Final Logic Gate (Page 9)

The most notable feature of these great cities is that they are brilliantly luminous. They are also frequently described as foreign in architecture, and so sublimely beautiful that, like all the other features of the implicate dimensions, words fail to convey their grandeur. In describing one such city Swedenborg said that it was a place “of staggering architectural design, so beautiful that you would claim this is the home and source of art itself.”

Love is the ultimate reality. It is the only. The all. The feeling of love is your experience of God.

In highest Truth, love is all there is, all there was, and all there ever will be. When you move into the absolute, you move into love.

Fear is the other end of love. It is the primal polarity. In creating the realm of the relative, I first created the opposite of My Self. Now, in the realm in which you live on the physical plane, there are only two places of being: fear and love. Thoughts rooted in fear will produce one kind of manifestation on the physical plane. Thoughts rooted in love will produce another. [...]

These are the two points — the Alpha and the Omega — which allow the system you call “relativity” to be. Without these two points, without these two ideas about things, no other idea could exist. [...]

If you knew Who You Are — that you are the most magnificent, the most remarkable, the most splendid being God has ever created — you would never fear. [...] But you do not know Who You Are, and you think you are a great deal less.

Every human thought, and every human action, is based in either love or fear. [...] Decisions affecting business, industry, politics, religion, the education of your young, the social agenda of your nations, the economic goals of your society, choices involving war, peace, attack, defense, aggression, submission; determinations to covet or give away, to save or to share, to unite or to divide — every single free choice you ever undertake arises out of one of the only two possible thoughts there are: a thought of love or a thought of fear.

Fear is the energy which contracts, closes down, draws in, runs, hides, hoards, harms.

Love is the energy which expands, opens up, sends out, stays, reveals, shares, heals.

Fear wraps our bodies in clothing, love allows us to stand naked. Fear clings to and clutches all that we have, love gives all that we have away. Fear holds close, love holds dear. Fear grasps, love lets go. Fear rankles, love soothes. Fear attacks, love amends.

Every human thought, word, or deed is based in one emotion or the other. You have no choice about this, because there is nothing else from which to choose. But you have free choice about which of these to select.

You make it sound so easy, and yet in the moment of decision fear wins more often than not. Why is that?

You have been taught to live in fear. You have been told about the survival of the fittest and the victory of the strongest and the success of the cleverest. Precious little is said about the glory of the most loving. And so you strive to be the fittest, the strongest, the cleverest — in one way or another — and if you see yourself as something less than this in any situation, you fear loss, for you have been told that to be less is to lose.

And so of course you choose the action fear sponsors, for that is what you have been taught. Yet I teach you this: when you choose the action love sponsors, then will you do more than survive, then will you do more than win, then will you do more than succeed. Then will you experience the full glory of Who You Really Are, and who you can be.

What is hell?

It is the experience of the worst possible outcome of your choices, decisions, and creations. It is the natural consequence of any thought which denies Me, or says no to Who You Are in relationship to Me. [...]

I tell you there is no such experience after death as you have constructed in your fear-based theologies. Yet there is an experience of the soul so unhappy, so incomplete, so less than whole, so separated from God’s greatest joy, that to your soul this would be hell. But I tell you I do not send you there, nor do I cause this experience to be visited upon you. You, yourself, create the experience, whenever and however you separate your Self from your own highest thought about you. You, yourself, create the experience, whenever you deny your Self; whenever you reject Who and What You Really Are. [...]

But if there is no hell, does that mean I can do what I want, act as I wish, commit any act, without fear of retribution?

Is it fear that you need in order to be, do, and have what is intrinsically right? Must you be threatened in order to “be good”? And what is “being good”? Who gets to have the final say about that? Who sets the guidelines? Who makes the rules?

I tell you this: You are your own rule-maker. You set the guidelines. And you decide how well you have done; how well you are doing. For you are the one who has decided Who and What You Really Are — and Who You Want to Be. And you are the only one who can assess how well you’re doing. [...]

The direct answer to your question is, yes, you may do as you wish without fear of retribution. It may serve you, however, to be aware of consequences.

Consequences are results. Natural outcomes. These are not at all the same as retributions, or punishments. Outcomes are simply that. They are what results from the natural application of natural laws. They are that which occurs, quite predictably, as a consequence of what has occurred.

All physical life functions in accordance with natural laws. Once you remember these laws, and apply them, you have mastered life at the physical level.

What seems like punishment to you — or what you would call evil, or bad luck— is nothing more than a natural law asserting itself. [...]

Then how can I know these laws? How can I learn them?

It is not a question of learning, but of remembering.

How can I remember them?

Begin by being still. Quiet the outer world, so that the inner world might bring you sight. This in-sight is what you seek, yet you cannot have it while you are so deeply concerned with your outer reality. Seek, therefore, to go within as much as possible. And when you are not going within, come from within as you deal with the outside world. Remember this axiom:

If you do not go within, you go without. [...]

You have been going without all your life. Yet you do not have to, and never did.

There is nothing you cannot be, there is nothing you cannot do. There is nothing you cannot have.

That sounds like a pie-in-the-sky promise.

What other kind of promise would you have God make? Would you believe Me if I promised you less?

For thousands of years people have disbelieved the promises of God for the most extraordinary reason: they were too good to be true. So you have chosen a lesser promise — a lesser love. For the highest promise of God proceeds from the highest love. Yet you cannot conceive of a perfect love, and so a perfect promise is also inconceivable. As is a perfect person. Therefore you cannot believe even in your Self.

Failing to believe in any of this means failure to believe in God. For belief in God produces belief in God’s greatest gift — unconditional love — and God’s greatest promise — unlimited potential.

Again and again NDEers use the same adjectives to describe [the life review], referring to it as an incredibly vivid, wrap-around, three-dimensional replay of their entire life. “It’s like climbing right inside a movie of your life,” says one NDEer. “Every moment from every year of your life is played back in complete sensory detail. Total, total recall. And it all happens in an instant.” [...]

During the instantaneous and panoramic remembrance, NDEers reexperience all the emotions, the joys and the sorrows, that accompanied all the events in their life. More than that, they feel all of the emotions of the people with whom they have interacted as well. They feel the happiness of all the individuals to whom they’ve been kind. If they have committed a hurtful act, they became acutely aware of the pain their victim felt as a result of their thoughtlessness. And no event seems too trivial to be exempt. While reliving a moment in her childhood, one woman suddenly experienced all the loss and powerlessness her sister had felt after she (then a child) snatched a toy away from her sister.

Whitton has uncovered evidence that thoughtless acts are not the only things that cause individuals remorse during the life review. Under hypnosis his subjects reported that failed dreams and aspirations — things they had hoped to accomplish during their life but had not — also caused them pangs of sadness.

Thoughts, too, are replayed with exacting fidelity during the life review. Reveries, faces glimpsed once but remembered for years, things that made one laugh, the joy one felt when gazing at a particular painting, childish worries, and long forgotten daydreams — all flit through one’s mind in a second. As one NDEer summarizes, “Not even your thoughts are lost… Every thought was there.” [...]

Like Whitton’s subjects, NDEers universally report that they are never judged by the beings of light, but only feel love and acceptance in their presence. The only judgement that ever takes place is self-judgement and arises solely out of the NDEer’s own feelings of guilt and repentance. Occasionally the beings do assert themselves, but instead of behaving in an authoritarian manner, they act as guides and counselors whose only purpose is to teach. [...]

