Portable Shrines

Extra Dimensional

““I felt like he was a father, a god, a brother, a friend, a teacher and most of all, an extremely superior entity that had total care for me, but seemed very strict with me at the same time, as if I was a child that he just caught running away with a cookie jar (that’s just a metaphor)………………………………………I must say again that “he” radiated superiority, but not a conceited or greedy superiority, not a better than you attitude, and not a proud superiority. It was like the kind of mature superiority you would notice in the most intelligent and wise person, but multiply that times like a billion, and that was the one standing before me. He was also so strong, emanating so much brilliance, that it was like he was omniscient, incredibly good, incredibly wise, and amazingly wonderful.”

The above quote is in reference to a fairly typical near death spirit guide encounter; in this case involving a 17 year old accidentally OD’ing on pills to escape an increasingly bleak medical crisis. I ended last month’s installment with the proclamation that: “the stupidity and spiritual ignorance of mankind, especially as we enter a new age of information, certainly seems conspiratorial.” And the attitude of irrational cynicism that we, as a culture, have taken in regards to the Near Death Experience is a prime example of what I was hinting at. For some reason, the likelihood of anyone learning anything about Near Death Experiences in say, school, church, or anywhere in the scope of the popular media outside of say, specialty shows on the Discovery Channel is fairly slim. Even in all the specialty shows that I’ve seen, the counter opinion of scientific materialism is almost always presented as the final and defining word on the subject. As a result, I can’t count the number of conversations I’ve had with people that seem to have never heard of NDE’s as they’re often referred, or more accurately have maybe heard about them in passing but were convinced, like most are in westernized culture, that they’re not a relevant thing to be thinking about.

Let’s contemplate this brilliance for a minute. When people get extremely close to dying, even to the point of being legally brain dead for extended periods of time, they come back with incredibly similar stories of spiritually transcending the physical realm. They enter a dark tunnel and are drawn toward a brilliant light composed of pure other worldly love and compassion. They’re reunited with dead relatives and in my personal favorite scenario, experience a profound life review telepathically. Also, a lot of times there are reports of floating around the hospital or elsewhere in close proximity to their surroundings, and accurately witnessing things that they couldn’t have possibly by conventional means. These experiences typically, although not always, have a profound and often overwhelmingly positive effect on the psyche of the divine contactee.

And yet, for some odd reason, this isn’t often seen as relevant evidence to the idea that life extends into an unlimited multiverse of pure consciousness after death. So let’s for once be critical of the insane skepticism that most of us apply to the millions and millions of people who have reported similar encounters on the verge of death throughout history. That never happened to me, so therefore it isn’t real. Yeah, that about sums up our attitude. In fact, the primary argument you get from the cult of scientific atheism/materialism is that: you know, there’s a chance that when you actually die, this entire cosmological expanse that you encounter just fades to black nothingness (and in mentioning black nothingness I just mentioned something, which is in fact a problem)

So now let’s review the mountains of evidence that consciousness doesn’t extend into eternity upon physical death. Oh wait, there isn’t any really. The “evidence” as posed by this dominant and in my mind fairly extremist mode of thought is that we don’t typically see or otherwise perceive souls leaving their bodies, so therefore it isn’t happening. But that’s not intriguing evidence per se. In fact, with new insights into things like quantum physics and astronomy, science has been increasingly telling us that we perceive only a very small slice of reality to put it optimistically. My personal favorite in this family of concepts is the fairly well respected theories of dark matter and dark energy in astronomy, which posit that over 95% of the universe is imperceptible to humanity.

Surely, even the most hardened of those weaned suckling at the blackened teat of supposedly “rational” materialism would have to concede that it’s at least a 50/50 probability that the Near Death Experience is a realistic reflection of what happens to us when we die and furthermore, that consciousness extending beyond death is actually quite likely. But it always seems to be framed like it’s 90/10 or at best 80/20 the other way. New cosmological models that incorporate infinite and expanding spiritual dimensions aren’t exactly gaining a lot of ground in scientific circles, or religious ones for that matter. Instead, the need for million dollar houses and the furthering of an expansionary agenda that benefits only the select few persists.

As Christmas approaches let’s take a quick second to contemplate how the winter solstice celebration ritual has been slowly warped into an orgy of hyper consumerism and gluttony rather than spiritual introspection. Instead of buying more synthetic frippery or in my case, downing beer after beer to deal with the constant uninspired dialogue that always goes hand in hand with endless obligatory Holliday festivities; let’s at least try to take some time out to reflect on the true nature of own ponderous existences. In my mind, the single most fascinating aspect of the near death experience is the commonly reported telepathic life review and its striking similarities to some of Christ’s core teachings.

