THE I B
Thoughts & Reflections
The In Between isn’t a place you go to or come from. It’s simply a place you are.
In sharing my experience of the In Between, I'm aware of how individual an experience it is, in terms of how it is constructed. I doubt its representation as I saw it exists without my attention there to engage it, though I know the machinations of the egg are currently underway on a more latent and sublime level, the gears ticking by one second at a time as my future unfolds.
What’s interesting is that the In Between is such an unknowable enigma but reveals to each person insights in accordance with their ability to see within, based on who they are at that moment. I suppose that just as we see life here through the filters we want, Over There we see things through the filters we need. That's why the same, ultimately objective, reality is seen so differently by so many in a tailor-made way. Yet for many, with similar signposts- the tunnel, the deceased loved ones, the life review, the angelic or holy being(s) and the return here.
Having spent a week (in our time here) yanking out events in my future, I initially wondered if I had shortened my life. I can't be sure that everything re-fit together into a smaller, more compact package of destiny, or if something else (an either/or proposition), filled the space. If my life is shorter, having been over to the other side and knowing we continue, I'm not too concerned. Better to live a shorter, better life than one that makes you sick both here and in the hereafter. But the question also reminds me of a story I read one time, where a wise man acknowledged that our destinies are indeed written in our palms, but if you can't change your future, what good does it do you? Yet God's Grace is not written in our palms, or in the stars, and with it unexpected things can happen as you're living under a different set of rules than those of destiny. Rules bent in which the impossible can happen, locked doors are thrown open, hardened hearts become soft, the evil try righteousness on for size and when your situation seems hopeless, help shows up at the last minute- so often that you learn to recognize it as His pattern.
More on the last-minute help from Above. Part of the art of letting go is the fading desire for intensity. This plane is all about intensity, full of experiences for the curious. No harm in that, just as going to an amusement park fulfills the same purpose. As we engage here, we try different things to see what we enjoy, what to avoid, what we're good at and supposed to "do for a living". Along the way, some our efforts are successful and some fail, as the world measures them. A sneaky form of attachment here is that when we are successful, the world praises us, we take the credit because we feel endorsed, we feel connected, we feel loved (for that day), and we translate that into words like "destiny" and "purpose", then preach to the young to follow our path and become pillars of society.
The downfall is when we try but do not succeed. Having established the pattern of accepting credit for our successes, we also are tricked into taking the blame for our failures, when we've tried just as hard in either case and work as diligently as those next to us who hit pay dirt. All we should hold ourselves accountable for is our effort, and leave the results to God. Again, it's about the journey of Becoming than the destination of Accomplishment. Of course there are exceptions, things for which immediate action needs no thought to justify. But for the long range goals and relationships, many times "the things isn't about the thing (that you think it is)".
In contrast to intensity is the sublime. Moving from the always-active to the always-still is when we change our perspective and frame of reference, and subtle patterns become observable behind the noise. We see the ways in which the world (and beyond) really work.
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I've been asked several times if I had a bad premonition on the day I crashed. Whether before takeoff if I was feeling nervous in any way about flying.
I'd say my greatest trepidation was before the first test flight, as one would expect. As I landed in one piece on the trial flight, even though I didn't like the way the plane handled, I had a sense of how to fly it.
I will admit that going up again was like riding a horse that's thrown you; you have to do it because tomorrow you'll want to do it even less. Continue along that way and eventually, you'll never ride again. But did I feel anything that said, "Don't fly today"? No.
It is a very valid question given the psychic value of the OoB experience, but there is a better question:
"Had you known that you would crash and what would follow, would you have been strong enough to get into the cockpit and fly anyway?"
I don't know about you, but my heart and my instincts tell me how I should be able to answer that question. And it's an answer most of the world won't agree with. Yet is an answer that reveals what is more important to me. Though I would like to think I'm strong enough to say yes, I suppose that I'm not- that lack of merit equating to no foretelling of the crash. One day, I do expect to know what's coming next, even if it is unpleasant, by having the single-mindedness to go through whatever is coming at me, understanding its place in my journey.
At the same time this makes me ponder- why don't we know our future? Could any parent prepare their child's lunchbox, tie their shoelaces and send them out the door to school, if they knew that in 5 minutes a car would jump the curb at the bus stop and kill their baby? This makes me think that if we can't see the future, perhaps it's because we choose not to. People come and go in and out of life every day. But if we lived with the pain of knowing who was next, we would hold back for fear of getting hurt and we would not engage in the ways we're meant to. Again, from the viewpoint of Understanding versus Answers, I see how the answer to "Who's next?" is less important than the understanding of making every moment count, and never parting in anger.
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Random Thought:
When I returned home from the hospital and began to write down my experience in the IB and my re-entry here, I test flew my story with a few people who I considered trustworthy. By that I mean self-introspective people who would read without initial judgement and with an open mind. Of this small population, some responded with enthusiasm and wanted to hear more and continue to be supportive. A couple asked, "What the hell is this all about?" which I thought funny and somehow endearing. The ones who puzzle me are those who went absolutely silent and I've never heard from again- and they used to check in on me at least to see how I was healing. I'm more puzzled than saddened by this. We weren't close but at least in one or two cases these people drove some distance to visit me when I returned home. Now, silence. I think I will now reach out to them to see why. If my story hit them in a certain way, I'd like to know. Perhaps they didn't like it, were ambivalent, or liked it but simply had no words or response. If I hear anything interesting in this follow-up, I'll post it here.
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One year after my time in the In Between, it was if I'd been given that time to heal and gather my strength for some changes to be made. From the outside, you’d think those changes were meant to be in my worldly life, but it soon became obvious to me that these were internal changes, and yes- with some reflection in the outer world. In these changes, I see some things that I find interesting in themselves, and more so in their implications.
Many times in my past, help would come just in the nick of time- it might be financial, it might be a job, it might be a premonition…it might be in warzones. Help probably came in a million other less-obvious ways to which I was oblivious.
With time and repetition, I gained some experience in seeing or sensing the patterns in which I was helped, and so with that came the trust to worry less and have faith, even when waiting to the last minute. It became a game in fact, using the last few minutes in which everything was about to turn to disaster, to look more deeply into … everything…. for the emerging help coming.
At this 1-year mark since visiting the In Between, I knew a new insight was being both given and asked of me. The last-minute help would still come when needed, but instead of magically coming through unexpected sources, God was asking me to take the lesson of interconnectedness and see how it worked through my relationships, which makes sense on so many levels. So He told me this was coming and what to watch for- watch the people, and the relationships- and take nothing personally. Watch how He works through people. And so I did. There are a lot of take-aways here, and they will continue to unfold as I look more closely at the pattern, and it repeating itself.
One thing immediately interesting was to realize that God can work through people and they have no idea what's going on. Think about that. Everyone is on their own journey, and most of us walk it with this illusion that we're in control of at least a few minutes of our day. Aside from how the interactions between free-will and fate answer “what did you do today?” the fact that God can work through anyone to do what needs doing is intriguing. When this happens, what is that person feeling right then? Do they feel good, purposeful, confused or ….what? Seeing this when it happens, I’m now in a place to recognize it, and ask. My task is to ask in a way that seems natural to the conversation, to influence the answer in the least way possible.
Another question about this dynamic: take someone who worries about the net-total each day of virtue & sin. If they are religious, they may hope that the net-total favors virtue. I’m really paraphrasing and simplifying here, so just walk with me as I shortcut. In that we may not be aware that day that God used us to help someone, but that on that day let’s say it happened, for that time period was the person without sin? Could those God-inspired actions ever color so outside the lines as to be- as the world sees it- unlawful? All it takes to go from being a good citizen to a criminal is the whimsy of the pen of a media-hungry politician, so allow the question a little flexibility.
In the bigger picture, since God can work through anyone at any time, where is the question of eternal damnation? Is this a simple choice of us asking Him to simply fill our days not with the actions of our desires, but His? But there were those who prayed for that, who at the same time lit the stakes with evil witches tied to them. So this is a pretty arguable point, I’ll grant you. But I think there is a middle path here, and I don’t think my perception of Him working through people is wrong. I’m just wondering- if this is indeed true- where does judgement come in?
I’ll park this for now and let it idle.
More later.
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06JAN2018
How many times have you heard people wonder if there is free will or fate? To what extent has the illusion of free will contributed to our suffering, versus making choices with a sense of being beholden to another person or higher purpose? Yet for the play we call Life to move forward, this illusion seems necessary to the drama.
The first thought I have is that there is both fate and free will. Fate is what happens to you throughout the day over which you have no control- suddenly losing your job, suddenly winning the lottery, a loved one having a bad day who distractedly says something dismissive and hurtful, having or causing a traffic accident. All these things in which we may have a minor role of awareness or action, but not necessarily the outcome. But to the unexpected loss of a job, we can choose to become despondent or feel liberated; to the impossible winning of the lottery we can choose to spend, save or donate; to the loved one who doesn’t realize they hurt our feelings, we can respond with offense, let our baggage make us defensive or become still and understanding- seeing the passing moment for what it is. A traffic accident that we’re involved in as either an instrument of the cause of party to the effect, we have myriad choices on how to respond and therefore define our roles in the range of possibilities.
In the 3rd paragraph of the Thoughts & Reflections page, I’ve shared my thoughts on fate being written in our palms. Free will is not written, but can be guessed by the pattern of fateful events continually coming our way from choices we will make. For many people, “free will” is pre-programmed by a long and intense history of stimulus/response. Though Pavlov’s dogs were rewarded and conditioned to salivate when they heard the bell, on some level it could be argued they still had the free will to slobber or not.
In sharing the story of how the future is written in our palms, I also said Grace is not. That’s where another possibility between free will and fate exists, when God takes over and directs our actions, without us knowing. As much as for any reason, this can occur in answer to our prayers. I mention this a few paragraphs above. God may help us by working through others, and He may also answer our prayers by moving us to act in unexpected and new ways. We may have no idea why we’re suddenly inspired to go left when we’d usually go right, or thoughtfully listen when we’d normally fill the silence that’s pregnant with meaning with our own comforting noise. But in those moments, God’s Will works through us. I’m curious to meditate more on this, because this is where living within His Will and not being necessarily conscious of It come together. If we were aware, it might give rise to pride.
And I’ve seen, when all else fails, God design a situation unique to us for which there is no other choice than for events to unfold in an unavoidable way. The only way we can atone for our past is to change the course towards our future. The future, as a set of probabilities, is more important than our past, frozen without change.
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11JAN2018
I was thinking the other day, if the egg-shaped machine of the future’s gears of experience tick by one second at a time, as things unfold, are experienced and then fade away, and that is what we call "living life", then how do I account for the constant whirring around of my future with no impact on my earthly life at that moment? Seeing those gears whirl around would have been a time-accelerated view of my life, but I didn’t come back as an older man, or from a years’ long sleep. I’m thinking that as I was in the IB, and not on earth, my life was suspended here for that one week, and therefore the machine could start, stop, recycle and begin again without impact to my life. As if my vacancy put things here and there in Neutral.
I also ponder how something so personal as the actual machinations of one’s life, down to the most microscopic granularity, could be represented as something so impersonal as a machine. Is it because that’s just how it is and my ego is affronted? Or is it because that’s how I view my life, from arm’s length and detached? While it indeed may be that I saw it that way because I didn’t get enough hugs as a kid, looking at one’s life objectively does have advantages.
Another thing, since I’m on a roll. When I was in the IB, I had no memory of the past or life left behind here. Because there, the past isn’t important- whether your viewpoint is that the past is dust or cast in concrete, it doesn’t matter to the certainty of Now and probabilities of the future. Also, with no consciousness of the past, there was no will or memory to return. Therefore the only way to come back is to be sent back. If someone had walked up to me and said, "You can go back or you can go on", I would have simply shrugged. Just shows how we have no control over anything.
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22JAN2018 - Random Thoughts
I was thinking the other day:
1 - I am sure the machine-type appearance of my future- the egg housing with the gears inside- is particular to me. Perhaps my way of seeing things and the way something would need to appear to me to call out my intuition of how it works is what shaped it. I don't know if it is an automatic thing- you show up like a key and the right lock presents itself, or if there is some hand behind the scenes that does that with the ability and go even further to give you what you need, and in ways that for years may not be discernable. I wouldn't be surprised either way, but I'm sure that whatever you need one second from now is there.
2 - The next question is, for anyone else who might have had a similar experience, in whatever form it would take to them, would the workings of their future have appeared also as something so impersonal as - for me - a machine? Or might it take a more organic form? For example, instead of a machine with gears/choices I needed to remove, might someone else see an intriguing garden with weeds that needed removing?
3 - Why does it matter? Only because looking at every second of one's life- the past and the future, implies a large measure of intimacy. It doesn't get much more personal than that. So my question could be: was it not the choices that were impersonal or represented as the gears needing removing, but the effects of those choices upon me? Meaning, if I was feeling the effects of my choice, as neutral or bad, then that was by grabbing the associated gear. If that's the case, was the gear itself the choice or the result? The cause or the effect? Based on the Interconnectedness, are they One? I think they are. I think it is our illusion here that would appear that some people get away with things- the uncaught thief, the anonymous insult hurled, the prowling serial murderer- but in the IB, I can tell you that you will feel the impact of things you've done that you will never have a clue about. As one mystic said, "To breathe is a sin", as we kill millions or organisms in the air with every breath. It simply can't be helped. But know in our hearts that the alternatives is not is what is desired by God. The trick is to find the answer of what suffering that is woven into the very fabric of our experience of being here is acceptable by the Divine and that we can pay off, if possible, daily so as to not be more than we can handle in one lump sum? The best answer I've gotten to that is daily meditation- connect to the Divine and burn off the things that attach you here.
4 - This is why the machine looked so impersonal. Because it is built according to the Law. The Law of Karma, Sowing and Reaping, Giving and Taking, Ups and Downs. And the Law is impersonal, as everyone knows. However, as one can ask the jury or judge for mercy, so can one ask for God's Grace. As choice and consequence are interconnected, we make it easier for God to help us when we make good choices, rather than bad ones from which we need rescue. God prefers to work within the law that he himself created and allows to exist, and so should we. Let the miracle be that we come to that place and sense its rightness to not be violated, rather than needing to be saved from the gallows every other day.
5 - Which brings me to my experience. God did not break any rules of saving me from unfortunate choices as much as he gave me a mirror of reality without benefit of ego-filters so that I could feel without protection of denial the effects of those choices, and remove them from my path. Not so that I could encounter them as temptations or miscalculations, but so that they would be removed from my life altogether. If I ask why this Grace of rewriting my future was given to me, it was surely in response to something I've asked for. Perhaps an answer to the prayer of "help me change". As I have no idea what changes I made other than I believe them a removal of bad things, I can only go step by step. In the end, it seems God still wants us to know through discovery and experimentation, than mere rote memorization of moral codes.
6 - No one ever made a cake by singing a recipe. You actually have to roll up your sleeves, get the ingredients and through trial and error, make a cake worth eating.
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22JAN2018
I'm not a joiner. My nature is to keep to myself. In learning, I always tended to the master:apprentice relationship, which is about as 1-on-1 as it gets. With more individual attention, I did much better in learning. Most of us would fit into that category.
Knowing this, God met me head on when I was little, speaking to me in the way I best understand.
It was in June, 1969. We lived in Jacksonville, Florida. AI was asking my parentsabout God and wearing them out with all the questions. They finally lost patience and toldme to go down the road to church- Highlands Baptist Church, on Broward Road. The next Sunday morning, Iput on my suit and walked past the 4 or 5 houses to the church, ready with allmy questions.
I sat in the pew and saw the minister up on the stage,talking to a team of helpers and obviously too busy preparing his sermon todeal with me. Looking up at the clock counting down to the Service, Ioriented myself by watching him, his body language and demeanor, looking at thecrowd around me and getting a general sense of what it was like to be in church.
My issue then, and now, with most sermons is that for a kid,"Open your heart to Jesus" literally means nothing. Conceptually I had no idea what that meant or how to do it. To know youwant God but be given the way in gibberish caused only frustration. Add to that the impression it makes on a child to be called a sinner who will burn in Hell unless he unlocks the gibberish and he starts to wonder if "their" heaven would his Hell. Imagine spending eternity with people like that. That would beone of my questions for the minister, for sure. If the instructions had beenas they are for something like yoga and meditation, "Sit in this position,breathe like this, relax, look into the darkness between your eyes, repeat thismantra....", reading like a checklist, well a child can follow that.Perhaps that’s the problem with Christianity today, that everyone is equally confused. How else are people unable to follow even the one, final commandment- to love your neighbor asyourself?
Atthe end of the service, I was ready to jump up and walk over to him buteveryone in the church was suddenly in line ahead of me to shake his hand,invite him to lunch or dinner, gain some counsel or just get ablessing. If I thought he was too busy before his service, there wasabsolutely no chance of speaking to him now. I left and went home,determined to figure out a way to talk to him next week.
Next Sunday came and again I went to church. Ithought to sit where I could get to the preacher at the end of his service morequickly and nearer the front of the long line of people.
But now we had a new preacher going through the samepreparation as last week. I looked at a woman sitting next to me in thepew and asked where Reverend Coolidge was. She said primly, "We gotrid of him." I asked why and she informed me that he did theunthinkable and married his daughter to a black man. To her, that explainedeverything, so I could now end the conversation and look straight ahead- whichshe would simply interpret as shock born of righteous indignation. Actually,I was confused even worse than before. As I said, this was the South inthe late 1960s, so it's not a guess as to what the predominant racial attitudeswere and I was reminded of them right then. But it made no sense tome. Even then I knew that spirituality shouldn't care about such things,and yet here were such concerns flooding the church. I didn't even hearthe sermon, and I couldn't leave before it ended as I realized that I was stuckin the middle of the pew and if I tried to escape, all the crazy people mightkill me. Best to lay low and run home at the first chance. Then I couldask my mom to help me sort it out. I never went back to that church.
My mother answered my questions as if she wereremembering a bit of forgotten news. She confirmed that Reverend Coolidge hadindeed married his daughter to a black man. Reverend Coolidge himself wasa Cherokee Indian- a very interesting (I thought "cool") lookingman. His younger daughter, Rita, was soaring in hermusic career and her slightly older sister, Priscilla, was alsoa rising star. Reverend Coolidge married Priscilla to Booker T (Jones), of Booker T andthe MGs. Legendary talent. So it was natural that 2 such peoplemight meet and fall in love, and I understood that. Yet the only thing so manypeople saw was color. Having been raised in this time and in this place, Ialso understood the prevailing sentiment of the congregation. But as atwelve-year-old in a racist, authoritarian culture, it mattered little what Ithought. If I had voiced my displeasure, it would have ended with a heavy-dutyspanking when I got home. In that there were no answers as to why it had to bethat way, this is when I began to intuit the greater importance ofunderstanding over answers. But the ability to articulate it this succinctlywouldn’t occur to me for almost a half-century. I guess it needed to sink in.
Now, after my NDE, I understand that God was saying itwas wonderful that I wanted to know Him. But if I walked the ways of man,I would come out with more questions than I went in with. If I walked with Him,He would tailor my lessons and where answers might fail, understanding would begiven.
A simple indicator of this was driven home in my confusion understanding the sermons, which I've mentioned. “Open yourheart”, “Straighten up and fly right” and other colloquialisms are cute as a linguistic shorthand when you understandwhat they mean. Simply put, most things that were or wouldhave been said in the church didn’t provide me with actionable intelligence. Butthe congregation of people who had surely made sacrifices in their lives toknow God as they could understand Him, who had made enemies and friends along that journey,were now kicking out their earthly shepherd for no worse a crime than he haddared marry his half-breed daughter to a black man. And that, is apparently the lesson I went to church to learn, for it’sthe only one which presented itself. That any honor man bestows, man can takeaway.
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03FEB2018
On my Home Page, the scene I have is the one I saw upon immediately arriving in the In Between. I have mentioned elsewhere that the artwork I have now is incomplete- the egg-shaped machine of my future should be full of sector gears, each ticking away a second at a time as the associated thought, word or deed begins, passes and ends.
At the end of last year, I was directed to meet someone with whom we might have mutual interests. I met with Tony at his location in a nearby town, in which he rents space to start-ups, artists, events, etc. The goal is to stir things up by giving people space to be creative- in art, business, technology, you name it- and then meet each other and further collaborate on new ideas. I imagine a next possible phase might be "business incubator", though it will likely be more than this. Interestingly, this turned out to be his logo- the sector gear, like I'd seen in the IB.
Also late last month, I met a very nice man in the film and advertising business named Nestor. As I'm working on a media idea to help share my experience in the In Between, it seemed natural to share this with him. I was surprised by how interested he was, the excellent questions he asked and the general overall sense that he got it. Since then we've had a couple of calls, and then yesterday he sent me this- it's just outside his office in New York:
I'm sure you can see why I find this interesting.
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7FEB2018
I was reading the news today, Science section. I enjoyed reading this article, as it points straight at something I learned in the In Between, but had not deeply considered yet. It makes perfect sense too.
Just as soon as you begin to feel comfortable with how things are interconnected, no matter how far apart they are, they throw a curve ball at you: that a change in one thing not only changes its interconnected companion on the other side of the universe, but also on the opposite end of time. That things right now impact you that cycled through the birth and death of their suns and that you will have an impact on something that won't exist for billions of years. Wow.
You thought quantum mechanics was confusing? Check out entangled time (click)
7FEB2018
I was reading the news today, Science section. I enjoyed reading this article, as it points straight at something I learned in the In Between, but had not deeply considered yet. It makes perfect sense too.
Just as soon as you begin to feel comfortable with how things are interconnected, no matter how far apart they are, they throw a curve ball at you: that a change in one thing not only changes its interconnected companion on the other side of the universe, but also on the opposite end of time. That things right now impact you that cycled through the birth and death of their suns and that you will have an impact on something that won't exist for billions of years. Wow.
You thought quantum mechanics was confusing? Check out entangled time (click)
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18FEB2018
I went driving today, where I do my best quiet thinking, and listening.
Here is that the IB revealed to me today.
There was no tunnel of light, no out of body perception of the room I was in and its activity around me. I simply appear in this otherworldly place to find myself resting on one knee, high up on a terraced rooftop of an abandoned building. I'm bent over in stomach pain and with great effort look up. ’
I see an amazing, panoramic skyline of a purgatorial city…gray buildings stacked upon gray buildings stretching all the way back to a brooding skyline. Apocalyptic clouds hover over the metropolis, storm-heavy.
In this gothic world, there are no sounds. I’m not deaf, it’s just that still and quiet.
Kneeling in its shadow all along, I suddenly notice to my left the only real thing of interest- a large egg-shaped structure, an open latticework of gray metal, with many gears inside. Monolithic. Austere. And finely crafted-- the egg is maybe four stories high, its intricate latticework constructed of a dull metal as gray as the world surrounding it. Another wave of nausea hits me.
I say out loud, “I don’t think I can stand this.”
Inside the egg, there is an immediate whirring of sector gears- the kind of partial arc gears you see in clock-like mechanisms. These move in all directions within the confines of the egg.
With great effort, I draw closer, studying the egg and its moving gears within.
What follows is a conversation that was telepathic and a characterization of what was communicated.
Me: What is this thing?
As I stand before the mighty mechanism, a disembodied voice responds, again, within my consciousness.
This is the future birthing into the now.
I see the gears— some which appear solid and some not- passing through each other in a physically impossible manner. The otherworldly dance of the gears is complex- like a 4-D model of time.
They come to rest and I reach through a gap in the side of the egg.
This is the process of Becoming.
My fingers touch one of the more solid appearing gears. On its surface, I see something like a video feed of future events. Then I double over in pain.
With a reflex, I rip the gear out, pulling it through the egg’s lattice wall and throw it over my shoulder. The machine responds by spinning its gears around again, recalibrating for the loss of one, whispering with a light clacking sound into a new configuration.
Me: What’s happening now?
