THE DAY I REMEMBERED MY SOUL
When I was 24, I killed myself. I put it that bluntly because it was not an attempted suicide, a cry for help, but a decision to self-murder. Yes, it was a desperate act, a last attempt to escape what my mind feared as lifetime imprisonment in a mental asylum [they still did that back in the early ‘70s]. It was even, in its own way, logical-- to my then agnostic mind at least. I had been suffering a profound clinical depression—the kind where you stop eating, sleeping, emoting, desiring. In time, your body begins to break down: I shook like an old man with Parkinson’s instead of the once healthy and robust young man of just a few weeks earlier. I had decided as a teenager that there was no God, no soul, no heaven or hell-- all just fantasies for those [unlike myself] not brave enough to accept that death means extinction of not only the body but the personality, consciousness itself. I know many people have that view today, and it does not appear to bother them. Well, why would it, until they’re faced with their own deaths?
Now what I’m about to relate will be believed by some, disbelieved by others, and the rest will probably just shrug their shoulders and give it no more thought. Yet is there really any question more important than the possibility of life after death: that you, your character, personality, memories —your consciousness — will continue, not for years or decades but forever. We are the only species out of millions to have a sense of mortality—then, too, we are the only transcendent species as well. And I think they are related, because what I was ‘shown’ [the best if rather feeble word I can come up with] is that I am two beings, sharing the same space or life, as it were, for a time: the one mortal, the other immortal, existing without beginning or end, beyond time itself.
I attended the London Film School in Covent Garden, London. I have loved movies almost as much as books since childhood. For some reason, which I still do not fully understand a half-century later, I dropped out in my third and final term. The unconscious mind is far more powerful than most people wish to acknowledge—can any of us really be said to know ourselves completely? Again, it’s not surprising that many aren’t aware they have a soul, as they can’t even acknowledge they have an unconscious mind, which affects their thoughts and emotions, not only in their dreams but in the waking world as well.
Of course, if I had thought things through, I might have decided to become a screenwriter- I have wanted to become a writer since I started thinking—really thinking—as a teenager. But I didn’t think of it, and soon after I returned to the States, I fell into a clinical depression, as it was termed in those days.
After a day, I would walk around the dining room table in my parents' house, asking myself why I had abandoned my dream—a hard thing for anyone, is it not?
Each day I walked around that table, all day long, eating less, sleeping less each night, asking myself why I ran away from my one chance—as I saw it then-- to follow a childhood dream. The more I did that the more I wished I could go back in time, back to London and the film school, and stop my foolish self from ‘running away’. That was part of the torment—seeking a time machine to correct my near-fatal error as it turned out. My parents were not very sophisticated and thought a camping trip to Vermont with a high school buddy would ‘snap me out of it’.
But each day we were driving through the beauty of that state, things just got worse. I had largely stopped sleeping or eating; my nerves were so shot that my hands shook with unceasing tremors, and while I knew that the mountains and valleys we drove through were very beautiful, I did not ‘feel’ that beauty one iota. It was the same when I saw a pretty woman: I knew I should feel an attraction, but I felt nothing.
It got worse. One day, we drove up to a scene where a dog had been hit and killed by a car, and the woman who owned it was weeping profusely. I could not understand why she was so upset. I had no empathy; I had no feelings at all, it seemed, good or bad. And in subsequent years, I came to realize that all our mental processes, be they thoughts/ideas, or appreciation of art, music, and literature, all our human thinking is fundamentally emotional, and MUST BE BASED on an emotion-- or we cease being human, alive, transcendent-- and soon become the living dead.