In NDE after NDE [the light beings] stress two things. One is the importance of love. Over and over they repeat this message, that we must learn to replace anger with love, learn to love more, learn to forgive and love everyone unconditionally, and learn that we in turn are loved. This appears to be the only moral criterion the beings use. Even sexual activity ceases to possess the moral stigma we humans are so fond of attaching to it. One of Whitton’s subjects reported that after living several withdrawn and depressed incarnations he was urged to plan a life as an amorous and sexually active female in order to add balance to the overall development of his soul. It appears that in the minds of the beings of light, compassion is the barometer of grace, and time and time again when NDEers wonder if some act they committed was right or wrong, the beings counter their inquiries only with a question: Did you do it out of love? Was the motivation love?

That is why we have been placed here on earth, say the beings, to learn that love is the key. They acknowledge that it is a difficult undertaking, but intimate that it is crucial to both our biological and spiritual existence in ways that we have perhaps not even begun to fathom. Even children return from the near-death realm with this message firmly impressed in their thoughts. States one little boy who after being hit by a car was guided into the world beyond by two people in “very white” robes: “What I learned there is that the most important thing is loving while you are alive.”

Fear is the opposite of everything you are, and so has an effect of opposition to your mental and physical health. Fear is worry magnified. Worry, hate, fear — together with their offshoots: anxiety, bitterness, impatience, avarice, unkindness, judgmentalness, and condemnation—all attack the body at the cellular level. It is impossible to have a healthy body under these conditions.

Similarly — although to a somewhat lesser degree — conceit, selfindulgence, and greed lead to physical illness, or lack of well-being. All illness is created first in the mind.

How can that be? What of conditions contracted from another? Colds — or, for that matter, AIDS?

Nothing occurs in your life — nothing — which is not first a thought. Thoughts are like magnets, drawing effects to you. The thought may not always be obvious, and thus clearly causative, as in, “I’m going to contract a terrible disease.” The thought may be (and usually is) far more subtle than that (“I am not worthy to live.”) (“My life is always a mess.”) (“I am a loser.”) (“God is going to punish me.”) (“I am sick and tired of my life!”)

Thoughts are a very subtle, yet extremely powerful, form of energy. Words are less subtle, more dense. Actions are the most dense of all. Action is energy in heavy physical form, in heavy motion. When you think, say, and act out a negative concept such as “I am a loser,” you place tremendous creative energy into motion. Small wonder you come down with a cold. That would be the least of it. [...]

Yet you are all mental lepers. Your mind is eaten away with negative thoughts. Some of these are thrust upon you. Many of these you actually make up — conjure up — yourselves, and then harbor and entertain for hours, days, weeks, months — even years.

… and you wonder why you are sick.

Achterberg’s recommendation that we rid ourselves of negative images is well taken, for there is evidence that imagery can cause illness as well as cure it. In Love, Medicine and Miracles, Bernie Siegel says he often encounters instances where the mental pictures patients use to describe themselves or their lives seem to play a role in the creation of their conditions. Examples include a mastectomy patient who told him she “needed to get something off her chest”; a patient with multiple myeloma in his backbone who said he “was always considered spineless”; and a man with carcinoma of the larynx whose father punished him as a child by constantly squeezing his throat and telling him to “shut up!”

Sometimes the relationship between the image and the illness is so striking it is difficult to understand why it is not apparent to the individual involved, as in the case of a psychotherapist who had emergency surgery to remove several feet of dead intestine and then told Siegel, “I’m glad you’re my surgeon. I’ve been undergoing teaching analysis. I couldn’t handle all the shit that was coming up, or digest the crap in my life.” Incidents such as these have convinced Siegel that nearly all diseases originate at least to some degree in the mind, but he does not think this makes them psychosomatic or unreal. He prefers to say they are soma-significant, a term coined by Bohm to sum up better the relationship, and derived from the Greek word “soma” meaning “body.” That all diseases might have their origin in the mind does not disturb Siegel. He sees it rather as a sign of tremendous hope, an indicator that if one has the power to create sickness, one also has the power to create wellness.

The connection between image and illness is so potent, imagery can even be used to predict a patient’s prospects for survival. In another landmark experiment, Simonton, his wife, psychologist Stephanie Matthew-Simonton, Achterberg, and psychologist G. Frank Lawlis performed a battery of blood tests on 126 patients with advanced cancer. Then they subjected the patients to an equally extensive array of psychological tests, including exercises in which the patients were asked to draw images of themselves, their cancers, their treatment, and their immune systems. The blood tests offered some information about the patient’s condition, but provided no major revelations. However, the results from the psychological tests, particularly drawings, were encyclopedias of information about the status of the patient’s health. Indeed, simply by analyzing patients’ drawings, Achterberg later achieved a 95 percent rate of accuracy in predicting who would die within a few months and who would beat their illness and go into remission.

1. The cell is like a human body and it functions without DNA

The cell is like a human body. It is capable of respiration, digestion, reproduction, and other life functions. The nucleus, which contains the genes, has traditionally been viewed as the control center — the brain of the cell.

Yet, when the nucleus is removed, the cell continues with all of its life functions and it can still recognize toxins and nutrients. It appears the nucleus — and the DNA it contains — does not control the cell.

Scientists assumed some 50 years ago that genes control biology. It just seemed so correct, we bought the story. We don’t have the right assumptions.

2. DNA is controlled by the environment

Proteins carry out the functions in cells and they are building blocks of life. It has long been thought that DNA controls or determines the actions of proteins.

Here I propose a different model. Environmental stimuli that come into contact with the cell membrane are perceived by receptor proteins in the membrane. This sets off a chain reaction of proteins passing on what could be described as messages to other proteins, motivating action in the cell.

DNA is coated in a protective sleeve of protein. The environmental signals act on that protein, causing it to open up and to select certain genes for use — genes specifically needed to react to the current environment.

Basically, DNA is not the beginning of the chain reaction. Instead, the cell membrane’s perception of the environment is the first step.

If there are no perceptions, the DNA is inactive.

Genes can’t turn themselves on or off… they can’t control themselves. If a cell is cut off from any environmental stimuli, it doesn’t do anything. Life is due to how the cell responds to the environment.

Of course, Lipton is a well-known crank, whose central idea seems to be a variant of The Secret, in which wanting something badly enough makes it so and that “modern science has bankrupted our souls.” Basically, he questions the “Newtonian vision of the primacy of a physical, mechanical Universe”; that “genes control biology” [...]

When I first started back in the '70s and my research was coming out, it was the golden age of genes. My research irritated a lot of people. I always thought of them as lemmings running off the cliff of DNA, and I'm standing there on the side with the results from my stem-cell studies thinking, 'Oh my God, you're all going the wrong way.' At some point I realised that they marginalised my work because it didn’t conform to their conventional beliefs and I thought, well, they’re not even being scientists. And I just left the system. I realised the message is more important for the average person than it is to argue in the halls of science.

Here is Metaphysics 101: A Short Course in Ultimate Reality.

As we've noted a while back in this conversation, all elements of life are imbued with what you would call, in your language, "intelligence" - or Awareness of Its Inherent Function.

This Awareness fills each element to its maximum capacity. That is, every element is imbued with Divine Intelligence utterly, full out, from border to border. Indeed, it would not be incorrect to say that the element itself IS this intelligence, in particle form.

So each element of life, down to the tiniest submolecular particule, is a part of the Mind of God.

With your sense of poetry, that would be how you would put it... and I have no reason to argue with you.

