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."
My law is the law of cause and effect, not the law of We’ll See. There is nothing you can’t have if you choose it. Even before you ask, I will have given it to you. [...]
The process of prayer becomes much easier when, rather than having to believe that God will always say “yes” to every request, one understands intuitively, that the request itself is not necessary. Then the prayer is a prayer of thanksgiving. It is not a request at all but a statement of gratitude for what is so.
You cannot not follow the [Natural] Law, for these are the ways things work. You cannot step aside from this; you cannot operate outside of it.
Every minute of your life you have been operating inside of it — and everything you have ever experienced you have thusly created. You are in a partnership with God. We share an eternal covenant. My promise to you is to always give you what you ask. Your promise is to ask; to understand the process of the asking and the answering.
“Great!” Richard replied. “My assistant will sort out the details.”
Richard was the founder & CEO of a multi-billion-dollar software company in Australia. The year was 2016. I was 24 years old and just starting my new business, CodeMakers.
I'd actually met Richard back in my university days when I was a starry-eyed 19-year-old with my fledgling tech startup, 99dresses. As a scholarship recipient, I was invited to one of the university's fancy award dinners along with their prominent alumni and supporters. Richard and I had been seated next to each other at a table with several other guests. He was around my dad's age. I had no idea who he was or what he did, but he seemed quite smart and lovely. We talked about various things together, then went our separate ways at the end of the night.
Five years later, I received an email from him. The message was attached to a media article about CodeMakers.
Nikki,
I hope this email address on LinkedIn still finds you.
I don't know if you remember me. I probably did not leave that much of an impression, but I did meet you some years ago at one award bake off or another, and was impressed with your entrepreneurship and flair. Your intellect shines through, your presence is powerful, and you have that icon air about you.
I am sorry to read about 99dresses. I thought it was a great idea. Regardless, I'm impressed by the way you talk about failure. I have, deep in my distant past, several non-fatal business failures that have informed my current (apparent) success.
I am very interested in engaging our next generation of software entrepreneurs and found your comments both important and a point of alignment. Personally, and through [my company], we are sponsoring a number of activities. [...] I/we want to do more...
Females, in particular, are excluded (or select themselves out) mainly by social factors from an early age. These pre-set social biases are very hard to defeat, as they are all but invisible. We all need to work hard, probably from early primary school, to offset such biases. We certainly need people like you to lead. I can't really provide the right setting for this myself, but I/we can provide resources, impetus and connections.
If there is any interest, I and [my company] would love to work with you, include you, sponsor relevant activities, or do anything to assist. Let me know if this is interesting.
I am sure you have many offers of mentorship, and I don't want to overreach, but if you ever want a sounding board (time permitting, I imagine for both of us), I am happy to provide one.
In case this is all too much or not of interest, I completely understand. I am still proud to have you as an Australian entrepreneur — I hope to see you learn, grow and excel now and in the future.
Regards,
Richard
I replied, of course. It was lovely to hear from him after so many years.
And that's how I found myself in his office in 2016. We talked for a while, then he gestured me over to his desk.
“You know, I wasn't always like this. I used to be a musician, back in the day.” He showed me a picture of a younger Richard. After taking it in, I glanced out the office window to the vast open-plan area of desks with people busily collaborating with each other and working together on his vision.
Richard directed my attention back to a graph on his desk. He traced his finger across many years of slow and steady growth. Then he tapped it at a steep inflection point — the moment everything changed and his company began making quantum leaps. It was an incline so steep that venture capitalists would've scrambled to get a seat on board that rocket ship.
With his finger still tapping on the inflection point, he looked me in the eyes and said, “This point right here represents the moment I learned how to think. I mean, really think.”
He told me about a course he did in New Zealand called A Black Belt In Thinking. He told me it changed everything for him. It changed the way his mind worked. It changed the way he approached problems. He could map complex systems using binary logic gates, identifying points of failure with incredible clarity. He could write clean epistemic code, using logic to identify small fixes that had huge flow-on effects. He could see problems as symptoms and trace them all the way back to their root cause.
It changed his company and it changed his life. It changed mine, too.
“Nikki,” he said, “I'm sending some members of my team to this ten-day bootcamp in New Zealand so they can learn the same thinking processes that I did. It's going to be intense — wake up at 6 a.m., go to bed at midnight, and train your mind in between. The bootcamp is in two weeks. I'd like to send you, too. I'll pay for the whole thing, of course. Flights, accommodation, food — all taken care of. Do you want to go?”
I was a bit surprised. That wasn't what I was expecting, but of course I said yes. When a smart, forward-thinking billionaire offers to send you on a $12,000 learning adventure, you'd be silly to refuse.
“Can I ask why?” I said after I'd accepted his offer. “Why me?”
“Because I have a feeling you're going to change things. I see something in you. You're going to make an impact.”
It was fascinating how his mind worked. He just saw things with such eerie clarity. I sometimes wished I had that foresight when I looked into a mirror and saw a lost 24-year-old staring back at me.