

When I Become a Wave

Living Life and Death to the Fullest

A Guide to Understanding Our Existence

Copyright © 2016 Michael Anderson

"The universe is immaterial – mental and spiritual.

Live, and enjoy."

Richard Conn Henry

Professor of Physics and Astronomy

The Mental Universe

Table of Contents

Introduction

Life After Death

Inconvenient Facts

Worlds Within Worlds

Thanks for the Memories – But Where Are They?

Expanded Consciousness

Shared Consciousness

Remembering the Future

Is Our Existence a Simulation?

Lives Within Lives

Conclusion

Notes

A Humane God?

An Animal Afterlife

For the Skeptical

Footnotes

Introduction

A pressing question in all of our lives is what happens when we die. Unfortunately, religious orders have been in charge of answering that question and their answers leave most of us with a high level of anxiety. For the deeply religious, comfort comes from pure faith that religious explanations will hold true in the afterlife. This book will hopefully lower your apprehension about biological death and deepen your understanding of our existence.

If you look beyond religion, there is a great deal of evidence, bolstered by science, that our consciousness (or mind/spirit), not only survives biological death, but the mind without a material body is our natural state of existence.

With respect to life after biological death, one thread of evidence is based on thousands of actual accounts by people who have had near-death experiences (NDEs), out-of-body experiences (OBEs), or past-life psychotherapies. There are two main qualities to this evidence: 1) the extraordinary consistency of accounts about the afterlife across thousands of testimonies; and 2) the fact that many of these accounts have been proven either by physical evidence or they have been independently corroborated by witnesses. In other words, there is very credible evidence these accounts are true. These narratives, which span a wide range of demographics, cultures and religions over the centuries, represent the best proof we have of an afterlife.

Descriptions of near-death experiences can be found in the folklore and writings of cultures worldwide, including ancient times. There are also death-bed accounts of those who have peeked into the afterlife just before entry. The last words of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs just before passing, were "Oh wow, oh wow, oh wow," as if he were getting a glimpse of the new reality he was about to enter. Thomas Edison, just hours before his death, emerged from a coma, opened his eyes, looked upwards and said "It is very beautiful over there." Many NDE survivors have said there are no words to accurately describe the "sense of ultimate perfection" that characterize the entry into the afterlife.

People who have researched such matters tell us that OBEs and NDEs are much more common than people realize. Many surveys have asked the general public throughout the world if they have had such experiences. If you take an average of those polls, about five percent of those surveyed have had such experiences. One estimate holds that about 25 million people worldwide have had an NDE in the past 50 years.

What adds credibility to NDE accounts, to my mind, is that such experiences come from people in all walks of life, age groups, races and religious affiliations and, with very few exceptions, they had no prior psychic or paranormal encounters before their experience – they just happened. In other words, accounts of NDEs from housewives in America closely resemble accounts of NDEs from Egyptian men. Children too young to have any expectations about an afterlife describe the same NDE as adults.

In addition, thousands of people have also been put under hypnosis by various practitioners under a variety of past-life regression modalities and asked to give details of what it is like in the afterlife. The utter consistency of these descriptions is one of the most compelling threads of evidence we have.

The next chapter, "Life After Death," describes a typical experience of life after biological death. It is an amalgam of experiences that have been reported from many different testimonies. It is fiction, but the core narrative is representative and reflects the most widely and consistently told descriptions of the afterlife. There are, however, individual variations to this narrative, some of which will be discussed.

It's impossible for us to look at the reality we live in outside of that reality. That's like asking a fish to describe the water it lives in. Statements from those who have experienced another reality, namely the afterlife, give us an opportunity to examine not only the hereafter, but life on Earth from a totally different perspective. As it turns out, the spiritual reality experienced after death is also an integral part of the reality we experience while living on Earth.

The fear of death for most of us comes from a fear of the unknown. This fear has led to heroic applications of medical technology to keep us breathing for just a few additional days, weeks or months because we have lost confidence in any existence other than the physical. This book is an attempt to alleviate such fear.

Dr. Stanislav Grof, who you will meet again, was the chief of psychiatric research at the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center and an assistant professor of psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. After supervising thousands of out-of-body sessions, he made the following statement:

"There is at present little doubt in my mind that our current understanding of the universe, of the nature of reality, and particularly of human beings, is superficial, incorrect, and incomplete."

I could not agree more. While the next chapter describes the afterlife, the remaining chapters attempt to provide a framework and some coherence to the puzzle of our existence and take the many "inconvenient facts" of our reality to their logical conclusion. To those unfamiliar with such discussions, it may seem to get a little wild at times, but I've come to realize that the true nature of our existence is far wilder than our wildest thoughts and dreams. As Niels Bohr once said, "Your theory is crazy, but it's not crazy enough to be true."

The book is brief by design and meant to be an introduction to a subject of vast proportions. It is for people of all faiths. It is also for people of no faith. The footnotes are full of excellent references for those who wish to explore these matters further.

Researching and writing this document has been quite a journey for me because I ended up at a destination I could not have imagined at the beginning. I don't expect anyone to arrive at the same place, but only hope you'll have a stimulating ride along the way and draw your own conclusions.

And if you end up calling me crazy, I'll take that as a compliment!

Mike Anderson

Life After Death

You've lived a good life. Perhaps too good. The extra inches around your girth reveal a life of plenty. As you wind your way through traffic, you wonder about the impact your regular bacon and eggs breakfast is having on your health.

You've been a good provider. A large home in the suburbs, a wonderful spouse and two children with good degrees and jobs.

You've thought about death, but mostly in terms of providing for your family. Thankfully, life insurance has taken care of that worry. You wonder why it isn't called death insurance.

The freeway has turned into a parking lot. Three lanes are closed ahead of you due to an accident. The freeway narrows into just one lane. You check your watch. You'll be late to the staff meeting. Anxiety creeps in.

Suddenly, there's an accident just four cars ahead of you. It closes the last remaining lane.

Something similar is happening inside your body. The main arteries leading to your heart have narrowed over the years. And, just as suddenly as the accident in front of you, there's been an accident along one of your arteries. A piece of plaque, some 40 years in the making, breaks away. Platelets quickly arrive at the scene and form a clot, which quickly grows until it completely blocks your narrowed artery, starving your heart muscle of oxygen and causing tissue death.

There's a rapidly growing tightness in your chest. You break out in a sweat, your skin feels clammy and your heart rate increases. You feel nauseated and weak. There are sharp pains in your jaw, your arms and other parts of your body. You start gasping for breath. You fumble with the controls and finally lower your window. You stick your head out the window desperately gasping for air.

Traffic is now the last of your concerns. As you struggle with your body, your foot slips off the brake pedal and your car jerks forward. It rear-ends the shiny new Corvette in front of you.

Your heart cells are desperate for oxygen. Getting none, they begin dying off.

