Out of Nowhere

By Andrew Price

OUT OF NOWHERE IS THE STORY OF A YOUNG, STRUGGLING TRADESMAN WHO UNWITTINGLY ENCOUNTERS A VIEW OF OUR WORLD THAT VERY FEW GET TO EXPERIENCE...

The unfathomable question of who we are and where do we come from... The answers are elusive and yet we cannot help but ask. 

This question, while certainly i

• Language: English
• Publisher: Shawline Publishing Group
• Release date: Jun 14, 2023
• ISBN: 9781922993250

Andrew Price

Farm boy, hooligan, tradie, father at 19, unprovoked spiritual explosion at 27, almost dying in a car accident at 32, self made businessman at 40, serial entrepreneur, philanthropist and an author at 50. Andrew Price is not your typical spiritual archetype and his unassuming and casual demeanour beguiles a life that is inspiring, intimidating and astonishing all at the same time. To have someone with both feet planted so squarely in both the spiritual world and the everyday world of ordinary human affairs is a rare thing.

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Out of Nowhere © 2023 Andrew Price.

All Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author. The only exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts in a review.

This is a work of non-fiction. The events and conversations in this book have been set down to the best of the author’s ability, although some names and details may have been changed to protect the privacy of individuals. Every effort has been made to trace or contact all copyright holders. The publishers will be pleased to make good any omissions or rectify any mistakes brought to their attention at the earliest opportunity.

Printed in Australia

Cover and internal design by Shawline Publishing Group Pty Ltd

First Printing: June 2023

Shawline Publishing Group Pty Ltd/New Found Books

www.shawlinepublishing.com.au/new-found-books/

Paperback ISBN 978-1-9229-9317-5

eBook ISBN 978-1-9229-9325-0

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Foreword

This book is the first in a series of books that are a true account of what can only be described as a spontaneous adventure into the

world of spiritual experience. It is not about traditions, religions, or other people’s stories. This is my story, a story interwoven into everyday events of a very broad and colourful life.

This first book describes a life-changing interaction after an event on the side of a dark North Queensland road in a remote part of Australia. An event that seemingly appeared out nowhere and illuminated a view of the world I had never seen before.

While the initial events described here happened in 1997, the full scope and implications of this life-changing event continue to unfold even today.

The first book focuses on the first two years immediately after this event, beginning with the initial entry into this mysterious and sometimes unfathomable world.

The remaining books in this series will take the reader on the author’s journey of reconciling and eventually integrating those initial experiences into everyday life, and describe reality through the backdrop of spirituality, travel, relationships, death, business, and philanthropy, and how all that fits into the infinite and mysterious universe we live in.

Everything written is a true account of this journey and while the names of some of the people throughout the stories have been changed, everything else is as unembellished and as factually as possible.

The mystery of life, always unfolding and changing…

‘Existence and our perception of it, luckily, does not require the agreement of others to uphold it, it simply exists whether others can see it or not.’

‘Have you ever wondered what holds up the universe, what exists outside of the reaches of our furthest imaginings?’

‘The fact that we seemly find ourselves on a small blue planet, circling at exactly the right distance from the sun in a universe that seems to expand in every direction should in itself be enough to make even the most important everyday human concerns into trivial and insignificant events.’

‘The concept of gods is nothing more than a convenient way to explain away a mystery far greater than our minds can understand; if gods created the universe, what created gods?’

‘If the Big Bang initiated life as we know it, what created the opportunity for the Big Bang to happen in the first place and where did the opportunity come from?’

‘The planet does not need saving, least of all by us. Life will go on well after homosapiens cease to exist; if anyone needs saving, it is homosapiens from themselves.’

1

On the Side of the Road

‘Okay guys, I’m outta here.’

I had just had a shower and a quick bite to eat after a long day installing roof sheeting and wall cladding on an industrial building in Gladstone with two of the boys that worked for me. We only had one work vehicle as we had left the other one on another job site down south and I needed the one we had to go and check on another job we were doing in Toowoomba.