Now the Elements of the Essential Essence are attracted to each other by an aspect or characteristic that you would call, in human terms, "common function".

That is, they are all trying to do something. And it is the same thing. They are all in action, forever moving, continuously vibrating - but not without purpose.

Their purpose is simply to BE. They realize that life is movement. If movement ever stops, that which you call life would not exist. [...]

Now, as to what each element wants to be, that doesn't matter. The individual element does not have a preference in the matter. It simply wants to exist. It desires to "be".

What is called "alignment", then - and the subsequent joint or unified action to which you refer - is created by the vibrational influence of any force larger than the individual element.

It is this way throughout all of nature. The larger the force, the more "pull" it has on every smaller element within its Impact Area. So every element within any Impact Area will fall into alignment with the larger force that is pulling on it. [...]

So if you, as creative beings, wish all the elements of life, down into the tiniest particle, to move in a particular direction, you must create alignment using the force of combined energy focused in a particular way.

And thought is that force.

The key point here is that at every level, the same variational, surprise-reducing dynamics must be in play to supply Markov blankets for the level above.

Fear is the energy which contracts, closes down, draws in, runs, hides, hoards, harms.

Love is the energy which expands, opens up, sends out, stays, reveals, shares, heals.

It was only a few years ago that I discovered that everything I thought I knew about poverty was wrong. It all started when I accidentally stumbled upon a paper by a few American psychologists. They had travelled 8,000 miles all the way to India for a fascinating study. It was an experiment with sugarcane farmers. You should know that these farmers collect about 60% of their annual income all at once, right after the harvest. This means that they're relatively poor one part of the year, and rich the other.

The researchers asked them to do an IQ test before and after the harvest. What they subsequently discovered completely blew my mind. The farmers scored much worse on the test before the harvest. The effects of living in poverty, it turns out, correspond to losing 14 points of IQ. Now, to give you an idea, that's comparable to losing a night's sleep or the effects of alcoholism.

If you think it defies common sense that water does this, you are right. In fact water does not respond to thoughts and feelings — it's just water. How then does one explain Mr. Emoto's experiments? My best guess is that Mr. Emoto grows hundreds of crystals and then selects different shapes to demonstrate whatever point he wishes to make. [...]

Do I know Mr. Emoto does this? No, which is why I called it a guess. Mr. Emoto has never published his work in a reputable scientific forum, where it would be scrutinized. He only presents it in self-published books, where he is free to say whatever he wants. Basic physics says the work cannot be correct, and Mr. Emoto has not convinced the scientific community that his experiments have any merit whatsoever.

Have I tried to reproduce Mr. Emoto's experiments? No, and I don't intend to. While I try to keep an open mind to new ideas, this one is just too outrageous. I only have limited time and resources, so I study ideas that I think are more likely to be fruitful. As we liked to say back on the farm in North Dakota — it's good to have an open mind, but not so open that your brains fall out!

It is very difficult to reverse the effects of negative thinking once they have taken physical form. Not impossible — but very difficult. It takes an act of extreme faith. It requires an extraordinary belief in the positive force of the universe — whether you call that God, Goddess, the Unmoved Mover, Prime Force, First Cause, or whatever.

Healers have just such faith. It is a faith that crosses over into Absolute Knowing. They know that you are meant to be whole, complete, and perfect in this moment now. This knowingness is also a thought — and a very powerful one. It has the power to move mountains — to say nothing of molecules in your body. That is why healers can heal, often even at a distance.

Thought knows no distance. Thought travels around the world and traverses the universe faster than you can say the word. “Say but the word and my servant shall be healed.” And it was so, in that selfsame hour, even before his sentence was finished. Such was the faith of the centurion.

May I interrupt you here? I hate to interrupt God when He’s on a roll… but I’ve heard this talk of unlimited potential before, and it doesn’t square with the human experience. Forget the difficulties encountered by the average person — what about the challenges of those born with mental or physical limitations? Is their potential unlimited?

[...] Do you think they are limited, as you put it, not of their choice? Do you imagine that a human soul encounters life challenges — whatever they may be — by accident? Is this your imagining?

Do you mean a soul chooses what kind of life it will experience ahead of time?

No, that would defeat the purpose of the encounter. The purpose is to create your experience — and thus, create your Self — in the glorious moment of Now. You do not, therefore, choose the life you will experience ahead of time.

You may, however, select the persons, places, and events — the conditions and circumstances, the challenges and obstacles, the opportunities and options — with which to create your experience. You may select the colors for your palette, the tools for your chest, the machinery for your shop. What you create with these is your business. That is the business of life.

Your potential is unlimited in all that you’ve chosen to do. Do not assume that a soul which has incarnated in a body which you call limited has not reached its full potential, for you do not know what that soul was trying to do. You do not understand its agenda. You are unclear as to its intent.

Therefore bless every person and condition, and give thanks. Thus you affirm the perfection of God’s creation — and show your faith in it. For nothing happens by accident in God’s world, and there is no such thing as coincidence. Nor is the world buffeted by random choice, or something you call fate.

If a snowflake is utterly perfect in its design, do you not think the same could be said about something as magnificent as your life?

But even Jesus healed the sick. Why would he heal them if their condition was so “perfect”?

Jesus did not heal those he healed because he saw their condition as imperfect. He healed those he healed because he saw those souls asking for healing as part of their process. He saw the perfection of the process. He recognized and understood the soul’s intention. Had Jesus felt that all illness, mental or physical, represented imperfection, would he not have simply healed everyone on the planet, all at once? Do you doubt that he could do this?

No. I believe he could have.

Good. Then the mind begs to know: Why did he not do it? Why would the Christ choose to have some suffer, and others be healed? For that matter, why does God allow any suffering at any time? This question has been asked before, and the answer remains the same. There is perfection in the process — and all life arises out of choice. It is not appropriate to interfere with choice, nor to question it. It is particularly inappropriate to condemn it.

What is appropriate is to observe it, and then to do whatever might be done to assist the soul in seeking and making a higher choice. Be watchful, therefore, of the choices of others, but not judgmental. Know that their choice is perfect for them in this moment now — yet stand ready to assist them should the moment come when they seek a newer choice, a different choice — a higher choice.

Move into communion with the souls of others, and their purpose, their intention, will be clear to you. This is what Jesus did with those he healed— and with all those whose lives he touched. Jesus healed all those who came to him, or who sent others to him supplicating for them. He did not perform a random healing. To have done so would have been to violate a sacred Law of the Universe:

Allow each soul to walk its path.

But does that mean we must not help anyone without being asked? Surely not, or we would never be able to help the starving children of India, or the tortured masses of Africa, or the poor, or the downtrodden anywhere. All humanitarian effort would be lost, all charity forbidden. Must we wait for an individual to cry out to us in desperation, or for a nation of people to plead for help, before we are allowed to do what is obviously right?

You see, the question answers itself. If a thing is obviously right, do it. But remember to exercise extreme judgment regarding what you call “right” and “wrong.”

A thing is only right or wrong because you say it is. A thing is not right or wrong intrinsically.

It isn’t?

“Rightness” or “wrongness” is not an intrinsic condition, it is a subjective judgment in a personal value system. By your subjective judgments do you create your Self — by your personal values do you determine and demonstrate Who You Are.

The world exists exactly as it is so that you may make these judgments. If the world existed in perfect condition, your life process of Self creation would be terminated. It would end. A lawyer’s career would end tomorrow were there no more litigation. A doctor’s career would end tomorrow were there no more illness. A philosopher’s career would end tomorrow were there no more questions.[...]

