The day I was electrocuted

It was the 26th of April 1981. It was my third visit to Pune, the one where I came with a one-way ticket, finally! I’d visited in 1977 and 1979, but this time I had sold everything – I wasn’t going back to Scotland.

I had been in Pune since the 5th of November and been working in Accounts since January, in Sundry Creditors. On Krishna House roof. It was covered, but the breeze flowed through it, a lovely environment actually. I don’t remember why, but then we changed our location and moved down to a temporary building made of wooden poles with a corrugated tin roof and a cloth ceiling. It was near where the Mala shop used to be, on the edge of the garden area in front of Krishna House.

It was afternoon, I remember clearly because during lunch break – it was April, which is hot, but for me still bearable in a way – we had been to what we called the swim quip. It was actually a large open well. We swam in it.

This well sticks in my mind because of the association with this experience, but I can’t picture where it was exactly or who was there. The only thing I can remember was that I felt absolutely exhilarated. It was like the best of India – the warmth, the nature, the space, everything. I just loved that swim.

Then, I’d not long been back at my desk when a guy appeared at the door to the office and shouted in to us, “Does any of you guys want to get off your butt and do some real work?”

I immediately said, “Yeah, me!” though I had no idea what was involved. I followed him right outside the front gate and turned to the left. It was explained to me later, that they expected a crane to come and replace the transformer, which was sitting on a concrete plinth next to the generator. But the transformer was too far from the street, so the idea came to build a platform next to the plinth, so that they could slide the transformer closer to the road where the crane could reach it.

They had already cut a large gap into the wire mesh cage and collected some thick planks of wood. Standing on the ground, we placed a plank stretching from the plinth to a metal frame just a metre away. The plinth was over 1,5 metres high! It was a job for two people, that’s why I was called. There we were sweating in our lungis and bare chests. Then, for the second plank, I put my end of the plank onto the plinth, and jumped up on it, to be in a position to help steady it and align it with the other planks.

The important thing is: they forgot to tell me that the transformer was going to remain live. Nobody thought of telling me. To be honest, I think it was because they thought no one could possibly be so dumb as to touch the transformer! Anybody working on it since morning must have been given very strict instructions to keep well away from it!

So I jump up onto the plinth and – totally unthinkingly – reach out my hand to grab something to steady myself. And the thing I touch is the transformer with 11,000 volts running through it!

All I hear at this moment is my partner at the other end of the plank screaming, “No!”

In less than a second I remember thinking: I’ve had an electric shock. I’m dead. It’s too soon. Shit.

The last thought I had was ‘Shit’. That swim quip was still very much in my senses and I felt: I’m in life, life is wonderful. I was like: It’s too soon. I’m still in my prime. That was the feeling, all compressed into less than a second.

The experience I now had is very difficult to describe; it’s not like any other experience I’ve had. It’s difficult to describe because there was no experiencer.

There was the Absolute, an infinite black depth. Limitless. Blacker than any darkness I’d ever seen. Yet shining. And so it’s literally impossible to describe it, because none of the usual things about perception apply.

The way this was experienced wasn’t the way I’m experiencing you just now, because there wasn’t an experiencer. I wasn’t aware there wasn’t an experiencer either, because there wasn’t someone there to appreciate that there wasn’t.

To describe things, we usually use words that apply to the senses. But: Was I seeing this blackness? No. Because there was no one there seeing it. You could ask: Was it seeing itself? That didn’t even come up.

It was a totally different way of an experience happening, without it being registered by an experiencer. There was a feeling of the most immense peace and coming home. But it made any experience I’d had before of either of those sensations or feelings irrelevant. It was just so much vaster.

First of all there was a sensation of hanging, but hanging in an instant – an instant that seemed eternal. Time had nothing to do with it. It’s hard to convey. If I ask myself how long it lasted, the answer is just: Well, that doesn’t apply.

It’s the only time I’ve ever experienced there being no mind and no body and no identity and no location.

No mind, no body, no identity, no location.

Yet the most amazing experiences that had ever happened were being registered – but kind of registering themselves without needing an experiencer.

When I was thinking about this afterwards, I thought the only parallel I could come up with was if you’re in a strange hotel and you get up in the middle of the night – it’s completely dark – you get up to go to the loo. You don’t know where you are, and so a question begins to form in you: Where am I? Now, if you can reduce those three words to the very first impulse – the impulse of just curiosity – before you’ve got to ‘where am I?’ it’s just… What? If you could imagine shrinking it right down to: What? Or any other question. How the hell – what – where – what is that very, very first thing? That began to arise in the space. So there was curiosity arising, but still not in an experiencer.

