiance, lifted towards a heavenly host and as I was as I was lifted, I felt completely accepted and acceptable, completely known, completely loved, completely free.    Later, I wondered if this could be what was really meant by salvation, being liberated from the illusion of isolation, lifted up out of fog of separation, delivered into the whole, into the reality behind the appearances of the world.

I was soaring, surrounded by radiance, accompanied, carried by a luminous force that was not separate from love, not separate from awareness.  It was clear that this light of awareness, this all-seeing reflective force of love (as opposed to the poor calculations my brain tried to make or the mostly second-hand associations it held) held everything that is.  It was clear that this loving awareness was the alpha and omega, the particle and wave, the unifying force that carries us forward when we leave the body, that accompanies us always, everywhere, that appears in us when we are open to receive it.

I was lifted out of time—this strange and beautiful communion, this sense of being liberated into reality could have lasted a year or a moment.  Yet it had to be brief because I was still kneeling on the sidewalk, still struggling to breathe.  I was detached from the struggle and this ancient posture of humility and awe felt right to me as I watched myself from above, as if I was in alignment with reality for once.  Without words, the being who searched me—the being who seemed to see my life spread out around me, past, present, and future, told me to relax, that this struggle would pass, that I would not be harmed.

It was conveyed to me that I would go on.  The being of light and heaven began to recede.  I relaxed, dropped like a dead weight, forcing my attacker to loosen his grip, allowing me to reach a ten dollar bill in the front pocket of my jeans.  I threw the bill on the ground.  My attacker jerked his arm off my throat, scooped of the bill, and ran off with the two young men who were guarding me.  I stood up.  I had my life back.  I stared down at the ripped grocery bag, wondering why the muggers hadn’t taken the cigarettes and beer.

Stay tuned (yes, again)…and thank you!

What really happened that cold night in Hell’s Kitchen?   I glimpsed the deathless.

The biggest of the three men slipped behind me and clamped his arm around my throat. Money!  His voice was a rasp.  His massive arm was pressing down on nerves that made it impossible for me to move my arm to reach the money in my front pocket, and I couldn’t talk to tell him this.  Money now!  He pulled his grip tighter. My vision started going black around the edges.  I remember thinking the situation was absurd.   It was like being caught in the gears of a machine, relentless, senseless, merciless.

I glimpsed the absurdity of the larger situation: I was a young woman alone at night on a deserted side in Hell’s Kitchen, lost in thought, oblivious to the world around her.  “When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully, “   wrote the English scholar and sage Samuel Johnson.  Attention suddenly terribly collected, I glimpsed that I was a kind ghost drifting above the living world, disembodied, dreaming, constantly substituting thoughts for real impressions of reality.

My brain sped up, working as fast as it had ever worked, calculating the size and strength of my attacker, the agility of two young men guarding me, my capacities, running aspect until it concluded it was hopeless, there could be no escape, no movie-like scene in which I would turn out to be a spy with deadly martial arts skills who could throw off her attackers. It was like watching a computer crash. The screen of the mind literally went blank.

It was then that I saw the light.   It was a small light at first, the sunlight of awareness broke through the dense cloud cover of thought.  This awareness welled up to fill my whole body and mind, brilliant, crystalline, revealing the situation inside and out just as it was—there I was trapped, gasping, helpless.

The light inside me gained force and direction until it became a stream of dazzling white light that shot out of the top of my head, soaring up until it merged with a dazzling light that was suddenly above me and all around me.   Behind all the forms around me, behind the tenements and skyscrapers in the distance, behind the young guys in hooded sweatshirts who stood o the sidewalk in front of me, there was a brilliant light, a luminous energy.

Suddenly, I realized that I could see myself and my attacker from behind and above. I could see the top and back of my own head as well as his massive back and head.  I watched myself gasping, watched as my knees buckled, and at the same time I watched myself looking up at the light.  Until I was embraced by that light.