We, all of us, would be through creating were there nothing more to create. We, all of us, have a vested interest in keeping the game going. Much as we all say we would like to solve all the problems, we dare not solve all the problems, or there will be nothing left for us to do.

If we are not fortunate enough to have the healing self-mastery of a [mystic], another way of accessing the healing force within us is to bypass the thick armor of doubt and skepticism that exists in our conscious minds. Being tricked with a placebo is one way of accomplishing this. Hypnosis is another. Like a surgeon reaching in and altering the condition of an internal organ, a skilled hypnotherapist can reach into our psyche and help us change the most important type of belief of all, our unconscious beliefs.

Numerous studies have demonstrated irrefutably that under hypnosis a person can influence processes usually considered unconscious. For instance, like a [MPD patient], deeply hypnotized persons can control allergic reactions, blood flow patterns, and nearsightedness. In addition, they can control heart rate, pain, body temperature, and even will away some kinds of birthmarks. Hypnosis can also be used to accomplish something that, in its own way, is every bit as remarkable as suffering no injury after a [fencing foil] has been stuck through one's abdomen.

That something involves a horribly disfiguring hereditary condition known as Brocq's disease [a.k.a congenital ichthyosiform erythrodermia]. Victims of Brocq's disease develop a thick, horny covering over their skin that resembles the scales of a reptile. The skin can become so hardened and rigid that even the slightest movement will cause it to crack and bleed. Many of the so-called alligator-skinned people in circus sideshows were actually individuals with Brocq's disease, and because of the risk of infection, victims of Brocq's disease used to have relatively short lifespans.

Brocq's disease was incurable until 1951 when a sixteen-year-old boy with an advanced case of the affliction was referred as a last resort to a hypnotherapist named A. A. Mason at the Queen Victoria Hospital in London. Mason discovered that the boy was a good hypnotic subject and could easily be put into a deep state of trance. While the boy was in trance, Mason told him that his Brocq's disease was healing and would soon be gone. Five days later the scaly layer covering the boy's left arm fell off, revealing soft, healthy flesh underneath. By the end of ten days the arm was completely normal. Mason and the boy continued to work on different body areas until all the scaly skin was gone. The boy remained symptom-free for at least five years, at which point Mason lost touch with him.

This is extraordinary because Brocq's disease is a genetic condition, and getting rid of it involves more than just controlling autonomic processes such as blood flow patterns and various cells of the immune system. It means tapping into the masterplan, our DNA programming itself. So, it would appear that when we access the right strata of our beliefs, our minds can override even our genetic makeup.

You can “solve some of the health problems,” as you put it, by solving the problems in your thinking. Yes, you can heal some of the conditions you have already acquired (given yourself), as well as prevent major new problems from developing. And you can do this all by changing your thinking.

Also — and I hate to suggest this because it sounds so mundane coming, as it were, from God, but — for God’s sake, take better care of yourself.

You take rotten care of your body, paying it little attention at all until you suspect something’s going wrong with it. You do virtually nothing in the way of preventive maintenance. You take better care of your car than you do of your body — and that’s not saying much.

Not only do you fail to prevent breakdowns with regular check-ups, once-a-year physicals, and use of the therapies and medicines you’ve been given (why do you go to the doctor, get her help, then not use the remedies she suggests? Can you answer Me that one?) — you also mistreat your body terribly between these visits about which you do nothing!

You do not exercise it, so it grows flabby and, worse yet, weak from non-use.

You do not nourish it properly, thereby weakening it further.

Then you fill it with toxins and poisons and the most absurd substances posing as food. And still it runs for you, this marvelous engine; still it chugs along, bravely pushing on in the face of this onslaught.

It’s horrible. The conditions under which you ask your body to survive are horrible. But you will do little or nothing about them. You will read this, nod your head in regretful agreement, and go right back to the mistreatment. And do you know why?

I’m afraid to ask.

Because you have no will to live.

Although Ullman believes such findings are evidence of the underlying state of interconnectedness Bohm is talking about, he feels that an even more profound example of holographic wholeness can be found in another aspect of dreaming. That is the ability of our dreaming selves often to be far wiser than we ourselves are in our waking state. For instance, Ullman says that in his psychoanalytic practice he could have a patient who seemed completely unenlightened when he was awake — mean, selfish, arrogant, exploitative, and manipulative; a person who had fragmented and dehumanized all of his interpersonal relationships. But no matter how spiritually blind a person may be, or unwilling to recognize his or her own shortcomings, dreams invariably depict their failings honestly and contain metaphors that seem designed to prod him or her gently into a state of greater self-awareness.

Moreover, such dreams were not one-time occurrences. During the course of his practice Ullman noticed that when one of his patients failed to recognize or accept some truth about himself, that truth would surface again and again in his dreams, in different metaphorical guises and linked with different related experiences from his past, but always in an apparent attempt to offer him new opportunities to come to terms with the truth.

Why don’t You fix the world, instead of allowing it to go to hell?

Why don’t you?

I don’t have the power.

Nonsense. You’ve the power and the ability right now to end world hunger this minute, to cure diseases this instant. What if I told you your own medical profession holds back cures, refuses to approve alternative medicines and procedures because they threaten the very structure of the “healing” profession? What if I told you that the governments of the world do not want to end world hunger? Would you believe me?

I’d have a hard time with that. I know that’s the populist view, but I can’t believe it’s actually true. No doctor wants to deny a cure. No countryman wants to see his people die.

No individual doctor, that’s true. No particular countryman, that’s right. But doctoring and politicking have become institutionalized, and it’s the institutions that fight these things, sometimes very subtly, sometimes even unwittingly, but inevitably… because to those institutions it’s a matter of survival.

And so, to give you just one very simple and obvious example, doctors in the West deny the healing efficacies of doctors in the East because to accept them, to admit that certain alternate modalities might just provide some healing, would be to tear at the very fabric of the institution as it has structured itself.

This is not malevolent, yet it is insidious. The profession doesn’t do this because it is evil. It does it because it is scared.

All attack is a call for help.

"Time" is not a continuum. It is an element of relativity that exists vertically, not horizontally.

Don't think of it as a "left to right" thing - a so-called time line that runs from birth to death for each individual, and from some finite point to some finite point for the universe.

"Time" is an "up and down" thing! Think of it as a spindle, representing the Eternal Moment of Now.

Now picture leafs of paper on the spindle, one atop the other. These are the elements of time. Each element separate and distinct, yet each existing simultaneously with the other. All the paper on the spindle at once! As much as there will ever be - as much as there ever was...

Excuse me, but I have to interrupt you again here. What about the person who is sick, but has the faith that will move mountains — and so thinks, says, and believes he’s going to get better… only to die six weeks later. How does that square with all this positive thinking, affirmative action stuff?

[...] The person who has the “faith to move mountains,” and dies six weeks later, has moved mountains for six weeks. That may have been enough for him. He may have decided, on the last hour of the last day, “Okay, I’ve had enough. I’m ready to go on now to another adventure.” You may not have known of that decision, because he may not have told you. The truth is, he may have made that decision quite a bit earlier — days, weeks earlier — and not have told you; not have told anyone.

You have created a society in which it is very not okay to want to die — very not okay to be very okay with death. Because you don’t want to die, you can’t imagine anyone wanting to die — no matter what their circumstances or condition.

