(I) The Rabbit Hole Opens - Part one

On that fateful night in 2012, Carolie was working late and alone, sorting timetables, rosters and the minutiae of a school in its first week back from the summer break.  I rang her at 6.45pm to request she collect some items for the evening meal.  I did not really need them but it was a well-used ploy to get her to come home.  She is very absorbed in her work, which is for many in this role a ‘calling’ rather than a job.  Working late and most weekends was part of her existence and something around which I had to strategize.

A sudden jolt in the daily round reveals we muddle on under a chimera of safeness.  The familiar anaesthetises against fear and terror; expected patterns and rhythms set up an illusion of what is ‘normal’.  To cope with the unknown and the 'unknowable' people often turn to faith and belief, trusting in divine entities or the wonders revealed in nature.  Some draw strength from spiritual faith in existential mysteries of the ‘here and now’ or the building blocks of our perceived reality; others take solace in belief in a divine ‘otherness’ and an ‘after life’. 

Discernible truths on how to navigate life’s mysteries emerge from ancient wisdom, spiritual practice and human endeavour.  Atheists and religious believers alike value selfless love, often expressed through service and sacrifice; they see nature’s wonders as evidence of the connectivity of all things, determined by a divine being or whole unto itself.   

What little grip I had on the fundamentals of existence came into stark relief that night.  Real faith and belief are profound touchstones for many.  For me the matter is simple – we cannot begin to grasp the unfathomable with rational cognitive tools; the intuitive or transcendental mind takes over:

         

Mysticism keeps men sane.  As long as you have mystery you have health; when you destroy mystery you create morbidity.  The ordinary man has always been sane because the ordinary man has always been a mystic.  He has permitted the twilight.  He has always had one foot in earth and the other in fairyland.  He has always left himself free to doubt his gods; but (unlike the agnostic of today) free also to believe in them.  He has always cared more for truth than for consistency.*

The Tao Teh Ching of Lao Tsze+ opens:

                    The way to which mankind may hold

                                    Is not the eternal way.

                        Eternal truths cannot be told

                                    In what men write or say.

You may rely on finger-posts to eternal truths - profound words, paintings, music, great discoveries and wonders of the cosmos.  From these you can fashion a spiritual toolbox, a lexicon of belief, a trust in deeper meanings, or just a hope for the best.  You may fear the prospect of serious illness, an accident, a sudden event you have no control over.  When it comes to the crunch, what do you do?  Will you have inner fortitude or cry out for help from an unknowable ‘other’, whether it reside in faith or intuition, within or without?  How do you cope with catastrophe?  It is an existential conundrum and I was far from sure I would cope in a crisis. There is a great line - “We’re in control until we’re not!”  This was one of those moments in spades.

Over my life, I have dabbled in several areas of ‘spiritual’ practice.  Since my teen years, I have been prone to depression, which goes some way to explaining an interest in ideas and activities to balance body and soul.  The ‘black dog’ has toyed with me regularly. Episodes at boarding school and in various higher education and work places triggered emotional turmoil that led to clinical depression. As a survival tool, I masked it with an outward demeanour of disengagement or indifference, while raging within.   

The notion that ‘spirit’ resides within all things – matter imbued with mysterious forces that influence our lives – resonates profoundly with me.  Growing up in Melanesia, and a later exposure to metaphysical ideas emanating from various philosophies and quantum physics, reinforced an intuitive sense that subtle forces are at play in all matter.  These forces are typically symbolised by non-rational archetypes – gods, prophets, saints and spirit totems - at the centre of animistic belief systems and the mysticism of religious philosophies.  

 An early interest in Tibetan Buddhism garnered a limited knowledge of meditation and the use of mantras, short prayers chanted to open the intuitive mind to subtle knowledge.  I have chanted a short mantra all my adult life to ease the anxieties of the daily round.  It has been a great comfort at times of stress and much employed in recent times.  I took up hatha yoga as a young man living and studying in India and have instructed others off and on for over thirty years.  Through this practice, I learnt something about the interconnectedness of body and mind, of emotional intelligence and physical well-being.   The events described here beckoned the ‘dark beast’ many times, and sorely tested my capacity to keep it at bay.

Getting back to the tale, my crunch came on a wet night as a typical unease with my wife’s lateness grew.  I knew she was prone to diversions and tangents and could easily field a phone call or an email that would make time stand still.  However, our local shops close at 8.30pm and she would unlikely ignore my request completely.  By 8.40pm, when she had not returned, I was ‘alert and alarmed’ to use a much-misused phrase in the modern security lexicon.  My first thought was a car accident in inclement conditions.  

 I jumped in our car and proceeded on Carolie's route to and from school every day.  My agitation was rising but had not hit panic mode. The intuitive mind appears to set off chemical triggers in the brain that readies you for something fearful; it had me on full throttle. On arrival at the school, her car was in its normal place.  I felt a sickening dread wash over me.  It is curious that a situation so superficially normal can be so discordant when it occurs outside ‘normal’ time and sequence.

My jolt was now a full-blown horror.  A locked school door and Carolie not answering her phone - something was drastically wrong. My mobile battery was low. I rang her several more times and then triple ‘0’, explaining the situation to the operator.  The closed door left me uncertain whether to ask for an ambulance or the police.  She advised the police were the best to respond as they could call an ambulance.  

The waiting seemed an eternity.  I fought the urge to use a tyre brace to break a glass panel on the door and enter.   You are tempted to burst the bounds of conformity - should I break the law or hold my nerve?  Could a failure to act be life threatening?  It was an angst ridden ten minutes until a police van arrived. 

Unhurriedly, three constables strolled over and inquired what the problem was.  I explained the situation yet again.  I made it very clear that this was most likely a medical emergency.  They proceeded to look around the school in a leisurely manner to see if they could sight Carolie, despite my plea for an ambulance. After a perusal, one of the constables told me she was not in her office.  He then suggested she might have gone for a walk. I really wanted to shake this constable.  It had been raining heavily. I replied that Carolie would either be on the floor of her office or the staffing room.  I wanted to shock these young men out of their apparent somnambulism but words escaped me: Why were they not breaking the door? Why were they so stupid? 

My emotions were at fever pitch but I knew it was useless trying to interfere. What do you do when you are at the mercy of authorities that have no sense of the alarm you are experiencing, no sense of the crisis unfolding behind the closed door?  My inner voice was shouting.  Waiting for that bloody door to open was surreal in its awfulness and aged me several years. I could not know this was just a curtain raiser to the panoply to follow, all of which was way outside my comfort zone. 

The police contingent eventually decided to ring school security - it would take twenty minutes for the night duty officer to arrive.  I was apoplectic but maintaining a semblance of worried calm. A second van of police came during the wait, which did not sharpen the decision-making. To this day, I have no idea why so many police came to the school.  It occurred to me that perhaps they suspected me of something.  

 It took all my self-control not to scream at them, which would have probably led to my arrest.  When security arrived, the police accessed the building.  They found Carolie immediately in the staff room unconscious on the floor.  I was told to stay at the door - a constable monitored me to ensure I did not enter.  It was only on finding her that police called an ambulance, which arrived within 15 minutes.  

......to be continued

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*                    David Tacey, Gods and Diseases, Harper Collins Publishers, 2011, p.16

+                  Tao A rendering into English verse of the Tao The Ching of Lao Tsze, Translation by Charles A Mackintosh, The Theosophical Publishing House, 1926