Hi folks! Been a couple weeks since I posted, due to some computer issues (which seem to have left me alone for a couple days). Anyway, looks like I may be able to post a new thread without getting kicked off the page or the net itself.
I've enjoyed this site, and mostly have stuck to fairly conservative stuff. There were a couple ranting threads about my experiences as a pharmacy technician, and the atmosphere of corporate greed and total f*cking over of the rest of us by the less-than-1% minority who seem to consider ordinary folk as at best, serfs, and at worst, slaves.
There have been cute little posts about my love of rats and all manner of small critters, sad posts about my late cat, who I am almost certain by now has crossed "Rainbow Bridge," and a thread about my academic training in music theory and efforts at composition; I guess partly, now that I can admit it, to "beat my own drum," but it's a part of me, and though I'm no J.S. Bach, I am a classically trained composer, and could be useful here for any who are interested in the old way of writing music, music history, and notation.
I am also one of those people who have had what is commonly referred to as an NDE (Near Death Experience) and though I have not yet come to terms with the best way to present this in a public forum, or whether it is even right to do so, I have determined that this is the night in which I will at least make a start, but keep it simple and even a bit fun at first, if such is possible.
I was smoking a bit of weed in those days (might as well admit that off the bat) and there will be those who might tend to try to "blame" my strange experiences right around the time of my grandmother's death in September of '07 on that ubiquitous yet illegal herb, but it never did anything to me before (or after, though I rarely smoke it these days, perhaps once a year) than give me the usual pleasant mild buzz and lust for junk food.
Right before I had these experiences, I had lost two good jobs in a row due to failed drug tests; one as a payroll clerk, and the other as a temp in the admin department of a GMAC collections center. At that time in early September 2007, I also was hired as a payroll clerk for Food Lion, but failed that drug test as well. This is a thread for honesty, and I have come a long way since then in determining that, though the stuff is mainly harmless, it doesn't exactly work wonders in today's legal atmosphere towards getting or holding down jobs.
When I failed that Food Lion drug test, I was really depressed, and went on a real bender. Drank at least a fifth of whiskey on top of beer. I went to take a piss, and after this routine operation, had a bit of an accident while flushing the toilet, and actually fell into the shower, striking my spine on the faucet, and woke up in the bathtub/shower a few hours later I guess, with a dreadful hangover and very painful injury to about the middle of my spine. I did what anyone would do at that point, and went to bed.
I awoke in the middle of the night, or it was a lucid dream (ok, I myself think this and the following was
no dream, but it is hard to actually prove these things to others). To this point, I have never gone beyond cryptic hints at what followed to any person in the world except for my brother Tyler, who is almost like a soul mate to me, until now; and after much thought, have chosen LOP to be the place to begin to go beyond such cryptic hints.
When I awoke, I was "drawn" to go outside my apartment, to the sort of cheap-apartment "patio" out there, and was met by three very human-looking figures, and they seemed, so far as I can remember, to have been clad in simple (not dramatic or flowing!) robes, and they just looked like three very ordinary young men. They greeted me with the following statement, which nearly five years later, I have still not quite figured out. Keep in mind that my memories of this whole episode, or really series of episodes, are a bit garbled and unclear in my mind, whether this is just due to the imperfection of human memory, or rather, as I myself tend to think, it is by design.
You see, I don't think we are meant to see and learn such things as I did, and come back from the other side with the perfect means to relate such experiences to others. Oh yes, though; the words the "spokesman" of the three people or entities said I do remember perfectly, and here they are:
"You have been brought along as a mitigating agent for vice, with the capacity for direct action."
There was more, and they seemed to be giving me a choice between returning to life or not. There were hints at reincarnation, and I am still not convinced one way or the other about the truth or untruth of this theory, especially as the "past lives" they told me of were impossible to have lived, as two of these lifetimes overlapped. Seems I was Mozart, J.W.V. Goethe, the great German poet (those two lifetimes overlapped), and Adolf Hitler. Of course, I don't believe this part of the whole episode, but the leader of the three did actually say it. I think now that this was a way of getting me to think about certain conflicting elements of my personality or soul, and that even if reincarnation is true, I was more likely some schmoe or schmuck, or average Joe.
Anyway, I seem to have made the choice to return to this dimension or lifetime, but there was a catch: I would have to deal with certain negative "karma" that needed to be worked out, and there would also be some sort of semi-unpleasant process to go through to make this possible. They told me to go back into my apartment, and "wait for the singularity." I think at that point, I went back to bed as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened (see, for those who have successfully made it thus far through this "text wall," I told you I would try to present it in as fun a way as such a profound experience could possibly be presented; yes, that's it. After this supernatural experience, I simply went back to bed!)
Next day, early afternoon (of course I slept late), my at-the-time pot connection showed up. He was a stupid, early 20s "kid" (for those who might have seen the post, the guy who once accidentally got super-hot sauce in his nose and eyes, and who I about died laughing about later, remembering his frantic attempts to wash it out). I think I was paying him for some bud (and it was most definitely not "Bud Light"), when he all of a sudden said "Robert, you look weird," while staring at me with a look of what seemed to be a mixture of fear and wonder. All of a sudden, he vanished, and a strange, glowing sphere of light appeared (yes, I know "that's what they all say") and I went through it.