Your heart suddenly stops beating.

Your brain cells start dying.

You lose consciousness.

A man in the Corvette steps out of his car and immediately notices your distress. Another motorist sees you slumped over the steering wheel and gets out of his car.

The Corvette man pulls your limp body from your car. He lays you flat on your back and expertly begins CPR.

Fortunately, he is well-trained.

Unfortunately, your body is already dead.

As the Corvette man works feverishly on your lifeless remains and a concerned group of people form a crowd, you experience a vivid sensation of your mind separating from your body. Like a spectator, you can now see your corpse sprawled out on the asphalt below you.

You feel very confused at this moment because you have a sinking feeling this is not a dream. Your "senses" are, in fact, heightened. You can somehow see in all directions at once. Your thinking is extremely lucid. The events which just occurred happened very fast. This is not at all like anything you have ever experienced before. Or is it?

At first, it's difficult to conceive of yourself without a body. It's been with you your entire life. It's an integral part of your identity. Or is it?

You now have a somewhat morbid curiosity which keeps you glued to the vision of your body. People are gathering around you with worried looks on their faces. You've never met any of them, yet they are concerned about you. The Corvette man is still heroically trying to save your life. Your faith in the basic goodness of humanity is somewhat restored.

You wonder why they are going to all this trouble because you're just fine. Then it dawns on you that this is definitely not a dream, but some sort of new reality. The reality of life after death.

Oh, sure, you've thought about this a little. You've even read accounts of people floating above their dead bodies in operating rooms for short periods, only to return to their bodies later. Although their biological death was brief, their consciousness somehow stayed alive. You dismissed the accounts because you thought they were a bunch of hallucinating nut-jobs. You now realize you may be one of them. But unlike them, you suspect you won't be returning to your body. Your biological identity has come to an end. The life you had on Earth is over.

You suddenly become concerned about your wife. And just as suddenly, you're in her office. You can see her sitting behind a desk. She's on the phone speaking to someone. Everything looks normal. She has not received news of your demise. You gaze at her longingly. You don't want to hurt her. You worry how she will take the news. You want to comfort her. You try talking to her, but she doesn't respond. You try touching her, but you can't.

Your concern turns to your son, Carl. Within a blink, you are in his veterinarian office. He's operating on a squirrel who had been hit by a car. A Good Samaritan brought the squirrel in because she knew Dr. Carl would care for any animal in distress. As he operates on the squirrel, you look at your son with admiration, not just for his skill, but for his compassionate work.

Your thoughts turn to your daughter, Peggy. Just by thinking of her, you are in her office, a large corner space in a New York City high-rise. She works as an advertising executive and she's in a heated exchange with a man who just lost an important account. You admire her beauty, her charm and her guile. She will not be pushed around by anyone, which is very evident at the moment.

Your thoughts return to your own situation and, instantly, you are back at the scene of your biological death. For some reason, you are not scared. In fact, you seem to be quite comfortable in your new and strangely different situation. Something, however, is quite unsettling. It seems that by just thinking about someone, you are instantly transported to their location. From your wife's work, in Oakland, California, to your son's office in Arlington, Texas to your daughter's office in New York City – in an instant.

You feel like you are some kind of waveform. You are everywhere and nowhere at the same time – yet can be anywhere in an instant. Different locations, within one location, within no location. Space and time have disappeared. They are suddenly irrelevant. Everything seems connected now.

Still hovering above your body, you feel something slowly pulling you away from the scene, some kind of force which is becoming stronger. You want to stay, but you cannot. It's like an invisible energy pulling at you and your waveform flows in its resonance effortlessly.

The pull increases in strength until you find yourself traveling at great speed through darkness, as if you were in a tunnel. For some inexplicable reason, you are not afraid. In fact, you feel comforted.

As quickly as you entered the darkness, you emerge from the tunnel and enter a new realm of dazzling light where you feel a euphoric sense of freedom, where you feel thoughts of love and companionship. There are mental projections of beautiful green meadows, valleys filled with flowers and crystal clear sparkling streams more stunning than anything on Earth. The scenes are within the context of layered levels of translucent light, all woven together, but without boundaries anywhere. The space is infinite.

In the distance, you hear the most beautiful music you have ever listened to. Music unlike anything you have ever heard before with ranges of notes far beyond anything on Earth. The melody vaguely reminds you of the song Bali Ha'i with its longing sense of innocence and happiness, accompanied by the repeated phrase "Come to me... Come to me...."

After going through the tunnel, you can no longer see Earth or its universe. You have left it behind. You realize that death is not darkness, but light and happiness. You also realize you're not really "dead," but simply left a lifeless and fast-rotting Earth-body behind.

You feel quite happy. You feel like you have been here before. It's a familiar feeling. Then, you realize you are returning Home. Again.

You see a waveform approaching you. It's projecting a human life form. You feel thoughts reaching out to you – energy contacting you.

It's your mother, Alice. Her waveform is projecting an outline of her physical body. She is beautiful. Her face is young, bright and eternal. She greets you warmly and you can sense her embrace. You feel like crying, but you are too happy. You want to tell her everything that's happened to you since she left, but she already knows. You speak without saying a word. The lingua franca among waveforms is pure thought.

Curt, your father, appears next. He projects himself as young and handsome and embraces you with his light. You feel his warmth, his strength. You exchange thoughts with each other.

Behind your father, you can now see many deceased relatives and friends, all waiting to greet you. There is uncle Bob, aunt Mary, your grandfather and mother, even your great-grandfather and great-grandmother and one cousin you were close to. They are followed by other friends with whom you had strong emotional connections. All of them appear to be in their prime of life on Earth. It is a reunion of friends and relatives you knew during your last visit to Earth. Some are projecting themselves as they looked on Earth, right down to the handlebar mustache on uncle Bob. Others are projecting themselves only from the waist up in a kind of translucent human form.

You exchange thoughts with each of them. In fact, you exchange thoughts with all of them at once. And you feel their love and joy enveloping you.

Then you see Sam – the biggest delight of your childhood – your dog. His tail wags furiously.

There is no grieving about your recent physical death because it is your Spirit – your soul – that made you human on Earth and your Spirit has now returned home.

After this joyous reunion, you feel relieved to be away from Earth and your body. You want to stay here forever because there is a sense of peace and well-being. In fact, you feel more alive than you ever did on Earth. It is pure ecstasy.

But just as you are awash with good feelings, you are pulled away from your friends and relatives. You quickly flow through vast distances until you reach a more enclosed space of pure energy, which you can feel throughout your essence. The energy is attempting to restore your Spirit to the level it was before your exposure to Earth – a degrading, damaging and contaminating environment. This includes a cleansing of all materialistic desires, appetites and passions. As your Spirit is restored, you lose all the negative thoughts and emotions you acquired on Earth.

