This story is my first memory of having a really weird experience.  It is not only my first memory of such an experience, but remains by far the most powerful and awe inspiring of my life.  I am not sure of the year, but I believe that I was around five, or possibly six years old, which would make is somewhere around 1952 or 1953.  The anesthetic (probably ether) was administered by dropping a liquid onto a cloth face mask.

When I think back on this experience, I don’t just recall it – I experience it once more.  I sometimes think that I must have almost died during that operation.  My impression of the event was that I experienced the dissolution of my body and rejoining of my mind with the cosmos.  Recalling this event reminds me that we are only here for a moment of time, only a temporary combination of star dust that experiences life for a brief time, and then goes back to where it comes from.  As the bible says; “ashes to ashes and dust to dust.”  I learned that life is all a dream, but a dream of reality that is real. The reality is energy and light.

When I was a little boy of about five years old I had been having chronic throat problems diagnosed as tonsillitis.  My parents and doctor decided that I needed to have my tonsils removed.  The doctor and my mother assured me that it would be quick and simple and that I won’t feel a thing.  Being a young child, I believed them.  Not only was it supposed to be quick and easy, but I was told that I would be allowed to eat as much ice cream as I wanted after the surgery.

The big day finally came when I went to the hospital.  I was told to put on a silly gown with no back, and get into the hospital bed.  It was slightly scary, but since my mom was with me and she seemed completely at ease, I was more curious than frightened.  After a short wait a nurse wheeled me down the hall to the operating room.  I recall watching the lights and ceiling tiles go by overhead as the nurse pushed me along.  When we were finally in the operating room, I looked into a big bright light above the bed. The doctor put a cloth mask over my nose and mouth.  He said that he was going to help me go to sleep and that when I woke up the operation would be all finished. He then took a little liquid (ether) from a bottle with an eye dropper device.  He asked me to breathe deeply and count from one to ten as he put drops of the liquid on the mask.  I took a breath, counted “one” and thought that he wasn’t going to be successful because nothing seemed to change.  After “two” I noticed that I was getting a little dizzy.  By the middle of “three,” I was launched into the most amazing experience of my life. 

I found myself looking into a dark night sky, full of bright stars.  I was not on the earth, but was floating in space completely comfortable, warm and at ease.  Then the sky slowly started to slowly spin around a point directly above me like a giant pinwheel.  As it spun, the sky started to change shape, forming a tunnel leading away from me into the distance. It was a little like I would imagine if I were to look directly up into the bottom of a big, slow moving tornado. 

What was even more amazing was what was happening to my body.  It started by becoming fluid feeling, as if it were made out of something like a big bunch of silly putty.  I could feel my arms and legs growing, and twisting in ways that were clearly impossible.  As I twisted and lost shape, I started to move into the bottom of the spinning tunnel, being pulled further and further into it.  Faster and faster the tunnel walls turned, and faster and faster I shot up the center of the tunnel.  After a bit my body started feeling like it was not only twisting and distorting, but was starting to come apart – all of the connections were still in place, but no longer felt connected.  My face and body distorted until I was just a blob of energy and matter, no longer in the shape of my body.  The tunnel got narrower as I moved up, and turned faster until it was a rapidly spinning tornado of energy and lights, carrying my distorting body up through the center of the vortex.

I noticed that there was an end to the tunnel.  At the very far end of the twisting tunnel there was a tiny dark spot which was rapidly growing bigger and bigger as I got closer to it.  As I neared the end of the tunnel, I could see through the hole to …. nothing.  I was still thinking and perceiving clearly, and understood that once I shot though the end of the tunnel I would enter a place of nothingness; a complete and black void.  At first that frightened me because it was so unknown.  It was bad enough to be twisting, turning and distorting inside of a giant spinning tunnel, but to be in nothing was frightening.  It wasn’t terrifying, but certainly not something I was looking forward to.  I found myself picking up a huge amount of speed, approaching what felt like the speed of light and everything was flashing by as a blur. The tunnel was getting narrower, getting very close to my body as it whirled around me.  It was obvious that I was not going to avoid the transition at the end of the tunnel, and found myself being really curious about what was going to happen next.  I started to almost look forward to the event of entering into nothingness.

Then I shot through the hole, into the void.  As I crossed the boundary, my body exploded into trillions and trillions of tiny particles that flew off in all directions into the great void.  All went silent, time stopped; motion became fast and slow all at the same time because there was no “thing” such as time and distance to measure them by.  I was just floating as trillions of tiny pieces, but I was still thinking, somehow I still had my mind.  I could still perceive, and could still think, but I was just part of an infinite, timeless void.  I floated like this for what seemed like an eternity in complete peace and joy.

Then I heard a voice.  It was very far away and very quiet. The voice was calling my name over and over again, soft and lovely and attractive – pulling me toward it.  I finally realized that I was supposed to go to the voice, and slowly started forming my body again.  When I finally opened my eyes I was looking into my mother’s face.  She was gently calling my name.  She looked pleased to see me open my eyes, and said that it was all over and that I was okay.

As I lay there trying to complete the reformation of my body, I was thinking that they should have prepared me for this wild journey; they should have let me know what I was going to experience.  Of course, now that I look back on it, they had no idea what was going to happen to me.  Since then I have talked to many people who have been operated on using ether, and none of them experienced anything at all like my wild ride to infinity.  A while ago I was listening to a friend tell about a “near death” experience that he had and it seemed very similar.  This makes me wonder if maybe something went wrong during the operation and I died.  Maybe the experience was my death, and they managed to bring me back to life.  I don’t know. All that I know is that it is my oldest recollection of an altered state of consciousness.

Whatever it was, it was by far the most dramatic and most enduring experience of my spiritual life.  I felt like I joined with the infinity, sometimes I still feel I never really came all the way back. The experience changed me forever in many good ways.  I feel like I am sort of half way between worlds, one foot in the infinite, and one on this earth.  And by the way, I really didn’t want the ice cream after all, I wanted steak instead.