Then – I can’t make the connection… because there’s going to be a connection back to full realisation of what had happened, and relocating myself in my body. But somehow that has been obliterated – I cannot make that connection. That’s very difficult to put into a narrative. All I can say is that certain things began to come in and they led to a relocation of my consciousness back into this body and this experience.

I’ve never really tried to tease all this out; I think there are probably two streams, I’ll follow one of them first.

I realised that even though I didn’t know who I was or where I was, at the same time I realised I was dead. I was absolutely calm and cool and objective about it, because I didn’t locate it in a body. I thought: Well, what have I heard about near-death experiences and what happens next? Yes, I had that thought. This curiosity.

And then another thought occurred: Maybe a kind of angel will appear ahead of me, a being of light. And it will ask me, “Do you want to come through, or do you want to go back?”

There wasn’t a shadow of a doubt – I didn’t want to go back. What came to me was: You have a shower in the morning so you can get dirty again; you can have a shower again the next morning, and on it goes. You clean your teeth once, and all you do is get them dirty again. And that’s what human life is. That was the way it seemed.

There was a sense of relief that I was out of the body, because all problems have to do with having a body. If you don’t have a body, you can’t have any problems. And the biggest part of dying is getting out of the body, separating from the body – and that’s already happened. So why would I want to go back in order to go through that process again?

Huge gratitude that in one second – that I hadn’t asked for – it had happened. There was this huge relief and this huge sense of: Oh, I’m just going to say no, I want to come through.

This is in one stream.

Then there’s a second stream. I can only think they were happening simultaneously, because I don’t understand it otherwise. It began with me hearing a voice saying, “He’s still alive, his chest is moving.”

It’s funny to think of this bit. I thought: Oh, good, he’s still alive. But I had no sense that that was me, that they were talking about me. And then I smelled burning. When I realised it was me that was burned, I came back… Well, no, I can’t say that; I didn’t come back completely. I came to an identification with the body, but still didn’t feel I was in there. I was lying on the ground and then started to get a sense that what was being said related to me.

Somebody must have picked me up and put the body in the back of a van and driven it to the ward at our medical centre, the one in # 70 behind the ashram. Still I didn’t feel anything, so don’t remember that drive, or how long it took. I was still somehow hanging around, but not fully identified.

At the health centre I heard a doctor’s voice saying, “Check his heart; after the shock, the most likely thing that will have been affected is his heart.” Then I heard someone else saying, “It’s pretty normal,” and I thought – still with complete detachment – Well, that’s good.

Suddenly this intense pain came in both my arms. The doctor must have seen me wince, because I remember hearing, “Do you want something to help with the pain?” They gave me morphine.

Then I became aware that I was in a bed in a single room. I was functioning, and everything was so vivid; the plant in the room – I’d never seen green that green. Very much like being on hallucinogenic drugs. It was like being reborn, like being a baby. And I started to sing.

The other thing I remember is a female sannyasin – presumably a nurse or maybe a cleaner – she came into the room and I asked her to come over. My arms were linked up to the IV, but I managed to get my arms around her and pull her down and give her a big hug. I was just so delighted to be back and to share it with another human being. How much of that was the morphine and how much of that was the bliss, I don’t know.

Then I thought – this really stands out for me – I thought: Okay, I might live… another four decades. However long, that’s nothing. This life, this world seems totally amazing and wonderful. I now know what it’s going to be like after this life, which is beyond wonderful. So my life’s going to be just a space between these two times out there. So what’s not to like?

I didn’t stay in the hospital for very long, because there were a lot of cases of hepatitis needing the beds. As soon as I could manage to walk, I was discharged.

It soon turned out I had caught hepatitis in the ward. Shit! So I was readmitted. I don’t know for how long – about a week, I should think – because again one day they came and said, “Sorry, you’re still in a bad way, but we need the bed.”

I got home probably by rickshaw, by myself. After the electric shock admission – and especially after the hep on top of it – I was so weak. My living accommodation – you remember that we lived anywhere that was habitable – was a sort of servants’ quarters. I wouldn’t put an animal in it. It was shocking when I think about it now, but I had been pretty desperate to find a place to live.

There was a little group of sannyasins who made a rota to bring me food. You remember the tiffins? Food from the canteen. What stands out for me is: I remember going to the bathroom, which was just next door (and very unsanitary as well). When I came back from the toilet, I just flopped on my bed, exhausted, just from that effort. So for days and nights I just lay there, unable to do anything. If it hadn’t been for Nirved, my ex-wife, and Viddy, and others… I wouldn’t have been able to manage at all.