After the cleansing, you feel yourself merging with your larger spiritual self, which consists of all the lives you have ever lived. To be reunited with your "core" Spirit is both an expansion of your consciousness and a return to your deeper, true identity. Your basic personality traits were present in all incarnations, but each differed slightly, depending on the type of human being you became.

The infusion of energy slowly comes to an end and you move into another enclosed area, where you meet your Guide. The Guide welcomes you warmly, and then takes you into a very large, magnificent amphitheater that seems to be suspended in the void of space.

The purpose here is to review your most recent life on Earth.

Before you can take in your brilliant surroundings, a replay of your entire past life begins. It's like watching an incredibly stunning movie projection, except that it's three-dimensional and you become part of the movie. The Life Review is like climbing inside a movie all about you. Every moment of your life is played back in complete, sensory detail. It is total recall.

You not only experience the senses of your life, but the emotions – the joys and sorrows which accompanied every event, as well as the happiness and hurt you experienced during your life. You also become acutely aware of the joy and pain you caused others. You see the potential of your life and how well you did or did not realize it. All the hidden turning points of your life, including your successes and failures come fully into view.

While the Life Review is a complete immersion into your past life, it all happens in what seems like an instance and it's over almost as soon as it began. Despite this, you were able to take in every moment.

Your Life Review is kept in a knowledge library, which has the life reviews of every human being who ever lived on Earth. You will be visiting the library frequently in order to study not only other lives, but your own past lives, in order to learn from them.

Following your life review, the Guide moves you to a small chamber and begins debriefing you about your most recent life on Earth. It is an emotional and cleansing encounter. The Guide asks you very pointed questions about what you did and did not learn during your past life. Motivations are questioned and often criticized, but never condemned. There is no punishment for your failure to do something, nor is there punishment for any acts of omission or commission while on Earth. If you did not meet your learning goals, it means you may be sent back to deal with the same issues again. The Guide's aim is to encourage you to learn and benefit from past mistakes.

For those who committed acts of evil on Earth, they are taken to special units, in seclusion, where their energy is reworked in an attempt to make their spirit whole again. They are never totally purified of earthly contamination until they can make their wrongdoing right in a future life.

Once your debriefing has ended, your Guide departs and you are pulled away by what feels like a mental force. Your Spirit moves through what seems to be endless space, until you are joined by a multitude of other Spirits, all returning from Earth. You travel with them in small groups, until you merge together with other groups into a larger stream of Spirits flowing together. You then merge into yet larger streams and still larger streams after that. As you move along with other Spirits, there is a sense of harmonious companionship because everyone has been cleansed of earthly contamination.

You then enter an area which appears to have spokes pointing in all directions toward different zones. Each zone has a certain vibration that allows Spirit passage when their energy waves are attuned to the proper frequency. Each zone represents alternate realities. There are, for example, different worlds where Spirits could travel other than Earth.

You are directed along one spoke which takes you to honeycombed areas arranged in clusters. Within each cluster, there are home spaces. As you enter your space, you see a projection that looks exactly like the house you grew up in. This is your home. This is where you live.

You do not live alone in the cluster, but with a group of friends and relatives from different lives who are at the same spiritual awareness level as you. They have arranged a homecoming party. The Spirit World is not so serious that Spirits cannot have fun together. There are games, pranks and sports that Spirits play. Your friends have projected a golf course for you, knowing you were quite the duffer in your previous life.

There are also larger support groups you belong to. They serve to help in your self-development and study.

You have just returned from your fifth incarnation on Earth. In one incarnation, you were a Confederate soldier who was shot and killed during the American civil war. In another, you were the wife of a publishing magnate in New York City during the 1920s. Although you were outwardly living the life of a high society fashion socialite, your husband beat you mercilessly until, in one violent outburst, he killed you. In another life, you were a peasant farmer in India during the latter part of the 20th century. You died alone in abject poverty.

Many Spirits have had hundreds of incarnations over the centuries. Each incarnation is a learning experience and an opportunity to work on a wide range of challenges, e.g., selfishness, greed, envy, jealousy, resentment, self-indulgence, prejudices against others, etc. For some, who do not make progress, they remain on the lower rungs of spiritual development until such challenges are successfully conquered. Instead of working on a new challenge and progressing, they return to Earth repeatedly to work on the same test. In one case, a Spirit was unable to conquer envy for 850 years while living numerous lives. In another case, a Spirit had a 2,000 year history of not being able to contend with abandonment.

In the Spirit World, such problems do not exist, per se, because there is a climate of love and compassion. In the Spirit World, there are no power struggles over territory, possessions or other material things. And, in a world of telepathy, there is very little you can hide. Unlike on Earth, Spirits can get into the minds of others and feel what they are feeling. In this way, they can quickly develop empathy and an understanding of others.

Going to a place like Earth (or other physical worlds), where such total empathy and understanding is not possible, serves as a challenging test-bed and proving ground for spiritual development.

Your Guide appears at your home. The Council of Elders has summoned you.

You enter into a chamber where the Council holds its meetings with those returning from Earth. The presence of an all-knowing force is always felt throughout the Spirit World, but it becomes much stronger when you go before the Council because they are advanced Spirits and closer to the Creator.

The Spirit World has a pecking order, in terms of enlightenment and awareness, and some Spirits are more advanced than others. But this does not translate into what we would consider positions of authority. Everyone exists within a structure of love, harmony and compassion and it is the desire of all to move toward a greater goodness and ultimately union with the Creator.

In many ways, your session with the Council is much like the debriefing you had with your Guide, but members of the Council are at a much higher plane of enlightenment. Their intent is to speak to you about the mistakes you made in your past life and give you advice about how you might correct them in your next incarnation. Rather than condemn you for your shortcomings, the Council radiates a healing energy that dissolves guilt and paves the way to an inner peace. They pass no judgment. There is only self-judgment, which arises due to your own feelings of guilt and repentance.

After the Council meeting, you feel compelled to give your wife a sign that you still exist. You want her to feel your presence. She had gone through a long period of grieving following your death and although you had tried to get into her mind, she was not receptive to your energy – until now.

While shopping at a hardware store, she ran into a friend. They were engaged in a conversation when a young clerk passed her. She looked startled, and then grabbed the man by his sleeve. She asked what kind of cologne he was wearing. He looked at her quizzically and replied that he did not wear cologne, not even aftershave. She then looked away dumbfounded. What she had smelled was your favorite cologne. And, at that moment, she knew it was you. She smiled and began nodding her head, knowing that you were with her.

Spirits obviously have personalities which can be the source of petty conflicts, jealousy, envy and the like. In other words, even in the Spirit World, lower-level Spirits are far from perfect, which means there are still challenges to be overcome and lessons to be learned. One of the best learning laboratories is Earth. You know that your next incarnation is just around the corner and you will once again have to leave the blissful existence of the Spirit World in order to face the physical and mental demands of living in a human body and dealing with humans.