Response: Each gear is the probability of a thought, word or action in your future. Your destiny is resetting itself around the now missing event.
Me: How did I know I could do that? Pull that gear out, removing that future moment?
Response: Why else are you here?
Me: I have no idea. I don’t even know what this place is.
Response: You are in the In Between.
Me: In between what?
Answer: Everything. The Impossible Now between the past and the future.
And I Say: That makes no sense whatsoever.
Response: It’s impossible in its short duration. Yet here you are, standing inside the eternity of a single moment. Do you remember who you are in the world to which your body belongs?
I look blankly into space, squinting with the effort to remember.
Me: I have no idea. I can’t remember anything.
Response: Then you see the truth in how the past is dust.
Me: OK. Why do some of these gears- these futures that I touch- make me sick and not others?
Response: All choices have unintended consequences, some unfortunate and some not. The pain each brings is your guide.
Me: Where are the gears that feel good?
Response: You’re not here to feel good.
More gears emerge within view, some passing through others, several clear and definite, many less defined and hard to focus on, though all bringing with them their clear images of meaning.
Each time they come to rest, I pull out a gear that I feel by my pain to be to my future detriment.
A new gear swings into view. On this one I see a Ferris wheel and happy grandchildren whizzing by, fingers grasping their car. LAUGHTER...they smile at me, or through me, looking off into their own world.
Obviously, I let that gear pass by.
At one point I look at the growing pile of gears.
Me: It’s starting to look like if I don’t have a bad future then I have no future at all. Am I going to die sooner from doing all this?
Response: Your destiny has to fit itself around futures that aren’t meant to be. Your number of breaths are already counted. I will worry about your last one.
Me: I don’t know how comforting that is.
Response: Eliminating bad choices doesn’t mean you won’t make wrong ones. You won’t know they are wrong until after they pass. Since right and wrong are variables you have no control over, the answers to what comes tomorrow are a waste. Better is understanding the beauty of how everything fits and re-fits together.
Me: So what am I missing here, in my lack of understanding?
Response: What is clearly before you. Grace. It is your birthright, but it must be asked for then chosen, at the expense of the world that separates us.
Me: This fixing my future is painful. And I feel ashamed that I’m not doing it with some moral compass. I’m only guided by pain. I don’t even know where these futures happen.
Response: Where is no more important than what or when. Removing your enthusiasm to further chain yourself to the world isn’t as painful as carrying the crushing weight of those chains, once forged around you.
Me: It's as if this place was made so I can only do one thing and one thing only, with no chance to screw it up.
Response: If those with choices make poor use of them, then offering fewer possibilities could be called mercy.
I watch a gear disintegrate into dust as it passes out of view, from the present into the past.
Response: You can’t change the past. But you can alter the future. Pay more attention to your relationships. Be gentle with others, as I am gentle with you.
Me: Gentle? What’s gentle about all this?
Response: You prayed for something for which being here is the answer. And now the man who fell from the sky is not the same who flew into it.
I look up into the stone gray sky and then out across the seemingly dead and abandoned city. I look back to the egg and reaching up, place my hand upon it.
(I say this out loud)
Me: I think I can live with this now.
That’s when I wake up, back on this physical plane of existence and find out later I was out for 1 week. I can tell you that I did not stop the entire time in the In Between yanking out those gears in order to feel less sick. But time didn’t seem to move at all there, and it’s not like I had a physical body that needed to rest, eat or sleep.
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16MAR2018
I have recently been invited to a luncheon in NYC and the topic for discussion is "Kindness Unedited". I find the topic and the location of this event interesting for 2 reasons:
1 - When I left the IB, I was told to pay attention to my relationships, because everything is interconnected. "Kindness" as a reason to get people together for a meal, fits.
2 - The location of the luncheon is exactly where the egg-shaped artwork shown above sits. Out of the entirety of New York, I find that interesting.
I guess I'm meant to go.
Also, I am fascinated how the things I was shown in the IB are constant as subjects of quantum phenomena in my science news feed. My inability to clearly focus on the machinations of my possible futures until they become concrete realities of the present seems logical and philosophically obvious. Yet when you really see this in action, there are subtleties at the edge the math may not show. I believe that if we can intuit how things work at a quantum level, we can influence them in a way that yesterday would have appeared as magic. I wish I could be more definite with that thought, but right now I can't.
I'll just have to look for an opportunity to present itself and try.
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17MAR2017
As I saw the gears spinning around, I was puzzled as to why I could clearly see their representations of things I’d think, say or do but not the gears themselves. As much as I tried, it was simply impossible to focus on them. To a point, yes, but oddly their background was in focus but not the gears themselves, even when stopped.
Then I realized that you can’t focus on a probability because it is a representation of several possibilities, which aren’t yet in a single place- to be focused on- until one supersedes the others and becomes the singular present. It is a poetic statement that the housing of all the gears birthing from the future to the present appears in the shape of an egg.
All of this was showing the quantum reality of time, entanglement and how all things are interconnected. Not only across impossible distances, but across all time. There are entangled particles that are a universe apart, but when you change the state of one, you instantly change the state of its entangled mate, no matter the distance in space or even in time. There are things that happened at the beginning of time that are, not will, affecting other things at the end of time. Therefore, what of what we call time between the beginning and the end of the universe, if what occurs impacts a particle at the beginning of time instantly impacts its entangled mate at time's end? I imagine that as we therefore travel along the arrow from one to the other, we are not traveling toward an end, but to the Source. Reaching the end, we reach the beginning.
One way of looking at it is that everything is already happening all at once. Time is the artificial construct by which the story plays out with a beginning, middle and end. And yet, though that implies that everything future is as scripted and concrete as the recorded past, you could say in one sense that is true and yet what you have to get used to is that each possible probability actually does spawn its own moment in time, with its own future, allowing every possibility to play out. It’s our limited ability to focus on only one reality at a time that keeps us from seeing all parallel possibilities come into expression simultaneously, and then see their timelines extending into the future. Yet it can be done.
This also makes sense of the statement in quantum physics that says the observer affects the outcome of any event through the simple act of observation. Yet when every outcome is occurring, the question is not how our watching events unfold affects them, but why do we see only certain (or one) outcome instead of all? Because we are following the script of a particular timeline. The best answer I can give as to why one timeline over another defines our observable, and observational, lives is destiny, karma, etc. A deeper question is, is there another version of us that split off from the present into an alternate future? Meaning, is there more than one of each of us, all living in billions of parallel realities simultaneously? If so, which one are we? Or is individuality, like time, an illusion and we are as infinitely probable as everything else?
If this is so, where rests the question of salvation and damnation- if in some realities we are gods and others, demons? Or is that the play where our growth into godhood is to know each version of ourselves, each flavor of reality, intimately? Is this what it is to be children of God?
OK, so if the above describes the usual but impossible ways in which everything plays out moment by moment, then how do I explain what’s going on here in the IB? If all realities are happening, then what is there for me to change? And where are the other Jims while I am here doing this? Is there a place where we’re all ever going to meet, in one place and in one time? And then I realized, I was being given a chance to remove choices across universes, not just mine. I was consolidating the realities to an increasingly singular set of circumstances and thereby aligning the Jim path across all possible timelines.
Then I realized that this is how God is bringing me home. That my all of me’s wanted this and it fell on one of us, the me at this time and in this place, to pull it off. That’s a lot to realize is at stake.
And as I pulled out the things that felt wrong to keep, I pondered the machine’s whirring around to reset the gears to futures that won’t exist. I understand now that all my parallel futures will become more similar, as I’ve reduced the choices my alternate selves will make, and that points to a convergence of realities. Perhaps the number of realities popping out of the present is based on our own individual desires, which are many. Many enough to ponder, “what if”? as we decide whether to turn left or right, to choose wrong or right, to choose the dark and the light- and every shade between. Perhaps as our desires fade, so do the number of ways we ponder them. The man with few desires is a man with few paths to walk. The man with no desire has no path to walk. In one sense, he is free to not be bound by time or space, and be everywhere there is to be, and at the same time. He can understand all the choices before us, and the fruits of each. Understanding causality from this perspective, he is also free from having to walk any more paths. He is done. It is done.
In seeing the resetting of the machine’s gears to those cancelled futures, the lesser man would try and remember every scene of major events as they whipped by- when to buy into the stock market, or make a major real estate purchase, and then when to sell- just in the nick of time. Who they would marry and when, who close to them would die and why, and on and on. These facts are answers to the big questions in life. What do I do for a living? Who will I marry? How will I die? But the greater man doesn’t worry about the answers because they are a one-shot deal to each parallel reality anyway. It’s the understanding, not the answers, that threads the multiverse together. By limiting the numbers of paths the present can take, your limited understanding, by definition, is increased to include them all. It may sound like a trick, but it’s how God bends the rules without breaking them.
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19MAR2018
I posted this a year ago on FaceBook. Seems appropriate to also place it here:
On the condition of lost innocence, by Wordsworth:
"Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting;
The Soul that rises with us, our life’s star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar.
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come,
From God, who is our home."
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30MAR2018
I've been quiet for the past couple of months, working, thinking and meditating on my story. Seeing how more of it is unfolding. One concept from the In Between that came up was the Impossible Now. It was "impossible" because of its incredibly short duration, and its infinitude of width. By design and how we fit within it, you are forced to be Present- as In That Moment present. Inside it, there is no past and no future, but it is infinite in its expanse across universes. This is why it's easy to get lost within it and experience difficulty even thinking or talking- for as you normally in speech, thought or writing are thinking of the next thing to say as you get this one out, in the Impossible Now you forget the next thing you would think of saying as soon as it flashes into your mind. It's like you are simultaneously in an observer mode even as you are speaking. I guess from being in this place, I sometimes read what I write while in there and wonder who wrote it, as I have no memory of doing it.
I sense also an association of this impossible thin-ness of the present with walking a razor's edge of focus. When we focus down to that quantum level of infinite shortness of Now between the future and the past, the width of a razor blade becomes wide enough to walk upon.
I'm understanding from quantum physics more about where I went, what I saw and what I experienced. That the impossibly intersecting gears of probable futures were appearing to pass through one another as a representation of the superpositioning of all possibilities. That they are in flux, coming to the fore and retreating again as the uncertainty of their selection to become "real" itself ebbs and flows, based on a million things. Finally, one of these waves of probability collapses into a dominant particle of manifestation and that's what we call reality. This is why I couldn't see all of the gears clearly, though I could the events they represented. The gears were hard to see because of their probable natures even though their meanings were clear.
I've spoken before about the importance of Understanding over Answers. That is because Understanding reveals Meaning and Answers reveal Purpose. Both are important, but purpose can take you only so far.
When I was removing the gears representing bad choices in my future, I have said that I wasn't guided by some moral compass or recitations from holy scriptures. I was guided by the pain of the choices I’d made, and those of the choices my current path would present for me and were likely to be made. As I removed them, I have no idea what they were, nor did I need to. They hurt me, so I got rid of them. It was that simple. The need to know what they were was replaced by the understanding that they were bad for me. It doesn’t mean I won’t still make wrong choices, but they won’t be bad ones.
And if you still think answers are more important than understanding, I’d ask you to consider how that worked out for Adam and Eve, when they traded the fruit of understanding and meaning in the Garden of Eden for that of answers and purpose in the world.
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19JUL2018
Back in late May, I went to visit my mother and help her with the final paperwork preparing for her eventual move to an assisted living facility. During the few days I was there, we accomplished everything needed.
On my way home, I noticed I felt differently, about my connection to life. This was a marked change since my plane crash and how I felt about the In Between and my connection to this world.
I would characterize it as feeling lighter in spirit, happier. But I also felt more engaged to the world and less moment to moment mindful of the IB in the same connected way as before. That bothered me, as I never want to lose that connection to the Beyond the NDE gave me.
Yet I thought further on it and asked, “Isn’t helping my mother the correct response to the IB’s telling me to ‘pay attention to your relationships’, as it tossed me back to Earth?” So if following orders resulted in differences of feeling about that which commanded me, then it must represent not just a change of state, but an evolving state, sanctioned by that giving the orders.
The admonition to “pay attention to your relationships” goes much deeper though. Read on.
Returning home in this lighter spirit, I received a phone call the next day from a customer, asking me to consider coming to their business and heading up an entirely new division that would significantly increase their revenues. My interpretation was that this call was either the result of the lighter sense of being, or the lighter sense of being was in preparation for it. But I also had a feeling that this call wasn’t to bear the expected fruit, but a warm-up.
A week later, my mother called to tell me she fell and broke her hip, and needed me. As I was packing the car, a former associate called me to tell me about his 6-month startup that had more business than they could handle and would I take them on as a customer. They increased my business significantly. Thankfully, I was able to perform my work for them, as for my other customers, remotely (meaning, from mom’s kitchen table).
In my initial conversations with this new customer, I felt as if they needed me, and liked coming to know me, not for what I could bring them, or my skills, but because of who I am. I could feel that subtext as strongly as if it was spoken out loud. I told them all at our first dinner of my NDE- as it is important to me and I decided to just get it out of the way. And besides, since the IB was facilitating this opportunity, it could perk up the ears of anyone sensitive to such a message, engendering further conversation.
Still, between helping my mother with everything and working to assist this very demanding and new customer, I was aware in how on the surface my connection to the IB was different in that I couldn’t think about it 24/7 non-stop, yet my deeper sense of connection to it, to the feeling that everything at every single moment is exactly as it should be, did not change.
During the next 5 weeks, my understanding grew.
My mother, who is very independent, would occasionally become very unhappy when dealing with her aging physical state and its further limitations expressed by her injury. In those moments, she talked to me just like she did when I was a child. I always knew she was unhappy back then today understanding it’s because she was far more driven and intelligent than those 1950s and 60s circumstances would have allowed. Her frustration vented towards me then and again now was one that assumes whatever you do and however you approach a problem (or life) was wrong and that you needed her to tell you how to do everything. Add to that a hardworking but emotionally absent father, and you have a young man arriving at the threshold of adulthood with no experience in confidence-building activities or a positive self-image based on the reinforcing and approving reactions of others. And that’s how I became a young adult- with little self-confidence, with low self-esteem and pretty much no feelings of self-worth. I knew I had to get out of town and away from my parents. I knew I had to redefine myself. That’s when I met my first wife-to-be and we went to Africa for 2 years, so I could learn filmmaking.
The difference in being on the receiving end of this type of parenting in my early 60s though is that the IB had changed me in a way that I didn’t take it personally any longer. I could see the process behind my mother’s interactions with me, much as seeing the gears of my future and how changes in them would refit my destiny together. And as I felt my years-long set of reactions start to surface, I simply challenged her respectfully not to speak to me in that way. And believe it or not, she changed her tone and wording- focusing on her appreciation of my being there, sympathetic to how all the extra running around must be taxing my own injured body. I told her, sincerely, that I was happy to be there to help, and so we did this for a total of 5 or 6 weeks.
In this time I flew back to CT to give my IANDS talk about my NDE and enjoyed that very much.
I continued to ponder the changes in my mindfulness of the IB though.
Then the unfolding of an answer began.
“Pay Attention to Your Relationships”. How so few words could mean so much. That wise and profound was the speaker of those words….
I believe that the change in my energy level- to a higher and increased state, one in which I felt happier, younger and more energetic, was precisely because of who I am becoming, the call from the one customer was a warm-up, a sign, if you like, and the next call that was substantive was why I needed that energy boost. And that my understanding of how our self-image is based on our continual subconscious and overt feedback from others given on a continual nonstop basis is what forms us as people- in terms of our self-image, our self-worth and esteem, our sense of contribution to life itself….and of course, our sense of connection to others.
As adults, any feelings of inadequacy and how those feelings defined critical decisions in life- whether pushing on for one’s dreams or settling for a mediocre job with a less than ideal income, marrying an unsupportive or self-absorbed spouse and raising entitled children…so much of this can be traced back to the childhood beginnings and evolution of a self-image based on low self-worth and the pattern of choosing the associated types of probabilities that collapse into ones’ singular reality.
My summary of events, granted by insight given by the IB, is that The IB not only gave me the opportunity to make better choices in the future by the process of elimination of many bad ones but in removing those representing obstacles to my evolution into a better person, I would now be presented with increasingly confidence inspiring relationships expressed through business. And I would very aware that these opportunities were not so much a product of my knowledge or skills I could bring- which are sufficient I believe, but as a direct result of the kind of person my time with the IB was allowing me to become. This is how my relationship with the IB is evolving, in how my relationship with myself is evolving. In short, this is healing.
And returning to be with my mom for 5 weeks to revisit the patterns of behavior on both our parts that led me down a warped sense of self needing healing, was gracious by God, as he used the shield of the IB’s powers of detachment to show me objectively what the process was and how it works, yet I was able to stay removed enough from it to detach and then rebuff it in a respectful way to see my mother’s behavior change. I don’t know if that works backward enough to heal her heart but in how she showed that an advanced age she could change, it does verify how amazing a woman she is- now so set in her ways that she can’t still learn and grow. In short, I hold no ill will for those years in which her anger and frustration diluted her love for me as her child. The IB and age have removed me from that.
So The IB, in telling me to pay attention to my relationships, has shown me and evidenced to me the deep, granular to a near quantum hair-splitting level, these details. And as always, these parts fit together with the prevision of fine machinery. There are no gaps, there is only “look closer” to see how those gaps fill in, in ever deeper and nearly invisible ways.
And sharing my experience with the IANDS group I could say felt like feeding my soul.
This change in my connection to the IB is analogous to an introverted child who stays in their room, reading comic books. A loving parent will tell them to go out and play with other kids. Eventually, the parent may have to create a condition outside they know will pique their child’s interest and draw them out from their room into the world outside. The child may wonder why they leave to leave the status quo, and they have some feeling of separation anxiety about being more than ten feet away from their parent, but as they begin playing with the other kids, they peek every now and then, looking for their parent to watch from around the curtain, wanting their child to have a good time. I believe this is the current snapshot of where I am with the In Between. And together, our relationship to each other grows and I am not departing the experience, but now expressing it on other aspects of my life, and therefore becoming more one with it, not less.
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29JUL2018, addition.
I was contemplating how Einstein's equation E = mc-squared essentially states that as we (as matter) approach the speed of light, our mass approaches infinity, distance approaches zero and so does time. Meaning, if/when we transition from matter to light, we are everywhere there is to be and at the same singular moment. This is one of the reasons I feel I was in a single moment in the In Between, while my body aged 1 week here. And in my talk, I referenced Max Planck, the "father" of quantum physics, born before the Civil War. He believed in a non-personal God, much like I experienced Him in the IB. Impersonal as in He is our natural state. It's not like our arms wake up happy to see us, we simply know what to do with them the minute we realize we have them. Kind of like that. And Planck Time, where quantum phenomena are observed, is in the Impossible Now of the In Between, measured as 10 to the -44 seconds, or a hundred millionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of 1 second.
I also referenced an earlier mention of how there are at least 2 entangled particles, one at the beginning of time, and the other at the end of time. Across an infinitude of space and an impossible expanse of time, whatever happens to one immediately happens to the other. The interconnectedness of all things. Therefore within the "in between" those two particles of immediate causality, everything else - The Present/The Impossible Now/Planck Time - exists. I was shown how the Impossible Now is impossible because of how thin (in duration) it is, yet unimaginably wide, across universes. In that single moment of the In Between, it makes sense that I was light, not only because my body was here, but because the egg-shaped machine of my life was at a standstill. Either it is because where I was (as light) no time passes (it doesn't for light), or I was moving so fast (as light) that it's like working on your car engine while it is running, because, at the speed of light, you could take the whole thing apart and put it back together again between piston strokes. Either way, I understand. In a state of that stillness where we aren't collapsing one of an infinite number of probability waves into a singular particle of present reality, we become light.
"Be Still and know that I am God" takes on a deeper, experiential, meaning.
The more Still we are, in that Impossible Now between what comes next and what turns to dust, the more in suspension our realities coming forth are. The more we reside in a state of pure Potential and come closer to this unmanifest aspect, the closer we are to the Highest (Unmanifest), God. In that suspended unexpressed state of all and equal probabilities, we are every place there is to be and in every time there is to be. We are One with all there is.
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02SEP2018.
Spiritual studies and quantum physics state that every moment is infinite with probabilities, our conscious decisions continually collapsing one of them into our present reality. There is also the theory that every one of those probabilities has a reality in which it is chosen, with every moment spinning off into an infinite number of directions. If this is so, then how can you travel back in time and create a paradox, no matter how much you want to? Whatever you choose to do would have its own timeline with consequences for sure, but this means your original timeline would remain intact where the time traveler chose not to alter history. If anything, such an exercise, if you could observe it from a higher frame of reference, would identify the specific timeline out of many that you are on.
And yet, if we're all one soul, interconnected, and living out each of these infinite number of realities at the same time....doesn't this speak to our divine infinitude? This only hints at what "children of God" can mean.
Thoughts on Stillness.
It's at our stillpoint of meditation, where we become present, that we realize we're within the nexus of all probabilities.
"To the mind which becomes still, the entire universe will surrender". Lao Tzu, Tao Teh Ching.
"Be still and know that I am God" Psalm 46:10.
The word "still" here is translated from the Hebrew meaning to "Let Go". Elsewhere in my writing I mentioned I heard reference in the In Between to the Art of Letting Go, and in the sharing of my NDE said, "That all the force of Will you need is found in the art of Letting Go. Always live Life in celebration of the individual spirit. For no one, no thing, can stand before the brilliance of a truly naked soul."
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20SEP2018
Tales of feeling Joy and Unconditional Love. What is the emotional state we should be going for?
There was a king who heard of a holy man, a carpenter, in a village within his kingdom. He sent for his high priest and asked that he travel to the village and check the carpenter out. So the priest dressed in normal clothing and traveled by normal means to the village, without the trappings of his office. In his disguise, he found the carpenter and stopped to talk to him while he worked. The priest noticed that the carpenter was building a casket. They make small talk and after a while, the priest was wondering where the holy part was. The man just seemed to be like anyone else. Suddenly, a neighbor ran into the shop, announcing to the carpenter that his only son had just fallen off the roof and died. The carpenter then nailed in the last nail and looked up, not at the neighbor but at the disguised priest, and said, "I know".
Obviously, he was spiritually-inclined and knew more than most of us. But in this, where was his joy? I would feel closer to the target to say that he had Peace, but I'm not sure the concept of joy is relevant.
Explore this with me. What do you think? Is joy the goal or is equanimity superior?
Is not the state of equanimity, beyond joy and sorrow, that allows for the full experience of pleasure and pain without the attachment and resistance that normally accompanies them, the better choice?
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27OCT2018
No lies are allowed in the In Between and after having been there, I don’t think it possible to lie to myself here as I did before. Thinking about it, we generally tell ourselves lies to get through life and sometimes, just today. But the intensity of the purpose-driven version of me and the “nowness” of my time in the In Between made for no dreams, no illusions, no lies. There was no memory of the past or anyone here. There was no fear, no joy. Just extreme laser-like focus.
One of the things I’ve had a clear feeling about when I was in the In Between was this enforced honesty. I characterized it initially by saying that being there was like looking in a mirror of truth, one that strips away the ego and lies we tell ourselves in order to look into the mirrors in our homes and not wretch. None of us are perfect or have gotten to where we are by being perfect. Many of us have made less than ideal choices. What happens when you arrive in a place in which such self-delusion simply can’t occur? I wonder if this is the reason I felt sick to my stomach during the entire time of my experience there. That I was stretched to my limits of being there to the point of pain.
When I was given the opportunity to reach forward into my future and feel the sector gears representing choices, some made me feel more nauseous and added to the pain I was already feeling. It was with an unthinking reflex that I pulled them from within the construct of my life and threw them away. After a week non-stop of removing bad choices from my future using not a God-pointing compass but the pain if I were to embrace and live those probabilities, I came to realize I was feeling a little less sick. Enough to say that I could now live with the changes. That’s when I was sent back.
