When we weren’t off visiting other parts of Brazil or other South American countries, most of my days that summer were incredibly boring… until school let out in the late afternoon for my teenage friends. The home I was staying in was in a wealthy neighborhood in Sao Paulo. The end of the street turned in front of a 4 foot high brick wall at the top of a hill overlooking the city, and I spent most of my weekdays sitting on that wall enjoying the impressive view, contemplating about nothing, and feeling bored while I waited for my friends to get out of school. In retrospect, I’m convinced that these long, boring hours of contemplation and stillness contributed to the spiritual opening that I was about to experience.
I’m also convinced that the other contributing factor was the transformation going on in the speech centers of my brain. I had considered myself a totally hopeless failure at learning foreign languages prior to this adventure. The way I processed foreign language words in high school classes was 1) A word in the foreign language is presented. 2) I would try to remember what it meant in English. 3) I would then try to put the meaning of the word into the context of the sentence it’s being used in. This is how it was taught to me in school, and I quickly realized how ineffective this technique is when communicating with people speaking full speed in their native tongue. Being alone in a foreign country, however, is quite different than being in a classroom. I never bought a Portuguese dictionary that summer to look up the words I didn’t know. I learned Portuguese the way a baby learns to talk… through immersion and absorption of the surrounding environment and strongly motivated by necessity. The first month, I needed a translator nearby, or I’d struggle to communicate with gestures and hand signals. The second month, I was able to listen to and understand most of the words in conversations going on around me, but I couldn’t speak Portuguese yet. The 3rd month of that summer I became fluent in Portuguese (no accent) and I dreamed in Portuguese. In fact, one game we often played was I would loan my blue jeans to my friend Paulo who was very good at speaking English, and we would go to parties and swap roles. He would act like a swaggering, arrogant American, and I would follow along in his wake apologizing to the girls in fluent Portuguese for my friend’s rude behavior.
The point about this brain transformation in language processing is there was no longer any process of “this word means this”. Portuguese words I heard went directly into their symbolic meaning automatically… going from the ears directly into a deeper level in the brain without any conscious translation step along the way. I learned that our consciousness and thoughts are not bounded by language. Language is merely a mechanical means for how information and meaning is normally transmitted and received between humans (along with more subtle forms of communication including body movements and facial expressions). The distinction I’m trying to highlight is the difference between how information is communicated externally using our senses vs. the language-neutral meaning within our consciousness once the information has been pre-processed by the language and speech centers of the brain.
When my friends returned home from school, our daily afternoon routine was one of the following reckless, risky, and machismo things that as teenage boys we enjoyed doing so much.
Near the end of that summer, I was sitting on my favorite spot overlooking the city when my friends pulled up to pick me up as they normally did each weekday afternoon. I didn’t want to go. There was no reason why. I simply didn’t want to go. Group peer pressure and “sissy” accusations made me cave in and I reluctantly got in the car, taking my place in the right-rear passenger seat. We went off on our normal routine of screeching around turns at high speed, taking turns at the wheel. Normally, I was able to control my fear but that day I could not. I felt my heart increasingly pounding in my chest and my fear level continuously rising, with no logical reason or explanation why. This was our normal daily routine and I had gotten pretty used to it, so I was completely puzzled why I was reacting that way on this particular day. It made no sense. Yet deep down I knew that I had made a terrible mistake getting into that car, and I couldn’t grasp why.
My rising fear level became so intolerable that I finally decided to take some precautions to see if it would help control my fear. I reached for my seatbelt and two things happened when the buckle went “click”. 1) My friends started laughing at me and ridiculing me. 2) That click resonated in a powerful way deep within my consciousness. I think of this resonance like how looking at an old photo allows us to re-experience a moment from our past, or how a smell or an old song we haven’t heard in years might remind us of someone we once knew, another place, or another time… an internal, unconscious association. That click of my seat belt echoed like thunder within me saying “Yes, this is good!”… a very positive inner message that bypassed all words and language, and went directly to internal meaning within. It was within that tiny instant in time of the sound of that click that I knew with total certainty that we were about to crash.