There are other worlds you could visit. Some are materialistic, like Earth, and others are immaterial, mental worlds. Some are easy to exist in. Their inhabitants are harmonious and blissful. The material worlds are the hardest and Earth is considered to be a particularly difficult place because of the nature of humans. And yet, that is part of the attraction. Humans can be very noble at their best and very malevolent at their worst. It is a stimulating environment for learning and it also provides an opportunity to improve the lives of other humans. Humans are, after all, other Spirits facing earthly challenges in order to advance themselves as Spirits.

You have been in training sessions with counselors and peer groups. They have helped you prepare several alternate Life Plans for your upcoming visit to Earth. Their recommendations for your next life are made based on what you need, not necessarily what you want. While you can reject their suggestions, it is not advised.

The next step is to choose the earthly environment you wish to live in, the events you wish to experience and the span of Earth time for your life. The Life Plans you have prepared, in consultation with your advisors, will put you in situations that will force you to work on different problems in order to advance your spiritual development. Learning experiences to work off karmic debts from previous lives are also taken into consideration.

In order to select a Life Plan, you first visit a place which resembles a small movie theater, except there are screens all around you. These screens allow you to briefly see yourself in the future by playing your Life Plan. You have the choice of either watching the screens or actually becoming part of the scenes on the screens – or both. By becoming immersed in the scenes, you can experience what your future environment would be like and experience it in your new body. You test out different locales – New York City, Oslo, Beijing and Mexico City. In the next life, you may want a lesson in acquiring humility, or a lesson on overcoming greed, or even a lesson in extreme suffering. You may want to experience severe emotional pain in order to acquire greater compassion and empathy for others. You may want to select a particularly difficult life as your learning platform. You may want to work on lesson plans you had trouble with in the past. The more pain and adversity you encounter, the more opportunity there may be to expand your spiritual potential.

You also try out different bodies in various Life Plans, e.g., a man, a woman, a homosexual, a disabled person.

You may also experience a group reincarnation. This means that the same set of Spirits who figured prominently in previous incarnations – both pleasantly and unpleasantly – renew their contact with each other in the next life. Roles can be reversed and sexes, ethnicities and other characteristics changed. The test will be the challenges that await the group when their Life Plans unfold and they begin to interact.

You are not able to see or experience your entire future in a Life Plan, just glimpses of it. Your Life Plan includes many significant parts of your life on Earth, such as your parents, when you will be born, when you will be married, have children, your career choices and when you will die. The Life Plan serves only as a road map for your next life and does not imply that every detail of your next life is predetermined. If that were so, there would be no purpose to living on Earth as you would have no decisions to make that would advance, or regress, your spirit.

The next life on Earth will present you with numerous choices. This is where your free will is exercised and the choices you make will provide spiritual growth opportunities. Although you have chosen a future life and that future has been outlined, your spiritual fate is still in development. Your next visit to Earth will play a role in that development because your earthly deeds will contribute toward creating your spiritual destiny.

Ultimately, the choices you make are not just in one life, but those in a chain of many different incarnations. Each life represents a challenge in developing your spiritual potential. How you handle the choices you face in each life will either move your spiritual destiny forward or backward.

You are now ready for your return to Earth. You split your energy in order to create a duplicate Spirit who will travel to Earth. Your core Spirit remains in the Spirit World.

You have a brief meeting with the Council of Elders and you are escorted to an embarkation space where you will leave for Earth to experience the Life Plan you have chosen.

After embarkation, you quickly find yourself inside the womb of the mother, sometime after the third month of pregnancy. You get acquainted with your host's brain and mind as you prepare to acquire its identity. The Life Plan you created, which contains the future events of your new life, becomes a part of the host's unconscious mind.

Although your memories are now a part of the host's unconscious mind, a block of amnesia is imposed on you at birth so that you will remember nothing of your past lives or life in the Spirit World. You start your learning experience on Earth with a blank slate as your Spirit combines with your host's mind to produce a new personality.

It is the amnesia block of your past which allows free will and self-determination in the new life and also promotes fresh decision-making. You are no longer burdened or distracted by memories of your past lives or spiritual self.

In this life you are a new person and, once again, on your own.

Inconvenient Facts

You've just read something that could be described as pure fantasy. Yet, thousands of people from all over the world with different backgrounds and demographics have been telling us this same basic narrative for thousands of years.

Did everyone drink the same Kool-Aid? Are all these people lying? Did everyone share the same hallucination?

Consider these facts:

A pre-school American boy suddenly begins talking in a dialect only spoken in the northern region of Tibet. He claimed he grew up in a Tibetan monastery in a former life.

A five year old white boy from Ohio claims that he was a black woman named Pamela Robinson in a former life. Pamela lived in Chicago and died in 1993 when she jumped from the Paxton Hotel which was on fire. The young boy has verified numerous details about Pamela's life and death and, while on camera, picked her out from 30 different photographs. He even remembered when the photo was taken.

A four year old girl, who remembered her former life, was reunited with her former husband and son. Her previous husband was extremely skeptical of her claim that she was his wife – until she revealed intimate details of their sex life only his former wife could have known.

A three-year-old boy living in the Golan Heights told his parents he was murdered in his past life. He was born with a birthmark where he said an axe hit him. At his prompting, his parents led him through villages to see if he could remember where he lived. They not only found the village, but the murderer. The boy confronted him and said "We had a fight and you killed me with an axe." The man turned white as a sheet. The boy then led a group of villagers to the exact spot where he was buried. The buried man's skull showed a split in the front, which matched the boy's birthmark. The boy also led the group to the spot where the axe was buried. This forced the murderer to confess his crime.

From the earliest age, an American boy had a fascination with toy airplanes. As he approached his second birthday, his nightmares began. He would thrash about, kick with his legs up in the air and moan "Airplane crash, on fire, little man can't get out!" His mother encouraged him to talk about his memories and a flood of details surfaced, including that he had flown Corsairs during WWII and been shot down by the Japanese. Although skeptical, his father began researching his son's story. One day the boy pointed to the island of Chichi Jima on a map and exclaimed "Daddy, that is where my plane was shot down." It was subsequently confirmed that only one pilot had been lost at Chichi Jima – a 21 year old Lt. James M. Huston Jr. They located a photo of Lt. Huston, which showed him standing next to a Corsair. The boy also had three GI Joe dolls which he named Leon, Walter and Billie. When asked why he used those names, he replied "Because they greeted me when I went to heaven." Military records confirmed that three of Lt. Huston's fellow pilots were Lt. Leon S. Conner, Ensign Walter J. Devlin and Ensign Billie R. Peeler. Many other details of the boy's memories have been verified.