But there are many situations in which death is preferable to life — which I know you can imagine if you think about it for even a little bit. Yet, these truths don’t occur to you — they are not that self-evident — when you are looking in the face of someone else who is choosing to die. And the dying person knows this. She can feel the level of acceptance in the room regarding her decision. [...]

The entire medical profession is trained to keep people alive, rather than keeping people comfortable so that they can die with dignity. You see, to a doctor or a nurse, death is failure. To a friend or relative, death is disaster. Only to the soul is death a relief — a release. The greatest gift you can give the dying is to let them die in peace — not thinking that they must “hang on,” or continue to suffer, or worry about you at this most crucial passage in their life.

So this is very often what has happened in the case of the man who says he’s going to live, believes he’s going to live, even prays to live: that at the soul level, he has “changed his mind.” It is time now to drop the body to free the soul for other pursuits. When the soul makes this decision, nothing the body does can change it. Nothing the mind thinks can alter it. It is at the moment of death that we learn who, in the body-mind-soul triumvirate, is running things.

All your life you think you are your body. Some of the time you think you are your mind. It is at the time of your death that you find out Who You Really Are.

Nothing is painful in and of itself. Pain is a result of wrong thought. It is an error in thinking.

A Master can disappear the most grievous pain. In this way, the Master heals.

Pain results from a judgment you have made about a thing. Remove the judgment and the pain disappears.

Judgment is often based upon previous experience. Your idea about a thing derives from a prior idea about that thing. Your prior idea results from a still prior idea — and that idea from another, and so forth, like building blocks, until you get all the way back in the hall of mirrors to what I call first thought.

All thought is creative, and no thought is more powerful than original thought. That is why this is sometimes also called original sin. Original sin is when your first thought about a thing is in error. That error is compounded many times over when you have a second or third thought about a thing. It is the job of the Holy Spirit to inspire you to new understandings, which can free you from your mistakes.

Are you saying that I shouldn’t feel bad about the starving children of Africa, the violence and injustice in America, the earthquake that kills hundreds in Brazil?

There are no “shoulds” or “shouldn’ts” in God’s world. Do what you want to do. Do what reflects you, what re-presents you as a grander version of your Self. If you want to feel bad, feel bad.

But judge not, and neither condemn, for you know not why a thing occurs, nor to what end.

It's perfectly obvious that time has a direction. All we mean by that is that the past is different from the future in lots of different ways. We were younger in the past, we will be older in the future. We remember the past, we don't remember the future.

The surprise is that the difference between past and future is nowhere to be found in the deep down laws of physics. Time is actually a lot like space. If you were out in a space suit flying around, there would be no difference between up, down, left, right. Likewise, there is no intrinsic difference between the past and the future in the laws of physics.

Now that's not completely a mystery to us. We know that what actually happens in the real world is that you're not just made of one or two particles bumping into each other. You're a very, very complicated collection of many, many particles, and they're becoming more disorderly with time. This is to say that entropy [disorder] increases.

The interesting thing is that every difference between the past and the future can ultimately be traced to the fact that the entropy was lower in the past and is growing. That's the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The universe was orderly, it's becoming more disorderly.

And that's not a surprise. There are more ways to be disorderly than to be orderly. The surprise is that the universe was ever low entropy to begin with. If we go all the way back to the Big Bang, 13.7 billion years ago, the universe began in a highly-ordered state. So, modern cosmologists are trying to understand right now why the early universe was in such a precise state, why it was so low entropy.

Once we undertand that, it will make perfect sense to us why the arrow of time stretches as it does from the past, to today, all the way toward the future.

Why is there such a delay between thought and creation before we die, and no delay at all after we die?

Because you are working within the illusion of time. There is no delay between thought and creation away from the body, because you are also away from the parameters of time. [...]

The phenomenon of "time" is really a function of perspective.

Why does it exist while we are in the body?

You have caused it to by moving into, by assuming, your present perspective. You use this perspective as a tool with which you can explore and examine your experiences much more fully, by separating them into individual pieces, rather than a single occurrence.

In describing the hereafter one child said that food appeared whenever she wished for it, but there was no need to eat, an observation that underscores once again the illusory and hologramlike nature of the afterlife reality.

There is no time. All things exist simultaneously. All events occur at once.

This Book is being written, and as it’s being written it’s already written; it already exists. In fact, that’s where you’re getting all this information — from the book that already exists. You’re merely bringing it into form.

This is what is meant by: “Even before you ask, I will have answered.”

If you think your life is about doingness, you do not understand what you are about.

Your soul doesn’t care what you do for a living — and when your life is over, neither will you. Your soul cares only about what you’re being while you’re doing whatever you’re doing.

It is a state of beingness the soul is after, not a state of doingness.

What is the soul seeking to be?

Me.

You.

Yes, Me. Your soul is Me, and it knows it. What it is doing, is trying to experience that. And what it is remembering is that the best way to have this experience is by not doing anything. There is nothing to do but to be.

Be what?

Whatever you want to be. Happy. Sad. Weak. Strong. Joyful. Vengeful. Insightful. Blind. Good. Bad. Male. Female. You name it. I mean that literally. You name it. [...]

So, in seeking to be Me, the soul has a grand job ahead of it; an enormous menu of beingness from which to choose. And that is what it is doing in this moment now.

Choosing states of being.

Yes — and then producing the right and perfect conditions within which to create the experience of that. It is therefore true that nothing happens to you or through you that is not for your own highest good. [...]

You are not on this planet to produce anything with your body. You are on this planet to produce something with your soul. Your body is simply and merely the tool of your soul. Your mind is the power that makes the body go. So what you have here is a power tool, used in the creation of the soul’s desire. [...]

The function of the soul is to indicate its desire, not impose it.

The function of the mind is to choose from its alternatives.

The function of the body is to act out that choice.

When body, mind, and soul create together, in harmony and in unity, God is made flesh.

Then does the soul know itself in its own experience. Then do the heavens rejoice.

Desire is the beginning of all creation. It is first thought. It is a grand feeling within the soul. It is God, choosing what next to create. [...]

Often a person on what you call a spiritual path looks like he has renounced all earthly passion, all human desire. What he has done is understand it, see the illusion, and step aside from the passions that do not serve him — all the while loving the illusion for what it has brought to him: the chance to be wholly free.

Passion is the love of turning being into action. It fuels the engine of creation. It changes concepts to experience.

Passion is the fire that drives us to express who we really are. Never deny passion, for that is to deny Who You Are and Who You Truly Want to Be.

The renunciate never denies passion — the renunciate simply denies attachment to results. Passion is a love of doing. Doing is being, experienced. Yet what is often created as part of doing? Expectation.

To live your life without expectation — without the need for specific results — that is freedom. That is Godliness. That is how I live.

You are not attached to results?

Absolutely not. My joy is in the creating, not in the aftermath. Renunciation is not a decision to deny action. Renunciation is a decision to deny a need for a particular result. There is a vast difference.

Could you explain what You mean by the statement, “Passion is the love of turning being into action”?

Beingness is the highest state of existence. It is the purest essence. It is the “now-not now,” the “all-not all,” the “always-never” aspect of God. Pure being is pure God-ing.

Yet it has never been enough for us to simply be. We have always yearned to experience What We Are — and that requires a whole other aspect of divinity, called doing.

Let us say that you are, at the core of your wonderful Self, that aspect of divinity called love. (This is, by the way, the Truth of you.) Now it is one thing to be love — and quite another thing to do something loving. The soul longs to do something about what it is, in order that it might know itself in its own experience. So it will seek to realize its highest idea through action.

