The Multiverse Menu          I was what you might accurately call a honeymoon baby.  Conceived just inside wedlock from the union of a working-class,  protestant father and a 16 year old,  virgin-bride,  catholic mother.  Neither parent was particularly religious but my mother was more so and insisted that I be brought up catholic.  Thus,  with my subsequent Christening in a small catholic chapel in the hard and grey city of working-class Glasgow,  I began my restless spiritual journey through this life in the autumn cold of 1953.          Due to my parents disconcerting habit of moving house a lot I found myself regularly attending different catholic and protestant schools depending on what was convenient and available at each new locale.  Being a child at the time God was simply God to me - and I was just as happy singing from a protestant hymn-book as a catholic one.  I had my first spontaneous lucid dream at 13 and by the time I eagerly left senior secondary school at 15  [same one as Billy Connelly]  - with absolutely no academic qualifications whatsoever - my sense of spirituality already seemed to be a much more fluid affair than that of my peers.          A few years later the death of a young and beloved pet - due to illness - delivered a mortal wound to my previously idyllic relationship with God.  I had prayed the most fervent and sincere of petitionary prayers from a huge font of powerful childlike faith and yet,  in the end,  despite all my intensive nursing and praying and believing,  "He" didn't help me or my pet at all and,  instead,  finally took my dearly loved-one away from me.  I had never experienced such desolation.  I had never felt such betrayal.  I had never known such rage;  and God got all of it - and then some.          This marked the beginning of the end for my hitherto fore unquestioned spirituality.  I started,  for the first time,  to really think about - and question - all the religious teaching I had ever been given and,  in the end,  I told God - with a degree of sincerity and strength of purpose I never even knew I had in me - to go fuck himself big-time.  I threw open the exit door on what I then thought was my spirituality,  slammed it shut - hard - in God's face on the way out. And unlike Lot's wife I never once looked back.          Of course I didn't know it at the time but I hadn't in fact killed off spiritual reality in my life at all then.  In fact I had did just the opposite.  I had actually moved deeper into - and considerably further along - the universal spiritual journey and,  consequently  - and paradoxically -  I had moved even closer to God as a result.  I had,  as I was to understand many years later,  made quite a quantum leap in my spiritual unfolding.  I had transcended the world-view that they call in Spiral Dynamics the "Blue Meme".  And "Science" - that I had loved increasingly since my first internal OOTB experience at the hormone-rampant age of 13 - finally became my new God.          Lucid dreams,  or internal out-of-body experiences,  not only continued but increased in frequency and finally developed into full, classic OBE's.  Then there were a whole bunch of other paranormal experiences too - and it pained me no end that science had nothing useful at all to say about any of these things.  Worse still it absolutely demanded of me that I dismiss all the extraordinary experiences I had ever had - and was still having - as some kind of hallucination or delusion or,  worse still,  some form of actual or impending mental illness!  And it did this en-masse - without any form of discrimination whatsoever.  To me this was clearly bull shit and under the banner of "Uses and Abuses of Argument" would certainly be justly stamped in red with the rejection "Rash Generalization".  I could,  of course,  quite easily accept that in some cases,  perhaps even in most cases,  the claimed paranormal experiences were indeed hallucinatory,  or self delusion,  or even the product of some form mental or physiological illness;  but I could not and would not accept that it would be so in ALL cases!  And certainly not in mine.  I didn't know what these phenomena meant - but I had a strong,  instinctive feeling that they sure as hell meant something substantial!  Perhaps even something extraordinarily important.          So,  the honeymoon with science was most definitely over.  Since going back to God-worship was not even a remote possibility there seemed to be absolutely nowhere else to go.  Consequently,  I found myself,  once again,  in the uniquely uncomfortable world of a paradigm crisis.  In the outer world I had fled the nest,  passed my driving test,  trained as a mechanic,  got married and,  with family help,  cobbled together an independent home with the intention of starting a planned family in the near future.  Yet,  despite all of these things,  a terrible sense of meaninglessness kept seeping into my life from all the holes that were constantly appearing all over my world view.  