Application of Impossible Things: A Near Death Experience in Iraq (2 page)

Note: A glossary can be found at the back of the book for those readers unfamiliar with military slang. Words found in the glossary are marked with an asterisk in the text.

Chapter 1 - The Catalyst

I had just closed my eyes, hand propping up my head, elbow on the door handle. It was the end of a long day of construction site visits and now only a few minutes out from base. I’d long ago quit paying attention to what was passing by outside the window and had lost track of how far we were from the rest of our security convoy. This team seemed to travel with a half kilometer or more of road between wagons, and I hadn’t seen the Iraqi police escort for a while. Not knowing the two security men in the front seats well, I hadn’t chatted with them. Some men prefer to rivet their attention on the environment; they weren’t talking with each other, so I felt they might not welcome questions or comments from me. The team was running on closed mic
*
, a stupifyingly dull way to travel in the back seat of an armored Land Cruiser
,
cut out of the chatter of hyper-aware security men informed by multiple sets of alert senses. As a passenger, I’d hit the familiar point of being artificially lulled into boredom.

All I heard was a “pop”—the sound of a champagne cork from one hundred meters—the Microsoft sound of opening a new window—a finger snap from across the office.

I vividly remember taking a long, deep breath—more of a sigh that echoed an internal sigh. I thought,
shit.
I was tired inside, exhausted from long days spent trying to train a new project manager while catching up with a demanding workload after an insufficient two weeks of leave. I didn’t want something hard, something that would require effort. I wanted to rest.

Tough luck.

Get on with it, I told myself.

I opened my eyes.

This is a portion of an account of the incident written shortly after I was discharged from Walter Reed Army Medical Center.
I’d relived the story over and over in my mind during my month as an inpatient, deliberately and ruthlessly attempting to maintain only that which I truly remembered. Adding and subtracting from memory is easy—we all do it, and do it casually. Determined to avoid that fiction, as I thought of it, I hoped to use the incident in a book about my sixteen months administering reconstruction contracts in Iraq. I wanted the entire account to be as accurate to my own memory as possible, without resorting to histrionic descriptions of war
. I was determined not to get s
ucked into the politics of a simplistic ideological support or condemnation of our efforts in Iraq, or
get mired in
creating an enthusiastic glorification or indignant diatribe on corruption and disgrace within the reconstruction effort.
Bang-bang
sells in any form, but I believe more complex stories contain valuable truths. I wanted to be able to relate the experience in a way that faithfully described the fine and wonderfully wild condensation of humanity with its
rich
complexities and paradoxes
, ending up somewhere
that mattered.

So the details recounted above are all true—unless omission counts as a lie. For all my insistence on telling things straight, it amuses me now that I was willing to deliberately omit what was, from a personal point of view, the
most interesting
part of the incident.

Here is the missing piece of the story:

I was in the truck, head on hand, half asleep, and then I was not. I’ll call this instantaneous movement
blinking
from one place to another, for lack of a better word.

In this new environment, I stood on an oval dais looking rather intrepid in my bloody and torn fatigues, slouching a bit, dirty and darkly tan, addressing thousands of white-robed beings or personalities. They were arrayed up and all around me as if I stood in the center of a huge stadium, the dais on which I stood being perhaps twenty feet in diameter.

The personalities were non-physical in essence, taking on form if they intended to do that for a particular purpose. I perceived the way they looked according to what I preferred for my purposes. At the time, since I had been abruptly transferred from the physical plane, it was simpler to perceive them in a human form, wearing glowing white robes.

Most of these thousands were familiar to me, and all were my equal regardless of their admiration for my latest silly feat on earth. (How intrepid is it, really, to choose to get blown up?) I knew the Gathering to be a meeting of many groups representing a wide variety of interests and responsibilities pertaining not only directly to earth and physical universe energies but to dimensions and issues beyond.

The concept that I first communicated was that I was tired and had no interest in returning to the physical plane. I understood that the decision was mine, and at this point my decision was to end my physical existence.

Immediately after that, or perhaps more accurately folded within it, I presented what seems from my current physical body/conscious mind perception to be a transfer of information in the form of an inexplicably complex matrix. The information was minutely detailed and broadly conceptual—at once layered and infinitely dense, yet elegantly simple. It included events, thoughts, incidents, individuals, and groups in all their relationship complexities: stories, concepts, connections, nuances, layers, judgments, and projections. It included kinetic equations and dimensions and symbols and flows. Rather than being a classic life-flashing-before-the-eyes scene, this download was a collection that emphasized what might be very broadly understood as cultural and political information. I was aware that I deliberately offered the condensed data in fulfillment of a request that had been made by this Gathering of personalities prior to my taking on this body for this physical lifetime.

While the personalities digested the matrix I’d made available, I was again amused by the admiration that was sent back to me. They were clearly impressed not only with my Raiders of the Lost Ark appearance but also by the depth and breadth of information I was providing. Yet I perceived the task as an easy one and the information obvious, therefore, unworthy of admiration.

When the thought form or matrix had been absorbed by everyone, which took but seconds, discussions proceeded among the various groups and within the whole of the Gathering. This may seem impossible considering there were thousands present, but it was not. No overlaps occurred, no interruptions took place, no misunderstandings formed, and disagreements were respectfully and thoughtfully engaged and resolved. All communication was accomplished through thought.

