Mary Boone

The Earliest Years

When I was a little kid, maybe five or six years old, I started having visions. Spiritual experiences.

Lots of people are skeptical of such things. They think the person somehow creates the experience in their head.

But I was just a little kid. How could I create something I didn't know existed?  I was living in a world of pajamas with feet. The first time it happened, I was just watching TV.

The vision was always the same. (Until I was 23 or so, I could have the experience at will by pressing this little internal button. I experienced it tens of thousands of times.) In no way can I come close to an explanation using words, but the vision was essentially about eternity. It was like I could see my life on this planet as having a distinct beginning and end, a mere blip on the screen; but that before I came and forever afterwards there would be zillions of other people, lives and events.

It's like our individual lives only amount to a single frame in an eternal movie; but the purpose of life for everyone is the movie. The feeling I got from it was the opposite of belittling. It was tremendously empowering. Our value is equal to everything; and for the most part we have hardly scratched the surface of what "everything" actually consists of.

I don't think anyone can grasp how monumentally this experience, coming at such a young age, impacted upon my life.

I've met lots of people who have had spiritual experiences at some point in their life. I don't know of any who started having them when they were as young as I was, nor anyone who had them consistently at will from the beginning on.

When you have them later in life, it's like putting up a house on shifting sand. We are our experiences. Earlier experiences may (most probably will) conflict with deeper reality. Undermine it. Keep it from taking a firm hold.

But these were my earliest conscious experiences, and they were bigger than parents, more concrete than the house I was living in. From that moment on I would bounce every new experience off that one, just like an abused child would build their life on the memory of abuse. My thought processes are different than most people. I don't think I've ever had a selfish thought. Not because I have strong will power or because I'm trying to appease someone's concept of God. It's just not there.

Life to me is like attending a Broadway play. It may be dramatic and wonderful, but I know it will end soon and then I'll go outside. I know what is outside. It is impossible for me to forget that, and absurd to think it would be a good thing if I could. Outside is everything.

But for most people, all they ever see, think about, and react to be that which goes on inside those four tiny walls.

You have no idea how absurd that seems to me. Indeed, how absurd it has always seemed to me since that very first experience.

Tim Folzenlogen
MB Modern, March 2001