Application of Impossible Things: A Near Death Experience in Iraq (7 page)

That as a Whole Being I actually chose to be blown up flies in the face of more than one cultural base assumption. We generally assume that things happen
to
us and that there are many things that we simply
can’t
control. Accidents happen, mistakes are made, some people are lucky, and some are not. My experience simply doesn’t support this base assumption. Whether consciously aware of it in the physical mind or not, my Whole Self is fully aware of every experience as a cooperative effort
between my focused
awareness within the physical
world,
my
Whole Self, and other individual Selves.
I
craft
my physical experiences. Things don’t happen
to
me without my consent; they happen
because
I created, co-created, or agreed to experience them.

Just to complicate matters in one (of many) directions, from expanded awareness, it is understood that beings can become so focused within one reality that they entirely (temporarily) lose track of their Whole Selves. Within that disconnect, they can cause all sorts of disruption through focused but non-cooperative action. This isn’t a cause for punishment; it’s a cause for healing.

Although in one sense all acts are creative, valid, and good from the perspective of expanded awareness, acts of violence and discord, as well as competition and aggression are not essentially actions that support the best reflection or expression of All That Is. Nor do they express a consciousness of our own inherent goodness or our cooperative connection to every other consciousness. The actions are
out of harmony
with our Selves and the flow of our collective creativity at its
best
. They
diminish
our capability to create a reflection of who and what we really are: co-passionately good and beautiful beings.

We’ve built our concept of the world on the assumption that humans are basically flawed, and it hasn’t given us a particularly attractive world: competition, greed, poverty, war, hate, fear. It has, though, given us a mirror—a world that reflects our collective base assumptions and fears. A physical world awareness of expanded consciousness could assume respect for ourselves and all other
beings, manifesting a natural
harmony of mutual creativity in the physical world. Until that awareness is common, what we’re experiencing now, individually and collectively, is
still
an expression of our Whole Selves in all our profound goodness. It has meaning. It matters, and for our Whole Selves
this
life is creative and entertaining. My Whole Self chose this physical focus and specific culture, and it continues to choose my experiences within them.

This doesn’t mean our concept of reality can’t evolve into something easier, more harmonious, or more fulfilling than what we have created to date. Life could be shaped into something
that
both
expanded
and physical consciousness perspectives would consider fulfilling and beautiful. Violence, fear, competition, and other essentially destructive experiences may be entertaining to expanded awareness, but admit it, they’re not exactly our best foot forward.

So much for good and evil. I’ll move on before catching my tail and gnawing it to bits.

The criterion that I used in judging my experiences intensifies an awareness that I’m fully responsible for everything that I experience in my physical life. In the best of circumstances, my Whole Self and my physically conscious mind would work in concert
to shape
an experience that an integrated self would enjoy. Physical world base
assumptions and beliefs, though
, often block an easy expression of the creativity of the Whole Self
.

Being that our lives are cooperative endeavors, the Whole Self won’t or perhaps is often unable to work through our conscious physical-world beliefs if they contradict its intention. The
conscious mind is a creator equal in power to the Whole Self, so its beliefs necessarily shape experience as much as do the intentions of the Whole Self.
Thought creates experience
means
that Whole Self
and
conscious self thoughts create experience.
In denying the reality of the non-physical and who we are as Whole Selves, we are not only oblivious to our own hand in creating the lives that we lead, but we stand in our own way. In hanging hard onto our beliefs, we are fighting ourselves.

It may be that my Whole Self orchestrated the experience of being blown up, but it could also be that my physical self’s beliefs and thoughts are responsible. And if it was an unconscious or subconscious belief that got me blown up, it would have been possible to consciously ferret out the beliefs that supported that experience and change them. It was
within my power
to do that. And without changing the beliefs that invited nearly dying (I’m tired, life is hard and not all that interesting any more, for example), I can be healed of my injuries but would probably just create another opportunity to
manifest those beliefs.

The
experience follows thought
concept
can be applied to anything. If I’m poor and want to be rich, I may be able to ferret out the beliefs that keep me in poverty, replacing them with beliefs that support wealth. My understanding is that the Whole Self is willing to—or perhaps in some cases is
bound to
—bow to the beliefs, requests, and direction of the conscious self focus. It’s as if this conscious focus of our Self has taken on a role, and the Whole Self will allow the flow of that improvisation and support it. To the Whole Self, whatever I create will be meaningful, creative, and fun.

Whether it’s my physical mind or Whole Self creating experience, there is no
victim status
available. My actions, emotions, and thoughts are not a hopelessly blind product of parents, school, television, abuse, poverty, social prejudice, racism, sexism, or politics. I entered the physical world as a complete being, a full-blown personality, a consciousness with intentions and agreements. My being blown up by a roadside bomb in Iraq isn’t the fault of the person who built the
bomb,
the person who placed it, or the person who triggered it. It wasn’t bad luck or coincidence. It was an event that my Self cooperatively created and agreed to, and for my Self the event was and is meaningful, creative, and fun. It might have been unnecessary or avoided had I consciously developed different belief systems, but the value of the experience is not diminished because of that fact.

With this understanding, I may be in unpleasant circumstances, but my conscious mind’s joy is understood as a choice that can only be destroyed
by my choice of perspective.
I can choose to view myself as a victim of circumstance or as a creative instigator and cooperative partner. I can choose to view my circumstance as random and meaningless or find and create the meaning in them. My joy need not be destroyed by a self-absorbed colonel, a terminally ignorant administrator, the incessant cell phone chatter of a self-important suit on the airplane, or losing sight in one eye. My joy is destroyed by
believing that they can affect my joy,
thereby making it so. The moment I become aware of myself as a Whole Self, I cease to be a victim of anything. Instead, I become the cooperative creator of my own experience, fully responsible. It’s possible to change my trajectory by changing my thoughts.

