It was raining maggots!  I wish the maggots were metaphorical, but they were quite real.  Well, sort of.  This is a very weird story.

About three years ago, I sat down to contemplate what I should study for my dissertation.  I was working towards a PhD in psychology, and I needed to come up with my next research project.  After reading several journal articles on social disgust, I decided to study the relationship between physical or core disgust and social or moral disgust.

For three or four hours, I wrote the draft for a reseach prosopal.  In the introduction, I described scenes that evoke physical disgust, like rotten grapes and maggots.  In fact, I spent at least an hour describing rotten grapes and maggots in colorful detail.  After many hours, I realized that I hadn’t taken the trash to the curb.  When I pulled the trash bags out of our large trash bin, I found that the trash bin was full of maggots.  Buckets of them!

There were so many, I had to pull the trash can into the backyard and blast them out with a garden hose.  I could not remember the last time I’d even seen a maggot, but the coincidence did not escape me.

Around the same period, a similar coincidence occurred.  I sat on a picnic blanket in a park writing a short story.  The story began with a man closely inspecting a housefly.  I sat on my blanket struggling to describe the intricate features of a fly, and wrote as much as I could within an hour, when I noticed a fly crawling on my blanket.  Without thinking, I put my finger in her path, and she crawled onto my finger!  She stayed still while I brought her up to my eyes and gazed intently at her.  She remained on my finger for more then twenty minutes, and I was able to finish my story.

(Incidentally, I did the same thing this summer, very intentionally, with a butterfly.  See Hold Our Your Hand.  About a week after that post, I went to a river where a butterfly landed on my hand and remained there for more than twenty minutes while I walked along the shore.  Reality is weird.)

Lately, I’d been struggling to complete my dissertation.  Raising two children on my own with few resources and little money posed a challenge, and moving to a new city consumed a lot of energy.  I accepted that it would probably take me months of slow, gradual progress to finish.

Then, about two weeks ago, I received a message from the department informing me that, if I did not enroll for the fall semester, I would owe the graduate school a $6000 degree completion fee.

My mother called, and I related my crisis in a tearful panic.  She pressed me to decide whether completing my dissetation was truly a reasonable goal.  Would it actually happen, she asked, or would it be wiser to abandon the dissertation?  I did not know what to tell her.  With my youngest son still at home, finishing seemed less plausible every day.  As I tried to answer her questions as honestly as I could, I walked through my kitchen to the far corner.  At the same time that I was straining to estimate whether I could finish my dissertation, I noticed an enormous pile of brown rice in the middle of the floor.  Without thinking, I reached for a broom.  As I brushed the grains of rice together, it finally hit me.

“Oh my god, that isn’t rice!” I wailed.  It was a thick pile of maggots the size of a serving platter.  “I gotta go!” I yelped, and hung up the phone.  One thing that struck me as odd… I didn’t feel disgust.  Instead, I was startled but very intrigued.  Somehow, the sight seemed positive.

When I turned to leave my kitchen, there were maggots spread across my entire kitchen floor.  There must have been at least one maggot on every six square inches of tile.  They were light brown and half an inch long and writhing.  How did I miss them?  How did I not see them?  My feet bare, I was consoled to see that not a single maggot lining the floor (and the path I had just traversed) had been stepped on.

My trash can was free of maggots.  In fact, I could not locate their source of origin.  They literally appeared out of nowhere, and as I swept them up, I would clear a large area, and then turn around, and more maggots had appeared, spread out in an evenly distributed layer.  It took me more than three hours to clear my kitchen of every last maggot, because they kept reappearing.  I could not explain where they were coming from, and when I told my family about it, they suggested that I examine the ceiling.  They seemed to be falling from the sky.

I did examine the ceiling and light fixtures, and I found no trace of them.

The last time I saw a maggot, I told my mother, was the day I originated the idea for my dissertation.  “I think this is a good sign,” I told her.  “I think this is the answer to your question.”

My mother loaned me the money to enroll and offered to watch my youngest son during the day.  I’ve been working on my dissertation every day since then, and I’m almost done.

This was not the first time that a horrible experience was, in fact, a good sign.

When I was forming an ongoing dance event in my new city, I had a horrible nightmare, one of the most disturbing nightmares of my life.  I was placing a baby into a washing machine.  I woke up moaning with horror, quite disturbed that my mind, that any mind, could even conceive of such a thing, and what can be conceived can be realized, so the thought that such a scene was even possible filled my mind with pain.

Completely distraught, I grabbed the mala beside my bed, held it gently in my hands, and imagined light in the space before me.  I was going to do the Tibetan Buddhist refuge meditation, but the moment I formed the intention, a deep peace overtook me, and all of the horror dissolved in a flash, replaced with tranquil pleasure.  In that soothing space, I was able to reexamine the dream and see it in a different light.

