You – the nominal person who just died to the 3D world – have gone through a couple of difficult stages, of which judgment of your failings was probably the most painful. But as acceptance replaces condemnation, you are ready to move again.
You’ve stopped holding on to the sides of the sliding board.
That’s right. Among the fears, perhaps chief is not, “I can’t take this,” but, “I’m worried about how much worse it can get.” At some point, in one way or another, you release your hold on what you knew of what you are. You allow yourself to see more deeply.
You have passed your first hurdle of unbearable self-criticism, and you are resigned to seeing what comes next. But remember, it is still that process of understanding A and B better by successively looking at each with slightly better understanding, and then seeing differently. In other words, you are alternating perception and discernment, just as in life. That connected two-part process is a mental process, following mental (that is, non-3D) laws, which is why it is unchanged even in the absence of the body and of relentlessly sequential time.
So, you have absorbed the shock to your self-esteem, and you have accepted any guilt attached to your not having done more with your life, or better. You have learned that the narrative wasn’t just the way you experienced it (or, one might equally say, constructed it). Then comes further transformation, that makes what went before into the slightest of prologs.
A parenthesis, here: I am not going to describe large portions of that early stage that may have been described in NDE literature. There’s no point, because even if there are generalities, still every new recovery from 3D is different. I mention it lest you think I’d forgotten, and lest you think I was by silence contradicting such testimonies.
So, the transformation. You see yourself as you have always seen yourself, as an individual who had gotten born, had grown and lived a life interacting with others. You look closer and you see how you affected others and were being affected. In other words, you see that you lived not independently but as part of the web of life. This is about the stage in the process where your regrets are likely to be strongest.
You absorb that and look again and you begin to see ties you perhaps did not expect to see (invisible connections visible now for the first time) between you as individual and everyone and everything you experienced. Every book or movie, every association or society, every conversation, every ancient philosopher whose life or work touched yours, every piece of music – and therefore all the musicians who made that music. At some point you see these connections are not merely points of contact, but representations of tendencies. Music may seem to connect you to that particular musician, but as you look closer, perhaps you see that the reason why it connected was (as a result rather than a cause) because you share a thread, or a strand, with that musician.
Then it is a short step to see that all the people sharing that thread may be said to be an integral part of you. And there are uncounted numbers of threads, each with uncounted numbers of others sharing them, not all human. Your self-definition takes a serious hit, and either shrinks back or expands, depending upon your temperament.
So, another realization moves back and forth in time as part of that same expansion of self-definition. You realize that “you” — in a sense – lived in other times and places, and can connect those other parts of yourself, in the same way you can connect along threads or any other relationship.
There could be more examples, but that is enough. The point is, you start off thinking you are an individual and you find yourself realizing that yes you are, but also no you aren’t and never were.
- Yes, you are and were, because you as soul were deliberately created by assembling potential traits, and were inserted into a given time and place to form a consciousness mediating your constituent parts. You were created, you were born into one body, you decided several million things, several million times in your lifetime, and so you created the habit-pattern that would (in a sense) be born into the non-3D to function along with its elders. All that is pretty individual, wouldn’t you say?
- At the same time, you were never an individual in the way you thought you were. The soul was created and born, yes, but what was it created of? Two elements at least:
- (1) threads of strands that had been formed by their own previous 3D existence, now continuing to live through you and anyone else sharing their strands.
- (2) The indefinable spirit that animates us all. As far as we know, it has always been here, it remains vital and unchanged, and if it needs us, we don’t know why it does or for what it uses us.
Either way you look at it, though, you aren’t what you thought you were, but something far greater. At the same time, you see that at best you are a very small frog in a very big puddle. It’s enough to shake you up.
— Edited from Awakening From the 3D World, available from publisher Rainbow Ridge Books (https://www.rainbowridgebooks.com) or from other booksellers.