Life Review — Love
"Yeah. I'll cover that in more detail later. Anyway, we went off on a tangent, so I want to return to the topic of NDEs. Can you summarize what we've already discovered about NDEs?"
"Yep," Zac said. "In our realm, we've forgotten Who We Are. That forgetfulness means we have little knowledge and live in fear. If we knew everything, we couldn't go on a journey of discovery and creation, because we would already know everything. Therefore, the journey to enlightenment is a journey of discovery as we create, and remember, Who We Really Are. The beings in the light realm have already done this, and their lack of fear gives them access to more knowledge, more intelligence, and a more beautiful and malleable reality."
"Great summary," I smiled. "This whole idea is also reinforced by the life review that happens after death. Here's God talking about it..."
The soul watches this whole drama play out, year after year, month after month, day after day, moment after moment, and always holds the Truth about you. It never forgets the blueprint; the original plan; the first idea; the creative thought. Its job is to remind you — that is, to literally re-mind you — so that you may remember once again Who You Are — and then choose Who You now Wish to Be.
In this way the cycle of creation and experience, imaging and fulfilling, knowing and growing into the unknown, continues, both now and even forever more.
Whew!
Yes, exactly. Oh, and there’s much more to explain. So much more. But never, ever in one book — nor probably even in one lifetime. Yet you have begun, and that is good. Just remember this. It is as your grand teacher William Shakespeare said: “There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
May I ask you some questions about this? Like, when you say the mind goes with me after death, does that mean my “personality” goes with me? Will I know in the afterlife who I was?
Yes… and who you have ever been. It will all be opened onto you — because then it will profit you to know. Now, in this moment, it will not.
And, with regard to this life, will there be an “accounting” — a review — a tally taking?
There is no judgment in what you call the afterlife. You will not even be allowed to judge yourself (for you would surely give yourself a low score, given how judgmental and unforgiving you are with yourself in this life).
No, there is no accounting, no one giving “thumbs-up” or “thumbs- down.” Only humans are judgmental, and because you are, you assume that I must be. Yet I am not — and that is a great truth you cannot accept.
Nonetheless, while there will be no judgment in the afterlife, there will be opportunity to look again at all you have thought, said, and done here, and to decide if that is what you would choose again, based on Who You say You Are, and Who You Want to Be.
There is an Eastern mystical teaching surrounding a doctrine called Kama Loca — according to this teaching, at the time of our death each person is given the opportunity to relive every thought ever entertained, every word ever spoken, every action ever taken, not from our standpoint, but from the standpoint of every other person affected. In other words, we’ve already experienced what we felt thinking, saying, and doing what we did — now we’re given the experience of feeling what the other person felt in each of these moments — and it is by this measure that we’ll decide whether we’ll think, say, or do those things again. Any comment?
What occurs in your life after this is far too extraordinary to describe here in terms you could comprehend — because the experience is other-dimensional and literally defies description using tools as severely limited as words. It is enough to say that you will have the opportunity to review again this, your present life, without pain or fear or judgment, for the purpose of deciding how you feel about your experience here, and where you want to go from there.
Many of you will decide to come back here; to return to this world of density and relativity for another chance to experience out the decisions and choices you make about your Self at this level.
Others of you — a select few — will return with a different mission. You will return to density and matter for the soul purpose of bringing others out of density and matter. Always there are on the Earth those among you who have made such a choice. You can tell them apart at once. Their work is finished. They have returned to Earth simply and merely to help others. This is their joy. This is their exaltation. They seek naught but to be of service.
You cannot miss these people. They are everywhere. There are more of them than you think. Chances are you know one, or know of one.
Neale Donald Walsch
"Now," I said, "cross-reference this idea of the 'life review' with the research done on NDEs. Again, this snippet is from The Holographic Universe."
Another part of the NDE that possesses many holographic features is the life review. Ring refers to it as “a holographic phenomenon par excellence.” Grof and Joan Halifax, a Harvard medical anthropologist and the coauthor (with Grof) of The Human Encounter with Death, have also commented on the life review’s holographic aspects. According to several NDE researchers, including Moody, even many NDEers themselves use the term “holographic” when describing the experience.
The reason for this characterization is obvious as soon as one begins to read accounts of the life review. Again and again NDEers use the same adjectives to describe it, 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.” “The whole thing was really odd. I was there; I was actually seeing these flashbacks; I was actually walking through them, and it was so fast. Yet, it was slow enough that I could take it all in,” says another.
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.”
As so, the life review is holographic not only in its three-dimensionality, but in the amazing capacity for information storage the process displays. It is also holographic in a third way. Like the kabbalistic “aleph,” a mythical point in space and time that contains all other points in space and time, it is a moment that contains all other moments. Even the ability to perceive the life review seems holographic in that it is a faculty capable of experiencing something that is paradoxically at once both incredibly rapid and yet slow enough to witness in detail. As an NDEer in 1821 put it, it is the ability to “simultaneously comprehend the whole and every part.”
In fact, the life review bears a marked resemblance to the afterlife judgement scenes described in the sacred texts of many of the world’s great religions, from the Egyptian to the Judeo-Christian, but with one crucial difference. 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.
This total lack of cosmic judgement and/or any divine system of punishment and reward has been and continues to be one of the most controversial aspects of the NDE among religious groups, but is one of the most oft reported features of the experience. What is the explanation? Moody believes it is as simple as it is polemic. We live in a universe that is much more benevolent than we realize.
This is not to say that anything goes during the life review. Like Whitton’s hypnotic subjects, after arriving in the realm of light NDEers appear to enter a state of heightened or metaconsciousness awareness and become lucidly honest in their self-reflections.
It also does not mean that the beings of light prescribe no values. In NDE after NDE they 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?
Michael Talbot
"That question reminds me of this quote from Conversations With God," I said. "Here…"
Yea, let all those who have ears to hear, listen. For I tell you this: at the critical juncture in all human relationships, there is only one question:
What would love do now?
No other question is relevant, no other question is meaningful, no other question has any importance to your soul.
Neale Donald Walsch