Dying to Be Me (22 page)

I don’t recall
ever
being encouraged to cherish myself—in fact, it would never even have occurred to me to do so. It’s commonly thought of as being selfish. But my NDE allowed me to realize that this was the key to my healing.

In the tapestry of life, we’re all connected. Each one of us is a gift to those around us, helping each other be who we are, weaving a perfect picture together. When I was in the NDE state, it all became so clear to me because I understood that to
be me
is to
be love.
This is the lesson that saved my life.

Many of us still believe that we have to work at being loving, but that means living in duality, because there’s a giver and a receiver. Realizing that we
are
love transcends this. It means understanding that there’s no separation between you and me, and if I’m aware that I am love, then I know that you are, too. If I care for myself, then I automatically feel the same for you!

In my NDE state, I realized that the entire universe is composed of unconditional love, and I’m an expression of this. Every atom, molecule, quark, and tetraquark, is made of love. I can be nothing else, because this is my essence and the nature of the entire universe. Even things that seem negative are all part of the infinite, unconditional spectrum of love. In fact, Universal life-force energy
is
love, and I’m composed of Universal energy! Realizing this made me understand that I didn’t have to try to become someone else in order to be worthy. I already am all that I could attempt to be.

Similarly, when we know that we
are
love, we don’t need to work at
being
loving toward others. Instead, we just have to be true to ourselves, and we become instruments of loving energy, which touches everyone we come into contact with.

Being love
also means being aware of the importance of nurturing my own soul, taking care of my own needs, and not putting myself last all the time. This allows me to be true to myself at all times and to treat myself with total respect and kindness. It also lets me view what may be interpreted as imperfections and mistakes with no judgment, seeing only opportunities to experience and to learn with unconditional love.

P
EOPLE ASK ME WHETHER THERE’S SUCH A THING
as too much self-love. Where’s the line, they ask, where it starts to become selfish or egotistical? To me, there’s no such possibility. There is no line. Selfishness comes from
lack
of self-love. Our planet is suffering from this, as we humans are, along with too much insecurity, judgment, and conditioning. In order to truly care for someone unconditionally, I have to feel that way toward myself. I can’t give away what I don’t have. To say that I hold another in higher regard than myself isn’t real and means I’m only performing.

When I’m
being love,
I don’t get drained, and I don’t need people to behave a certain way in order to feel cared for or to share my magnificence with them. They’re automatically getting my love as a result of me being my true self. And when I am nonjudgmental of myself, I feel that way toward others.

In light of this, I’ve learned that it’s important not to be too hard on myself if I’m experiencing challenges. Oftentimes, the problem isn’t the cause of the apparent conflict. Instead, it’s the judgment I have for myself. When I stop being my own worst enemy and start loving myself more, I automatically have less and less friction with the world around me. I become more tolerant and accepting.

When we’re each aware of our own magnificence, we don’t feel the need to control others, and we won’t allow ourselves to be controlled. When I awoke into my infinite self, I was amazed to understand that my life could be dramatically different just by realizing that I
am
love, and I always have been. I don’t have to do anything to deserve it. Understanding this means that I’m working with life-force energy, whereas
performing
at being loving is working against it.

Realizing that I
am
love was the most important lesson I learned, allowing me to release all fear, and that’s the key that saved my life.

CHAPTER 16

Infinite Selves and Universal Energy

During my near-death experience, it felt as if I were connected to the entire universe and everything contained within it; and it seemed that the cosmos was alive, dynamic, and conscious. I found that every thought, emotion, or action I made while expressing through the physical body had an effect on the Whole. In fact, in that realm of Oneness, it felt as though the whole universe were an extension of
me.
This realization has, of course, dramatically changed the way I view things. We’re all co-creating this world and our lives within it through our emotions, thoughts, and actions.

Language isn’t an adequate tool for expressing something that can’t be perceived with our five physical senses, so it’s challenging to find the right words to express my understanding of what took place during the experience. However, I’ll do my best in this chapter to share as clearly as possible what I sense about this world, how we move through it, and how it’s changing for the better.

First, it’s important to understand that my NDE wasn’t like any other event I’ve experienced. It didn’t have a clear beginning and end. It was more like a door that once opened, never closes. It initiated ongoing, progressive, deeper understanding and new possibilities that never end.

Because words are a poor tool to express this kind of phenomena, what I write here is only meant to stir the appropriate emotions within you. Even after I share this, my own understanding will continue to grow and expand. Words taken literally or held as ultimate truth can keep us stagnant and stuck, holding on to old ideologies. I now know that everything I need is already contained within me and is completely accessible if I allow myself to open up to what I sense is true for me…and the same is true for you.

B
EFORE MY
NDE,
PROBABLY BECAUSE OF MY CULTURE,
I used to think that the purpose of life was to attain nirvana—that is, to evolve beyond the reincarnation cycle of birth and death, striving never to come back into the physical. If I’d grown up completely immersed in Western culture, maybe I would have been trying to get to heaven. This is actually a fairly common goal, regardless of culture—to live in such a way as to secure a perfect afterlife.

