The White Room

Other than the waking state, there were two other states of consciousness that I experienced as a baby. One of these was black and one was white. The white state is what I call the White Room and is a state of consciousness that is distinct from waking or sleeping. The experience is of just pure bright white light. I think it could be a pre-conscious state, which is why some believe it is pre-life and post-life, because everything else in this life is experienced in consciousness. 

We call the black state sleep of course, but unlike the normal sleep we all have, there was no loss of consciousness during it. It was a return to the base state of First Self, the observer without any of the waking influences that later would completely take over our lives to the point that anything else would be relegated to unconsciousness. The waking state is primarily for survival purposes, and like the society which supplements this role, anything else is subsumed to the point of irrelevance. And so, this dreamless sleep has become a dead-zone where the consciousness that remains during it, is forgotten and deemed unimportant to a social world that demands utility. 

If there are no maintained neurological paths to normal living from this twilight zone, then there will be no memory passed from divine experience to everyday life. Every night we lose consciousness during sleep, but this time is not empty; only empty of the stuff that is valuable to our social world. If there is no peg to hang the experience on, then the experience is not consciously registered. It is invisible. I used to wonder if it was within this arena of invisibility that the source for a lot of the answers missing from my life were hiding.

But the white state is the supreme state. It is bliss; the feeling is fantastic — very soft. It is the best place to be. There is no time here; it is different. It is almost certainly the experience that has led to concepts of heaven. Personally, it is nice to think that it is the enrolment of the universe into one, where time has stopped like it does at the speed of light, and where everyone and everything experiences the same thing, and your experience is God. But this is just a retrospective story created by a human mind, like all other theories and beliefs that have ever been had or ever will.

There are no thoughts within these states of consciousness, and any interpretations and mental constructs occur afterwards, which are then influenced by the beliefs and indoctrinations from contact with other human beings, or simply by pure unrestricted imagination. There are no answers here.

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The White Room is a common state to enter as a baby, and I can remember crying when I was not able to re-access this state. The usual entering into black and then white became entering into black only, and the white diminished in frequency as time passed. It upset me on more than one occasion that I could not enter into it, because it had become anticipatory after I got tucked up and it was so nice. It is the place I long to return to; it is the epitome of abandonment to the divine.

A significant visit to the white room occurred when I took Salvia Divinorum, which is a sacred plant used by shamans in Mexico, where it grows in a single valley which is the only place it grows natively in the world. The entry into the altered state is the tricky bit. The first time felt like I was being eaten through millions of years of evolution, chewed up and digested again and again — infinitely. It was pretty horrible. This theme was no doubt influenced by the fact I had been to the dentist earlier that day, and teeth were very prominent in this delirious stage. There was a definite choice point where I could have resisted and pulled out, but instead I chose to surrender — to just let it be whatever it will be — and I abandoned myself to it and was prepared to die, and in this mental state of acceptance just about anything is tolerable. This is important because any clinging or resistance will stop you from passing through this stage.

But I went through it and eventually emerged out of a puddle into just pure bright white light. There was nothing there other than bright white light in all directions for as far as I could see, and it felt soft and spongy. It was home. It was as if I had only just jumped into this world we call planet Earth, which was insignificant and one of countless others, and had now come back home.

My absence from this white room, from this origin of me, into my life in this world, had been due to a little curiosity, and the life I have been living (and still am), was just one of an infinite number of lives, on an infinite number of worlds, over an infinite amount of time. It is all so unimportant. Every lifetime is just a blink of an eye.

I was a little surprised that there was no one else there — it was entirely empty. It was as if there was only me, and I played the parts of everyone else, which from the point of view of base consciousness, is about right.

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Enlightenment

The experience of the 'White Room' is literally enlightenment. En-light-en-ment: the 'en' means 'in', and the 'men' means 'mind': in-light-in-mind. This is what the word is literally referring to: being in the light in the mind. The experience of the white light exists whether the eyes are open or not, as this light exists only in the mind.

My experience of the divine has been like a rolling up of the universe into pure white light with no past or future, and free of form. The bright white light of heaven is a theomorphic experience.

But it isn't only human beings who know of the white room; it is I believe a state of consciousness which is common to all sentient life forms, and perhaps the base state of all experience, which is why it is the last thing experienced before death.

One night I was disturbed by the incessant bleating of a neighbour's lamb that had managed to escape the field it was in but now wanted to get back to its mum but couldn't find its way back in. I was anticipating a difficult time trying to catch the lamb as their instinct is to run away, but when I shone the torch at it, it very obligingly ran straight up to me, at which point I just picked it up and put it over the fence. It was clearly attracted to the light and its instinct was to go towards it.

On another occasion, driving home from a gig down country back lanes at 2 am in the morning, there was a sheepdog in the middle of the road, who upon seeing me started to trot towards me. I stopped the car and he continued to come until he passed from view in front of the bonnet of the car and I heard a bump as he ran straight into the front of the car. I then saw him continue his trot in the opposite direction away from the car, presumably a little disconcerted as he now had his tail between his legs. He was obviously running towards the bright white light from the headlights and was no doubt disappointed that he didn't enter heaven.

The trans-species proclivity for white light attraction and experience is interesting. The fact that it is a common near-death experience for humans, combined with my own early life experiences and the behaviour of other animals when encountering it, means it is a very fundamental state of consciousness. It also shows that animals have religious experiences too.

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