The Spiritual Dimension
I’ve always been a rationalist. Keeping a healthy scepticism of events in my life that could not be readily explained away but never entirely dismissive that there may be forces at work in our lives of another dimension. I keep my feet on the ground with my mind open but there is one story which I have never been able to entirely explain…
In 1996 I took some time-out to go travelling in India and Nepal, I spent much of my time examining the religions and history of the regions I passed through whilst studying Buddhism.
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| Tal, Annapurna district (Nepal) |
I was only four days into my trek through the Nepalese Himalaya when I reached the village of Tal one overcast afternoon. It was a couple of hours until sunset so I made arrangements for lodgings and headed off to the waterfall which dominates the village to find a suitable spot to meditate. I had been there about an hour when I was disturbed by shouts behind me and turned to see a wild-eyed Nepalese dressed in rags waving a long stick with a forked tip striding towards me with urgency. Sensing a problem I swiftly rose to my feet as he plunged his staff into nearby reeds and to my amazement yanked a large boa constrictor into the air. His gestures towards the village needed no farther explanation so I hurried on my way with a quick bow of appreciation wondering how on earth snakes survived at such an altitude. Clearly I had a lot to learn about the region.
I got back to the lodge for a simple meal of rice and lentils and retired for the night only to be haunted by vivid and disturbing dreams which faded like mist at dawn leaving me tired but able for the day’s walk ahead.
Much to my surprise I was greeted at breakfast by a fellow European who had lodged there that night. A young French climber of mixed (Indian) parentage who was having some problems with her young Nepalese guide who had taken a bit of a shine to her so at her request I agreed to walk with them for the next leg of my journey in the hope that my company would cool his ardour. By eight o’clock we were on the path to the next village on my trekking map with her sulking guide trailing along some distance behind us.
After a few hours the surrounding landscape started to change dramatically as grassy terraces gave way to pine forests which in turn give way to maple-like trees I didn’t recognise. The route begins to get steeper and narrower, sometimes obscured by small landslides but the beauty makes a fine reward for the effort and its not hard to find enterprising fellows selling cups of hot chai on the route, thankfully my new companion prefers not to chatter as we walk so we take in the scenery in a peaceable silence. By mid-afternoon we approached our planned destination of Bagarchap only to find the village decimated by a land-slide with a small sign erected by the local police at the entrance explaining that the slide had killed many of the villagers and some foreigners only some four months before. We made our way to the only sign of activity, the half destroyed lodge where we found the owner still living and providing fresh tea for passing travellers. I pulled out my maps and over another energy boost of chai planned the next stage of our route which I confirmed with the lady of the lodge to be about two or three hours walk, if we kept-up a brisk pace we could easily make it by nightfall.
The next phase of our journey was much harder progress as the route closely followed the fast-flowing ever twisting mountain river regularly punctuated by loose shale from earlier slides but the natural beauty of the area kept our spirits high. After about two hours the path widened out into a flattened plateau of loose stones carved out of the mountainside by a recent slide. We were both beginning to tire so we walked over towards the edge onto a large smooth rock about five or six metres across to admire the view of the setting sun filtering through the trees and the river rushing past some fifty meters below us. We took off our packs, took out our flasks and sipped water in silence.
After a few minutes I began to get strange pangs of déjà vu about the place and got to my feet to look over the edge of the rock to the river below but as I looked over the edge those feelings started to overwhelm me as images started to fill my head which I knew I had seen in my dreams the night before. Images of someone tumbling down the cliff into the river below head-over-heals again and again in a grey and purple jacket.
My pulse began to race and the hair on the back of my neck was swiftly on end as I slowly turned on my heals toward my new companion seated not three meters away from me in that very same distinctive grey and purple jacket. Quickly I tried to think of a plausible explanation but in my panic I just couldn’t think of one, all I could think of was that I needed to get her away from here. Quickly I strode over to her, rammed my flask into my back-pack and slung it over my shoulder in a pathetic attempt to look nonchalant.
“Its getting late”, I ventured, “we should be getting on our way or we won’t get to the next village by nightfall” but my eyes must have been like dinner-plates and she could tell I was scared. She wanted an explanation but I knew there was no time so I plucked up her bag with one hand and with the other grasped her upper arm firmly and pulled her sharply to her feet frog-marching her away from the edge of the cliff as fast as I could.
The moment our trailing feet left the rock it swung into the air like the opening jaws of a monster and in a cloud of dust slid swiftly down the cliff into the river below leaving the two travellers standing stunned in its wake.
————————- Epilogue ————————-
At first we stood there in silence and just stared downward as a sense of immense relief filled my body. Then as the initial shock subsided she started to gabble words of gratitude for my decisiveness but this stopped abruptly as the search for a rationalisation of what exactly had transpired gradually crossed her mind. Now she was scared of me.
