I woke up with this thought today and then it became a sketch because I wanted to consider it in color and line.
Eben Alexander is a neurosurgeon who went to Harvard. A few years ago he became very ill with a bacteria which attacked his brain. He went into coma. He should have died. But he survived. He lectures now about his NDE (near death experience). He described the first part of it as being in what he called “the worms-eye-view”, because it was as if he was immersed in muddy earth. It was dark and foreboding with creatures of sorts who would periodically rise up out of it and then re-submerge. He said there was a loud gong-like sound; a slowly beating, low frequency that permeated the space. When he described it I thought it seemed like a magnified heart beat. At one point he described a tear in the surface of this space and a brilliant white spinning orb above him, with gold tendrils with a perfect melody. He was able to move out of the muck up and into this other space that had much beauty. I am not going to describe more of his experience, as my thoughts this morning only referred to these descriptions.
I then thought of a spatial interpretation of humanity. As if war, turmoil, disease, cruelty, disorder and greed were a kind of low-level covering on the surface of existence. Like Eben’s worms-eye-view, only spread out, covering the earth. It is a space and has dimension. I thought, any human involved in war, could choose to just stop. It doesn’t have to exist. It does exist because people choose to allow it to go on. They engage in it. They create the dimension.
And then I wondered what it would be like if they could transcend that space, as Eben did and rise out of it to another surface. This surface has dimension as well, and it is layered on top of the worms-eye-view. Another man, who had his own NDE, Robert Young of Australia, describes the idea of a wave, where turmoil and chaos, suffering and pain are inside the wave. He says you can choose to ride on the top of the wave and if you do you can see everything in all its beauty and vastness. So, in my thoughts I merged this idea with that of Eben’s and I saw a spiral, where the worms-eye-view was in the center of a wave and if you transcended you could stand on the surface dimension of the wave. And from that surface you could look outwards to vistas you did not know existed. And this surface dimension contained beauty, love, light, creativity, thriving and health. And this wave moved, it was not static.
As I considered these two spaces I thought of the idea of tears. And how tears are often the ladder which allow you to move from one dimension to the other; from the worms-eye-view to the space of light and vast vistas.
So I finished drawing what I was thinking. And I realized I had drawn a modified version of the Eye of Horus with the Golden Tear. I did not intend to do so. But I wonder, if the Eye of Horus was a description of another person’s waking moment after sleep.
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