image credit: waveneyavenue
In my post on Unity Consciousness, I explored ways in which we can experience the feeling of oneness that the sages tell us is our birthright. I recently read an excellent book that was the recipient of the Nautilus Silver Award, by Dr Allan J Hamilton, The Scalpel And The Soul: Encounters with Surgery, the Supernatural, and the Healing Power Of Hope. In his book, Dr Hamilton relates stories that have taught him much about spirituality and the nature of consciousness. He refers to “the fabric of consciousness” which reminds me of the theme of Unity Consciousness. He speaks of the encounter with people who are at the edge, where the ego drops away, where a person comes face to face with the stark reality of their mortality and chooses to affirm the spirit, as a transformational phenomenon that engages both doctor and patient alike. Though a scientist, the ubiquitous nature of his experiences with patients who face death and dying, awoke in him a curiosity of the spiritual realm and the nature of reality.
Dr Hamilton tells of an experience when he was a young doctor in a village in Africa, where the natives live with a trust in nature, where time and reality as we know it, does not exist in the same way. While lost on an expedition to reach another remote village, traveling down a river in stormy weather, he and his guide met a stranger. This man told them that he had been waiting for them, because he had dreamed that they were coming and would be needing his help to show them the way. The stranger mentioned that he was expecting them the previous day. He did not know that the doctor had started his journey earlier but was delayed one day. Dr Hamilton says, “… It was not really the waters of the river that carried us. It was the hand of invisible forces. Suddenly, the notion of being afraid, and especially the idea of being lost, seemed absurd.”
Dr Hamilton muses over the experiences of his career: the premonitions of patients who know that they are about to die; the ghost of a father who returns to the foot of the bed of his comatose son to watch over him; the indomitable faith of a grandmother with late stage ovarian cancer, the only caretaker for a sick grandchild, who lives to see the child grow up and get married; his own possession by the spirit of a young man who died, to whom he was still emotionally attached.
These experiences became a source of contemplation on the nature of reality for Dr Hamilton. He says: C0uld we, I now wonder, be connected together beyond the abilities of our individual brains to sense and comprehend? He continues: A great school of fish, made up of thousands of shimmering individuals, is capable of swerving instantly as a unit without the awareness or insight of each fish in the group. Could it be that, like the individual fish, I had mistakenly believed the journey I was undertaking was mine alone? Instead, perhaps, it was the journey of many, forged from myriad physical existences that were interwoven into a fabric of consciousness far beyond the reach of our senses or the grasp of our intellect. Perhaps we are like the gathering school of fish, steadfastly maintaining we are single individuals while our collective awareness moves us freely into unrecognizable depth.
The stories in this book, some hilarious, some heart wrenching, are written with poetic insight and provoke my own contemplation. I have in the past, categorized many stories that were related to me of supernatural encounters, as the reality of those whose beliefs attract such occurences. Dr Hamilton reminds us that his approach was one of scientific curiousity, he was not a man of spiritual inclinations, yet it became necessary for him to connect to the spiritual aspect to make sense of the experiences that he and his patients shared.
