New Coordinates

Recently I got a new cell phone subscription. It came with a whole new cell phone as well – “for free,” as the slick offer put it, although my monthly subscription payments eventually cover more than well for its cost.

Anyway, it’s quite a piece of technology, and I’ve been spending lots of time figuring out just a fraction of the stuff I can do with it. It’s obvious that I won’t even use most of it. But it does have this GPS functionality that I do like.

Just in case you don’t know what GPS is, it stands for ‘Global Positioning System.’ It’s basically a satellite system that allows the GPS receiver installed on my phone to calculate my exact position on the globe.

When I give in coordinates or address info for another position that I want to go to, an app on my device can then calculate the shortest or fastest way to get there.

Pretty neat, right? With a gadget like this, you can’t really get lost anymore. That is, if the device is first able to locate my current position. After all:

We only get lost because we don’t know where we are. Without that basic information, we can’t find the way home. The app will never be able to figure out how to get to where we want to be if it doesn’t know where we are to start with.

Now it’s worth realizing it’s pretty much the same thing in life… kind of like John Lennon used to sing:

And in order to be able to plot a reasonable course for ourselves in life, one of the most essential starting coordinates is our concept of “who we are.”

Because without having a more-or-less accurate view of it, we can hardly make true sense of our experience in life, let alone grasp the enormous power we possess to take control of our experience and change it into one that actually makes us feel happy and fulfilled.

In that context, the sad thing is that most people don’t have the slightest notion of who they really are.

That’s why this article intends to provide some (empowering) perspective.

So let’s dig in…

So Who Are You?

Most people identify themselves with the role(s) they play in their lives, such as their job, income, upbringing, likes and dislikes, family and acquaintances, etc.

Watch an average game show on TV and you’ll see people tell ‘all about themselves:’

“Hi, my name is Bob Bloggs, I’m a banker and make loans and deposits and stuff, I’m married with three children, I like football and also like to have a good laugh and party.”

This is one perspective on the question of “who am I,” which pertains to our ordinary, day-to-day experience, and one that most people are inclined to limit themselves to. And indeed:

When we think about ourselves we typically see the various roles and identities we manifest. In Carl Jung’s psychological terms, these are called ‘personas.’ And of course, our personas have plenty of reality:

• Any one persona can take center stage in our consciousness and totally control who we ‘are,’ ranging from a few moments to an entire lifetime.
• And most of the time we don’t deliberately use them… It’s rather the other way around: our personas use us, as they pop up pretty much automatically and involuntarily, and without any conscious control on our part.

So we must not underestimate their power.

But that doesn’t mean they’re who we really are…

Beyond The Roles We Play

The roles and personas mentioned above are pretty much entirely associated with our body.

But then consider this:

Experienced meditators and those who got skilled at the ‘participant-observer’-method (described in this article) have developed the ability to basically ‘get behind’ their ordinary identities and roles, through a simple act of mentally disidentifying from the immediate experience by ‘stepping back into observer mode’…

In other words:

They have essentially experienced that they don’t have to be frozen into any one, concretized pattern, but that there’s fluidity underneath all these patterns. And once we actually experience this, we immediately feel a sense of control and deliberate choice:

• Suddenly we’re no longer at the mercy of emotional whims and negative thoughts…
• We now even gain the ability to make a conscious choice about which persona to ‘put on’ when, thus using them to a certain end by leveraging their strengths, and then setting them aside when appropriate…
• And rather than identifying our whole self-concept with them, it also allows us to say: “I have a certain set of beliefs, and I don’t know if they’re really true, but I act on them sometimes.”
  In fact, we can even distance ourselves from them even more by asking: “Do I want to believe that is who I am?”

Basically, we see that we no longer have to confuse the theories we have about ourselves with who we really are (even though they may have effectively run our lives until now). Put differently:

We’ve gained a new level of awareness that’s less dependent on the body, and in fact gives us a first hint that we’re more than just our bodies and brains.

Albert Einstein put it as follows:

So if we’re not solely equivalent to our brains, bodies, beliefs, roles and identities, then who are we?

For that, we have to dig in deeper…

How To Dig In Deeper

Asking the right questions allows us to dig in deeper. And indeed: every now and then people send in questions in response to a newsletter or a survey, or to simply bring up a topic they want me to address.

Now in the context of this article’s subject matter, a while back there were actually a few folks who asked an interesting one that’s relevant to our exploration here. The question was:

Now there’s one that’s not easily answered! (At least not empirically…) And what’s more:

• It’s one that’s often accompanied by more than a little emotional charge and zealous reactions, because of the many fear-laden images that are associated with it and all the various religious connotations that often surround it.
• Besides, you may not even care… Because at first glance, the question may not seem so relevant to our current experience. After all, if we’re seeking to improve our existence right now, then what the hell does it matter what happens when it’s all over?

