Awakening from the Near Life Experience
November 18, 2018
One of the realizations that came to me in the immediate wake of my NDE was the awareness that most of my life and the lives of everyone I was in contact with ought to rather have been called “near life experiences.” The state of suffering can really be boiled down to a collection of tensions, that effectively bind us to an extremely limited experience of life, like wearing size 2 shoes with size 10 feet. We end up missing out on almost all the real living that we could experience, clutching with all of our strength on a rusty dime with a forgotten fortune in our back pocket. I had no idea how much fear and tension I had, even as a 13 year old, until it suddenly "fell off" during the car accident which took my mother's life and dunked me into a powerful state of Samadhi. It was such a dramatic sense of weightlessness, that I was slightly shocked I had been so blind to all of the unnecessary tensions I had foisted upon myself. Truly, we all do the best we can to make do until we come to something better.
Thus, a major facet of the path to awakening is the progressive dissolution of those binding structures of tension. This doesn’t have to be a particularly painful or difficult process. It also doesn’t have to be time consuming. Whenever we dive down into the field of Pure Consciousness, the structures of limitation are weakened. Even one little taste of being deeply in the zone can dramatically change the trajectory of a life. If we make that dive frequently, the pace of returning to our natural state of expansive wholeness is quickened. While those habits of thought and bundles of emotional trauma may have taken decades (or lifetimes!) to form, it need not take a long time for them to be healed. It is deeply natural and pleasurable for our whole organism to move in the direction of Silence and relaxation. With each trip to the depths, a certain momentum builds, creating a habit of moving toward Stillness, undermining the old habits of limitation, and curtailing the development of new painful grooves.
Many traditions have painted the unconscious as a frequently frightening place, an ocean patrolled by a watchful and hungry Leviathon. From the perspective of the limited identity (that is the main jailer of the supposedly frightening contents) this is totally understandable. Thankfully, we are not a tiny wave on the surface of the ocean, we are the whole of it. As we practice meditation, this notion becomes more and more a fully grokked (a wonderful word coined by Heinlein, communicating a kind of instant total understanding) experience. Perhaps the deepest area of constriction is the Shadow (using Jung’s conception) itself, that repository of all that was deemed unworthy or otherwise unfit for conscious feeling or display. The denizens of the Shadow are like so many fractured parts of our Self, waiting to be again acknowledged and embraced. Repression is an immense and ongoing drain of our vital energies. As the light of inner consciousness becomes brighter the walls of the shadow fall, the vital energies spent on inner imprisonment are restored, the exiled aspects of the psyche are returned to the whole, new-old talents and abilities very often emerge, and a flowering of renewed creativity blooms in the fertilized field of Life. And, thankfully, a near death experience is not required to wake up out of the near life experience :) If it somehow strikes your heart, in the space of a few hours over a few days, I teach courses in the very same effortless meditation techniques that brought me into a state of Living, and continue to bring immense transformation in their wake.
