I spend my days and nights enthralled by the testimonies of Near-death experiences (NDEs). If I’m not watching their testimonies, I’m reading about them, out-of-body experiences (OBEs), mystics or anything that has insurmountable evidence for the afterlife, a spiritual realm, and by extension, a divine Creator. The subject intrigues me, and it does so because it’s opened the lid to overwhelming evidence that what I perceive as a finite material universe is a very convincing but utterly false base reality. Even more interesting and inspiring is NDEs’ discovery that we are embodied souls, and this body of ours is like an organic suit used and only as real as required to participate in what appears to be a real physical world.
This isn’t the simple illusion of Buddhism—Maya—which states that there’s no “us” behind this illusion. This type of understanding has come from deep meditators in the East. But this understanding is a superficial level of awareness which is implicitly arguing for materialism. Like being aware of the dreamless sleep state—the space between awake and dreaming. However, millions of NDEs and OBEs have personally experienced that our individual consciousness survives not only outside and independently of our brain but death itself. If this is true, and it’s been demonstrated repeatedly that it is, then not only is the eastern religions’ concept of no-self wrong and misleading, but contradictory to their other doctrine of Karma and rebirth. Because how can a “no-self” be reborn and accumulate Karma?
Contradictions like these can’t be reconciled when contrasted to actual people’s first-hand experience of an afterlife. People of every race, culture and belief system have died with no brain or heart activity registered, from minutes to hours, and all have reported incredibly similar experiences. Even if you doubt the details of the experiences themselves, you can’t doubt that their consciousness survived uninterrupted to experience those experiences and return, again uninterrupted, to report on it. But that’s not what proves their consciousness of surviving death.
What does prove their conscious survival after death is their ability to report back what they witnessed while disembodied as a spirit, not only in the room or the immediate area where they died, but often also elsewhere, perhaps hundreds of miles away. Not only is something like this impossible if their consciousness wasn’t there to experience it, but it couldn’t even be attributable to any other absurd explanation like a hallucination or guesswork. Despite what most people have been indoctrinated and conditioned to believe, we do survive physical death; a “spiritual” realm exists through and all around the physical. That realm is populated infinitely by beings, and as the source of it all is a “God”, Creator or Supreme Intelligence that emanates nothing but love and wisdom. According to NDEs, those are the closest descriptions that our language allows because they all say that what they saw, heard and felt was indescribable with Earth’s words.
So, the question has been asked of me a few times now, if I already know there’s an afterlife and survival after death, why do I keep watching, listening and reading NDEs, OBEs and spiritual texts matching their experience?
Well, apart from the subject being very interesting to me, I am also reconditioning myself out of the old paradigm I operated under. I realised I had lived under an oblivious, paradoxical mindset all my life. I’ve always felt that there was something more than this material reality, but that feeling was completely overpowered by the day-to-day sensory hypnosis I lived under. That is, “life” was too “real”, with its problems, pains, joys, bills, emotions, thoughts, worries, and everything else.
Under normal awareness conditions, I am programming myself every day, week, month and year by what I constantly and repeatedly focus on and experience. If all of my days I don’t research, experience or receive any spiritual or transcendent information, then how am I meant to embody that belief and make it part of me? But it’s not just a matter of obtaining information sporadically. For any new belief to lay down roots and operate at a subconscious level, not only do I have to immerse myself for most of the day in the genre or subject matter, but I also have to have an emotional reaction to it. It’s the same principle when you’re doing an apprenticeship or a hobby you love; you’ll “see” what you do everywhere. Hairdressers notice hair, tailors notice suits, jewellers notice jewellery, meteorologists notice the weather, and mystics notice the divine.
I want to notice the divine.
I want to see God’s fingerprint in everything.
I want to feel you as the soul you are, not the lost and struggling body you appear to be.
I want to view everything this way naturally because that’s the reality of our existence, as confirmed by millions of NDEs. And the only way to do this, to naturally perceive the world this way, is to constantly feed my mind and heart divine and spiritually focussed testimonials and experiences.
There’s a wizard behind the curtain
I don’t have any extra-sensory gifts, nor have I experienced an NDE or OBE, and I have a lifetime of philosophically sensory conditioning to overcome. So my path to unshakeable faith and understanding is to overwhelmingly saturate myself with evidence, contemplating arguments for and against every area of this subject (by the way, arguments against this subject fail miserably), and listening and watching touching testimonials from people who’ve crossed the veil and returned utterly changed. And I can tell from doing this over the past 5 – 7 years that it’s starting to take effect.
The effect has been that the world around me sporadically appears like a cheap copy of something grander; it almost seems plastic. Sometimes (like right now as I write this), my visual field feels like a finely pixelated movie playing in my mind when I look out at my surroundings. I feel sensations, experience smells, tastes, and sounds and most of the time, I’m lost in them. But more and more, the whole “life out there” concept feels like a thin veneer. I have to keep remembering what the NDEs said—this is temporary, illusory, like a game, and I don’t have to take it too seriously. But, increasingly, in sporadic moments of lucidity, I seem to awaken and see that this is no more than theatre.