I then became deaf and blind to the teasing and ridicule I was receiving from my friends. They no longer mattered. The undeniable experience of my rising, uncontrollable fear level became like filling a bottle with water in the sink with your eyes closed. The sound made by water splashing inside a bottle increases in frequency and tone as the air inside is displaced. It’s not too hard to tell by extrapolation when the water’s going to spill over the top of the bottle by carefully listening to that sound. I not only knew with total certainty that we were heading to disaster, but I also had a clear sense of when it was coming. I then started acting on autopilot without any conscious thinking about what I was doing or the reasons why. I unbuckled my seatbelt, took off my jacket, wrapped it around my right arm with the coat-tail hanging down, re-attached the seatbelt, braced my right palm against the front frame of the rear window next to me with the coat-tail of my jacket covering the window, and grabbed the bottom front edge of the rear seat with my left hand. I then took a deep breath, held it, and said to myself… “Now” as the pavement outside tilted up to my window, and shut out all light. At that moment of blackness, the instant the street hit my window, I closed my eyes and time stopped.
The distortion in time I experienced totally freaked me out, and I thought to myself “What’s happening to me? Am I about to die?”… and surprisingly, there was a crystal clear reply. While it requires using words to describe, these replies were not in any language or words. The messages I received were warm, loving, and compassionate, and definitely had the vocal qualities of a man, yet were not transmitted using sound. It was communication at a deep level, below the language processing centers in the brain. I have no idea if these replies originated from within my own subconscious or were from an external entity of some sort (such as God or a guardian angel perhaps).
My first thoughts were concern for my own personal safety and the reply was “You are safe and being watched over. Pay close attention. Observe, learn, and most important… Remember!” My next thought was “What’s going to happen to me?” Instantly, that internal part of me that I think of as “The Watcher” was transported outside the VW bug we were in. (The Watcher was a cosmic super-hero in a comic book I once read as a child that was omnipresent but had no physical abilities)… that awareness within all of us that does not think, but simply observes. At my slightest whim, under my complete control, I was able to move my point of view anywhere I wanted in time as well as space. It was like doing video editing on the computer, what’s called non-linear editing. I could scroll the video backwards and forwards in time at any speed. Unlike video editing, however, I could also move my point of view anywhere in 3-D space around the accident scene. I watched in crystal clear detail how the car would roll 3 times, and eventually stop right side up on all 4 tires. Feeling a bit relieved that I would survive, my next thought was one of compassion and concern for my friends. I then watched the driver as he was thrown from the rolling vehicle. I zoomed in to inches away and watched up close as his shoulder landed on the pavement, and he rolled away to safety. “Mostly road rash but he’ll be fine” I thought. (I was wrong. He actually broke his collar bone.) Next I watched my friend in the front passenger seat crash his head through the windshield and then fall back into his seat. “Cut up pretty bad. He’ll need stitches, but he’ll be fine” I thought. Then I watched my friend next to me in the back seat slam his head into the ceiling. “Nasty bump. Possible concussion, but he’ll be fine” I thought. With my concerns regarding the near-term future and safety of the occupants answered, I was instantly back in the present, and the accident was still just beginning to unfold. All I could do at that point was wait for things to play out, observe, and hope for the best.
With my eyes closed, what I remember the most was listening to the imploding glass tinkling in all direction around me in slow motion traveling back and forth like a crystal clear Dolby surround sound demo. I remember thinking how odd it was that these glass particles were moving so slowly, yet unlike slowing down a video or audio tape, there was no distortion in the frequency of that sound. They were still making high pitched tinkles in their natural tones as the little squares of imploding tempered glass collided in the air all around me… yet I kept thinking it would be more logical that they should have a deeper, lower sound frequency because of the slow motion time distortion I was experiencing.