But after my NDE, I feel differently. Even though I know I’ll go on living beyond this plane, and I don’t fear physical death anymore, I’ve lost my desire to be anywhere but the place I am now. Interestingly, I’ve become more grounded and focused on seeing the perfection of life in this moment, rather than focusing on the other realm.

This is primarily because the concept of reincarnation in its conventional form of a progression of lifetimes, running sequentially one after the other, wasn’t supported by my NDE. I realized that time doesn’t move in a linear fashion unless we’re using the filter of our physical bodies and minds. Once we’re no longer limited by our earthly senses, every moment exists simultaneously. I’ve come to think that the concept of reincarnation is really just an interpretation, a way for our intellect to make sense of all existence happening at once.

We think in terms of “time passing,” but in my NDE, it felt as though time just
is,
and we’re moving through it. This means that not only do all points of time exist simultaneously, but also that in the other realm, we can go faster, slower, or even backward and sideways.

In the physical plane, however, our sensory organs limit us. Our eyes take in what they see in this instant; our ears hear in the same way. The mind can only exist in one moment, and then it strings those moments together to form a linear progression. But when we spill out of our bodies, we cross all time and space with awareness—not sight, hearing, touch, taste, or smell. We’re pure consciousness.

I experienced this while in the NDE state. I was aware of my brother on a plane coming to see me and of conversations the doctors were having outside my room and down the hall. I understood many aspects of my future life, as they would be panning out, as well as what would happen if I didn’t come back and live. This showed me that time, space, and solid matter don’t always exist as we normally think of them. During my NDE, I felt that I could focus on any point in time that I needed to access.

Because of this, I believe that when someone has a glimpse of what have previously been interpreted as “past lives,” they’re actually accessing
parallel
or
simultaneous
existences, because all time exists at once. And because we’re all connected, it’s possible to achieve states of consciousness where glimpses of others’ reality seep through into our present moment, entering our consciousness as though they were memories.

My new perspective has made me wonder about our focus and purpose, if reincarnation and time itself don’t exist the way that so many of us were raised to believe. What if all our goals are the wrong way around? What if heaven or nirvana is actually
here
in physical expression, and not
there
in the afterlife?

I
SENSE THAT WE CHOOSE TO INCARNATE
into a physical body in order to express love, passion, and the full range of other human emotions not available to us separately in the state of pure awareness and Oneness. What if this life on this planet is the main show, where the action is, and where we wanted to be?

This reality is a playground of expression. It looks as though we aren’t here to learn or gather experiences for the afterlife. There doesn’t seem to be much purpose in that because we don’t need any of it there. Rather, we’re here to experience and evolve this physical universe and our own lives within it. I made my decision to return when I realized that life here was the most desirable state for me at this time. We don’t have to wait until we die to experience nirvana.
Our true magnificence exists right now!

The reason why humans are so vulnerable and fearful around this subject is because we create our ideas of the afterlife and our gods in human terms. We assign to these concepts the same physical properties and fallible values that we posses and are vulnerable to—values such as fear, retribution, judgment, and punishment. And then we project all our strength and power onto our own creations.

But if all time and experience exist right now, and we’re simply moving through it as we express our magnificence in a physical world, then we have nothing to fear. We don’t have to live in anxiety about what comes next. We can recognize the energy that we’re already a part of, and we can
be love
in every aspect of our lives.

It’s unfortunate that we keep searching outside ourselves for answers—in religion, medicine, scientific study, books, and other people. We think the truth is somewhere out there, still elusive. Yet by doing this, we’re only getting more and more lost, appearing to move away from who we truly are. The entire universe is within us. My answers are inside of me, and yours lie within you, too. Everything that seemingly happens externally is occurring in order to trigger something within us, to expand us and take us back to who we truly are.

I often use the phrase
infinite self
in place of terms such as
higher self, soul,
and
spirit
. In order to be a little clearer, understand that I’m referring to the part of me that was aware during the NDE that I’m not just my body—the part of me that felt I was one with every single thing. I was merging with pure consciousness as an infinite, magnificent being, feeling the clarity of why I’m in this body and life at this point in time. This is also the part of me that understood that the illusion of separation is created by identifying too strongly with the external.

I believe that when we leave our physical bodies, our infinite selves are all connected. In the pure consciousness state, we’re all One. Many people have felt this unity during intense spiritual experiences or out in nature. When we work with animals or have pets, we feel it, too. We sometimes experience synchronicity and even extrasensory perception (ESP) and other such phenomena as a result of our being One with all creation, but because most people aren’t aware of it, it doesn’t happen as often as it could.

In truth, I’m not my body, my race, religion, or other beliefs, and neither is anyone else. The real self is infinite and much more powerful—a complete and whole entity that isn’t broken or damaged in any way. The infinite me already contains all the resources I need to navigate through life, because I’m One with Universal energy. In fact, I
am
Universal energy.