It was Brilliant that I couldn’t see the choices I needed to discard. As I had to reach up high into the egg giving birth from the future to the present, I could only go by feel. If I could see the gear that showed me winning the PowerBall but felt horrible because I’d become a complete ass by doing so, I’d have been tempted to keep that event in my future, promising to not become worse than I already am. But I was only given the blindness of feeling as my guide. This is what was meant when said to me that “If those with choices make poor use of them, then offering fewer possibilities could be called mercy.” And so I kept pulling, nonstop, 24/7 for a solid week. I was also told this:
“Eliminating bad choices doesn’t mean you won’t make wrong ones. You won’t know they are wrong until after they pass. Since right and wrong are variables you have no control over, the answers to what comes tomorrow are a waste. Better is understanding the beauty of how everything fits and re-fits together.”
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31OCT2018
It is mostly reported that what we see and experience in a Near Death Experience is presented in ways we can make meaning of- each is tailored to our state of development and understanding.
As the "place" most people report going to is pleasant and comforting (not all are), I wonder if those who appear to be our loved ones who've already died and welcome us there are actually spirits whose job is to help us transition and could care less how we color them in?
If we are coloring in the place with things comforting and familiar, why not those who meet us as well?
Each according to his or her nature.
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01NOV2018
Have you ever asked, "What is the best version of myself?"
It's natural to reflect back to the happiest or most productive times of our lives. Personally- with friends and family during holidays or some momentous occasion, or professionally- achieving some goal that resulted in recognition, a promotion and/or salary increase.
What if the best version of yourself wasn't when everything was going right, but when everything was going to hell and you were getting your ass kicked?
Why are the heroes in stories not those who were born and lived forever with,a silver spoon in their mouths, but those who were knocked down over and over again, sometimes only picking themselves up from the dust because if they didn't, it's right there they would starve? Is it because all of us know adversity of one form or another and so this is how we identify with the hero's journey, or because we admire their strength and determination to not fail? Do we love the hero for whom success comes easy or the one who holds back nothing, having or about to lose so much that there's nothing left to hold onto?
There is an old saying of the Bushi (Samurai) when faced with an unwinnable battle: "When a Samurai draws his sword and throws his scabbard away, he is free to fight his finest battle". he will never need his scabbard again because, on that day, he will not re-sheath his sword. Little does it matter whether he wins or loses as the world measures it, it is only important that with courage and heart, he fought his battle ever. This is because he simply Let Go.
What if we model that example when faced with what seems an insurmountable challenge?
What if we lived that way every single moment?
When this life is done and if we are given the opportunity to look back on it, will we love the version of ourselves that was happy as our place in relationships defines it, or when we went alone to fight our most fearsome dragons? Even if we don't win, will we evaluate our performance with that score, or that we found within us the courage to try?
At the end, which is better? What will people remember us for? Is this not the stuff of ballads?
Consider for a moment then, that getting the crap kicked out of us is the opportunity for us to see what we're really made of. That in so doing, this is our finest moment. That this is the best version of ourselves.
At some point, when the battle is over and we reflect back on our struggles, if these are our finest moments, are we willing to return to that struggle to continue the work of man-making? Or do we acquiesce into mediocrity, with nothing more than a few trophies that gather another layer of dust every year.?
What will be our legacy? What is it we carry forward into the Great Beyond, that which will be our new foundation of growth and firm step in our evolution?
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06NOV2018
The past is dust. You can try to atone for the past but only in making better choices in the present, as the future unfolds its infinite possibilities into the now. Using one's desire to do better, to think better and to be better will filter the choices we make to a fewer set of probabilities, and blind us to other, unfortunate ones. We may still make wrong decisions, but they will not be the same bad ones grounded in the seven vices.
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17NOV2018
In contrast to many NDEs, I felt no joy in the In Between but more an intense sense of purpose, like I was/am on a mission. I guess removing bad choices from my future could be happiness but the exercise was not joyful, per se.
Happiness without joy but with purpose is part of the quantum level hair splitting I to do now.
St. Catherine of Siena said: “Be who God meant you to be and you will set the world on fire.”
She also referred to what happens in the In Between as the perdition of the fires of love. Not a pleasant place but a good place. The fires in which the noblest are forged.
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Thanksgiving; 22NOV2018
While in the In Between, I believe I was inside a single moment. In a place where time stands still, you don’t change. You don’t grow and you don’t diminish. You stop identifying with the parts of you that change and and begin to see and identify with that which doesn’t change. Have this impression stamp itself hard enough upon you, and you’ll see an after effect upon returning that allows you to sit motionless, staring at a wall for 6 hours. You feel fewer desires because they are associated with change and stimulation- things you feel less associated with now in communing with the sublime.
I guess this is part of being present, of becoming a blank slate or still and reflective pond. If you look at something, it exists. When you look away, it doesn’t.
Some NDEs don’t result in bringing back psychic powers. Maybe the experiencers come back with nothing more than a Connection. With their change in perspective, they may bring back wisdom. I realize even within the NDE community that there is an interest in knowing what you saw and any abilities you might now have. But fewer ask, “What did you learn? How are you wiser?” More than wisdom, most want the entertainment of stories and the demonstration of powers. Maybe it’s that folks have taken a bite of life’s apple and are still chewing before they can take a bite of whatever “wisdom” anyone else can share.
The IB may tell us to pay attention to our relationships, but there is an aspect to walking with God that’s incredibly solitary. There are things you can’t share because people will think you’re crazy or the experience is so personal, but eventually it’s because your frames of reference that give the Walk meaning are themselves transcendent and no one has that frame of reference to understand.
There is a difference between sitting in a theater with the entertained and distracted masses and going solo on an expedition. At some point, if you love adventure movies, wouldn’t it be natural to get on a plane or ship and go have an adventure? And when you come home people will want to know about what you saw and hold the souvenirs you brought back, but few ask what you learned about others or yourself.
Answers and Understanding are both important, but we are neither the answer or the understanding. We are the question- that’s why we search.
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25NOV2018
Thank you to those who have visited and taken the time to read this. The challenge is that so many of us think we have all the answers we need. I deal with it myself- it’s human. Not to diminish the bruising of hard-won truths but new epiphanies are always ready around the next corner. That’s why when we re-read spiritual books, they can seem like a new, fresh read. It’s because we ourselves have changed. As we walk toward God, He runs toward us. Every father’s hand since Adam rushes to help us, every killer’s fist since Cain will try and stop us. In the end, it isn’t about wrestling our destiny from this war-torn place. It’s about letting go, to live within a new set of rules- God’s Grace. In our palms may be written our destiny but upon no palm or movement of any star is the dictation of His Grace, for it is in living only moment-by-moment, free of worry, that we are free at all.
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14JAN2019
One morning I came down to get my coffee, and noticed our parrot outside his cage, playfully hanging on near the bottom of the cage. I figured that my wife had uncovered him from his night’s sleep. But when I microwaved my coffee and was walking to my office, I realized that his cage was locked with him inside it. Another time, I heard some friends argue at a get-together and later, when I mentioned it to my next door neighbor, he had no memory at all of its occurrence. Another thing that seemed odd was the frequency that when someone popped into my head, they contacted me within three days after- no matter how far away in distance or since we’d last seen each other- one person was from 35 years ago. I began watching my mind more to look for any subtle differences in the way these thoughts of others came into my mind than others. For sure, their appearance was more on the subtle side than by thunderous arrival.
I mentioned this to my wife one day. She said something odd. “Perhaps the edges of your reality are just fraying”. I thought about that and said nothing. Later, when I asked her about it, she didn’t remember saying it.
Over the next few weeks, more “fraying at the edges” of my reality continued. I began lucid dreaming, where I could choose to fly, or not, at will. I began to realize that this was a power to be used wisely, not just for the jubilant freedom from gravity. I started to combine it with things I read in spiritual books, and that formed the reality of the dreams. In one dream I finished upon waking, I saw myself on a beach at dawn and a decrepit figure in a shawl on the other side of a fence, holding a horse by the reins. Within my head, I heard a celestial gentle but high pitched sound and with a gentle force of will, slowly levitated up and over the fence to stand beside him. As I did so, I listened more intently to the Sound and felt waves of compassion for this wretched creature, which now I knew represented some sad condition of the human spirit. I sensed the difference between the actor and role they were damned to play. As I landed, we both looked into each other’s eyes and whatever he thought of the situation, he surrendered his horse’s reins to me and walked away. Then I awoke.
Last December, my wife brought our family to her office's holiday party at a nearby upscale restaurant. As I backed our car into a parking space, I noticed a nice-looking young woman crossing the parking lot toward us. I said to my wife, thinking this young woman one of her colleagues, "Now there's a very put-together looking young lady". It was only when we got out of the car that I recognized this person was our youngest daughter. I said as much t my wife, who said she thought I was kidding with the compliment to our child. Honestly, it was plenty light out and I'm not losing my mind, that I know if. I just didn't recognize her, or should I say that for a moment, she didn't look exactly like Fionna.
Inside the restaurant, we socialized with everyone, and eventually, I sat down and had a few small things to eat. Our 21-year-old son arrived, looking dapper and sat with me eating some tidbits and enjoying his beverage. He went back for seconds and I looked around, taking n everyone. Next thing I knew, a young man sat down where my son was sitting with a plate of food and began to eat. Right then I thought several things: 1, what a nice looking young man he was and 2, I wondered as to his sense of familiarity with me, so casual in "my space". But I didn't say anything, I just studied them. All of a sudden, I recognized him as my son. I remember paying particular attention to the line of his jaw, in studying the unfamiliar face before me.
I have to wonder, is this what it is like to look at someone through quantum filters, not only superimposed probabilities but slightly different versions of ourselves? This does make me wonder how my vision improved to 20/15 after my crash and yet things ebb and flow in and out of focus all the time. I could on and on, but will pause here.
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TUE 15JAN2019
Anyone who has looked at the after-effects of NDEs will be surprised to see that 75%-78% of experiencers eventually go through a divorce. Those who have an NDE return transformed in ways that constantly surprise them- the way they think, speak and react to what is familiar and what is new is changed according to the changes in their values. A loss of fear of death, less materialistic, generally more loving and less judgemental are some of the changes that await them, often causing those close to them to struggle with retaining their closeness. If your values change, it represents an ambiguity to any personal relationship, and ambiguities are never seen favorably. They represent a threat with a big question mark...usually at the end of "What Now".
I myself am trying to navigate this challenge. Talk about a long road, and still with an uncertain destination.
Within my own NDE, I felt a strong sense that everything is as it should be. So I stopped praying, as most prayers are a lack of willingness to accept that, in expression of the prayer's thoughts and desires. If we are to pray, let it be that our will folds into God's. Yet I made an exception this past summer when I was out driving and thinking, and I asked God to help my marriage. In a flash, He spoke loud and clear. "You will have a wife for as long as I want you to have a wife." I felt the direct power of the statement, and I felt its truth. If we have breath in our bodies for as long as He wills it, then what is there that we have that is also not as long as He wills it? So I didn't ask again, and I also felt the worry lift.
At this time, I'd say we're at a more critical-mass stage than before, but I'm not worried and feel again that everything is at it should be. I'm not saying I expect a particular outcome, but I just feel that everything that is happening is in accordance with His will.
In most marriage vows, "Til Death do us part" is standard.
There are two subtle truths that spring to mind as I think about this, as most divorces are a break of that promise.
1 - Many people think that when their spouse dies, they will meet them on the Other Side. Why should that be? I guess this is how many deal with their grief, and I'd not deny them that. But is the reason people who are being called away from here to simply hang out over there with nothing better to do? Especially with regard to their own Development, they are simply waiting for the surviving spouse to die? What if the spouse left behind remarries? What if the remarried spouse again becomes a widow or widower? Who meets them when they die? In all this, people seem to forget that in their marriage vows they are agreeing to be husband and wife only for as long as they both shall live amd until death parts them.
2 - I wonder if people who have Near Death Experiences and transform as a result have difficulties with their marriage in accordance with these vows. If they are married until death parts them, what happens when one actually dies? Never mind that they return- they don't return from death as the same person who went into it. So I wonder if an NDE is sometimes the divorce itself- as disenfranchisement occurs on many levels and in many relationships.
None of these "truths" are particularly comforting, I know. But as one Zen mystic said, "Hearing the Truth should disturb us". Another one said, "The Truth will set you free. But first It will make you miserable". The only way I know to deal with truths who cut at what I want to be true is to simply Let Go. See what happens next.
Though the NDE-experiencer struggles with relationships, they very much want to have them. This can be complicated by a more open heart to everyone, where men see women now as mothers, sisters and daughters and women see men as fathers, brothers and sons. Yet where mixed-sex friendships are concerned, most in the world are still struggling with that particular mote in their eye. "It must be about sex. " And yet though it may be for some, it doesn't have to be for all, and it is less so with those who have died. Celebrating life doesn't always take place below the belt. But for spouses who have not had such a transformative experience and were attracted to their husband or wife in part because of physical need, it is a mystery they can't fathom, a truth they can't believe and a hurt they internalize to themselves or project upon the other.
This points to another truth of an NDE experience- the ability to see many more shades of gray between the two extremes of right and wrong, truth and lies. But just as religion is a simplified version of Spirituality, so do most people need to define life in simplistic, sometimes black and white terms just to survive life.
So I just keep putting one foot in front of the other, intuiting my path. it's not important I know the future, only that I see the beauty of how everything fits together. In the end, our stories don't begin here, nor do they end here. We're all just passing through.
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MON 21JAN2019 Martin Luther King Day
Today, when we see or hear of ruthless actions in personal or professional relationships, many people refer to Darwin and Natural Selection, citing “survival of the fittest”. Some of these references are popularly misquoted from "Origin of Species", but the point pretty much boils down to, “kill or be killed”. Evidence abounds of a fear-based culture believing that there isn’t enough to go around.
Did you know that in Darwin’s sequel, "The Descent of Man", he writes only twice of “survival of the fittest,” and 95 times of love?
He writes of selfishness 12 times, and 92 times of moral sensitivity.
Of competition 9 times, but 24 times of mutuality and mutual aid.
And of something else our world is in sore need of, mind and brain -- he writes 200 times.
It has been conservatively estimated that 5% of the world has had a Near Death Experience. With a global population of 7.7 billion people in 2019 , that’s 385 million. The 2019 population for the USA is 329 million. India has 4 times that and China, 5.
I’m not sure how many people are poor, obese, suffering from one disease or another, but to think that there is the common thread of a deeply transformative experience running through more people than live in America makes me reconsider what it is to be a majority.
Could it be that NDE experiencers form the greatest single majority group of people on earth? If I am missing a larger group that should be obvious to mention, please forgive my tunnel vision- obviously I am thinking about this with a pretty strong bias and I am open to correction.
If I'm correct though, then there might be a reason to have hope.
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TUE 05FEB2019
To give life meaning and our lives purpose, there must be a balance between chasing the right questions and when not just one answer will do, meaning. As an example, a young romantic idealist may contemplate romantic love and ask, "Where is the one for me?" But expand that to ask, "How do I need to be loved?", and the self-discovery that requires honesty and humility will be more encompassing. Embrace that, and the filters you see the romantic world through will change. People you may have discarded before suddenly pop into focus.
When we grieve, it isn't for the departed, it is for ourselves. When we fall in love, it happens either because or despite our projected hopes and dreams are cast upon the object of our desire. It is important to turn the projector off and see what's behind the image, underneath the glamor (which means, "illusion").
The only reason anything has life is because we give our attention to it. When young, the toy we couldn't live without was soon discarded, gathering dust under the bed. As we get older, that transitions to the new car, the new clothing, the new social club, etc. The second our attention no longer breathes life into something, it is dead and forgotten to us.
I've heard it sad that the reason a cat licks the whetstone is that it doesn't realize the blood it tastes is from its own tongue as it wears down across the rough stone.
Because we tend to spend all our lives coloring in people and places, even to the point of revising history, according to our hopes and fears, I wonder if the same process, reinforced over a lifetime, applies on the other side. On the one hand, people who have NDEs report seeing loved ones who have passed over and welcome them to a new, beautiful experience. On the other hand, especially with children, if they see what they think is an angel or Whom they think is God, they may ask, "Is that your true form?" and usually there is a shift to dazzling light. So this makes me wonder if the spirits that are there to help us over are not our deceased grandparents, but are happy nonetheless for us to color them in however we wish just to deal with coming to grips that we're not in Kansas anymore.
We have so many filters we cling to for meaning and sometimes, just to survive life.
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SAT 16FEB2019
Visited today with PMH Atwater. After my NDE, I listened to a wide variety of books to better understand the experience. Hers was by far the best so I reached out her. And we hit it off! Please check her out: "Atwater is one of the original researchers in the field of near-death studies, having begun her work in 1978, and is a pioneer in subjects like near-death experiences, the after-effects of spiritual experiences, transformations of consciousness, reality shifts, future memory, and modern generations of children and how they differ from previous generations."
https://www.near-death.com/science/experts/pmh-atwater.html
It was wild enough to hear her describe what happens to you in a vehicle crash (mine was an aircraft) but then she described the type of NDE that follows and it matched mine. And then she used terms to describe the experience she picked up over there in her own NDEs, which were the same exact terms I picked up on the other side with my experience. If that’s not validating, I don’t know what is.
18FEB2018
I went driving today, where I do my best quiet thinking, and listening.
Here is that the IB revealed to me today.
There was no tunnel of light, no out of body perception of the room I was in and its activity around me. I simply appear in this otherworldly place to find myself resting on one knee, high up on a terraced rooftop of an abandoned building. I'm bent over in stomach pain and with great effort look up. ’
I see an amazing, panoramic skyline of a purgatorial city…gray buildings stacked upon gray buildings stretching all the way back to a brooding skyline. Apocalyptic clouds hover over the metropolis, storm-heavy.
In this gothic world, there are no sounds. I’m not deaf, it’s just that still and quiet.
Kneeling in its shadow all along, I suddenly notice to my left the only real thing of interest- a large egg-shaped structure, an open latticework of gray metal, with many gears inside. Monolithic. Austere. And finely crafted-- the egg is maybe four stories high, its intricate latticework constructed of a dull metal as gray as the world surrounding it. Another wave of nausea hits me.
I say out loud, “I don’t think I can stand this.”
Inside the egg, there is an immediate whirring of sector gears- the kind of partial arc gears you see in clock-like mechanisms. These move in all directions within the confines of the egg.
With great effort, I draw closer, studying the egg and its moving gears within.
What follows is a conversation that was telepathic and a characterization of what was communicated.
Me: What is this thing?
As I stand before the mighty mechanism, a disembodied voice responds, again, within my consciousness.
This is the future birthing into the now.
I see the gears— some which appear solid and some not- passing through each other in a physically impossible manner. The otherworldly dance of the gears is complex- like a 4-D model of time.
They come to rest and I reach through a gap in the side of the egg.
This is the process of Becoming.
My fingers touch one of the more solid appearing gears. On its surface, I see something like a video feed of future events. Then I double over in pain.
With a reflex, I rip the gear out, pulling it through the egg’s lattice wall and throw it over my shoulder. The machine responds by spinning its gears around again, recalibrating for the loss of one, whispering with a light clacking sound into a new configuration.
Me: What’s happening now?
Response: Each gear is the probability of a thought, word or action in your future. Your destiny is resetting itself around the now missing event.
Me: How did I know I could do that? Pull that gear out, removing that future moment?
Response: Why else are you here?
Me: I have no idea. I don’t even know what this place is.
Response: You are in the In Between.
Me: In between what?
Answer: Everything. The Impossible Now between the past and the future.
And I Say: That makes no sense whatsoever.
Response: It’s impossible in its short duration. Yet here you are, standing inside the eternity of a single moment. Do you remember who you are in the world to which your body belongs?
I look blankly into space, squinting with the effort to remember.
Me: I have no idea. I can’t remember anything.
Response: Then you see the truth in how the past is dust.
Me: OK. Why do some of these gears- these futures that I touch- make me sick and not others?
Response: All choices have unintended consequences, some unfortunate and some not. The pain each brings is your guide.
Me: Where are the gears that feel good?
Response: You’re not here to feel good.
More gears emerge within view, some passing through others, several clear and definite, many less defined and hard to focus on, though all bringing with them their clear images of meaning.
Each time they come to rest, I pull out a gear that I feel by my pain to be to my future detriment.
A new gear swings into view. On this one I see a Ferris wheel and happy grandchildren whizzing by, fingers grasping their car. LAUGHTER...they smile at me, or through me, looking off into their own world.
Obviously, I let that gear pass by.
At one point I look at the growing pile of gears.
Me: It’s starting to look like if I don’t have a bad future then I have no future at all. Am I going to die sooner from doing all this?
Response: Your destiny has to fit itself around futures that aren’t meant to be. Your number of breaths are already counted. I will worry about your last one.
Me: I don’t know how comforting that is.
Response: Eliminating bad choices doesn’t mean you won’t make wrong ones. You won’t know they are wrong until after they pass. Since right and wrong are variables you have no control over, the answers to what comes tomorrow are a waste. Better is understanding the beauty of how everything fits and re-fits together.
Me: So what am I missing here, in my lack of understanding?
Response: What is clearly before you. Grace. It is your birthright, but it must be asked for then chosen, at the expense of the world that separates us.
Me: This fixing my future is painful. And I feel ashamed that I’m not doing it with some moral compass. I’m only guided by pain. I don’t even know where these futures happen.
Response: Where is no more important than what or when. Removing your enthusiasm to further chain yourself to the world isn’t as painful as carrying the crushing weight of those chains, once forged around you.
Me: It's as if this place was made so I can only do one thing and one thing only, with no chance to screw it up.
Response: If those with choices make poor use of them, then offering fewer possibilities could be called mercy.
I watch a gear disintegrate into dust as it passes out of view, from the present into the past.
Response: You can’t change the past. But you can alter the future. Pay more attention to your relationships. Be gentle with others, as I am gentle with you.
Me: Gentle? What’s gentle about all this?
Response: You prayed for something for which being here is the answer. And now the man who fell from the sky is not the same who flew into it.
I look up into the stone gray sky and then out across the seemingly dead and abandoned city. I look back to the egg and reaching up, place my hand upon it.
(I say this out loud)
Me: I think I can live with this now.
That’s when I wake up, back on this physical plane of existence and find out later I was out for 1 week. I can tell you that I did not stop the entire time in the In Between yanking out those gears in order to feel less sick. But time didn’t seem to move at all there, and it’s not like I had a physical body that needed to rest, eat or sleep.
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16MAR2018
I have recently been invited to a luncheon in NYC and the topic for discussion is "Kindness Unedited". I find the topic and the location of this event interesting for 2 reasons:
1 - When I left the IB, I was told to pay attention to my relationships, because everything is interconnected. "Kindness" as a reason to get people together for a meal, fits.
2 - The location of the luncheon is exactly where the egg-shaped artwork shown above sits. Out of the entirety of New York, I find that interesting.
I guess I'm meant to go.
Also, I am fascinated how the things I was shown in the IB are constant as subjects of quantum phenomena in my science news feed. My inability to clearly focus on the machinations of my possible futures until they become concrete realities of the present seems logical and philosophically obvious. Yet when you really see this in action, there are subtleties at the edge the math may not show. I believe that if we can intuit how things work at a quantum level, we can influence them in a way that yesterday would have appeared as magic. I wish I could be more definite with that thought, but right now I can't.
I'll just have to look for an opportunity to present itself and try.
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17MAR2017
As I saw the gears spinning around, I was puzzled as to why I could clearly see their representations of things I’d think, say or do but not the gears themselves. As much as I tried, it was simply impossible to focus on them. To a point, yes, but oddly their background was in focus but not the gears themselves, even when stopped.
Then I realized that you can’t focus on a probability because it is a representation of several possibilities, which aren’t yet in a single place- to be focused on- until one supersedes the others and becomes the singular present. It is a poetic statement that the housing of all the gears birthing from the future to the present appears in the shape of an egg.
