SELF-AWARENESS
Plunging Towards Certain Death I Saw My Life Flashing By
We choose to take things impossible to explain and put them on an out-of-reach shelf
Moments before I’d carefully dropped my machete to the ground over thirty-five feet down, I started down the tree. It was cold as the late afternoon breeze blew through the tops of the tall, long-needled pines that covered the mountains. Like listening to the roar of a crowd in a distant stadium, the rushing sound of the wind has always put a spell on me, as it did that afternoon. I wondered if it was the cones that sang with the wind or if it was the pine needles.
We were near two volcanoes in high elevation and the late afternoon. El Salvador's highlands were brisk and foggy at Christmas time. A cool fog had materialized and moved mystically through the trees. The sticky pine sap odor was nature’s perfect incense offering. It was wondrous.
Before climbing I had tied a machete to my belt, a small machete, and removed a suitably shaped branch that would work well as a Christmas tree. I thanked the huge fifty-foot tree, I felt sure it did not feel that it was missing one small branch, thus my conscience was mostly clear.
My wife Sally and son Timmy pulled the branch from a pile of logs under the tall pine and were pulling it toward the big, ancient, Oldsmobile Delta 88 my father-in-law bought us when we were preparing to drive from Michigan to El Salvador. Its massive trunk would hold the pine branch.
The old farmer who lived in the thatched hut nearby helped load it into the big eight-cylinder. His talkative children and grandchildren watched me scramble around in the pine’s top. Below I could hear the farmers’ pigs grunting uneasily around the adobe thatched dwellings. Roosters crowed as though announcing the day's end. Even this far up the powerful smell of the family’s cooking fire filled my lungs.
My wife asked how I was doing as I’d stopped calling down. My son voiced concern, and I could hear Mom comforting him. The cool breeze, subtle at times, was clearly creeping through me, getting a hold of me. A cold sweat wasn’t helping.
A group of black howler monkeys across the valley were putting up quite a storm with their trademark roar. Looking across at them I could make out their large black furry bodies as they jumped from branch to branch. I must have been an unwelcome sight for them. It was unusual to see howlers this far up into the highlands.
The late afternoon mountain air worked its way through my sweaty t-shirt and suddenly the cold became an issue. A few minutes earlier, as I was chopping the branch, I knew I was feeling tired, which I ignored. I was in my late twenties, strong, and felt no concern.
The rough surface of the tree trunk had old branch stubs sticking out. It was easy for me to climb as these old cut branches as they were very much like a ladder! Soon I reached the top. It was up here where I climbed to find a branch for Christmas.
As the branch stubs made for excellent grab hold I needed no rope; it was a free climb of the kind I’d done countless times as a kid. I felt good about my climbing skills. As a youth in the Guatemalan forests, my friends and I climbed tall pines and crossed from treetop to treetop without coming down, making it into a contest. Funny now some might call that an extreme sport, a foolish activity, but that’s what ten-year-olds did, at least we did.
We were in El Salvador as I was managing an old hotel in El Salvador’s center. Our son attended primary school close to our neighborhood. My wife ran the accounting department in the hotel.
I started down the side of the trunk, picking my footing carefully on the protruding branch stubs below me. My sense of overwhelming fatigue surprised me and worried me. I couldn’t very well take a fifteen-minute break up in the branches as that would have caused my family concern, so I continued. My palms got cold and sweaty.
The fatigue I felt was the kind one can get swimming too long in big ocean waves. It creeps up on you. Suddenly I was without power. Gone. No strength.
I lost my grip and fell earthward. It was the ‘flight’ down which I felt needed to be told.
This is what I remember. I blacked out as I saw the branches rushing away from me, more accurately it was me moving away from them!
Green pine branches slapped across my face as I fell. They felt cool, at first comforting. Almost as though a cradle trying to hold me. Then I was ‘gone’. Simply lost consciousness as I plunged through the air.
In that micro space of time, I reviewed everything I’d done in this life. Everything. I can’t overstate this, I saw a video of my entire existence, from a very personal and detailed perspective. This was in the early seventies and my mind has since erased everything I saw. For months following my fall, I could recall at length the things I saw. They are all mostly gone now.
But here’s the cruncher. Not only was I allowed to witness the life I’d lived, but I also saw all the dreams I ever had! It has taken me many years to write it down, but after much thought and all the debate on the powers of the mind so rampant these days, I thought it wise.
I remember one of those dreams. It was my son, my firstborn, and in this dream, we were on a pine tree. The tree stood next door to my mom’s house in Guatemala. My son was out on a limb, he was too young to be there, and I recall seeing my shock at finding him up there. I tried climbing out to him on the horizontal branch he now clung to. He lost his grip and fell with a sickening thud to the hard ground. I watched in indescribable anguish and helplessness, as he lay with eyes closed. It affects me to this day.
He tried opening his eyes. In another moment, he was back with us and fine. That was one of the visions I saw as I flew towards the ground in El Salvador.
My eyes opened as I gained consciousness. My wife said I’d landed on top of the pile of big logs at the trees’ base and that the farmer helped pull me off. The farmer said that I’d gone into the death rattle, a sound he’d heard often before one died.
“Let’s go home,” I said, a bit confused. I gazed past my wife and son, past my pine tree, into the darkening, cloud-filled skies over El Salvador. The wind picked up and the pine branches everywhere seemed to be in revolt. My wife said, “The farmer said you can’t move, Fred, you landed on logs. I need to go now and call an ambulance from the hotel nearby. Are you going to be okay, Fred? Timmy is here with you, I’ll be gone for a little while, okay?” Her strong, sweet voice comforted me.
Her brave decision to head up the mountain alone was something I’ll never forget. It was 1973 and El Salvador was slowly being drawn into political violence throughout the country. This was at a time when Marxist guerillas attacked travellers in the country to get whatever money they could. All too often these episodes ended tragically.
“Oh, heck let’s just go, I just need to get up.” I didn’t want her to go up the mountain alone. I was clearly missing something. I’d awoken and felt that it was a simple matter of sitting up and then getting into the car.
“Fred, please, the farmer…”
I attempted to sit up and will never forget the ‘sound’ my broken ribs made, like ominous, poorly tuned piano keys. I forced my way up much to Sally’s protests, and just as quickly I went back down.
“Wait, just give me a minute…” I tried again but now a sharp pain announced itself. My wife left to find help.
The ambulance arrived past nightfall. Red Cross. Those guys are champs. I heard of their countless death-defying heroics once a full war broke out in El Salvador. We went to the Capital, to the hospital.
In the hospital where I was recovering, a group of Siddhis, a group of Maharishi's meditators who were staying with us at the hotel for a month came to visit. They had come to El Salvador, sent by no less than the Maharishi to meditate for peace in this country. They were all rather impressed by my ‘flying’ report.
An advanced teacher of the group assured me that what had happened during my flight down to the ground was that my mind took leave. As in, the mind senses the predicament it’s in and bails out. This was to be one of the most unusual explanations yet.
I broke several ribs along my spine, one in front which the doctors ignored and today sticks out in an odd twist, a wrist bone which I can still ‘feel’, a wing bone. The farmer assured me that my head had bounced off a top log when I hit. I credit the head bounce for over twenty years of migraines (now gone), and the reason my perception of life may vary from others, is why it seems I can sense another place.
To this day I can still not find a workable explanation for my flying experience.