However, the truth is that the question can be highly relevant even to our current experience. To get a feeling for why, consider these words by the influential Chinese philosopher Zhuang Zhou (also known as Zhuangzi, Chuang Tzu and Chuang Tse) in this context:

In other words:

• Our whole perspective of ‘death,’ along with any kind of preconceived notions we have about the afterlife (or lack thereof) has the potential to influence our whole motivation for existence, and thus the overall atmosphere of our life experience and the nature of the roles we manifest in life.
• And as such, our own metaphysics informs our understanding of who we are and what we’re capable of becoming, along with how we decide to go through life.

So it can serve us well to explore this topic. Because in our investigations of who or what might survive death, we’re simultaneously investigating who we really are.

So let’s dig in deeper…

What ‘Death’ Tells Us About Who We Are

Obviously, empirical study in the context of death remains difficult for the contemporary scientific method, which typically requires some form of (double-blind) experimentation. And let’s face it: it can be a bit of a challenge to experiment with death.

Besides, as the dominant stance in the mainstream scientific community is that consciousness is solely produced by the brain, relevant research that actually is performed in the area of death is often received with lots of skepticism, preconceived notions and disbelief by the establishment.

Nevertheless, today even mainstream science is beginning to take cognizance of the ever growing body of experiences that suggest the reality of consciousness living beyond the body and brain.

From a scientific point of view, at the time of writing this article it’s particularly the recent work of Penny Sartori [1] and Pim van Lommel [2] that appear to suggest how conscious experience outside the body can take place during a period of clinical death when the brain is flatlined.

To provide some illustration:

Van Lommel is a Dutch cardiologist who produced a massive exploration of near-death experiences, and his findings even got published in the reputable British medical journal The Lancet [3].

He got interested in the whole phenomenon about 40 years ago when a patient told him about her near-death experience. But it was only after reading a book called Return From Tomorrow [4], in which an American doctor called George Ritchie detailed his own near-death experience, that Van Lommel started to study the phenomenon seriously.

He began to ask all his patients if they remembered anything from the period of time during which their hearts had stopped beating. Here’s a quick selection of some of the accounts he recorded:

What’s interesting to note about all this is the fact that these people were able to ‘perceive’ in a state of detachment from their bodies. They were separated from their bodies, but they were still ‘there,’ and they didn’t need their eyes or any other part of their bodies to ‘perceive.’

Another striking notion is the consistency between all the different near-death experiences. The bliss, the tunnel, being met by long-passed loved ones, and the disappointment of having to come back are all recurring themes.

Near-death experience isn’t limited to people with specific demographic characteristics either: there’s no clear relationship between their occurrence and a person’s age, sex, marital status, race, religion and/or spiritual beliefs, social class, educational level, income, frequency of church attendance, size of home community, or area of residence.

It’s not even a phenomenon of this day and age alone. Out-of-body and near-death experiences appear to have been occurring universally throughout the ages. For example:

• They’re described at length in both the eighth-century Tibetan Book of the Dead and the 2,500-year-old Egyptian Book of the Dead.
• Also, in Book X of The Republic, the ancient Greek philosopher Plato gives a detailed account of a Greek soldier named Er, who came alive just seconds before his funeral pyre was to be lit and said that he had left his body and went through a ‘passage way’ to the land of the dead.
• Furthermore, the Venerable Bede gives a similar account in his eighth-century work A History of the English Church and People.
• Carol Zaleski, Harvard professor of world religions, says that medieval literature is filled with accounts of near-death experiences [5].
• British theologian Paul Badham concludes that the near-death experience “shares many of the characteristics of the deepest religious experiences know to humanity” [6].
• And it has been argued that near-death experiences provide striking parallels to the teachings of the Hindu Upanishads and to early Babylonian, Egyptian and Zoroastrian texts, as well as to shamanism, Taoism, Tibetan Buddhism, Gnostic Christianity, Mormonism, and other faiths [7].

Here’s a summary of a typical near-death experience [8]:

Of course, there are other characteristics too, and not all near-death experiences involve all the above elements. But this description seems to capture the overall gist.

Van Lommel and Sartori have not been the only ones studying this phenomenon seriously. A plethora of similar cases is recounted by other authors and researchers as well, including ones where the ‘dying’ person was able to report things they really couldn’t know from a rational point of view.

For example:

According to Van Lommel, when some people ‘return to their body,’ they often have a sense of being imprisoned compared to the freedom they had experienced briefly. Others say it transformed their lives, and they all lose their fear of death. As Van Lommel says:

This suggests that what passes through that ‘tunnel’ is a level of our consciousness that’s independent of the brain and body, perhaps the self-aware essence that we really are and that’s making a transition from one level of ‘reality’ to another.