I was met by a much more mysterious figure (still human-looking, though I could not make out his face) who gave me greetings, but these were not in words, but more like thoughts, instantly understood, but hard to relate in words. I will leave some stuff out here, since this is becoming a novel rather rapidly, but I think I was given a life review. I'm pretty sure this "fellow" was not God or Christ, but I'm also sure he wasn't from around these parts, know what I mean, Vern?
When I returned, or was returned to my apartment, I seemed to have had to go through some sort of polarity-reversal process (only way I know to describe it) and the last thing I was told was to begin writing down my thoughts. These led to a failed attempt at writing a book called
The Gospel of God's Pet Rat, but I don't now think they really wanted me to write a book, just get down some thoughts so that I did not completely forget my experiences.
Here's where it gets weirder, if that is even possible. I wrote down the first page of my "book" at white heat, a page which I will post an image of. The strange part is, that after I wrote down that page, in my awful handwriting, I happened to look at my right arm. The hairs on my arm had somehow electrically aligned themselves into words from the opening paragraph of my "book," in such a way that they were completely legible! By this point, though I have never in my life been Schizophrenic or heard voices in my head (except for musical ones, being a classically-trained composer), I asked "what the hell is going on here?" and the reply I got was "those are
your words; they will stay with you until your "book" is written." By now, I of course know that "book" is not a book I was supposed to write, but a metaphor for my lifetime. I had either nearly died from that alcohol-induced accident involving falling into the shower, or actually died and was brought back,
by my own request. You see, I'm like a lot of you; I want to see if anything interesting happens in 2012 or soon after, and also felt it was not the time to say goodbye to my family. One thing that still scares me: right before my return, "they" said "the people you return to will be
just like the people you remembered from your old life, but you will eventually catch up with the Singularity."
Funny thing is, while all this was happening, my 93 year old grandmother (mom's mom) was in the process of dying, and one of the last things she said was that she had gone through a light and met the spirits of two of her dead sons, and late husband...
I then proceeded to stay up for three days almost straight, all the time seeming to be communicating in my head with spirit or "guide" voices, and began to try to collect my thoughts. One of the first things I did was to contact my brother, and let him know my initial thoughts. I'm almost done for now, though there is so much more, and if I could remember everything, so much more than even that. I had begun writing some basic thoughts down, and trying to make connections between some of the concepts I had been so strangely and suddenly introduced to. In a moment of relative frivolity, I wrote a brief poem about one of my first experiences with LSD, in 1994 or so. I haven't messed with that stuff since then, and wasn't doing anything more out of the ordinary than weed or alcohol in 2007 when this whole NDE-thing happened.
I wrote the poem is two parts: the opening was relating the brief poetic effort to some clever and inventive internal and end-rhymes on the vowel "I" in a song my brother Tyler, a talented guitarist and songwriter (though too involved in a Biology career to pursue music professionally) had just written, called
Violet Bean. I'll end this beginning to my story (and I do realize it is a long beginning indeed) by posting first the lyrics to my brother's song, then my little poem about LSD, then the first page of my "book" (the words that inexplicably presented themselves in some sort of interaction with my magnetic field or perhaps Chi on my arm and later even chest and belly hair!) and then the strangest thing of all, the strange doodlings and little proverbs I started writing on the inside cover of a notebook while preparing to write my "book,"
The Gospel of God's Pet Rat, a highly-flawed effort which reached 120 typed pages before I abandoned it. I still have the initial sketchbook, and there are interesting things in there that I could also post, if this thread generates any interest. You see, one of the things I started thinking about is that to God, this human experiment on Earth might be similar to how I see the rodent pets I have always loved to keep from the time I was a child, even up to now, as a 43 year old man. My present rat, Yoda, is now dozing peacefully in his cage after a nice meal of leftover steak and rodent mix! (Well, by this point, he's actually gone back to munching on that rodent mix!)
God to man is as man is to (domesticated, not wild) rat: pet rats are loveable, intelligent, interactive, full of vices like overeating, chewing things up, and stealing cigarettes and guitar picks (in Yoda's case), and sometimes, they can also be "bad." See one of the reasons I chose the screen name I did? Pets can sometimes be exasperating, and God, though I do not know his nature, but have something of the Deist in me, and feel "him" (he probably has no "body" as we understand it) to be rather a hands-off manager, must feel pretty discouraged sometimes at our behavior towards each other and at our destruction of this beautiful earth. I'm sure there are some Dr. Who fans here. If anything, God is a "Timelord." The "Singularity" is the moment of the "big bang," a moment in which all future time in this universe of light was contained, and God, having organized that big bang, is the entity for whom all time exists as a single moment, since he is viewing it from the highest possible dimension (I got part of that from Cayce, just to give credit where credit is due, in the wording at least, but also received the knowledge independently through my experience).
I don't know where this confession I have finally chosen to make will lead. I'll probably be called a kook by some, some will blame it on the cannabis and alcohol, some will be fascinated, probably. I still don't understand it myself, but as the opening sentence of my book quite simply proclaimed:
"Even a little rat does his best to understand."