They then requested that I return to my physical body to accomplish some further work. I was given to understand that my particular skills with energy were needed at this time and would be effective only were I actually present in a body within the earth vibration. I replied that I was willing, but given my level of exhaustion and disinterest in the difficulties of this particular physical life to date, I requested that certain assistance be provided within that continued physical existence.

While we all digested some details, I retreated to a deep place that I’ll refer to as another vibrational dimension, for lack of a better description, where I could recuperate and restore my energies. Other beings assisted with this, doing most of the work while I entered a sort of spiritual deep resting state. From the physical perspective, this state lasted an equivalent of centuries within less than a moment.

When I returned to the Gathering, we agreed upon specific tasks that I would accomplish and specific things that they would assist me with once I was back in the physical. This wasn’t a
barter exchange
, as we might assume from our cultural perspective. It was more of a genuinely easy granting of services with no weight placed on the value or relative cost of effort implied by each agreement.

Having agreed, I moved to another vibrational location where healing would be performed on my physical body. From this location, I could see my physical body in the truck, head propped up by my right hand, elbow resting on the door handle exactly as I’d left it. I could also see my body as an energy matrix. Reading from both those levels simultaneously, I could tell that my right hand was nearly severed at the wrist, my right foot and ankle were badly mangled, and
I had a deep wound in my right torso. There was a large hole in my head:
I was missing one eye, the frontal sinus, and a portion of my brain.

Some energy beings and I worked together, quickly repairing the body, primarily working through the matrix. The injuries weren’t entirely healed, as some were to be of use in situating me for tasks I had agreed to perform or things that I wanted to experience as a whole infinite
Self. While we worked, we joked with each other about what should and shouldn’t be done and casually engaged in a great deal of goofing off.

When we’d finished, I thanked my companions, and then I moved to another location that served as a convenient jump-off point. There I met briefly with some other beings that were familiar to me. We discussed mechanical details of what I’d agreed to do for the Gathering, as well as some personal issues. Then I simply took a deep breath and popped back into the body.

I estimate that all of the events just described took place in the space of less than five seconds on the physical plane. The truck was still rolling down the road when I opened my eyes. I was aware of a disconnect and had a flash memory of some of what had occurred, but that memory was immediately put aside in order to deal with what was happening on the physical plane.

While this out-of-body experience took place in the past as we understand time
,
I can revisit the experience, and it is still alive. The scenes and my participation in them retain the quality and details of favored waking life memories or lucid dreams
,
everything
being
as vivid as when I first experienced it. An advantage to this lucidity is that I’m able to relive isolated segments of it with a simultaneous awareness of myself in the physical environment. Applying a physical life perspective to what is clearly an environment drastically different from what might be considered normal allows me now to examine and describe deeper layers of the events and environment that are only implied, or ignored altogether, in the short account given above.

In navigating our daily lives, we take for granted underlying structures of culture and environment, and I did the same during the out-of-body experience. At the time I didn’t think W
hy am I communicating by thought? How is this possible?
Just as in daily physical life, we don’t think
How can I possibly mentally string together words that describe conceptual thought and then make the words audible by coordinating all the correct muscles?
We
use physical, perceptive, and cultural tools without necessarily being aware of their origin or mechanics.

Those physical world
base assumptions
are often not brought into focus until we are confronted with a challenge by a different set of assumptions. On a simplistic cultural level, for instance, an American eats pizza with his hands and may not think of that as a cultural choice until visiting Spain where pizza is eaten with a knife and fork. An American might think nothing of a business acquaintance sharing a few details of an impending divorce while a Brit would be paralyzed with discomfort were a colleague to so casually share such personal information (unless it were turned into a witty joke—that British social savior). Some cultures agree to stop at red lights while others consider traffic lights to be less a rule, exactly, than a rather uselessly polite suggestion. On another level, I wasn’t conscious of the fact that there were so many muscles and tendons involved in rotating a wrist until mine was shattered, immobilized, and then required to re-learn how to move using appropriate combinations of muscles rather than compensating with others. On yet another level, many cultures assume dreams are not real experiences while others consider them more real than the physical world.

The unconscious or subconscious assumptions we carry around are structures that allow us to interact with each other and the physical world in agreed upon ways, thus making sense of our collective experience. Were I to organize memory according to theme or concept instead of by date, filling out medical history forms might be unnecessarily complicated. Were I to conceive of time in terms of the weather while others used a clock, it might be hard to set up a rendezvous with a friend. Being able to revisit my out-of-body experience while simultaneously being aware of the collective physical consciousness, our shared reality, allows me to bring into focus some of the different assumptions active in each.

The depth and breadth of information available in the out-of-body event is so rich that organization of it in the linear fashion required by writing is problematic. In an attempt to solve that to some extent,
I’ll begin each chapter with one portion of the story, using that portion as a reference to expand upon. In this way I’ll take
the reader through the experience more slowly,
fleshing out
my bare bones account
by describing s
ome of the assumptions, as well as my impressions and conclusions, in an effort to better understand at least some basic aspects of the reality that I experienced. After that more detailed
examination o
f the incident, I’ll try to bring the information forward in the final chapter, broadly describing how this experience has informed my physical life. After all, we’re currently alive and primarily conscious in bodies and a physical environment. If the out-of-body experience doesn’t touch that life, its value is limited. Practical application, the manifestation of any experience, is the stage on which we’ve chosen to learn and expand.