Monday, January 21, 2013

My out-of-body-experiences and their importance

In 1973-4, I was working night shift at Mayview State Mental Hospital and taking psych, drama, and writing at Pitt night school. First at the Medical Center, in which the patients were also physically sick, and later at Bengs Building I had, through exhaustion from caffeine and whatever other factors, what later through reading I came to understand were out of body or near death experiences. Since I didn't die, I call them out of body experiences. There was an hour long break on night shift at Medical Center, during which I went into the visitors room and laid down on the couch and immediately fell asleep and (you know how sometimes we can tell when it's time to wake up because we have some kind of internal clock) slept what seemed like an hour and I jumped up and went out to look at the clock - but much less than an hour had elapsed, so I laid back down...This occurred several times until the hour really was up. And this happened on more than one night. I looked at the clock, and a couple times spoke to the older fellow employee about how I thought the hour was up, but she kept reading her book as if I wasn't there...I later put together that my spirit only jumped out of my body to see what time it was each time.

The one out of body experience in the Bengs Building was much more deep and meaningful, with increasing meaning as I have remembered it in light of reading about obe's years later, and I have a scientific perspective about it which integrates the science w/spirituality. While working on a paper on autism for psych, and at that time taking caffeine pills like they were candy, I finally concluded that I may have been subclinically autistic myself, and I remembered the one line in a book given me by a priest I counseled with after having been rejected ("not mature enough" I think) for the seminary after grade school - The one sentence was "The Universe is a living manifestation of God." I was so exhausted that I gave up working on the paper, fell down sitting on a couch in the dayroom of the ward I was supposed to be taking care of (wishing I was in the back corner, a more strategic place should the one patient who was "on high" and potentially violent wake up, or should the nurse come on her rounds...I would be more likely to wake up and pretend I had been awake so the nurse wouldn't find I'd been sleeping on the job)...Well, a vortex of energy sucked me into a tunnel to a light...or a vortex of energy brought the light to me I don't know which (and there was a crackling sound as if a thousand leaves were rushing or electrical sparks or some sound like that) and I thought I was dying and with all my might got myself sitting back up and then wondering what that marvelous light was...and then falling back and coming to the light again (or it coming to me) and again becoming scared thinking I was dying and so pulling again with all my might to sit up again and then again wondering about that light...maybe five or six times...I felt that light was a being, loving...and I when I was down was watching from near the celing in the far corner of the dayroom (the most strategic place) what was then happening (or going to happen, you see we're in a different dimension here, somehow above time-space) when I had what was the first what might or might not be called the first auditory hallucination I had ever had (despite a long history of psychedelic drug use) - I heard as clear as a bell, each time I succumbed to tiredness and fell back to sleep on the couch and came to (or was come to by) the light, a heavy metal door opening which indicated that either the nurse was coming onto the ward or the "on high" patient was coming out of the side (isolation) room or one of the other patients were coming out of the group bedroom...Years later, I remember the Jimmy Stewart character in It's a Wonderful Life who is given a look by his angel at what the world would be without him...I would have watched as my body passed out on the couch was discovered by the nurse, or some other scenario which would ensue if I died then...Previous to the door opening, I felt the whole environment to be alive with vibration...The next morning I decided all the drugs I had taken over the years had finally "burnt my brain" (caused brain damage), but there was an awe in my memory of the experience, and I remember swearing during it (the light being helped me with a loving non-judgemental life review) that I would never smoke a cigarette again...a resolution I have broken since many times...And I read of a study that claimed to find that obe's actually more fully integrated the brain (such as between the left and right hemispheres) rather than do damage to the brain. For many years I said psychedelics can be mind expanding, but they are not soul expanding. And I do nothing illegal now, though I do advocate the legalization under prescription of psychedelics (including the mild psychedelic and tranquilizer marijuana), but use of these while they were illegal has been a huge mental complication in my life, since each experience has to be filtered through the question Does this represent a "flashback" or is what I'm experiencing perfectly natural?...I concluded that I had not damaged my brain - with all the psychedelics, anyway - when I aced the CLEP (College Level Examination Program) which gave me (minus 15 credits of distribution of studies necessary regardless of the test results) the first two years of college credit without having to take the classes..."I'm speechless", I said to the woman who told me the test results. "I am too", she said. So now I'm listed as mentally ill, on disability, and, with this low monthly income I am free to work on whatever I feel is my own unique gift/contribution to life, including having helped found a community organization, a community newspaper and community garden organization.
So how crazy am I? You decide. I know that the experiences of such a "mystical" type as out of body experiences don't make sense in ordinary physics. But the most advanced, wise science is now coming around to an acceptance of the miraculous.
All life is miraculous.
Jim McCue
St. Jim the Composter
412-421-6496
composter and biotech researcher
http://bioeverything.blogspot.com/2009/02/celebrate-earth.html
http://hazelwoodurbangardens.blogspot.com
http://facebook.com/alllifelover
http://hazelwoodhomepage.org

