The Blue Light

Last Thursday night I woke up some time after midnight and saw that the living room was filled with a blue light. I thought to get up but could not, and fell back asleep almost at once.

I dreamed of friends and relatives, very peculiar dreams, as if I was searching for something among them that I could not quite find.

When I woke up the next morning, my left ear was hurting terribly. The object that was put in it in May of 1989 had migrated from the top of the ear down nearly to the lobe, leaving the whole ear terrifically sore.

I was frightened. A doctor has already tried and failed to remove the thing because, when his scalpel touched it, it slipped away on its own. He observed it to be a white disk, and the bit of it he did get seemed to have a metallic base and to be covered with cilia, which are apparently what enabled it to move.

The doctor who removed the fragment, John Lerma, says that the pathologist who examined it thought it was the strangest thing he’d ever seen.

So, whatever happened, it caused the object to move. But that wasn’t all that happened. I had a wireless mouse and keyboard on my computer. Both were ruined. Likewise my monitor, and my Tape/DVD converter. All needed replacement.

This wasn’t all. During the week prior to Christmas, both Anne and I had experienced electronic anomalies. Usual for me, quite unusual for her. Throughout our Christmas holiday, street lights went out when we passed under them–something that happens to many close encounter witnesses and also to members of my family–and our computers were balky in odd ways.

But to make a long story short, I was left on Friday exactly where I am always left by the experiences–without any real idea of why this might have happened, or, indeed, what had happened.

However, the evening after the event, I suddenly remembered an incident in the Hotel Kitano in San Francisco that had taken place a good twenty years ago.

Why I remembered this particular incident I do not know, but I will relate it here because I think that there must be some sort of connection.

I was staying at the hotel with my wife and our little boy. We were sleeping in one bedroom, he in the other. There was a small living room, and at about one in the morning, I was up meditating, when suddenly all hell broke loose.

First, the hotel building made a terrific cracking sound, which I thought might mean an earthquake. Immediately thereafter, though, there appeared before me one of the most extraordinary people I have ever seen. It was a young woman. She had a flat, Nordic face, blond hair and wore a dress or garment of some sort that teemed with pictures that I could not understand and have never been able to remember.

Her effect on me was incredible. I thought myself sitting before somebody whose beauty was just magnetic–so much so that I literally leaped out of my body and seemed to slump into her lap. She reacted with surprise and embarrassment.

The next moment, my son burst into the room saying, “There’s a flying saucer outside my window.” At the same moment, the apparition disappeared.

Now, the night after the event of the blue light, I sat attempting to meditate, and thought of her. It seemed to me that I remembered something she had said to me–although, at the time, I recalled none of this.

What I remember this time is the indescribable sense of the sacred that came over me when thought of her came to mind.

As I had all those years ago, I sat down to meditate, and I wondered very deeply who she was and longed for her to return.

What came to mind next was that we can meditate on the grandeur of God. I sat trying again and again and not being able to do it. But I did taste some tiny bit of the terror and wonder of our situation, lost as we are in the stars.

There is a certain surrender involved in becoming what the great thirteenth century master Meister Eckhart described as “a clear glass through which God can shine.” It is a very particular state, active and passive at the same time.

I did not touch it, but I moved toward it, most certainly, and for that I am grateful to whomever or whatever was responsible for what happened to me last Thursday night.

Still, though, the mystery remains. I put my finger on my implant. It’s physically real, no question. It has startled a doctor to the point that he would not continue removing it. I remember perfectly clearly the moment when it was put in.

I have never had it removed, which my wife Anne said was the right decision. As deeply as I trust her, I remain wary of it.

I wish, after more than twenty years of struggling with this, I had gotten farther with making it more concrete. But I have not gotten farther, and I wonder if that’s even possible.

The grandeur of God. If only I could understand. Find the creator of the blue light, for example, and ask what has been done and why.

But that is not our destiny, I don’t think. Our destiny is live in question, to struggle and wonder. And, I believe, after what happened these last few days, that this is, perhaps, our true glory and our blessing. We can bow before the grandeur of God and the vastness of the mystery that surrounds us. We can know it. But we can never, finally and forever, bring it into focus.

A tragedy, perhaps, but I think not. To question is human, and it builds the mind in ways that no other intellectual activity can. But the ability to wonder seems to me to have the power to take us beyond ourselves and into deeper, truer realms. It adds to the question, the dimension of the sacred.

NOTE: This Journal entry, previously published on our old site, will have any links removed.