Training Wheels for the Bardos
“O God, I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a
king of infinite space—were it not that I have bad dreams.
From Hamlet by Shakespeare
(Imagine that the context of this event I will describe here, occurred a day away from the darkest day of the year on Winter Solstice with the theme of this year’s Sacred Theater offering being: She Sheds Her skin and Rises in Radiance).
If you want to experience a “trial-run” of the Bardo’s immediately after death, break a body part that lands you in the Emergency Room of a hospital. (I broke my femur and hip bone) tripping on something (and not the light fantastic, believe me,) on my garage’s concrete cement floor.
At first as they loaded “me” into the emergency vehicle, I knew right away where I was headed. (Though there was no sign on the side of the vehicle, I knew certainly it was headed straight for the Underworld). Assigned to a cell in this place, I was assailed by unambiguously disturbing, relentlessly bright lights and jarringly loud sounds, poked and prodded with needles and tubes etc.. As you would expect in the hell realms, this tableau was further pierced and punctuated by a man screaming in a nearby room, over and over in pain, which hooked into my primal core and pulled on my guts every time his screaming hit me, adding to the cacophonous din that kept on rampaging through and further disorienting my already fragile psyche. I found it surprising that there would be phones here in the Underworld.. but there was a phone outside my door that NEVER stopped ringing.. which to me was like a buzz saw working over my already fragile nervous system. Then even though I had a special sign made for the door that said “Please make sure the door is shut”, I could still hear through the door the constant manic chattering like monkeys speaking in an incomprehensible language. Different sequences of numbers were being blasted through a loud intercom from a monotonous, android sounding voice, nonstop. I looked endlessly at the wall in front of me for clues as to where I was. In that regard, there was an oversized number 6 on the wall in front of me and a dry erase board with scribbled writing on it, from which I was trying to decipher some sort of meaning. Six is not a number that I have resonated with in my life or had a symbolic relationship with like 3, 9 or 13, but what became clear was that whatever these symbols were that I stared at through the haze of extreme pain hour after hour had nothing to do with my identity or clues about how to hold reality presently. I became more and more disoriented and confused about how to hold my “sense of self” together.
Then some nurse forgot and left the door open and outside in the hall I could see a bright red electric sign on the ceiling that said “EXIT” which began my mind’s inquiry as to where I actually was, as to what I was exiting from or going toward. Even knowing that things are never only as they appear on the linear surface of experience, that there is a deeper symbolic meaning to everything in this Universe, I couldn’t seem to get to that symbolic understanding to make sense of my actual condition and whereabouts in consciousness. Then night came with the relief of a more cushioning darkness. As I began to settle into that darkness, I finally fell asleep (which had been almost impossible with the constant shrieking of the man). I awoke startled by a loud noise, which was my phone crashing to the floor. I, of course, being immobilized and helpless, could not reach it, so I tried to find my nursing red call button. I was horrified to find that it too had somehow fallen to the floor out of reach. After hours of feeling a helpless kind of panic, normally foreign to me, there was a point where real fracturing began in earnest. I felt like I was a nautilus shell dropped and breaking into many pieces. My sense of self identity simply shattered. Oddly enough, the pieces that were falling away felt heavy, infinitely dense. I had no choice but to stay present with what was presently happening. The overall sense that I had in this part of the experience was one of the intense pressure and the flattening of what it is to actually be in human form..ultimately compacting from being in lighter frequencies of light. Then seeming to come as a gift of grace, I finally began to feel a lightening from that paralyzing feeling of density and I began to feel like “I” (my consciousness) was actually only sparks of light moving in a Void space. Then over time, the sparks picked up speed and started being magnetically drawn toward a center of immense power.. the only sense that I had was that all of the light shards which were formerly myself, were hurling toward a center that meant complete dissolution and annihilation like the level of compaction of entering a black hole. There was no “personal choice” in this process. I was just experiencing it. I surrendered to the process. I have no idea how much time was consumed in that journey..
The next thing I consciously remember is looking out at an egg shell colored wall.. like a Tabla Rasa surface which hadn’t been imprinted with anything as yet.. nascent.. awaiting a script or symbol to be put on it as if that would re-define the “self” that had left on this journey, back to something meaningful that I could identify with. Slowly, golden threads began to surface from somewhere in my psyche, aspects that had defined my world and self, but which now were much more fluid and open than before and newly radiant with incipient potential. (Perhaps this new more fluid sense of self was the result of shedding an old skin of perception as to “who I am” that is perhaps the offering required for exit from the Underworld.) I am still in this process and re-integrating after this initiatory experience, moving slowly, not wanting to “snap right back” into previous definitions or identifications of self…wanting to fully garner whatever the gifts are from this visit to the Underworld that I am still engaged with and learning from as a soul.
In Fierce Love.. .ariel