This urge to do this is called passion. Kill passion and you kill God. Passion is God wanting to say “hi.”

But, you see, once God (or God-in-you) does that loving thing, God has realized Itself, and needs nothing more.

Man, on the other hand, often feels he needs a return on his investment. If we’re going to love somebody, fine — but we’d better get some love back. That sort of thing.

This is not passion. This is expectation.

This is the greatest source of man’s unhappiness. It is what separates man from God.

Why do some people, take Christ, for example, seem to hear more of Your communication than others?

Because some people are willing to actually listen. They are willing to hear, and they are willing to remain open to the communication even when it seems scary, or crazy, or downright wrong.

We should listen to God even when what’s being said seems wrong?

Especially when it seems wrong. If you think you are right about everything, who needs to talk with God?

Go ahead and act on all that you know. But notice that you’ve all been doing that since time began. And look at what shape the world is in. Clearly, you’ve missed something. Obviously, there is something you don’t understand. That which you do understand must seem right to you, because “right” is a term you use to designate something with which you agree. What you’ve missed will, therefore, appear at first to be “wrong.”

The only way to move forward on this is to ask yourself, “What would happen if everything I thought was ‘wrong’ was actually ‘right’?” Every great scientist knows about this. When what a scientist does is not working, a scientist sets aside all of the assumptions and starts over. All great discoveries have been made from a willingness, and ability, to not be right. And that’s what’s needed here.

You cannot know God until you’ve stopped telling yourself that you already know God. You cannot hear God until you stop thinking that you’ve already heard God.

I cannot tell you My Truth until you stop telling Me yours.

I leaned back against the wall and sunk to the floor, my face in my hands. I was in my room in Phuket, Thailand. I'd been training at a Muay Thai camp for the past few months, occasionally spending weekends at my Uncle's place. He and his wife lived by the water, a short fifteen-minute drive away.

How did I, a cognitive athlete, end up sparring at a Muay Thai camp in Phuket, you ask? Well, that's a funny story...

It starts in Brisbane, Australia. I'd been living there for six months, but my soul had become restless again. My good friend, Lachlan, and I were getting drunk on cheap wine and racing office chairs around our coworking space one Friday night. I told him I needed a new place to go; somewhere on a US timezone. He looked at me and said, "Doesn't your best mate live in Colombia?"

Two weeks later, in the middle of the night, I flew into Medellin, Colombia. Zac and I immediately opened some cold beers and sat on his outdoor lounge under the starry night sky, catching up for hours. I hadn't seen him in two years. When I was a teenager, we used to hang out all the time at his place, laughing about internet memes and working on our businesses. When we got bored, we'd wander down to a hidden Sydney beach in the middle of the night, sit on the pier, and eat mangoes while dreaming about everything we were going to do with our lives.

The thing is, those dreams weren't dreams. They were more like plans. I moved to New York as a 22-year-old, and Zac moved too. My startup failed while Zac's business thrived. As I packed up our New York apartment as a 23-year-old, I told Zac I wanted to try the "digital nomad" thing, running a location-independent business that did something wholesome and fulfilling. Zac told me he was going to gallivant around Europe all summer, then fly down to Colombia and buy a beautiful penthouse in the City of Eternal Spring. He'd been my trusty, hilarious, fiercely loyal sidekick for so long, and that fork in our path marked the end of an era.

Years later, as I sat on his penthouse balcony in the City of Eternal Spring as a 26-year-old who ran a wholesome-and-fulfilling children's coding school, we realized we'd both done exactly what we said we'd do. He was a broke bartender when I met him, but now there he was — a small town Aussie kid running rampant in Colombia.

And just to clear things up, because I know people are incapable of believing that a heterosexual male and female can be close platonic friends: no, there's nothing romantic between us. Zac and I spent the first five years of our friendship saying "Y'know... it would be so convenient if we were attracted to each other." But the body wants what the body wants. As Zachary likes to say: there are so many things I want to do in this life, and my sister is not one of them.

Anyway, I joined a boutique gym in Medellin. There was only one other person who worked out in the middle of the day. He'd always take his shirt off and spend several hours doing all manner of grueling exercises. He looked like he'd walked straight off the cover of Men's Fitness magazine — dirty blonde hair, blue eyes, chiseled jawline, ripped body. Zac, being the collossal asshole that he is, would come to refer to this handsome stranger as "Hitler's Wet Dream."

One day, I was packing my bag at the lockers when the stranger came by. "Hey," he smiled. He had a beautiful smile. I mean, who the hell looks that good after a workout? Honestly...

"I've seen you around for a few weeks," he continued. "Where are you from?"

"Australia," I replied. "What about you?"

"Vienna. I'm Mikel, by the way." I could tell he wasn't a native English speaker.

He asked me where I'd been traveling. I reciprocated. He was a contruction engineer and property developer back in Vienna. He'd spent the past few years traveling on-and-off, doing what he loved — hiking, training, sports.

After a thirty minute conversation by the lockers, Mikel asked if I'd have coffee with him the next day. Several hours went by as we sipped cappuccinos and ate a croissant de almendras and spoke about various things. As the sun set, we moved on to drinks, then dinner, then drinks again.

There was something mysterious about him. He was like an enigma; a puzzle. I like puzzles. I couldn't quite figure him out — which I'm pretty sure was the point. My soul knew exactly how to pique my mind's interest.

Unlike most people I met on my travels, Mikel made his living the old fashioned way: offline. He also had no social media, which I found refreshing. He loved building things and talked with such passion about a house he wanted to construct when he arrived back in Vienna. I could tell he'd been raised with old-school European manners — opening doors for me, walking on the outside of the footpath, making sure I got home safely. In some ways, he was like a time capsule floating around in a modern lifestyle. I found the paradox fascinating.

We quickly became friends. Nomadic life is transient, and he was leaving in a few weeks to head to the US, then Canada, then Thailand to train at a Muay Thai camp. "You should meet me there!" he said as he leaned against my treadmill one day. "I think you'd like the training."

"Maybe..." I replied. I was enjoying Colombia. I'd established a productive work routine and social circle there. However, my visa was going to expire in a couple of months and I needed a new place to go — preferably a cheap one. I still kept all my money in my business for growth, so I'd only withdraw the minimum salary needed to live comfortably. Luckily, "living comfortably" is far more affordable in foreign countries — much cheaper than living a mediocre lifestyle of ramen noodles in a place like Sydney. And yet despite this creative hack, my career still felt like a never-ending exercise in delayed gratification: invest, invest, invest, hold on, hold on, hold on, it's just another month, another year, another failure, another business... but one day, you will reap the harvest. Compound growth is the eighth wonder of the world.

"Come on," Mikel coaxed, flashing me his movie-star grin. "It's an all-you-can-eat buffet of training. There are so many things to try: Muay Thai kickboxing, yoga, jiu-jitsu, fitness classes, traditional boxing, Thai sword fighting-"

"Sword fighting?" My ears pricked up. For the past eighteen months, I'd been having recurring visions of me wandering around the world with an ornate sword in my hand. I wasn't sure what the visions meant, but Mikel's words caught my attention.

There. I felt it. That gut-level clarity. It was a voice that whispered, Follow the white rabbit, Nikki. Follow the white rabbit.

So that's how I ended up in Phuket, sinking to the floor of my apartment, my face in my hands. And no — my mental distress had nothing to do with a man. Nor did it have anything to do with Muay Thai, which turned out to be a poignant metaphor for my creative process: getting repeatedly punched in the face, and learning to love the taste of my own blood.

