Pain is an incredible thing. We spend our lives avoiding it. Yet there are instances where pain brings something wholly unexpected.
I had bone surgery once and the anesthetic never put me under. The drug to paralyze me worked quite well. But I felt and heard everything. I was screaming in fear of knowing what was coming only to realize the doctors had now idea I was fully awake. I felt them moving me around, intubating and then finally the searing pain of the scalpel opening me up. Believe having your bones chiseled apart has to be close to the ultimate pain experience.
Anyways at the height of the pain I somehow checked out. I separated from the pain and had what could only be termed a “mystical experience”. I connected with something that seemed vastly old and wise.
This entity told me while I was in what could only be termed as a crisis mental state. “Calm down. Everything is OK. That I needed to learn about pain”. I was mentally screaming in horrific tortured pain “what do I have to learn about pain?!!”
I was instantly removed from the hell I was experiencing and found myself in a state of perfect painless calm. I sensed a golden fog like light that permeated a vast emptiness. What struck me most was a primal sense of overwhelming awe. I was in a place unlike anything I could even imagine. Nothing existed there except perfection and what I can only call love.
The voice asked me. Now. Do you understand? I said NO! I DON’T UNDERSTAND THIS! I was in a total state of shock and confusion.
I was lifted to a similar state only magnitudes more powerful. The sense of awe was beyond overwhelming. Like living in a state of perfect love. I experienced that state for what seemed a few seconds.
Then It happened again this time the sense of awe was like seeing and understanding infinity. My level of awe was so intense that I felt my self dissolving into this realm. It was terrifying yet vastly beautiful and loving. A sense of coming home to what I really was and in a state of perfect pure love. I felt that if I embraced it I would cease to exist. Dissolving and becoming part of whatever it was I was experiencing.
The voice then asked me “Now. Do you understand?” I found myself yet in a state of total confusion and disorientation saying “Yes. I think I understand”. It felt like something inside me knew what this “being” was asking me. Just not the superficial part I consciously know as “me”.
I was told this is the last time I would need to go thru this. An image appeared in that strange golden light. A sphere. Suddenly a layer formed below the sphere and wrapped itself around it. Two more times this happened. Three realms wrapped around me.
The next thing I knew was in post op. The nurse was trying to wake me. I could tell she was very concerned and somewhat frightened. I couldn’t breath and struggled to find my breath. I didn’t know if I was breathing or not but the nurse settled down patted my arm and left.
After relaying the “medical”! part of all this to my surgeon he freaked out and sent me to the Anesthesiologist.
When I stopped at his office and asked for him, the receptionist talked to him. He instantly left his current patient and took me to his office. No doubt concerned of a lawsuit. He pulled out the charts of my anesthesia. Showing me all the drugs administered and where the graph fell from the top of the chart to near the bottom. I remember him telling me “ This is as close to death as I can put you without killing you”. “How you knew what was going on, I can’t explain” I could tell he was being totally truthful and truly couldn’t explain what was going on.
That kinda shook me up. I never told him my experience other than the excruciating pain.
Thirty years later I still grapple with this experience. What IS pain?….