Two Deaths

I don’t know if there is any connection.  Not long after David’s passing, I spent the night in Uncle Len’s house and as I lay in bed I had my one and only out of body experience.  With no sound my ‘body’ floated upwards from the bed on which I was lying and I was able to look down at my other ‘body’.  From my back, a silver cord hung down and joined onto the umbilical of my other body lying on the bed. Slowly, I floated back down and the two bodies joined again.

Many years later, my mother gave me a book called “The Third Eye” by Lobsang Rampa.  The book was totally believable. Years later I discovered that rather than being a Tibetan lama, the author was really Cyril Henry Hoskin, a plumber from Devon.  He claimed that his body hosted the spirit of a Tibetan with the name Tuesday Lobsang Rampa, the first part of his name relating to the Tibetan tradition of naming children after the day in the week they were born.  I was amazed to read of his having had the same experience, although his tales were much more embellished with astral travel and sky walking.  Curiously, he had another name, Carl Kuon Suo and was married to San Ra'ab Rampa.  He died in Calgary, Canada, in 1980.

Man is temporary, Man is frail, life on Earth is but illusion and the Greater Reality lies beyond

Why my mother gave me this book I don't know.  Sometime before reading the book I had had a dream which I can still see clearly:  my sister Connie was riding a black pony down to a stream.  Someone was leading the horse down the slope.  Connie was wearing a black cloak and her dark hair was long and shining.  Although I didn't realise at the time, the scene took place somewhere in Tibet.

When Connie and her husband John came to visit us from Australia, we took them to Samye Ling Monastery.  In the temple there was a ceremony going on with lots of drums banging and bells ringing.  Connie said, "I love to hear the sound of the drums.  Maybe there was something about her psyche that related to Tibet.

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My mother’s family were poor and her parents had heavy Yiddish accents of the Polish kind.  They lived in a poorly furnished flat with only linoleum on the floor and a light bulb hanging from the ceiling.  There were no pictures on the wall and a table with a white lace tablecloth stood in the middle of the floor.  The bathroom was at the end of a hall outside the main house and was shared by about six families though I’m not sure about the number.  I had never shared a toilet with anyone outside of my immediate family and all this seemed strange to me.  But the worst was the toilet paper.  The glossy non-absorbent Izal brand was bad enough, but squares of torn up paper stood on a spike on the window ledge.

In a room was a sink with a mirror hanging over it and a shelf on which stood my grandfather’s open razor, his shaving mug and a bristle brush.

The only luxury was a handsome ornately tooled samovar on a stand with a candle

burning underneath and a little tap on the side of the barrel.  From this my grandmother would pour tea into a glass in a steel caged holder.  A slice of lemon floated on the top gave a distinct burst of flavour to my young tongue.  A sweet proffered instead of sugar and the tea was noisily sucked through the sweet held on the tongue.

I can still see my grandfather as I was leaning out of our third floor window in Butterbiggins Road.  My sister Connie and I watched as his thin and sprightly frame crossed the road, holding up his walking stick to alert the traffic that an old man was about to cross the road.  Not long after this, and not surprisingly, he died under the wheels of a motorbike.  I guess his Polish habit of holding up traffic didn't work in Glasgow.