Experience description:

Now it’s 1978. I’ve been in the USMC for about ten months. I’m a lowly Lance Corporal, still getting my bearings, learning the ropes. I have some sort of awareness that this is a massive lesson for me. I discovered, much to my dismay, that I’ve descended into a social arena that consists of very lost souls after being on my aforementioned college prep track in high school. It’s utterly different from any place or time I’ve been in before. But as a caveat to that I’m surrounded by people from across the nation. Having never lived anywhere else but a deeply parochial region of the nation I’m now surrounded by ‘the rest of the nation’ and even people who were born in and grew up in other countries. I’ve learned new words, phrases, new music, new accents, heard about new places, been to new places. It’s a constant learning experience and that’s the part that I’m eating up like an endless dessert. I’m aware that this is an extremely important time in my life. This is truly excitement on a scale I’ve never experienced before. And I’m adding vast amounts of data about the world to my internal database. My. Eyes. Are. Partially. Open.

Apparently, I’m sending out signals of some sort that I’m not like everyone else. It must be in how I talk to people, what I’m referencing, how I conduct myself. I don’t know who I am yet because I’m totally occluded, naive, have no mirror to see myself and not self-aware yet in any measurable way; indeed, I’ve never had a discussion about any of what I’ve amassed, the observations I’ve made, with anyone else. Ever. I’ve only known people from my own culture before this, most of whom I can’t really relate to. And as I’ve explained, I’ve learned to keep quiet about any extraordinary patterns I’ve discovered inside myself or outside myself. Nonetheless, as usual, I’m in pure observation mode. I’ve cleaved up the universe into the ‘physical’ and the ‘spiritual’ worlds. I’ve decided that I’ve been plunged into ‘the physical world’, which contains vast amounts of lessons, and that my task is to learn everything I possibly can. I learned this approach from poetry that has spilled out of my head for years now. Poems seemed to be pointing me in the right direction. I was writing them as they snuck up on me at the oddest times. I had kept a pen and pad with me to make sure to capture them. They came up when I’d least expect it and I’d be compelled to write them down. Even in boot camp. Do you know how difficult it was to write a poem in boot camp in secret? I can’t believe I never got caught. It was still a driving force that would strike and I had no control over it. I was Usaysha’s mouthpiece and I just went along with it. She was telling me things in a language I still didn’t quite understand but recorded anyway. The frisson that poems gave me were still on the order of an orgasm and I craved them.  Despite that, I was a being I didn’t have a clue about. I was profoundly lost, still unaware of the nature of my existence, the nature of reality, the makeup of my mind and how the world around me functions. I’ve had extraordinary experiences, on the order of metaphysical things happening to me and I had no idea why any of it was being presented to me. None of the books I’ve ever read on any topic that I thought I needed to know about had prepared me for this new chapter in my life. I didn’t know that I was about to began a transformational journey like no other, the journey I’m still on to this day. Being in the USMC should have been the journey itself; and I learned it was the end all and be all for just about everyone else. But it was just the beginning for me. Entering the military happened to get me in front of my mentor. Looking back, I suspect I set this detour up for myself before I was even born just to meet the Sergeant. He picked up my signals….

It was 5:30 am on 17 May 1978. I had been assigned to guard the vehicles on the deck of the Navy LST ship our unit was on. I’ve been there since two AM and was watching the dawn break over the horizon. The horizon around the ship was perfectly flat since we’re well out to sea and it’s quite calm out. I’m on board this ship because our unit from Cherry Point Air Station is part of an annual joint sea op with the Navy called ‘Solid Shield’. It’s the height of the Cold War era and it was part of our nation’s ongoing Cold War training. I had been assigned this wee hours watch over vehicles and equipment that were strapped down on the main deck and weren’t going anywhere, nor would be messed with by anyone. I considered this watch punishment for being a lowly enlisted.

I was going to be nineteen in five days. As the sun rose on the placid deep blue water that early morning I stood on the bow of the ship contemplating my literal place in the world. I’ve never been fully out to sea like this. So, this was indeed the first time I’ve ever had this experience. I’m truly enjoying it. Every detail of this moment is being stuffed into my internal database. I’m alone and it’s the perfect opportunity to simply experience an awesome sunrise with absolutely no land to be seen anywhere. My alone time was broken by a Marine sergeant (I saw his stripes) who came up to the railing nearby. He was there to watch the sunrise, too. We locked eyes and he immediately came over to introduce himself. Until this time I’d not seen him on board the ship. There were hundreds of sailors and Marines onboard and I certainly hadn’t seen all of them yet. This was, I believe, the second or third day being on board the ship anyway. Surprisingly, he quickly and deliberately established a rapport with me; and insisted that I call him by his first name. That was a first for me. I had had it drilled into my head by this time that rank was absolute and that no one called anyone by their first name, especially a lower ranking person to a higher ranking person. This was step one of having my mind blown. An insignificant thing like ‘first name basis’. Imagine that.