At that time the whole ashram was in a state of flux. First Osho went into his Silent Phase, his discourses were replaced with silent satsangs, then at the end of May he left Pune for the United States. Everybody had to decide what to do next. Some people said, “I’m staying here.” Others said, “I’m going to find out where Osho lands and get myself there as fast as I can.” I wanted to be one of those who carried on the commune experience, whatever it was. But I realised that I was so weak and making such little progress. People were disappearing daily, going to the West.

Luckily they let me do some work in Accounts, but I couldn’t do a full day – just go in for a couple of hours. Then I realised this was not working, that it wasn’t the best way to recover and that I was a bit of a liability to the ashram. So I went to the office and asked if I could go back to the West. I left on the 10th of July, I think.

I came back to Scotland. I stayed briefly with my parents and got a job working with difficult adolescents in a care unit. It was crazy – I was nowhere fit to do it. And it was a lousy job.

What did your parents think of everything?

My mum was just concerned that her laddie was in such a weak state. Parents can often show an amazing lack of curiosity about what you are up to. There was very little “What was it like in India?” or “How did this happen?” Maybe I also edited the story quite a bit; in some ways I didn’t want them to worry that I’d actually nearly died.

How long did it take to recover and become healthy again?

It took me about six months. I would get up in the morning and have no energy. I was working, but I would have to take maybe four weeks off work. It was like a repeat of that weakness. I’ve read about people who have had an experience like that. The first thing is that most people who’ve had an electric shock of that intensity are dead. It kills them.

I think I was lucky that the electricity came in one hand and ran up the arm, across my chest, and down the other arm. So the burning was just on the lower part of one arm as the electricity came in, and on the lower part of the other arm as it went out. The electricity would have gone through the heart. But in the sequence of each heartbeat, there’s a moment when it can go right through the heart without damaging it. I’m assuming that was what happened to me, because my heart, as far as I can see, wasn’t damaged. Also, I was young then, 37 years old. It might be different if it had happened now that I’m 82.

And the burns on your arms?

The burns had been treated in the medical ward in the ashram; they’d used some state-of-the-art cream from America, which interacts with the skin and eventually the burnt tissue is scraped off. I ended up without any scarring.

You’d told me earlier that you started a centre in Edinburgh and were working as a social worker in the Sick Children’s Hospital. And there was a guy living in your flat…

I came home from work one night and my housemate, Dutch Geetam, came out to meet me. “You were the guy on the other end of the plank!” he yelled. We’d been living together for a while and neither of us had realised that we were both ‘the guy on the other end of the plank’.

Quite a dramatic moment. What he then said to me was, “You know how you hear sometimes that in your last moment before you die you see your most vivid experiences flash before your eyes?” He said he’d always thought that for him the most vivid one would be the sight of me flying through the air with blue light coming out all over me.

And my memory of him was: when I opened my eyes in the ward there was this guy. He was sitting beside me, looking so solemn and anxious. I just said to him, “Haven’t you got a job to go to?” I was feeling so euphoric… It was Geetam.

The second person to arrive at the ward was Nirved. When I opened my eyes, she was sitting there. She’d heard that I was the guy who’d had the electric shock and had come to be with me.

The people in Accounts sent me a greeting card wishing me well; they had signed it all over. I sent a message back saying, “If anybody sees…” – and here I put the name of the guy who had invited me to get off my butt and do some proper work – “please give him a loving kick in the balls from me.” One of the people in the office, maybe it was Garimo, later said to me, “I showed Osho your note to the Accounts team, and he had a good laugh.”

I thought: Oh, it’s worth it all just to have made Osho smile.

You mentioned earlier you had a strange reaction to all this – that you were ashamed?

It was a weird, very unusual experience. I didn’t know what to do with it. I also suspected that I’d been given an exceptional grace.

There’s a weird conditioning that says that you don’t boast about things. As a result you just put it somewhere. Only later I noticed that it was stored in a dark place in me, separate from any other experience I’d ever had.

At a retreat, the founder of the Diamond Approach work, Almaas, gave a talk about the Absolute with a capital A. It sounded very much like what I’d experienced after the electric shock. I got up and told him about it, and his response allowed me to recognise and bring it into the rest of my experiences.

He just said, “It’s who you are.” That’s all he said. I then sat down again, because that was enough.

I do feel as though it’s been good to bring it into a bit of light again now.

Is there any last thing you want to say to cap it all off?

I would say: I wouldn’t have volunteered for it, but I wouldn’t have missed it for the world.

Thank you!

Thanks to Geetam for refreshing my memory regarding the operation of the exchange of transformers.
Featured image: artwork by Madhuri – Editing by Punya