As the car rolled over each time, I counted them… “One”… “Two”… and the last one seemed to take quite a while as we barely had enough momentum to roll over the wheels once last time. The VW Beetle finally bounced and settled onto all 4 wheels as I expected. “Three.” I was about to get out of the car when this “voice” or presence within instructed me to wipe the glass dust off my eyes before I open them. I did so carefully and then opened my eyes.
The first thing I saw was the driver’s seat leaning forward and the driver’s side door swung wide open. It felt like a valet attendant had opened the door for me and was inviting me to step outside. I unbuckled my seat belt and stepped out of the car expecting this strange experience to be over.
I saw that we were in a large town square with a central fountain, perhaps 5 or 6 arterial roads feeding into the square, and lots of small stores and shops all around the perimeter of the square. The driver of our car had gone down one of the arterial streets into the square and tried to make too sharp a left turn, attempting to go up the next road to the left. Our rollover accident was quite visible to the shops around the square and people were running from all directions toward us. I then noticed that they were running in slow motion, some frozen mid-stride in the air with both feet suspended off the ground. I looked at an old woman standing in front of a shop with a shocked expression of horror on her face and tears in her eyes, and I could tell that she was re-living a tragic experience in the past of an auto accident involving her son. I looked at a smiling teenager and felt his joy and excitement over how cool and spectacular our wreck was. I looked around more generally and realized I could feel and experience everyone’s thoughts and emotions all around me. This was more than I could bear and I blacked out at this point. By “blacked out” I don’t mean that I passed out and collapsed in the street. I mean I have absolutely no memory whatsoever of what happened after that or how I got back to the house I was staying at. I suspect I walked home, shocked and in a daze, which would have been a pretty good navigation trick since I didn’t know the roads very well on my own.
The next day I went to the hospital to visit my friends. They were in three parallel beds in a large hospital ward. It was then that we noticed something inexplicable. There wasn’t a single square inch of exposed skin on the hands and faces of my friends that weren’t peppered with many small cuts and scratches from the flying glass from the imploding windows… yet as hard as we looked, we couldn’t find a single scratch anywhere on me. We all agreed at that moment to a lie… Since I wasn’t at the scene when the ambulances and police arrived (no witnesses that I was there other than my friends in the car with me), I wasn’t injured, and in order to keep me out of the police reports and to avoid parental anger, we all agreed to tell everyone that I wasn’t in the car with them that day. How I didn’t get a single scratch from the flying glass is something that I believe completely defies rational explanation. Some might even consider it a miracle.
Why am I sharing this particular story? One reason is the concept of body knowledge. I remember when I first learned how to drive a car how awkward it was to navigate a turn without over or under steering. With practice the motions became automatic and I was able to concentrate on higher-level thoughts beyond the basic mechanics of how to move my hands on the wheel. Learning to become fluent in a foreign language is like this. Playing a musical instrument is like this. Aikido is like this. The key is practice.
The other reason I'm sharing this story is the result of the experience of once watching an Aikido master demonstrate defending himself against a half-dozen or so black belt attackers. It was like watching an expert kayaker navigating intense, boiling rapids with efficiency, confidence, and ease. All around him was turbulence and violence, and at the center was this calm little man enjoying himself and in complete control to choose where he wanted to go in this river of violence. It was like everyone around him was moving in slow motion from his perspective. One attacker came from behind with a knife hand attack to the back of his head (ushiro yokomen uchi) and this Aikido master reached over his shoulder without looking, snatched the attacker's hand out of the air, bent his knees slightly, and effortlessly threw the attacker over his head and across the room. My logical mind tried to rationalize how he could have done this. He must have seen the attacker and his hand… no he didn't turn his head and he didn't look. He must have heard the sound it made in the air… unlikely with all the chaos and noise going on. I truly believe that this Aikido master was able to control his perception of time, and was able to expand his awareness to see or sense this attack in ways beyond our conventional senses. In my story told here, this sort of awareness came to me temporarily under extreme stress in a life threatening situation. I believe that there are advanced souls among us who can teach us a great deal, that can control this unconventional consciousness to distort time and expand their awareness at will.