For years I had completely - and quite happily I may add - accepted that death was the total end of everything on the personal level.  Life of course went on but we,  as individuals,  were destined to be worm food - pure and simple.  And I had no problem with that at all.  Non-existence held no fear for me whatsoever - and held no fear for me still - but,  increasingly,  the question I just could not shake out of my mind was:  "What is the point then - of anything really?"          Depression?  No.  This was authentic,  bona fide,  existential angst.  There was simply a growing hunger for "worthwhile purpose" that nothing in my life seemed able to satisfy.  And,  alarmingly,  the more I searched my world view for some sustaining sense of meaning "in" and "to" my life - the less of it I found.  As a result the angst just kept growing and growing in power until,  finally,  it was beginning to win out repeatedly against any reason I could still manage to bring to bear against it from my ever dwindling reservoir of inner resources.  Then,  one lonely night,  lying in bed beside my sleeping wife,  the inevitable happened and that which I feared most came upon me.  In the dark early-morning hours of another long,  sleepless night - the angst finally and completely overwhelmed me.          It felt a bit like drowning alone in a night-time sea;  going under in the dark,  struggling up again,  going under - deeper and darker;  slowly loosing the fight for light and breath.  As I "drowned" all the major memories of my existence came back to me and flashed vividly before my inner eyes in a concentrated parade; just like they do in the movies.  Desperately searching for something - anything - to cling on to, I was then suddenly fast-forwarding through all my remaining dreams for the future. I visited them all.  I had to - for I feared my very life depended on it - and saw each one of them realized and fully lived down to the last detail.  All dreams made true.  "Yes,  but what then?" whispered my angst:  "What then?"  Suddenly, in the time-machine of my mind's eye I saw the last 60 seconds of my life's inevitable end.  With uncompromising crystal clarity I saw myself rasping and gasping my last few struggling breaths of life away;  with that same fucking question still red-hot and aflame in the very core of my mind - burning the remaining unfulfilled life right out me: WHAT WAS THE POINT OF ANY OF IT? ... no answer ...          The dark vision of my inevitable end ran on;  gasp by dreadful gasp.  What - had - been - the - point?  ... gasp..gasp...  Ok,  ok,  I got to drink all that good beer  ...gasp..gasp...  Ok,  I got to make love to all those beautiful women  ...gasp..gasp...  and yes,   I did indeed eat all that excellent food  ...gasp..gasp...  Made huge amounts of money  ...gasp...  Had and raised all those fine kids  ...gasp...  Even helped some needy people and some real good causes along the way  ...gasp...  Hell,  I even got to be famous a bit  ...gasp...  But if it all  - IT ALL -  just ends like THIS  ...gasp...  here;  like this  ...gasp...  for ALL of us  ...gasp...  just like THIS  ...gasp...  even for all the kids  ...gasp...  everyone's kids  ...gasp...  then did any of it REALLY mean anything?  ...gasp...  what did ANY of it REALLY,  REALLY matter?  ...gasp..gasp..gasp...  Then the dark vision ran on far beyond my own immanent and utterly insignificant death.  I remembered,  as science had taught me,  that at some point even the Universe itself will wind down  ...gasp...  AND DIE  ...gasp...  THE UNIVERSE  ...gasp...  As all the suns EVERYWHERE finally go out  ...gasp...  one by one  ...gasp...  so that in the end there is no more light  ...gasp...  NO MORE LIGHT  ...gasp...  ANYWHERE  ...gasp...  EVER AGAIN  ...gasp...  Nothing but infinite and eternal freezing blackness  ...gasp...  Everywhere  ...gasp...  for ALL time  ...gasp...  devoid of any life or even any further prospect of it  ... gasp...  Ever  ...gasp...  What THEN will have been the POINT of ANY of it  ...gasp...  Of anything  ...gasp...  ANYTHING  ...gasp...  EVER  ...gasp...  ....gasp.....  ........gasp........  ............      ............ With that last imaginary breath in my death-vision everything inside of me just kind of stopped too.  The startlingly vivid vision itself.  All my thoughts.  My feelings.  Breathing.  Strangely,  I seemed to feel no need at all to think or breathe.  Even the terrible angst was completely gone.  It was as if I had been hollowed out and emptied of absolutely everything.  It was as if I had somehow become nothing at all,  yet I was still there;  fully aware of everything around me but from within a rare state of still alertness.  Then,  eventually,  from the great calm that had come upon me,  emerged the only reasonable - the only possible - response to this new dead-end vision of reality.  I decided I would kill myself as soon as possible. It seemed the only authentic action left open to me and the very decision itself spread through me like a liberation.  Like a kind of victory even.  