Sumangali.org: In The Spirit Of Serendipity

I was fortunate to be introduced to meditation at age sixteen, and somehow intuitively knew it was the key I needed to access satisfaction in life. Without a spiritual teacher, spiritual family background or spiritually inclined peers, I regularly became discouraged, and made all sorts of excuses for ignoring my intuition. I drifted further and further out to sea while chasing the seemingly close, yet ever-elusive outer happiness.

I knew all along I was avoiding the one thing I really needed (the spiritual life), but it just seemed easier not to address it. A strange conscious thought was always at the back of my mind: God would have to give me a pretty life-changing experience to redirect my attention towards Him. For some reason, I assumed it would involve a car accident. Don’t ask me where this thought came from; I have no idea. I was surprisingly unconcerned though, and assumed it would happen eventually. In the meantime, life was just a very long party.

In late August 1995 I was about to journey into the most significant (yet remarkably strange) day of my life. I had just passed the scene of a road accident, giving thanks to God that it was not my turn, when suddenly… it was my turn.

I was in the middle of three lanes on a very busy motorway, about to overtake a slower car on my left (because that’s the way we do things in England). To my astonishment it indicated and pulled out inches in front of me. Somehow I saw (or rather felt in such a small span of time) that there was space for me to pull into the fast lane. As I was driving faster than the intruding car, we were getting closer by the millisecond. I had to move immediately, but then correct myself so as not to hit the central reservation. This did not look very feasible overall, especially in an unfamiliar hired car.

I missed the other car and the central reservation probably by millimetres, but could not correct my car very smoothly; soon it was weaving about like a fish on a hook. Trying to steer into the swerve to regain balance seemed almost to work, but then I lost control all together. The back end flicked out like a whip and I was spinning anticlockwise in a circle across all three lanes.

I saw that all three lanes of traffic had stopped in a perfectly straight line. To me it seemed there was a line of light in front of them forming a barrier. I could almost make out people holding hands, like the sort of paper-people chain you may have made at primary school. I can’t exactly say I saw it with my eyes, but I knew it was there.

I know this sounds strange. It was.

Have you ever heard people say their life flashed before them during a “near death experience”? I thought this was a Hollywood invention, but it actually happened, like a video on fast-forward. I gripped the steering wheel and looked down at my arms and legs for a moment, thinking it might be the last time I would see them. My thought for them: “Well, thanks limbs, you have served me well.”

I must confess to being afraid of many things, but somehow I was not afraid then, or even worried; about death or even injury. Time stretched out and my perspective changed totally. Some things in me were changed forever.

I felt like God was having a conversation about me. I know that sounds strange. It was. It was like being a child, knowing your parents are talking about you, but you can’t get your ear close enough to the keyhole to make out the words. I don’t know to whom I thought He would be talking, and I can’t say I exactly heard anything with my ears either. It was like an awareness somewhere above and around me. I just assumed He was deciding my fate.

I was fully ready to accept that my almost complete conscious avoidance of Him over the previous nine years might well throw up a fairly significant result. The only thing I couldn’t stand was waiting for that result while spinning in a car, for what seemed like hours. It was like waiting for all the exam and test and interview results of a lifetime, multiplied and rolled into one.

Each time I faced the row of traffic I looked into the eyes of the open-mouthed drivers as they also gripped their steering wheels in anticipation of the outcome. Finally I hit the central reservation backwards. Game Over. The car was about half its original length, but I walked free without a scratch.

I should point out here that I am not the kind of person who sees and hears things outside of herself without using the normal human senses. I would be of no interest to the Arthur C. Clarkes of this world.

Suddenly life went back to full speed and I found myself running down the middle lane punching the air with my fist like a character in a Charlie Chaplin movie, and yelling a few choice words at the culprit who had pulled in half a mile away. Two guys who had witnessed the whole thing ran after me and sorted everything out with the police and so on. I can’t explain why, but I totally trusted them as if I already knew them. Strange. They took me to a service station where I could call the person I was due to meet. The voice on the other end of the phone said,

“WHAT? Are you CRAZY getting into a car with two strangers? How do you know they’re okay?”

I looked out of the phone box to find that one was helping an old lady from her wheelchair into her car, and the other was handing me an ice cream. It seemed God had it all pretty well under control.

That night I felt like I had just been born into this world. Everything sparkled with newness, and held such fascination for me. I don’t think I have ever been so close to an understanding of the meaning of gratitude, or of the truly unconditional nature of God’s Compassion. It was a new experience at the time, but all of these feelings have stayed with me to enhance my view ever since.

The year immediately following this event was somewhat challenging. I will spare you the details, and myself the memory of them. A good result was that I started meditating pretty much every day, using a visualisation exercise I had read about in my teens, but which I had never actually practised. In short, you imagine you are in a safe, beautiful place and that your spiritual guide meets you there. Then you meditate. This exercise really helped me to get through that year; I don’t know how I would have survived it otherwise.

I was never consciously searching for a spiritual master, and did not even know of the existence of Sri Chinmoy. I just wanted to meet spiritually inclined people and learn some meditation techniques, so I started looking for classes.

When I found the Sri Chinmoy Centre, I realised that the guide in my visualisations bore a very striking resemblance to Sri Chinmoy.

Read more in Learning To Live.

Image by Prashphutita Greco at Sri Chinmoy Centre Gallery

Tags: autobiography, God, near death experience

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 7th, 2008 at 3:14 pm and is filed under miracles, sri chinmoy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.