All of this was showing the quantum reality of time, entanglement and how all things are interconnected. Not only across impossible distances, but across all time. There are entangled particles that are a universe apart, but when you change the state of one, you instantly change the state of its entangled mate, no matter the distance in space or even in time. There are things that happened at the beginning of time that are, not will, affecting other things at the end of time. Therefore, what of what we call time between the beginning and the end of the universe, if what occurs impacts a particle at the beginning of time instantly impacts its entangled mate at time's end? I imagine that as we therefore travel along the arrow from one to the other, we are not traveling toward an end, but to the Source. Reaching the end, we reach the beginning.
One way of looking at it is that everything is already happening all at once. Time is the artificial construct by which the story plays out with a beginning, middle and end. And yet, though that implies that everything future is as scripted and concrete as the recorded past, you could say in one sense that is true and yet what you have to get used to is that each possible probability actually does spawn its own moment in time, with its own future, allowing every possibility to play out. It’s our limited ability to focus on only one reality at a time that keeps us from seeing all parallel possibilities come into expression simultaneously, and then see their timelines extending into the future. Yet it can be done.
This also makes sense of the statement in quantum physics that says the observer affects the outcome of any event through the simple act of observation. Yet when every outcome is occurring, the question is not how our watching events unfold affects them, but why do we see only certain (or one) outcome instead of all? Because we are following the script of a particular timeline. The best answer I can give as to why one timeline over another defines our observable, and observational, lives is destiny, karma, etc. A deeper question is, is there another version of us that split off from the present into an alternate future? Meaning, is there more than one of each of us, all living in billions of parallel realities simultaneously? If so, which one are we? Or is individuality, like time, an illusion and we are as infinitely probable as everything else?
If this is so, where rests the question of salvation and damnation- if in some realities we are gods and others, demons? Or is that the play where our growth into godhood is to know each version of ourselves, each flavor of reality, intimately? Is this what it is to be children of God?
OK, so if the above describes the usual but impossible ways in which everything plays out moment by moment, then how do I explain what’s going on here in the IB? If all realities are happening, then what is there for me to change? And where are the other Jims while I am here doing this? Is there a place where we’re all ever going to meet, in one place and in one time? And then I realized, I was being given a chance to remove choices across universes, not just mine. I was consolidating the realities to an increasingly singular set of circumstances and thereby aligning the Jim path across all possible timelines.
Then I realized that this is how God is bringing me home. That my all of me’s wanted this and it fell on one of us, the me at this time and in this place, to pull it off. That’s a lot to realize is at stake.
And as I pulled out the things that felt wrong to keep, I pondered the machine’s whirring around to reset the gears to futures that won’t exist. I understand now that all my parallel futures will become more similar, as I’ve reduced the choices my alternate selves will make, and that points to a convergence of realities. Perhaps the number of realities popping out of the present is based on our own individual desires, which are many. Many enough to ponder, “what if”? as we decide whether to turn left or right, to choose wrong or right, to choose the dark and the light- and every shade between. Perhaps as our desires fade, so do the number of ways we ponder them. The man with few desires is a man with few paths to walk. The man with no desire has no path to walk. In one sense, he is free to not be bound by time or space, and be everywhere there is to be, and at the same time. He can understand all the choices before us, and the fruits of each. Understanding causality from this perspective, he is also free from having to walk any more paths. He is done. It is done.
In seeing the resetting of the machine’s gears to those cancelled futures, the lesser man would try and remember every scene of major events as they whipped by- when to buy into the stock market, or make a major real estate purchase, and then when to sell- just in the nick of time. Who they would marry and when, who close to them would die and why, and on and on. These facts are answers to the big questions in life. What do I do for a living? Who will I marry? How will I die? But the greater man doesn’t worry about the answers because they are a one-shot deal to each parallel reality anyway. It’s the understanding, not the answers, that threads the multiverse together. By limiting the numbers of paths the present can take, your limited understanding, by definition, is increased to include them all. It may sound like a trick, but it’s how God bends the rules without breaking them.
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19MAR2018
I posted this a year ago on FaceBook. Seems appropriate to also place it here:
On the condition of lost innocence, by Wordsworth:
"Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting;
The Soul that rises with us, our life’s star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar.
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come,
From God, who is our home."
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30MAR2018
I've been quiet for the past couple of months, working, thinking and meditating on my story. Seeing how more of it is unfolding. One concept from the In Between that came up was the Impossible Now. It was "impossible" because of its incredibly short duration, and its infinitude of width. By design and how we fit within it, you are forced to be Present- as In That Moment present. Inside it, there is no past and no future, but it is infinite in its expanse across universes. This is why it's easy to get lost within it and experience difficulty even thinking or talking- for as you normally in speech, thought or writing are thinking of the next thing to say as you get this one out, in the Impossible Now you forget the next thing you would think of saying as soon as it flashes into your mind. It's like you are simultaneously in an observer mode even as you are speaking. I guess from being in this place, I sometimes read what I write while in there and wonder who wrote it, as I have no memory of doing it.
I sense also an association of this impossible thin-ness of the present with walking a razor's edge of focus. When we focus down to that quantum level of infinite shortness of Now between the future and the past, the width of a razor blade becomes wide enough to walk upon.
I'm understanding from quantum physics more about where I went, what I saw and what I experienced. That the impossibly intersecting gears of probable futures were appearing to pass through one another as a representation of the superpositioning of all possibilities. That they are in flux, coming to the fore and retreating again as the uncertainty of their selection to become "real" itself ebbs and flows, based on a million things. Finally, one of these waves of probability collapses into a dominant particle of manifestation and that's what we call reality. This is why I couldn't see all of the gears clearly, though I could the events they represented. The gears were hard to see because of their probable natures even though their meanings were clear.
I've spoken before about the importance of Understanding over Answers. That is because Understanding reveals Meaning and Answers reveal Purpose. Both are important, but purpose can take you only so far.
When I was removing the gears representing bad choices in my future, I have said that I wasn't guided by some moral compass or recitations from holy scriptures. I was guided by the pain of the choices I’d made, and those of the choices my current path would present for me and were likely to be made. As I removed them, I have no idea what they were, nor did I need to. They hurt me, so I got rid of them. It was that simple. The need to know what they were was replaced by the understanding that they were bad for me. It doesn’t mean I won’t still make wrong choices, but they won’t be bad ones.
And if you still think answers are more important than understanding, I’d ask you to consider how that worked out for Adam and Eve, when they traded the fruit of understanding and meaning in the Garden of Eden for that of answers and purpose in the world.
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19JUL2018
Back in late May, I went to visit my mother and help her with the final paperwork preparing for her eventual move to an assisted living facility. During the few days I was there, we accomplished everything needed.
On my way home, I noticed I felt differently, about my connection to life. This was a marked change since my plane crash and how I felt about the In Between and my connection to this world.
I would characterize it as feeling lighter in spirit, happier. But I also felt more engaged to the world and less moment to moment mindful of the IB in the same connected way as before. That bothered me, as I never want to lose that connection to the Beyond the NDE gave me.
Yet I thought further on it and asked, “Isn’t helping my mother the correct response to the IB’s telling me to ‘pay attention to your relationships’, as it tossed me back to Earth?” So if following orders resulted in differences of feeling about that which commanded me, then it must represent not just a change of state, but an evolving state, sanctioned by that giving the orders.
The admonition to “pay attention to your relationships” goes much deeper though. Read on.
Returning home in this lighter spirit, I received a phone call the next day from a customer, asking me to consider coming to their business and heading up an entirely new division that would significantly increase their revenues. My interpretation was that this call was either the result of the lighter sense of being, or the lighter sense of being was in preparation for it. But I also had a feeling that this call wasn’t to bear the expected fruit, but a warm-up.
A week later, my mother called to tell me she fell and broke her hip, and needed me. As I was packing the car, a former associate called me to tell me about his 6-month startup that had more business than they could handle and would I take them on as a customer. They increased my business significantly. Thankfully, I was able to perform my work for them, as for my other customers, remotely (meaning, from mom’s kitchen table).
In my initial conversations with this new customer, I felt as if they needed me, and liked coming to know me, not for what I could bring them, or my skills, but because of who I am. I could feel that subtext as strongly as if it was spoken out loud. I told them all at our first dinner of my NDE- as it is important to me and I decided to just get it out of the way. And besides, since the IB was facilitating this opportunity, it could perk up the ears of anyone sensitive to such a message, engendering further conversation.
Still, between helping my mother with everything and working to assist this very demanding and new customer, I was aware in how on the surface my connection to the IB was different in that I couldn’t think about it 24/7 non-stop, yet my deeper sense of connection to it, to the feeling that everything at every single moment is exactly as it should be, did not change.
During the next 5 weeks, my understanding grew.
My mother, who is very independent, would occasionally become very unhappy when dealing with her aging physical state and its further limitations expressed by her injury. In those moments, she talked to me just like she did when I was a child. I always knew she was unhappy back then today understanding it’s because she was far more driven and intelligent than those 1950s and 60s circumstances would have allowed. Her frustration vented towards me then and again now was one that assumes whatever you do and however you approach a problem (or life) was wrong and that you needed her to tell you how to do everything. Add to that a hardworking but emotionally absent father, and you have a young man arriving at the threshold of adulthood with no experience in confidence-building activities or a positive self-image based on the reinforcing and approving reactions of others. And that’s how I became a young adult- with little self-confidence, with low self-esteem and pretty much no feelings of self-worth. I knew I had to get out of town and away from my parents. I knew I had to redefine myself. That’s when I met my first wife-to-be and we went to Africa for 2 years, so I could learn filmmaking.
The difference in being on the receiving end of this type of parenting in my early 60s though is that the IB had changed me in a way that I didn’t take it personally any longer. I could see the process behind my mother’s interactions with me, much as seeing the gears of my future and how changes in them would refit my destiny together. And as I felt my years-long set of reactions start to surface, I simply challenged her respectfully not to speak to me in that way. And believe it or not, she changed her tone and wording- focusing on her appreciation of my being there, sympathetic to how all the extra running around must be taxing my own injured body. I told her, sincerely, that I was happy to be there to help, and so we did this for a total of 5 or 6 weeks.
In this time I flew back to CT to give my IANDS talk about my NDE and enjoyed that very much.
I continued to ponder the changes in my mindfulness of the IB though.
Then the unfolding of an answer began.
“Pay Attention to Your Relationships”. How so few words could mean so much. That wise and profound was the speaker of those words….
I believe that the change in my energy level- to a higher and increased state, one in which I felt happier, younger and more energetic, was precisely because of who I am becoming, the call from the one customer was a warm-up, a sign, if you like, and the next call that was substantive was why I needed that energy boost. And that my understanding of how our self-image is based on our continual subconscious and overt feedback from others given on a continual nonstop basis is what forms us as people- in terms of our self-image, our self-worth and esteem, our sense of contribution to life itself….and of course, our sense of connection to others.
As adults, any feelings of inadequacy and how those feelings defined critical decisions in life- whether pushing on for one’s dreams or settling for a mediocre job with a less than ideal income, marrying an unsupportive or self-absorbed spouse and raising entitled children…so much of this can be traced back to the childhood beginnings and evolution of a self-image based on low self-worth and the pattern of choosing the associated types of probabilities that collapse into ones’ singular reality.
My summary of events, granted by insight given by the IB, is that The IB not only gave me the opportunity to make better choices in the future by the process of elimination of many bad ones but in removing those representing obstacles to my evolution into a better person, I would now be presented with increasingly confidence inspiring relationships expressed through business. And I would very aware that these opportunities were not so much a product of my knowledge or skills I could bring- which are sufficient I believe, but as a direct result of the kind of person my time with the IB was allowing me to become. This is how my relationship with the IB is evolving, in how my relationship with myself is evolving. In short, this is healing.
And returning to be with my mom for 5 weeks to revisit the patterns of behavior on both our parts that led me down a warped sense of self needing healing, was gracious by God, as he used the shield of the IB’s powers of detachment to show me objectively what the process was and how it works, yet I was able to stay removed enough from it to detach and then rebuff it in a respectful way to see my mother’s behavior change. I don’t know if that works backward enough to heal her heart but in how she showed that an advanced age she could change, it does verify how amazing a woman she is- now so set in her ways that she can’t still learn and grow. In short, I hold no ill will for those years in which her anger and frustration diluted her love for me as her child. The IB and age have removed me from that.
So The IB, in telling me to pay attention to my relationships, has shown me and evidenced to me the deep, granular to a near quantum hair-splitting level, these details. And as always, these parts fit together with the prevision of fine machinery. There are no gaps, there is only “look closer” to see how those gaps fill in, in ever deeper and nearly invisible ways.
And sharing my experience with the IANDS group I could say felt like feeding my soul.
This change in my connection to the IB is analogous to an introverted child who stays in their room, reading comic books. A loving parent will tell them to go out and play with other kids. Eventually, the parent may have to create a condition outside they know will pique their child’s interest and draw them out from their room into the world outside. The child may wonder why they leave to leave the status quo, and they have some feeling of separation anxiety about being more than ten feet away from their parent, but as they begin playing with the other kids, they peek every now and then, looking for their parent to watch from around the curtain, wanting their child to have a good time. I believe this is the current snapshot of where I am with the In Between. And together, our relationship to each other grows and I am not departing the experience, but now expressing it on other aspects of my life, and therefore becoming more one with it, not less.
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29JUL2018, addition.
I was contemplating how Einstein's equation E = mc-squared essentially states that as we (as matter) approach the speed of light, our mass approaches infinity, distance approaches zero and so does time. Meaning, if/when we transition from matter to light, we are everywhere there is to be and at the same singular moment. This is one of the reasons I feel I was in a single moment in the In Between, while my body aged 1 week here. And in my talk, I referenced Max Planck, the "father" of quantum physics, born before the Civil War. He believed in a non-personal God, much like I experienced Him in the IB. Impersonal as in He is our natural state. It's not like our arms wake up happy to see us, we simply know what to do with them the minute we realize we have them. Kind of like that. And Planck Time, where quantum phenomena are observed, is in the Impossible Now of the In Between, measured as 10 to the -44 seconds, or a hundred millionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of 1 second.
I also referenced an earlier mention of how there are at least 2 entangled particles, one at the beginning of time, and the other at the end of time. Across an infinitude of space and an impossible expanse of time, whatever happens to one immediately happens to the other. The interconnectedness of all things. Therefore within the "in between" those two particles of immediate causality, everything else - The Present/The Impossible Now/Planck Time - exists. I was shown how the Impossible Now is impossible because of how thin (in duration) it is, yet unimaginably wide, across universes. In that single moment of the In Between, it makes sense that I was light, not only because my body was here, but because the egg-shaped machine of my life was at a standstill. Either it is because where I was (as light) no time passes (it doesn't for light), or I was moving so fast (as light) that it's like working on your car engine while it is running, because, at the speed of light, you could take the whole thing apart and put it back together again between piston strokes. Either way, I understand. In a state of that stillness where we aren't collapsing one of an infinite number of probability waves into a singular particle of present reality, we become light.
"Be Still and know that I am God" takes on a deeper, experiential, meaning.
The more Still we are, in that Impossible Now between what comes next and what turns to dust, the more in suspension our realities coming forth are. The more we reside in a state of pure Potential and come closer to this unmanifest aspect, the closer we are to the Highest (Unmanifest), God. In that suspended unexpressed state of all and equal probabilities, we are every place there is to be and in every time there is to be. We are One with all there is.
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02SEP2018.
Spiritual studies and quantum physics state that every moment is infinite with probabilities, our conscious decisions continually collapsing one of them into our present reality. There is also the theory that every one of those probabilities has a reality in which it is chosen, with every moment spinning off into an infinite number of directions. If this is so, then how can you travel back in time and create a paradox, no matter how much you want to? Whatever you choose to do would have its own timeline with consequences for sure, but this means your original timeline would remain intact where the time traveler chose not to alter history. If anything, such an exercise, if you could observe it from a higher frame of reference, would identify the specific timeline out of many that you are on.
And yet, if we're all one soul, interconnected, and living out each of these infinite number of realities at the same time....doesn't this speak to our divine infinitude? This only hints at what "children of God" can mean.
Thoughts on Stillness.
It's at our stillpoint of meditation, where we become present, that we realize we're within the nexus of all probabilities.
"To the mind which becomes still, the entire universe will surrender". Lao Tzu, Tao Teh Ching.
"Be still and know that I am God" Psalm 46:10.
The word "still" here is translated from the Hebrew meaning to "Let Go". Elsewhere in my writing I mentioned I heard reference in the In Between to the Art of Letting Go, and in the sharing of my NDE said, "That all the force of Will you need is found in the art of Letting Go. Always live Life in celebration of the individual spirit. For no one, no thing, can stand before the brilliance of a truly naked soul."
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20SEP2018
Tales of feeling Joy and Unconditional Love. What is the emotional state we should be going for?
There was a king who heard of a holy man, a carpenter, in a village within his kingdom. He sent for his high priest and asked that he travel to the village and check the carpenter out. So the priest dressed in normal clothing and traveled by normal means to the village, without the trappings of his office. In his disguise, he found the carpenter and stopped to talk to him while he worked. The priest noticed that the carpenter was building a casket. They make small talk and after a while, the priest was wondering where the holy part was. The man just seemed to be like anyone else. Suddenly, a neighbor ran into the shop, announcing to the carpenter that his only son had just fallen off the roof and died. The carpenter then nailed in the last nail and looked up, not at the neighbor but at the disguised priest, and said, "I know".
Obviously, he was spiritually-inclined and knew more than most of us. But in this, where was his joy? I would feel closer to the target to say that he had Peace, but I'm not sure the concept of joy is relevant.
Explore this with me. What do you think? Is joy the goal or is equanimity superior?
Is not the state of equanimity, beyond joy and sorrow, that allows for the full experience of pleasure and pain without the attachment and resistance that normally accompanies them, the better choice?
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27OCT2018
No lies are allowed in the In Between and after having been there, I don’t think it possible to lie to myself here as I did before. Thinking about it, we generally tell ourselves lies to get through life and sometimes, just today. But the intensity of the purpose-driven version of me and the “nowness” of my time in the In Between made for no dreams, no illusions, no lies. There was no memory of the past or anyone here. There was no fear, no joy. Just extreme laser-like focus.
One of the things I’ve had a clear feeling about when I was in the In Between was this enforced honesty. I characterized it initially by saying that being there was like looking in a mirror of truth, one that strips away the ego and lies we tell ourselves in order to look into the mirrors in our homes and not wretch. None of us are perfect or have gotten to where we are by being perfect. Many of us have made less than ideal choices. What happens when you arrive in a place in which such self-delusion simply can’t occur? I wonder if this is the reason I felt sick to my stomach during the entire time of my experience there. That I was stretched to my limits of being there to the point of pain.
When I was given the opportunity to reach forward into my future and feel the sector gears representing choices, some made me feel more nauseous and added to the pain I was already feeling. It was with an unthinking reflex that I pulled them from within the construct of my life and threw them away. After a week non-stop of removing bad choices from my future using not a God-pointing compass but the pain if I were to embrace and live those probabilities, I came to realize I was feeling a little less sick. Enough to say that I could now live with the changes. That’s when I was sent back.
It was Brilliant that I couldn’t see the choices I needed to discard. As I had to reach up high into the egg giving birth from the future to the present, I could only go by feel. If I could see the gear that showed me winning the PowerBall but felt horrible because I’d become a complete ass by doing so, I’d have been tempted to keep that event in my future, promising to not become worse than I already am. But I was only given the blindness of feeling as my guide. This is what was meant when said to me that “If those with choices make poor use of them, then offering fewer possibilities could be called mercy.” And so I kept pulling, nonstop, 24/7 for a solid week. I was also told this:
“Eliminating bad choices doesn’t mean you won’t make wrong ones. You won’t know they are wrong until after they pass. Since right and wrong are variables you have no control over, the answers to what comes tomorrow are a waste. Better is understanding the beauty of how everything fits and re-fits together.”
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31OCT2018
It is mostly reported that what we see and experience in a Near Death Experience is presented in ways we can make meaning of- each is tailored to our state of development and understanding.
As the "place" most people report going to is pleasant and comforting (not all are), I wonder if those who appear to be our loved ones who've already died and welcome us there are actually spirits whose job is to help us transition and could care less how we color them in?
If we are coloring in the place with things comforting and familiar, why not those who meet us as well?
Each according to his or her nature.
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01NOV2018
Have you ever asked, "What is the best version of myself?"
It's natural to reflect back to the happiest or most productive times of our lives. Personally- with friends and family during holidays or some momentous occasion, or professionally- achieving some goal that resulted in recognition, a promotion and/or salary increase.
What if the best version of yourself wasn't when everything was going right, but when everything was going to hell and you were getting your ass kicked?
Why are the heroes in stories not those who were born and lived forever with,a silver spoon in their mouths, but those who were knocked down over and over again, sometimes only picking themselves up from the dust because if they didn't, it's right there they would starve? Is it because all of us know adversity of one form or another and so this is how we identify with the hero's journey, or because we admire their strength and determination to not fail? Do we love the hero for whom success comes easy or the one who holds back nothing, having or about to lose so much that there's nothing left to hold onto?
There is an old saying of the Bushi (Samurai) when faced with an unwinnable battle: "When a Samurai draws his sword and throws his scabbard away, he is free to fight his finest battle". he will never need his scabbard again because, on that day, he will not re-sheath his sword. Little does it matter whether he wins or loses as the world measures it, it is only important that with courage and heart, he fought his battle ever. This is because he simply Let Go.
What if we model that example when faced with what seems an insurmountable challenge?
What if we lived that way every single moment?
When this life is done and if we are given the opportunity to look back on it, will we love the version of ourselves that was happy as our place in relationships defines it, or when we went alone to fight our most fearsome dragons? Even if we don't win, will we evaluate our performance with that score, or that we found within us the courage to try?
At the end, which is better? What will people remember us for? Is this not the stuff of ballads?
Consider for a moment then, that getting the crap kicked out of us is the opportunity for us to see what we're really made of. That in so doing, this is our finest moment. That this is the best version of ourselves.
At some point, when the battle is over and we reflect back on our struggles, if these are our finest moments, are we willing to return to that struggle to continue the work of man-making? Or do we acquiesce into mediocrity, with nothing more than a few trophies that gather another layer of dust every year.?
What will be our legacy? What is it we carry forward into the Great Beyond, that which will be our new foundation of growth and firm step in our evolution?
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06NOV2018
The past is dust. You can try to atone for the past but only in making better choices in the present, as the future unfolds its infinite possibilities into the now. Using one's desire to do better, to think better and to be better will filter the choices we make to a fewer set of probabilities, and blind us to other, unfortunate ones. We may still make wrong decisions, but they will not be the same bad ones grounded in the seven vices.
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17NOV2018
In contrast to many NDEs, I felt no joy in the In Between but more an intense sense of purpose, like I was/am on a mission. I guess removing bad choices from my future could be happiness but the exercise was not joyful, per se.
Happiness without joy but with purpose is part of the quantum level hair splitting I to do now.
St. Catherine of Siena said: “Be who God meant you to be and you will set the world on fire.”
She also referred to what happens in the In Between as the perdition of the fires of love. Not a pleasant place but a good place. The fires in which the noblest are forged.
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Thanksgiving; 22NOV2018
While in the In Between, I believe I was inside a single moment. In a place where time stands still, you don’t change. You don’t grow and you don’t diminish. You stop identifying with the parts of you that change and and begin to see and identify with that which doesn’t change. Have this impression stamp itself hard enough upon you, and you’ll see an after effect upon returning that allows you to sit motionless, staring at a wall for 6 hours. You feel fewer desires because they are associated with change and stimulation- things you feel less associated with now in communing with the sublime.
I guess this is part of being present, of becoming a blank slate or still and reflective pond. If you look at something, it exists. When you look away, it doesn’t.