Here’s what Van Lommel says of ‘death:’

Van Lommel goes on to explain how his work led him to understanding that the brain does not produce consciousness. According to him, the body and brain are a receiver/transmitter of information like a computer or television:

In addition, there’s other (not-so-conventional) science that appears to support the idea of consciousness that lives on after physical death. For example, scientists at the University of Virginia have been studying apparent cases of reincarnation for over 45 years.

As part of this, they studied spontaneous statements made by young children about a previous life that proved to be surprisingly accurate upon further investigation. Others appear to show birthmarks or birth defects that appear to match wounds suffered by previous personalities [12-18].

Of course, this doesn’t mean that this is the exact way it always goes, but it does provide additional illustration to the possibility that consciousness survives death of the body and brain.

So to summarize:

Who we are, whether we choose to call that our ‘soul,’ ‘essence’ or ‘consciousness,’ is not totally equivalent to the brain or the body. Even when the body dies eventually, our consciousness appears to live on.

That said, let’s conclude with more clarity about who we really are, and what that means in regards to plotting our course in life…

CONCLUSION: A New Starting Coordinate

I remember a couple of years ago when my grandmother died… At the funeral my mother and her sisters decided to keep the coffin closed, because they wanted everyone to remember her like she was: a vibrant, sparkling woman.

Her body had deteriorated significantly due to all kinds of cancer. It was lying there in the coffin as lifeless as a switched-off and heavily corroded computer.

However, they had put a picture of my grandmother on the coffin from when she was still with us. Her body may have been dead, but I can tell you one thing:

That picture was alive!

It had captured her smile, the sparkle in her eyes, the ‘life energy’ that was the real ‘her.’

The essence of who we really are can’t get much clearer than that. ‘Living’ people have a sparkle in their eyes that conveys one of the clearest signs of ‘living consciousness’ we can find. It’s expressed most clearly when people are happy and laugh. They just radiate life.

So that body in the coffin was not my grandmother; it was but a switched-off machine. The real ‘her’, i.e. her awareness, simply can’t cease to exist, and the material explored in this article appears to support that notion.

But back to our basic coordinate: who are we really? Well:

“Who we really are” seems to be a unique vantage point within infinite awareness. And ‘life’ (as we know it on this plane of existence) and ‘death’ are merely different states of an infinite consciousness that’s essentially located everywhere.

Van Lommel concludes his study as follows:

Now let that be the new basic coordinate from where to plot our new course in life!

Here’s how we can…

NEXT STEPS: Plotting A New Course

Near-death experiences and similar mystical experiences may point the way toward unlocking humankind’s dormant spiritual potential.

The cumulative effect of the uplifting accounts of the ever-increasing number of experiencers may foster the spiritual evolution of both the individual and the collective consciousness of humanity, if we open ourselves up to their message [20].

In that regard, here are some practical takeaways to implement in our own lives:

(1) Realize that the real power of ‘manifestation’ fully resides in your consciousness and your ability to steer it:

You really do have far-reaching powers to create the kind of happiness, fulfillment, and success you seek. But it’s worth realizing that that power is not in your mind, nor in any particular technique!

The mind is merely a tool that can be applied in the process of steering your consciousness, and certain techniques can serve as stepping stones and training instruments towards internalizing that ability (<– without making ourselves dependent on them).

(The Crack Your Egg Program and other articles and e-books on this website help you do so.)

Then, from there…:

(2) Step BEYOND Your Apparent Roles & Beliefs:

Our new basic coordinate of who we really are clearly shows that we’re not frozen or stuck in any one, concretized pattern, role or identity. With our new understanding of who we really are, the question really is this:

Now that you’ve read this article and you look in the mirror, who do you choose to see and be?

• Do you choose to see your job, like the garbage man, a stock broker, a doctor, a ‘lead integration optimization orchestrator,’ or whatever you do for a ‘living?’
• Do you choose to see a ‘friend of,’ ‘husband/wife of,’ or ‘son/daughter of’ someone (apparently) (un)important?
• Do you choose to see a poor, hard-working slave with little perspective of anything other than making ends meet in our modern-day jungle?
• Do you choose to see some powerless pipsqueak who’s been made to believe they’re at the mercy of vaguely-defined ‘greater powers,’ and/or designated by ‘the universe’ as a martyr or a victim of life?
• Do you choose to see the arbitrary result of a long chain of random accidents that’s arbitrarily being shuffled from cradle to grave and completely ceases to exists afterwards?
• Or do you choose to see a unique representation of infinite consciousness with the inherent freedom and power to create your own reality, and begin to act accordingly?

The choice is yours, and it will determine the entire motivation for your existence, the atmosphere of your experience, your implicit intent, and your ability to leverage the creative power you really harness deep inside. (So choose wisely!)