I quickly discovered that Les lived in the same building I did back on base. The building was so huge though that I would never have seen him unless this ‘chance’ encounter had happened. The building was shaped like the letter H and had several stories. I recall that it had over a hundred one-room apartments in it. I lived on the ground floor and had a roommate. Les lived in a totally different wing, was a couple of flights of stairs up and had no roommate.

During the five days while we were on board the ship an interesting thing happened. I ‘caught’ him writing what I thought was a poem on a sheet of paper. This was a first for me, too. Someone else was a poet, like me? In the Marines? And he was writing a poem while standing up with all these guys milling about? So, I had to ask. How do you do it? How do you bypass the regimentation to hear the Muse? After all, there were lots of people hanging out and there was plenty of noise. I was unable to do that when anyone was around. I needed quiet; and as I’ve already made very clear, writing poetry is my PERSONAL endeavor. No one gets to watch me do it. He found my question amusing. That’s when told me he was the keyboardist of a band back in Cleveland (where he was from) called Iconoclast and he was writing a song lyric. He had instantly upped the game. You see, in high school all of my favorite friends were musicians. I had long considered anyone who could make music to be a god. That was due to my intense need for music and the fact that I was entirely non-musical myself. He was suddenly another god. This was no accident meeting him. I didn’t know it at the time but he was on to me. He had indeed picked up my signal. He was about to be promoted, as it were, if he could get through to me. We’re not talking a military promotion here. This was a real promotion. Unfortunately, I had only minor interactions with him the rest of the time on board the vessel.

We ended up parting ways once we had arrived at our destination. He wasn’t in my unit and had nothing to do with the equipment I worked with. So began a month long op in the field, which was at Camp LeJeune USMC base. I didn’t forget about Les during that month. He was profoundly different from anyone I’d met so far. I had to see this guy again who deliberately got into total rapport with me and who was a musician to boot. I was chomping at the bit to visit him later on once the op was over and we all ended up back on our air station. And nearly the first thing I did once back on base was to find his room and visit him as often as possible just to talk. I desperately needed a sounding board.

Les totally intrigued me. Somehow his ability to establish and keep rapport with me was impossible to stop. He would listen without reservation, without judgment. He never told me to go away or to shut up, nor did he pull rank on me. He just let me talk. This is not something that had ever happened to me in my entire life - this simple act of just being who I am with someone else. No adult I had ever interacted with had ever just listened to me. Certainly not my emotionally trashed parents. Not once. Not even my fave teacher in high school interacted with me that way. When Les talked with me he asked me important questions. He asked me what I thought about creativity, music, color, sound, light, dreams, reality, love, philosophy, etc. I reeled with amazement. No one had ever asked me important things like that before. He made me explain myself about all these topics - if I had an opinion about them - and more. He was testing me, probing me. He was allowing me to pour my mind into the open. He was speaking to me as if I were an actual human being, not a puppet, not a kid, not someone to manipulate, not someone to order around. For the very first time that I can recall I was in the presence of a rational adult. I did not know other rational adults. I grew up knowing six alcoholics in my immediate family. This interaction with Les was an unknown for me. The closest thing I had ever even been to this before was watching the opening credits of the TV series Kung Fu where Master Po and ‘Grasshopper’ were interacting! That’s how poor my background literally was.

Until our talks I was utterly alone in my musings of the nature of reality apart from my scant scientific understanding of how things worked, or the unusual things that that happened to me in my life so far. In this case tho, our talks were about intangible things. Light? Dreams? Color? Creativity? WHAT? I could actually talk like this to another human being? But he did more. He constantly steered our conversations to consider what’s beyond thoughts and words. Les walked me into areas of thought where there ‘isn’t anything’. And I went to this terrifying and profoundly amazing ‘place’ with him often. Somehow I knew this ‘place’  and yet he was the only other person who would acknowledge it with me. I craved it. I relished it. It was a natural ‘place’ for me to access and I had no idea about that before knowing Les.

Very quickly, I realized I was in the presence of something profound. Les had not only become a mirror to my mind, he was also the Windex. He corrected me, pointing me in the right direction. He steered me to keep opening up further and further, never letting the limitation of my thoughts or beliefs keep me closed up. Again, I had never once met or talked with or to anyone else like him. Up until this time I was swimming in a sea of belief about everything outside myself.