Some NDEs don’t result in bringing back psychic powers. Maybe the experiencers come back with nothing more than a Connection. With their change in perspective, they may bring back wisdom. I realize even within the NDE community that there is an interest in knowing what you saw and any abilities you might now have. But fewer ask, “What did you learn? How are you wiser?” More than wisdom, most want the entertainment of stories and the demonstration of powers. Maybe it’s that folks have taken a bite of life’s apple and are still chewing before they can take a bite of whatever “wisdom” anyone else can share.
The IB may tell us to pay attention to our relationships, but there is an aspect to walking with God that’s incredibly solitary. There are things you can’t share because people will think you’re crazy or the experience is so personal, but eventually it’s because your frames of reference that give the Walk meaning are themselves transcendent and no one has that frame of reference to understand.
There is a difference between sitting in a theater with the entertained and distracted masses and going solo on an expedition. At some point, if you love adventure movies, wouldn’t it be natural to get on a plane or ship and go have an adventure? And when you come home people will want to know about what you saw and hold the souvenirs you brought back, but few ask what you learned about others or yourself.
Answers and Understanding are both important, but we are neither the answer or the understanding. We are the question- that’s why we search.
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25NOV2018
Thank you to those who have visited and taken the time to read this. The challenge is that so many of us think we have all the answers we need. I deal with it myself- it’s human. Not to diminish the bruising of hard-won truths but new epiphanies are always ready around the next corner. That’s why when we re-read spiritual books, they can seem like a new, fresh read. It’s because we ourselves have changed. As we walk toward God, He runs toward us. Every father’s hand since Adam rushes to help us, every killer’s fist since Cain will try and stop us. In the end, it isn’t about wrestling our destiny from this war-torn place. It’s about letting go, to live within a new set of rules- God’s Grace. In our palms may be written our destiny but upon no palm or movement of any star is the dictation of His Grace, for it is in living only moment-by-moment, free of worry, that we are free at all.
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14JAN2019
One morning I came down to get my coffee, and noticed our parrot outside his cage, playfully hanging on near the bottom of the cage. I figured that my wife had uncovered him from his night’s sleep. But when I microwaved my coffee and was walking to my office, I realized that his cage was locked with him inside it. Another time, I heard some friends argue at a get-together and later, when I mentioned it to my next door neighbor, he had no memory at all of its occurrence. Another thing that seemed odd was the frequency that when someone popped into my head, they contacted me within three days after- no matter how far away in distance or since we’d last seen each other- one person was from 35 years ago. I began watching my mind more to look for any subtle differences in the way these thoughts of others came into my mind than others. For sure, their appearance was more on the subtle side than by thunderous arrival.
I mentioned this to my wife one day. She said something odd. “Perhaps the edges of your reality are just fraying”. I thought about that and said nothing. Later, when I asked her about it, she didn’t remember saying it.
Over the next few weeks, more “fraying at the edges” of my reality continued. I began lucid dreaming, where I could choose to fly, or not, at will. I began to realize that this was a power to be used wisely, not just for the jubilant freedom from gravity. I started to combine it with things I read in spiritual books, and that formed the reality of the dreams. In one dream I finished upon waking, I saw myself on a beach at dawn and a decrepit figure in a shawl on the other side of a fence, holding a horse by the reins. Within my head, I heard a celestial gentle but high pitched sound and with a gentle force of will, slowly levitated up and over the fence to stand beside him. As I did so, I listened more intently to the Sound and felt waves of compassion for this wretched creature, which now I knew represented some sad condition of the human spirit. I sensed the difference between the actor and role they were damned to play. As I landed, we both looked into each other’s eyes and whatever he thought of the situation, he surrendered his horse’s reins to me and walked away. Then I awoke.
Last December, my wife brought our family to her office's holiday party at a nearby upscale restaurant. As I backed our car into a parking space, I noticed a nice-looking young woman crossing the parking lot toward us. I said to my wife, thinking this young woman one of her colleagues, "Now there's a very put-together looking young lady". It was only when we got out of the car that I recognized this person was our youngest daughter. I said as much t my wife, who said she thought I was kidding with the compliment to our child. Honestly, it was plenty light out and I'm not losing my mind, that I know if. I just didn't recognize her, or should I say that for a moment, she didn't look exactly like Fionna.
Inside the restaurant, we socialized with everyone, and eventually, I sat down and had a few small things to eat. Our 21-year-old son arrived, looking dapper and sat with me eating some tidbits and enjoying his beverage. He went back for seconds and I looked around, taking n everyone. Next thing I knew, a young man sat down where my son was sitting with a plate of food and began to eat. Right then I thought several things: 1, what a nice looking young man he was and 2, I wondered as to his sense of familiarity with me, so casual in "my space". But I didn't say anything, I just studied them. All of a sudden, I recognized him as my son. I remember paying particular attention to the line of his jaw, in studying the unfamiliar face before me.
I have to wonder, is this what it is like to look at someone through quantum filters, not only superimposed probabilities but slightly different versions of ourselves? This does make me wonder how my vision improved to 20/15 after my crash and yet things ebb and flow in and out of focus all the time. I could on and on, but will pause here.
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TUE 15JAN2019
Anyone who has looked at the after-effects of NDEs will be surprised to see that 75%-78% of experiencers eventually go through a divorce. Those who have an NDE return transformed in ways that constantly surprise them- the way they think, speak and react to what is familiar and what is new is changed according to the changes in their values. A loss of fear of death, less materialistic, generally more loving and less judgemental are some of the changes that await them, often causing those close to them to struggle with retaining their closeness. If your values change, it represents an ambiguity to any personal relationship, and ambiguities are never seen favorably. They represent a threat with a big question mark...usually at the end of "What Now".
I myself am trying to navigate this challenge. Talk about a long road, and still with an uncertain destination.
Within my own NDE, I felt a strong sense that everything is as it should be. So I stopped praying, as most prayers are a lack of willingness to accept that, in expression of the prayer's thoughts and desires. If we are to pray, let it be that our will folds into God's. Yet I made an exception this past summer when I was out driving and thinking, and I asked God to help my marriage. In a flash, He spoke loud and clear. "You will have a wife for as long as I want you to have a wife." I felt the direct power of the statement, and I felt its truth. If we have breath in our bodies for as long as He wills it, then what is there that we have that is also not as long as He wills it? So I didn't ask again, and I also felt the worry lift.
At this time, I'd say we're at a more critical-mass stage than before, but I'm not worried and feel again that everything is at it should be. I'm not saying I expect a particular outcome, but I just feel that everything that is happening is in accordance with His will.
In most marriage vows, "Til Death do us part" is standard.
There are two subtle truths that spring to mind as I think about this, as most divorces are a break of that promise.
1 - Many people think that when their spouse dies, they will meet them on the Other Side. Why should that be? I guess this is how many deal with their grief, and I'd not deny them that. But is the reason people who are being called away from here to simply hang out over there with nothing better to do? Especially with regard to their own Development, they are simply waiting for the surviving spouse to die? What if the spouse left behind remarries? What if the remarried spouse again becomes a widow or widower? Who meets them when they die? In all this, people seem to forget that in their marriage vows they are agreeing to be husband and wife only for as long as they both shall live amd until death parts them.
2 - I wonder if people who have Near Death Experiences and transform as a result have difficulties with their marriage in accordance with these vows. If they are married until death parts them, what happens when one actually dies? Never mind that they return- they don't return from death as the same person who went into it. So I wonder if an NDE is sometimes the divorce itself- as disenfranchisement occurs on many levels and in many relationships.
None of these "truths" are particularly comforting, I know. But as one Zen mystic said, "Hearing the Truth should disturb us". Another one said, "The Truth will set you free. But first It will make you miserable". The only way I know to deal with truths who cut at what I want to be true is to simply Let Go. See what happens next.
Though the NDE-experiencer struggles with relationships, they very much want to have them. This can be complicated by a more open heart to everyone, where men see women now as mothers, sisters and daughters and women see men as fathers, brothers and sons. Yet where mixed-sex friendships are concerned, most in the world are still struggling with that particular mote in their eye. "It must be about sex. " And yet though it may be for some, it doesn't have to be for all, and it is less so with those who have died. Celebrating life doesn't always take place below the belt. But for spouses who have not had such a transformative experience and were attracted to their husband or wife in part because of physical need, it is a mystery they can't fathom, a truth they can't believe and a hurt they internalize to themselves or project upon the other.
This points to another truth of an NDE experience- the ability to see many more shades of gray between the two extremes of right and wrong, truth and lies. But just as religion is a simplified version of Spirituality, so do most people need to define life in simplistic, sometimes black and white terms just to survive life.
So I just keep putting one foot in front of the other, intuiting my path. it's not important I know the future, only that I see the beauty of how everything fits together. In the end, our stories don't begin here, nor do they end here. We're all just passing through.
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MON 21JAN2019 Martin Luther King Day
Today, when we see or hear of ruthless actions in personal or professional relationships, many people refer to Darwin and Natural Selection, citing “survival of the fittest”. Some of these references are popularly misquoted from "Origin of Species", but the point pretty much boils down to, “kill or be killed”. Evidence abounds of a fear-based culture believing that there isn’t enough to go around.
Did you know that in Darwin’s sequel, "The Descent of Man", he writes only twice of “survival of the fittest,” and 95 times of love?
He writes of selfishness 12 times, and 92 times of moral sensitivity.
Of competition 9 times, but 24 times of mutuality and mutual aid.
And of something else our world is in sore need of, mind and brain -- he writes 200 times.
It has been conservatively estimated that 5% of the world has had a Near Death Experience. With a global population of 7.7 billion people in 2019 , that’s 385 million. The 2019 population for the USA is 329 million. India has 4 times that and China, 5.
I’m not sure how many people are poor, obese, suffering from one disease or another, but to think that there is the common thread of a deeply transformative experience running through more people than live in America makes me reconsider what it is to be a majority.
Could it be that NDE experiencers form the greatest single majority group of people on earth? If I am missing a larger group that should be obvious to mention, please forgive my tunnel vision- obviously I am thinking about this with a pretty strong bias and I am open to correction.
If I'm correct though, then there might be a reason to have hope.
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TUE 05FEB2019
To give life meaning and our lives purpose, there must be a balance between chasing the right questions and when not just one answer will do, meaning. As an example, a young romantic idealist may contemplate romantic love and ask, "Where is the one for me?" But expand that to ask, "How do I need to be loved?", and the self-discovery that requires honesty and humility will be more encompassing. Embrace that, and the filters you see the romantic world through will change. People you may have discarded before suddenly pop into focus.
When we grieve, it isn't for the departed, it is for ourselves. When we fall in love, it happens either because or despite our projected hopes and dreams are cast upon the object of our desire. It is important to turn the projector off and see what's behind the image, underneath the glamor (which means, "illusion").
The only reason anything has life is because we give our attention to it. When young, the toy we couldn't live without was soon discarded, gathering dust under the bed. As we get older, that transitions to the new car, the new clothing, the new social club, etc. The second our attention no longer breathes life into something, it is dead and forgotten to us.
I've heard it sad that the reason a cat licks the whetstone is that it doesn't realize the blood it tastes is from its own tongue as it wears down across the rough stone.
Because we tend to spend all our lives coloring in people and places, even to the point of revising history, according to our hopes and fears, I wonder if the same process, reinforced over a lifetime, applies on the other side. On the one hand, people who have NDEs report seeing loved ones who have passed over and welcome them to a new, beautiful experience. On the other hand, especially with children, if they see what they think is an angel or Whom they think is God, they may ask, "Is that your true form?" and usually there is a shift to dazzling light. So this makes me wonder if the spirits that are there to help us over are not our deceased grandparents, but are happy nonetheless for us to color them in however we wish just to deal with coming to grips that we're not in Kansas anymore.
We have so many filters we cling to for meaning and sometimes, just to survive life.
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SAT 16FEB2019
Visited today with PMH Atwater. After my NDE, I listened to a wide variety of books to better understand the experience. Hers was by far the best so I reached out her. And we hit it off! Please check her out: "Atwater is one of the original researchers in the field of near-death studies, having begun her work in 1978, and is a pioneer in subjects like near-death experiences, the after-effects of spiritual experiences, transformations of consciousness, reality shifts, future memory, and modern generations of children and how they differ from previous generations."
https://www.near-death.com/science/experts/pmh-atwater.html
It was wild enough to hear her describe what happens to you in a vehicle crash (mine was an aircraft) but then she described the type of NDE that follows and it matched mine. And then she used terms to describe the experience she picked up over there in her own NDEs, which were the same exact terms I picked up on the other side with my experience. If that’s not validating, I don’t know what is.
I have been curious for some time about one commonly-described feature of NDEs. I'm curious about your thoughts.
It's been widely stated that in an NDE, we "get what we need" to learn something, to get our life back on the rails, to realize what's important, etc.
It's also been stated that things there take on a shape meaningful to us, as part of getting what we need out of the experience.
In that the places we go to or see, the sounds we hear, the things that are shown us are tailor-made to our current ability to understand, could it be that the "loved ones" we see who welcome us and help situate us there or steer us back here are not those long lost to our past but kindly spirits whose job is nothing more than help us adjust to our new reality? Do we just color them in with faces we trust in order to get through the magnitude of the initial shock? If we color in this objective reality ("bigger than just us") with the subjective familiar (trees, meadows, flowers, how God and angels look to us and so on) in order to understand what we're supposed to, then why not in this regard as well? I've wondered this also because so many people console themselves that their deceased spouse is waiting for them on the other side- but what if they are not? What if "Until Death do us part" means just that?
I'm not wanting to rain on anyone's parade and no matter what I am considering, I know that the truth will be self-evident There. But if I want to see things as much as they really are to the extent that I can stand, it's worth asking the question now.
Thank you for your consideration.
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FRI 01MAR2019
I am feeling that it's time to focus on a couple of things- obviously because these synchronize with my life right now- lol.
1 – Near Death Experience After-effects: There are laundry lists with statistical backing that are helpful. I think this list, where possible, should be expanded and deepened. https://iands.org/ndes/about-ndes/common-aftereffects.html
2 - "What now?"/Integration: Then this one follows. If there are other paths of psychotherapy which have elements that apply, might not be a bad idea to employ them, but I avoid over-categorization, as we're trying to understand something that's not totally understandable. But there may be some perspectives that could borrow from Multiple Personality Disorder and other Depersonalizing experiences that help experiencers better understand not just how they have changed (answers to their questions) but even more importantly: the process of the changes (meaning, based on understanding). As looking at a story (of our experiences) from a process-perspective is a somewhat depersonalizing, objectifying path, perhaps it would make it easier to identify the signposts that were behind us, are next to us and will come around the next corner in integrating the experience. I know one challenge is that, in feeling separated from the masses and recognizing the aloneness of what one is going through, it is possible for the ego to creep in as a defense from the perceived or real ostracization- that one is "chosen". Funny thing is, this could be indeed true. But to feed the ego with it isn't the right path, though ego, in terms of identifying self on a good day and trying to incorporate a new sense of self on a bad day- does play its role.
One thought I've been having in terms of moving from the After-effects to the Integration stages has to do with the electrical sensitivity- the messing up of electrical devices. I've had this aplenty, and it's not like I read this beforehand- it becomes a noticeable pattern after-the-NDE. Like if people say, "When you are around, I feel happy" or "when you touched me, my pain went away". Of course, this makes the "What now?" discussion easier, because you have a pattern of points of information and placing them on a graph and studying their attributes, you can detect possible patterns, even to the point of predicting future outcomes- if the attributes are accurately and completely captured.
For instance- it is easy to wonder what emotional state you are in when a light bulb next to you blows. Were you experiencing any heightened emotions? This is especially natural because that's how Hollywood would portray it- you get angry and lights pop, cars are tossed around and the bad guys die. But again, that focuses on content which is personal. And as such, I have found no corresponding emotion to associate with these things. The only possible pattern I think I have seen, and it kind of makes sense as a path to further investigate, is that these things happen when I am talking about the In Between, or even recounting my experience there. Times like these are when I feel it in the room, other people do as well (as I might not say anything but right when I get a wave of it through me, they remark on their own that they feel it). By a combination of focus on the experience of being There and taking "me" out of the equation as much as I can- and again I was depersonalized there, so it's kind of built-in for me- maybe I am becoming a conduit for the In Between- and that's when people benefit and electrical craziness happens. Therefore, part of "What now?" for me would be to see if this is true for other experiencers, if it represents a discernable pattern, what that pattern tells us and if it has any predictive value when the attributes are re-created. If we can show that, then I think we will have risen our understanding considerably.
Summary: Set up conditions to reveal changes in the environment when people share their NDE experience itself, especially connecting to it with their emotions, "seeing" it all over again.
Action: Bring this process into the conversation.
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13MAR2019
A new NDE friend has mentioned working in hospices. This is something I have wondered about.
Here is what seems a natural sequence of possibly linked events.
1 - As you can see from my last post, I have been lately pondering/meditating on the "What Now?" of integrating (coping with) the NDE into all of my life. Honestly, it is making its own room, pushing in everywhere- it's almost like the better question is "How to get out of the way?" more than "How to invite it in?" lol...
2 - A woman who I met at the local IANDS meeting a few months ago suddenly emailed me this morning, wanting to know if I am interested in hospice work. She mentioned the need to sit with people who are dying with no one at their side and how there was someone who recently died whom she thought would have particularly benefitted. This tugs at my heart.
3 - In addition to finding this synchronicity interesting, that my friend suggested my investigating hospice work only this past weekend and this months-ago meeting contact offering it this morning, I had a small epiphany:
4 - A few years ago, I felt God saying to me, that when you have an emotional need, sometimes the best way to receive it is to find someone who has the same need, but to a greater degree. The "good" person inside you will want to give it to that person- solidarity, compassion, a moment of non-judgment, etc. So when you find yourself giving to someone else with a greater hunger exactly what you yourself need, this is the magical fulfillment. You needed it and there it is- coming from within you- and to the benefit of you both. So God is saying, "It's already within you" and the magic happens when we live our lives in service to others- it is called out of us. I remember this is also the root of the word "educate"= "to draw forth"; with the assumption that all truth and all beauty already exist within us and the role of our teachers isn't to put things inside us as much as help us remember what we already know- imagine waking up in a world like that. =-)
5 - So perhaps this begins the answer to "What Next?" for me in the becoming One with the experience God graced me with.
So I may reach back to her on this and see where it leads. Likely baby steps.
Have a wonderful day!
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13MAR2019
On another topic, regarding After-Effects of an NDE, I am sure many of you know about the strange electrical things that happen. Light bulbs pop, digital watches go wonky, computers sometimes act weird, Points of Sale in stores go down right when you're trying to purchase something (3 times for me and once with an NDE friend when we were on the phone together talking about NDE stuff, right as she pulled her wallet out!), and for me this past year- in addition to the above- blowing up my central A/C and Gas furnace at the same time, blew up my microwave (and when microwaving my room-temperature coffee for only 30 seconds, it exploded when I went to take it out, my son saw the whole thing), etc.
Well, for me, here's a new one!
A couple of weeks I was talking to PMH Atwater on the phone. We began talking at 3:00pm on a Friday, and finished the call at 5:00pm. At 4:40pm, I felt a surge of energy- but more like I was feeling more engaged, interested, and Present. I imagine like if I'd taken a pill to enhance my mood. At that same moment, she said, "I can feel our energies melding", so at that time I told her I agreed, feeling what I felt. We then started talking about the Impossible Now(she calls it the Eternal Now), and being Present. When we concluded our call, I walked out to my car, which had been running already to warm up for my afternoon drive, and 2 things happened: 1 - I looked up at my porch light and it blew, right then. I got into my car and immediately noticed that my 2 clocks- one in the radio which is the master of the one in the dash- were at 2 different times: the radio (master) one was on normal time. The one in the dash was frozen on - guess when? - 4:40pm! It was "Present". So I had 2 timezones in my car for my drive that day- one was normal Earth time and the other was In Between time. The next day, both clocks were back to normal.
A few weeks later, I was driving to visit PMH. About 20 minutes outside her home, an NDE friend suddenly felt "called" to text me through a popular messaging app we (and a zillion other people) use. My phone was mounted to my dash for my use of its GPS app when my friend's message pinged in. So I tapped it and saw her text. I pulled over and typed back that maybe she was thinking of me because I was about to meet PMH- a pioneer of NDE research, having had 3 NDEs of her own back in the 70s and definitely ''the real deal". My friend was delighted at the timing. While I then saw the "dot-dot-dot" in her text field indicating she was typing her next thought, my own text field suddenly started typing its own text. I was now driving, with both hands on the steering wheel. My eyes opened in amazement as my phone created its own text, saying, "Thank you for being a kind and loving person". I panicked, not knowing what was going on or the originator of the text and worried that it might suddenly take a left turn and say something I might have to explain, so I highlighted it and deleted it. I told PMH (and my friend, later) about it and she laughed, saying, "This is just the beginning".
This past weekend, a new NDE friend who has a lot of focus, energy and commitment to the truth of his NDE suggested I reach out to an NDE researcher in Europe who is beginning a new study/research project. So I did. She sent me an email later saying I was accepted and that we'd speak on the phone soon. The next morning, I get into my car and before I leave my home, I open up my NDE email folder to see if there are any NDE podcasts that I'd enjoy while driving. At the top and as the most recent email in that NDE folder was a real puzzle: the email showing was as if from this researcher, who I'd just met and received only one email from, but the body of the email- the message itself- was one from 11 years ago from my ex-wife, regarding meeting spiritual groups we are interested in, here in the northeastern USA. I have never heard of this happening before to an email. I find it interesting that both were linked to spirituality but 11 years apart, and becoming merged? Wow, there are several meanings to this one.
And then the occurrence mentioned above, in the post before this one regarding hospice work, popped in to greet me today.
I'm telling you, this is a roller coaster!
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13MAR2019
I have been curious for some time about one commonly-described feature of NDEs. I'm curious about your thoughts.
It's been widely stated that in an NDE, we "get what we need" to learn something, to get our life back on the rails, to realize what's important, etc.
It's also been stated that things there take on a shape meaningful to us, as part of getting what we need out of the experience.
In that the places we go to or see, the sounds we hear, the things that are shown us are tailor-made to our current ability to understand, could it be that the "loved ones" we see who welcome us and help situate us there or steer us back here are not those long lost to our past but kindly spirits whose job is nothing more than help us adjust to our new reality? Do we just color them in with faces we trust in order to get through the magnitude of the initial shock? If we color in this objective reality ("bigger than just us") with the subjective familiar (trees, meadows, flowers, how God and angels look to us and so on) in order to understand what we're supposed to, then why not in this regard as well? I've wondered this also because so many people console themselves that their deceased spouse is waiting for them on the other side- but what if they are not? What if "Until Death do us part" means just that?
I'm not wanting to rain on anyone's parade and no matter what I am considering, I know that the truth will be self-evident There. But if I want to see things as much as they really are to the extent that I can stand, it's worth asking the question now.
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21APR2019, Easter Sunday
Thinking of how only the 3 traditional cups of wine were passed among the group in the Last Supper; the fourth I understand Jesus said he would forgo until He was within the Kingdom of Heaven. It was on the cross someone placed a sponge of soured wine to his lips. In taking it, this was the 4th cup of wine and then he said, “It is finished”. It’s meaningful this “cup” of wine was bitter and his point of conclusion.
The path of the spirit is not for the weak of heart. And in the end, more than courage, Heart is what it’s all about. For no one, no thing, can stand before the brilliance of a truly naked soul.
In Reflection, with a transcental experience, I have realized how hopes and dreams backfill into the present, impregnating the choices before us with their reflections. Seeing which choices we can make increase the probability of bringing us to our desires, we choose accordingly. But what happens if a transcendental event cuts the roots of attachment in a way to also wither those attachments? What happens when you realize you have no hopes and dreams anymore? That the way they used to color your day- how the sky looked, how your relationships were defined- including your place in the universe and how they would have loaded your question of, "What is my purpose"? ....all comes to a sudden and immediate end? And that as you try and figure this out over time, you realize the few attachments you are left with are no longer fed by these dying desires- and so every attachment, every joy and every pain you enjoyed or suffered before is now running on fumes as you empty out? Not only do the old hallmarks now seme empty of joy, but the things that hurt you also have less power to do so.
