Application of Impossible Things: A Near Death Experience in Iraq (9 page)

Have I gotten that assistance? I’ll return to that subject in Chapter Nine.

In the meantime, I’m about to blink to another environment.

Chapter 6 - R and R

While we all digested some details, I retreated to a deep place on what I’ll refer to, for lack of a better description, as another vibrational dimension to recuperate and restore energies. Other beings assisted with this, doing most of the work while I entered a sort of spiritual deep rest state. From the physical perspective, this state lasted an equivalent of centuries within less than a moment.

When I returned to the Gathering, we agreed upon specific tasks that I would accomplish, and specific things that they would assist me with once back in the physical. This wasn’t a barter exchange, as we might assume from our cultural perspective. It was more of a genuinely easy granting of services with no weight placed on the value or relative cost of effort implied by each agreement.

Having proposed practical assistance for the trajectory of my physical life, should I ultimately agree to return to one, I move to a place specifically suited for rest.

Again, there is no guide or outside direction involved in getting where I want to go. I seem to know exactly where to go and
blink
there
through intent
.

Looking at the experience now from the outside, it seems as if I fold in upon myself, turning inward until I am completely enveloped by myself. Rather than taking me into a smaller reality though, it’s as if I turn inside out, emerging into a different but equally spacious place. Within it, I am without boundaries. As a consciousness, I’m unlimited, enormous, with no edges or definition. This limitless space appears at first to be dark. The darkness isn’t impenetrable though. It’s rather what I imagine deep space might be like: it’s as if darkness itself contains all light and has depth that can be sensed and seen. It could be described as a sense of
potential
light—remember the Easter Bunny?

The stillness and vast space is profoundly peaceful in its silence. Although the idea of a vast emptiness might seem cold and intimidating to some, this vastness is intimate and cozy. Imagine burrowing under thick down quilts in the most comfortable bed imaginable while a snowstorm rages outdoors. Close your eyes then, and while you are feeling so physically cozy, enter into the limitless dark, peaceful, and creative space of the mind. Imagine the body as weightless and without boundaries within that, and the deep contentment that I felt in this Rest Environment might be approximated.

This interlude in the Rest Environment lasts one moment
and forever
. I can sink into the state now and feel as if I’ve always been there and am able to stay forever if I’d like. I still drift there, suspended, for long periods, yet come back out of it to find only two or three seconds have passed on the physical plane.

The Rest Environment feels like a different dimension than the Blink Environment. I want to describe it as being on a different thread of Time/Space outside physical form dimensions. It may not be possible to create physical form in this dimension; whereas the Blink Environment has variations of physicality should one choose to work with that. This thread, actually, feels as if it is
deeply private
, as if it may not be accessible to anyone at all without my guidance and permission.

Once in the depths, I perform what might be a variation of the life review that others have reported upon returning to the physical from near-death experiences. No deliberation is involved, meaning that I don’t settle in and say, “Ok, bring it on.” It’s more of a casual drift into reflection, the way we tend to drift into sleep with images smoothly flowing through. And whereas in a sense my life flashed before my eyes, it is not a flash so much as a deep and multi-layered, instantaneous yet leisurely wander through life. I simultaneously perceive layers of emotional, mental, and physical experience with underlying connections and patterns and progressions, as well as the links between all of those. Layers and links that we don’t acknowledge as real in physical consciousness become obvious. Coincidences are revealed as connective tissue between deeper aspects of the intersections between self-consciousness and physical experience. Interlocking patterns of my connection with all consciousness became apparent.
All consciousness
, including other people, mass events, objects, animals, plants, elements, what we perceive as individual molecules, atoms, subatomic particles, and energies. Although we arbitrarily assign consciousness to only a few things in our current definition of what is real in this physical universe, it becomes clear in the expanded consciousness perspective that all form has consciousness. And all of consciousness cooperates to co-create and maintain what we think of as our physical world reality.

These perceptions are available visually, but the impossible depth and richness is an experience of multi-sensual absorption, a digestion and integration that our language has no adequate words to use to describe. A simultaneous awareness exists of the interconnectedness of innumerable strings of being, expansion, possibilities and probabilities, back in time and forward, sideways and between what we perceive from the physical. The multi-layered digestion and integration includes alternate paths of action, reaction, and interaction as they may have played out had I chosen this or that option instead of what action I did choose to follow at any point in physical life. Those are perceived as explorations, like dreams within this Rest Environment that inform the actions and movements that I did choose through focus to follow or inhabit.

The process of review is not analytical since it isn’t linear or evaluative in a way that we might understand from within a physical consciousness. The experiences are absorbed through all levels of comprehension and perception at once
.
The
senses of perception
feel as if they are expansions of the physical senses we use on earth though more closely connected to each other. If I hear a sound, it is much richer than anything imagined in physical experience. At the same time that I hear the sound, I am also able to taste that sound, to feel it, and to perceive it visually. So in some way, a single sense is all senses, each informing the other. The physical senses that we use could be likened to a thin and isolated strand within a thick cable while the expanded senses would each be as large as the whole cable with each braided into the other sensory cables so that any input immediately flows through all cables.

Upon integration or more accurately
within
integration comes a deeper comprehension of my life experience as it relates to all that I am—my expanded consciousness as a whole—and to All That Is, the creative force that is within all that exists on every dimension through every consciousness. Evaluation takes place only in the sense of deciding whether this or that
maximizes
Whole Self potential, whether through it I am able to absorb a broad swath of connective experience, or whether it serves as a contraction in some way.
I’m noticing
whether my experiences carry through intent toward exploration in particular directions, which were personally determined prior to having entered this particular physical experience. The life is evaluated, then, on the basis of whether it is especially useful toward personal creative ends and whether it is particularly useful in moving forward into other creative endeavors. Within that, all experience is recognized as essentially good.

