Dying To Be Me Read online

  Similarly, when we know that we are love, we don’t need to work at being loving toward others. Instead, we just have to be true to ourselves, and we become instruments of loving energy, which touches everyone we come into contact with.

  Being love also means being aware of the importance of nurturing my own soul, taking care of my own needs, and not putting myself last all the time. This allows me to be true to myself at all times and to treat myself with total respect and kindness. It also lets me view what may be interpreted as imperfections and mistakes with no judgment, seeing only opportunities to experience and to learn with unconditional love.

  PEOPLE ASK ME WHETHER THERE’S SUCH A THING as too much self-love. Where’s the line, they ask, where it starts to become selfish or egotistical? To me, there’s no such possibility. There is no line. Selfishness comes from lack of self-love. Our planet is suffering from this, as we humans are, along with too much insecurity, judgment, and conditioning. In order to truly care for someone unconditionally, I have to feel that way toward myself. I can’t give away what I don’t have. To say that I hold another in higher regard than myself isn’t real and means I’m only performing.

  When I’m being love, I don’t get drained, and I don’t need people to behave a certain way in order to feel cared for or to share my magnificence with them. They’re automatically getting my love as a result of me being my true self. And when I am nonjudgmental of myself, I feel that way toward others.

  In light of this, I’ve learned that it’s important not to be too hard on myself if I’m experiencing challenges. Oftentimes, the problem isn’t the cause of the apparent conflict. Instead, it’s the judgment I have for myself. When I stop being my own worst enemy and start loving myself more, I automatically have less and less friction with the world around me. I become more tolerant and accepting.

  When we’re each aware of our own magnificence, we don’t feel the need to control others, and we won’t allow ourselves to be controlled. When I awoke into my infinite self, I was amazed to understand that my life could be dramatically different just by realizing that I am love, and I always have been. I don’t have to do anything to deserve it. Understanding this means that I’m working with life-force energy, whereas performing at being loving is working against it.

  Realizing that I am love was the most important lesson I learned, allowing me to release all fear, and that’s the key that saved my life.

  CHAPTER 16

  Infinite Selves and Universal Energy

  During my near-death experience, it felt as if I were connected to the entire universe and everything contained within it; and it seemed that the cosmos was alive, dynamic, and conscious. I found that every thought, emotion, or action I made while expressing through the physical body had an effect on the Whole. In fact, in that realm of Oneness, it felt as though the whole universe were an extension of me. This realization has, of course, dramatically changed the way I view things. We’re all co-creating this world and our lives within it through our emotions, thoughts, and actions.

  Language isn’t an adequate tool for expressing something that can’t be perceived with our five physical senses, so it’s challenging to find the right words to express my understanding of what took place during the experience. However, I’ll do my best in this chapter to share as clearly as possible what I sense about this world, how we move through it, and how it’s changing for the better.

  First, it’s important to understand that my NDE wasn’t like any other event I’ve experienced. It didn’t have a clear beginning and end. It was more like a door that once opened, never closes. It initiated ongoing, progressive, deeper understanding and new possibilities that never end.

  Because words are a poor tool to express this kind of phenomena, what I write here is only meant to stir the appropriate emotions within you. Even after I share this, my own understanding will continue to grow and expand. Words taken literally or held as ultimate truth can keep us stagnant and stuck, holding on to old ideologies. I now know that everything I need is already contained within me and is completely accessible if I allow myself to open up to what I sense is true for me…and the same is true for you.

  BEFORE MY NDE, PROBABLY BECAUSE OF MY CULTURE, I used to think that the purpose of life was to attain nirvana—that is, to evolve beyond the reincarnation cycle of birth and death, striving never to come back into the physical. If I’d grown up completely immersed in Western culture, maybe I would have been trying to get to heaven. This is actually a fairly common goal, regardless of culture—to live in such a way as to secure a perfect afterlife.

  But after my NDE, I feel differently. Even though I know I’ll go on living beyond this plane, and I don’t fear physical death anymore, I’ve lost my desire to be anywhere but the place I am now. Interestingly, I’ve become more grounded and focused on seeing the perfection of life in this moment, rather than focusing on the other realm.

  This is primarily because the concept of reincarnation in its conventional form of a progression of lifetimes, running sequentially one after the other, wasn’t supported by my NDE. I realized that time doesn’t move in a linear fashion unless we’re using the filter of our physical bodies and minds. Once we’re no longer limited by our earthly senses, every moment exists simultaneously. I’ve come to think that the concept of reincarnation is really just an interpretation, a way for our intellect to make sense of all existence happening at once.

  We think in terms of “time passing,” but in my NDE, it felt as though time just is, and we’re moving through it. This means that not only do all points of time exist simultaneously, but also that in the other realm, we can go faster, slower, or even backward and sideways.

