Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Welcome to Otherworld. I'm your host, Jack Wagner. This episode features a story that is honestly a bit hard to describe. It comes from a man named Michael, who is currently a minister living in Washington. But when this story takes place, he was a Tibetan Buddhist novice monk living in New York. As you might imagine, being a Buddhist monk involves a great deal of intense meditation.
And in meditation, people often have very profound experiences. These are the types of things that Michael had become very familiar with during his meditation practice and life as a monk. But one day, during one of his meditations, Michael experienced something far more intense and unexpected than he could have ever imagined. Something that I'm not quite sure how to categorize.
This episode is called From Now On, and you're listening to Otherworld.
Hello? Is this Bobby? Yes, it is. At its core, the science, you can't argue with.
I'm worried about all the science. Up in the sky. It's almost frustrating that it's happening. I'm going to die. It's limbs were just like, wrong. Everybody moves back into the light, even if it takes them a minute.
My name is Michael Ellick. I currently live in Bainbridge Island, Washington. I work in Seattle. I am a minister, but was at the time I'd served as a Tibetan Buddhist novice monk and attendant to a teacher for years that led up to this experience, maybe in part. I was raised inside of a, you know, evangelical Christian context.
And like a lot of people raised in an evangelical Christian context, I totally abandoned it at some point in high school and thought it was all nonsense. And so I decided that I was going to be a poet and an artist and a writer and had nothing to—no interest in— sort of a Judeo-Christian framework, always felt like a religious person deep down.
I always felt like a spiritually inclined individual and fascinated by the depths, but not Christian. And at some point, 18, 19, I had what can only be described as religious experiences that changed my worldview and pulled me out of a traditional Western materialist framework. I was...
Following 18 and a series of religious experiences, spiritual experiences, I was actively seeking out ways of making sense of those experiences, some of which happened while I was awake and some of which happened in a dream setting, but shook me enough. So I studied comparative religion and philosophy as an undergraduate. I was a double major.
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Chapter 2: What unique experience did Michael have during meditation?
So I ended up feeling that I needed to serve inside a Christian, that I needed to leave my own religion better than how I found it. And that as a Western Tibetan Buddhist, I would always be a little bit of a tourist and a foreigner inside it.
But if I committed to my practice inside of a Christian framework, maybe I could help serve and more generously interpret what I came to view as the ancient Jesus mysteries. And it was around that time that I shifted from serving primarily in a Tibetan Buddhist context to serving initially in odd jobs and volunteering in a Christian context. It was around that time that this experience emerged.
even after leaving the Tibetan Buddhist world formally, have maintained a pretty serious practice. Today, I'm as much a meditation teacher as I am a minister. And that has just been a big fundamental anchor of my life. But it's substantively changed with this experience. And this experience that I'll share has sort of informed a lot of pieces of that pursuit ever since.
To go deep in meditation, I think, you know, these days we live in a culture that's pretty distraction-oriented, and it's really hard inside a normal American life to practice with any depth without a community around you, of other people that help kind of ground your system down into it.
But if you do that, if you find your way to that experience, I think the ancient texts and contemporary texts talk about surreal things that can occur. And the ancient texts talk about a series of powers that might emerge. In Sanskrit and Pali, they talk about the various powers things that could happen, including like a certain degree of magnetism or clairvoyance or telepathy.
These are things that people talk about in the ancient tradition, right? In my own experience, I think that, and I think the experience of others around me, when you start going into longer periods of trance practice, you might start having
light telepathy with people and things like knowing things in advance of clairvoyance um not like a turn on switch power but around the edges those things can start to emerge you know when you really start to practice it can it can bring up um
especially in the beginning it can bring up a lot of buried things if you're someone who has buried trauma or unresolved issues very often it can suck those things to the foreground it's a very common in meditation that when you really start to find a rhythm that things that maybe you haven't dealt with properly rise to the surface and it can feel like you're sliding backwards like
thought meditation was supposed to help me. Here I am reliving these things, but it's extracting those things and helping you process through them. So, My experience up until 2006 was that those type of things were occurring. Like, you know, not consistently, not all the time, but it was something I would talk about with fellow meditators. You know, you knew that something was going to happen.
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Chapter 3: How did Michael's past as a Buddhist monk shape his worldview?
Like these weird posters that I used to have. Like I remember there was this silly poster that I had you know, that someone had given me probably when I was in middle school, but it just never got taken down. But it was like this cartoony poster my parents had got me, and it was a picture of a really messy room, right? And then the logo of it was, My Room, Love It or Leave It.
And I kind of hated that poster, right? It was like, I thought it was stupid. It didn't seem cool. It seemed like a kid thing. And I just never took it down for whatever reason. But I had not thought about that poster, you know, for over a decade or whatever. And seeing that again was like, oh, my God. Plus a lot of things.