A toddler in Sri Lanka heard her mother mention the distant town of Kataragama and proceeded to state that she had drowned there when her "dumb" brother pushed her into the river. Upon investigation, her mother from her previous life was located in the town of Kataragama and she confirmed that her two-year-old daughter had drowned in the river while playing with her mentally challenged brother. Twenty-seven of the thirty factual statements made by the child have been verified.

During an out of body experience, a man's consciousness traveled to a location where several people were plotting his murder. After returning to his body, he proceeded to confront one of the conspirators and frightened her into admitting their plan to murder him.

When thousands of cases like these are documented and the facts of their stories verified, it should catch our attention. But somehow it doesn't. Instead, these cases are swept into the dustbin of tabloid trivia and summarily forgotten. Like many other things in the world, these are inconvenient facts that our current view of the world simply cannot and does not try to explain, except to lamely say these individuals were probably hallucinating.

Perhaps not.

The problem with verified information that can't be explained is that it's like a festering sore. Over time, as similar stories are published and facts confirmed, the amount of information grows. As a result, the sore becomes larger and more irritating, particularly to those who are skeptical.

In the late Middle Ages and through the Renaissance, there were scientific discoveries that were verified, but could not be explained by the well-established view of the Church. One of the most consequential discoveries was that the Earth did not occupy the center of the universe. At that time, common sense could easily verify that everything in the sky moved around a stationary earth. All one had to do is look at the moving stars in the night sky or watch the sun travel around the Earth during the day.

The Church tried to sweep these heretical beliefs into its own dustbin of trivia but, like a festering sore, the new theories gained followers. In an effort to stop this heresy, the Church burned Bruno at the stake. Galileo was put under house arrest for the remainder of his life. Copernicus had the good fortune to die before the church could punish him. Many others met the wrath of religious authority for their unorthodox beliefs. To say the Earth was not at the center of the universe shattered the celestial order, challenged existing authority and wreaked havoc on the fundamental assumptions nearly everyone held about the world they lived in.

The Earth, of course, never did change position. Its position changed in our minds.

This radical shift in perception not only caused a profound adjustment in how we viewed the universe, but eventually how we viewed ourselves, our culture, and our ideas about common sense.

What I propose is that a five year old white American boy who remembers being a black woman in a former life represents an inconvenient fact that is just as important as those inconvenient astronomical facts discovered in the late Middle Ages. It also has the potential to radically change our perceptions about the world for the better.

The remainder of this book will elaborate on and provide support for this view.

Worlds Within Worlds

According to the current scientific view, the Earth was a highly improbable accident. Our universe came out of "nowhere" and just popped (or Big Banged) itself out of absolutely "nothing." It was all an accident – a highly implausible and against-all-odds accident. And yet, somehow, the hit and miss forces of random chance miraculously created this finely-tuned place humans call home.

This is similar to saying that if you put an infinite number of monkeys in front of an infinite number of typewriters and add an infinite amount of time, they would eventually write the complete works of Shakespeare. According to mathematician David Osselton, however, it would take a million million monkeys about a million million years to type out just the name of William Shakespeare. To get just two lines from one of Shakespeare's plays, the number of monkey keyboard strokes required would be billions of billions times more than the number of atoms in the entire universe. In other words, such an idea is pure monkey business.

Random chance may do many things, but what it does not do is create. Just as typing monkeys could never create Macbeth, let alone the complete works of Shakespeare, random chance could never have created the masterpiece we call our universe.

The process of random chance could not possibly have produced laws of physics that are exactly balanced to support the existence of life on Earth. If the Big Bang had been just a hair too strong or a hair too weak, none of us would have ever sipped a Piña colada on our patios. If the gravitational force were just a bit stronger or a bit weaker, none of us would be around to watch a Robin Williams movie. Were the sun just a bit further out on the horizon, we wouldn't be around to order our eggs sunny side up. There are over 30 constants in the universe that are so exact and harmonized it would be preposterous to claim they were the result of random chance. The really important thing? These constants are necessary for our existence. And modern science cannot explain how these orchestrated forces came to be – other than the monkey business theory.

On the biological front, a living cell has a chain of amino acids, which are dependent on 1,000 to 2,000 highly specialized enzymes. For these enzymes to work in the amino acid chain, 20 to 30 key amino acids must be "just right." The probability of a thousand different enzymes coming together in exactly the right way over the course of the Earth's history in order to form just one living cell is 1040,000 to 1

In many other scientific areas, similar calculations have been performed and they arrive at similar improbable conclusions.

Playing like a great symphony, all of these forces are perfectly synchronized to support the universe and, specifically, life on Earth. When you take all this into consideration, the only conclusion you could possibly draw is that a "Creator" designed Earth for living beings to inhabit. Were any of these forces just a smidgen off kilter, life would not exist.

The universe and life in the universe was no accident. The forces of random chance are blind. They do not orchestrate, nor do they organize. In fact, random processes tend to destroy order, whereas intelligent processes create order. There is no intelligence guiding random chance.

Another way of saying the Earth was created for humans is to consider that we are the only biological inhabitants of the universe. As such, humans and many other living beings have perceptions that are completely unique to the entire universe.

For example, there's an age-old question, "If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?" The answer: No, it does not make any sound. The falling tree produces acoustic vibrations, but no sound. Sound is exclusive to living beings. For acoustic vibrations to be translated into sound, you need an ear to convert them into electrochemical impulses, as well as a central nervous system, including the brain, to interpret the impulses and create a perception. The perception of sound is registered in our minds, not our ears. In other words, sound doesn't exist anywhere in the universe – except in our minds.

Another question: "Does the sun produce light?" No, it produces electromagnetic waves. Humans are equipped with the right equipment, the retina, to convert electromagnetic waves from the sun into light. Like sound, light is purely the result of perception – and that happens in the mind. The only light that can be found in the entire universe is in our minds.

When you place your finger on a table, are you actually touching it? The answer: No. Your mind thinks it has touched the table, but in fact you have not. The electron shells on the surface of your desk and those on the surface of your fingertips have come into close proximity to each other. But, the shells are actually repelling each other, creating a stimulus and an electrochemical impulse which travels up to your brain to create a perception in your mind of touching the table – even though you have not physically made contact with the table. The mind produces the feeling of touch, not the fingers – your mind is touching the table. Living beings on Earth have the only sensation of touch in the universe.

When we look at a person, the image of the person is really on the surface of our retinas. Yet we do not perceive people as being on our retinas, but in the world "out there." The eyes are our visual organs, but it is the mind that perceives a three dimensional world and projects a person's image out into the world.

And if no one is around to see a rainbow, it simply doesn't exist. Rainbows were made for humans because only our minds have the necessary apparatus to perceive them and convert the energy packets of various wavelengths into colors. Rainbows do not exist anywhere in the universe – except in our minds.

We could go on, but humans (and other biological beings) are equipped with a number of sensory receptors and from them we form unique perceptions of the world around us. What we perceive through our receptors (light, sound, touch, smell, taste, etc.) does not exist anywhere in the universe – except in our minds. We don't see through our eyes, we see through our minds. We sense the world around us not through our senses, but through our minds.

