The Summer of Nosebleeds
In the summer of 1985, I was getting a lot of bloody noses. They could have been stress-induced or psychosomatic. My therapist Dr. Groves, who offered his services at the university I attended, was a staunch atheist trying to “save” me from my fear of hell and my religious conversion, which had occurred nearly six years earlier when I was a senior in high school. His repeated attempts had so far proven futile. Like Herman Melville’s description of Nathaniel Hawthorne, I could neither believe, nor be comfortable in my unbelief. I struggled with the orthodox hell doctrine and feared my inability to accept this doctrine might send me to hell. Groves had good intentions in his ongoing attempt to deconvert me, but he was a rather vain man and his smug belief in his secularism turned me off. I had a very active imagination, perhaps too active for my own good, and my dreams and other experiences made it impossible to reject the notion of the supernatural.
Groves believed, perhaps for good reason, that I was delusional. He knew, for example, that I had, since the age of five, a pathological fear of Burt Lahr as the Cowardly Lion. My fear of that character was so great that every year when The Wizard of Oz aired, I had a pit in my stomach. I knew I’d want to watch the classic film, but I could not for one second behold the Cowardly Lion’s face because even to glimpse the delineations in the lion’s cheeks and forehead and look at those eyes flitting about through the mask slits was to give me a direct line to what the demons looked like in hell.
While listening to me express my fear of Burt Lahr in a lion costume, Groves had this way of sitting back in his chair, tilting his head to the side, scratching his gray beard, smoking a cigarette, eating Twinkies, and staring at me behind his black-framed spectacles and a cloud of smoke that made me uneasy. At times, he seemed to be looking at me the way a scientist looks at an insect underneath a microscope rather than assessing the struggles of an anxious human being.
I shared with Groves my immediate challenges: The panic attacks I’d often have while sitting in class that would compel me to leave the classroom. My fear of women. My nightmares. The Cowardly Lion was a frequent visitor to my bad dreams. I’d often wake up bathed in sweat in the middle of the night. You’d think that waking from the nightmare would offer me relief from my night terrors, but you’d be wrong. Waking up was only the beginning. The evil presence of the Lion in my dream continued in the waking state. Sometimes I could feel the Lion’s presence in my room. One night, he seemed to be sitting on the bed next to me and an icy fear surged up my spine, I could not breathe, and I almost fainted.
On another occasion in the summer of 1985, I had been reading Erich Fromm’s Escape from Freedom and You Shall Be As Gods: A Radical Interpretation of the Old Testament and Its Tradition. Fromm was a Jewish humanist and self-described atheist who believed you could interpret the Bible in a figurative way that promoted individual freedom without being attached to the baggage of literalism. He argued that literal biblical interpretations were “authoritarian” and self-destructive. Reading Erich Fromm and his arguments for secular humanism on one hand and C.S. Lewis and his arguments for Christianity on the other created a deep conflict inside me that often expressed itself in my dreams. One night I dreamed that I was running in a field and there was a circle of flames ahead of me. If I could run through the circle of flames, I would be able to break through my fear of hell and connect with Erich Fromm’s humanistic worldview, but just as I was about to reach the circle of flames, the Cowardly Lion appeared, cutting me off at the path, and my fear of him paralyzed me. Not only could I no longer run, but I also could not even scream. My muffled screams were accompanied by shortness of breath so great I thought I would suffocate. Then an even stranger thing happened. I appeared to wake from my dream, and in my wakened state as I lay supine in my bed, I began to levitate, about a foot above my mattress.
When I told Groves about my experience, he recommended several medications for my condition. I could tell by his expression that he saw me as a crazed young man whose only hope was to turn to pharmaceuticals.
During that summer of 1985, which I would later refer to as The Summer of Nosebleeds, I had been reading issues of my Twilight Zone magazine. There was one in particular, the June 1985 issue, that featured a black panther on the cover and a Darrell Schweitzer short story titled “Jungle Eyes.” One night after reading the story, I had a very peaceful dream. I was walking by myself in a Norwegian forest when several tigers approached me and licked me on the face in a most loving, affectionate way. I woke up from the dream with a bloody nose and instead of getting a tissue to stop the bleeding, I sat over a piece of paper and let my blood fall on the paper. The blood painted the face of a tiger. I wrote “Tiger’s Blood” at the top and thumbtacked the paper to my bulletin board. I only know of one person who saw the “painting.” He was my friend Wade Worthington. He was the keyboard player in a punk band called Faith No Man, which would later go through a name change and be called Faith No More. I occasionally was a roadie for the band when they’d play at San Francisco punk clubs, including Mabuhay Gardens, also known as The Fab Mab. Often detached, quiet, and appearing to be withdrawn in his thoughts, Wade was a bit unusual and I knew he would not dismiss me as a crazy man for my “Tiger’s Blood” nosebleed painting. I was correct. He liked the painting and did not see it as evidence that I was strange or crazy.
