Black Widow Spider in Five Dimensions

Near the end of my third decade of life, I crashed headlong into one of life’s biggest problems —namely, suffering. I was then living in Munich, doing research for my Ph.D. dissertation in cultural history. My life seemed well on track for a high-powered career in academia until a depressive episode bottomed out into complete debility.

I had no clue how to go about finding help. Everything I reached out for evaporated even as I reached until I could no longer try at all. I was alone, crushed and immobile at the bottom of a deep well of despair.

In these depths I found my spiritual path. (Actually it found me, but that’s another story). I knew immediately that this was my way out of the pit. I began meditating the two and a half hours daily that my new guru asked of me — I couldn’t do much else anyway — and that turned the corner. Regular meditation allowed me some measure of relief and eventually resilience. Over the following weeks I began to feel alive again. So I kept it up.

Long story short, I returned six months later to my home in the San Francisco Bay Area, bailed out of academia (which had been a significant part of the problem), and assembled a new life around my new spiritual path. I took care to maintain the habit of meditating no less than two and a half hours a day. This was my lifeline and I knew it. There were no ecstatic experiences, no out of body travels, no transcendent, non-dual insights, but slowly and steadily I was beginning to thrive again.

Good enough for a work in progress, I figured. Peace of mind and a more or less well-adjusted, well-functioning life was plenty to be grateful for. I had no idea that one of those fabled openings of consciousness might suddenly strike me like a bolt out of the blue, fifteen years later, nor that it might be triggered by a black widow spider on my kitchen counter.

Here’s what happened.

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While cleaning my kitchen counters one day in 1996, I pulled a large glass jar toward me so I could wipe behind it. A cobweb shredded as I pulled. Something small and dark scurried around to the farthest side of the jar and stopped down low where I couldn’t see it, behind the scant two inches of lentils inside the jar.

Was that a red splotch I’d glimpsed? My hand jerked away as stress hormones kicked in.

Nothing had fled across the counter. This thing, whatever it was, must still be sitting there on the jar’s far side. Cautiously I set my fingertips down on top of the lid and rotated. This time I watched carefully as the creature skittered away again: black, smooth, shiny body; high arched legs; red hourglass on its belly…

Black widow spider! My stress system kicked up to full blast as thoughts flashed like lightning around a sudden, primal urge: Kill it! Kill it before it runs away and hides and I won’t know where it’s hiding and I’ll never dare do anything in my kitchen ever again because I’ll always be afraid that a black widow spider might be lurking there! Grab something and smash it! But what if I break the jar? Or what if I miss? HURRY! DON’T WASTE TIME! The hell with the jar; just smash this thing before it can run away!

Why hasn’t it run away already?

Why isn’t it running now?

All that in a few seconds, during which the spider had not moved from the far side of the jar over which I was hovering like a thundercloud. I took a deep, steadying breath. As I did it occurred to me to wonder what a black widow spider was even doing on my pale, clean, tidy countertop. Such things don’t live in our spaces. They haunt dark crevices down at ground level.

Staying put precisely where I couldn’t see it, the spider had to be hiding from me by intent. It must know I was ;here.

That’s when I understood why it wasn’t running away. On my spacious countertop there was no bolt hole for it anywhere nearby. It was caught in a bright, open, exposed place.

It occurred to me that this must be the little creature’s worst nightmare.

In that moment my attention flipped. For a fraction of a second I was that wee spider, looking out through its eyes and awareness. In my mind’s eye I can still vividly see the clear glass edge of the jar I was hiding behind, tall as a cliff. A huge monster out there knew where I was. All I could see of it was a vast, dim shadow, but I knew that it saw me and hated me and wanted to kill me, and I had no place to run to. No place to hide.

In the next instant I was myself again, still shaking, but now for an entirely different reason. The poor little thing! It was terrified. It knew something huge out there hated it and wanted to kill it, and it was tiny and fragile and had nothing to defend itself with but a little bit of poison.

It’s just like us!

That realization knocked the wind out of me.

Shit. I couldn’t kill it now. But I couldn’t just let it wander off either, or I’d never feel safe in my own kitchen again. I’d have to catch it without hurting it and put it safely outside, like I do for bees and other bugs that wind up inside the house.

