Was I scared, facing down that big robber snake? Not more than I was angered. There's a big difference between fighting your so-called "enemy" and being afraid of something.

What's to be afraid of anyway? Not men, but nature, certainly. You know, I always meet these girls who love to ask silly questions: "Have you ever had a near death experience?" Then, I reel off a tale about how I almost bought it..! In fact, I've had at least three near death experiences. The first one is embarrassing, and the second is a sure best-seller. The third close call is harder, because you can never figure a slavish Slav like me. We say we're coming, but never show up...

None of these events which follow will ever happen to you as they actually did happen to me. It appears to be part of my destiny to live through improbable disasters. That's me - the knob with nine lives and a feckless giggle to mend each mistake I make.

My first near-death experience took place around 1992, in Canada. I was riding my bicycle along Whyte Avenue, a busy thoroughfare. It was a beautifully crisp spring afternoon, sunny, brisk air. I had to turn right onto 109th street. Two pretty blonde girls stood there in short skirts next to the TD bank. I couldn't keep my eyes off them... So, I didn't bother to check left as I rounded the corner. I didn't see any traffic lights. A small city, but a busy corner. I felt a big something whump me from behind and I somersaulted through the air. I landed on my back and the back of my head knocked against the asphalt. I was unconscious for about 10 seconds and then woke up. I hurt, but nothing was broken. Then someone helped me up. I picked up my bike and went home. An ambulance whisked me over to the hospital. The doctor said I'm okay.

The second near-death experience happened only a few years ago, in 1997, during a cycling trip en route to Chamdo, capital of eastern Tibet. High in the hinterland of northern Yunnan province lies a delightful Shangri-La called Tiger Leaping Gorge. This natural phenomenon is etched between two peaks overlooking the Yangtse River. Believe me, it's a really dangerous place to go for a walk unless you're as sure-footed as a billy goat. That day, the day I almost died, I had already ridden 70 kilometres up the main highway from Lijiang. I was still faced with a 20 kilometre hike along the path to Walnut Grove, the village in middle of Tiger Leaping Gorge. My first mistake should have struck me as ominous rather than innocuous: I ignored a local lady in the village restaurant at the trailhead. She vociferously tried to make me leave my bike behind with her so I could walk up the path instead. After I'd set out, some way up the path, a repair crew almost stopped me from going on as I reached a big heap of house-size boulders fallen across the route; and yet, I insisted on hauling my bike over the rocks.

A resthouse appeared not far beyond the massive landslide, so I ate some noodles and downed a beer. Rain is frequent in the summer, and I encountered some slippery mud and wet gravel slides. I was tired and wanted done with the remaining ten kilometres to my hotel. A recent fall of scree crossed out the pathway ahead, except for a thin trail. Not so easy to walk a bicycle along this thread. I made the first of these tiny paths, no problem. But I still had to negotiate another, then another.

I was exhausted and dizzy. You never know when you might faint on your feet. It really did happen to me. There I was - plodding along. I fell asleep for a tenth of a second - enough to lose my balance. Falling woke me. My right hand shot out as I landed on my back. Does this sound like Reader's Digest? The fingers of my right hand caught a rock and gripped it. Miraculously, the rock held me, even with the heavy bike laying across my chest. I would have slid backwards off the sharp ledge if it weren't for the rock in my right hand. I rolled my eyes back and saw upside down: behind and below my head the gorge fell away at a killer angle, at least 80 degrees all the way down 300 metres to the river below. I had to remain motionless and was trapped, since the bike lay heavily on me. What made things worse, the tiny ledge upon which I lay was tilted about 30 degrees down towards the precipice only inches below my head: one false move and I'd slip over. No kidding, this really happened and it was definitely a lot more real than any big budget thriller!

What could I do? Nothing but cling and lie there, gripping the rock and the bicycle frame. I thought for a second: how odd that my heart wasn't pounding! I felt no panic or fear. There had been one instant of reflex and adrenaline as I fell. But now, lodged in this upside down position, with no way out, I only felt annoyed and angry with myself. I could not simply crawl out from under the heavy bike! At least not till I thought about it and could muster some strength... My right hand did have a firm grip on the rock, but I could not slide my legs left or right without upsetting the delicate balance. A couple of minutes went by, lying like that, helpless. Then, I saw a young man walking along the path, a Chinese road crew worker. He carried an empty glass teapot in his left hand. He hurried up when he saw my predicament.