I remember seeing little things like I remember I'd gone to some camp and this is years before 1990. But like your room gets filled with the detritus of like weird stuff that eventually you get rid of. But like there was this like name. What do you call it? Like it was like a little. cross section of a tree, of a small tree.
And it was this craftsy thing you do at camp where you do name tags, right? And it's your name, but you painted it and now you hang it as a necklace. But I'd done one that said my name and then a bunch that were like crazy fake names. You know, it's stuff like that, like weird drawings. I was into things like you know, role-playing games, and I would sketch out.
I was a sci-fi fantasy reading kid, and I would draw things or have books. All that stuff was there. And, you know, a couple times, I'm like, boy, I wish I still had those books. You know what I mean? Like, who got rid of those? Did I get rid of those? It was like... I was back in time. It was perfect. It was not a dream. The experience subjectively was that I was perfectly there.
And I was in my body at 15. You know, I was conscious of the fact that this is the morning after the accident. And I am in total effing shock. I did not try to do this. I didn't solicit this experience. And I don't know what to say about those first few moments other than it was the most surreal experience, probably one of the most surreal experiences of my life up until that moment.
I really felt the ontological shock is the only word. And I'm sitting up and I'm feeling myself and I'm looking at myself and I can feel the bandages on me. Right? I'm looking around. I'm seeing water and medicine and God. You know, this is the room I've been set up to recoup and recover. But I'm in such like, holy shit. Excuse my language. I'm blown away. I'm in 1990.
You know, I just, so I got up out of the bed because I'm looking outside now at the driveway. I'm seeing what car, right? Dad used to drive that car. I'm, and you know, I lived with my little brother at the time. And I got all of a sudden, like, his name is Sean. I'm like, oh, Sean's here somewhere. So I get up from my room and I hobble in and immediately my head swoons.
And I realized, oh, I'm, I'm still recovering. I'm a little damaged. I'm sore. There's other damage. So I walk a little more ginger and I walk in and I see my brother in his room, but he is a little kid. He is eight years younger. So, you know, when I was 15, he was like, whatever, seven, eight. And I was like, well, I can't tell him what's happening. He's a little kid. So I go downstairs.
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Chapter 4: What profound memory did Michael recall from his teenage years?
Like, will I pass out? Is this astral projection where my body will just crumple? And then what happens to my kids and my wife in the car? You know what I mean? Like, I sort of I don't feel clarity about doing it. So I don't do it. But it shakes me. And I go back, you know, I pay for whatever the thing is.
And I go back in the car and I tell my wife immediately, like, you're not going to believe what happened. Because to me, that was a really distinct thing. It doesn't sound like a very good story, but that memory pattern felt so distinct that I was like, oh my God, oh my God. So, you know, I am a professional meditation teacher and minister.
And I know there's a line that people... You know, there's certain things that are too much to be believed, right? They just can't take it in. It's changed me. It's changed what I think is possible. It opened up my worldview. One of the things that really sticks with me is... is that sense of social and emotional freedom I had.
You know, there's a religion, there's a sociologist of religion named Mircea Eliade, and he was Romanian, and he basically argued that the Western materialist concept of time is something that is essentially psychologically inherited from the Hebrew tradition, right? In the Hebrew tradition, the past is a time of paradise where we were connected to God in the garden, right? Mythologically.
The future is going to be a time when the Messiah returns and we'll be with God again. But the present is a time of exile. where we are stranded, waiting in between one thing and the next. And so Mircea Eliade argued that that sort of sense of being stranded in time and time as being exile speaks to me. And I think part of what that experience did was sort of unhook me emotionally. And
You know, I could just waltz through class. I wasn't invested, you know what I mean? And I think on some level, that has carried with me even... Like, I don't feel like I'm entirely in this timeline anymore, you know what I mean? Like, it's sort of... I don't know. I think in a weird way, it detached me from something. And...
I think, I don't know if I would have named that moment, but part of me still doesn't get caught up in the way I used to around social, you know, like, I don't really care. I don't know. It's weird. But I feel like something about my psychological perception of time has shifted.
And that's left me to think that what Jung and a lot of the quantum physicists say is true, that time, the way we conceive it, is a psychological projection. And if that's true, then a lot of other things are psychological projections. And that if that projection is withdrawn, reality becomes a really different place.
And I think that's what we are, the fullness of that is what we're experiencing when we practice meditation, when we distill our thoughts and develop compassion for others. So yeah, I mean, I think it's folded into my wider experience journey as a spiritual person, and it's empowered it in some way, and it continues to impact it, I think, probably forever.
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