One evening, while on our building guard duty, I stopped by to talk to him as usual. That evening I learned a valuable lesson about how our senses can lie to us. I knew about optical illusions, of course. But my poor background experiences hadn’t shown me that our senses could lie to us in other ways. He taught me about mental illusions. For example, what if music isn’t the arrangement of notes, but rather the arrangement of silence. What if life hadn’t chosen me but rather I chose to be born?  What? That was the opposite of what I believed. He was testing me. Pushing me. Forcing me to think about things I had never thought about before, like always. I was told to think ‘backwards’, upside down, inside out; not to believe that the linear way I was thinking was the correct or only way to think. I could barely keep up with him. Doing so is completely fundamental now, but that evening I had to press my palms against my temples. I felt as if fuses were popping inside me. He was destroying my foundational belief systems. He was making me tear down my entire reality. The convos were no longer about what I already thought and believed. He had been merely trying to access where I was coming from before. Tonight’s convo was different. It had taken on a decidedly different tone. We had reached a threshold and he was about to push me across it. It was about forcing me to walk up a flight of stairs to another level of thought. What if everything I’ve ever believed is a total and complete illusion. What if nothing I believed or thought or felt was real at all. What if my entire reality was a massive contrivance. What if I didn’t actually exist but rather merely believed I existed. What if what I thought was true was a poorly constructed contrivance and I was operating out of a set of nothing but beliefs. What if I were actually a ‘senseless’ being; what if I were actually deaf and blind and were connected to tubes, with no limbs to have a sense of touch, and everything I thought was real was a construct only in my head. What if I had completely invented being in a functioning carbon-oxygen body. What if I couldn’t tell that I were living inside my mind only. What if I was floating in a sensory deprivation tank and had no idea that I was having a hallucination of having a body and living my life. He was pushing me to see farther and farther. You have to get that these convos were laser-like. This wasn’t offhanded musing. This was serious stuff. It was him staring at me, looking deeply into my very being and making me - forcing me - to answer him, to dig as deeply as possible. If I evaded the question or responded ‘too simply’ he’d laugh and make me keep digging. He was making me shed so many ‘skins’, so many illusions about myself and the world I thought existed that I was becoming nothing. And I willingly went there. I seemed to be magnetically drawn to go where ‘nothing’ was, where all my beliefs went to die. It was as if I’d waited my entire life to have this convo, to force myself to shed my presumptions, to dive into an abyss of pure nothingness and experience it. My deepest held beliefs, thoughts, musings and sureties died one by one. I began to see that I was an egg. An unhatched egg.

The next day I realized I would never be the same. That previous evening led me to a profound awareness that reality couldn’t be as real as I had believed. Certainly it wasn’t ‘real’ in the sense that it existed outside of me. Instead, I was aware that I was creating this reality as I lived it. I had never once considered that! I had believed that reality, a solid independent reality, existed as a thing outside myself and I was merely participating in it. I began to sense that maybe everything I had ever been led to believe about, well, everything, was totally false. Maybe everything was an illusion after all. Atoms are mostly space. I already knew that from high school. How did that translate to reality being ‘mostly space’, eg, not as real as I thought it was. I was still far too new at this to understand it but I was sure I was on to something. Something totally novel. How did I know that I was on to something? The sense of wonder and the feeling I had in my entire body told me this. It wasn’t just a thought process anymore. It was an experience - just like the experiences I had when poems erupted from nothingness. At this point in my short life I knew nothing about the debate the original relativity scientists already had decades before my birth about the quantum nature of reality. About how reality is just waveforms, energy patterns; not something solid to the touch that conforms with our evolved senses. But here I was now… experiencing that knowledge.