To become empty of desires means you perceive all possible outcomes at any moment with equanimity- with less bias than before. Yet this stage of spiritual change can be discomfiting as you wonder if this growing emptiness is a sign of things to come, or if something else will fill it? I've heard it both ways, but it seems the more detached Eastern approach says total emptiness os the target, while the West preaches that we will be filled with joy. However, I'm concerned that to be filled with anything that wishes to avoid its polar opposite is not perfect balance.
But as I become emptier as a result of the depersonalization experienced on the other side, that now growing within me here day by day, I have less and less in common with this place or its fears and worries, much less its hopes and dreams. Yet I feel self- contained, so it's not necessarily so that a solitary path is a lonely one, but there is definitely a feeling of having been removed from the masses.
So. As this emptiness replaces clutter, what is the meaning impregnating this silence?
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TUE 23APR2019
Continuing along the lines of detachment, with less bias toward any one outcome over another, this objective place in my perception leads me to somewhat more indifference in the expectations of any of my actions leading to success- in and of themselves. We can merely act according to the situation or need and being in the present, don't- in fact, cant, think about the end result. Being in the present, all I can feel any sense of connection to is my effort. Standing back at it all, you can see processes and flows from further away than deeper in- the old adage about not being able to see the forest for the trees applies. As you fall into the beauty of the processes, seeing them flow, carrying us all- actions or not- to wherever we're meant to go, it's as if you intuit the cosmic mathematics within each flow- just as an illiterate uneducated caveman could probably run to catch a ball tossed to him- not being conscious of all the calculus he's using to do so, charting the ball's parabolic trajectory, accounting for wind deflection, speed and so on. In the end, you find yourself drawn to do the right thing, not because of some reward or even because it makes you feel good, but because the "math" in the situation simply calls for it. You aren't looking for a connection to the common or greater or even a private Good, you're just following the math equation and solving for "x", and the correct answer is simply the one that is good. Then it is on to the next flow, the next math problem.
As I ponder this, I am noticing a process emerging. I can't yet be sure if my perception of it is accurate, but it's the best I have so far. It's like my NDE, in removing me from the herd, cut off the pipeline of how desires, fears, hopes, and dreams fuel my desire for being here. Since my NDE, if I go out and try and do any of the things I enjoyed or was otherwise attached to before, it is with less attachment, less pleasure and in some cases, less pain. It's not that I'm numb, it's more like I'm empty. The world I went to was gray, not full of color. And this world becomes grayer every day. I'm becoming present in the In Between as I write this and having trouble maintaining thought. With the pipeline cutoff, every aspect of what I do here feels like it is running on fumes. Imagine every time you go to a movie, you enjoy it a little bit less. Now imagine the same for every other aspect of life. Relationships feed you less and less. Thank heavens it's not a clean break but one that while sometimes seeming accelerated, are I'm sure paced to what I can just stand. Imagine the desire, not for wealth but a financial cushion also grips you less and less. Imagine that you realize sex has nothing to do with love and for a time is simply "need reduction" and then it fades away as the associated need also fades away. Imagine that even food- your old favorites or not- simply have less taste- as you realize the body is nothing more than a machine that needs fuel. You see what people call Love as, in the majority of times, nothing more than the fulfillment of projected desires upon the world around us. With the transactions of "what can you do for me" establishing work, romance, families, religious beliefs being negotiated every single moment...with our subconscious watching and waiting to react to any momentary dip in the negotiated deal. Such a dip introduces ambiguity into the relationship. And ambiguities are never, ever, welcome in any relationship. And an NDE represents perhaps the greatest ambiguity of all, as those "closest" to you who don't have the transcendental experience ask, "where did you go? I want my friend-spouse-coworker-etc back". And there you are, standing with a blank look on your face, at first unknowing of the Change, scratching your head to either wonder what they mean or wondering, "how do they know?" People can tell when you're engaged- well beyond the obvious and well beyond the subtleties of nuance, voice inflection, choice of words or body language. You can feel it in just their touch- whether they are present or distant.
Pausing to breathe for a moment, I reflect that it seems like the gray world of the In Between infected me, as I become grayer every day. I am pretty sure that the reason that world looked like it did was so that I wouldn't be distracted by it and would more easily focus upon my purpose there- even needing the lack of distraction to intuit my purpose in the first place. As within, so without- they say. So, in as much as I didn't ask for this in as articulate a manner as the answer appears to be coming (I smile as I write that), I can only continue to put one foot in front of the other and see where it takes me. I feel that this world is also becoming less distracting so that I will discover my true purpose. Remove all else, and you can hear even the Silence. Adjust your eyes to the dark, and you can see the smallest hint of light- I've seen my way across sand dunes in Africa- hundreds of miles from anyone- with nothing more than starlight. As each photon reached the end of its millions of years of longing to touch for the briefest moment my face turned upwards into the night, we met. That briefest moment is the Present. The past is dust and the future is many possibilities rolled up into one- just waiting for us to choose.
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THU 25APR2019
This may be more meaningful to those who also have experienced death and returned...
Upon return from your NDE and integrating it into your life here (I also call it, "coping" - lol), have any of you noticed that this type of analogy for any detachments? My analogy is this: It's like your attachments had a gas tank to power them, and now there is no more gas filling the tank. So for the engine of some attachments ("life"?), some are running low on gas, some are running on fumes and some have run completely dry. Which leaves you with, "What do I do now?" If any new attachments/habits replace them, they don't seem to have the staying power as they might have before- so they run out of gas and you move on. It makes a kind of sense, doesn't it? I have found that intensity binds us to a sense of self- that's why war veterans (beyond the explanation of PTSD) still might jump into bushes if a car backfires, why people return to terrible relationships, etc. If- as I'm still working this out - this is true, then I guess the intensity and the Timelessness (it's always "new") of an NDE might re-root us from here to There. For me, I am constantly working on what now to fill my time with. I have no interest in old hobbies and very little (but some, at least intellectually) interest in establishing new hobbies. I'm an introvert and now I feel more self-contained, so I don't get lonely. I just work and find myself spending less time with other family members who are engaged in their own busy days and nights. I am not complaining! This is just adding more to my last 2 posts about becoming Empty, which I believe was because my sense of self was redefined by a powerfully intense but de-personalizing experience. I can still engage with people, and they find me likable, but there is no "glue" now. Even if someone pisses me off, it doesn't last long at all and I forget about it pretty quickly. I feel like I'm just skating along, waiting to see what the Great Beyond sends me next. I'm sure the world would have a hundred ways to describe this as a pathology, but mystical writings say this is right path:
I don't miss "the old me", though I am sure some do. I feel like I am slowly becoming the person who was on the Other Side- someone with no personality, ultimately with no ego even, no attachments, no memory of things past or anticipation of things future. Just present, within the Impossible Now. That some of the weird after-effects with electronics continue, I know it's not just an easy thing to say that I'm nuts.
I also find it challenging to talk to a counselor about this, because if they haven't had an NDE or are NDE-familiar (or even NDE-friendly), then I realize I'm wasting my breath about 2 minutes into the conversation. I do have one heavyweight in the world here who is considered a pinnacle of NDE research, having had 3 herself and authoring 15 books, who is becoming a friend and has been to where I have- finishing my sentences for me and describing in long detail my experience from so many angles in one of her books. It's like I can "feel" her even though she lives so far away. And it's reciprocal.
Perhaps the level we go to Inside defines the new planet from which we come. If it is populous, you may not feel as solitary upon return. If where you go is less populated, then it's glaringly apparent upon return the solitary path (not necessarily lonely though, if you don't feel that) you now walk.
I hope this isn't distressing anyone to share this with. I'm not feeling distressed, but I do have a big cartoon question mark over my head a lot of the time, I suppose. Just interested in comparing notes with brother and sister travelers along the way.
I recently wondered whether thoughts become more powerful upon return. I do believe this to be the case, from what I'm experiencing. Perhaps one lesson in becoming empty means that whatever you do think about has more room to fill you and that additional capacity IS the power. But like a lot of things, once you can do it, it loses its magic a bit. How many things did you think were incredible, impossible or magical when you were little, but if you learned how to do them later in life they seemed almost more mechanical than magical? I'm sure DisneyWorld looks a lot less magical behind the scenes. On one side, you have It's a Small World robotic children amazing the park attendees, but on the backside, you can see all the gears whirring around making it happen. Once you've gone behind the scenes, you'll never look at the facade the same again.
You can't unsee how sausage is made once you've done it.
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FRI 26APR2019
Returning from the other side, many of us find ourselves divorced from things that defined our past. That person died and remained dead. Now is what you have left. There is no going back, only building anew. The noise we loved now pains us as cacophony. The sights which thrilled us now over-saturate us. The food we gorged on and the drink which inebriated us are simply gone. We eat less, we drink simply, we seek less stress and realize that the past is dust. As attachments fall away to the point we forget about them, those that are new don’t have the staying power and run their courses more quickly. Emptying out, any thought that fills us, fills us more, increasing the power of how we direct that thought- whether by fear or desire. Also in becoming empty, we see how the after-effects of NDEs increase. Not the product of an emotion or mental state but the flow from the In Between to here. The more empty we are, the greater the interconnectivity between the two states. When doing this with another NDE-realized soul, the effects amplify. If 5% of the world has had an NDE, that’s 60 million more people than live in the USA. Imagine if that population of 380 million people all emptied themselves at once to connect The In Between to here. What do you think would happen?
In choosing the sublime over the intense, the silence over noise, focus over distraction, dualities like joy and pain withdraw into the main axis of the sine wave of emotion and we walk along that axis, not choosing to have pleasure or avoid pain. When we hear someone speak, their words give us answers, but from their nuance, inflection and body language emerges meaning. Finally, we realize that the silence between their words is filled with information that grants us understanding. I believe this is how communication works in the In Between. Even telepathically, we can absorb only so much information, and the download of an entire narrative may take quite a while back on earth to open up and play out, and even then when we chew on it slowly, we discover new layers and depths with each consideration. Moment by moment, we are changing. Becoming something else. The analogy of our change can be like one carried along by a stream or falling victim to an infection, but in all cases we have no choice. We feel that we don’t belong to our own selves because we no longer belong to that which we once thought we were: our desires and our fears. Waking up like this in a somnambulating world creates definite challenges. Finding others like ourselves also coping with this transition helps, especially when we use similar reference points in language and thought in ways unique to those who have fallen from the sky as different people than those who flew into it.
In my NDE, I saw that God could care less about most of the crap we get wrapped around the axle about. All He wants is to have a relationship with us. How we live our lives tells us how close or far we feel to Him. He is more appreciative of 1 inch of gain than we are of 1 mile. As we walk to Him, He runs to us. If we really want to do something others judge as sinful, He says “See how that works out for you. When you’re done, come back, I’ll be right here. I’m not going anywhere”. Otherwise, trying to please everyone else, trying to follow many rules which seem arbitrary to you, means you’re living someone else’s life, not yours. Always- Always- live life in celebration of the individual spirit. Starting with yours. ❤️
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SUN 05MAY2019
As I watched this, I wonder if viewing it the other way around, in terms of where I’m going versus where I’ve gone, would suggest the appearance of a tunnel as everything whizzes by? https://youtu.be/nGnX6GkrOgk
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FRI 10MAY2019
Last December, my wife invited the family to her office holiday party.
As I backed our car into the parking space at the restaurant, I noticed a young woman walking across the small parking lot to us. I figured it was someone from my wife's office and said, "That young woman looks very put together". It wasn't until I finished parking that I realized it was our youngest daughter, and my wife thought I was making a general, though complimentary, observation about our daughter.
I thought it was strange how I didn't recognize her- there was still plenty of light to clearly see who she was.
In the restaurant, I sat at a table and our 21-year-old son arrived. He was sitting across the table from me while we chatted. Then he went to the buffet table to get his dinner. When he returned, I didn't recognize him. As he sat there eating, I studied this unknown person's face and thought that he was a nice looking young person. I remember studying his facial structure and jawline. I was a little surprised by how comfortable he seemed to be, this stranger eating in a casual manner not 3 feet from me. I was almost put off a little bit. Then I realized it was our son.
In considering this later, I realized that it was like he simply morphed into a person recognizable to me from one who was not.
This evening, I saw my wife walking toward me on the other side of the street and thinking, “What a very good looking woman!” She was oscillating between someone I knew and someone I'd never seen before. Our daughter walked across the street to her while this was still going on so I knew she recognized this person. Finally, my wife became familiar to me, but not 100%- vestiges of “someone else” was still oscillating or radiating around her. Imagine seeing someone you know suddenly start shapeshifting into other people. It was kind of like that.
When this happens, it does so within a context where I still know everyone else. I am not sure what's happening here, but I have wondered if it is seeing the multiple probabilities superpositioned on an individual- where they are each one of these things but the possibilities keep flipping through until one becomes their/our/my present reality. I think there is something "quantum" going on here, but I've not heard of this before.
The one thing constant in these instances is that they- my children and wife- were all in a high energy state and themselves possibly in flux of “who they were”. The 2 kids needed to be mature and grown up for the holiday business party and possibly were thinking of how to project themselves so. My wife, on the premiere night of her play, would have also been in a heightened energy state and mindful of needing to be "a different person", one with her character, and projecting that to be a believable actor. So maybe I was just seeing their inner world in that moment. Empathy would certainly allow for that- a common after effect of an NDE. Perhaps being more sensitive to others for whom I can sense their unification/disparity between their inner and outer worlds will grant greater insights and direct me in ways to be of greater service.
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THU 27JUN2019
Some of the groups I follow ask big questions about life here and in the spirit. Many ask about our purpose and meaning in life. Purpose is an answer and Meaning is Understanding. For the most part, purpose gives rise to meaning, based on the perception of patterns which emerge by simply living and observing life. Even if the patterns that emerge say that you made a wrong turn and need to change, you have not fulfilled an expected purpose but you will still gain meaning from that as a lesson.
In thinking about this question of purpose s little further, I’d like to share my latest thoughts.
One perspective says that we travel in soul groups, agreeing to “contracts” and “rules of engagement” prior to every incarnation. That the love of your life in the last go-round will be your professional nemesis next time and your kids will be your parents, etc. I understand the “why” to be so that we can understand the human experience.
But I can’t understand why we have to take the “stupid” pill to do so. I mean, here you are talking to your “soul group” in a transcendent condition about how f****d up you’re going to make each other’s lives. To me, this is a pathology, not a path to Enlightenment. Otherwise, why would we need Salvation in any form? Just keep hitting the Reboot button over and over. The issue is this: what good are these lessons if here we forget them?
You can’t “escape” from this wheel of suffering from up there. The work must begin here. And since I believe we have incarnated more times than there is a number for, there is a flaw in this perception. Doing the same thing over and over, just playing different roles in the play of life on earth with the same yet similarly entrapped souls bound to the earth, is a wretched condition- even if you are at the top of the garbage heap with your own television show and product line and attending sycophants.
So for me, the purpose in life should be to get the hell out of this cycle. A cat licks a whetstone because it thinks the blood it tastes is from the stone, not its own tongue. An inconvenient truth for sure.
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SAT 06JUL2019
I am listening to people talk about soul groups and contracts. I assume the concept is that groups of souls form a type of collective and time their reincarnation cycles to come again and again into each other's lives, playing different roles each time: parent:child, spouses:lovers, boss:worker, tyrant:victim, mortal enemies. The explanation I'm mostly hearing is in response to the question, "why do we have to return here at all?" and the number 1 reason is "To learn to Love". If I am already off-track, please stop me now. If I am on track, then I have a real issue with this concept and would like to hear from anyone else who has a thought on this.
OK, so 2 or more souls are in a more enlightened state between lives, where they can see and understand things naturally that are hard if not impossible to appreciate here in this mortal perspective. Bottom line, when "There", we are "More" than we are "here". So if my above paragraph is correct, when in a more enlightened condition, we have what appear to be sane conversations with members of our beloved soul group about coming back into the world and into each other's lives, and sometimes not as those who love each other, but as people who may be trying to kill each other with everything they have. One may even be the serial killer to another. Max out this thought as much as you can. I have an issue with this;
1 - In a more enlightened sense of self, we communicate in normal tones about how we will leave that state to come into the material squalor of the world, put on the daily dying meat sack of a body, take an amnesia pill and a stupid pill too, and start killing each other....all to teach us about love. When we're already in a place where subtleties and the power of love can be seen and shared as in no way possible here on earth.
2 - Just as we've seen how gifts can pass from one life to another, with 5 year old Mozarts and 10 year old Einsteins, so too can damage- there are hurts that can pass from one lifetime to another, preventing a soul from blossoming, from living a full life and realizing "love" or whatever you call it that was responsible for that long-lasting hurt from the last life. And we, in our more enlightened state, are agreeing to do this to each other.
3 - As I wrestle with an analogy to further state the absurdity of the concept, I imagine playing with a child and their dolls. We move the dolls around, using different voices, and we plan out our day with the dolls going together here and there. Then imagine I start tearing the dolls up, ripping them apart. Once they have been destroyed and their parts thrown all over the place, I look at the terrorized child and say, "this was the lesson about Love we agreed to before we were born. You meditate on this now and have a nice day". You tell me, what is the difference?
4 - If this perspective offends any of the rainbow and unicorns folks who see where they went as a big playground tailor-made for their enjoyment, I apologize so that I don't get banned. But I can't believe there is any convince me that we terrorize each other in order to teach each other about love.
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SUN 07JUL2019
Inner Journey with Greg Friedman
https://www.kx935.com/category/podcast/inner-journey-with-greg-friedman/
Podcast tonight, 7:00PM Pacific Time / 10:00PM Eastern Time (USASUN 07JUL2019): kx935.com
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SAT 13JUL2019
People Change. Really.
1 - First significant reality shift of seeing someone appear differently.
Here is what happened to me in the 7th grade. Like every day, I rode the bus to school. I was 13 years old.
There was a very simple, wooden ramshackle house the bus would stop at and pick up a little boy and girl- brother and sister. He was kind of a tough kid but quiet, kept to himself- I think it was a defensiveness to an entire bus of his peers stopping outside his shitbox of a house every day and being reminded of how poor he was. His sister, Bonnie Butler (a name I later heard in Gone with the Wind- one of the characters), looked like she'd been in a car accident and gone through the windshield. Her entire face was scarred with the badly healed cuts that actually misshaped her face. What a hell, huh? So she was kind of quiet too, but for different reasons I guess. Poor thing. Well, one day the bus stopped and they got on board. Except for today- and I swear on anything anyone wants- Bonnie looked normal and had a slightly outgoing personality. Same height, physical build, carriage, hairstyle, and color, etc. Except there was absolutely no deformity and she really was engaging. I know because she and I sat next to each other on that day. Now I know how fucking unbelievable this is but I've learned since that when such things happen, many times we don't freak out- we just go with it. So I did. And on the way home that afternoon, we again sat next to each other and she was just chatting away.
The next morning she looked like her other self, got on the bus and I don't think she even looked at me but I can't remember- I am not sure if we ever talked again either. This would have been 1968-1969.
At the end of that school year, June 1969, I had the other lesson I have written about- where our preacher at Highlands Baptist Church, Reverend Coolidge, married his daughter to a black man and got thrown out within a week as a result. This was Jacksonville, Florida, in the 1960s, after all. When I heard this I thought everyone had gone nuts. The church was only 5 houses away and I'd just been trying to meet the preacher to get some Big Questions answered. Interesting story- he had 2 daughters- one was Rita Coolidge. The daughter who he married was Priscilla and she married Booker T of Booker T and the MGs. Really cool music pedigrees! In any case, after my NDE 47 years later I realized the lesson God taught me that day- that if I walk the ways of man (religion), I will come out with more questions than answers. But if I walk with Him, we will go where we're told not to, we will color outside the lines, we will celebrate the life of the individual spirit, and where I may not be given answers, but by God, I will be given Understanding.
2 - Being so Present you can't watch a movie or understand anything else that unfolds linearly.
One night I woke up and saw the shadows of leafless branches in sharp detail, cast upon a black wardrobe in my bedroom. It was in February and the wind was blowing, causing the limbs to move violently back and forth across the furniture.
As I watched the limbs move, my focus changed and I saw a story playing out- as if the motion of the limbs was being translated into a movie or cartoon- just like we use computers to convert what would appear to be a random bunch of 1s and 0s into a story with a beginning, middle and end. Its appearance was like a very old style black and white movie and I just accepted this was happening and lay there- trying to understand the story.
However, I could not. The challenge I had was that I was Present. This meant I was in the moment that trying to interpret any information in a linear fashion would be futile. The best analogy I can give is this: movies play at a rate of 24 or 25 frames per second- each frame a single photograph. When your present contracts to near zero time, past and future cease to have meaning, and so does the last frame you just saw because you forgot and the next frame, you can't anticipate. You simply see, not watch, the movie one frame at a time. So it's impossible to derive meaning this way- we have to take in information in a different way. I can better understand my experience in the in Between and others who report similarly that receiving information is like getting a download. Again, it's like downloading a movie of 1s and 0s in 3 minutes, but being able to play it through a media player that translates it into something intelligible. I guess if you could read binary, you might be able to understand the entire movie in one glance of entire file- who knows.
This also helps me understand another reason I could not see the choices I removed from the egg of my destiny, why only pain was my guide. I mentioned that when I looked at the gears, I could see a video feed playing in my head of the event. But honestly, they had little meaning to me. I thought it was because they were in my future, but as I further consider this, my description of what I saw in the 2 instances I can remember could be summed up in a single frame, maybe two. If I had tried to pick out which gears needed removing by using our predominant sense- sight- I would have been at a loss to do so- because in that state I couldn't have understood the beginning, the middle and the end of what the sector gears were telling me.
But I could understand pain, whether it ran the course of the gear's arc, or whether it lasted only for that impossible nowness of Planck Time: one hundred millionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of 1 second. So while I felt badly that pain instead of virtue was guiding my decisions in pruning my future possibilities, I see now there was little choice in terms of how I could process information within the literal time constraint of no-time. You need time to process linear information. Without it, being in the moment, a movie or any other narrative is only a frame by frame set of pictures seen by an amnesiac. By the time they see the next frame, it's as if they have forgotten the one they are looking at now- even if they could accurately describe it in full detail. This is how different I think things are over there- in terms of who we really are, in terms of how we interact, perceive and process information and how challenging it must be to communicate with us during our brief visits there. Hence the download process- just load us up with videos that we can play back in the media players of our minds when we return home.
3 - Seeing people change from the familiar to the unfamiliar and back again.
Last December, my wife invited the family to her office holiday party.
As I backed our car into the parking space at the restaurant, I noticed a young woman walking across the small parking lot to us. I figured it was someone from my wife's office and said, "That young woman looks very put together". It wasn't until I finished parking that I realized it was our youngest daughter, and my wife thought I was making a general, though complimentary, observation about our daughter.
I thought it was strange how I didn't recognize her- there was still plenty of light to clearly see who she was.
In the restaurant, I sat at a table and our 21-year-old son arrived. He was sitting across the table from me while we chatted. Then he went to the buffet table to get his dinner. When he returned, I didn't recognize him. As he sat there eating, I studied this unknown person's face and thought that he was a nice looking young person. I remember studying his facial structure and jawline. I was a little surprised by how comfortable he seemed to be, this stranger eating in a casual manner not 3 feet from me. I was almost put off a little bit. Then I realized it was our son.
In considering this later, I realized that it was like he simply morphed into a person recognizable to me from one who was not.
More recently, I saw my wife walking toward me on the other side of the street and thinking, “What a very good looking woman!” She was oscillating between someone I knew and someone I'd never seen before. Our daughter walked across the street to her while this was still going on so I knew she recognized this person. Finally, my wife became familiar to me, but not 100%- vestiges of “someone else” was still oscillating or radiating around her. Imagine seeing someone you know suddenly start shapeshifting into other people. It was kind of like that.
