Page 109 - Microsoft Word - SPIRIT AND THE MIND.doc

Confirmation 93
stopping the world? I felt as though the world had stopped . . .
S: Did your mind stop?
A: I was astounded. All these figures of speech that people use—
“stopped dead in my tracks”—that’s what I was. It stopped me dead in my tracks. I was rooted to the floor (pause) but it wasn’t as if my mind stopped. It was like it was racing so fast that you can’t see it— like a propeller going around—so fast that it may as well not be there.
ONE WEEK LATER
S: Do you remember much about the reaction that you had last time?
A: I was in a state of panic—or terror. I’ve been thinking about it, and I can’t really describe it. I don’t experience panic very often, an occasional test panic or something like that—”Oh, my God, I’m not going to do well.” But I don’t think I’ve ever experienced anything you would really call terror before—I mean, fear for my life or that something really terrible was going to happen. But the reaction last week was something else. It was just a mental tilt. It was more the feeling of being in the grip of something that I didn’t understand, and I experienced that with fear. I experienced it as terror or panic or something like that.
I can’t think back and say what it was that I thought was going to happen to me, it isn’t as though if I do “x” I will die or I’ll be destroyed or something like that; it was much less specific than that. But I think what freaked me out so much was that it was so physical and it was so real and it wasn’t something I had made up or was trying on for effect. I went through all of these things in my mind during the week. What was I trying to prove? Was I trying to make an impression on someone? Was, you know, was I trying to make an impression on you? Was I trying to be obedient for you for some reason or another? But no, I don’t think it was any of that. It was very real, very gripping, and it was very, very sudden. I had come in here at the beginning of the session and was blabbering on about this, that and the other thing and I wasn’t prepared for what happened.
S: Did you experience it as a fear like a fear of some kind of bodily harm—did you feel you were in danger?
A: Yes, but, again, I couldn’t have said in danger of what.