BEGIN FIRST WITH PARTS I through V BY CLICKING THE LINKS BELOW:

PART I: I Guess You Wonder Where I’ve Been

PART II: On The Day I Died

PART III: If I Should Die Before I Wake

PART IV: ReBoot

PART V: And Miles To Go Before I Sleep

NOW BEGINS PART VI

In part five of this series, we discussed my 7 different perceptions of sleep. In this final piece, let’s apply all that you have read thus far to my actual experience.

As is the case with anyone voluntarily going in for an operation, I entered into The Sleep of Resolution. It is appropriate then to review the factors of this sleep:

1. It is an artificially induced unnatural sleep.
2. This type of sleep will last as long as the effect of whatever caused it exists in the body as long as what was used is not fatal.
3. It is affected and influenced by your state of mind.

Now if you recall earlier in the series, I had concerns regarding my history of coming out of anesthesia early from my dental experiences, so my state of mind was affected by that worry.

Additionally, take note again, that I had a practiced ability to affect and control aspects of my autonomic body functions. As such, the order I gave to my body as I counted back from 10 prior to the operation was “for God sake, just don’t wake up”.

This order was entirely unrelated to my willingness to live or die, but as it was given under circumstances of a voluntary and unnaturally induced sleep, it circumvented the default wakeup call the mind gives the body under The Sleep of Reconstitution. This was the first anomaly.

Thus, by entering into an unnatural sleep with an anxious mind bent on controlling the experience, my Sleep of Revelation was not spiritually based, but no different than what is revealed when a person is high or drunk.  There is no warm and guided spiritual reconciliation of the daily fragmented chaos of life being brought into enlightening order, but only the coldness of sounding brass and tinkling cymbals played back in feckless disharmony.

Entering into The Sleep of Revelation in this manner, with your connection to the Spiritual WiFi blocked by the noise of your own understanding, is where nightmares come from. Our minds scream while trying handle the data alone. We just don’t have the processing power without connecting to that God force. This was the second anomaly created by my choice.

The Spiritual WiFi grants us that peace that passeth all understanding while helping us to reconcile our lives. And so, when you enter into The Sleep of Revelation unnaturally and anxious, the noise barrier that it creates brings forth every unresolved matter in your life for which you cannot alone come to terms with, without the God force that grants you the peace of understanding.

Knowing that the anxiety surrounding my proclivity to come out of anesthesia early would cloud my state of mind, the wisest thing I should have done was to confess the matter to my friend who was there and ask her to pray about it. Instead, I kept it to myself and remained silent.

Had I told her and asked her to keep it in prayer, that would have formed a spiritual tether between her and me that, while I was disconnected from the Spiritual WiFi by my unnatural sleep, I could basically use hers.

Remember the “effectual fervent prayer of the righteous availeth much”. In other words, prayer is others connecting you to their Spiritual WiFi when yours is weak. It is a shared connection of joint experiences and joint answers in which all are empowered and edified by wisdom.

I went into the operation denying myself the benefit of that tether. As such, every rough water of my life that I had relied on the God force to grant me peace was given full reign to create chaos. Many times, when we go through these experiences, we want to call it “an attack from the Devil” when it is really a failure on our part- like complaining about the rough ride of your car after you removed the shocks and struts.

While there are, indeed, forces of evil that try to influence choice, it is still our choice. And the state in which I entered the operation was of my own choosing.

Some people try to be particular about who is good enough to pray for them. But in an emergency, if your phone battery is dead, how many of us would beg and borrow the phone of even a stranger? It is because we know that, regardless of phone brand or the service that it is tied to, we understand enough about the technology that it will connect to a tower and put our call through.

This is why it is necessary to look past the religious titles and types of service we try to catalog people into and simply understand that we are ALL spiritually connected. Whether a person wants to believe in prayer or not, or reject giving the intelligence of the universe a name and worshiping it or not, compassion and empathy are embedded into our humanity and that is the GRACE that is sufficient for you and me and ANYONE to access the Spiritual WiFi on behalf of themselves or others. Because, contrary to popular belief, it is an open network. The pass-code is not Jesus or Mohamed or Jehovah. Just simply look for the open connection called L-O-V-E.