Still holding the teapot, the boy reached out and took hold of the bike frame on my chest. He hauled it up. Then he grabbed my left arm and held me so I could scramble up to a new footing. Giddy with relief, I gave the kid a hundred yuan right away and took his picture. Man, did I feel like a fool! Do I ever hate being a goddamn idiot knob like that!

I made it to Walnut Grove, exhausted. The new morning felt like a gift. As I lay in the soft hotel bed I shuddered at yesterday's memory - a memory that inspired a fantasy fear much worse than the real experience! I kept picturing my calamity over and over again: had I not grabbed for the rock, I would have fallen, scraped and battered on the sharp rocks, down into the river gorge. I would have drowned... It's impossible to imagine a more horrible death!

Unwillingly, I repeated this incredible story to a pretty French art student who happened to show up at the Walnut Grove guest-house. This particular airhead started to giggle as if I was telling a joke. I said, "It isn't funny. I almost died." She stopped laughing. Since then, I've told the story three or four times in company. No more. Now, I want to forget. Because each time I recollect, I see myself holding on and then after being skinned alive, I plunge beneath the rapid water and dye. Pure vertigo and fear: an awful memory.

The other near death experience happened in 1999. You don't know what an earthquake is. It's horrible - the world's biggest monster. You don't want to meet one. It's more frightening than a horror movie, and during the quake, I was much more terrified than when I lay clinging to the rock in Tiger Leaping Gorge. The earthquake woke up nearly everyone, and killed many, at about 2:00 A.M... I dreamed someone was shaking me. I half-woke up, flat on my back. My girlfriend woke up, too. I still thought it was a dream. Then, as the intensity of the quake increased, I wasn't asleep anymore!

As the whole room shakes, you feel helpless. I was paralyzed - trying to gauge the monster. My girlfriend clung to me and whimpered pitifully like a puppy. I muttered, "It's okay, it's okay."

The trembler approached its crescendo. Together we cringed and clung together in the predator's path: the beast leered hungrily at us for a moment, as if deciding whether or not to spring. Twenty seconds - all rumbling and bumping up and down. Then, the shaking grew even more violent - a mighty and destructive earthquake!

Helplessness pierces the heart until it speeds into fear. The apartment block jerked around so much that you could feel the entire structure whip-lashing to and fro, and up and down - right through all the floors below the seventh... Funnily enough - my fear and adrenaline surged even as the earthquake was subsiding, perhaps because my frozen system needed extra time to saturate my body with hormones... I hugged my lover girl and whispered, "That was a big one."

A huge disaster. No electricity and a steady pulse of aftershocks rippled through everything... The morning news told about hundreds buried alive. But nobody knew how extensive the damage was because the quake was centered deep in the central mountain range. My quake fear did not go away for weeks and weeks afterwards. Things shook under my feet as the quake perpetually seemed to revive again. The mind cannot understand its inspiration. So, we tend to blot out whatever shocks, confuses and bewilders us.

On this account, I used to call myself a "mystic rationalizer" - or, in more modern words, a skeptical unbeliever... My main hunch wanted to accommodate the obvious fact that human beings need to invent ideas that "explain" everything with no issue, cause or reason. So, we have many ways of believing. Modern philosophy was confounded by the efflorescence of science and thinkers were obliged to deny many good ideas. Our essence became a mute point of sorts. Instead, we have become occupied with ideas inspired by our immediate awareness and we count ourselves most limited by "ignorance of the facts." This ultramodern state of constant apprehension imbues living consciousness!

Although we are aware that we are alive and part of nature, we do not fathom what life and nature really are... That's the central paradox of all philosophy. We have intuitions that answer and frustrations that fail. This relationship with reality gives us the human dilemma, and reveals our imperfect intelligence. Perhaps what we are is actually at the heart of what nature is! Most of our gods would have us believe so...