I took several slow, deep breaths and reached for my usual bug-eviction kit — a clear glass tumbler and a piece of thin cardboard.

I wouldn’t have thought it possible, but my body’s stress system kicked up yet another notch as I began the catch-and-release operation. In a more intense state of one-pointed focus than I’d ever achieved in fifteen years of daily meditation, I jiggled the jar. The tiny thing did exactly as I was praying. Instead of making a desperate run across the countertop, it crept slowly off the jar and paused. I was able to set the tumbler upside down over it without hurting it.

In the most concentrated state of one-pointed focus I have ever achieved in my entire life, before or since, I picked up the assemblage, walked to an open window and shook poor spidey out of the tumbler. It dropped the short distance to the ground and instantly ran away to cover.

Huge exhale of relief. Now this creature was where it belonged, with my blessing, down by the foundation of the house where such things have always lived and had never bothered me until now.

Until now. How had one of them ended up in my bright kitchen , spinning a web between that lentil jar and the tiled backsplash of my countertop?

I stood in the middle of my kitchen and looked around and saw all the places another black widow spider might be hiding. My heart began to pound again. I felt a sense of incredible menace like a physical pressure. The walls started closing in. Suddenly, urgently, I needed to pull everything out of all those cabinets and cupboards, every single thing, today, starting right now, and scrub all the cupboards out, or else I would always be wondering where another black widow spider might be lurking in my kitchen.

Six seconds into a full-blown panic attack, hyperventilating and all, I stopped short and laughed at myself. Come on, old gal, I thought. You’re forty-four years old and you have never met a black widow spider face-to-face until now. You can reasonably assume that you will go another forty-four years before you meet another one.

It was wonderful to feel that panic-driven compulsion slide off me like a loose robe drops to the floor. I really didn’t want to spend the next eight hours in a joyless frenzy of housecleaning.

My kitchen now clean, tidy and arachnid-free, the next item on my day’s agenda was to sit for my daily afternoon meditation session. I walked over to my usual chair in the living room. As I stooped to arrange the cushions, it occurred to me that I’d been able to let go of that incipient panic attack, and could sit down peacefully here only a few minutes later, because I had chosen to respect the spider’s life.

I smiled, turned, and started to sit down.

In mid-air, half-way between standing and sitting, my eyes still open, I had a flash. Literally a flash. It was as if an aperture opened in my mind’s eye for a fraction of a second, revealing an immense, splendid vista.

What “really” happened in that fraction-of-a-second opening? I have no idea. A metaphor is the only way I know to convey the felt experience.

Imagine yourself situated in the middle of a vast, supremely beautiful natural setting, the most glorious you can imagine — let’s say Yosemite Valley on a clear day. But you have never actually seen this landscape, because you can’t. In the midst of this magnificence you are sitting inside a dark room. You always have. This room is all you have ever known. There are no windows in this room, but the wall behind you has an aperture that works like the lens in an old-fashioned single-lens reflex camera. You cannot turn to look at the lens behind you. You can only face the sensitive screen on the wall in front of you.

Suddenly, without warning, the aperture behind you opens for an instant and projects a two-dimensional image onto the wall facing you. You see the image and immediately grasp what it represents. It’s the image of a portion of the vast panorama that surrounds you on all sides, but which you have never seen directly.

Within a twentieth of a second the aperture closes. You can’t see the image any longer, but you retain a vivid impression of what you’ve glimpsed, and what you understood it to represent.

You don’t remember much in the way of specifics afterwards , but you cannot doubt this: some really, really, really vast landscape lies outside the room you’ve lived in all your life and you’ve just caught a glimpse of it. Whatever that landscape may be in itself, you will always know that at least you had this experience of it. Nothing can convince you otherwise.

What I’ve just said about the room and lens and landscape and image is all a metaphor, constructed after the fact. But at the time it truly felt as if some aperture had opened in my awareness. What I seemed to perceive in that instant was an indescribably vast mechanism in five dimensions. I understood it to be that which manifests our entire known universe. I “saw” with precision, and in stunning detail, how this 5D mechanism casts projections down through four dimensions to manifest the three-dimensional physical universe (plus linear time) in which we live and move and have our being.

