Incredible Adventures of Xavier Hawk #3
Word Count: 1400
Estimated Reading time: 7 min
THIS IS PART THREE OF A FOUR PART MINI SERIES EXPLORING DEATH
As is stood there looking at her, silently begging and pleading with my entire spirit for her to save me from this hell I found myself in, I knew there was no amount of comforting she could provide me that would fix what had already been done.
Like humpty dumpty, not even all the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put me back together again.
I had cracked open the shell of my understanding and there was no going back.
I had, of my own volition taken 9 Hits of LSD or some experimental synthetic (I couldn’t be sure) and my world would never be the same again.
Standing in my room in the middle of the night facing a concerned mother wondering why her son was up at 3am pacing in his room, I knew.
I knew i had betrayed her trust, but I was more concerned with the fate of my eternal soul.
“Mom,” I said. “I took nine hits of LSD and I’m afraid I’m going to be crazy for the rest of my life.”
If I was in terror for my eternal soul and it could have a facial expression, it was hers.
I watched her thoughts run across her consciousness like a ticker tape.
I still didn’t know how to differentiate others people’s thoughts and emotions from my own at 17 and on the LSD it was even worse.
If I doubted my sanity before talking to her, now I was certain that I was doomed.
She called her soon to be husband, a psychiatrist of all things, and he suggested we go to the emergency room.
“We can’t be sure it was LSD and not some other concoction,” he said.
He was right.
LSD shouldn’t have stopped my heart, but by the end of the ordeal that is precisely what happened.
In the emergency room I found some solace, because from the time I had confessed my transgression to arriving in the hospital there was some purpose to my actions.
Get dressed, tie shoes, go to the car...there was something purposeful happening and not the wayward drifting through time and space that had me spinning like Dr. Strange through the multiverse.
I was in a state of primary experience, that is to say there was no filter between what I was experiencing and what I thought.
There was no ego to decide what every experience meant to me.
I was watching the universe in all of its tremendous glory unfold without any of the cognitive biases I was raised in.
I was a blank slate devoid of self identity and I careened through the world of sensory data like a raw nerve unable to differentiate the outer world from my identity.
I was everything I was seeing.
I recall sitting next to a mother and her crying baby.
This poor crying baby’s throat hurt and I could FEEL how much it hurt.
I was the baby after all, and all it could do to tell everyone its throat hurt was to cry.
So I thought since i could in fact speak that I would interpret its crying for the people around me and tell the nurse exactly what was the matter.
I couldn’t seem to convince the baby’s mother, the nurse, my mother, or her fiancee that I knew what was the matter.
For some reason, even though clearly I was them and they were me, they did not seem to experience this.
I knew their innermost thoughts and feelings yet they did not know mine.
I was confused.
I was even more confused when the nurse took me aside and began asking me questions about my own condition.
How would I convey that I had no name at all, or that the totality of this experience was my true name.
I was the walls.
I was her, the nurse asking me my name.
I was the baby crying.
I was my disappointed scared mother and the bothered fiancee.
I was all of these things and yet none.
How did she not experience this as well?
How did my family not get it?
How could life continue without this primary understanding?
I expressed this.
It was then decided that for my own safety and those in the waiting room that I would be isolated in a room with my mother and her fiancee.
This pleased my future step dad since he was a well known physician in this town and didn’t want to be further embarrassed.
After an ongoing interrogated by my mother and my future step father as to who did this to me and being thoroughly confounded with my inability to self identify, they relented.
I lay down on the bed trying to make some sense of the now senseless world that I could feel spinning at thousands of miles an hour hurtling through space around a gigantic ongoing nuclear explosion.
I was becoming more and more terrified.
There was literally no point to anything.
My idea of self was completely absurd in the deep ocean of eternal time that is the cosmos which I could now, for the first time ever it seemed, grasp.
My heart began pounding in my chest harder and harder.
I had absolutely no purpose, nor could I be certain that I did in fact exist separate from the sea of information around me.
The beating of my heart increased in frequency and intensity.
I was a meaningless speck of awareness in an infinite sea of consciousness which was now apparent and inseparable from my “self.”
My heart pounded now, threatening to explode out of my chest.
The intensity of the pounding of my heart correlated with the depth of submersion I experienced drowning deeper into my body, an allegory representing the absurdity of my “self.”
I was aware of everything and I was everything.
It was then that my heart stopped.
When the heart stopped “I” was slingshotted out of the depths and shackles of my sensory body and all of a sudden i was floating above the scene.
I looked down at the room and saw everything.
I thought of my little sister sleeping at home and instantly I was transported there floating above her sleeping form.
Then I was at my biological father’s house seeing him slumped on the couch passed out as quickly as I thought of him.
Then I was floating above the earth looking at the entire world undulating in a rhythmic dance that I would many years later come to understand as the song of the earth.
I was instantaneously transported back into the hospital room as though I was Lucy in the movie of the same name with Scarlett Johansson.
I looked down at my still form and every skin cell on my face each became a story of my life.
Each cell was a record of EVERY instance of my earthly sojourn.
They told of the actions I had taken both consciously and unconsciously.
They recorded the results that I had never known, normally would never see, and effects my actions had on others who then acted in turn to others and so on.
I saw the results of my unconsciousness out several layers and I felt a tremendous sadness.
Instantaneously, I became aware of others who were near me.
They were floating with me in my perceived solitude.
They said they should not be seen and that they were my family.
They said that if I saw them I would want to join them and not return to my body.
They said it was not my time.
I was embarrassed because the poor unconscious person I had been was laid bare right there before them.
They showed me that I was judging myself.
There was no god condemning me.
They saw me and every decision and loved me.
I condemned myself in my own ignorance and unknowing.
I said this unconscious being laying in the bed below me was not who I had come here to be. They said they knew that.
I extended my thought form arms into the body and made some sort of adjustments to the still form.
My intention was to rewire my being to not only remember this experience but to operate more consciously.
It was then that my mother noticed that my body was not breathing.
To be continued in episode 4…..
Stay Tuned for episode 4 wherein we explore past lives, rebuilding an ego, and the need to survive.