When this happens, it does so within a context where I still know everyone else. So it's not like having a stroke.
The one thing constant in these instances is that they- my children and wife- were all in a high energy state and themselves possibly in flux of “who they were”. The 2 kids needed to be mature and grown-up for the holiday business party and possibly were thinking of how to project themselves so. My wife, this instance being on the premiere night of her lead role in a play, would have also been in a heightened energy state and mindful of needing to be "a different person", one with her character, and projecting that to be a believable actor. So maybe I was just seeing their inner world in that moment. Empathy would certainly allow for that- a common after-effect of an NDE. Perhaps being more sensitive to others for whom I can sense their unification/disparity between their inner and outer worlds will grant greater insights and direct me in ways to be of greater service.
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SAT 27JUL2019
Thought I am Wondering About today:
So what if an NDE heals all of your inner pain- maybe even some of your physical pain. But it takes a while to realize it, because of the momentum of attachments to things and relationships from the past which no longer serve you, but you do them out of habit, for a while.
The rest of your life will be allowing the associated attachments to simply run dry. Some do so more quickly, some will take the rest of your lifetime. You begin to detect the process as a pattern, as things fall away, your taste in food, music, people and even former thoughts of "Who God Is" change.
That's why physical aliments may lessen up, your feelings of suffering because of them may lessen, your attachments to "bad" behaviors and relationships will lessen in strength and so on.
Which means that the rest of your life is a study in why you hang on to the things that limit you rather than just give them up sooner than later. Unless that's part of the lesson- in letting go, you also let go of the need to hurry up. This is God working to free the silk scarf of your soul from the thorn bush of the world, in which it has become tightly knotted over lifetimes. He does so gently (even in light of the circumstance producing an NDE- you could handle it, right?), one thorn at a time, lest He rips the precious scarf.
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SUN 12JAN2020
My experience was about removing potentially bad choices in my future, to give me better odds to make right decisions. I may still make wrong ones here and there but at least they are much less likely to be bad ones.
This implies that we are born with everything we need to be happy and spiritual. It’s the becoming self aware, then puberty then entering adulthood where we feel more and more individualistic and leave our personal Gardens of Eden in separation from God.
We spend the rest of our lives missing that innocence, trying to recreate it through holidays with our children, reinstituting traditions that take us back to that time for a few minutes.
All we have to do is let go and then forget those things that separate us from God. Being Present is easier when we have fewer regrets pulling at us from the past and fewer desires pulling us into the future. Even for a few minutes, we need to remove their crushing weight from our shoulders, put them on the ground, maybe look at them for a moment to see them for what they are...and then just walk away, lighter of heart and with more spring in our step.
On the field of battle, when a samurai draws his sword and throws away his scabbard, it’s because he will never need it again. On that day, he will fight his best. This is the Art of Letting Go. Every moment should be lived with such passion and abandon.
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THU 07FEB2020
Amazing story from today to share: I took some window screens to a shop to get repaired yesterday- the people were very nice. They called today to say they were ready. I went in at the end of the day and one thing led to another (to save time in my story) and I told them about my NDE. They were really interested. Then their daughter walked in and they told her I was in a plane crash (that caused the NDE). She looked at me and said, "I remember you". She is an upper thoracic/heart surgeon in Hartford- MILES away- and she remembered taking care of me 3 years, 4 months ago. So I was able to thank her and then SHE wanted to hear about the NDE and fully respected it. The point of this amazing synchronicity is this: the mother asked if I now am more intuitive, psychic, etc and I responded by saying- that THIS- the synchronicity that goes way against the chances- of their daughter being who she was in respect to my story and that she just happened to walk in right then....THIS is the type of miracle that blows so many "powers" out of the water. Because it is about people, them being kind and proof how we are all connected. Just wonderful and incredibly poignant. I could tell they were really trying to fit this all together, undeniable as it was.
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SUN 01 MAR 2020
I’ve been a question I am asked a lot: “what is the purpose of life?”
When we talk about purpose of life, I wonder if we should first consider its meaning.
When life happens, we can ask questions and we can ponder meaning. Answers to our questions give rise to purpose and meaning gives rise to understanding. But answers and purpose may grant shorter term benefits while understanding lasts a lifetime.
Example: “Who robbed the bank?”, creates a police investigation whose purpose is to find and arrest the bank robber. And that’s it. Understanding why someone would rob a bank is a discovery of the meaning of poverty and desperation for people who have nothing left to lose- even if their sad circumstances are self-created through poor decisions. In this case, the answer of “Who?” closes the police case. But understanding “Why” leads to compassion and insights on how to make society better and prevent problems before they arise.
It is understanding life that gives it meaning and meaning then provides context for our individual lives, accounting for our unique gifts and abilities, allowing us to apply ourselves where we feel we can be of service. The more unique our approach, the better, as this is how we live life in a way that celebrates the individual spirit. And THAT is our purpose. Not so much what we do as how we do it. Approach life as an artist and explorer.
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FRI 13MAR2020
I was meditating on an answer to my editor’s question about my connection to the IB. It is important I share it with you:
I’m still connected to It but our conversation is always evolving. Pattern-based nonlinear communication. Always a stretch but that’s growth and evolution. I was asking It about really stepping back into that vision and in answer, It showed me an angle to the sunlight that reminded me of Being There. All I can say is that for a split second, simply seeing here the way the light looked There, including something as subtle as its very angle, felt like a knife into my gut and I was instantly 100% uncomfortable in my own skin. It took me several days to recover. I suspect that there is a quality to the In Between that makes it almost impossible to stay very long in, maybe it’s like grabbing a live electrical circuit. I know that the imagery I have for it is symbolic, not the reason, for this. It’s a challenge. It does beg the question, “Who do I need to be, how do I need to change, to walk within that world with absolute comfort?” I intuit that on that day I will have nothing in common with anyone here and will be totally disinterested in this or any other world’s affairs. But that day is not today and so the work continues. I’m being given all I need to keep walking forward.
And before anyone suggests a concern that this isn’t the Rainbows and Unicorns” story so many others are, the world beyond this one isn’t either. Here, we see life through the filters we want. There, we see life through the filters we need. And that can be painful. But it’s worth the price.
It's been widely stated that in an NDE, we "get what we need" to learn something, to get our life back on the rails, to realize what's important, etc.
It's also been stated that things there take on a shape meaningful to us, as part of getting what we need out of the experience.
In that the places we go to or see, the sounds we hear, the things that are shown us are tailor-made to our current ability to understand, could it be that the "loved ones" we see who welcome us and help situate us there or steer us back here are not those long lost to our past but kindly spirits whose job is nothing more than help us adjust to our new reality? Do we just color them in with faces we trust in order to get through the magnitude of the initial shock? If we color in this objective reality ("bigger than just us") with the subjective familiar (trees, meadows, flowers, how God and angels look to us and so on) in order to understand what we're supposed to, then why not in this regard as well? I've wondered this also because so many people console themselves that their deceased spouse is waiting for them on the other side- but what if they are not? What if "Until Death do us part" means just that?
I'm not wanting to rain on anyone's parade and no matter what I am considering, I know that the truth will be self-evident There. But if I want to see things as much as they really are to the extent that I can stand, it's worth asking the question now.
Thank you for your consideration.
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FRI 01MAR2019
I am feeling that it's time to focus on a couple of things- obviously because these synchronize with my life right now- lol.
1 – Near Death Experience After-effects: There are laundry lists with statistical backing that are helpful. I think this list, where possible, should be expanded and deepened. https://iands.org/ndes/about-ndes/common-aftereffects.html
2 - "What now?"/Integration: Then this one follows. If there are other paths of psychotherapy which have elements that apply, might not be a bad idea to employ them, but I avoid over-categorization, as we're trying to understand something that's not totally understandable. But there may be some perspectives that could borrow from Multiple Personality Disorder and other Depersonalizing experiences that help experiencers better understand not just how they have changed (answers to their questions) but even more importantly: the process of the changes (meaning, based on understanding). As looking at a story (of our experiences) from a process-perspective is a somewhat depersonalizing, objectifying path, perhaps it would make it easier to identify the signposts that were behind us, are next to us and will come around the next corner in integrating the experience. I know one challenge is that, in feeling separated from the masses and recognizing the aloneness of what one is going through, it is possible for the ego to creep in as a defense from the perceived or real ostracization- that one is "chosen". Funny thing is, this could be indeed true. But to feed the ego with it isn't the right path, though ego, in terms of identifying self on a good day and trying to incorporate a new sense of self on a bad day- does play its role.
One thought I've been having in terms of moving from the After-effects to the Integration stages has to do with the electrical sensitivity- the messing up of electrical devices. I've had this aplenty, and it's not like I read this beforehand- it becomes a noticeable pattern after-the-NDE. Like if people say, "When you are around, I feel happy" or "when you touched me, my pain went away". Of course, this makes the "What now?" discussion easier, because you have a pattern of points of information and placing them on a graph and studying their attributes, you can detect possible patterns, even to the point of predicting future outcomes- if the attributes are accurately and completely captured.
For instance- it is easy to wonder what emotional state you are in when a light bulb next to you blows. Were you experiencing any heightened emotions? This is especially natural because that's how Hollywood would portray it- you get angry and lights pop, cars are tossed around and the bad guys die. But again, that focuses on content which is personal. And as such, I have found no corresponding emotion to associate with these things. The only possible pattern I think I have seen, and it kind of makes sense as a path to further investigate, is that these things happen when I am talking about the In Between, or even recounting my experience there. Times like these are when I feel it in the room, other people do as well (as I might not say anything but right when I get a wave of it through me, they remark on their own that they feel it). By a combination of focus on the experience of being There and taking "me" out of the equation as much as I can- and again I was depersonalized there, so it's kind of built-in for me- maybe I am becoming a conduit for the In Between- and that's when people benefit and electrical craziness happens. Therefore, part of "What now?" for me would be to see if this is true for other experiencers, if it represents a discernable pattern, what that pattern tells us and if it has any predictive value when the attributes are re-created. If we can show that, then I think we will have risen our understanding considerably.
Summary: Set up conditions to reveal changes in the environment when people share their NDE experience itself, especially connecting to it with their emotions, "seeing" it all over again.
Action: Bring this process into the conversation.
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13MAR2019
A new NDE friend has mentioned working in hospices. This is something I have wondered about.
Here is what seems a natural sequence of possibly linked events.
1 - As you can see from my last post, I have been lately pondering/meditating on the "What Now?" of integrating (coping with) the NDE into all of my life. Honestly, it is making its own room, pushing in everywhere- it's almost like the better question is "How to get out of the way?" more than "How to invite it in?" lol...
2 - A woman who I met at the local IANDS meeting a few months ago suddenly emailed me this morning, wanting to know if I am interested in hospice work. She mentioned the need to sit with people who are dying with no one at their side and how there was someone who recently died whom she thought would have particularly benefitted. This tugs at my heart.
3 - In addition to finding this synchronicity interesting, that my friend suggested my investigating hospice work only this past weekend and this months-ago meeting contact offering it this morning, I had a small epiphany:
4 - A few years ago, I felt God saying to me, that when you have an emotional need, sometimes the best way to receive it is to find someone who has the same need, but to a greater degree. The "good" person inside you will want to give it to that person- solidarity, compassion, a moment of non-judgment, etc. So when you find yourself giving to someone else with a greater hunger exactly what you yourself need, this is the magical fulfillment. You needed it and there it is- coming from within you- and to the benefit of you both. So God is saying, "It's already within you" and the magic happens when we live our lives in service to others- it is called out of us. I remember this is also the root of the word "educate"= "to draw forth"; with the assumption that all truth and all beauty already exist within us and the role of our teachers isn't to put things inside us as much as help us remember what we already know- imagine waking up in a world like that. =-)
5 - So perhaps this begins the answer to "What Next?" for me in the becoming One with the experience God graced me with.
So I may reach back to her on this and see where it leads. Likely baby steps.
Have a wonderful day!
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13MAR2019
On another topic, regarding After-Effects of an NDE, I am sure many of you know about the strange electrical things that happen. Light bulbs pop, digital watches go wonky, computers sometimes act weird, Points of Sale in stores go down right when you're trying to purchase something (3 times for me and once with an NDE friend when we were on the phone together talking about NDE stuff, right as she pulled her wallet out!), and for me this past year- in addition to the above- blowing up my central A/C and Gas furnace at the same time, blew up my microwave (and when microwaving my room-temperature coffee for only 30 seconds, it exploded when I went to take it out, my son saw the whole thing), etc.
Well, for me, here's a new one!
A couple of weeks I was talking to PMH Atwater on the phone. We began talking at 3:00pm on a Friday, and finished the call at 5:00pm. At 4:40pm, I felt a surge of energy- but more like I was feeling more engaged, interested, and Present. I imagine like if I'd taken a pill to enhance my mood. At that same moment, she said, "I can feel our energies melding", so at that time I told her I agreed, feeling what I felt. We then started talking about the Impossible Now(she calls it the Eternal Now), and being Present. When we concluded our call, I walked out to my car, which had been running already to warm up for my afternoon drive, and 2 things happened: 1 - I looked up at my porch light and it blew, right then. I got into my car and immediately noticed that my 2 clocks- one in the radio which is the master of the one in the dash- were at 2 different times: the radio (master) one was on normal time. The one in the dash was frozen on - guess when? - 4:40pm! It was "Present". So I had 2 timezones in my car for my drive that day- one was normal Earth time and the other was In Between time. The next day, both clocks were back to normal.
A few weeks later, I was driving to visit PMH. About 20 minutes outside her home, an NDE friend suddenly felt "called" to text me through a popular messaging app we (and a zillion other people) use. My phone was mounted to my dash for my use of its GPS app when my friend's message pinged in. So I tapped it and saw her text. I pulled over and typed back that maybe she was thinking of me because I was about to meet PMH- a pioneer of NDE research, having had 3 NDEs of her own back in the 70s and definitely ''the real deal". My friend was delighted at the timing. While I then saw the "dot-dot-dot" in her text field indicating she was typing her next thought, my own text field suddenly started typing its own text. I was now driving, with both hands on the steering wheel. My eyes opened in amazement as my phone created its own text, saying, "Thank you for being a kind and loving person". I panicked, not knowing what was going on or the originator of the text and worried that it might suddenly take a left turn and say something I might have to explain, so I highlighted it and deleted it. I told PMH (and my friend, later) about it and she laughed, saying, "This is just the beginning".
This past weekend, a new NDE friend who has a lot of focus, energy and commitment to the truth of his NDE suggested I reach out to an NDE researcher in Europe who is beginning a new study/research project. So I did. She sent me an email later saying I was accepted and that we'd speak on the phone soon. The next morning, I get into my car and before I leave my home, I open up my NDE email folder to see if there are any NDE podcasts that I'd enjoy while driving. At the top and as the most recent email in that NDE folder was a real puzzle: the email showing was as if from this researcher, who I'd just met and received only one email from, but the body of the email- the message itself- was one from 11 years ago from my ex-wife, regarding meeting spiritual groups we are interested in, here in the northeastern USA. I have never heard of this happening before to an email. I find it interesting that both were linked to spirituality but 11 years apart, and becoming merged? Wow, there are several meanings to this one.
And then the occurrence mentioned above, in the post before this one regarding hospice work, popped in to greet me today.
I'm telling you, this is a roller coaster!
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13MAR2019
I have been curious for some time about one commonly-described feature of NDEs. I'm curious about your thoughts.
It's been widely stated that in an NDE, we "get what we need" to learn something, to get our life back on the rails, to realize what's important, etc.
It's also been stated that things there take on a shape meaningful to us, as part of getting what we need out of the experience.
In that the places we go to or see, the sounds we hear, the things that are shown us are tailor-made to our current ability to understand, could it be that the "loved ones" we see who welcome us and help situate us there or steer us back here are not those long lost to our past but kindly spirits whose job is nothing more than help us adjust to our new reality? Do we just color them in with faces we trust in order to get through the magnitude of the initial shock? If we color in this objective reality ("bigger than just us") with the subjective familiar (trees, meadows, flowers, how God and angels look to us and so on) in order to understand what we're supposed to, then why not in this regard as well? I've wondered this also because so many people console themselves that their deceased spouse is waiting for them on the other side- but what if they are not? What if "Until Death do us part" means just that?
I'm not wanting to rain on anyone's parade and no matter what I am considering, I know that the truth will be self-evident There. But if I want to see things as much as they really are to the extent that I can stand, it's worth asking the question now.
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21APR2019, Easter Sunday
Thinking of how only the 3 traditional cups of wine were passed among the group in the Last Supper; the fourth I understand Jesus said he would forgo until He was within the Kingdom of Heaven. It was on the cross someone placed a sponge of soured wine to his lips. In taking it, this was the 4th cup of wine and then he said, “It is finished”. It’s meaningful this “cup” of wine was bitter and his point of conclusion.
The path of the spirit is not for the weak of heart. And in the end, more than courage, Heart is what it’s all about. For no one, no thing, can stand before the brilliance of a truly naked soul.
In Reflection, with a transcental experience, I have realized how hopes and dreams backfill into the present, impregnating the choices before us with their reflections. Seeing which choices we can make increase the probability of bringing us to our desires, we choose accordingly. But what happens if a transcendental event cuts the roots of attachment in a way to also wither those attachments? What happens when you realize you have no hopes and dreams anymore? That the way they used to color your day- how the sky looked, how your relationships were defined- including your place in the universe and how they would have loaded your question of, "What is my purpose"? ....all comes to a sudden and immediate end? And that as you try and figure this out over time, you realize the few attachments you are left with are no longer fed by these dying desires- and so every attachment, every joy and every pain you enjoyed or suffered before is now running on fumes as you empty out? Not only do the old hallmarks now seme empty of joy, but the things that hurt you also have less power to do so.
To become empty of desires means you perceive all possible outcomes at any moment with equanimity- with less bias than before. Yet this stage of spiritual change can be discomfiting as you wonder if this growing emptiness is a sign of things to come, or if something else will fill it? I've heard it both ways, but it seems the more detached Eastern approach says total emptiness os the target, while the West preaches that we will be filled with joy. However, I'm concerned that to be filled with anything that wishes to avoid its polar opposite is not perfect balance.
But as I become emptier as a result of the depersonalization experienced on the other side, that now growing within me here day by day, I have less and less in common with this place or its fears and worries, much less its hopes and dreams. Yet I feel self- contained, so it's not necessarily so that a solitary path is a lonely one, but there is definitely a feeling of having been removed from the masses.
So. As this emptiness replaces clutter, what is the meaning impregnating this silence?
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TUE 23APR2019
Continuing along the lines of detachment, with less bias toward any one outcome over another, this objective place in my perception leads me to somewhat more indifference in the expectations of any of my actions leading to success- in and of themselves. We can merely act according to the situation or need and being in the present, don't- in fact, cant, think about the end result. Being in the present, all I can feel any sense of connection to is my effort. Standing back at it all, you can see processes and flows from further away than deeper in- the old adage about not being able to see the forest for the trees applies. As you fall into the beauty of the processes, seeing them flow, carrying us all- actions or not- to wherever we're meant to go, it's as if you intuit the cosmic mathematics within each flow- just as an illiterate uneducated caveman could probably run to catch a ball tossed to him- not being conscious of all the calculus he's using to do so, charting the ball's parabolic trajectory, accounting for wind deflection, speed and so on. In the end, you find yourself drawn to do the right thing, not because of some reward or even because it makes you feel good, but because the "math" in the situation simply calls for it. You aren't looking for a connection to the common or greater or even a private Good, you're just following the math equation and solving for "x", and the correct answer is simply the one that is good. Then it is on to the next flow, the next math problem.
As I ponder this, I am noticing a process emerging. I can't yet be sure if my perception of it is accurate, but it's the best I have so far. It's like my NDE, in removing me from the herd, cut off the pipeline of how desires, fears, hopes, and dreams fuel my desire for being here. Since my NDE, if I go out and try and do any of the things I enjoyed or was otherwise attached to before, it is with less attachment, less pleasure and in some cases, less pain. It's not that I'm numb, it's more like I'm empty. The world I went to was gray, not full of color. And this world becomes grayer every day. I'm becoming present in the In Between as I write this and having trouble maintaining thought. With the pipeline cutoff, every aspect of what I do here feels like it is running on fumes. Imagine every time you go to a movie, you enjoy it a little bit less. Now imagine the same for every other aspect of life. Relationships feed you less and less. Thank heavens it's not a clean break but one that while sometimes seeming accelerated, are I'm sure paced to what I can just stand. Imagine the desire, not for wealth but a financial cushion also grips you less and less. Imagine that you realize sex has nothing to do with love and for a time is simply "need reduction" and then it fades away as the associated need also fades away. Imagine that even food- your old favorites or not- simply have less taste- as you realize the body is nothing more than a machine that needs fuel. You see what people call Love as, in the majority of times, nothing more than the fulfillment of projected desires upon the world around us. With the transactions of "what can you do for me" establishing work, romance, families, religious beliefs being negotiated every single moment...with our subconscious watching and waiting to react to any momentary dip in the negotiated deal. Such a dip introduces ambiguity into the relationship. And ambiguities are never, ever, welcome in any relationship. And an NDE represents perhaps the greatest ambiguity of all, as those "closest" to you who don't have the transcendental experience ask, "where did you go? I want my friend-spouse-coworker-etc back". And there you are, standing with a blank look on your face, at first unknowing of the Change, scratching your head to either wonder what they mean or wondering, "how do they know?" People can tell when you're engaged- well beyond the obvious and well beyond the subtleties of nuance, voice inflection, choice of words or body language. You can feel it in just their touch- whether they are present or distant.
Pausing to breathe for a moment, I reflect that it seems like the gray world of the In Between infected me, as I become grayer every day. I am pretty sure that the reason that world looked like it did was so that I wouldn't be distracted by it and would more easily focus upon my purpose there- even needing the lack of distraction to intuit my purpose in the first place. As within, so without- they say. So, in as much as I didn't ask for this in as articulate a manner as the answer appears to be coming (I smile as I write that), I can only continue to put one foot in front of the other and see where it takes me. I feel that this world is also becoming less distracting so that I will discover my true purpose. Remove all else, and you can hear even the Silence. Adjust your eyes to the dark, and you can see the smallest hint of light- I've seen my way across sand dunes in Africa- hundreds of miles from anyone- with nothing more than starlight. As each photon reached the end of its millions of years of longing to touch for the briefest moment my face turned upwards into the night, we met. That briefest moment is the Present. The past is dust and the future is many possibilities rolled up into one- just waiting for us to choose.
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THU 25APR2019
This may be more meaningful to those who also have experienced death and returned...
Upon return from your NDE and integrating it into your life here (I also call it, "coping" - lol), have any of you noticed that this type of analogy for any detachments? My analogy is this: It's like your attachments had a gas tank to power them, and now there is no more gas filling the tank. So for the engine of some attachments ("life"?), some are running low on gas, some are running on fumes and some have run completely dry. Which leaves you with, "What do I do now?" If any new attachments/habits replace them, they don't seem to have the staying power as they might have before- so they run out of gas and you move on. It makes a kind of sense, doesn't it? I have found that intensity binds us to a sense of self- that's why war veterans (beyond the explanation of PTSD) still might jump into bushes if a car backfires, why people return to terrible relationships, etc. If- as I'm still working this out - this is true, then I guess the intensity and the Timelessness (it's always "new") of an NDE might re-root us from here to There. For me, I am constantly working on what now to fill my time with. I have no interest in old hobbies and very little (but some, at least intellectually) interest in establishing new hobbies. I'm an introvert and now I feel more self-contained, so I don't get lonely. I just work and find myself spending less time with other family members who are engaged in their own busy days and nights. I am not complaining! This is just adding more to my last 2 posts about becoming Empty, which I believe was because my sense of self was redefined by a powerfully intense but de-personalizing experience. I can still engage with people, and they find me likable, but there is no "glue" now. Even if someone pisses me off, it doesn't last long at all and I forget about it pretty quickly. I feel like I'm just skating along, waiting to see what the Great Beyond sends me next. I'm sure the world would have a hundred ways to describe this as a pathology, but mystical writings say this is right path:
- To become detached from the world (even to the point where food loses its flavor- which is also true for me),
- To become empty of worldly things (if your heart is full of the world, where is there room for God?)
