1. NDE Research
I’ve long been fascinated by Near Death Experience (NDE) research.
The Division of Perceptual Studies at the University of Virginia and the International Association of Near Death Studies (IANDS) have made a science of studying this phenomenon. And the aspect of the NDE that most fascinates me
is the Life Review, in which the temporarily dead subject, with the aid of a disincarnate guide, is shown an encyclopedic, audio-visual, 360-degree, wraparound Dolby sound movie of the entire life just ‘ended’. And the most fascinating aspect of that review – apart from the fact that there is zero judgment from the guide – is that the ‘deceased’ gets to experience each event from the perspective of each person who was directly involved in the event. And not just the idea “I wonder what Johnny felt like when I said that to him?” But, rather,
I temporarily become Johnny and feel intensely what the effects were.
It gets even more fascinating however: the ‘viewer’ also gets to understand and experience the ‘ripple effect’ as it spreads out to all of the people and creatures who will be affected by Johnny’s subsequent behavior, as it was influenced by my interactions with him. In fact, those ripples – however faint – will affect the very cosmos and all its denizens. In truth, each single act creates a separate timeline, spinning off a parallel reality that involves not just all sentient beings but everything that depends on energy for its very existence and self-propagation – which, in fact, means Everything! And by ‘acts’ I also mean thoughts and words, since these also are energy forms.
‘History’ as we experience it, is simply the trajectory of a particular timeline created by the cumulative sum of all the choices made by all of the players.
2. Take Two!
I want, however, to take a still deeper dive into this phenomenon. Imagine you could ask your guide to tweak the act in question and then see what kind of a timeline it would spin off, with all of the corollary effects on the cosmos and its inhabitants. No matter how many ways you divide up infinity, each section will still be infinite. So, you could ‘re-tweak’ any of the spun-off timelines and watch the resulting scenarios evolve. Then you could grade them on a scale of ‘really bad’ to ‘really good’.
Perhaps, then, you could choose a new incarnation, parachuting into that new lifetime in order to take the new, better, more life-affirming and love-promoting action. Since I do not believe in a linear, one-incarnation-at-a-time, in strict chronological sequence, I foresee the parallel processing and mutual, interactive learning that would result from the blending of these lifetimes.
3. Pareidolia
Pareidolia, allegedly, is the mistake of inferring meaningful patterns from utterly random data e.g., seeing an elephant in a cloud formation. But I believe that ‘pareidolia’ is, in fact, the ability to call into a level of reality any object through attention and intention. It is the Quantum Mechanics double-slit experiment writ large. I believe that the ‘ultimate reality’ is an infinite matrix of pixels which can either be turned ‘on’ or ‘off’, thus creating a universal language capable of bringing to the sensorium any image from its potential state to its actualized state. This is the language of Boolean Algebra (binary mathematics) and, at a simple level, it’s what makes video and audio possible on your TV or computer screen.
4. Healing the Family Tree
The combination then of these new forms of the NDE life review and the creative power of ‘pareidolia’ can, I believe, bring about not only healing and growth for the individual soul but for the family tree. And by ‘family tree’ I don’t just mean an individual’s genetic lineage but the tree of the family-of-all-sentient-beings.
Imagine a cup of tepid tea abandoned and forgotten for 10 minutes on the countertop, as you went about the tasks of the day. Then you remember it and you simply add some boiling water. This addition does not dump the languishing, languid molecules but it adds new hot ones so that the entire beverage has a new, much more pleasant taste. In the same way, I believe it’s possible to heal the family tree, not by ‘unhappening’ a previous timeline lineage, but by adding a new one. The blend is an improvement that didn’t need to pretend that the previous history never occurred.
Is this the meaning of the life of Jesus? That he came to spin off a new timeline which upgraded other timelines both ‘retroactively’ and ‘pro-actively’?
5. Conclusion
Each of us is a butterfly-in-Brazil flapping its colorful, delicate wings and thus helping to create the weather patterns in California. Each of us, as we dip our oars into the ocean of incarnation, is creating ripples. You are helping to spin off a new timeline in which all creatures swim.
Be mindful.
Image by Jackson Hendry from UnSplash.
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