You might well be thinking that all this was a result of physical shock, of oxygen deprivation.  A choke hold can kill in 20-30 seconds. Someone skilled in martial arts can knock someone out within 8 seconds using such a hold, and brain damage can happen after about 15 seconds because stopping blood flow to and from the brain can lead to brain hemorrhage, and/or the pressure on the heart can cause it to stop.  If only the airway is constricted, someone (me) could reasonably last minutes before death occurs.  In fact, someone once offered to put me in a similar choke hold to prove that similar effects would happen.

But that what I’m about to describe did not depend on my embattled brain and body—except that I was there to witness it.   I’ve fainted, had high fevers, various drug experiences, amazing dreams.  Yet never in those experiences did I have that feeling of being met, seen–lifted out of the darkness of my own isolation as I was.   As others who have written about near death experience have related, it was conveyed to me that I was loved and completely accepted, that there was nothing I could do to lose that love.  Is there a drug that can do that?  And where might I get it?

Stay tuned for the dramatic conclusion….

PART II

I was passing an empty parking lot on West 35^th Street near 10^th Avenue, when three men rushed out at me from the shadows of a gutted tenement across the street.  I heard before I saw them, pounding toward me, whipping past me, stopping and wheeling around, taking up stations around me, as purposeful and practiced as football players, or predators.

For a few moments, we stood and stared at each other.  Incredibly, I was gripped by an impulse to smile and make eye contact, to diffuse the situation by establishing that we were all fellow human beings.  I remembered romanticizing outlaws in the movies, imagining them to be free in a way that I was not but these men were not free.

Their eyes were open but blank, like darkened windows, and they were pumped up, panting, panicking. Two looked like lanky teenagers, wraith-like in dark hooded sweatshirts. The third was older and much bigger. A faded green sweatshirt pulled taut across his chest, wrists dangling out of the sleeves, as if he was wearing someone else’s clothes, and maybe he was because the next day there were reports in the papers of escaped convicts in the area. His broad face was grim.   My mind fought to distance myself from the encounter. I thought about how I would describe what was happening over dinner……

The big guy, the leader, darted behind me and jerked his arm around my throat. I felt his chest heaved and heard the rasping of his breath.  Staring up at the side of his face, I saw a long shiny scar. It was strange to be pulled so close, but even stranger was the pang of compassion I felt for him, for wounding that had made the scar, for the suffering he must feel to be doing this.

It was the strangest thing.  I am far from saintly—moments before, I had been walking through Hell’s Kitchen mired in thoughts and emotions strictly limited to my own happiness and welfare, to me and me alone.  Yet, the compassion that arose in me for this man who was attacking me was a kind of feeling I associated with saints.

Recent brain studies show that the readiness of the body to move precedes our awareness of being willing and intending to move—our sense of free will or conscious intention is mostly illusion.  Everything that happens is dependent on causes and conditions below our ordinary limited level of consciousness.  But the compassion I felt didn’t feel like an unconsciously conditioned response, like the impulse to smile at my muggers—it was another consciousness was breaking through “my” consciousness.

After the great tsunami of 2004, stories were written about how no animals were found among the dead, as if they sensed what was coming and headed for higher ground.   In a few more moments, I would have a near death experience.  I would experience a world of consciousness that was completely free of my physical brain.  But before that happened, before my conscious brain could comprehend what was happening, the animal of my body was heading for higher ground, opening to receive help from above.  Even before I glimpsed the light, my heart was opening to a kind of feeling that cannot be created or destroyed by anyone, only received.

TO BE CONTINUED…..

The Old English “hel” belongs to a family of Germanic words meaning “to cover” or “to conceal.”  Hel is also the name, in Old Norse, of the Scandinavian queen of the underworld.  Way back in the 1980’s, I discovered how we humans consign ourselves to hell, while all around us, heaven.