This isn’t to say I think that nothing’s real. I suffer from pain, emotional highs and lows, habitual thought patterns and behaviours. But my belief in those things’ absoluteness, permanence and importance dissipates more frequently—at least twice a day, but often more. For example, before sleep, I see the sensory stimuli entering my consciousness from my eyes, ears and skin as no more than signals being perceived through my brain’s filter by my soul.
I can feel the aliveness vibrating subtly in each body area I focus on. I can hear the muffled sounds of traffic outside my windows and the soft whirring of the pedestal fan as it swings from side to side. I can feel the gentle cool air skim across my face and the comforting warmth of my quilt lying over my right side. I close my eyes and can see the faint, pixelated static at the back of my eyelids. I open my eyes slowly, and the faint static overlays what I see. I close my eyes again and slowly, drowsily become aware of my own awareness being aware of itself.
Then, I’m awakening from a dream I thought was also real while I was dreaming it. I still find that realisation confronting. It’s easy to forget our complete immersion in the dream because we’re so used to it. But it’s important to recognise that while in our dream state, we thought and lived and emoted as if it was real life. Well, only until we awaken, or are lucky enough to become lucid in the dream and realise we’re dreaming.
I’ve lost count of the number of times NDEs explain that the spiritual world felt infinitely more real than this one, and the transition from embodied to spirit was like waking up from a dream. What they say makes sense because I often find myself operating on automatic; I’m barely conscious of what I’m doing or of my embodied experience. I’m like a sleepwalker entranced by my thoughts and the repetitive conversations in my head. I essentially operate in a dream state while awake, with momentary flashes of clarity when I’m “awake” in an experience.
I don’t want to waste this opportunity
But life is a marathon, not a sprint. I’m a tortoise, not a hare. I’m happy to take my time, knowing that persistence wins in the long run. I know regardless of what I do (or don’t do), I’m going to physically “die”, disembody and return to awareness of my spiritual home. Seeing the afterlife and being more “spiritual” isn’t the point of my reconditioning. No, my reconditioning work is so I’m not wasting this incarnation by sleepwalking through it. It’s way too easy to keep reacting to life based on my conditioning.
My conditioning isn’t a problem, either. After all, according to NDEs, spiritism, Swedenborg, OBEs and others, I chose this life, my parents, and therefore, all the conditions and conditioning that would go with it. Why? Because they would present me with the issues I needed to break free from. I needed to evolve past the emotional issues I’ve gone through, and the best way to do that is through a fully immersed, incarnated Earth experience. Like training in a flight simulator instead of just knowing the theory.
This is why my reconditioning to constant awareness of my spiritual home and this temporary life being no more than a simulator for me and billions of other souls is so important. I want to keep remembering I’m not this or that. I am a piece of the divine, as are you, temporarily here to evolve through direct experience.
• To experience evil, so I appreciate love.
• To experience pain, disease and death, so I appreciate immortality.
• To experience isolation and separateness, so I appreciate unity.
• To experience vice and sin, so I appreciate virtue.
• To experience the false and ignorance, so I appreciate truth and wisdom.
• To experience conflict, so I appreciate peace.
• To experience ego, so I appreciate God.
If I become aware of my existence here in this incarnated simulation, I become aware that I chose this. Everything in my life, I either chose pre-birth or made it happen from the choices of my conditioning. It’s radical self-responsibility. And it’s the most freeing insight I’ve ever had. It’s freeing because I know whatever’s happening is meant to happen, either because of my incarnation goals or the conditioned choices from my personalised life.
Responsibility for my future choices, what I place importance on, and what I value is entirely up to the level of awareness and maturity I hold at any moment in time.
If so, then I want to make this incarnation count. I don’t want to come back and have to repeat the same lesson on this planet’s simulation. I need to grow up. I need to evolve past the pettiness of perceived injustices and self-importance. If anything, this incarnation has shown me how full of myself I am; thinking and feeling that I am so above the fold, so full of pride, that I have the audacity to feel offended and insulted by actions from wounded and unconscious fellow souls—just as I’ve done to others. Perhaps done differently, but everything that hurt my ego or insulted my expectations, I’ve done (or wanted to do) to someone else and probably worse.
This simulation mirrors my faults by making me feel my effects on others when it’s done to me.
It’s a hard pill to swallow, but it’s all true. In psychological terms, it’s called projection. Rather than becoming aware of our dark side, our shadow and all the nasty thoughts, words and actions we carelessly throw at others, we instead attract and identify those same things in others as repulsive and offensive. This way, we point fingers at others rather than owning and healing our faults.
We love to throw stones but forget we’re made of glass.
How do I know I’ve healed and evolved in what I came here for?
When the actions and words of others no longer affect me in the same way. Then, I’ll know I’ve made peace with a piece of my shadow by bringing light onto it. Once this happens, not only do I own the pettiness and evil that I’m capable of, but I no longer need to blame it on others; nor feel triggered when I see others mindlessly saying and doing what I have disowned in myself.
I’ll no longer see them as a faulty villain, but as an amnesiac soul struggling through the game, just like me.
They’re going to the same place at physical death as me, after all. After the game ends, both the King and the pawn return to the box. And then, just like all the NDEs before us, we’ll wonder what all the fuss was about. What was so vital that we withheld love and actively or passively intended to punish someone for their perceived slights?
Insanity!
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Also published on Medium.