This idea of goodness was addressed in Chapter 4, but it is worth noting again. As an example of the goodness implicit in every single experience and the meaning of judgment when applied within that base assumption, imagine that you have a big
bowl full of all the types of candy you particularly like. In judging which you want to eat next, in other wor
ds which is important, you don’t find a single piece that isn’t interesting, attractive, and enticing. How will you choose which one to eat right now? It’s hard! But let’s say that you just had a chocolate bar an hour ago, so you’ll take chocolate off the list for now (I know, that’s not a very good reason to forego chocolate … it’s just an example). You like looking at some bright yellow pieces and the way they contrast with the other candies so you won’t eat those yet; and you had jelly doughnuts for breakfast, so something squishy isn’t as interesting at the moment as something crunchy. All the red peanut M&Ms—perfect! You sit there and pick out all the red peanut M&Ms, contentedly munching away.

All of those pieces of candy are good, just as every single experience in life is good. The evaluation, or judgment, on the choice of candy or on the life experience, is only applicable in light of personal interest or intent, which shifts and changes easily depending on this or that subjective circumstance and interest. The decisions aren’t dire and excruciating because every choice has a good ending (even though in the
physical
experience, it might be excruciating, boring, painful, or ugly). Choice is not fraught with tension and fear; every choice will lead to creative and satisfying experience.

From the Rest Environment, everything is valuable, yet some choices could be understood to offer more interesting views along the way or to offer a distinct value (the clarity of key lime pie vs. the symphony of chocolate). A small action might be unexpectedly found to be a lead toward interesting possibilities never before imagined. Chords of experience become formed during integration and evaluation. I’m able to see all the ways that small actions affect interconnections throughout the physical dimension and beyond into other dimensions, rippling outward without my knowing (from the physical perspective) that one action could have such far-reaching effect or that it could result in that particular effect. This life review might more properly be called a life exploration, as it was an exercise in discovery more than evaluation.

The exploration is accomplished with great amusement and affection for the self for
being
. The belief structures of karmic law or religious punishment have no place in this process or in fact in my entire experience. Even now I can return to these states and in looking for such structures, find them only within the physical dimensions as structures created and maintained purely by the very belief itself: thought taken form. The beliefs are not cosmic law or rules under which the expanded consciousness operates because consciousness exists already beyond them. Consciousness can simply slip between those ideas or step past them.

All of this activity may not sound particularly relaxing or restful, but within it I felt deeply relaxed and peaceful. A lack of time limits, criticism, fear, anticipation of punishment, recriminations, debts, outcomes, or conclusions is profoundly liberating. The overall ambiance is one of radiant, quiet, sound, profound joy. Not joy as a reaction to something but the joy of
being
.

As described, I was not alone in the Rest Environment. The others that are with me are working on technical adjustments while I go about my own business. Present at my request, I understand that these beings are experts at healing on these dimensions though they seem to lack any emotional involvement in the process or with me personally.

Their work implies that I have some equivalent of physicality though I perceive myself as a limitless consciousness. It’s as if, as energy, I yet have some interior structure. Within an ethereal no-form, I contain an infinite depth of energy structures that have no form and occupy no space. If these could be perceived as visible patterns of living, they might be constantly changing shapes. I sense them as mechanical structures of perception that assist with creative experience and integration. This might be thought of as an equivalent of the physical body structures that support the mechanism of the body: circulatory or lymph systems. The technicians were only tinkering with balances in these systems and structures as if tuning a car or changing a light bulb. My translation of the adjustments is that they aid in the functioning of consciousness as a whole at top performance. Important or essential in that process, they have nothing to do directly with information or the quality of consciousness itself.

When I feel sufficiently rested, I return to the Gathering in the Blink Environment. Being outside time and space as we understand them, no disconnect or lapse exists between the time I retreat to the Rest Environment and the time that I return to the Gathering. Describing it as a progressive experience
and laying it out in a lin
ear fashion for the sake of making rational sense out of it, unavoidably distorts it. I could more accurately say that while standing in front of the Gathering proposing assistance from them, I shift focus to a simultaneous experience in the deep Rest Environment.

As introduced at the end of the last chapter, I request that I receive assistance once back in the physical. From all I’ve described so far, it might seem that I should be perfectly able to affect my own assistance with physical experience since I’m an expanded consciousness with such broad awareness available. Upon thinking that, however, I find a flood of conceptual information describing the difficulties involved in accomplishing these tasks once back in the physical
focus and thus, the
advantages to having outside assistance. The intense focus currently used to maintain the Self in what appears to be a consistent physical form within what appears to be a consistent physical universe in conjunction with the belief structures of physical consciousness (what we call our minds) can make it difficult to maintain full comprehension of who we really are as expanded beings, and even if we remember that, to effect the conscious consequences. Whole Self intentions can quickly veer off course under the influence of the conscious mind in a physical universe. Beliefs taught to us since
birth and ingrained through the
benign
brainwashing of repetition via
collective consciousness—which provides the structures of reality that we currently perceive
as real—have influence on and can affect or even block the Whole Self intentions. Th
ough
beliefs
can interfere with clear expression of the Whole Self, the Whole Self will still inform the physical existence to the extent that the conscious and subconscious minds allow.