When Not Seeing Is Believing

On the Phantom Presence

I will never forget the first time I heard The Voice - it was Halloween, four months prior to my big Awakening. I’d had memories of childhood abuse surface again, and I was drinking even more than usual. I knew it was time to take a booze break, but I’d grown dependent, and preferred the more relaxed, carefree person that I became after drinking. So I was just about to take a gratifying sip of my first drink when I heard a very loud voice in my head say, “NO!”

It was odd hearing The Voice because it wasn’t me exactly, certainly not conscious me. That may also be why I didn’t pay it any heed and just continued on drinking. And that was when it hit me— instead of the soothing ahhhhh feeling of alcohol coating my insides, I felt something even worse than the angst I was trying to drown. It was like I’d skipped the fun part of drinking and gone straight to the hangover. Every part of my being was now acutely aware of the toxicity of alcohol.

I tried to test the waters several times after that in case it was a fluke, but it was always that same awful feeling. Not being able to numb myself with alcohol anymore felt like I’d been abandoned in the emotional wilderness without any support. I was forced to sit with all of the parts of myself that I hated and become intimately familiar with them. I couldn’t escape myself anymore, so I couldn’t ignore what my mind and body were trying to tell me. I was finally listening.

I wound up delving even deeper into who I was, practicing meditation and reading books about trauma and anxiety. One book in particular, Bessel van der Kolk’s Your Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind and Body in the Healing of Trauma, was such an aha for me! It explained how trauma is stored in the body and can keep you in a constant state of high alert throughout your life. The book resonated so powerfully that I started experiencing heart palpitations while reading it. The accounts of other people’s trauma, especially, just floored me, and I found myself needing to take breaks while reading them.

It was hard for me to believe that just reading a book could physically affect me this much! My body had become so ramped up that I actually visited a cardiologist and got my bloodwork done to be safe. I wound up getting a clean bill of health, though, and with it, a shift in my belief system about how the mind and body are shaped. I’d been raised in a medical family and chalked most mental health issues up to imbalanced brain chemistry, genetic inheritances only manageable with lifelong medication. I was diagnosed “Bipolar” as a teen and encouraged to just accept that this was how my brain worked and take my pills.

As a result, I always felt like I could never really trust my own mind. The Voice turned all of that on its head, though - if the chemistry of my body could seemingly be altered with the flip of a switch, what else was possible? My mind started to open, and I let myself think that maybe everything I’d been feeling wasn’t simply a result of WHO I was, but rather the experiences I’d had. It was in those liberating moments that my familiar identity began to crack, and some of my shame began to lift.

Looking back, it feels like The Voice pressed the factory reset button on my life. Others have suggested that maybe my body had reached a saturation point with the alcohol, but The Voice felt more like my whole system pivoting us towards a new trajectory, a fresh start. The Voice was the me who could see the bigger picture of our potential. I wasn’t punishing myself, I was freeing myself, making that wake-up call I knew I might need. I can see now too how my childhood abuse ultimately acted as a springboard for my awakening process, and so I can’t help but be grateful for it.

I was reminded of The Voice while reading Touching the Void, Joe Simpson’s autobiographical account of climbing a mountain that almost killed him and The Voice that saved his life. The Voice arrives after Joe is suffering extreme pain from shattering his leg and going without food or water for days. He’s also alone, as his climbing partner, Simon, believes he is dead. Joe knows that he will probably die soon, and as he becomes more and more physically and psychologically spent, he begins to regularly hallucinate, fall asleep, and lose track of time and space.

The Voice arrives to reorient Joe and become his north star; it breaks through the fog of his mind and the fatigue of his body to keep him moving - crawling mostly - towards Base Camp. The Voice is an unemotional, steadfast presence completely unaffected by the decline of Joe’s mind and body. He reports experiencing many other voices in his head instructing him to ignore The Voice, but The Voice is the one running the show. It is calm, lucid, and methodical. It tells Joe every day how much progress he must make to reach Base Camp in time.

An inner voice is also urging Joe’s climbing partner, Simon, to stay at Base Camp longer than his rational mind tells him makes sense. Simon has accepted that Joe couldn’t have survived - both he and Joe knew the moment Joe was injured that he was doomed - but something inside Simon is telling him to wait. “Such moments of intuition,” he says, “always seem to feel the same — impersonal, as if the decision has not come from my own mind.”

Simon was following this intuition when he cut the rope tying him to Joe. He’d done everything he could to save Joe up to that point, and it was, ironically, in cutting the rope to save his own life that Simon inadvertently saved Joe’s. It began a chain of events that led to both of them surviving apart, instead of very likely dying together. It seemed like The Voice, the presence of an intuition, had a plan for them.

Joe Simpson’s account of The Voice led me to a whole compilation of similar stories in John Geiger’s The Third Man Factor: Surviving the Impossible. The “Third Man” is a term for this “other” that’s known to help people in dire situations. It was popularized by a famous verse in T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland, inspired by a news report Eliot had read of Ernest Shackleton’s unseen companion during an Antarctic Expedition. Shackleton was actually with two other men who also experienced the presence, a fourth man who became a third via Eliot’s poetic license.

Though Geiger’s book proposes several scientific theories regarding the brain’s ability to create this phantom presence, none of them can explain how multiple people like Shackleton and his crew sometimes witness the same presence, or why the presence often vanishes just before it is no longer needed. There are several accounts of the presence seemingly abandoning a person in distress before that person consciously realizes that they’re now safe or about to be rescued.

The voice or presence is also sometimes experienced as a recognizable other - a loved one who’s died, or even in one account, a spouse who was very much alive but not physically present. Presbyterian minister Angus MacKinnon was sailing solo from Nova Scotia to Scotland when a long battle with rough seas nearly bested him. He was in the cabin resting when he felt the presence of his wife, Mary, who told him that he needed to go on deck immediately. When he ascended, he discovered that the storm had turned the boat completely around so that it was sailing in the wrong direction.

The experience led MacKinnon to wonder:

What is our presence?....Why should skepticism narrow down our cognition to exclude fields of knowledge that we are simply too uneducated to understand? The fallacy that ‘seeing is believing’ as a foolproof principle of deductive inquiry is glaringly obvious to an open mind.

MacKinnon was already a man of faith, but many of the other Third Man experiencers were not. Though some concluded that it was simply a mechanism of their brain, most felt that the presence was evidence of something beyond the physical.

Interestingly, several climbers visited by the Third Man died a short time later on different climbs. Geiger also notes that long after the disappearance of one climber, his journal was discovered with entries about a Presence that had been accompanying him. While Joe Simpson credits The Voice for his survival, others experienced a Presence there to simply keep them company until help arrived.

When faced with death, many of the people in Geiger’s book speak about the fear of isolation as something even worse than dying. For me, The Voice ultimately forced me to face myself, to feel completely and utterly alone so that I could remember the truth: that I was never actually alone at all, that none of us are.