‘Hopefully you guys will be right for the next week or so until I’m back, eh?’ I said, feeling a bit guilty. They only had two bicycles for transport, and they had to ride from the caravan park where we were staying to the job site each day, which was about one kilometre away. We had set up a couple of secure toolboxes onsite, so at least they didn’t have to carry any tools with them.

‘Do you want a joint before you leave?’ Brad cheekily asked.

‘Nah, I’m good,’ I replied with a smile.

By now it had become pretty normal for me to knock back a joint, even before a long drive like I was about to do. If it were six months earlier though, it would have been a different story.

Up until that point, my life pretty much revolved around getting stoned; I was twenty-seven and had been smoking pot pretty much nonstop since about seventeen. For the first few years, I smoked whenever I could afford it, which, on the wages of an apprentice plumber in the late 1980s, was a couple of times a week at best. However, by the time I was twenty, I was working for myself and had a bit more money and a lot more stress, so I pretty much smoked every day.

I guess you could say I was a functioning pot addict. Even though I was smoking daily, I still managed to successfully run my roofing business that employed five to seven people.

In the beginning I was only smoking in the evenings and on weekends; however, as I became more stressed at work and unhappier in my relationship, I found it easier to just stay stoned most of the time rather than deal with how I felt.

In periods of high stress, this resulted in me sometimes even getting stoned in the morning before going to work and, on most days, getting stoned as soon as I got out of the car in the evenings before going into the house. I figured there was no way I was going to leave my kids and I couldn’t see how my relationship was going to improve. So I would just get stoned and ignore it all.

Because life up in the house felt like it was shit most of the time, I would often sit there in the garage with my mates or on my own, smoking and contemplating life.

I didn’t have a religious bone in my body and aside from wondering if maybe there was something to this Karma thing, had no interest in spirituality thanks to my mum’s enthusiasm towards embracing the alternative life and moving us to Nimbin when I was ten. Nimbin is considered one of the birth places of the hippie movement in Australia and is still home to a strong alternative community dominated by alternative thinking and a desire to break the ‘system’.

Being seen as a hippie back in the 80s, especially when I finished my last two years of high school in Kyogle, which back then was about as red neck as they come, was not much fun for me. However, sitting in my stoned haze, some pretty strange things would often pass through my mind. Like thinking how cool it would be if we could change bodies as easy as we could hop into someone else’s car. You know, like take someone else’s body for a spin.

I also wondered what held up the universe – as in, what’s at the edge of space? what holds us up? and lastly how did all this come to be in the first place? The Big Bang is a bit of a poor explanation in my mind; I was more interested in what was it that allowed the Big Bang to happen in the first place, assuming of course the Big Bang even happened at all.

As my life sucked most of the time from my perspective, I also wondered what sort of sick joke it was to be born into the world only to suffer for seventy or eighty years and then drop dead at the end of it all.

Life just didn’t really make sense to me, and I wondered what the point of it all was. I really wanted to know how and where did everything commence. Not just how we got here; I wanted to know how any of it got here.

Aside from the crazy thoughts, I also noticed that my feelings, which seemed closely tied to my emotions, would sort of swell and recede, to the point that I could just about predict how I would feel in advance. As I started to feel the good feelings swell inside me, I knew that within a few days I would feel depressed or heavy again.

At least I knew there was a cycle and that I was not endlessly caught in only one feeling.

Upon realising this, I began trying to control the movement of my internal feelings, particularly good feelings. I thought if I could try and hold that good feeling at a lower, more stable level, then maybe I could prevent the bad feelings that came after it.

I did get better at prolonging good feelings by holding them low in my stomach, sort of trying to suppress them, but inevitably the good feelings would well up inside to the point I couldn’t hold them and they would rise up through my body. Once those feelings welled and slipped past my efforts to keep a lid on them, I knew it would be only a matter of time before I would hit bottom again and another cycle would start.