No. My mental distress was self-induced. I was just furious at my soul.

You see, after arriving in Thailand, I'd begun to free-fall into another full-blown existential crisis. I could usually feel these waves building up in my consciousness, and I wasn't very good at diffusing them before they crashed down on my life, obliterating everything in their path. This one was accompanied by an uncomfortable pressure in my solar plexus — like the power of a mighty ocean, trapped inside a little box.

I'd recently begun feeling constrained in my career. It wasn't matching up with my interests anymore, and everything felt like a chore. I was scared and confused and disillusioned. What went wrong? I thought I was doing everything right — taking risks, working hard, overcoming obstacles, leaning into fear, allocating time for myself so I didn't burn out, staying active, following my passion and curiosity, making daily progress towards my goals.

I used to love this. I used to love building tech products. But now the thought of doing that seemed so humdrum. I loved my children's coding school, and I was confused as to why I suddenly felt complete apathy towards it — just like so many other creative projects that had faded in and out of my life.

Please don't do this to me again, I begged my soul. Can I please stay focused on this one? I like this creation.

Nothing was ever stable for me. Everything was always transient and fluid — like sand, shifting through an hourglass. One minute, I was high on life. The next, I was crashing and tumbling and falling and lost.

And I judged myself so harshly for it, too. I'd tried corralling my soul when it wanted to change directions, but I was starting to learn that resistance was futile. I'd tried running in the opposite direction of my curiosity, with abysmal consequences. I'd tried smashing it into the mold that society had built for it, and that gave me no success. I'd tried muting it, and subduing it, and lassoing it, and yelling at it, and every time I tried to fight against it, the roaring ocean would rise up at full force and come crashing over my head, sending me tumbling down into the darkness.

The depressive phases were hopeless and debilitating and grey. I would swing down into these melancholy states for months on end, but it wasn't a depression in the sense that I had no will to live. No, not at all. I had plenty of will to live. My mind was a silent explosion of ideas in the depths of a pitch-black ocean.

The darkness only swallowed me when my heart pulled one way, but my head resisted it because it wasn't what I "should" be doing. I should be doing this and this and this to be successful and be a good person and be responsible. I should be reaching my potential and earning more money. I knew I was capable of earning way more, but money didn't motivate me like it seemed to motivate other people. My soul only cared about money to the extent it gave me freedom to follow the white rabbit. Once that need was met, it ceased to provide any incremental value to my life.

I should be making my parents proud of me. They loved me and supported me, but I also knew they were worried I'd never grow up. It was hard for them. They wanted me to be safe and secure, but I wanted to be wild and free. I was their difficult child, and although they'd done everything right by the parenting books, I think they wondered where they'd gone wrong with me.

"But how is this going to earn you money?" my mother would ask. "I don't understand where the value is in all this work you're so obsessed with. Why does it matter?"

"Mum!" I'd say, incredulously. "I honestly don't understand how you can't see this! It is the only thing that matters. It is the root cause of everything. What is the meaning of life? How is the illusion being constructed? When I throw an apple in the air, why does it move? Don't tell me it moves because of Newton's laws — that's a description of what it is doing. I want to know why it is doing it. I want to know what is happening at the lower dimension. And if I can just figure it out, then the world will finally make sense to me. And maybe other people would like to know the answer, too."

"Well, as long as 'other people' pay for it somehow, that's all I care about. You can't keep working for free forever, Nikki. You need to think about your future."

She didn't understand. No one understood. I was all alone on my quest. And if I failed, I'd be all alone in that too.

So my mind would say, "do this responsible thing." But my soul would whisper, come over here, instead. Come over here and get lost in the middle of the night for hours on end, chasing rabbits down imaginary rabbit holes in your mind, and achieve none of those responsible goals. Oh, and don't worry about everything else in your life — I've replaced it all with apathy. I've removed all passion from everything you used to adore, and focused myself right here, in this vortex of fate that you can't fight. Come over here, or get lost in depression.

If I could just remove the cage of "should" I'd shackled around my mind, maybe I wouldn't feel this guilt and anger and frustration wash over me like waves smashing against rocks.

I just wanted to feel like I was useful to the world. What did I have to do to feel useful to the world?

Just be, Wisdom whispered. Just be.

No, Wisdom! I want to know what I have to do. What do I have to do to finally feel like I matter? Like I'm valuable? Like I'm in my element? Like my life has a purpose? What do I have to do to finally feel proud of myself? To finally feel like I'm not an imposter? A loser? A failure?

Tell me what to do and I'll do it!

I was so sick of working hard and building a skill, then having my passion change form, constantly manifesting in different areas. Every time I applied myself diligently and began to feel successful with a project, my curiosity would pull me in a different direction. I felt like I was being dragged through a winding path, over rocks with jagged edges that left scars in my confidence and ripped at my self-worth.

But for what purpose? It didn't make any sense. I'd spent four years running around, observing things, trying things, learning things. What was the point of it all, anyway? What was the point? I couldn't see the bigger picture. My life was a mish-mash of random brushstrokes. It was chaos.

Nikki, my soul whispered. Stop lying to yourself. You've seen the future; you've felt the pull of destiny. You already know how this story ends. But you're feigning ignorance so you don't have to come to terms with your own power. You're not scared that you're wrong about this — you're scared that you're right. You're scared that you could strike one match and blow up the whole world. Yet know this: the privilege of a lifetime is to become Who You Really Are, and the most terrifying thing is to accept oneself completely.

But I couldn't hear the whisper of my soul over the frantic screams of my ego. I leaned back against the wall and began to cry. Alone, in the middle of the day, in my bedroom. I'd been crying a lot lately.

"What the fuck do you want from me?!" I yelled at my soul. The sobs were erupting from my mouth. I was a mess. "I don't understand what you want from me! I've followed you around the goddamn world, and here I am, miserable and alone on the floor of a Thai apartment."

I want to return you to yourself, my soul smiled. I want to-

"Where's all the success I was promised, huh? I followed you, and followed you, and followed you, and you promised me it would lead to something. I worked my butt off in pursuit of my dreams. You promised me my dreams would come true if I just had the courage to pursue them. I trusted you, and you lied. I've followed you for a decade, and all I have are some beautiful and bitter-sweet memories.

"I followed you with 99dresses, and that failed. I followed you with Jesse, and he left. I followed you with all the different skills I've learned and then lost interest in. I followed you with CodeMakers, and now I've suddenly fallen out of love with that business too and it's breaking my heart. It's too painful. I can't bear it."

That business has served its purpose in your life. It's time to let it go, and move to the next phase of your journ-

"-And now, to top it all off, I'm starting to question my entire choice of career. I don't even think I want to build these tech products anymore, and I've been doing this since I was a teen. Why do I feel a longing to write and teach and talk instead? Why do I feel a longing to just tell stories, and make people laugh, and make them cry, and help them see the world in a different way? Why? I'm not perfect. Look at me. I'm a fucking wreck right now. I oscillate between melancholy and euphoria. What can anyone learn from me?

"Fuck you, intuition. Fuck you, curiosity. Fuck you, passion. Fuck you, soul. I thought you were supposed to be looking out for me. Whatever happened to that, huh? Whatever happened to 'follow your heart, and everything will all work out?'"

