A Skeptic's Guide to the Supernatural
Out-of-body experiences as they happened to someone too smart to believe in them.
I don’t dwell much on the supernatural. When it comes to psychic phenomena, I’m very skeptical. But then again, I’m a Leo, so I would be.
I do believe in aliens, and I do believe in UFOs, although I worry that they will first land in Passaic, New Jersey, decide that we are not an advanced species, and leave without looking back.
I have faith in general, but not in the specific. When asked for my religious views, my answer is usually, “From a distance, if at all possible.” An eternity in Heaven surrounded by True Believers sounds amazing in the abstract. But if you want to know what that actually feels like, spend a weekend in Salt Lake City, Utah.
If I’m going to spend my afterlife in Heaven, I will need to be around my people. People who get why I’d ask an angel playing harp if they know any Skynyrd. It’s not to say I don’t want to go, I just don’t want a neighbor who’s going to get mad if I ask the Archangel Metatron if they’re a Transformer.
And I’m told that when I do, I’ll be reunited with all past generations of my relatives. Some of them, let’s be honest, were very difficult people. I don’t relish the idea of explaining to hundreds of judgmental Irish, German, and Polish immigrants why they risked everything and sacrificed so much to build a new life in America, just so I could have the freedom to make fun of them decades after they were gone.
The truth is, I just can’t see a reason to wait on the supernatural to reveal itself when the natural world around us is so fascinating. There’s a species of bloodworm that has copper teeth. And not the kind you have to have a great dental plan with no deductible to afford. They develop organic copper teeth. Why would I fear demons that may not exist when something so weird and terrifying can be found by just digging in the dirt?
Having thus established my bona fides as a skeptic, I can now tell you truthfully that I have had two out-of-body experiences.
The first happened when I was newborn, and I was sick, and I had spinal meningitis, and the doctors believed that I might not live. And I remember watching my own little body in the nurse’s gloved hands as it was placed into the foil-covered incubator, and this more clearly than I can remember whatever I watched on television last night.
I never really thought this was unusual. When I was a child in the 1980s, nobody really talked about “out of body experiences” for fear of being labeled a lunatic. After all, you could get ostracized from polite society and end up spending your life in social exile – which, coincidentally, involves moving to Salt Lake City, Utah.
The second instance happened on a summer night, when I was sick with what turned out to be cellulitis, which is what you get when the strep you get every year because you can’t afford health insurance finds its way under your skin.
I was so hot and so dehydrated that I could barely sleep from the burning under my skin. And I lay in my bed, and my breathing slowed, and I felt my physical body slip away from me, and I was frightened that I was dying and yet I was so at peace I could feel no fear, could feel nothing but the hum of the Universe passing throughout my soul as I floated up and up away from the world, into the great void, and I became one with everything, even Passaic.
And then a great voice Spake unto me – and that is a pretentious way of phrasing it, I know, but this was such a grand voice that reverberated through everything I was and ever will be as if I was some sort of cosmic Marshall Stack, that truly only the overtly grandiose words of the King James Bible can do it justice.
And it spake unto me thusly, and I am quoting exactly, and I swear that this is a true story, and it sayeth unto me, “Appreciate Beck while you can, because he won’t be with you forever.”
And then gradually, the cosmos and the forever of eternity slipped away and I came back to my physical body, and the only way I can describe the feeling is as the exact opposite of candles melting into wax; slowly slipping back into my body like the fingers of a small child’s hand entwined in those of its mother’s. I found no great surprise there, in the discovery that, once again, the world had left me with more questions than answers.
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