In short, I “saw” and “understood” the precise way in which everything in our known universe is a projection of our minds.

By “minds” I mean our rational, discursive intellects as they exist collectively in their own native “realm” of five dimensions, or what is known in some wisdom traditions as Universal Mind.

And I mean “projection” literally, like the movies we pay to watch in theaters. The movie exists physically only as a transient play of light and color on a flat, two-dimensional surface. But while the projection lasts we experience it as a “real” drama of solid, three-dimensional beings in three-dimensional settings.

Yes, I mean that our known physical universe of three dimensions (plus linear time) is a projection from a five-dimensional meta-reality. At any rate, that’s how the insight translated itself into my awareness.

I also grasped that this five-dimensional “projector” is always running. Just as in a movie theater, if the projecting mechanism were to stop, in that very instant the projected “movie” — our known universe — would cease to exist.

Another way to say it is that the moment of creation is always this present moment. The Origin truly is Ever-Present, as Jean Gebser insisted.

What made the biggest impression on me during that instant of opening is the role we human beings play in the process. This part is even harder to put into words, even using metaphors. But I’ll try. Please take these next few paragraphs as a thought experiment.

Or: here is the story I tell myself to make sense of my experience .

Each of the world’s wisdom traditions has its own term for some essence that is the core of each of us — who we really are. Examples include Soul, Higher Self, Atman, Buddha Nature, Pure Witness, and so on.

These traditions also speak of some absolute transcendence that is the source of everything manifest. For this we have terms such as Godhead, Ever-Present Origin, the Source, Brahman, Sat Purush, the Tao, the Word, and so on.

I like to label this ultimate, transcendent Godhead, or Tao, or whatever, as an ocean of consciousness. For the sake of this thought experiment, let’s posit that this ocean of consciousness exists in eight dimensions. Each of our Souls, Higher Selves, or whatever, would then be (metaphorically) a drop in that eight-dimensional Ocean of Ultimate Consciousness.

Now imagine further that this drop-in-an-ocean pattern is repeated in the five-dimensional realm that I experienced in my momentary insight. This dimension, called in some traditions the Universal Mind , is the source from which our intellects arise. It is also the level that projects the “reality” we experience in our daily lives.

Thus, the individual intellect in each one of us can be imagined as a drop within the “ocean” of the Universal Mind.

According to this analogy, the individual intellect in each of us would thus be a tiny part of that mechanism which manifests our known universe, moment by moment.

Which means that at this five-dimensional level we Homo sapiens really do participate in the creation of the manifest universes, moment by moment.

That spider-triggered opening in my awareness took place nearly three decades ago. This essay is a much later unpacking. My life has taken several more unexpected turns since then, but it has continued to be rewarding and uplifting if not always comfortable. What I have left today of that long-ago experience is (here I take a deep breath) a memory of a brief glimpse of a snapshot of a vast panorama.

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I have the memory of an instant in which my tiny individual intellect “saw” and understood the Universal Mind in all its projecting parts.

And that last paragraph is another metaphor. The problem is that words and even concepts can capture only a faint echo of the experience. But I remain absolutely sure of one thing. All those saints, sages, masters and holy men and women—those who have been talking about stuff like this for ages—were not just making it up. Something very big and very real is out there. Or in here. Whatever. My point is that we humans are a tiny part of something vast and wonderful that’s far beyond what our neural wetware can grasp directly.

Yet even if we cannot comprehend it with our intellects, we can experience it consciously.

That opening in my mind happened in the moment my derriere was sixteen inches above my meditation chair. It had closed by the time I landed. But one specific nugget did make it through into conscious memory and has stayed with me ever since: when we are no longer poisonous in our hearts and minds, the creatures of the natural world will no longer need to be poisonous either. That’s because we humans are part of the projecting process that manifests the known universe.

Or, slightly unpacked, as we men and women of the world grow in wisdom and compassion, the Universal Mind grows with us. Indeed, it grows in part by means of us. This is what we humans bring to the mix.

Might this point toward a solution to the problem of suffering? Perhaps. Just like us, it’s all a work in progress.

Come! There is a path
From the house you’ve lived in so long
To a garden that will take your breath away.

Maulana Rumi