Brain Karma: Understanding ‘The Day My Brain Exploded’

Hemorrhaged brain, a hallucinogenic journey into God’s cosmic uterus, and now the author’s story ready to be turned into a movie. But here he shares how his spirituality affected his resurrection, and lessons learnt. 

My name is Ashok Rajamani. I’m the author of “The Day My Brain Exploded: A True Story”, the Pulitzer Prize-Luminary Commended Memoir.
It tells the tale of my experience as a 25-year-old Indian American suffering a massive, full-throttle brain hemorrhage that occurred at my brother’s wedding.
Though I survived, I was left with permanent bisected blindness, epilepsy, distorted hearing, erratic transient amnesia, metal staples in my brain, and ultimately, a carved cranium courtesy of extensive brain surgery.

Published a decade ago by Algonquin Books, ‘The Day My Brain Exploded’ is finally on its path to becoming a motion picture. While a production studio has yet to be decided upon, the visionary and legendary director Tarsem Singh will be directing it.

In honor of my memoir now making its way to the big screen, I was invited by ‘A Lotus in the Mud’ web magazine to write an article on how my spirituality affected my resurrection and what I’ve learned through it all.

I couldn’t say no, as my connection to the unseen is what led me past death into the land of the living.

I was 25 when my brain exploded at my brother’s wedding.

I was hospitalized immediately. For the next few months, I existed not only in the soundless neurocritical care world but also in the deep, dark world of my mind.
Days bled into nights, nights into weeks. I had lost track of time while my entire world lay in my skull. The staff nurses would continuously ask what day and hour it was. Sometimes I knew, sometimes I didn’t. It was often impossible to figure it out. Even surrounded by people, mine was a world of maddening solitude and darkness.

Ashok Rajamani’s memoir received worldwide acclaim, including raves from Pulitzer Prize Luminary Jane Smiley. He also performed the unabridged audio production of the book, which was called by Dr. Gregory O’Shanick, Medical Director Emeritus of the Brain Injury Association of America, a “groundbreaking masterpiece.”

The Liquid Afterlife

My brain began functioning in the only way it knew how at that point: hallucinations. And it started with my journey to the afterlife.

Indeed, I saw the great beyond. Yet rather than seeing the proverbial white light, I entered splendid, deep blue water, and emerged fish-like, making my way through a liquid passage, a magnificent cosmic uterus.
I was pushed through a thick wetness to emerge as a newly born. Dying, it seemed, was as difficult as being born.
The work a newborn endures to leave the womb seemed akin to my struggle. I forced my way through the watery birth canal, to die and be reborn anew.

I discovered the world after death. But just as I was pushing hardest through the heavy fluid, I was stopped – my nurse was slapping my face.
It seemed my blood pressure had dropped dangerously low; there was fear for my life. As my death illusion revealed, my hallucinations revealed a new form of consciousness I had never known.

The liquidity taught me that in death we return to being the fish we were in our mother’s womb.
And we enter another, far more substantial womb. Whether this was, indeed, God – as mother, as woman – setting us free once more, or whether the world beyond was a liquid afterlife, I knew that our visions of the hereafter – simple constructs like heaven and hell – meant nothing.
A joy, an exuberance, waits for us after our last breath. But it is neither light nor white. It is dark and blue.

To Fight, To Surrender

While my mind was swimming in divine adventures, my body had entered hell. I felt the sharp intrusive needles stabbing me.
I felt the metal tubes drilling into my skull. I felt the restraints strangling my hands and arms. I felt the injections on my feet to prevent clotting.

And I fought it every step of the way, kicking and screaming at the doctors and nurses. Like an animal, I was restrained to the bed for the rest of my stay.

Yet, in the blackness of my hemorrhaging brain, I found a way to tolerate it all: I worshiped it.

Since my pain was so intense, I decided it must be virtuous. I began deifying the pain, making it holy. Surrendering to it.
And when the nightmare became too intense, this Hindu boy named Ashok became a crucified Christ.

When I watched my family members – all sitting in chairs, their faces wearing looks of deep agony and despair – I realized I had to save them.

So began my romantic affair with my corporeal self. I would rant daily, “I’m the Body of Love, I’m the Body of Love,” as my family looked on in mute, helpless horror. In those moments, I inhaled the world’s suffering. All of humanity’s dreams, hopes, fantasies and nightmares lay inside of me, and I never let the doctors and nurses forget it.
Whenever they performed their routine tasks, I said solemnly, “Go ahead. My body is ready for you.”

After three months of pain and solitude, my skull was finally drilled open and three lobes of my brain – which were mutilated from the hemorrhage – were restructured.

