Conundrum

from an exhibit at the Norton Museum

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In the three or four years that Rob has been teaching meditation, the course has taken place at our gym or at a local yoga studio.  I attend most of these courses, unless they are held at an obscenely early morning time slot. We’re the typical lark/owl couple. I’m a night person, he’s a day person. While he’s out on the porch meditating at dawn, I am deep in a dreaming world. My day starts around 9 AM.

Rob’s meditation course is once a week for six weeks.  Between weeks four and six, things get very interesting. We go deeper than we’ve gone before. We encounter realms that are not business as usual. In this realm, I’ve seen my parents, who passed over in 2000  and 2005. I’ve seen other entities/spirits that seems to know me but whom I don’t know.  My cheek has been caressed by one of these spirits, I have entered past lives I knew nothing about.

I have also experienced some physical discomfort during these meditations, where we stretch out on a hard floor.  I feel like a total idiot even admitting this, but honestly,  a yoga mat doesn’t do much to mitigate hardness. The hard floor bothers my back and most of the time I have to keep my legs bent to  get into the zone. And there  is  a zone.

This indescribable place, this zone, is where I go after I have moved  beyond my physical discomforts. If I were camping, it would be the point where I separate  from my physical body to travel, well, elsewhere. I drift in the currents of Rob’s voice. One time during this particular meditation, I observed two elderly women who were watching the class, taking notes, as though it were an assignment. When one of them touch my cheek, I felt her touch,  just as real as a human touch. But tonight – nothing. I fell asleep, that’s the long and short of it.

But I was reminded of a dream I’d had when I was 18. I was a freshman in college in upstate New York and was staying at a friend’s place in the countryside. The silence felt huge, infinite; the stars were grand and magnificent.  My bed in the guest room was soft, delicious. And I dreamed that I was waiting in a crowded lobby to talk to someone who would guide me through the next step of a process. At some point, I realized  I had died and was in a holding area, a lobby with several dozen other people, who were also dead and waiting  until someone came along and explained what was going on. Then I woke up.

The next morning, I told my friend what I had dreamed. She got this look on her face – a look I have come to know as that of the gentle skeptic – and said, “It’s just a dream, Trish. It doesn’t mean anything.”

I knew she was wrong. Even then I knew that dreams holds answers and insights, information and guidance. Even then, I knew that sometimes we dream Big Dreams that hold fundamental truths. 

After my mother died and my dad was living with us,  he came out for breakfast one morning and reported that when he’d looked at himself in the mirror, he had seen the face of a black man superimposed over his own. The face was that of a young, handsome  black man, full of life. And my dad, who wasn’t mystically inclined at all, said, “I think I glimpsed myself in my next life.”

Shortly afterward, Rob and  I gave him a book called, Looking for Carroll Beckwith: The True Story of a Detective’s Search for His Past Life, by Robert L. Snow. This book, coupled with Carol Bowman’s Children’s Past Lives, led him toward a realization that we live many lives.

The conundrum initiated by that dream when I was 18 has haunted and pursued me, sculpted my interests and passions, threaded itself through my fiction and nonfiction. It has drawn me to certain people, belief systems, experiences that have brought me new knowledge – and new questions. But the ultimate bottom line question remains the same all these decades later: What is the nature of reality?

 Thanks to research in NDEs, consciousness, OBEs, quantum physics, reincarnation, shamanism, the paranormal, UFO encounters, the unconscious, dreams, synchronicity, and all the rest of it, we have glimpses, hints, pieces of theories. But we don’t know for sure. We are Keenu Reeves in The Matrix, Jim Carey in The Truman Show, Gwyneth Paltrow in Sliding Doors, Emma Thompson in Dead Again. It’s all about the journey toward discovery.

So if someone tells me they have all the answers, I run – fast  – in the opposite direction. The bottom line is that none of us knows for sure. We are the babes in the woods.