But we dare not whisper our psychological knowledge. For it seems that those truths closest to essential knowledge and deep faith are unutterably nameless - borne upon the moving shapes and shadows of insight about progress and meaning, too quick to catch with the voice. Write the poem as soon as you wake up. A minute later will forget it for you...

Truth becomes apparent to us as the object of reason because we believe that the form and content of our experience reflect the source springs of all nature - as the purest reality. This idea is not readily intelligible to the Eastern mind, which seeks beyond expression, reason and response for an absolute reality quite unavailable to the senses.

Think about how necessary natural life is for experiencing philosophy: the subtlety of our conceptual world and the discerning eye can only be permitted by living contemplation - the spontaneous contents of awareness. The differentiation of life from the being of all things leads to the articulation of awareness. From the human perspective, life is congruent to the development of intelligence; at the root of intuition we feel this. Individual embodiment provides the clues we need to understand how we come to believe in things. The dilemmas of existence inspire familiar assumptions that have donned the guise of solutions. Christ assumed that God wanted all people to aspire to infinite and perfect goodness. The ratio of this wish evolved into the active cultivation of responsible morality. After all - exactly where did morality start for Christendom? Significantly enough, in a garden symbolizing the beginning of life's irrepressible growth and the development of higher consciousness! The inevitable growth of deicentric and anthropocentric habits of mind led Christianity to assume that God intended humanity to embody His identity. The development of Christian psyche is necessarily complicated by "the fall" and our seemingly inevitable departure from the garden of eternal life; Christians and Westerners have always viewed themselves as very much short of the perfection presumed to reside in the great Deity who created us. Perhaps wisdom reveals that we perpetually depart from the garden; for as we advance, we apply the knowledge the garden inspires in us, for the garden is nature. It is no small irony that we are able to believe in the Divine inspiration of things, especially as we realize that everything we have achieved comes through evolution and learning; yet, it is so obvious that we have only grown so wise, somehow because we began in a former, more stupid and nature-borne state of primeval being... We forget our beginning for new ends, ends generated purely, of consciousness itself...

Meanwhile, in the East, long ago, Buddha was persuaded that the sense-world is illusory and distracts us from the peace of true insight and release. In fact, most Eastern creeds conclude that the culprit inspiring our agony is the material reality all around us - which imposes grave care and suffering pain. Hunger, privation and lust drive men down into the animalism of small-minded and selfish craving that fuels the murderous fear and pride forcing all of us to fight for empires and so defeat our own hearts with the worst of misled passions. According to Buddhism, the physical world is founded on nothingness; in Hinduism, appearances only deceive us with shrouds upon the essential nature of reality, and these veils conceal the true being behind all material things.

To understand, to become enlightened - this natural goal is equivalent to the experience of truth. For Buddha, wisdom is a peace free from care and anguish. For the Hindus, true understanding is knowing that Atman really is Brahman...

Human intellectual advance inspired new kinds of religious beliefs in the West. Inventing words and mathematics gave us our sciences. Because the early modern philosophers still believed that God was responsible for everything, these thinkers concluded that the divine intelligence behind nature must also be reflected in our talents, and even in the structure of knowledge. Even so, it was only a matter of a few hundred years for humanity to apply science. New systems of philosophy gave us a chance to "realize" that we are the playthings of DNA. Yes, we are created by nature, we know that most certainly now. God may be behind nature, but he or she certainly need not exist at all...

Today, as in every age, no matter what you believe, human beings feel a subconscious identity corresponding to the present level of civilized advance; in fact, talent makes up your mind for you, and we realize that humanity may be aptly described as the self-created species. We do rule our own destiny, even if we agree that we aren't very good at it.

It's crucial to see that creativity generates new and very imaginative ideas, especially convictions about what truth is, and what we think that it cannot be. Compelled to explain everything through a precise expression of our relationship with reality, we seem to be embodied beings living within the being of all things. So, truth as we now know it ultimately depends upon the conceptualization of human being, which is like claiming that identity rises from a natural and an obvious expression. Humanity wishes to use intelligence to express an alliance between the heart and those instincts exactly acquired to articulate truth.