Everybody’s familiar with the biblical golden rule of “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” and other popular Christian proverbs of compassion such as turning the other cheek and while life review NDE’s vary extensively, the theme that life is a lesson in how your actions effect others and an exercise in lessening the negative impact of those actions is fairly consistent. In one commonly reported scenario, the contactee relives the effects of their exploits from the perspectives of those whom they’ve impacted most profoundly in a negative or positive context. In reading some of these accounts, it’s easy to speculate that this consistently reported psychic situation served as the genesis for the information that our sacred holy books are still trying to communicate to us today. And yet, we don’t seem to listen, and this is one instance where I would like to boldly point out that whether or not these experiences are “real” or not is entirely irrelevant. If people truly believed in and behaved as if this is exactly what they might encounter on the other side, the world would be a better place. Turn the other cheek, because ultimately, you might as well be hitting yourself.

Whereas I’ve been lucky enough in my life as to have never been left teetering on the brink of death, I have spent a considerable amount of time developing the ability to astral project, or to have what many refer to as out of body experiences. I did this at the age of 20 or so at the prompting of my mom, who was years earlier profoundly spiritually inspired by her (you guessed it) near death experience. I was of course looking for answers to my paradigm shattering encounters with psychedelic drugs. I went about taking a trip down this particular rabbit hole by meditating while listening to a series of tapes from The Monroe Institute laden with what they refer to as hemi-sync technology. This helped me achieve what many refer to as the sleep paralysis state, which is as far as I can tell, a convenient gateway to another realm.

The most compelling aspect of this esoteric undertaking of mine is that I’ve never been actually able to attain true astral travel in the same manner that many describe it (floating above your body and what not). In fact, I’ve gotten the distinct impression that I’m tethered strongly and intentionally to my physical body for reasons unknown. I could only speculate that this is for my own protection, but much like more traditional astral travelers, what I eventually found was that the same spirit teachers that most seek out for guidance would come to me as I began to spontaneously enter the necessary head space in my sleep. I would rank these cosmic mind melding dream transformation encounters right up there with the most powerful and profound of my life.

During one visitation 5 or so years back, I went through something similar to the life review that NDE reporters often relate, although I will admit that it did lack the same kind of emotional resonance often associated with NDE life reviews. I found myself disembodied and staring at what I can only describe as a fifth dimensional model of consequence. There was a being educating me as to how my actions had effected those around me and illuminating some of the adverse effects I’ve had or will have (hard to tell) on other’s behavior. I can’t stress enough that this was framed in terms that were often very indirect and surprising. Like, say you have a drunken conversation with one of your friends at a bar, and because of this conversation, your friend then misinterprets what you had to say and does something incredibly stupid. It was showing me the wider arching causality of my behavior in a visually immersive story board.

Anyway, as previously mentioned it kept pointing out the rather extensive negative wave of plotlines that had originated from my behavior and I got the distinct feeling that a negative interpretation to my art or writing was equally significant to this model as my directly physical actions. After enduring this for quite a while, I got a tad pissed at my heavenly advisor and said something to the effect of: “Why the hell are you showing me this, what the fuck was the point if I was responsible for all this misery?” to which it promptly responded (and at this point I got the impression there was more than one being present) to not get them wrong, this was just a lesson and I had done way more right than wrong in the world by a long shot. With that revelation, a second mass of positive and iridescently glowing storylines emerged which dwarfed the reddish hued expanse of negativity.

Shortly after that I found myself awake in bed and still kind of drunk with my mind thoroughly blown yet again. You’d think this is the kind of thing you’d get used to, but it’s always more than a bit dumbfounding to those immersed in our society………. always. So basically, what I’m trying to tell you is that I’m pretty sure with a little bit of effort, you could probably digest a bit of transcendent, ontology shattering wisdom over the Hollidays if you were so inclined. In doing so, you might learn valuable lessons about not only the future of our spiritual development as a species but insights as to its origins as well. If that goal is a bit far out of your sights, then at least take some time to read up on near death experiences. Contemplate the future of our species in an age where junk scientific atheism has lead us deep into the throes of a spiritual dark ages, all the while at least entertaining the possibility that we know quite a bit more than we think we do about the true nature death.