And if you notice that a particular role, emotion or inhibiting belief begins to get the best of you, so to dominate your consciousness and put you in a state that’s no longer constructive to what you seek to accomplish, use this technique to gain back control.

And finally, from there:

(3) Don’t hold back and begin to make a life NOW!

It’s not all just about ‘making a living’… It’s also about ‘making a life,’ and the latter doesn’t exclude the former. Never forget:

You harness a staggering (perhaps dormant) power to really make something out of your life (<– which is explained in detail in the Crack Your Egg Program)… So why not turn it into a thing of beauty, happiness and fulfillment?

After all, to quote Lewis Carroll:

Take it from the many near-death experiencers that got to see themselves as integral parts of a benevolent and purposeful universe, and experienced an increased appreciation for life, a heightened sense of purpose and decreases in their fear of death and competitiveness.

As a practical starting point to this end, ask yourself:

• “What I you really want to do with my life?” And/or:
• “What do I really want to bring to this world, and/or create?”

Then begin by taking the first step today (no matter how small)… or take a next step if you were already on a path that you still stand behind. Either way, whatever it is:

• Don’t take some half-baked approach to just “try…”
• Instead: do it with full engagement and (renewed) inspiration!

Just go for it with all your heart. Don’t hold back. Feel the experience. And enjoy the ride.

Because as the content of this article illustrated, consider the words of the late comedian Bill Hicks as an appropriate conclusion to this article:

So what’s your choice?

P.S. Feel free to post a comment below to share your thoughts.

References

[1] Sartori, P. (2014), The Wisdom of Near Death Experiences: How Understanding NDEs Can Help Us to Live More Fully, Watkins Publishing Limited, Oxford, United Kingdom;

[2] Lommel, P. van (2011), Consciousness Beyond Life: The Science of the Near-Death Experience, HarperOne, New York, NY;

[3] Lommel, P. van, R. Van Wees, V. Meyers, and I. Elfferich (2001), “Near-Death Experience In Survivors of Cardiac Arrest: A Prospective Study in the Netherlands,” The Lancet 358 (9298), pp. 2039-2045;

[4] Ritchie, G.G. and E. Sherril (2007), Return From Tomorrow, Chosen Books, Grand Rapids, MI;

[5] Zaleski, C. (1987), Otherworld Journeys: Accounts of Near-Death Experience in Medieval and Modern Times, Oxford University Press, New York, NY;

[6] Badham, P. (1997), “Religious and Near-Death Experience in Relation to Belief in a Future Life,” Second Series Occasional Paper 13, Oxford: Religious Experience Research Center, p. 5;

[7] Greyson, B. (2006), “Near-Death Experience and Spirituality,” Zygon 41 (2), pp. 393-414;

[8] Talbot, M. (1991), The Holographic Universe, HarperCollins Publishers Inc., New York, NY, p. 240;

[9] Raymond Moody, Life After Life: The Investigation of a Phenomenon – Survival of Bodily Death, Harper Collins, San Francisco, CA;

[10] Moody, R. and P. Perry (2005), The Light Beyond, Rider, London, United Kingdom;

[11] Alexander, E. (2012), Proof of Heaven, Piatkus, London, UK;

[12] Keil, H.H.J. and J.B. Tucker (2000), “An Unusual Birthmark Case Thought to Be Linked to A Person Who Had Previously Died,” Psychological Reports 87 (3f), pp. 1067-1074;

[13] Stevenson, I. (2000), Children Who Remember Previous Lives: A Question of Reincarnation, Revised Edition, McFarland & Company Inc. Publishers, Jefferson, NC;

[14] Keil, H.J.J. and J.B. Tucker (2005), “Children Who Claim to Remember Previous Lives: Cases with Written Records Made before the Previous Personality Was Identified,” Journal of Scientific Exploration 19(1), pp. 91-101;

[15] Pasricha, S.K., Keil, J., Tucker, J.B. and I. Stevenson (2005), “Some Bodily Malformations Attributed to Previous Lives,” Journal of Scientific Exploration 19 (3), pp. 359-383;

[16] Tucker, J.B. (2005), Life Before Life: A Scientic Investigation of Children’s Memories of Previous Lives, St. Martin’s Press, New York, NY;

[17] Tucker, J.B. (2008), “Children’s Reports of Past-Life Memories: A Review,” EXPLORE: The Journal of Science and Healing 4(4), pp. 244-248;

[18] Tucker, J.B. (2013), Return to Life: Extraordinary Cases of Children Who Remember Past Lives, St. Martin’s Press, New York, NY;

[19] Wilber, K.E. (1998), The Marriage of Sense and Soul: Integrating Science and Religion, Random House, New York, NY;

[20] Fontana, D. (2004), “Survival Research: Opposition and Future Developments,” Journal of the Society for Psychical Research 68 (4), pp. 193-209.