Chapter 8
People call me Danny, but they’re mistaken. That name no longer fits me. It’s just a placeholder for some flesh and bones and a collection of memories that, when I was crazy, I used to think was the real me. In truth, I am invisible; and that gives me freedom. In truth, I am unlimited, location-less; and simply being excites me more than anything. I am pure awareness—Heavenly Mind; and nothing can mess with that. I know who I really am.
- From His Recorded Words
“The beginning is obvious,” Danny said softly. “I never felt the crash that killed me. One moment I was hugging Joe’s jacket on the back of the bike, still excited about the evening we’d spent with you and Jen and Sally, thinking my new backpack was pretty cool, and just plain laughing in the wind…then—
“Bang!
“No sound, no feeling of movement—but suddenly I’m in a completely new world, hanging between ground and sky, my arms and legs stretching out, looking down on the world. Time stopped. Everything became crystal and 3D…and totally still. In that second, I could see every detail—I saw the motorcycle twisted over the front end of the car; through the windshield I saw the startled face of a woman, mouth open in a scream; I saw Joe’s body flying in a bundle ahead of me, about to flatten a thousand blades of grass, and his hands were clawing at the air trying to right himself.” Danny laughed here, while I winced below. “And of course, the street curb, where I knew I was going to land, like a pillow you’d put your head on—only made of cement.” He chuckled softly.
“In that pause, that perfect pause, I had a perfect thought. A knowing.”
“What?”
“Cover your eyes.”
“Sorry.”
Danny said, “My body is not who I am.” I pictured the smile I heard in his voice.
“You weren’t scared?”
“Not at all. I could see my body flying to it’s destruction, but it wasn’t a problem anymore. All I knew was a, ‘Well, so that’s how this contraption finally ends up, what do you know? Wonder what comes next?’ Then someone hit the restart button, and I smashed into the curb, helmet first. Blackness.”
Danny paused and I remembered my own experience when I was hurtling through the air. It was just a panicky jumble, and I definitely didn’t have any frozen moments of crystal-like vision. Just one streaming thought, “Sheeeiiiit!”
“The next thing, I was awake again, super awake, with the same perfect vision of everything around me. I found myself looking from above, but this time without eyes. I was a tiny god. Below me was an operating room—a big metal table with busy doctors and nurses around it; a mangled body on the table; machines on the sides with flickering lights, one that was making a single long beep.”
“Oh,” Michelle gasped.
“Really. One of the doctors was pumping the body’s chest with those electric paddles. The other doctor was using a tool to pry open the head, which was swollen like a big purple basketball. It was unrecognizable. Except it was mine. And I knew that without shock. I actually felt embarrassed—I wanted to tell them, ‘Hey, don’t worry about it. Don’t get all worked up and sweaty. I don’t need it anymore. Forget using that big needle. I’m not even there. Ignore that beep. I’m fine.”
Michelle said, “You were dead?”
“No,” Danny replied in a mysterious tone, “my body was dead.”
“If you weren’t a body…what were you?”
“Floating awareness, floating awe—that’s not quite true. It’s all I can come up with.”
“Okay, floating awareness. I’m almost floating inside my own head now. But I understand. It’s a metaphor. Keep going.”
“One nurse stepped back from the table. She mopped her brow with a small towel and it pulled a sliver of almost white blonde hair out of her cap. She stuck a hand inside a pocket and I could tell she was clenching something. I focused inside the pocket and saw she was squeezing a—”
“You could see inside her pocket?” Michelle said.
“Yes—but not like you’re thinking. I opened my awareness to her pocket. I didn’t move to it, because I wasn’t in any real place. It wasn’t x-ray vision either. I simply had the curiosity and it unfolded to me—like seeing, but much more. She was squeezing a small statue of the Virgin Mary and I heard her little prayer, “Please God, help us. Let us bring this one back.”
“And then I was above it again. I thought, I don’t really need this anymore, and a question came to me from nowhere: Ready to let go? And I had the thought—which was a trigger, and an understanding—I AM.