Only human minds can turn serialized noises into poetry. Indiscriminate chance cannot do that. Only human minds can create culture. Ants can create a highly organized colony, but not a culture. Blind chance can't even create a colony, much less a universe.

It wasn't serendipity that combined carbon, oxygen and hydrogen molecules to create sentient beings with a love for music, literature, and movies that make us laugh.

In other words, the universe is a very dark, silent and bleak place without human minds in it. In fact, the human mind, or consciousness, is the most important asset in the universe – and the reason it was made for us. This is because the human mind is a part of our Spirit.

Modern science is very good at explaining things it can observe and measure, such as a visibly expanding universe. What it cannot explain is what caused that expansion. Scientists are absolutely and profoundly stumped if you ask them to explain, for example, what existed before the Big Bang. Their answer? Nothing.

The real answer? Consciousness. Specifically, the consciousness of a Creator.

Which raises the next question: How can a universe materialize from consciousness? How can matter be created from "nothing"?

In the medieval view, the invisible world was far more important than the visible world. That is, the spiritual world was more important because the universe operated according to spiritual laws.

Newton crushed this view by showing that nature's laws were in no way spiritual, but mechanical and with highly predictable results. Modern science declared that the universe, and everything in it, operated like a finely-tuned machine.

As part of the scientific revolution, there was a rebirth of atomism, which held that the ultimate constituent of reality was the indivisible atom. Everything in the universe was composed of tiny atoms and the ultimate nature of reality was solid. Atoms served as the building blocks of nature. A table, chair, mountain and human beings were all just collections of atoms.

Instead of an invisible spirit world, the ultimate nature of reality was very visible, tangible and hard. So visible that if something could not be measured, it did not exist. Everything could be explained on a material basis – even mental phenomena and consciousness were the result of material interactions. Consciousness was simply a byproduct of the material brain and died when the brain died.

Since humans interact with a material world and it is out there for us to measure and manipulate, the physical aspects of an atomistic view would seem to make perfect common sense.

This view of reality turns out to be wrong. In fact, we have come to learn that an atom is not solid at all. An atom is mostly "empty" space without any physical structure at all. There is just one part of actual matter to 500 trillion parts of space. The chair you're sitting on, in other words, is mostly made of space. Everything we think of as solid is mostly space – so much space that if all the nuclei of all the atoms on Earth were packed together, they would fit within the radius of a football stadium and its parking lot. That's how porous Earth is.

What this means is that there is a more fundamental, underlying and, yes, invisible aspect to the universe which keeps all these tiny atoms organized. This invisible force permeates everything in the universe – which means the "empty" space out there is not so empty after all. In fact, this not-so-empty space can actually turn into matter. The visible and measurable can emerge from the invisible and immeasurable. The immaterial can become material.

It's been discovered that electrons, as well as other bits of small matter, exhibit a very peculiar behavior in that they can be both a material object and an immaterial object – a material particle or an immaterial wave. Electrons can be a visible, measurable particle one moment, then an invisible, immeasurable wave the next.

When matter turns into an immaterial wave, it loses the properties of mass and energy. These are replaced by another property: information about the entity, which scientists have extrapolated into patterns of numbers. The interaction of these number patterns determines what kind of matter can be created. As such, waves can be thought of as potential matter.

At the most fundamental level, reality consists not of solid little atoms, but of a universe-wide ocean of invisible waves (or patterns of immaterial numbers). This is analogous to what the ancient Greek Pythagoras said: the things of this world are not made of stuff, but numbers.

Ultimately, the primary state of reality in this universe is an immaterial wave. A particle and a wave are simply different expressions of the same thing – the Creator's consciousness. These waves, or number patterns, come from and are expressions of the Creator's mind.

This brings us to another question: What actually turns an immaterial wave into matter? The answer: consciousness – both divine and human.

In the famous double-slit experiment, where single electrons were shot at a plate containing two slits, it was repeatedly proven that in the presence of human observers, the electrons always behaved as particles of solid matter. However, if the experiment was run with no one observing, the particles reverted to their primary state of existence – immaterial waves. In the presence of human consciousness, the wave always turned into matter.

What this shows is that even at the subatomic level, there is awareness in the material world. This reflects the presence of the Creator's mind. Whether it is a wave or a particle, even the tiniest bits of matter are aware of our presence. Why? Because this material universe was specifically made for humans and that causes matter to appear and persist in our presence.

The double-slit experiment has been replicated countless times and the results are always the same. Incredible as this may seem, invisible, immaterial waves have an awareness of our consciousness and always materialize in our presence. Some experiments have even suggested the mere knowledge of an experiment in a scientist's mind is sufficient to materialize a wave. Scientists have tried to trick the waves through different experimental setups, but the behavior is always the same. These forces cannot be tricked. Like King Midas – with a twist – it seems everything human minds "touch" turns to matter.

Other experiments have also demonstrated the Creator's mind in nature. Beryllium atoms move between "unexcited" and "excited" states – depending on whether or not an observer is present. To paraphrase one author, it's like a pot of water sitting on an open flame that won't boil when you're in the room, but once you leave the room – and stop thinking about it – it begins to boil.

Among other things, these are scientifically proven demonstrations that nature is imbued with consciousness. Freeman Dyson of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton has said,

"...mind is already inherent in every electron...."

Another physicist at Princeton, Robert G. Jahn, said this:

"I think we're into the domain where the interplay of consciousness in the environment is taking place on such a primary scale that we are indeed creating reality by any reasonable definition of the term."

Sir James Jeans, a British physicist, astronomer and mathematician stated:

"Mind no longer appears to be an accidental intruder into the realm of matter... we ought rather hail it as the creator and governor of the realm of matter."

These and other discoveries have provided science with something of a paradox: while science scrupulously avoids any reference to a transcendent realm of reality, scientific discoveries themselves are forcing us to accept that such a reality exists. The work of science itself is forcing us to accept that consciousness is an integral property of nature. As such, modern science is now taking us back to a more "primitive" view of the world, where the spiritual world is more important because the universe operates according to laws that were created by a "Great Spirit."

The reason matter persists and is aware of our presence can be boiled down to the fact that our consciousness is a part of and connected to the Creator's consciousness. Albert Einstein provides an example of this connection:

"Here arises a puzzle that has disturbed scientists of all periods. How is it possible that mathematics, a product of human thought that is independent of experience, fits so excellently the objects of physical reality? Can human reason without experience discover by pure thinking the properties of real things?"

Many scientists have observed how abstract mathematics – a product purely of the mind – magically matches the structure of the physical universe.

