Going back to my roots...

Where did my belief come from? I was born and raised an atheist in a completely secular household, i can count the number of times I ever visited church on the fingers of one hand and all of those were at christmas time to sing songs and hold funny contraptions which in previous lives were once oranges. I had no religious organisation to my life whatsoever, at any time, and no religious influences. I was not interested in spirituality, the notion of God, or anything of the kind. At best I was an agnostic, although a better word would have been an apathetic: I simply didn't care one way or the other and the concept of God or anything spiritual simply never entertained a second of my thoughts.

When I was 19 I experienced what some people would refer to as a Near Death Experience. I was very ill and spent somewhere between a week and two weeks at the bottom of my health levels. One night I experienced a dream which was so vivid and real that it left an impression on me that would in some respects shape my life thereafter. I am reluctant to refer to it as a dream because even now it was so much stronger and more immediate than a regular dream that I would personally classify it as something else entirely. It was heavily laden with universal or archetypal symbolism and themes, and felt more real and significant often than waking reality does. I was "there".

I floated up through what looked like I was coming out of it like a large rabbit or badger hole, and started to look around me to see a landscape resembling the English countryside at night, with slightly rolling hills, grass, hedgerows and bare trees. The scene was very gothic and the sky was very black, although everything was entirely realistic in proportion, colour, appearance etc.

As I floated just a few feet above the grass a creature that can only be described as a bulldog on steroids, possessing a serious attitude problem and a formidable set of drawl-covered teeth, barked and snapped at me, jumping up and locking its jaws around one of my ears (I can't remember which one). It held on and shook its head briefly but I managed to escape and continue floating upwards out of its reach, feeling relieved as I looked down on it jumping and snarling but unable to now reach me. I remember feeling startled at the prospect that this creature wanted to cause me so much pain and had so much refined aggression for me, with me having never before seen it in my life.

I landed some way away, with the threat of the dog now gone the dog itself seemed to have disappeared, and I found myself stood in the middle of a meadow, looking towards a patch of high ground perhaps a few hundred metres away, with the landscape rolling away from me. Two figures stood completely still in a field on the near side of this undulation, with their garments blowing in the wind, otherwise they were completely still and completely silent. How best to describe these figures? Imagine the ring-wraiths from the first movie of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, black garbed riders on horseback with frayed robes and large hoods sitting atop jet black steeds, and you have precisely the image of these figures. I felt intuitively that where their hoods drew over their heads, where their faces should be, there was a vacuum: a black hole of empty nothingness. No skull or disfigured face like in the horror movies, but an impossible void of non-existence. That was a prospect that shook me to the core and filled me with a profound and overwhelming sense of pure and very heavy despair, the likes of which I have never experienced in waking life.

I turned to my left and walked towards the outside of a tree-lined path, the trees lining it had grown in such a way so as to arch over the path and meet atop in the middle so as to create a tunnel lined all around by thick tree branches, and there was a small break in the trees just in front of me. The path itself led in both directions, and as I stood on the side I leaned precariously over the path and into the tunnel, looking both left and right, and seeing that it was dead straight and it faded into complete darkness in both directions. This was the archetypal "long dark tunnel", and I could sense that the darkness in both directions was the same void that filled the hoods of the grim black figures on the hill. I teetered on the edge of the void for a few moments, and then withdrew with a step back. I drew immediate inspiration from the fact that I had not actually set foot on this path, I had only stepped right up to the edge of it and taken a good look; however, the overarching feeling that accompanied this experience was one of a despair and deep deep darkness too pure and extreme to put into words.

I awoke shortly after in my bed and was in a state of uncontrollable fear and disturbance. I prayed heavily for the first time in my life and asked that God let me live long enough to see the next sunrise, as I had a feeling that I was at a crossroads, and if I could just make it through the immediate hours I would begin to move away from danger and start on the road to recovery. In my desperation I offered a deal of sorts, as I imagine many have done in similar circumstances, I pretty much said "Let me live through this and come out the other side and I will promise to seek you out". I'm not sure such deals are the best way to go about communicating with the all powerful creator of life but I have decided this much as a result of my experiences since: if you make a promise to God in one of your prayers, you will be called to account for it whether you have any intention of delivering or not, and it will be on God's terms, not yours.

Well, as evidenced by me typing this blog, I did recover, and I thank God for that. But when I woke up the next morning, feeling truly blessed to be alive and filled with a positive feeling that the worst was now behind me, I still did not necessarily "believe" in God, "believe" that there was a God, or "believe" that he had tipped the balance in my favour as my future hung by a thread in the deep of the previous night, I only knew that I was awake, alive, and starting to think positively for the first time in a number of weeks, and I felt in my heart of hearts, that I had "been somewhere" the night before, to a place where my physical body could not follow, and to a place that had touched me at a previously untouched depth of my being. It was my first mystical experience; a taste of the shadowlands that lay between this life and whatever comes next, complete with archetypal "rabbit-hole", trans-realm guard dog, grim-reapers and the classic of classics: the long dark tunnel. This was to be my first taste of the mystical experience, but not my last.

Date experienced: Approx. February 2003