Our present task is to do a Copernican Shift.
Copernicus, you know, realized that the center of the solar system is not the earth, but the sun. Once he put the center in the center, all the phenomena that had been charted for so many thousand years were suddenly seen in a different light. That is all that happened, and all that ever needed to happen. And that’s all that needs to happen with us.
I had promised to continue my series of posts on So You Think Your Life Was Wasted every Friday, but I have been ill this month, and found myself unable to provide this week’s installment. Sorry. Next week, hopefully.
As I said last week, most people find it hard to formulate a believable vision of the afterlife. As the minds that I call The Guys Upstairs once said (via writing), “It is from lack of a plausible model more than from any other single thing that the division between seen and unseen world has come to seem so absolute.”
Over the course of several days in the summer of 2007, they talked to me about the nature of the soul. I put the entire 5,000-word discussion (and two diagrams) onto this blog, as “A Working Model Of Minds On The Other Side,” and provided the gist of the material in an article for The Meta Arts. That material provides us with our jumping-off place for further consideration of the question of the meaning or meaninglessness of our lives.
From http://www.damninteresting.com/the-threshold-to-the-other-side, via a friend.
The Threshold to the Other Side
Written by Jason Bellows on 24 April 2006
The phenomenon of near death experiences (NDEs) are as old as life itself, and to some people they are spiritual and moving tales that affirm a life after death, and interpreted as indisputable proof of the existence of god.
For any not already familiar, in the west most of the NDEs contain some basic points, where a person who dies floats out of the body, and looks back at the remains from a point above. The period of this external watching varies in time from a few seconds to more than an hour.
There is a generally a feeling a weightlessness. Almost invariably the deceased succumbs to a second stage, of being drawn to a tunnel with a clear, white light at the end. Sometimes they are drawn in by a gentle, deep voice, sometimes by the beckoning of loved ones, and sometimes by an indescribable urge. Sometimes they reach the light, and sometimes they do not. There is often a period of watching the events of one’s own life as a panoramic, and some report conversations with god, usually Jesus. Then, inevitably in order to come back to life and tell the tale, the deceased must return to life. The means that turns them back is variegated, but some common examples include an angelic messenger turning them back because their time has not yet come, a previously deceased family member sending them back, or turning away from the light of their own accord for the love of those left behind.
For the past few years, the guys upstairs have been giving me a view of the world that seems to me much more complete than we usually get, because it ties together the physical and the non-physical aspects of the world. The farther into the picture I go, the clearer it becomes, how much the world is suffering from the effects of the either-or worldview that says “take the other world on faith” or “there isn’t because there can’t be another world.” For the next few Fridays, a few glimpses into what may be a book to come.
Undoubtedly, you’ve heard by now of the imminent publication of Carl Jung’s Red Book. The Jungian world is agog. Me too, and for a very personal reason.
Continue reading Jung and the Red Book and Robert Clarke and me
In going through old journals, working on another book of conversations with people on the other side, I came across this with author Upton Sinclair that may be of interest.
Continue reading Upton Sinclair on how (and why) he worked with spiritualists