Dr. Groves was a different matter. I dared not tell him about “Tiger’s Blood.” After hearing me talk about my dream involving my body levitating over my bed, I could imagine he was already poised to call a mental institution and have me carried away in a straight jacket.
I soon after quit going to see Dr. Groves at the university. Based on a recommendation from a customer who frequented the wine store I worked at in Berkeley, I began to see Dr. Moyers, a Jungian psychologist and lapsed Seventh-Day Adventist. He had an office on College Avenue, which was close to the wine store.
What I liked about Dr. Moyers is that when I told him about my surreal dreams, my levitation experience, and my “Tiger’s Blood” painting, he did not judge me as crazy. Regarding “Tiger’s Blood” and my “Tigers of Norway” dream, he said my experience made him think of Carl Jung’s notion of meaningful coincidences or synchronicity.
I enjoyed talking to Dr. Moyers for a couple of years, but I had to stop seeing him when he suggested that I work through my issues by playing with the toys that he had in a sandbox inside his office. There were toy soldiers, dinosaurs, and animals, and he wanted me to go inside the sandbox and connect with my unconscious mind by playing with these figurines. Because I had no faith in the exercise and in fact believed it to be an embarrassment, I quit seeing Dr. Moyers after that.
The year 1987 would have been the last time I ever mentioned “Tiger’s Blood” and the dream of levitation. As far as I was concerned, we lived in a world where people believed most everything could be explained in rational terms, and to talk about events that might be interpreted as being supernatural didn’t seem like a proposition that would be in my self-interests. In fact, it seemed best to me if my memories of the supernatural were locked in a vault and never discussed again.
But that all changed in 2023. Based on my love of Princeton Professor Dale Allison’s 2016 book Night Comes: Death, Imagination, and the Last Things in which Allison takes a look at near-death-experiences and a critical assessment of the doctrine of eternal damnation, I started to read his 2022 Encountering Mystery: Religious Experience in a Secular Age. Similar to William James’ classic The Varieties of Religious Experience, Allison chronicles the many accounts of those who have experienced a firsthand encounter with the divine; people are bathed in loving light, overcome by a sense of humility, and sometimes see a glimpse of heaven itself. These experiences instill a belief in God that transcends all arguments against such belief.
Not content with testimonies of heavenly encounters, Allison also shows the dark underbelly of supernatural experiences, the hellish side. Referencing David J. Hufford’s The Terror That Comes in the Night: An Experience-Centered Study of Supernatural Assault Traditions, Allison includes people’s experiences with evil. They cannot breathe as they lie in bed, they sense an evil presence; Allison’s own daughter has seen “shadow people,” perhaps creatures from hell itself, and her experience has given her PTSD.
One of the purposes of Allison’s book is to show that there are universal accounts that go back thousands of years of both divine and evil encounters and in an age that is so arrogantly dogmatic about framing everything in rational terms, we are cutting ourselves off from a rich history that explains the human condition.
It was not until I read Encountering Mystery that I believed I had a sort of permission slip to go back and dig into those memories of my encounters with the supernatural.
I’ve already gotten the hellish part out of the way. I’ve described my bone-chilling fear of The Cowardly Lion--not as a movie character but as a demon that has snarled at me during the nights for decades; I’ve described my bizarre “Tiger’s Blood” painting; I’ve described the time I appeared to levitate after waking from a nightmare.
But there is a heavenly side as well. These were encounters with a Benevolent Being. There were a total of four of these encounters, and all four spanned a very brief period--four months, November 1978 to March 1979. Two things I have to make clear about these encounters. First of all, my conversion to Christianity happened in April of 1979, so these experiences were not received in a Christian context or with any kind of theological worldview. The second thing I should point out is that none of these experiences ever felt like an impetus for my conversion. On the contrary, my Christian conversion was all about the fear of hell and wanting to convert in order that I receive something I would later refer to as Hell Insurance. My life’s narrative would have been so much cleaner and cheery if my four Benevolent Being experiences were in tandem with my Christian conversion. That they were not in concert with my conversion and in many ways contrast sharply with my post-conversion depression vexes me to this very day.
The first benevolent encounter I refer to as Moscone Night. I wrote about Moscone Night in an essay I wrote a short time ago. The essay, “Higher Powers,” chronicles my struggle to conquer some of my addictive behavior with the help of the psychiatrist and author Phil Stutz whose approach to therapy, popular among Hollywood industry types, was made well known in a Jonah Hill documentary Stutz. Hill chronicles his therapy sessions with Stutz in order that more people can benefit from his therapist’s teachings.