  In the physical plane, however, our sensory organs limit us. Our eyes take in what they see in this instant; our ears hear in the same way. The mind can only exist in one moment, and then it strings those moments together to form a linear progression. But when we spill out of our bodies, we cross all time and space with awareness—not sight, hearing, touch, taste, or smell. We’re pure consciousness.

  I experienced this while in the NDE state. I was aware of my brother on a plane coming to see me and of conversations the doctors were having outside my room and down the hall. I understood many aspects of my future life, as they would be panning out, as well as what would happen if I didn’t come back and live. This showed me that time, space, and solid matter don’t always exist as we normally think of them. During my NDE, I felt that I could focus on any point in time that I needed to access.

  Because of this, I believe that when someone has a glimpse of what have previously been interpreted as “past lives,” they’re actually accessing parallel or simultaneous existences, because all time exists at once. And because we’re all connected, it’s possible to achieve states of consciousness where glimpses of others’ reality seep through into our present moment, entering our consciousness as though they were memories.

  My new perspective has made me wonder about our focus and purpose, if reincarnation and time itself don’t exist the way that so many of us were raised to believe. What if all our goals are the wrong way around? What if heaven or nirvana is actually here in physical expression, and not there in the afterlife?

  I SENSE THAT WE CHOOSE TO INCARNATE into a physical body in order to express love, passion, and the full range of other human emotions not available to us separately in the state of pure awareness and Oneness. What if this life on this planet is the main show, where the action is, and where we wanted to be?

  This reality is a playground of expression. It looks as though we aren’t here to learn or gather experiences for the afterlife. There doesn’t seem to be much purpose in that because we don’t need any of it there. Rather, we’re here to experience and evolve this physical universe and our own lives within it. I made my decision to return when I realized that life here was the most desirable state for me at this time. We don’t have to wait until we die to experience nirvana. Our true magnificence exist
s right now!

  The reason why humans are so vulnerable and fearful around this subject is because we create our ideas of the afterlife and our gods in human terms. We assign to these concepts the same physical properties and fallible values that we posses and are vulnerable to—values such as fear, retribution, judgment, and punishment. And then we project all our strength and power onto our own creations.

  But if all time and experience exist right now, and we’re simply moving through it as we express our magnificence in a physical world, then we have nothing to fear. We don’t have to live in anxiety about what comes next. We can recognize the energy that we’re already a part of, and we can be love in every aspect of our lives.

  It’s unfortunate that we keep searching outside ourselves for answers—in religion, medicine, scientific study, books, and other people. We think the truth is somewhere out there, still elusive. Yet by doing this, we’re only getting more and more lost, appearing to move away from who we truly are. The entire universe is within us. My answers are inside of me, and yours lie within you, too. Everything that seemingly happens externally is occurring in order to trigger something within us, to expand us and take us back to who we truly are.

  I often use the phrase infinite self in place of terms such as higher self, soul, and spirit. In order to be a little clearer, understand that I’m referring to the part of me that was aware during the NDE that I’m not just my body—the part of me that felt I was one with every single thing. I was merging with pure consciousness as an infinite, magnificent being, feeling the clarity of why I’m in this body and life at this point in time. This is also the part of me that understood that the illusion of separation is created by identifying too strongly with the external.

  I believe that when we leave our physical bodies, our infinite selves are all connected. In the pure consciousness state, we’re all One. Many people have felt this unity during intense spiritual experiences or out in nature. When we work with animals or have pets, we feel it, too. We sometimes experience synchronicity and even extrasensory perception (ESP) and other such phenomena as a result of our being One with all creation, but because most people aren’t aware of it, it doesn’t happen as often as it could.

  In truth, I’m not my body, my race, religion, or other beliefs, and neither is anyone else. The real self is infinite and much more powerful—a complete and whole entity that isn’t broken or damaged in any way. The infinite me already contains all the resources I need to navigate through life, because I’m One with Universal energy. In fact, I am Universal energy.

  DURING MY NDE, THERE WAS NOTHING outside of my greater awareness because I was one with the entirety of Universal energy. It felt as though I encompassed totality. In that state, there was total clarity and all became known. I seemed to become everything, and I existed in everything.

  The ability to see my own magnificence and to realize that the universe and I are one and the same caused my healing. I became conscious that there isn’t an external creation separate from me—because the word external suggests separation and duality. Living with this awareness allows me to continue to interact in the physical world with strength, love, and courage.

  To explain this from another perspective, although I’ve been using the words Universal energy, know that I can just as easily say chi, prana, or ki. These words mean “life-force energy” in Mandarin, Hindi, and Japanese respectively. This is the chi in Tai Chi and Chi Gong, and it’s the ki in Reiki. In a nutshell, it’s the Source of life, and it runs through every living thing. In fact, it fills the entire universe and is inseparable from it.