It happened one cold night in Hell’s Kitchen. Bent almost double against an icy wind blasting up West 35^th Street from the Hudson, cradling a bag of groceries–dried pasta, cigarettes, and beer, the three major food groups of young people in the city–I pushed my way past gutted buildings and empty lots, back to the renovated tenement where I was having dinner.   Parts of Manhattan, especially the streets near the rivers, are subject to the wind-tunnel effect.  It can be hard for the biggest, sturdiest person to stand upright against the force of the wind, and I was not sturdy.

I was walking the way experts say a young woman should never walk, head down, not confidently present, not owning her space or even upright, lost in thought.  Wondering why I ever agreed to leave my cozy apartment on the Upper West Side to come down to this godforsaken neighborhood, worried I might be coming down with the flu, I tried mentally describing what I was doing as if it was cool, having a late dinner in a loft full of exposed brick and modern furniture in a bad neighborhood.  And isn’t that what I moved to New York to do?

Manhattan in the 1980’s was a gritty place, but it had a dark glamour, and like many young people I was drawn to that, or the thought of myself against such a sophisticated urban backdrop.  I moved to New York like someone drawing close to a fire.  I longed to draw closer to life—to more fully experience being alive—but I mostly just added fancier thoughts and associations.  I went to foreign films.  I went to museums. I saw a kind of lonely urban romance and these streets: Edward Hopper might have painted here.

Years after it happened, I realized that there was a deeper, more basic kind of awareness at work under all that thought, and that this awareness was actually much closer to what I longed for than my ordinary thoughts.  Although I didn’t notice—or didn’t note it as special– I was aware that there was “I,” a net of tensions and thoughts that resisted life that felt as if it was out of tempo with the rest of life.   There was a lack of trust in life, a feeling that I had to fix things.

I decided that too much of my life involved going places or making all kinds of gestures to be nice or generous, only to realize I didn’t really want to make those gestures or go those places.  Why had I agreed to go to the store when it turned out there wasn’t enough spaghetti to make dinner?  I wondered when and how I had become a waif, drifting along on the surface of life, pushed this way and that even when there wasn’t an icy gale blowing me down the street.

I repeated the phrase “When hell freezes over.”  I should have stood up for myself.  It didn’t occur to me that this way of thinking was a symptom of the underlying unease—disease.  I knew I was apart from the fundamental rhythm of life, that a fear of losing myself had kept me away from life—yet like most humans I placed myself smack in the center of the universe.

The little Spanish market on the corner of W. 35^th St. and Ninth Avenue was the only pocket of light and warmth for blocks.  All the big Greek markets and little Italian and Middle Eastern restaurants on Ninth Avenue closed down by ten, and for blocks to the West there was nothing but deserted streets that led to the crumbling docks that jetted into the river.

Nobody knows for sure why the Manhattan neighborhood between West 34^th Street and West 59^th Street between 8^th Avenue and the Hudson River, a neighborhood real estate developers now call “Clinton” or “Midtown West” (or even the Mid-West) was once called “Hell’s Kitchen.” Most the name to the 19^th Century and to notorious tenements (including a “House of Blazes,” where people were lured to drink only to be doused with flammable liquid and set ablaze) and to tough Irish gangs.  A local historian traces the name to the observation of Dutch Fred The Cop, a 19^th Century policeman, who was watching a small riot on West 39th Street near 10th Avenue. His rookie partner supposedly said, “This place is hell itself.”  Fred replied, “Hell’s a mild climate. This is Hell’s Kitchen.”  Whatever the origin, the night I walked there it was a very apt name, the very place for that Old English root meaning, to conceal.

I was passing an empty parking lot near 10^th Ave. when three men rushed out at me from the shadows of a gutted tenement across the street. I heard them pounding toward me in the dark before I saw them. I felt the purpose in it. They ran past me, stopped, wheeled around, taking up stations around me, surrounding me like lions singling out a calf that had strayed from the herd.

We stood and stared at each other.  Incredibly, I was briefly gripped by an impulse to smile and make friends, to diffuse the situation by making eye contact, to make nice.  They were not interested in making friends.

TO BE CONTINUED…..