Spiral

I was about four years old when I realized that sometimes we are conscious when we’re unconscious. Of course, I didn’t realize that I realized that. I didn’t think about it that way. It was just a part of life.

When I was four, my tonsils were removed. The doctor knocked me out with ether. Unfortunately, he administered too much ether. He gave me an overdose. If you’re a doctor, how do you know you’ve administered too much ether? Does your patient stop breathing? Probably. That’s what happened to me. 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 re-experienced its intensity.

And now, a lifetime later, I wonder if, on some level of reality, might it 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? Or was my soul about to leave my body, and the beings around me, the beings I assumed were doctors and nurses ... perhaps they were spirit guides and teachers working to keep my soul in my body to prevent me from dying. Perhaps it 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 structure of a seashell to the shape of our galaxy, spirals are truly abundant. Now there is a clue to something important.