  Chi has no judgment and doesn’t discriminate. It flows through us whether we’re an elevated guru or a sea slug. It’s useful to think about this, because once we describe the energy with a different word—such as Source, God, Krishna, Buddha, or whatever—it can be difficult for some of us to see beyond the name. These terms mean different things to different people, and also seem to impose form upon the infinite. There are often certain expectations attached to these labels, and many of them keep us locked in duality so that we view this energy as an entity separate from us. But Universal energy, like our pure state of consciousness, needs to remain limitless and formless so that it can become one with us and create healing, magic, and miracles.

  I felt strongly during my NDE that we’re all connected to this Universal energy; we’re all One with it. Each of us has this magnificent, magical life force coursing through every single cell. It’s not some external entity, but rather a state of being—an internal phenomenon. It’s inside, outside, and all around. It doesn’t matter what race, religion, culture, or belief system we belong to. We’re connected to it just because we’re alive—in fact, we are this universal current. We don’t have to do anything, be anything, or prove anything to access it. We’re all magnificent, powerful beings, and we all have access to it because it and we are one and the same.

  The only thing that can keep me from being aware of this energy is my mind—that is, my thoughts, particularly my self-limiting beliefs about myself. The deep release I mentioned earlier that took me to the NDE was actually my intellect completely letting go, taking my self-limiting beliefs with it and allowing universal energy to take over. Once my mind got out of the way, the floodgates opened. Instead of fighting against the nature of the universe in order to heal, I allowed chi to flow on its own terms.

  It can be tricky at first to distinguish what’s motivating us. The difference is that the mind is more about doing, and the soul is more about being. The infinite self is our essence. It’s who we truly are, as I described in the last chapter when I explained the importance of being love. The intellect is just a tool for navigating through this life. It figures out how to make enough money to put food on the table and make the rent, while the soul only wants to express itself.

  The infinite self is where we have our instincts and intuition. If we’re buying a house, the mind will narrow down the options by choosing a practical location, setting a budget, and so on. The final decision on a specific place to live, however, may be made purely by gut feeling. We just get a good sense about a certain place, and there’s no logical reason that we can explain. That’s the infinite self.

  Sometimes our complicated lives make us forget that we’re connected to Universal energy and that we have these natural abilities. We stop listening to ourselves and start to give our power away to external forces such as bosses, teachers, and friends. Blocking our feelings also breaks down our awareness of our own magnificence because emotions are a doorway into the soul. But we’re complex beings, and we try to control how we feel.

  When we live completely from the mind over a period of time, we lose touch with the infinite self, and then we begin to feel lost. This happens when we’re in doing mode all the time, rather than being. The latter means living from the soul and is a state of allowing. It means letting ourselves be who and what we are without judgment. Being doesn’t mean that we don’t do anything. It’s just that our actions stem from following our emotions and feelings while staying present in the moment. Doing, on the other hand, is future focused, with the mind creating a series of tasks that take us from here to there in order to achieve a particular outcome, regardless of our current emotional state.

  I have discovered that to determine whether my actions stem from “doing” or “being,” I only need to look at the emotion behind my everyday decisions. Is it fear, or is it passion? If everything I do each day is driven by passion and a zest for living, then I’m “being,” but if my actions are a result of fear, then I’m in “doing” mode.

  When we feel off track, we think there’s something wrong with us—something we have to do or get in order to right ourselves—so we go searching outside for answers. We look to others in the hope that they’ll fix us. We may feel better for a little while, but it’s usually short-lived, and we eventually end up feeling worse. However, when we really start to tune in to who life intended us to be—and we’r
e attuned to the emotions that motivate us—we connect with the soul of our magnificence. We feel clarity when we allow this connection and take our power back, and our lives start to work.

  When we come from this place of being who we are, we can choose to learn from external gurus, teachers, books, or spiritual philosophies. We become aware of our own inner magnificence and truth, instead of believing that others have power that we don’t. In fact, when we realize our magnificence and live in our true nature of love, we’ll synchronistically attract the right teacher, book, or spiritual philosophy at the right time!

  UNFORTUNATELY, BEING UNAWARE OF OUR OWN magnificence can have effects that seem far greater than simply feeling lost, although it’s all of the same essence. During my NDE, it felt to me that all judgment, hatred, jealousy, and fear stem from people not realizing their true greatness. Lacking awareness of our perfection keeps us feeling small and insignificant, and this goes against the natural flow of life-force energy—that which we really are. We go against ourselves.

  The way I see it, if we were encouraged to express who we truly are, we’d all be very loving beings, each bringing our uniqueness to the world. Problems and strife come as a result of our not knowing who we are and not being able to show our inner beauty. We’ve created so much judgment about what’s “perfect,” which leads to doubt and competitiveness. Since we feel as though we’re not good enough, we go around acting out. However, if each of us became aware of our magnificence and felt good about ourselves, it seems to me the only thing we’d have to share is our unique nature, expressed outwardly in a loving manner that reflects our self-care.