“Total recognition. That was it. Everything exploded around me. The physical world splintered away like bits of glass as I shot through it, everywhere, like a Big Bang. Faintly I heard what I figured would be my last contact with the world—a doctor’s shout: “Keep trying!” Then silence, and it was all left behind.”
He paused for a minute and Michelle sounded concerned, “Danny, is everything okay?”
I heard him take a deep breath. “I need to feel this part from inside. I’m out of parallels now. The only way I can get this out is to re-feel it. These are the things not of this world. Cover your eyes, Michelle.”
“Okay. You’re doing fine, Danny.”
“That’s what you think.”
This is where I started having problems understanding, now that he was telling about “things not of this world.” There was nothing solid I could picture anymore, not like a scene out of Conan. Danny emphasized his expanding—“expanding, expanding, expanding”—beyond the body (naturally), but also beyond the story of Danny; and shedding all the little bits of nagging personal history (like his father hitting him at the dinner table, or when I first met him in the neighborhood and gave him and snuggy, and later apologized with a candy bar), all of which just floated away as if to say, “That wasn’t such a big deal, was it?” But it was not a forgetting, he told Michelle; it was a cleansing. He explained about some new sense that replaced the old physical senses, and there wasn’t the tunnel that Michelle asked about, because there wasn’t any inside or outside, or any other dimensions for that matter. (Huh?) And light? Nope, he told Michelle, not light, but some sort of really big “brightness” that didn’t cast shadows and that wouldn’t make you squint (of course, if I understood this right, he didn’t have eyes anyways). And then lots of energy, and more brightness, and some larger-than-human love that knows no opposite and can never hate (not like my kind), and then he said something about “flowing into Heaven, as Heaven flowed into me.”
Through the slits, I saw Tim separating from the other football players and walking to a spot where he could look straight at Danny and Michelle in their half-hidden corner. His hands went to his hips—then he started to approach. Danny and Michelle apparently hadn’t noticed because they just continued talking. I thought of ways I could slide up fast in case Tim came up the bleachers.
Suddenly Danny laughed hard. “No, you really can’t imagine. I was teasing.”
“Danny! Well, then what happened?”
“It spoke. But not with words.”
“It?”
“Heaven. All of it. It filled me up with an understanding: ‘Far enough…time to return …you have seen yourself…you are changed…your blessing.’ Then the brightness closed up and everything slipped back—through the tunnel with no sides, back into all the memories, sort of. Back to the body, sort of. And I slept until I was ready. Then I woke up to see Joe reading a magazine.”
Tim reached the bottom of the bleachers. “Michelle! What are you doing up there?”
Even from twenty rows down on the field, I could see his forehead in knots. “Did you come to watch or what? You can’t see anything from there.”
Michelle yelled back, “We’re not watching, Tim. We’re talking. Go back to practice.”
Tim said, “I hope you’re not jabbering about all that heavenly crap.”
Mic
helle said firmly, “Tim, go back to your practice. We are just talking.”
He stared for a second, then snapped around with a “to-hell-with-you” wave. I kept my eye on him all the way back to his teammates.
Danny said, “I guess he likes your attention.”
“He thinks I spend too much time with you. He might be a little jealous… Danny, what was the blessing?”
“It’s all still a part of me, Michelle. Or I’m a part of it. My mind is still in the heavenly dimension. As we’re talking, right here, right now, that knowing is alive inside me. Working through this human body, it’s who I am.”
There was the smallest gasp from Michelle.
He said, “But the point of it is—so are you. You just don’t know how to see it. So are all of us. So, let’s fix that. We have twenty minutes.”
“This is the experiment?”
“Umm, hmm. Ready?”
If I could have left then, I would have. This would have been the place to do it. It was a whole lot to absorb even if you weren’t really listening. Once I asked Danny if going to Heaven was like going to China for a day and coming back with slanty eyes. He said it would be more like going to China for a day and then coming back speaking Chinese. Now that he had described the trip, I guessed he was going to teach Michelle the Chinese language.