And that is not really hyperbole. Depression does not just stop you from relating to other people, but it cuts you off from yourself as well-- you feel hollow, empty, a walking shell, very much a living hell. Believing it was only going to continue to get worse until I lost complete control and was ‘put away’ to suffer, it seemed logical to end my life as soon as possible. So one night when we stopped at a large campsite by Lake Champlain, I decided that after my friend went into the tent to sleep, I would walk into the lake and drown myself (for some reason, I had a sense that drowning was a painless death). But I wanted to leave my parents a good-bye note: I still had that much humanity left in me. But my hands shook so hard that the pen just made scribbles, and at that moment these words—these exact words-- came into my head: ‘Just let me write this. ’
And as soon as I had uttered this ‘prayer’ to God, the God I had stopped believing in as a teenager, my hands became completely steady—and yes, I mean instantly. It was like going from 100 mph to standing still, without any deceleration whatsoever! Then I looked up from the camp table I was sitting at, and saw the stars of the Milky Way and ‘felt’, for the first time in weeks, their beauty—and I thought to myself, why would I want to die? So I went into the tent and slept, the first good night’s sleep I had had in a long time.
The next morning I woke up, refreshed, happy to be alive (the depression seeming like a bad dream, now over), and my vanity had returned: I would shave and shower. But as I walked towards a large building where the showers were, I felt ‘something’ come from behind me and into me, as it were, and before I got to that building, I had begun shaking terribly again.
And now I was desperate. I don’t know why I was so naive the night before when weeks of suffering disappeared as soon as I sought help from the God I thought I had stopped believing in. It could have been the ‘placebo effect’, my mind did not want to die along with my body so its unconscious part shut down the depression—I am pretty sure this is how my shrink interpreted it when I told him about it. I might have agreed with him, except that it was not logical that my ‘mind’ would then return me and my body to that profound clinical depression and make it even worse than before!
As we drove into Montpelier that morning, I saw a bridge and, knowing I had very little time left before I lost complete control, I told my friend to go for breakfast, and I would join him after I walked some to ‘calm down’. I walked to that bridge that spanned the spring-swollen Winooski River and hesitated! Not because of fear—I still saw death as extinction and so preferable to the living hell I didn’t seem able to escape. Twice I walked to the ledge to jump, but something pulled me back: I interpret it as the ‘life force’ that many writers have alluded to-- whatever it is in us (and it is not fear) that wants to keep us alive. But I knew as I walked away that if I didn't do it then, I wouldn't be able to later—so I turned and ran to the ledge and flung myself over.
Because we don’t forget the best or the worst in life, I remember it like it was yesterday, and not 50-some years ago, how pleasant it was to fall through the air [I can understand why skydivers love their sport]. I don’t remember hitting the water, but I do see myself going feet-first through some rock-strewn rapids (I have a scar on my back from hitting one of those rocks, but thank God it was not my head!). I went unconscious briefly again, it seems, because my next memory is of finding myself swimming in the river, and as I saw the shore, I thought to myself, why am I swimming? I want to die...and I put my arms straight up and sank.
The next part is hard. Not hard to recall—if only!-- but hard to relive, hard to accept, I suppose. At some point, I was conscious, not of having a body, just ‘pure’ consciousness. I have no doubt it’s hard, if not impossible, to believe if you’ve never experienced it: Even in our dreams we have bodies. And I could see, but what I saw was an infinite darkness, far blacker than the darkest night. I was utterly alone, and worse of all, in torment. I don’t use that word lightly: it was beyond any imaginable pain, and my consciousness was roiled by it. And again, I called out to God, not to end it but with a question: ‘How long will it last?’ To this day, I have no idea why I asked that question.
When I regained ‘this world’ consciousness, I was on the bank of the river on a gurney being put into an ambulance—it lasted only seconds until I passed out again.
I spent four weeks on the psych ward and had a series of electroshock treatments, which appear to have done the trick in alleviating the depression. I began rebuilding my life, taking college courses for a new career and seeing a very good shrink for the next two years. He was a good man who helped me a great deal to explore my ‘unconscious’ side-- talk therapy, it’s called today. But I’m sure he rationalized away the hellish experience of my unbodied consciousness, my soul, as I was drowning in 12 feet of water.
