Guardian Angel?

Prose, including snippets (mini-memoirs).
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sasha
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Guardian Angel?

Post by sasha » October 21st, 2017, 1:11 pm

 
I once saw a National Geographic documentary entitled “The Angel Effect”, concerning apparent visitations by strangers or the dead who appear to individuals under extreme duress. The show included 1st person accounts by a 9/11 survivor who claimed he'd been guided down a burning stairwell in the South Tower by a person unknown to him; a cave diver who (quite foolishly, I thought) made a solo dive into a Blue Hole, and after losing her guideline was led back out by her recently-deceased husband; and astronaut Jerry Linenger, recounting the stresses of keeping the aging Mir space station in working order, and the extreme isolation and loneliness he felt hundreds of miles from Earth with a Russian crew who spoke practically no English. He used the treadmill as a means of escape, and claimed that during an exercise session he'd had a visitation/hallucination in the form of his father, who'd offered him comfort and encouragement.

The video presented a few different hypotheses based in neuroscience that might explain these occurrences. They all had something to do with our sense of Self as an entity separate from the rest of the world - that in certain extreme circumstances that sense gets confused, so that the Self is vaguely perceived as Another. The most plausible of these to me was that under conditions of extreme stress, the body starts shutting down subsystems deemed less essential to survival in order to allocate energy resources to those deemed moreso. According to this hypothesis, those brain regions involving Self and body sense are among the first to go - "browning out" in the documentary's words - leading to the impression that there is suddenly another individual present, one who is there to assist you in your time of need. It's called "The Third Man" hypothesis.

And while watching, it suddenly occurred to me that I have had that very experience.

Those occasions I've perceived myself to be in grave physical danger are very few, and not so extreme as to have convinced me beyond any doubt that I was about to die. Even my final scuba dive was probably not as life-threatening as it had felt at the time - it had been just frightening enough to force me to think, to remain rational, and to follow accepted protocol. Instead, the circumstances under which my "angel" had appeared were more like Linenger's - an extended period of continual low-level stress combined with a profound sense of hopelessness and social isolation.

It happened in late August 1978, when I was a computer programmer at a New Hampshire based insurance company. Having come from a scientific and engineering background, insurance was a foreign language to me (still is, actually). I found it unutterably dull and boring (still do, actually), and had only taken the job after being laid off from my previous one. My ignorance of the subject was (and remains) abysmal. I was desperately unhappy, overwhelmed by the bewildering complexity of the software systems I was responsible for maintaining. Like the Mir, they had evolved organically for years before I was ever hired, and I had no idea what their overall architecture might be. Further, I had married about a year earlier despite misgivings, and time had only reinforced my doubts about the wisdom of that union. Weeks would pass without physical intimacy; and after living for years surrounded by woods and open pastureland, I now found myself imprisoned within a tiny 3-room apartment in the middle of Keene, surrounded by acres of other tiny 3-room apartments. My wife was lobbying - hard - to buy a house, but I saw this enormous financial commitment as just another of the traps snapping shut all around me, blocking every possible avenue of escape. For months I'd been living in Elliot's state of quiet desperation, with no way out in sight.

During the summer months, we programmers would gather every Friday afternoon at Otter Brook State Park to grill burgers, drink beer, and smoke copious amounts of controlled substances. On this particular evening, my wife had chosen to drink wine instead, and was making significant headway into the two bottles we'd brought. She was always flirtatious by nature, but the alcohol - and perhaps the extended periods of celibacy that seemed to characterize our marriage - was making her particularly so tonight. Ordinarily I'd gamely play along with the act, but on this occasion she seemed especially reckless and forward, and the responses to her faux overtures struck me as overly sincere.

It was clear to me that her behavior was delighting the department bachelors - and attracting the bemused attention of the attached - as if I weren't even there. I felt keenly that I was pointedly being excluded. Unable to bear the performance any longer, and nursing a dull sense of angry resentment, I slipped away into the background and began walking slowly along the beach toward the marshy savannah where the river slows and begins to pool into the reservoir. At the end of the groomed beach I tossed my beer bottle into a rusted 50-gallon trash drum and lit up a joint. Then I continued on into the marsh. Before long I found myself out of sight and sound of the revelry. I might have been the only person in the park.