For example, Subrahayam Chandrasekhar explored the beauty in a mathematical entity known as an ellipsoid which, it was thought, did not exist anywhere in the universe. He even published an entire book on the subject. His contemporaries accused him of wasting his time with such an abstraction. Some twenty years later, after scientists began studying the different shapes of galaxies, it was discovered the ellipsoid is used in nature's designs. Scientists now use Chandrasekhar's book to understand such things as what holds the Milky Way together as it spins.

In the nineteenth century, Bernard Rieman discovered an entirely new system of geometry, which was little more than an obscure mathematical oddity until Einstein used it in his general theory of relativity.

In the 1950s, physicists Chen Ning Yang and Robert Mills became engrossed with abstract mathematical entities called gauge fields. It wasn't until the 1970s and thereafter that physicists came to believe that all the forces of nature could be described in terms of gauge fields.

There is a long history of scientists tapping into the Creator's consciousness in their dreams and finding solutions to problems. Srinivasa Ramanujan, an extraordinary Indian mathematician, said that the Hindu goddess Namakkai would visit him during his dreams and reveal mathematical formula that he would later verify. This pattern continued throughout his entire life.

Dmitri Mendeleyev had a dream one night in 1869 which resulted in the periodic table of elements and the prediction of three new elements, which were discovered within the next 15 years.

The discovery of the insulin hormone by Frederick Banting was directly related to a dream he had.

Science and mathematics are replete with such occurrences. How is it possible for these mathematicians to discover nature residing inside their heads? It's possible because mathematical ideas form a reality of their own, which we cannot create or change, but only perceive through our minds. These same ideas were used to create and sustain our universe. The reason we have access to these ideas is because our consciousness is a part of the Creator's consciousness. Like mystics probing ever deeper into human awareness, mathematicians have been able to discover these ideas inside their minds.

Einstein recognized as much.

"The intellect has little to do on the road to discovery. There comes a leap in consciousness, call it intuition or what you will; the solution comes to you and you don't know how or why."

Just as Plato believed that ideas are as real as matter and possess an independent existence above and beyond the world of material objects, ideas are even more fundamental than the world of matter because they ultimately create and organize it. The material world we live in was constructed from ideas that originated in the Creator's mind.

Another indicator that the Creator's consciousness permeates nature is instantaneous communication throughout the universe. Such communication was proven through experiments with entangled electron "twins," which act in complete unison even though they could be on opposite ends of the universe. When one electron changes its position or spin, the other makes those changes instantly. This is accomplished without any exchange of force or energy and without sending a signal that needs to travel through space. That is, these changes happen without having an identifiable material cause.

The communication between the twins is traveling faster than light – something scientists once thought was impossible. The reason they thought it was impossible is because it means the future and past would coexist, time travel would be possible and a Pandora's Box of paradoxes would emerge.

These entangled electrons are acting as if time and space do not exist. They're also acting as if they are not separated, but intimately connected.

It turns out, as some have suggested, they may not be separated at all. They may be connected at a deeper level of reality where space, time and the speed of light have no meaning. Where everything is interconnected and "everything interpenetrates everything." A world within our world where all of nature is in constant, instantaneous communication. A world that cannot be weighed or measured. A world that is far beyond our senses: the world of our Creator's mind.

The universe is not built from matter. It is built from the "empty space" in our universe. The Creator's consciousness is the invisible foundation of the universe which holds it together. The Creator's mind is woven into the fabric of the material world. It is embedded, imbued and saturated in our material world. It subtly penetrates and sustains our existence through a vast information network where instantaneous communication and the creation of matter from patterns of numbers are just a small part of the Creator's design. The universe is the creation of and a part of a Great Spirit. And, it was specifically made for humans to inhabit.

The Western World has come full circle: the universe does indeed operate according to spiritual laws. Instead of a great machine, our universe turns out to be the projection of a Great Spirit's mind.

Thanks for the Memories – But Where Are They?

Memories are, of course, an integral part of the mind. Modern science holds that memories are stored in the brain and, when the brain dies, so too do those precious memories. There are several big problems with this idea. Despite billions of dollars of research spanning decades, science has never discovered where memories are located in the brain, much less what memory is made of and how memories are retrieved.

Every few years, neuroscientists come out with new theories about how memories are stored in our brains. One problem is that these are simply theories and are either based on simple statistical correlations or have severe logical problems. There has never been – nor will there be – any real evidence that memories are located in the brain. There's a simple reason for this: memories do not exist in the brain.

One long-standing theory is that there are memory "traces" which are somehow stored in the brain. No evidence of a memory trace has ever been found to substantiate such an idea. This theory not only lacks evidence, but logic. If memories are stored as physical "traces" in the brain, then there also has to be a retrieval system with its own memory traces that locates and identifies the stored traces in the brain. But in order to use this retrieval system, it too would require yet another retrieval system with its own memory traces – and so on ad infinitum. Research into whether memories are physically stored in the brain began many years ago with experiments on hapless animals. Many of these experiments began with an effort to find specific locations of memories. The scientists, much to their dismay, came to the unexpected conclusion that memories have no specific locations.

For example, Paul Pietsch, a biologist from Indiana University, conducted over 700 operations on salamander brains. He sliced, diced, minced, flip-flopped, switched hemispheres and removed large sections of their brains. What he found was that no matter how badly he mangled their brains, their feeding and overall behavior quickly returned to normal shortly after these operations – as if nothing at all had happened.

In a large number of experiments spanning more than 30 years, Karl Lashley also tried to locate specific memory stores, or traces, in the brains of monkeys, chimpanzees and rats. He trained the animals in a variety of tasks. After training, he surgically cut nerve tracts or systematically removed various portions of the brain, then measured the effect on the animals' memory. He discovered the animals remembered what they had learned even after large amounts of their brains were removed.

Why were they able to remember their tasks? Because their memories were never stored in their brains in the first place.

A student of Lashley's, Karl Pribram, undertook a series of experiments with trained octopuses and their learned habits survived despite having various parts of their brains removed. This led him to conclude that "memory is both everywhere and nowhere in particular."

It's even been shown that moths can remember what they learned as caterpillars, despite all the changes they go through during metamorphosis, which includes dissolution of most of their nervous system.

"Water on the brain," or hydrocephalus, is a condition in which much of the skull is filled with cerebrospinal fluid. A British neurologist named John Lorber found that some people with extreme hydrocephalus were astonishingly normal. He scanned the brains of six hundred people with hydrocephalus and at one point posed the question: "Is the brain really necessary?"

What he found was that sixty of his subjects had more than 95% of their cranial cavity filled with fluid. Some were retarded, others were normal and some had IQs well over 100. One young man with an IQ of 126 and a degree in mathematics had "virtually no brain" yet he was fully functional. The only brain cells he possessed formed a very thin layer around the inside of his skull, about a millimeter thick. The remainder of his skull was filled with fluid.

