Great Spiral

When I was about four years old, my tonsils were removed. The doctor knocked me out with ether. At one time, ether was a common anesthetic, but when safer anesthetics were invented, ether was dropped because it is very toxic. Ether depresses breathing and can damage the liver and kidneys.

Unfortunately, ether overdoses were common. That’s because the LD50 of ether, the dose of ether that produces death in 50 percent of the population, is only slightly higher than the dose of ether required to reduce consciousness sufficiently for surgery.

That’s what happened to me. The doctor gave me an ether overdose.  On the outside, I was very peaceful – a little too peaceful, in fact. On the inside, it was quite another story.

I was unconscious, and perhaps my breathing had stopped, but I felt anything but unconscious. I could feel myself lying on the operating table in a dark room. Although I could not see them, I could sense around me the presence of others whom I took to be doctors and nurses. Above me in the blackness was a mighty, glowing spiral. It glowed with an intense white light as it slowly rotated. The spiral was unbelievably intense and seemed to burn its brilliance into my brain. I struggled to get off the operating table. The doctors and nurses fought to keep me on the table, but I lashed out at them with all my strength: kicking, flailing with my arms, thrashing, fighting. They held me down on the table while the burning white spiral spun slowly in space above me with an intensity beyond words.

When I awoke from surgery, I remembered how I fought to get off the operating table. I hoped that my struggle with the medical staff had happened only in my mind, but I couldn’t be sure; the struggle seemed so real. I knew the spiral had existed only in my mind, and therefore wasn’t “real”, but the memory was extremely vivid. For years afterward whenever I remembered that spiral I experienced its intensity all over again.

For a long time I wondered if, on some level of reality, it might have been real. Maybe something happened that my young mind tried to make sense of in the only way it could. With an overdose of ether in my brain, was I subconsciously fighting those who were administering it? Was my soul about to leave my body? The beings around me that I assumed were doctors and nurses ... perhaps they were guardian angels, or spirit guides and teachers, working to keep my soul in my body to prevent me from dying. I’d like to think that, but I have to believe that most likely – in fact, almost certainly – the experience was simply an intense, drug-induced dream and nothing more.

I don’t know why I saw the spiral, but the spiral shape is surely a fundamental part of the Cosmos. From the design of a seashell to the shape of our galaxy, from the design of the inner ear’s cochlea that allows us to hear, to the Spira mirabilis (marvelous spiral) in mathematics and the golden spiral in geometry, spirals – both real and abstract – are truly abundant. Now there is a clue to something important.