Oh, I am looking out for you. Just let your ego throw this tantrum, and then we'll keep moving. Basecamp is just on the other side of this dark ravine-

"-I just don't get it. I don't get it. I'm done. I'm sick of this. Do you hear me, God? If you want someone to solve this fucking riddle, maybe you should pay them for it. Isn't that what academics are for? Don't they get paid for all this stuff I'm doing for free? I'm twenty-seven, and I'm getting older, and I have to think about my future. I can't keep going on like this — being a slave to your childish agenda. I can't keep treating the world like a wondrous playground. Can you please just stop this storm raging in my heart and let me be? My God, what is wrong with me!?"

In that moment, and many moments like it, I hated myself. I loathed who I was. Unsuccessful. Undisciplined. Fucked up. Failure. Loser. Idiot. Fraud. Imposter. Unlovable. Worthless. There were so many colorful labels that I placed upon my own forehead.

What value do I add to the world? I wondered. What is the point of it all? If I follow my soul, I end up here. If I don't follow my soul, I kill myself at twenty-seven, then spend the next seventy years waiting to die. What gives?

I needed some meaning in my life.

Very few of the value judgments you have incorporated into your truth are judgments you, yourself, have made based on your own experience. Yet experience is what you came here for — and out of your experience were you to create yourself. You have created yourself out of the experience of others.

If there were such a thing as sin, this would be it: to allow yourself to become what you are because of the experience of others. This is the “sin” you have committed. All of you. You do not await your own experience, you accept the experience of others as gospel (literally), and then, when you encounter the actual experience for the first time, you overlay what you think you already know onto the encounter.

If you did not do this, you might have a wholly different experience — one that might render your original teacher or source wrong. In most cases, you don’t want to make your parents, your schools, your religions, your traditions, your holy scriptures wrong — so you deny your own experience in favor of what you have been told to think.

Why don’t You fix the world, instead of allowing it to go to hell?

Why don’t you?

I don’t have the power.

Nonsense. You’ve the power and the ability right now to end world hunger this minute, to cure diseases this instant. What if I told you your own medical profession holds back cures, refuses to approve alternative medicines and procedures because they threaten the very structure of the “healing” profession? What if I told you that the governments of the world do not want to end world hunger? Would you believe me?

I’d have a hard time with that. I know that’s the populist view, but I can’t believe it’s actually true. No doctor wants to deny a cure. No countryman wants to see his people die.

No individual doctor, that’s true. No particular countryman, that’s right. But doctoring and politicking have become institutionalized, and it’s the institutions that fight these things, sometimes very subtly, sometimes even unwittingly, but inevitably… because to those institutions it’s a matter of survival.

This is not malevolent, yet it is insidious. The profession doesn’t do this because it is evil. It does it because it is scared.

All attack is a call for help.

"Time" is not a continuum. It is an element of relativity that exists vertically, not horizontally.

Don't think of it as a "left to right" thing - a so-called time line that runs from birth to death for each individual, and from some finite point to some finite point for the universe.

"Time" is an "up and down" thing! Think of it as a spindle, representing the Eternal Moment of Now.

[...] The person who has the “faith to move mountains,” and dies six weeks later, has moved mountains for six weeks. That may have been enough for him. He may have decided, on the last hour of the last day, “Okay, I’ve had enough. I’m ready to go on now to another adventure.” You may not have known of that decision, because he may not have told you. The truth is, he may have made that decision quite a bit earlier — days, weeks earlier — and not have told you; not have told anyone.

But there are many situations in which death is preferable to life — which I know you can imagine if you think about it for even a little bit. Yet, these truths don’t occur to you — they are not that self-evident — when you are looking in the face someone else who is choosing to die. And the dying person knows this. She can feel the level of acceptance in the room regarding her decision. [...]

All your life you think you are your body. Some of the time you think you are your mind. It is at the time of your death that you find out Who You Really Are.

Nothing is painful in and of itself. Pain is a result of wrong thought. It is an error in thinking.

A Master can disappear the most grievous pain. In this way, the Master heals.

Pain results from a judgment you have made about a thing. Remove the judgment and the pain disappears.

Are you saying that I shouldn’t feel bad about the starving children of Africa, the violence and injustice in America, the earthquake that kills hundreds in Brazil?

There are no “shoulds” or “shouldn’ts” in God’s world. Do what you want to do. Do what reflects you, what re-presents you as a grander version of your Self. If you want to feel bad, feel bad.

But judge not, and neither condemn, for you know not why a thing occurs, nor to what end.

Like Whitton, NDE researchers have also uncovered evidence that our lives are planned beforehand, at least to some extent, and we each play a role in the creation of this plan. This is apparent in several aspects of the experience. Frequently after arriving in the world of light, NDEers are told that "it is not their time yet." As Ring points out, this remark clearly implies the existence of some kind of "life plan.” It is also clear that NDEers play a role in the formulation of these destinies, for they are often given the choice whether to return or stay. There are even instances of NDEers being told that it is their time and still being allowed to return. Moody cites a case in which a man started to cry when he realized he was dead because he was afraid his wife wouldn't be able to raise their nephew without him. On hearing this the being told him that since he wasn't asking for himself he would be allowed to return. In another case a woman argued that she hadn't danced enough yet. Her remark caused the being of light to give a hearty laugh and she, too, was given permission to return to physical life.

That our future is at least partially sketched out is also evident in a phenomenon Ring calls the "personal flashforward." On occasion, during the vision of knowledge, NDEers are shown glimpses of their own future. In one particularly striking case a child NDEer was told various specifics about his future, including the fact that he would be married at age twenty-eight and would have two children. He was even shown his adult self and his future children sitting in a room of the house he would eventually be living in, and as he gazed at the room he noticed something very strange on the wall, something that his mind could not grasp. Decades later and after each of these predictions had come to pass, he found himself in the very scene he had witnessed as a child and realized that the strange object on the wall was a "forced-air heater," a kind of heater that had not yet been invented at the time of his NDE.

In another equally astonishing personal flashforward a female NDEer was shown a photograph of Moody, told his full name, and told that when the time was right she would tell him about her experience. The year was 1971 and Moody had not yet published Life after Life, so his name and picture meant nothing to the woman. However, the time became "right" four years later when Moody and his family unwittingly moved to the very street on which the woman lived. That Halloween Moody's son was out trick-or-treating and knocked on the woman's door. After hearing the boy's name, the woman told him to tell his father she had to talk to him, and when Moody obliged she related her remarkable story.

Some NDEs even support Loye's proposal that several holographic parallel universes, or time tracks, exist. On occasion NDEers are shown personal flashforwards and told that the future they have witnessed will come to pass only if they continue on their current path. In one unique instance an NDEer was shown a completely different history of the earth, a history that would have developed if "certain events" had not taken place around the time of the Greek philosopher and mathematician Pythagoras three thousand years ago. The vision revealed that if these events, the precise nature of which the woman does not disclose, had failed to take place, we would now be living in a world of peace and harmony marked "by the absence of religious wars and of a Christ figure.” Such experiences suggest that the laws of time and space operative in a holographic universe may be very strange indeed.

Even NDEers who do not experience direct evidence of the role they play in their own destiny often come back with a firm understanding of the holographic interconnectedness of all things. As a sixty-two-year-old businessman who had an NDE during a cardiac arrest puts it "One thing I learned was that we are all part of one big, living universe. If we think we can hurt another person or another living thing without hurting ourselves we are sadly mistaken. I look at a forest or a flower or a bird now, and say, 'That is me, part of me.' We are connected with all things and if we send love along those connections, then we are happy.”