Trying to manage and control all those feelings got me nowhere in the end, so after months of suppressing them, I took the opposite approach by relaxing my body and pretending it had the consistency of jelly with no contractions inside it. As the good feelings began to well up, I would let the good feelings radiate out evenly through me. This was certainly much easier to do than trying to control them as I had been previously, but it was difficult to do it consistently.

In any case, pot was a big part of my life that seemed to help with all those roller coaster feelings. I think the relationship with pot was stronger than my relationship with my partner; it even felt female to me. I was sure that I would still be smoking when I was seventy years old. So, you can imagine my surprise when around six months prior to being in Gladstone, I was sitting in my office out in the shed and I refused myself a joint.

When I say I refused myself, I was sitting there doing some work and had just rolled a joint.

I was just about to light it when I heard, ‘You don’t want that.’

I looked around and said to myself, ‘what do you mean I don’t want that? I always want a smoke’, and promptly ignored it and had it anyway.

After the first encounter with this voice, I entered into an ongoing battle with it over the next weeks until, much to my dismay, it finally won, and I found myself refusing a smoke.

I didn’t stop straight away; slowly but surely it wore me down and became so annoying that I got the shits as it got the better of me. The end result was that days between smoking became weeks and then eventually months, which was very strange for me, and the boys would often ask in jest if I was okay.

‘Are you sure?’ Brad asked. ‘It’s a long way from here to the Sunshine Coast if ya gonna be straight,’ he added with a smile.

‘Yeah, I’m sure,’ I said, with a bit of a laugh. ‘It’s been a while since I’ve had any and it would probably put me to sleep.’

Driving and me had always been a curious thing, I loved it. I loved cars, I loved driving fast, I loved driving long distance and I loved driving at night. Being that I was stoned much of the time, I had learnt to drive as well in an altered state as I could when I was straight. This was not without some effort though, particularly when I was doing a long drive. It seemed that the combination of driving fast and for an extended period, which took a lot of concentration, resulted in my perception doing some pretty strange things.

The weirdest was the feeling that my body would start to feel like it was being stretched to the point where it sort of felt like I was literally sitting in the back seat of the car. The first time it happened I didn’t know what was going on and thought that maybe there was something wrong with me. My reaction times to turning and braking where all over the place and it was incredibly hard to focus as it felt like my arms and legs where so long that there was a lag to actually get them to move.

I wasn’t the sort of guy that would go and see a doctor, so I just had to learn to live with it. As I got used to it, I learnt to sort of work ahead of myself and respond well before I needed to until it became almost normal. I became so good at it, even at high speed, that no one in the car with me when this happened even suspected that anything was different, yet for me, I felt sort of stretched or expanded. I had of course put all this down to the pot I smoked and had dismissed it as one of those inexplicable things that just happen. This had been happening for years now, and I didn’t really think about it or consider it unusual anymore.

The stretching was always confined to the limits of the car – not that I had realised that at the time, though. It was a slow process that would take time to set in, but once it landed it would often last for as long as I was driving. Once I was out of the car it would dissipate within a few minutes, and I would back to normal and forget it had even happened.

‘I’ll see you boys in a week or so, eh?’ I said as I jumped in the car and drove away.

It was about 7:30 p.m. when I pulled out of the caravan park and I had a five- or six-hour drive in front of me, so I settled in and focused on the road ahead. About two hours into the drive and completely out of nowhere the most inexplicable thing happened.

Without any warning my awareness exploded. There was no slow burn, nor was it confined to the limits of my car. I just simply had the experience of exploding in every direction like a bomb going off. The shock was so immense that I automatically hit the brakes and pulled the car over to the side of the road and sat there in shock and disbelief. It was like my perception had expanded and now somehow encompassed a new additional layer of reality over and above my usual senses. The effect was that of simultaneously experiencing both the normal visual world I had always been aware of and a new world where I could see that everything was woven into one single fabric that was not separate in anyway.