Monday, January 14, 2013

Plan B

There are no formulas for success in this world. What works one day won't the next. In this time of great change, those who think things will stay the same are planning for a future that is not going to be there. Those unable to wake up to the new reality will be stuck-on-stupid, like zombies stumbling around with their eyes closed. Our Plan A's are not working; it's time to start considering alternatives.

I'm sorry for feeling that in order to do an honest job I need to write about some very serious subjects, but this is how I see things at present:

Environmental feedback effects are bringing on catastrophically rapid climactic changes. Barring the miraculous, nothing will stop this radical change. And it's not decades or years down the line, it's now. Even if somehow people all over the world were able to work together enough to stop all combustion processes such as burning gasoline, oil, coal (and even biofuels), permafrost melting and fermentation (emitting co2 and methane) - along with melting and consequent release of undersea methane frozen till now in ice - will make the climate shocks to date look tame in comparison.

I do, however, believe in the miraculous. First of all, all life is miraculous. For instance, though we humans have learned how to use phenomena such as electricity, we really don't understand it. Each moment and every day is a miracle, whether you personally are too arrogant to realize it. Along with the quantum increase in problems - such as pollution, biodiversity loss, high-tech warfare, human-caused weather changes, overpopulation - the progress of science is also mushrooming.

A silver lining to the planetary emergency is that inclusiveness of rich and poor in this crisis is forcing to the forefront (of a media previously controlled by money) the naked truth of how technological progress has been held back by the financial concerns of the defenders of the status quo. A prime example, with little known Pittsburgh history, is the life of the inventor Nikola Tesla. Tesla worked in Pittsburgh. There is a street named after him in Hazelwood. Were it not for the economically driven dumming down of our educational system, every citizen grade school age and older in the world would know of Tesla as well as we know of Einstein, Edison, JP Morgan, Westinghouse, and Marconi. He helped Westinghouse, Edison, Marconi, and Morgan make a lot of their money, and then his work was destroyed when his further inventions threatened their profits. Planned obsolescence, which should have been made illegal a long time ago, has also held back progress due to the status quo. For an intro to how the long term health of our society has been damaged by short-term money-making, take a look at this short video-clip called
The Light Bulb Conspiracy - The Untold Story of Planned Obsolescence
http://youtube.com/watch?v=wYuggmRLjgQ

Mushrooming technological progress in the field of communications is clearing the way for harmonious human change on a previously impossible scale. Since everyone knows we're all in trouble, and with our newfound capacity to throw massive amounts of information at the speed of light (electronically), we can use the same flexibility of mind which gave our species top status to transform our technology to life-nurturing rather than the current dog-eat-dog model, which is based on the assumption of scarcity. What's holding up feeding the world and restoring the planet's ecosystem to health is economics, not technology.

If we get off our addictive mindset (which says we have no choice but to do things this way - driving in our cars alone rather than carpooling and bicycling and walking; making money doing destructive things such as selling junk "food", manufacturing weapons, fighting over oil and other natural resources) - we can stop committing suicide via Earth ecosystem destruction. If we: stop competing and work together with Nature to let Earth be reforested; change to electric vehicles fueled by green energy (including the "free energy" Tesla was working on); massively convert our industrial agriculture (which tortures life for short-term profit) to pro-life local agriculture (which produces by nurturing the whole web of life rather than naming certain species as enemies and going to war on them) - then we have a shot at remaining on the planet's list of keeper species. It requires a more ethical consciousness.

Jim McCue
412-421-6496
http://hazelwoodhomepage.org
http://hazelwoodurbangardens.blogspot.com
http://bioeverything.blogspot.com/2009/02/celebrate-earth.html
http://facebook.com/alllifelover