Suddenly,  and paradoxically,  I realized that in letting go of absolutely everything,  even desire for life itself - I now felt totally free!          Apart from the total meaninglessness of existence itself there were no more problems then;  of any kind. How could there be?  Faced with the inevitability of a freezing black lifeless universe that would run blindly on at the atomic level until everything left in existence began turning slowly to iron;  whereupon the last erg of energy in the universe would finally expire into an infinite black and lifeless void.  A void that would have a uniform temperature of absolute zero - everywhere- for all eternity!  In the face of such ultimate finality there could be no "personal problems" anymore.  There could be no real problems of any kind anymore - ever again - because problems are only problems when things matter.  And now,  ultimately,  nothing did.          After what seemed a very long time I felt myself begin to breathe again.  Not in gasps like in my dark vision,  but quietly,  gently,  and with ease.  This felt a little odd as it seemed to me that I hadn't actually breathed in a quite a while.  The feeling was still one of great peace and freedom but this peace and freedom was ice cold.  I thought that perhaps,  like the Tin Man in Wizard of OZ,  I no longer had a heart.  Or perhaps,  like my mind,  it had merely been stunned numb by the sheer enormity and utter finality of the death-vision.  In either event,  like everything else,  it didn't matter much one way or the other now.  My wife slept on beside me innocently oblivious to everything.  I looked at her and wondered how she would get on without me, then realized that even my very "wondering" was just like absolutely everything else;  merely a pointless flash in the cosmic pan of a doomed mechanical universe.  I looked away,  stared blankly ahead into the semi-darkness of the silent room for a while,  then turned the unusual clarity of my mind to the practicalities of my immanent demise.          At some point amid my deadly deliberations I was suddenly interupted by a short and totally spontaneous thought:  "But what if your are wrong?".  The effect was quite a dramatic one.  It was as if I had been listening to loud music play and someone had just switched it off mid-song.  Again my mind was still and quiet except for the echo of the uninvited question.  Wrong?  Of course I wasn't wrong.  I wished to hell I was - but how could I be.  All the evidence for it was plainly there;  you just had to follow the whole thing through to the very end to see it.  God was a joke.  Religion and God-worship was nothing more than a primative and embarrassing leftover from a previous more gullible and superstitious time, but it was different now.          Science had finally debunked the world of hokum.  It could predict with an impressive degree of likelyhood that the big-bang would end in one of two ways:  1) everything would finally stop flying apart and the resulting static universe and everything in it would slowly turn into iron or,  2) after finally stopping its incredible outward rush it would then begin to contract and compress again;  finally ending in the big-crush.  Either way there was just no future in it because everything would certainly end regardless - and,  worse,  vanish without the slightest trace.  I dissmissed the question and resumed evaluting the practicalities of my immanent demise.          Again the question butted in:  "But what if your are STILL wrong?".  "What if you are missing something important?"  This got me thinking.  What for example if there was more to all those lucid dreams and oobe'e than I gave them credit for.  And all that paranormal stuff!  I had always reckoned that there must be something to all of that - perhaps there STILL was.  I considered all these things for quite a while.          There was certainly something going on there that science just had no answer for - this much I knew for a fact.  Perhaps then there might even be much more of that ilk out there that neither science nor I knew anything about at all?  Yes.  I had to admit that this was at least a possiblity.  Well then,  the voice in my head that seemed to be me continued,  why not at least have a real good look - just to make absolutely sure - before killing yourself.  If there is really nothing to it then no harm done - because everything would then DEFINITELY be meaningless,  even the wast of time,  right?  Again I had to admit that this was perfectly reasonable.  But if you did find new territory - and a way through it - what then might you discover?  And what then might lie beyond even that?          I was sold.  There was nothing to lose and,  perhaps,  out there somewhere,  there really was something that could indeed make life worth living again.  So,  I put death on ice - for later.  For now though I would search.  I would give it my very best shot too.  And if there was an "answer" out there hiding somewhere then I would find it.  I closed my eyes.  