It was a lovely late-summer afternoon. A golden sun was still a few diameters above the horizon, reflecting warmly from the glittering waters of the pond. The ambient sounds seemed to wrap around me like a warm, soft shawl: the chorusing crickets & katydids, the occasional plop of a frog taking to the water, or the nearby trill of a red-winged blackbird. Settling down on a stone near the water’s edge, I gazed across the pond to the sylvan skyline of the far shore, now silhouetted by the lowering sun, and remembered with aching nostalgia a similar view from the bedroom window of my bachelor days. The blessed solitude and tranquility were a badly-needed respite from the Hell I felt my life had become, and I could feel the tension draining away. I found myself awash in a deep, comforting peace cleansing my heart of all the unhappiness of the past months.

In fact it felt like a homecoming. It was as though this place, this small enclave of wilderness, were embracing me, protecting me, nurturing me, assuring me that here, anyway, all was well. That other world of uncertainty and misery was far, far away, and on this rock by this water's edge I would be cared for. Here, I was welcome. Here, I was loved.

This feeling of benign, caring Presence was so powerful, so sudden and overwhelming that I burst uncontrollably into tears. In the calming, soothing presence of magnificent Nature, I sobbed with a relief and gratitude I'd never experienced before, nor have since. Eventually the sobs would slow; but then an errant dragonfly would hover nearby or a frog would bob to the surface before me, and, interpreting these as manifestations or familiars of the Divine, I'd break down again.

I did not want to be discovered in such an overwrought state, and concerns that my presence would be missed motivated me to start pulling myself together. It wasn't easy. It felt like telling God, "Thanks, Lord, but I'm overdue back at the House of Pain." I didn't want to leave - how could I walk away from such an awesome, loving Presence? Simply contemplating the separation brought more tears. It felt like saying good-bye for the last time to a lover. I don't know how much time passed before I thought I could face people again, but I did manage to compose myself sufficiently to feel I could rejoin the party. By this time my wife had passed out, and everyone else was either too drunk or stoned to have taken notice of my absence or my red puffy eyes.

It was my one and only Transcendental Experience, and for it I am deeply, profoundly grateful, even if it was only a perceptual error induced by prolonged stress and cannabis intoxication. Maybe it was only a slight synchronization problem between two lobes of my brain. Maybe it was only a minor neurological hiccup.

Maybe.

(Footnote to a thread in Poetry - http://studioeight.tv/phpbb/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=31306 …)
Last edited by sasha on January 31st, 2018, 9:52 am, edited 1 time in total.
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"Falsehood flies, the Truth comes limping after it." - Jonathan Swift, ca. 1710

creativesoul
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Re: Guardian Angel?

Post by creativesoul » November 11th, 2017, 8:27 pm

with out a doubt-there are spiritual doorways and angels- i dont need to 'understand' how the matrix works ,,,,
reason is over rated, as is logic and common sense-i much prefer the passions of a crazy old woman, cats and dogs and jungle foliage- tropic rain-and a defined sense of who brings the stars up at night and the sun up in the morning---

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sasha
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Re: Guardian Angel?

Post by sasha » November 12th, 2017, 5:44 pm

I enjoy peeking under the hood, to try glimpsing how it all might work. It doesn't alter or diminish the reality for me - quite the opposite. As physicist Richard Feynman put it:

"Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars - mere globs of gas atoms. I, too, can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more? The vastness of the heavens stretches my imagination - stuck on this carousel my little eye can catch one-million-year-old light. A vast pattern - of which I am a part... What is the pattern, or the meaning, or the why? It does not do harm to the mystery to know a little about it..."

thanks for reading & commenting!
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"Falsehood flies, the Truth comes limping after it." - Jonathan Swift, ca. 1710

creativesoul
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Re: Guardian Angel?

Post by creativesoul » November 12th, 2017, 8:10 pm

Yes that light is pretty amazing
reason is over rated, as is logic and common sense-i much prefer the passions of a crazy old woman, cats and dogs and jungle foliage- tropic rain-and a defined sense of who brings the stars up at night and the sun up in the morning---

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