The Mystical Bars

I once had this weird experience.

I had broken my arm and it was being repaired. They gave me an injection of some sort. I must say that I disliked it intensely. I have been a control freak. I wanted to be always in control of myself.

Scenarios where I would loss consciousness and would be at the mercy of others never really have appealed to me. I would have preferred to be conscious while they were setting my arm. But they wouldn’t listen to it. And honestly the pain was something I could have done without too.

They wanted me to count to ten after the injection. I counted up to four or five I think and lost consciousness.

The next thing I remember was my totally altered state of consciousness. There was this tunnel which was not actually a tunnel. It was made out of some sort of luminous material with variegated of colors. I was not conscious of my body at all. There was not any such thing. I seemed to be like a point of consciousness with only the properties of vision and mind. I felt trapped inside this strange thing and wanted to get out of it.

I could turn and move and move at unimaginable speeds. I was searching for an opening in the tunnel. I was not at peace with myself. In fact I have never felt so frightened in my life. I thought that I would never come out of it and started frantically to move in any direction I could. The freaking thing would open up an unending tunnel where ever I turned and I would hurtle through it and it would continue without end winding and twisting and elongating. The moment I stopped moving the thing would settle around me or sort of wall me in. I changed courses every now and then. I was conscious of time and its passing.

I distinctly remember of an intense awareness of my existence and individuality. But I did not know who I was and what I was doing in that place. I had no recollection of my earthly existence. I desperately wanted to find a way out and I could not. I do not know how long it continued I can’t say. Then my consciousness came back to me and I was back in the world.

I think that I have written about this somewhere before too. Some thing recalled this experience to me.

Mystical experiences have always intrigued me. I may have had some such in my life too. But I have never taken them in the totally superstitious way that most people take them. I have always felt that if there are experiences that are not normally available to us through our limited perceptive capabilities they at least should be contained in a germinal form within us and everything that we see around us. Unless there is a blue print of the whole world within every atom in the universe they won’t remain connected.

In the last decade there were some reports that mystical experiences could be located to a certain area of temporal lobe in the brain. Scientists have claimed to have produced religious experiences in the brains of those who are not religious by eclectically stimulating this area.

Those on whom the experiments were conducted reported of some ‘presence’ within them during stimulation and the EEG is said to have recorded a “classical spike and slow wave seizure at the temporal lobe” at the very moment the mystical experience occurred.

This is interesting. Certain drugs seem to have the property of altering consciousness too. The experience that I had with one of them, was not very rewarding I must say. Yet it seemed to show some promise in that direction.

There have been religious schools in India that used to relay on a preparation made from opium for achieving such states. The philosophy behind it seems to be that if such experiences could be had without years of training and hard work in meditation and other practices why not go for them. The only problem could be that it would lead to slavery to the drug rather than the liberation of the “seeker” in the end.

But I am interested in the neurological researches into such states. If there is a seat of mystical experience in our temporal lobe and mystical states can be achieved by stimulating the area, nothing could be more wonderful to us than that.
It would considerably lessen the troubles people take to have such experiences and minimize the time to be spent on them.

Who knows, in the future there could be “mystical bars” where people go to have a ‘quick one’!

Any way I am all for the idea. We already have oxygen bars!