As the particles of myself raced and expanded in every direction, the world I had always known as solid and steady fell away and was replaced with a fluid world that I had never seen before. In a sense, it was the same world I had lived in my whole life; however, I could now see everything interacting with everything else.

When I say I could see, it was not exactly like the way I normally saw stuff, it was more like I could tell it was there, the same way you can tell when someone is standing nearby in the dark. If you look directly at them, they disappear; however, when you look slightly to the side of them, you can make out their silhouette quite clearly.

I jumped out of the car and rolled around on the ground laughing in total disbelief that I had not been able to see this before. It was the most amazing thing I had ever seen.

The boundaries of myself had disappeared and I was literally dispersed, connected to and fluidly moving with everything. I could feel it all. I could see I was part of the trees, the grass, the planet, the stars, the galaxy… Wherever my attention went, I was there, I was everything.

I felt like I had become waves of electricity, pulsing through everything. My hair stood on end as I realised that everything was actually me and that I was everything. I stood there aware that even simply standing on the earth, I was actually standing on myself and that everywhere I looked I was there, it was all me.

To say I was connected completely fails to adequately express what was actually happening. To reduce what I was experiencing to that would be like saying my heart was connected to my body rather than my heart is part of my body. The word ‘connection’ seems to imply that it is also possible to be disconnected, and that simply is not possible. There is no possible way to be separate to anything, never has been, never could be, and never will be.

2

Let’s Back Up a Bit

Up until that point, my life was what I considered a pretty normal life. I wasn’t religious, nor had I much time for science beyond what I saw in mainstream media or the occasional flick through a magazine should I happen to be in a waiting room with time to kill. I had some awareness of spirituality from hearing random conversations as a kid when my mother dragged us off to Nimbin to live when I was about nine. However, this was mainly limited to Karma and watching adults running around naked at the local water hole.

This was much to the horror of my very religious grandparents, I am sure, who, even though we rarely saw them, were very devout Christians and let us know in one way or another that we weren’t. Mind you, they seemed to live a pretty happy life and were married for over seventy years before departing this world, both in their nineties.

After having no choice about how I grew up as a child, I can tell you I was very glad to become an adult and, theoretically, start to make my own choices about what to focus my attention on.

I grew up in a financially poor family in rural Australia during the 70s and 80s and was the eldest of four boys. I was a pretty innocent and sensitive kid and loved being outdoors. The first school I went to was in Majorca, a small goldmining town in Victoria that only had fifteen children in total, and even there I stood out as being a well-mannered straighty.

My parents divorced before I was seven, and we were raised by my mum and a mentally abusive stepfather until I was about fifteen. By this stage I had lived in at least ten different houses and attended four different schools in addition to a year of home schooling.

The result of all this, particularly from the effects of our stepfather, was that our family became quite divided. I even felt separated from my brothers and would often wake up early in the morning and leave the house to go horse riding, fishing, or hunting. I would literally spend hours on my own out in nature, which was where I felt happiest and most peaceful.

After spending year four home schooling and years five, six, seven and eight at Nimbin Central School, I finished years nine and ten at Kyogle, which was an old conservative farming community. Coming from Nimbin meant I was the odd one out in a large school and seen as a hippie, only managing to make a couple of friends. Even many of the teachers seemed to have a hard time with me, not able to relate to the kid that was a bit different to everyone else.

My grades were low, and I only just managed to pass year ten. I was sixteen, and decided there was no point continuing with school, so after getting home from our year ten party, I grabbed a pair of old overalls and stuffed them with all my clothes, tying up the feet and hand holes so nothing fell out.

Once all my clothes were stuffed inside, the overalls looked like a man with no head. I carried my headless clothes man outside, sat him on the back of my motorbike and tied him around my waist with string. I also had a kelpie cattle dog that would ride on the tank of my bike. So, together with my headless clothes man, my dog, and my motorbike, I left home.

I think I mostly blamed my mum for the hard time I got at high school and for raising me differently to most of the other kids. As an adult, though, I am extremely glad she did.

I left home because I