After seeing the documentary, I read two of Stutz’s books co-written with Barry Michels: The Tools and Coming Alive. The authors contend that when we commit ourselves to leaving “The Maze” of self-destruction, which consists of the comfort zone and the addiction to immediate gratification, we begin to connect with Higher Powers. These powers become stronger and stronger and the dark forces that keep us trapped in the Maze become weaker. Some may criticize Stutz and Michels’ work as being New Age mysticism or Christianity Lite packaged for Hollywood script writers who need to drink fewer cocktails and commit to more rewrites, but whatever the case, I found their books to be both challenging and helpful. Stutz and Michels’ books made me recall my own “Higher Powers,” which I began to write about in my essay of the same title. One of those Higher Power experiences, which I wrote about in that essay would later be referenced as Moscone Night:
I think back to November 27, 1978, the day Dan White shot and killed San Francisco Mayor George Moscone and City Supervisor Harvey Milk. I was living in the San Francisco Bay Area and saw the distraught Board of Supervisors President Dianne Feinstein announce Moscone’s and Milk’s death on the local evening news. I brooded in my backyard, reclined on one of the deck’s patio chairs when a Giant Version of Me came to me in a vision. This being was about ten years older than I was, a muscular man in his mid-twenties, and he emerged from the earth, causing the earth to quake as he rose from beneath the earth’s surface. His whole body radiated with love and kindness. He stood up, cradled me in his arms, and told me to be strong and good, and I wept for several hours. Was that my Jungian Shadow? Was it God? Was it a solipsistic dream?
Of all the four encounters I had over the four-month period, Moscone Night was the least impressive because while I did indeed find transcendence and comfort from this encounter, the Benevolent Being was too much like myself, too much of a projection of myself, and therefore lacked the Otherness of the other three experiences. As I write this assessment of Moscone Night, I laugh at how absurd and ridiculous it would be for me to sample my spiritual experiences the way a sommelier samples wines, writing down comments like “This one is a bit too narcissistic and solipsistic while that one, on the other hand, has the right amount of otherness to be a legitimate supernatural experience.”
The second encounter with a Heavenly Presence happened within a week of Moscone Night. I had attended a Peter Gabriel concert at San Jose State the night before and had to get up at seven to go to high school Friday morning. When I woke up, I saw heaven. The main color was green and upon seeing heaven, I was overcome with humility, and I said over and over, “I need to be like this all the time,” and as I beseeched myself to be forever humble, the image of heaven receded and I got up smitten by a vision that I feared I would never see again in my lifetime. If my memory serves me correctly, at some point during the day, I had a bloody nose.
The third encounter was about three months later, sometime around February 1979. I was working at Taco Bell one evening on Redwood Road in Castro Valley, California. I was a bodybuilder with a broad skull that was too big for the little hat I had to wear. One day during my break as I was eating inside the break room, I was overcome with a message that my sole purpose in life was to love everyone with a pure heart. My whole body felt warm and seemed to glow. I had tears in my eyes. When my break was over, I still felt shrouded by this warm glow. I remember wiping tears from my eyes and walking to the cash register where I took an order from a middle-aged couple and the wife turned to her husband and whispered this about me: “That young man is very nice.” In fact, I was not particularly nice. I was an angry, intimidating bodybuilder who worked out so I could be big and strong to protect my mother, a recently-divorced alcoholic with bipolar disorder, who was bringing all sorts of strange and unsavory men into our home. The Taco Bell customer who spoke of me as being nice was referring to the warm glow that had come over me, not to the angry young man who seethed underneath.
The fourth experience happened a month later in March of 1979. I was taking a Pop Lit class. There were no lectures. We checked out books at the library, quietly read in class, and filled out a book report form. I don’t remember the teacher’s name. She was in her sixties. She appeared to dye her hair black, and she seemed to have checked out long ago. During class while we read, she’d pay her bills, read pulp fiction, and do whatever she could do to keep a distance between her and the students. One of the books I had chosen was Andre Maurois’ 1931 novel The Weigher of Souls, about a physician who attempts to isolate the soul as it presumably exits the human body after death.
One afternoon, I got bored with my book. I set the book down and was thinking of not much at all when the most powerful experience of my life happened to me. I wrote about it in “Higher Powers”:
I am thinking of March 1979 when in my high school literature class I felt a surge of divine love in my body and the overwhelming notion that I was at peace (I said, “I’m at peace” over and over) and I walked out of class in tears, made it to my car, and sat behind the wheel wondering what had just happened to me. That experience reminds me of something I would later read about from the French philosopher Blaise Pascal. He famously described an encounter he had with God that was so intense he wrote about it and put the writing inside his coat lining. He called his experience “The Night of Fire.”