I don't miss "the old me", though I am sure some do. I feel like I am slowly becoming the person who was on the Other Side- someone with no personality, ultimately with no ego even, no attachments, no memory of things past or anticipation of things future. Just present, within the Impossible Now. That some of the weird after-effects with electronics continue, I know it's not just an easy thing to say that I'm nuts.
I also find it challenging to talk to a counselor about this, because if they haven't had an NDE or are NDE-familiar (or even NDE-friendly), then I realize I'm wasting my breath about 2 minutes into the conversation. I do have one heavyweight in the world here who is considered a pinnacle of NDE research, having had 3 herself and authoring 15 books, who is becoming a friend and has been to where I have- finishing my sentences for me and describing in long detail my experience from so many angles in one of her books. It's like I can "feel" her even though she lives so far away. And it's reciprocal.
Perhaps the level we go to Inside defines the new planet from which we come. If it is populous, you may not feel as solitary upon return. If where you go is less populated, then it's glaringly apparent upon return the solitary path (not necessarily lonely though, if you don't feel that) you now walk.
I hope this isn't distressing anyone to share this with. I'm not feeling distressed, but I do have a big cartoon question mark over my head a lot of the time, I suppose. Just interested in comparing notes with brother and sister travelers along the way.
I recently wondered whether thoughts become more powerful upon return. I do believe this to be the case, from what I'm experiencing. Perhaps one lesson in becoming empty means that whatever you do think about has more room to fill you and that additional capacity IS the power. But like a lot of things, once you can do it, it loses its magic a bit. How many things did you think were incredible, impossible or magical when you were little, but if you learned how to do them later in life they seemed almost more mechanical than magical? I'm sure DisneyWorld looks a lot less magical behind the scenes. On one side, you have It's a Small World robotic children amazing the park attendees, but on the backside, you can see all the gears whirring around making it happen. Once you've gone behind the scenes, you'll never look at the facade the same again.
You can't unsee how sausage is made once you've done it.
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FRI 26APR2019
Returning from the other side, many of us find ourselves divorced from things that defined our past. That person died and remained dead. Now is what you have left. There is no going back, only building anew. The noise we loved now pains us as cacophony. The sights which thrilled us now over-saturate us. The food we gorged on and the drink which inebriated us are simply gone. We eat less, we drink simply, we seek less stress and realize that the past is dust. As attachments fall away to the point we forget about them, those that are new don’t have the staying power and run their courses more quickly. Emptying out, any thought that fills us, fills us more, increasing the power of how we direct that thought- whether by fear or desire. Also in becoming empty, we see how the after-effects of NDEs increase. Not the product of an emotion or mental state but the flow from the In Between to here. The more empty we are, the greater the interconnectivity between the two states. When doing this with another NDE-realized soul, the effects amplify. If 5% of the world has had an NDE, that’s 60 million more people than live in the USA. Imagine if that population of 380 million people all emptied themselves at once to connect The In Between to here. What do you think would happen?
In choosing the sublime over the intense, the silence over noise, focus over distraction, dualities like joy and pain withdraw into the main axis of the sine wave of emotion and we walk along that axis, not choosing to have pleasure or avoid pain. When we hear someone speak, their words give us answers, but from their nuance, inflection and body language emerges meaning. Finally, we realize that the silence between their words is filled with information that grants us understanding. I believe this is how communication works in the In Between. Even telepathically, we can absorb only so much information, and the download of an entire narrative may take quite a while back on earth to open up and play out, and even then when we chew on it slowly, we discover new layers and depths with each consideration. Moment by moment, we are changing. Becoming something else. The analogy of our change can be like one carried along by a stream or falling victim to an infection, but in all cases we have no choice. We feel that we don’t belong to our own selves because we no longer belong to that which we once thought we were: our desires and our fears. Waking up like this in a somnambulating world creates definite challenges. Finding others like ourselves also coping with this transition helps, especially when we use similar reference points in language and thought in ways unique to those who have fallen from the sky as different people than those who flew into it.
In my NDE, I saw that God could care less about most of the crap we get wrapped around the axle about. All He wants is to have a relationship with us. How we live our lives tells us how close or far we feel to Him. He is more appreciative of 1 inch of gain than we are of 1 mile. As we walk to Him, He runs to us. If we really want to do something others judge as sinful, He says “See how that works out for you. When you’re done, come back, I’ll be right here. I’m not going anywhere”. Otherwise, trying to please everyone else, trying to follow many rules which seem arbitrary to you, means you’re living someone else’s life, not yours. Always- Always- live life in celebration of the individual spirit. Starting with yours. ❤️
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SUN 05MAY2019
As I watched this, I wonder if viewing it the other way around, in terms of where I’m going versus where I’ve gone, would suggest the appearance of a tunnel as everything whizzes by? https://youtu.be/nGnX6GkrOgk
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FRI 10MAY2019
Last December, my wife invited the family to her office holiday party.
As I backed our car into the parking space at the restaurant, I noticed a young woman walking across the small parking lot to us. I figured it was someone from my wife's office and said, "That young woman looks very put together". It wasn't until I finished parking that I realized it was our youngest daughter, and my wife thought I was making a general, though complimentary, observation about our daughter.
I thought it was strange how I didn't recognize her- there was still plenty of light to clearly see who she was.
In the restaurant, I sat at a table and our 21-year-old son arrived. He was sitting across the table from me while we chatted. Then he went to the buffet table to get his dinner. When he returned, I didn't recognize him. As he sat there eating, I studied this unknown person's face and thought that he was a nice looking young person. I remember studying his facial structure and jawline. I was a little surprised by how comfortable he seemed to be, this stranger eating in a casual manner not 3 feet from me. I was almost put off a little bit. Then I realized it was our son.
In considering this later, I realized that it was like he simply morphed into a person recognizable to me from one who was not.
This evening, I saw my wife walking toward me on the other side of the street and thinking, “What a very good looking woman!” She was oscillating between someone I knew and someone I'd never seen before. Our daughter walked across the street to her while this was still going on so I knew she recognized this person. Finally, my wife became familiar to me, but not 100%- vestiges of “someone else” was still oscillating or radiating around her. Imagine seeing someone you know suddenly start shapeshifting into other people. It was kind of like that.
When this happens, it does so within a context where I still know everyone else. I am not sure what's happening here, but I have wondered if it is seeing the multiple probabilities superpositioned on an individual- where they are each one of these things but the possibilities keep flipping through until one becomes their/our/my present reality. I think there is something "quantum" going on here, but I've not heard of this before.
The one thing constant in these instances is that they- my children and wife- were all in a high energy state and themselves possibly in flux of “who they were”. The 2 kids needed to be mature and grown up for the holiday business party and possibly were thinking of how to project themselves so. My wife, on the premiere night of her play, would have also been in a heightened energy state and mindful of needing to be "a different person", one with her character, and projecting that to be a believable actor. So maybe I was just seeing their inner world in that moment. Empathy would certainly allow for that- a common after effect of an NDE. Perhaps being more sensitive to others for whom I can sense their unification/disparity between their inner and outer worlds will grant greater insights and direct me in ways to be of greater service.
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THU 27JUN2019
Some of the groups I follow ask big questions about life here and in the spirit. Many ask about our purpose and meaning in life. Purpose is an answer and Meaning is Understanding. For the most part, purpose gives rise to meaning, based on the perception of patterns which emerge by simply living and observing life. Even if the patterns that emerge say that you made a wrong turn and need to change, you have not fulfilled an expected purpose but you will still gain meaning from that as a lesson.
In thinking about this question of purpose s little further, I’d like to share my latest thoughts.
One perspective says that we travel in soul groups, agreeing to “contracts” and “rules of engagement” prior to every incarnation. That the love of your life in the last go-round will be your professional nemesis next time and your kids will be your parents, etc. I understand the “why” to be so that we can understand the human experience.
But I can’t understand why we have to take the “stupid” pill to do so. I mean, here you are talking to your “soul group” in a transcendent condition about how f****d up you’re going to make each other’s lives. To me, this is a pathology, not a path to Enlightenment. Otherwise, why would we need Salvation in any form? Just keep hitting the Reboot button over and over. The issue is this: what good are these lessons if here we forget them?
You can’t “escape” from this wheel of suffering from up there. The work must begin here. And since I believe we have incarnated more times than there is a number for, there is a flaw in this perception. Doing the same thing over and over, just playing different roles in the play of life on earth with the same yet similarly entrapped souls bound to the earth, is a wretched condition- even if you are at the top of the garbage heap with your own television show and product line and attending sycophants.
So for me, the purpose in life should be to get the hell out of this cycle. A cat licks a whetstone because it thinks the blood it tastes is from the stone, not its own tongue. An inconvenient truth for sure.
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SAT 06JUL2019
I am listening to people talk about soul groups and contracts. I assume the concept is that groups of souls form a type of collective and time their reincarnation cycles to come again and again into each other's lives, playing different roles each time: parent:child, spouses:lovers, boss:worker, tyrant:victim, mortal enemies. The explanation I'm mostly hearing is in response to the question, "why do we have to return here at all?" and the number 1 reason is "To learn to Love". If I am already off-track, please stop me now. If I am on track, then I have a real issue with this concept and would like to hear from anyone else who has a thought on this.
OK, so 2 or more souls are in a more enlightened state between lives, where they can see and understand things naturally that are hard if not impossible to appreciate here in this mortal perspective. Bottom line, when "There", we are "More" than we are "here". So if my above paragraph is correct, when in a more enlightened condition, we have what appear to be sane conversations with members of our beloved soul group about coming back into the world and into each other's lives, and sometimes not as those who love each other, but as people who may be trying to kill each other with everything they have. One may even be the serial killer to another. Max out this thought as much as you can. I have an issue with this;
1 - In a more enlightened sense of self, we communicate in normal tones about how we will leave that state to come into the material squalor of the world, put on the daily dying meat sack of a body, take an amnesia pill and a stupid pill too, and start killing each other....all to teach us about love. When we're already in a place where subtleties and the power of love can be seen and shared as in no way possible here on earth.
2 - Just as we've seen how gifts can pass from one life to another, with 5 year old Mozarts and 10 year old Einsteins, so too can damage- there are hurts that can pass from one lifetime to another, preventing a soul from blossoming, from living a full life and realizing "love" or whatever you call it that was responsible for that long-lasting hurt from the last life. And we, in our more enlightened state, are agreeing to do this to each other.
3 - As I wrestle with an analogy to further state the absurdity of the concept, I imagine playing with a child and their dolls. We move the dolls around, using different voices, and we plan out our day with the dolls going together here and there. Then imagine I start tearing the dolls up, ripping them apart. Once they have been destroyed and their parts thrown all over the place, I look at the terrorized child and say, "this was the lesson about Love we agreed to before we were born. You meditate on this now and have a nice day". You tell me, what is the difference?
4 - If this perspective offends any of the rainbow and unicorns folks who see where they went as a big playground tailor-made for their enjoyment, I apologize so that I don't get banned. But I can't believe there is any convince me that we terrorize each other in order to teach each other about love.
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SUN 07JUL2019
Inner Journey with Greg Friedman
https://www.kx935.com/category/podcast/inner-journey-with-greg-friedman/
Podcast tonight, 7:00PM Pacific Time / 10:00PM Eastern Time (USASUN 07JUL2019): kx935.com
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SAT 13JUL2019
People Change. Really.
1 - First significant reality shift of seeing someone appear differently.
Here is what happened to me in the 7th grade. Like every day, I rode the bus to school. I was 13 years old.
There was a very simple, wooden ramshackle house the bus would stop at and pick up a little boy and girl- brother and sister. He was kind of a tough kid but quiet, kept to himself- I think it was a defensiveness to an entire bus of his peers stopping outside his shitbox of a house every day and being reminded of how poor he was. His sister, Bonnie Butler (a name I later heard in Gone with the Wind- one of the characters), looked like she'd been in a car accident and gone through the windshield. Her entire face was scarred with the badly healed cuts that actually misshaped her face. What a hell, huh? So she was kind of quiet too, but for different reasons I guess. Poor thing. Well, one day the bus stopped and they got on board. Except for today- and I swear on anything anyone wants- Bonnie looked normal and had a slightly outgoing personality. Same height, physical build, carriage, hairstyle, and color, etc. Except there was absolutely no deformity and she really was engaging. I know because she and I sat next to each other on that day. Now I know how fucking unbelievable this is but I've learned since that when such things happen, many times we don't freak out- we just go with it. So I did. And on the way home that afternoon, we again sat next to each other and she was just chatting away.
The next morning she looked like her other self, got on the bus and I don't think she even looked at me but I can't remember- I am not sure if we ever talked again either. This would have been 1968-1969.
At the end of that school year, June 1969, I had the other lesson I have written about- where our preacher at Highlands Baptist Church, Reverend Coolidge, married his daughter to a black man and got thrown out within a week as a result. This was Jacksonville, Florida, in the 1960s, after all. When I heard this I thought everyone had gone nuts. The church was only 5 houses away and I'd just been trying to meet the preacher to get some Big Questions answered. Interesting story- he had 2 daughters- one was Rita Coolidge. The daughter who he married was Priscilla and she married Booker T of Booker T and the MGs. Really cool music pedigrees! In any case, after my NDE 47 years later I realized the lesson God taught me that day- that if I walk the ways of man (religion), I will come out with more questions than answers. But if I walk with Him, we will go where we're told not to, we will color outside the lines, we will celebrate the life of the individual spirit, and where I may not be given answers, but by God, I will be given Understanding.
2 - Being so Present you can't watch a movie or understand anything else that unfolds linearly.
One night I woke up and saw the shadows of leafless branches in sharp detail, cast upon a black wardrobe in my bedroom. It was in February and the wind was blowing, causing the limbs to move violently back and forth across the furniture.
As I watched the limbs move, my focus changed and I saw a story playing out- as if the motion of the limbs was being translated into a movie or cartoon- just like we use computers to convert what would appear to be a random bunch of 1s and 0s into a story with a beginning, middle and end. Its appearance was like a very old style black and white movie and I just accepted this was happening and lay there- trying to understand the story.
However, I could not. The challenge I had was that I was Present. This meant I was in the moment that trying to interpret any information in a linear fashion would be futile. The best analogy I can give is this: movies play at a rate of 24 or 25 frames per second- each frame a single photograph. When your present contracts to near zero time, past and future cease to have meaning, and so does the last frame you just saw because you forgot and the next frame, you can't anticipate. You simply see, not watch, the movie one frame at a time. So it's impossible to derive meaning this way- we have to take in information in a different way. I can better understand my experience in the in Between and others who report similarly that receiving information is like getting a download. Again, it's like downloading a movie of 1s and 0s in 3 minutes, but being able to play it through a media player that translates it into something intelligible. I guess if you could read binary, you might be able to understand the entire movie in one glance of entire file- who knows.
This also helps me understand another reason I could not see the choices I removed from the egg of my destiny, why only pain was my guide. I mentioned that when I looked at the gears, I could see a video feed playing in my head of the event. But honestly, they had little meaning to me. I thought it was because they were in my future, but as I further consider this, my description of what I saw in the 2 instances I can remember could be summed up in a single frame, maybe two. If I had tried to pick out which gears needed removing by using our predominant sense- sight- I would have been at a loss to do so- because in that state I couldn't have understood the beginning, the middle and the end of what the sector gears were telling me.
But I could understand pain, whether it ran the course of the gear's arc, or whether it lasted only for that impossible nowness of Planck Time: one hundred millionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of 1 second. So while I felt badly that pain instead of virtue was guiding my decisions in pruning my future possibilities, I see now there was little choice in terms of how I could process information within the literal time constraint of no-time. You need time to process linear information. Without it, being in the moment, a movie or any other narrative is only a frame by frame set of pictures seen by an amnesiac. By the time they see the next frame, it's as if they have forgotten the one they are looking at now- even if they could accurately describe it in full detail. This is how different I think things are over there- in terms of who we really are, in terms of how we interact, perceive and process information and how challenging it must be to communicate with us during our brief visits there. Hence the download process- just load us up with videos that we can play back in the media players of our minds when we return home.
3 - Seeing people change from the familiar to the unfamiliar and back again.
Last December, my wife invited the family to her office holiday party.
As I backed our car into the parking space at the restaurant, I noticed a young woman walking across the small parking lot to us. I figured it was someone from my wife's office and said, "That young woman looks very put together". It wasn't until I finished parking that I realized it was our youngest daughter, and my wife thought I was making a general, though complimentary, observation about our daughter.
I thought it was strange how I didn't recognize her- there was still plenty of light to clearly see who she was.
In the restaurant, I sat at a table and our 21-year-old son arrived. He was sitting across the table from me while we chatted. Then he went to the buffet table to get his dinner. When he returned, I didn't recognize him. As he sat there eating, I studied this unknown person's face and thought that he was a nice looking young person. I remember studying his facial structure and jawline. I was a little surprised by how comfortable he seemed to be, this stranger eating in a casual manner not 3 feet from me. I was almost put off a little bit. Then I realized it was our son.
In considering this later, I realized that it was like he simply morphed into a person recognizable to me from one who was not.
More recently, I saw my wife walking toward me on the other side of the street and thinking, “What a very good looking woman!” She was oscillating between someone I knew and someone I'd never seen before. Our daughter walked across the street to her while this was still going on so I knew she recognized this person. Finally, my wife became familiar to me, but not 100%- vestiges of “someone else” was still oscillating or radiating around her. Imagine seeing someone you know suddenly start shapeshifting into other people. It was kind of like that.
When this happens, it does so within a context where I still know everyone else. So it's not like having a stroke.
The one thing constant in these instances is that they- my children and wife- were all in a high energy state and themselves possibly in flux of “who they were”. The 2 kids needed to be mature and grown-up for the holiday business party and possibly were thinking of how to project themselves so. My wife, this instance being on the premiere night of her lead role in a play, would have also been in a heightened energy state and mindful of needing to be "a different person", one with her character, and projecting that to be a believable actor. So maybe I was just seeing their inner world in that moment. Empathy would certainly allow for that- a common after-effect of an NDE. Perhaps being more sensitive to others for whom I can sense their unification/disparity between their inner and outer worlds will grant greater insights and direct me in ways to be of greater service.
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SAT 27JUL2019
Thought I am Wondering About today:
So what if an NDE heals all of your inner pain- maybe even some of your physical pain. But it takes a while to realize it, because of the momentum of attachments to things and relationships from the past which no longer serve you, but you do them out of habit, for a while.
The rest of your life will be allowing the associated attachments to simply run dry. Some do so more quickly, some will take the rest of your lifetime. You begin to detect the process as a pattern, as things fall away, your taste in food, music, people and even former thoughts of "Who God Is" change.
That's why physical aliments may lessen up, your feelings of suffering because of them may lessen, your attachments to "bad" behaviors and relationships will lessen in strength and so on.
Which means that the rest of your life is a study in why you hang on to the things that limit you rather than just give them up sooner than later. Unless that's part of the lesson- in letting go, you also let go of the need to hurry up. This is God working to free the silk scarf of your soul from the thorn bush of the world, in which it has become tightly knotted over lifetimes. He does so gently (even in light of the circumstance producing an NDE- you could handle it, right?), one thorn at a time, lest He rips the precious scarf.
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SUN 12JAN2020
My experience was about removing potentially bad choices in my future, to give me better odds to make right decisions. I may still make wrong ones here and there but at least they are much less likely to be bad ones.
This implies that we are born with everything we need to be happy and spiritual. It’s the becoming self aware, then puberty then entering adulthood where we feel more and more individualistic and leave our personal Gardens of Eden in separation from God.
We spend the rest of our lives missing that innocence, trying to recreate it through holidays with our children, reinstituting traditions that take us back to that time for a few minutes.
All we have to do is let go and then forget those things that separate us from God. Being Present is easier when we have fewer regrets pulling at us from the past and fewer desires pulling us into the future. Even for a few minutes, we need to remove their crushing weight from our shoulders, put them on the ground, maybe look at them for a moment to see them for what they are...and then just walk away, lighter of heart and with more spring in our step.
On the field of battle, when a samurai draws his sword and throws away his scabbard, it’s because he will never need it again. On that day, he will fight his best. This is the Art of Letting Go. Every moment should be lived with such passion and abandon.
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THU 07FEB2020
Amazing story from today to share: I took some window screens to a shop to get repaired yesterday- the people were very nice. They called today to say they were ready. I went in at the end of the day and one thing led to another (to save time in my story) and I told them about my NDE. They were really interested. Then their daughter walked in and they told her I was in a plane crash (that caused the NDE). She looked at me and said, "I remember you". She is an upper thoracic/heart surgeon in Hartford- MILES away- and she remembered taking care of me 3 years, 4 months ago. So I was able to thank her and then SHE wanted to hear about the NDE and fully respected it. The point of this amazing synchronicity is this: the mother asked if I now am more intuitive, psychic, etc and I responded by saying- that THIS- the synchronicity that goes way against the chances- of their daughter being who she was in respect to my story and that she just happened to walk in right then....THIS is the type of miracle that blows so many "powers" out of the water. Because it is about people, them being kind and proof how we are all connected. Just wonderful and incredibly poignant. I could tell they were really trying to fit this all together, undeniable as it was.
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SUN 01 MAR 2020
I’ve been a question I am asked a lot: “what is the purpose of life?”
When we talk about purpose of life, I wonder if we should first consider its meaning.
When life happens, we can ask questions and we can ponder meaning. Answers to our questions give rise to purpose and meaning gives rise to understanding. But answers and purpose may grant shorter term benefits while understanding lasts a lifetime.
Example: “Who robbed the bank?”, creates a police investigation whose purpose is to find and arrest the bank robber. And that’s it. Understanding why someone would rob a bank is a discovery of the meaning of poverty and desperation for people who have nothing left to lose- even if their sad circumstances are self-created through poor decisions. In this case, the answer of “Who?” closes the police case. But understanding “Why” leads to compassion and insights on how to make society better and prevent problems before they arise.
It is understanding life that gives it meaning and meaning then provides context for our individual lives, accounting for our unique gifts and abilities, allowing us to apply ourselves where we feel we can be of service. The more unique our approach, the better, as this is how we live life in a way that celebrates the individual spirit. And THAT is our purpose. Not so much what we do as how we do it. Approach life as an artist and explorer.
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FRI 13MAR2020
I was meditating on an answer to my editor’s question about my connection to the IB. It is important I share it with you:
I’m still connected to It but our conversation is always evolving. Pattern-based nonlinear communication. Always a stretch but that’s growth and evolution. I was asking It about really stepping back into that vision and in answer, It showed me an angle to the sunlight that reminded me of Being There. All I can say is that for a split second, simply seeing here the way the light looked There, including something as subtle as its very angle, felt like a knife into my gut and I was instantly 100% uncomfortable in my own skin. It took me several days to recover. I suspect that there is a quality to the In Between that makes it almost impossible to stay very long in, maybe it’s like grabbing a live electrical circuit. I know that the imagery I have for it is symbolic, not the reason, for this. It’s a challenge. It does beg the question, “Who do I need to be, how do I need to change, to walk within that world with absolute comfort?” I intuit that on that day I will have nothing in common with anyone here and will be totally disinterested in this or any other world’s affairs. But that day is not today and so the work continues. I’m being given all I need to keep walking forward.
And before anyone suggests a concern that this isn’t the Rainbows and Unicorns” story so many others are, the world beyond this one isn’t either. Here, we see life through the filters we want. There, we see life through the filters we need. And that can be painful. But it’s worth the price.