Horseshoe Souvenir

The brain surgery also gave me something permanently visible to all around me. Since much of my cranium had been opened, it now had to be put back, bolted with titanium staples.
This resulted in a life-long scar.
A scar in the shape of a horseshoe. And like the hooves of many horses, my skull was now altered for life, modified by metal.
But the difference remains. Instead of running through a racetrack or a farmer’s road, the horse I had become fought to move past death’s ocean – through a liquid afterlife – swimming, pushing, forging ahead, and ultimately surviving.

The Dagger and the Flute

I believe in God. There has to be a reason why I’m still here. Sure, the surgeons did a bang-up job in bringing me back to life. They inserted clips and resected veins and arteries in my skull. Nobody is dismissing their exceptional job.
I’m not that dumb. But, in the end, they were simply gas station attendants, while God was the fuel I needed to keep me alive. To me, the Divine is beyond gender.
Yet I now realize that God – male or female – holds an infinitely feminine power, though not in the way the West thinks of femininity, as a purely inactive, nurturing essence.
Yes, that aspect is definitely present, but “female” power, described by us Hindus as Shakti, is ferocious, powerful, ruthless, and at times vengeful.
After my own hallucinogenic journey into God’s cosmic uterus, I believe in the womanhood of God, represented by the sheer force of the hypnotic Kali, correlated with Shakti.

However, I couldn’t have survived without the passivity of Lord Krishna, whose loving and warm sensuality embraces the nurturing side of both genders.
Both worlds – the passive and the vengeful – assisted me in my path to resurrection. Kali, her tongue ferociously extended, holds a dagger. Krishna, the tender, affectionate deity, plays a melodious flute.
The flute and the dagger symbolize the two deities – the two aspects of Godhead. In my transformational journey, I veered back and forth from wielding the dagger to playing the flute.
Moments of forcible rage swiftly changed to passive surrender. In the end, neither sword nor flute consumed me wholly. But the holy union of both – resistance and surrender – saved me.

I now realize that God holds an infinitely feminine power, though not in the way the West thinks of femininity, as a purely inactive, nurturing essence. Yes, that aspect is definitely present, but “female” power, described by us Hindus as Shakti, is ferocious, powerful, ruthless, and at times vengeful.

Higher Education

Life is bondage. Everything we see around us is illusory, or maya.
Reincarnation exists because we must return to this tiresome earth until we fully evolve, and we fully grasp the unreal nature of the material world.
In other words, the body is a prison from which our souls must be freed. After what happened to me, I’ve begun to understand. Only when you witness your once-healthy mind and body deteriorate do you realize that real life is unseen, beyond physical comprehension.

The whole thing is like high school. Achieving ultimate consciousness and awareness is the equivalent of finally entering senior year.
Spiritually, that’s a level that usually takes numerous lifetimes to reach.
Then, and only then, we can graduate and find salvation, or, as some might say, heaven. We can, at last, travel past even the Liquid Afterlife.
I don’t know why my karma, my fate, took me on this astounding journey of my brain’s destruction, and I don’t know why I survived it.
I don’t know why I’ve been given a second chance on this Earth: to walk, talk, see, hear, and breathe. Having had the divine experience of swimming in God’s womb, the experience of living after dying, I’ve worked hard to exist again.

In the educational institute we call life, God might be a strict, butt-kicking high school principal, but She’s a fair grader.

Yet although I doubt that I’ll make valedictorian, I definitely won’t flunk this time around, whether it ends tomorrow, two months or 50 years from now. I was granted access to enter the Liquid Afterlife, for at least a moment.
So, I think that I’ll be moving up a rung in the next life, graduating to the next grade.

After all, I’m sure making it through my brain’s long, devastating, yet triumphant journey through death and rebirth has earned me, at the very least, a bucket-load of B’s in this lifetime.

And maybe even an A or two.

Lessons

This was, this is, my karma. To experience the detonation of my brain and live once more. And it’s beautiful.
Author John Pavlovitz once summed up one of his open letters to readers by labeling his note as “a plea and a promise, a dare and an invitation.”
My own goal with this essay was not to force my concept of a Higher Power on anyone –whether you name this higher essence God, or the Universe, or simply Energy.

Rather, what I’ve written is a plea and a promise, a dare and an invitation.

See the unseen.

Wield the dagger yet play the flute.

Fight the war yet surrender to the journey.

Moonwalk through the flames, wearing sunglasses as you do.

Never give up.

You’ll make it through. Just trust that no matter what obstacles you face, no matter what suffering you experience – nothing can defeat your battle cry and your divine melody, the gorgeous karma of your life.

Lead image: “Self-portrait”; Photo by Ashok Rajamani 

“Kali Triptych” (ink, charcoal. acrylic, ink, ricepaper, canvas), Artwork by Ashok Rajamani