I would later refer to the experience as Pop Lit. So there you have it, over four months I experienced Moscone Night, A Glimpse of Heaven, Taco Bell Night, and Pop Lit. Everything went downhill after that. My Christian conversion in April of 1979 wasn’t about anything about the loving forces I encountered. It was about fear, not just the fear of hell, but my revulsion for a particular type of God who needed to punish his Son in order to slake his thirst for wrath. There is a popular strand of Christianity that states that Christ paid the price for us. He suffered God’s anger and hell itself so that we didn’t have to. When we allowed Christ to take our punishment for us, we had a sort of HAZMAT suit to protect us from God’s eternal rage. When I attended church, I felt like my fellow churchgoers and I were walking around in HAZMAT suits. Our purpose in life was to get as many unsaved people as possible to put on the same HAZMAT gear so they wouldn’t burn in the Lake of Fire. I would later read that this belief that Christ died to pay for our sins is called the doctrine of Penal Substitutionary Atonement. This doctrine poisoned my spirit. I could not separate this doctrine from the personality of God and this personality seemed malevolent. As such, my conversion was accompanied by a growing depression and demoralization that diverged from the four pre-conversion Benevolent Experiences I described. Unable to reconcile my faith with my spiritual experiences, I could not be whole.
To add to my depression, some of my church friends were not at all reluctant to tell me that my deceased Jewish relatives were in hell, including the ones that were killed in Auschwitz. My Christian friends told me we all have a choice and though God loves us, he can’t force us to love him, so I would have to accept that my deceased Jewish family members were in eternal hell, and at the same time, I was supposed to be happy because God loved me. To use modern parlance, I felt like my church friends were gaslighting me.
Not all Christians depressed me. During the Summer of Nosebleeds in 1985, I was in the university library. I came across a book by Quaker writer and professor of philosophy at Haverford College, Rufus Jones. I don’t know what led me to the book with the banal title Fundamental Ends of Life. The book was a series of lectures Jones presented at Oberlin College and Yale Divinity School. Standing in the library, I read through the book’s first lecture, “Quest for Fundamental Ends.” Jones dismisses two kinds of “utilitarian” Christianity, the fundamentalist “rescue mission” to save mankind from hell and the “modernists” who want to build “a new and better social order.” Real Christianity is about the fundamental ends of life. Jones writes:
But there is nevertheless in our world a nucleus of real intrinsic religion--religion in spirit and in truth--which seeks God, as the artist seeks beauty, as the lover seeks the beloved, as the saint seeks holiness, for no ulterior and extrinsic purpose, solely to find Him and to worship Him and to love Him and to be like Him. Religion, when it comes to its full glory and “emerges” from the complex forms that have gone under the name of “religion” is a fundamental end of life. It attaches to an ultimate reality. It seeks, finds, and enjoys a Great Companion, a loving Friend, a tender Father. It has its ground and basis in the essential nature of the soul of man, as these lectures will endeavor to show.
My eyes welled up with tears and my knees shook, causing me to almost fall to the library floor. For the first time since March of 1979, nearly six years earlier, I was reading about a conception of God that seemed to spring from the four experiences I had during the four months preceding my conversion.
I wish I could say I became, like Rufus Jones, a Quaker and finally found a religion that matched my spiritual encounters, but I remain agnostic. Part of me says I can’t pick and choose what I want to believe in the Bible. To use an analogy that many have used before me, if there are watermelon seeds in the biblical doctrine, I don’t get to spit out the seeds and call myself a Christian. To be a Christian, I have to swallow the sweet fruit and the bitter seeds. On the other hand, while I can’t call myself a Christian, I have gone down a lot of misguided rabbit holes during my sixty-one years--seeking power, material comfort, pleasure, and status--to come on the other end and realize that I was squandering my life on chicanery and the only true quest is to become the way the apostle Paul describes Jesus in Philippians: Someone who stripped himself of status and lowered himself to serve others. I can't help but see this example of Christ as being the highest example we can aspire to, a model of behavior that is similarly expressed in Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning in which Frankl writes that we don’t get to pick what meaning is. Life circumstances pick meaning for us, and it is our responsibility to listen to what life demands of us and be of service. Only by carrying our Cross to serve others, the Jewish writer Frankl writes using Christian imagery, can we find our life purpose.
What vexes me to this day is that I had four encounters with a benevolent being and at the time I had no watermelon seeds to spit out. The experiences seemed so pure and simple. I had the mind of a babe, to borrow the words of Jesus. But with my conversion came all these doctrines and I’m torn: On one hand, spiritual experience can’t be completely detached from a doctrine of personal accountability and on the other, I cannot reconcile my heavenly encounters with the God of orthodoxy, so I feel exiled in a no-man’s land, a place far away in the bleachers, the cheap seats, often disparagingly referred to as the nosebleeds.
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