I wish I could do so as well. Accepting the reality of hell can be terrifying, but I am a big fan of reason [which will surprise the secular-minded]. And my reason tells me that if things are not a matter of chance, but are directed by some Power or Mystery none of us can really comprehend, then ‘God’ could have left me there as well. The man who jumped into that river to save me was a Vietnam vet riding by on his Harley when he saw me jump. There were about 50 people on the riverbank that day (so I was told), and nobody did anything, except for an ex-soldier who drove his bike to save my life.
I know our memories can play tricks on us, but usually it happens with the commonplace: mixing up a date or name, thinking you did something when you hadn’t. But from what I’ve read and have been told by others who’ve ‘dipped’ into the twilight zone, we don’t forget trauma. And what could be more real than death, or the prospect of death? I wrote a little ‘memoir’ some 25 years after the event, and everything was as real then as it had been when I was 24—and it is all just as real—and yes, perplexing still, another 25 years later. But not just for me.
When I started taking some college classes for a new career, I met a young woman in one of them. Our mutual attraction was immediate and intense (a few months earlier, when I was depressed, I would have felt no attraction). Soon, we were living together, and while we had an inordinate amount of passion for each other, we never developed the friendship that I came to learn was the sine qua non for a long-term relationship. If we had an argument, we would just go make love to resolve it—and yes, we had a lot of arguments. Passion, especially very intense passion, really does need the ballast of friendship to temper not its joy but its wildness….
So one ordinary afternoon after our classes, we returned to our rented studio and made love, as we usually did in those heated days. No drugs, no drinking; we intoxicated each other enough. Suddenly, I found myself outside my body, that is, my consciousness. I could see our bodies in the bed at the other end of the room, and though I could not see her own soul, I sensed it ‘hovering’ near mine—as she told me later she did mine. [I also remember knowing it was my body but not feeling any ‘attachment’ to it—it seemed unimportant to my consciousness then, to my soul.] And then, as suddenly as we had left, we were back in our bodies.
There are thousands of written accounts of NDEs (near-death experiences) and OBEs (out-of-body experiences) and other paranormal events, going back at least as far as Plato’s telling of the near-death experience of the soldier of Ur after a great battle. I understand why many people are skeptical —I probably would still be an agnostic materialist myself if I hadn’t gone through what I did. The body-brain is such a complex organism that if you open a closet and something falls off a shelf, your hand will automatically reach out for it before your ‘conscious’ brain is even fully aware. And of course we’ve learned so much about medicine and science, but any good doctor will admit medicine is as much an art as a science.
Because I live in a body in a material world, I have no idea how I could see without eyes or think without a brain —but I did, as apparently many others have over time. I know, as I know I breathe, that my ‘self’, my personal being, in some form or another, has always existed and always will [though in what place may be the tricky part]. Can’t prove any of it, but then I can’t even prove I love my wife-- but I’m beginning to realize only now, as an old man, after being with her the better part of half a century, how much I do love her, though can I or anyone ever know how much of anything we are in this world of birth and death?
So I’ve come to suspect dying—the great universal human fear (and we seem to be the only species to fear it in the abstract)-- may be akin to waking up shortly after a dream: You recall the dream, and how real it seemed whilst you were dreaming it, but now realize ‘life’ is reality, not the dream. And what about the tens of thousands of dreams you’ve had and don’t even know you had them? Would it then be so surprising that if we are reincarnated, as I suspect myself, we don’t recall our past lives—save perhaps in bits and pieces? Like feeling an attachment to certain places, or taking an instant liking—or disliking—to someone you just met. Or perhaps the work you seek or the music or books you love?
The man was right: For the time being, we can only see through a glass darkly….
A version of this memoir was first published by Braided Way in 2022
© Nolo Segundo
Enjoy other posts by Nolo Segundo HERE.
 |
Nolo Segundo
|
Nolo Segundo, the pen name of retired teacher L.J. Carber, began publishing in his 70s in 220+ literary journals in 18 countries, and 3 poetry books were published in softcover by Cyberwit.net, the latest titled 'Soul Songs'. And the reality of his soul, his endless consciousness, is what he discovered as he was drowning in a Vermont river over 50 years ago.
Follow Feed the Holy