The day before, I had created a logo for the event, a dancer twirling and swirling in a galaxy of creation.  Of course, upon reflection, the image looked very much like someone tumbling in a washing machine.  Which was actually kind of funny!  In my dream, I was placing a baby into the logo.  I wasn’t sending a child to his death.  I was giving life to a new project.  The dream, which evoked so much horror, was actually a good dream.

What if all of the bad elements of this dream you are having right now, your life, were not bad dreams at all but good signs continuously pointing you to something wonderful and ever present?

There are times when this wonderful, ever present something fills my awareness.  The movie Inception gave me a way of describing exactly what it feels like to experience a period of total wakefulness or what I began to call “luminosity.”  Many periods of luminosity have occurred my life in recent years, becoming more frequent and more prolonged as time goes on.  The luminosity is characterized by intense mental clarity, profound inner stillness, a nearly unbearable bliss, and dramatically altered perceptions of time, space, and my sense of self.  There is only the moment and only this.  No past or future, yet no sliver of a present moment either.  No boundaries.  No me.  And everything is perfect exactly as it is.

This experience is challenging to explain.  How can everything be perfect as it is?  Where does the bliss come from?  What has really become of time and personal identity?

In the movie, Inception, characters plunge into dreams within dreams.  In other words, they dream that they are dreaming that they are dreaming, forming multiple layers of ever deepening dream worlds.  However, things that happen to them in one dream are felt and reflected in the deeper dreams.  They dream of sleeping in a van that careens off a bridge, and in the dream which their van-riding dream self is having, they begin to float weightlessly through a hotel.  Sensing the loss of gravity in the van shapes their dream of the hotel, and suddenly there is a loss of gravity in the hotel.

The mind, occupied by a given dream, this life, is nevertheless engaged in a larger reality, and that larger reality, however one might describe it, is impinging upon our being in this very moment.  Your being, your body, everything you see.  You are made of it.  Deep in dreaming, we feel none of it, but start to wake up, and suddenly, you are floating weightlessly through the air, so to speak.  More precisely, you begin to feel the divine light pouring into you, an undending river of love and contentment, and you know that every single thing you are perceiving in this moment, even your flawed, wounded self, is, in actuality, an element of that light.  As a consequence, you sense the divine light in everything you stare at and everything that touches your skin and every thought that passes through your mind.  Sometimes, in that span of wakefulness, I stare at the ground in front of me, and I feel as though I’m staring into blissful eternity.

I turn to those I love and struggle to convey it, but of course, they already have it.  All I can do is enter their dream and hope my presence helps to awaken their senses.

The luminosity can fade when, slowly, one begins to believe in the dream again, to take everything fabricated as the solid reality, or the only reality, and the sensation of the divine river fades, but the river is still gushing into us just the same.  There is this faint, lingering memory of the light, but to find it again, we look to the dream… and dream of being thirsty.

Perhaps desire and craving represent what it feels like to perceive the divine light while asleep.  Imagine that refreshing water is pouring into your mouth while you sleep, and in your dream, you sense it barely, but because you can’t sense it fully, you experience craving.  The craving is not for something you don’t have.  The craving is just to wake up.  Buddhism counsels against craving, but it’s not desire and craving in themselves that send us deeper into sleep.  It’s putting the wrong face to the name, so to speak.  Forming a mental image of what would satisfy the craving, an image of something not present.  It’s not knowing or not realizing that the craving is already being satisfied, and all we need is to still our dreaming and open our true senses.  If you know that all you need is to wake up, don’t lose the craving.  Enter it, and let it lift you from the deepest layers of slumber.

After describing luminosity to a friend this way, I found this poem by Rumi:

Infinite mercy flows continuously
But you’re asleep and can’t see it
The sleeper’s robe goes on drinking river water
While he frantically hunts mirages in dreams
And runs continually here and there shouting,
“They’ll be water further on, I know!”

This life, sometimes it feels like a bad dream, but perhaps things are not what they seem.  Look at everything that is happening, even losses and irritations, or think back on events that disturbed or traumatized you, leaving you shaken.  Then step back, and ask yourself:

If it was a dream, how might it be a good sign?  How might it serve to convey some meaning or intuition that could guide you towards awareness of the light continuously entering your being, even as you read this?

We tend to think of things that happen as experiences that are thrust upon us, but sometimes, they are more like demonstrations of some truth unfolding for us to witness.  I once dreamed that I was a snake with a terrible desire to bite anything in front of me.  I saw a tail dangling in front of me and bit down hard.  Within moments, I was wailing in pain.  Then, the dream rewound and replayed.  In the second version, I was still a snake with a desire to bite, but when I saw the tail, I knew it was me.  I put my jaws around the tail and bit gently.  I had gone to sleep asking for a better understanding of karma.  The dream showed me that bad dreams are not just punishments for our foolish choices.  Often, they are just stories designed to show us something, and even the foolish choices are a part of the story.