We walked to the next village in silence, arranged lodging for the night and I never saw her again.
I would sneer but have had a couple of strange things in my own life I cannot explain. In one case this was witnessed by two people. Ineresting voyage anyway. I set off to backpack to Egypt once and then spent 3 months on a Greek beach instead.
Wolfie,
This is a beautiful post. I appreciated very much because I like our rationality to be challenged. However, i think there still is a rational explanation for your dream and our common understanding of rationality is false and I will explain why.
We apprehend the world by building expectations. Even our sensory perceptions are built on previous expectations. Our brain does this job. Expectations have different levels, phylogenetically (history of our species) they have survival value but most of the time in our sedentary life and in the absence of predators and of danger, they are at their lowest level. Also, level of expectation in a certai n situation depend on our personal history (if we experienced traumatic events) and on our personality (if we are more emotional, more open to others, more empathetic, including the spiritual experience because the spiritual experience is, above all, one of empathy with a better other. When we find ourselves in a dangerous situation which requires more alertness, our expectations are set on a high level.
I have the explanation of what might have happened to you:
You must have got a glance of the girl at the lodge but it was a subliminal perception, may be you were tired and did not pay attention to this person. Another hint at the colors you saw in your dreams might have come probably from the fact that trekkers are usually dressed with such colors. During the night, having sensed the danger of your trekking experience (there is always danger we sense when we are in a foreign country and in a challenging situation) and having experienced real danger with the boa, your brain might nhave started to build expectations on other possible dangers. In your dream, it was another person who fell because it is always easier and reassuring to attribute this experince to others.
Now I can tell you my own story. In 1982, I was studying in France and i visited my ailing mother in lebanon who was dying from a brain cancer. My mother had lost consciousness and was bound to bed paralysed, due to the developing of the tumor and my father wanted me to return to not jeopardize my studies so I returned to France knowing that my mother was going to die. One night in december, I dreamed that my mother was stepping outside her bed, her arms stretched to heaven. I was anxious because of this dream and in some way I avoided calling my father fearing bad news. The day after this night I get a call from my father confirming my mother’s death and when i asked at what time the death happened, the hour that was given to me coincided with the time of my dream.
Now I come to my definition of rationality. We usually see rationality as a kind of cold computation but it is not. Human rationality is soaked with emotions that serve first to build our expectations of the world and of our relations with the outside world and when these relations are matter of survival, emotions play even a bigger role in ou rational decisions and in our rationaly built expectations.
Thank you for your explanation Sophia, I’ll put that down as another possibility however I’m sceptical that the encounter with the snake triggered a subliminal fear response as I was not the slightest bit afraid. My response was embarrassment in that I had been foolish in not recognising that the reeds might harbour snakes and it was not particularly close by. Also I’m pretty sure that I did not see this girl or any other westerner the night before as westerners were few and far between and thus it is common to greet anyone you come across. I spent some time analysing my memories for any possibility that I had seen her before that day and I did ask her about her movements that morning, it is this aspect of the story that serves as the “control” in the thesis of a spiritual connection.
Vivid dreams are common when hiking at high altitude as the thin air has strange affects on the brain but I didn’t have a repeat experience of this during my trip, possibly because I acclimatised.
Thank you for sharing your story about your Mother’s death. I understand your grief as I lost my Father in my twenties; loosing a parent is a terrible loss that brings a sudden end to the certainties of childhood with a focus on the reality of corporeal mortality.
The history of humanity is littered with stories of people who have had dreams or visions of a loved one at the time of death, there are too many to idly dismiss. It occurs to me that our minds may be connected in some way that science has yet to establish. Our brains consist of neural networks stimulated by chemically induced electrical charge which can be detected from outside the skull so it seems a possibility that in spite of the weakness of this signal that we may, through some mechanism not as yet recognised, be able to detect the unique signal of loved-ones or close relatives at times of trauma.
There is still so much to learn about nature, the universe and indeed ourselves.
Hey there Wolfie
Thanks for stopping by and commenting on my blog- thought I’d do the same-I always like to check out the blogs of someone who’s been reading along with mine!
That was quite a lucky escape for both you and the woman you saved from the edge; and a much more prophetic dream than I have ever had- though I like to think that my dreams are more than meaningless sleep-time travelling I haven’t experienced one that actually came true.
From the little I’ve read so far I’ve come to the conclusion you’ve led an interesting life!
Excellent post..bit of an ungrateful cow though to have fled the next day , thinking you were some witch docor or something.
Wonderfully written story, Wolfie. there are more things in heaven and earth …