My Mystical Experience                  bcmeikle@shaw.ca

---

         While age brings on a kind of hardening of the arteries of what's possible, at one point in my life I was consumed by the wonder, by the infinite possibilities in the universe. I mean life can be pretty numbing...the drudgery, the nasty bosses, the poverty... you have to understand that in the years when I was just out of university...age 23 or so, I had experience almost none of the negative. In fact I seemed to meet a fairly large amount of people who were larger than life...turning expectations on their head.

      To say that I was in a world where it was considered 'normal' to have had a paranormal experience or two, wouldn't be going too far. Indeed it was an area of interest of mine. I graduated from university and immediately headed for the bookstore. I bought dozens of books, all the things I'd wanted to read but couldnt find time for while studying.

         You have to understand that I was working as a musician during this time. Life was pretty easy, I got paid well for wearing a black tux and playing conventions, I'd go to after-hours clubs and play jazz, and the only pop act I'd played with was soon to have a gold record... There's something that breeds flakiness in those experiences... the women Id hang with... dunno.

        So on the life changing night in question there was pot smoked. Looking back, my 40 year old view of things is that I'd rarely touched the stuff before and I hallucinated, but I'm putting this forth as an area for future researchers to look into just in case.

          It started with the hypercube:

           

          I remember I was reading Rudy Rucker's book on the 4th dimension and I wanted to show
the drawing to my new girlfriend. I found it amazing how the cube tumbled in my perception,
(something that doesn't happen as much for me now) The hypercube is also called the tesseract
a word that brings to mind witchcraft and 'A wrinkle in time'... This page shows the tumbling.

    So there we are, relaxed, lying on the bed, looking at the hypercube watching it tumble. I mean
I'd been doing some pretty deep thinking about matter and energy and resonance, so I was pretty
primed about a drawing that refused to resolve into just 3 dimensions. Also a friend of my wife
(who is a genius doctor) says he remembers here teaching herself most of math and physics, and that at one
point in her childhood she spent time drawing such cubes and playing with them...

        I don't know, but what happened is this: The cube began to tumble faster and faster for me. So fast that it
turned into a bright light and I was kind of blasted back from the page. At the exact same instant my wife too was pushed back. After this, for perhaps an hour, all manner of weirdness ensued. I was under the impression that I could walk through my wife's mind, I could hear harmonics in sound, and see harmonics in white light...

       I really can't say what my wife experienced but she reported oddity. I was badly freaked out. I went to sleep hoping that all weirdness would be done for when I woke up.

        Next morning I awoke with a sense of foreboding. All the rules of what was real had broken down. I sensed the same magic in the air, even though I was sober now, and I wanted it to go away. The phone rang.
"Do you know who this is?" said the voice on the other end.
"No I don't" I said but I had a bad feeling.
"It's William James, I'm calling phonelessly" said the voice.

I forge the rest of the conversation, but suffice is to say I hung up and added it to the list of weirdness I'd experienced.

A few hours later a friend told me they new of a william james. One of the first psychic explorers, From the 1800's wrote a book called 'the varieties of religious experience'. I was freaked out. As it turns out he is an entity who contacts psychics quite a lot. Jane Roberts who wrote the 'Seth' books, also put out an entire book of channelings from William James. Go figure.


        I mean, I think a lot of my focus after that time became on NOT having any more weird things happen to me. While in those days I often felt I was in a weird belt of co-incidences, meeting people I know all over the world, events unfolding as if they were planned, I don't feel that now.  For at least a decade I've been grinded,
I mean grounded by the real world, building a house, writing computer software. There is something extremely mortal-making about hard incremental work, that takes the importance of intuitive leaps out of our perception.

       Do I think it was real? No, the me that is now, is skeptical of all things...But I'm writing this blog, perhaps because part of me still believes in possibilities.

        Perhaps the brain cycles at a frequency and some perceptions speed up that cycling. At very high speeds perhaps new perceptions are possible. Something tells me that these things are NOT REPEATABLE, that is, they are experiences that only happen once in a lifetime to most...when events converge.

       I mean another thing is that I've just grown used to the weirdness. I mean if I think about someone I haven't thought of in years, and they phone a few minutes later or email, I don't even consider it odd. I almost expect it. I have tried hard to hide in the reversible, quantifiable world of the computer, but I'm aware, as poets and artists are, that truth and meaning probably lie outside quantities... I just don't like too much weirdness at once.