Somewhere, in the midst of this unnatural sleep, the operation triggered The Sleep of Resistance. Compounding and complicating the mental focus in which I had already ordered my body to maintain sleep, and the mental and emotional chaos of being disconnected from the Spiritual WiFi, came a request from my body to divert all energies to survival.

Had I confessed my anxiety. Had I confided in my friend to pray, I would have had the energy and focus to comply with the needs of my body. But I left myself to my own understanding and therefore helpless to make a peaceful and rational decision.

My body had a standing order from my mind not to wake up. It received an order from itself to do what was necessary to heal. Because of the chaos of conversations going on from all the other life situations confronting me, I did not have the presence of mind to logically conclude that simply deferring to the request of my body to enter into The Sleep of Resistance, would have automatically covered whatever anxiety I had about waking up. And so I held to that first order at the risk of my own death.

As such, I cannot say that the operation failed or became so complicated or life threatening as to have cost me my life. I am certain the surgical team was just as shocked as to what was happening with no prior health history or indication that such a simple procedure could turn for the worse. But I was dying and no one could explain it. Mistakes had not been made. Everything was by the book. Except my own spiritual decisions for which they had no idea how to factor.

I quickly found myself in The Sleep of Reconciliation, unconscious but aware that my body was close to final death. At this point, the body begins to pull from your local backup in your DNA in preparation to upload to the cloud.  That meant I had access to stored spiritual wisdom even though I had been disconnected from the Spiritual WiFi. That stored wisdom was sufficient to make me aware of the foolishness of my state of mind and the choices I made that got me to the point of death.

Still, I had a decision to make. I had come that far. I mean, would it really be that bad not to go back? I spent what seemed to be an eternity being confronted by the noise of all the reasons that people and life had let me down. Cold facts without the grace of wisdom is the state of mind of the suicidal.

Now I was being presented with REASON. But was it reason enough to choose to live? What would really change by turning back toward life? As I went down the checklist of disappointments, what I did not understand until later is that accessing the reserve wisdom in my DNA had activated my Spiritual WiFi. It was not strong enough to reach the cloud, but it was sufficient enough to reach my friend in the waiting area.

Simultaneous to me contemplating whether or not to come back, unbeknownst to me, she began to have a panic attack and insist upon seeing me. The absence of anyone willing to give her an answer as to my condition and her perception of being stalled as the waiting time had exceeded three times the hours she was told she would have to wait, created a force of energy that pierced my consciousness as I lay dead on the table.

I would later discover, upon talking to other friends, that the force of her concern permeated through the Spiritual WiFi as some were compelled to try to call or text or email or pray not knowing what was happening. But their efforts did indeed also reach me as an undeniable force of love. One by one their presence supplanted my list of disappointments beckoning me back into their lives and reminding me of the purpose I still had before me.

And so, like a transgender Dorothy in Oz, I clicked my heels three times, and found myself awake and alone on a cold operating table looking at the end of an abandoned intubation tube extending from my mouth. After a deep inhale an excited voice came running into view saying “he’s awake. He’s awake”.

I recall in my mind asking him to remove the tube because I was concerned about recovering my voice for work. Hindsight tells me there is no way I should have been able to vocalize that request, and yet he shook his head and responded “okay, yes okay, I understand” as he tilted my head back and removed the tube.

I floated in and out of lucidity after that, awaking, finally, back in my room where my, still somewhat discombobulated but relieved, friend, oblivious to the fact that her anxiety was justified, sat vigil for me. Each nurse and doctor who came in had a wide smile of relief beyond her awareness of the reasons why. Nobody told her how close it had been.

Upon discharge and getting settled in at home, we had conversations about how many times after my operation the doctors and nurses seemed unusually nice and attentive and shaking her hand. Having gone through much more serious medical procedures with other family members and friends, and also having served in hospital administration herself, she was at a loss to explain it.

And then I told her.

We proceeded to exchange notes of timelines and happenings and she gasped to comprehend that her anxiety attack coincided with my death.

Over the course of the following weeks, I would hear similar stories from others who were spiritually connected to me and unaware that they were beacons of light in my journey home- as now are all of you who have taken time to read.

I am reminded of a scripture that says let your light so shine that others might see.

We are all here to be a light to someone. And I remain humbly blessed that the canvas of my life, even in the deep of dark, is so bountifully glittered with stars.