Les had had permission from the base chaplain to use the chapel’s organ whenever he felt like it. He had even given Les a key to the chapel so that he could go and play whenever his Muse struck him. I hadn’t known that until this one particular night, a little over a month after the beginning of our discussions. At that point we had had at least two dozen convos. I recall being unable to tolerate more than twenty or thirty minutes of him barraging me with questions or making me see things in new ways as our discussions got deeper and deeper, as he forced me to peel back layer after layer of my beliefs about my life and about reality. The fuses kept burning out and I needed him to go slowly with me. But I kept coming back for more.  It was as if I were a completely dry sponge and he was an infinite well of brand new knowledge that I couldn’t get enough of. The weirdest thing is that he never ‘taught’ me a thing. No axioms. No dogma. No new phrases to learn. Nothing. It was all about peeling off layers of illusions, layers of confusion, layers of improperly amassed thoughts and beliefs. He seemed to be in search of who I was with nothing in the way. And he hadn’t gotten there yet. He was still looking for the single point of consciousness that was ‘me’. Well, that evening we went to the chapel. I hadn’t been inside a chapel or church since I had quit Sunday school at 12 yrs old; or attended a wedding or two later on. Les found the light switch for the organ area and it was the only light inside the space. This was a first for me once again. A dark chapel at night with just two people in it. I tried various pews out, trying to find the right acoustics as he began his haunting keyboard expertise. I finally settled on a spot and he began to play something that almost made my heart stop. It was radiant, beautiful, sad and scary all at once because it was nuanced and multi-layered; and was all done live; and on an organ that he seemed to know perfectly well how to play. My mouth was agape for the entire piece. It was at least ten minutes of pure bliss. When he was done I asked him was it was called. He said he didn’t know because it had just come out of him as he was playing it. I was stunned. He had channeled it. I had never been in the presence of such a thing before. I was completely unaware that music was a form of communication; waveforms, energy patterns; that it contained a concentrated form of information, and that that information was constantly talking to us even if I didn’t understand its mathematical language. At that time I only knew that certain musical patterns affected me emotionally.

We left after that and returned to his room to talk some more. We talked deeply again. He pushed me beyond my ability to understand him, as always. He blew fuses as usual. I tried to absorb more but suddenly I had an extreme urgency to leave. I have no idea why but I just had to go. That was highly unusual. I had never felt this urgency before. In all other circumstances talking with him I just told him I had had enough, that I had to assimilate what we had discussed. Not so this time. This was completely different.

So, he let me go.

It was late now. Probably around midnight. But something told me to not return to my room. So, as I descended the stairs I headed out into the dark where the baseball fields were located some distance in the back of our large residence building. They were unlit that late at night. The closer I got to the nearest diamond the weirder I begin to feel. I needed to yell out because of some odd feeling that was coming up, but I couldn’t get any sound to come out of my mouth. I tried to understand what this was going on inside me but I had no previous experience with which to describe it. I had no reference point. I only knew that more fuses were popping. This time though it wasn’t because I was mulling over something he had asked me to think about, or because I was going over one of our convos from the evening. I was utterly unable to think. Something was happening inside me that seemed out of my control and unrelated to my thoughts. Suddenly, the most bizarre thing happened. I felt as if my body were disappearing. This odd feeling rapidly overwhelmed me. I crossed my arms over my chest and grab my upper arms, thinking I could hold myself together. But it was no use. In a flash my body entirely disappeared and my consciousness was the only thing that existed. It was utterly unlike that one time when I was 16 years old during my meditation. I was wide awake. I was standing up. My eyes were open. Suddenly, in this totally free state of ‘I-as-a-being’ I became aware that my life was a game. I controlled the game and yet I had completely forgotten that. Just as quickly as that awareness came up I had another astounding realization. I had done this before. This particular life I was living was a single spark from a sparkler of many lifetimes. That knowledge was astounding. I had no inkling of that before! I realized then that I had complicated a very simple thing. I had totally and completely forgotten that I decided in this life to work out ‘stuff’. Instead, I had let other people who had ‘authority over me’ decide everything.  Les had arrived to nudge me back onto my path. He had been deliberately working with me to peel off the illusions I had amassed. The utter stupidity of how I had complicated everything in my life so that I would forget my purpose was so hilarious that I began to laugh. The folly of giving up my power was a joke, a very bad one. I had re-entered my body by this time, so to speak. I don’t know how long it took for me to ‘return to my body’ but it happened after I had those revelations. I laughed so much and so hard that the laughter shifted to utter sadness as I realized the pain and suffering I had taken on so far in my very short life to keep this awareness from myself. To. Keep. This. From. Myself! Why the actual fuck would I do that? This was the most important thing I could be doing. This shedding of illusions was paramount! And I deliberately forgot!?!?!?! I was so devastated by this knowledge that I dropped to my hands and knees on the pitchers mound and began to sob. I was once again overwhelmed. This time by a flood of deep indescribable grief. I can’t begin to tell you how deep it was. I had hidden the essence of myself from my conscious awareness! Deliberately. Everything Les and I had ever discussed mixed, wove together, blended and became a tapestry of enlightenment of such utter importance that everything else I had ever learned before was nothing compared to that moment of awareness. I was the master and I had given away my power to everyone. EVERYONE!

I don’t know how long I remained on that pitcher’s mound but it was quite a while. Finally tho, the tears subsided, I had calmed down and my breathing had returned to normal. I had to work the next day so I headed back to my room to get some sleep. Once finally back under the lighting of the building I saw Les. He was knocking on my door! He didn’t know I was out on that baseball field and there’s no way he knew what I had just experienced. He saw me coming up the sidewalk. Instinctively, I asked him what just happened. He had this grin on his face, said one word: ‘Bye’, and turned to leave. I grabbed his arm and made him tell me.