The wording of that is not meant to imply that I’ve mastered this perspective in my own physical life. This is not always simple to apply
. Consciously connecting to the intentions of my Whole Self is not always straightforward, and beliefs
are often deeply seated or otherwise difficult to identify, much less dissolve or change. And certainly changing one’s beliefs may sound like an unrealistically simplistic or lame approach to joy for someone starving to death, blinded, or missing limbs—I don’t mean to diminish the reality of pain and anguish: it
exists, it is real, and it matters. Personally, being in the throes of a migraine or nerve pain
or falling down a flight of stairs because having only one fully functioning eye doesn’t afford the best depth of field, I’m not wondering how I created this torment and leafing through my beliefs to find the source. I am often, however, aware of and at least slightly amused by my perception of these events as flaws in my life. I’m also perpetually sure that I created the experience,
so after the cussing has run its course a quick flip through my beliefs or a little chat with my Whole Self
is
sometimes in order
. The differences between the intentions of the Whole Self and the intentions of our conscious physical minds can be a yawning gulf, which can seem confounding if not downright outrageous.

Describing t
he idea that we each choose our experiences, no matter how difficult or nasty, worries me for the possibility of an erroneous assumptions being made from the statement. It isn’t someone’s
fault
if they’re injured or otherwise have a difficult life. Our cultural beliefs support ideas that consider anything less than an idealized perfection to be a flaw, a mistake, a problem, a lack, a weakness, or the wages of sin. Science tells us that only the strong survive, which then makes sickness, age, or injury an implied threat and, again, a
fault
. Religion tells us that good things happen to good people. It is absolutely essential to understand that, from the perspective of expanded awareness,
all experience is valuable.
So when I say it is my responsibility and choice that I got blown up, and it is others’ choice that they have been injured or hurt or are living difficult lives, that is not to be interpreted as placing blame. I’m
not
thinking,
It is my fault.
I’m more likely to be thinking,
It is my unique gift to myself. I can try to appreciate it in some way.

The staggering variety of our personal lives could and perhaps should be considered fascinating and exciting to ourselves and to each other. Instead of thinking,
Whoa, that person is seriously f*ed up!
I could think,
Whoa! That experience took guts
, or
That one gets high points for drama
, or
Huh -- very subtle
, or
Shit -- they’re really piling it on
, or
Hmm -- they’re like a microcosm of the macrocosm of what’s going on in the world,
or
I wonder what I’m/they’re doing with this? I wonder how it fits into the cooperative whole of creation?
Maybe I can learn from someone else’s experience; they may be exploring something that I don’t want to go through myself but can learn from
vicariously. They may be creating something that I’d never imagined, thus inspiring me.

Understanding things in this way does not negate compassion for suffering and pain. Perhaps paradoxically, it often makes me more sensitive to it. I know that in the intense focus of being in the physical, the pains and discomforts and difficulties are terribly real and can feel endless and utterly hopeless. My own compassion is intense and can be nearly crippling, perhaps partly because I’ve been somewhere similar but also because I want to be able to wave my hand over the problem to make it disappear, the way I was able to do for myself while out-of-body. I want to give others a glimpse of the expanded perspective that I experienced in order to assure them that their pain isn’t forever, there is value and reason in it, and that the reason is their own—the experience is potentially as valuable as their pain is intense and real.

Acknowledging that life can be utterly miserable and difficult, I’m suggesting that sometimes joy can be found even within and between difficult experiences. The way we think about the experience can transform it in surprising ways. By becoming aware that on some level we created this experience and that it’s valuable to our Selves, a new perspective can be gained that may shift our emotions and thoughts regarding physical life experiences.

Returning to the Blink Environment—whew! Where were we? Oh yes, we’ve established that I’m entirely my own authority. I’m free to leave or stay. I’m free to alter agreements, negate them, or enter into new ones. I can disregard my original intent or expand upon it. Within any intent, I can choose one path toward its fulfillment or any of an infinite number of other paths—whichever looks like the most fun to my Whole Self. In the end, purpose is my own choice and that purpose is directed by my personal intent.

Luckily, at the moment I’m in the Blink Environment, so I’m aware that I am profoundly, thoroughly, and perfectly
good
, deeply content, casually confident, broadly compassionate, endlessly curious, and infinitely creative. My disturbing sense of humor, short temper, and irritability with the world as it is has been left behind, so I’m not likely to return to earth to zap the people that I growled at during physical life: obstructive bureaucrats can relax; self-aggrandizing colonels can breathe easy; yo-yo’s yapping on cell phones while driving city streets are free of my wrath. To be honest, I don’t feel any attachment to the people, the landscapes, or the situations left behind that, from the physical, I might judge as unfinished business. I’m not particularly interested in returning to the physical at all. I’m tired. I wouldn’t mind a good rest.

Given adequate motivation though, like maybe the prospect of doing some potentially enjoyable things that I hadn’t thought of doing? Tempting
…

Chapter 5 - Skills and the Consciousness/Body Connection

They then requested that I return to my physical body to accomplish some further work. I was given to understand that my particular skills with energy were needed at this time and would be effective only were I actually present in a body within the earth vibration. I replied that I was willing, but given my level of exhaustion and disinterest in the difficulties of this particular physical life to date, I would request that certain assistance be provided within that continued physical existence.