I now knew I would live - at lest for a while.  I also knew,  however,  that "something major" in me had just died for sure,  but it would take another 25 years before I would be able to write the words "Orange Meme" on the long empty gravestone.  I emptied my mind.  And for the first time in ages welcomed that strange little mini-death we call sleep.          In the months that followed I remained completely angst-free and despite many difficulties in my outer life there seemed to be an almost permanent sense of deep peace and calm at my innermost core.  Having no axe to grind one way or another now I had been objectively busy with my search throughout this period.  I had begun this search for possible "Meaning" within the only point of experiential contact with the mysterious side of life that I could honestly lay claim to;  my dreams.  Especially those relatively rare ones in which I paradoxically became conscious without the usual formality of first physically waking up.          Since dreams have always seemed to me to be in some strange way meaningful despite all commonsense evidence to the contrary,  Sigmund Freud's "The Interpretation of Dreams" cried out from the local library shelf "Here is a good place to start" - and I saw no reason to disagree.  It was a heafty tombe but I worked my way studiously through about 75% of it accumilating copious notes in the process.  I marvelled at the possibility that behind the "manifest content" of our dreams lurked a hidden "latent content" in which the real meaning of our dreams resided,  and marvelled too at the postulated psychodynamics [secondary elaboration, etc] that generated the former from the latter,  and then marvelled even more that there was actually a technique [free association] for reverse engineering the manifest content of the dream back into its original latent content!  I had set off in search of "Meaning" and here was Freud telling me - in no uncertain terms - that even our seemingly nonsensical dreams are demonstrably full to the very brim with it.  So,  I reckoned that I may indeed have possibly picked up the scent of that possible "Mysterious Meaning" - and I endeavoured to follow the trail as best I could,  for good or ill,  whereever it may lead me in the end.          The trail led me on to Carl Jung's "Man and His Symbols".  This book seduced me away from Freud's heafy tombe even before I had finished it.  Jung's Archetypes, his Animus/Anima, the Shadow - all blew my mind wide open.  Celia Green and her "Lucid Dreams" followed and I drank deeply of the knowledge that there were actually many others out there that also became "conscious" while they were still seemingly "unconscious" and to all external extents and purposes fast asleep!  Immediately I felt a powerful and spontaneous sense of connection and kinship with these people which was unprecedented for me.  My search quickened.          Oliver Fox's "Astral Projection" held me riveted from start to finish.  I was totally amazed by it.  Reading his book was uncanilly like reading a diary of my own experiences.  There he was using terms like "False Awakening" and "Dual Consciousness" that I truly thought I had invented as descriptive terms for strange events that I had believed were unique to me.  I was utterly gobsmaked by his work time and time again.  In the end I resolved to read everything I could lay my hands on regarding these Astral Projection phenomena.          Soon I was reading the works of Muldoon & Carrington and Robert Monroe.  By now I was in absolutely no doubt that there was most definitely a very mysterious and strangely meaningful "something" going on behind the bricks and mortar of our physical existence.  I had absolutely no idea whatsoever just what that "mysterious something" was but I knew with everything that was in me that I wanted to find out.  There was no doubt about it then - I had indeed found a raison detre that was most definitely worth living for - and now that I had I knew that there would be no stopping me.  The suicidal angst that I had put into the deep-freeze pending-box had not only thawed out - it had fully evaporated.  I didn't know it at the time - that would take another 2 decades - but I had just entered the honeymoon phase of the world-view that Spiral Dynamics calls the "Green Meme".          ...          ... Namaste! Gordon D McHendry                  "Wonder of wonders! this very enlighenment is the nature of all beings and yet they are unhappy for the lack of it." The Buddha [ on attaining enlightenment ]                  The Multiverse Menu Sun Oct 12, 2008 12:01:02 This webpage last updated: 30.12.2004 © 2004 Gordon D McHendry: All rights reserved.    The Ultimate Journey            All Is Frequency    Infinite Universes            Beyond the Mind    Infinite Dimensions            Transcending all Isms    Multiversal Spirituality            Walking the Talk    A New Humanity            The Final Yes Homepage    Top                     "And I saw a New Heaven and a New Earth..." Revelation 21:1