He said ‘You intercepted my message’.

I what!?!? There’s no possible way he knew what just happened to me because he wasn’t there, much less knew where I had gone. He thought I was in my room. I hadn’t even told him what had happened. Just that something had happened!

I asked him what message.

He said he could no longer be my teacher, adding that he had taught me everything I was able to absorb from him. I unquestioningly accepted his explanation, although I still hadn’t said a single word to him about what had just happened. At that very instant I was absolutely sure that what had happened to me was very very real.

The next day I explained in detail to Les my experience on the baseball diamond. He assured me that I was at the end of a cycle of action and that was the result. He had no idea how I had gotten ‘his’ message. But it had happened. Somehow I had ‘translated’ his message to what I had experienced. But he let me know that he had carried my ‘dead weight’ as far as he could. It was now up to me to complete the journey without him.

Any associated medications or substances with the potential to affect the experience?      No     

Was the kind of experience difficult to express in words?          Yes    At the time I had no words or experience to adequately describe what happened. It took about a decade to really piece it together as I acquired knowledge about it; and the wording or phrasing to describe it properly or cogently.

At the time of this experience, was there an associated life threatening event? No     

What was your level of consciousness and alertness during the experience?    On a scale of 1 to 10 I was most def at a 10.

            Was the experience dream like in any way?  No. It was more real than my 'real life'.

Did you experience a separation of your consciousness from your body?   Yes    I was a single point of consciousness. My body had effectively 'disappeared' because my consciousness seemed to have expanded to fill all of space-time.

What emotions did you feel during the experience?          As described above: wonder, surprise, deep grief.

Did you hear any unusual sounds or noises?         None that I remember.

LOCATION DESCRIPTION:  Did you recognize any familiar locations or any locations from familiar religious teachings or encounter any locations inhabited by incredible or amazing creatures?         No     

Did you see a light?        No     

Did you meet or see any other beings?         No     

Did you experiment while out of the body or in another, altered state?         No     

Did you observe or hear anything regarding people or events during your experience that could be verified later?          No     

Did you notice how your 5 senses were working, and if so, how were they different? Yes    I was no longer in my body. I was consciousness and mental activity.

Did you have any sense of altered space or time?  Yes    I lost track of time. The timing in the experience as described above is my best guess recollection.

Did you have a sense of knowing, special knowledge, universal order and/or purpose?         Yes    All described in detail above.

Did you reach a boundary or limiting physical structure?           Uncertain    

Did you become aware of future events?      No     

Were you involved in or aware of a decision regarding your return to the body?          No      Did you have any psychic, paranormal or other special gifts following the experience that you did not have prior to the experience?         Yes          Afterward, (as described in my longer essay about this) I experienced about a year where I seemed to be very aware that all of us, including myself, were unconsciously acting out a role in an odd massive play. I had to be very careful to not say anything about this to anyone because of the artificial nature of our lives at that particular point. This 'gift' (I use that word very loosely) became a burden eventually and I was glad it finally went away.

Did you have any changes of attitudes or beliefs following the experience?     Yes    Oh, boy. The answer to this question is described in VAST detail in my longer essay. This experience basically completely changed my entire life. I was no longer the person I was before.

How has the experience affected your relationships? Daily life? Religious practices? Career choices?   The answer to this is also described in VAST detail in my longer essay. Suffice it to say that I learned so many new healing modalities that I was able to manifest anything I wanted. I mean that, too. Relationships, healing my emotional body, my past experiences with my convoluted family were cleared with MASSIVE amounts of forgiveness, I had a nearly 30 year career, a very long term personal relationship which I'm still in, retired early, etc. You name it. I learned how to MANIFEST! It was the best gift ever but it didn't happen immediately. I learned how do to that along the way because the STE had taught me that I was the authority in my life, not outside events or people.

Has your life changed specifically as a result of your experience? Yes    It was the pivotal moment in my young life. It completely transformed my understanding of what I'm doing here, and informed how I ran my life from that moment on... to this very day.

Have you shared this experience with others?       No          What emotions did you experience following your experience? Lots of wonder, indescribable frissons, mountains of grief due to a feeling of being deeply alone all the sudden, then discovering how to experience waves of bliss - at my command. Much more. I became very tuned to my emotional state after this experience, especially when I was able to put labels on what I was feeling.

What was the best and worst part of your experience?          Best: I learned that I'm not my body but rather pure consciousness.