Since time immemorial—or at least as long as I can remember in the vast dark of my dreaming—man has sought for moments in life to leave an individuated ego-skin in order to reconnect with a fundamental mystery, to directly experience the ‘world beyond’, the ‘realm of forms’, ‘a separate reality’ or the ‘harmony of the spheres’; not—I would suppose—out of boredom, listless ennui or the desire for ‘entertainment’, but paradoxically through a quite stubborn inclination toward survival in the physical world.  To find a means of subsistence, to heal one’s self or family, man has had occasion to resort to ekstasis(1) (“to be or stand outside oneself”) or, we could say, to ‘step outside of the box’.  Thus the wisdom of an oft cited sentiment: ‘You can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking you used when you got into them.’(2) 

In ‘The Cosmic Serpent’, Jeremy Narby relates his experiences with a native Peruvian community when in the 1980’s he was working towards preserving their Amazonian forests.  When he asked them how they came to cultivate such knowledge of an outstanding pharmacopeia, the people routinely replied that knowledge of a plant’s medicinal properties was told them directly by the plants themselves—in visions they communicate with the essences of different lifeforms, including the plants, and in this way they obtain the information regarding the plant’s particular character and uses: “Nature speaks to people in visions and dreams.”(3) 

By many accounts it would seem a fruitful procedure, this ‘being reborn’, and for the intrepid seeker who would willfully submit to these practices—dangers be damned—we can see how an attitude of reverence would be prescriptive; and how a certain faith in one’s chosen practitioner could be a helpful aid if one lacked the benefit of that age old agent-of-change ‘nothing left to lose’. 

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In what may be at least a mildly amusing diversion I’ll relate here two anecdotes—what I would qualify as my own Near Death Experiences—neither of which occurred when at age eight I was initiated into the previously mentioned and wholly innocuous coming of age ceremony practiced by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. 

After my grasp on time and physical sensations had ‘dripped’ off of me (as though by a steadily mounting melting process) my body apparently acquired some super-human strength, operated in puppet fashion through ‘strings’ from a world of half-conceivable dreamlike scenes.  Physical time had entirely fractured and was perceived kaleidoscopically, each moment in its own eternity.  I was occupied in a timeless world of archetypes in which a prominent theme was one of ‘breaking out’.  Back in the ‘real world’ several windows had indeed also been ‘broken though’—the penetrating object being in this case my head—and so there was a bit of a bloody mess on the floor as well.  Apparently It took five people to hold down what I would certainly classify as a rather scrawny body.  An ambulance was called: A police car arrived.  They carried me away in the back seat.  The left rear car door window did not escape intact. 

At last I ‘came to’ in hospital.  Sometime during the phase of physical re-entry toward the end of the perplexing and mmm… disconcerting itinerary I found myself ‘around’ my body in the care room bed while the sheet was raised over my face in a death scene cliché—there was nothing more they could do.