Most neurologists will argue that consciousness is a product of the cerebral cortex, yet they can't begin to explain how the cerebral cortex manages to produce consciousness. In addition, there are instances of people with hydrocephalus who showed no physical evidence of even possessing a cerebral cortex.

In 2006, a study was published showing that hamsters with the most severe forms of hydrocephalus – where their brain matter was practically nonexistent – could think, move, breed and act like any other normal hamster.

It's not uncommon in the cases of transplanted organs, such as a heart, for the recipient to receive some of the memories, behaviors, preferences and habits associated with the donor. In one famous case, a female heart-lung transplant patient suddenly developed a taste for beer, chicken nuggets and motorcycles following the transplant. After she spoke with the donor's family, she found she had the heart of an eighteen-year-old motorcycle enthusiast who, yes, loved beer, chicken nuggets and motorcycles.

In another case, a young girl began having nightmares of being murdered immediately following her heart transplant. She was so traumatized, she went to the police. Her description was so detailed that authorities used the information in her dreams to capture and convict the murderer of her donor.

Personality changes have happened not just in heart transplants, which are the most common, but in almost every organ in the human body which has been transplanted.

If memories are supposed to be physically stored in the brain, how can a transplanted heart, liver or kidney take memories with them?

But what about memory loss from brain injury or degeneration? Doesn't that prove that memories are stored in the damaged tissue of the brain?

Not at all. The memories still exist, they simply cannot be retrieved. The brain acts as a memory retrieval system for human beings, not a memory storage system. If the brain is damaged or degenerated, this will affect its ability to retrieve memories, both short- and long-term. Often, following a concussion for example, there will initially be severe memory loss, but memory will be restored over time. This reflects the brain regaining coherence in its ability to retrieve memories that were never lost, but simply could not be retrieved. Memories are never lost with brain damage because memories are not a physical entity.

Also, people often recover either partially or completely from brain damage even though the damaged regions of the brain never regenerate. This is difficult to understand for people who cannot distinguish the material brain from the immaterial mind, particularly since memories are stored in the mind.

As a piece of matter, the brain can be weighed, measured, scanned and dissected. The mind, however, has no mass, volume or shape and it cannot be measured. Mind is a nonphysical phenomenon that interacts with the human brain, but is not a part of it. Essentially, the brain is a processor for the mind and its primary focus is attending to needs of the human body, such as bodily functions, sensory inputs and, yes, memory retrieval from the mind.

In other words, the mind doesn't require a three pound brain to exist. Looking for our mind (and memories) inside our brain is like primitive natives looking for the announcer of a soccer game inside a radio set.

Expanded Consciousness

By saying that the mind, or consciousness, somehow arose from matter, modern science simplistically concentrates on what is materially obvious. Nothing in science, however, explains how a group of molecules in your brain – or any other physical object of the brain – creates consciousness. As Dr. Donald Hoffman has stated, "The scientific study of consciousness is in the embarrassing position of having no scientific theory of consciousness." This is because modern science has it exactly backward: mind creates matter, not vice versa.

For those who have had out-of-body experiences, the common denominator is that their mind (and memories) was no longer a part of their physical bodies. OBEs offer ample evidence that consciousness not only can, but does exist independently of the brain. In fact, the material brain actually limits the mind. Without your body, you would experience Expanded Consciousness, i.e., a greatly expanded awareness of the universe and the ability to access thoughts and memories in your unconscious mind. With your body, you experience Limited Consciousness, with occasional brief episodes of Expanded Consciousness. Following an NDE, many have said that returning to their bodies was like being imprisoned in a "foreign substance."

No one knows that feeling better than Dr. Eben Alexander. He is a neurosurgeon and expert on the workings of the brain who once thought like all other conventional neurosurgeons – until he had a near-death experience. After that, the neurosurgeon suddenly stepped forward and declared that the mind not only exists independently of the human brain, but exists after biological death.

Jill Bolte Taylor, a Harvard-trained neuroanatomist, had an NDE and made this statement: "My perception of physical boundaries was no longer limited to where my skin met air.... Because I could not identify the position of my body in space, I felt enormous and expansive, like a genie just liberated from her bottle."

Other NDEers have described their experience as "...like an escape from prison." One subject said: "I've never felt so good. Unworldly ecstasy. Bright, bright light.... There is no ground and no sky. No boundaries of any kind. Everything is open. There are other people there and when we want to communicate, we can do so without having to listen, without having to speak...."

When your body dies, your brain dies with it. But your mind does not. All this preoccupation with the brain producing consciousness is simply the reflection of a materialistic view of the world, the primary bias of modern science. When you come to accept that the mind, or consciousness, exists independently of the brain, it resolves all the paradoxes the scientific view has created.

Given that our consciousness existed before our birth and will survive our death, what exactly is it? And if the mind is not in the brain, where is it? Many Spirits, in the afterlife, have described consciousness as a unique, immaterial energy wave which permeates not only the brain, but the entire body. This would, among many other things, explain how transplanted organs can take memories with them to another body.

Spirits have also described our mind, or consciousness, as expanding or contracting, depending on "frequency ranges." During our Earthly visits, we "tune-in" to a specific frequency range, which places limits on our minds, confining our perceptions to the material world, unless extraordinary efforts are taken to alter this frequency range, such as when mystics probe their minds, which is reflected in altered brain frequencies.

In the beginning of the book, there is a description of a Spirit returning to the Spirit World. It goes like this:

You then enter an area which appears to have spokes pointing in all directions toward different zones. Each zone has a certain vibration that allows spirit passage when their energy waves are attuned to the proper frequency. Each zone represents alternate realities. There are, for example, different worlds where a Spirit could travel other than Earth.

Our consciousness is an immaterial energy wave when in the Spirit World. When we become humans on Earth, it is tuned into the Earth's "frequency zone" and our mind converts these frequencies into a coherent material world. In other words, our minds construct the objective reality we experience on Earth by interpreting frequencies that are ultimately projections from the Creator's mind.

Tuning into different frequencies provides the keys to entering different realities and opening the doors to different modes of perception.

By analogy, if you put tiny free-floating particles, such as colloids, into ordinary water and vibrate the water at different frequencies, these particles immediately assemble themselves into three-dimensional geometric patterns in the water. Each pattern changes when the frequency changes, making visible the hidden geometric forms within the water.

We cannot hear a dog's whistle because our ears don't operate in that frequency. Vibrations from the whistle will reach our ears, but our bodies don't have the conversion capabilities to turn those vibrations into sound. In a similar fashion, human perception is limited by Earth's frequency zone. We are receiving frequencies from other realities, such as the Spirit World, but we cannot tune into them without extraordinary efforts or abilities, such as those shown by mystics or psychics. Just as we have a blur of frequencies penetrating our air space from various electronic sources, such as radio and television, there are frequencies from other realities which are crisscrossing our existence in our everyday lives. Just as different geometric forms suddenly appear in water, depending on the frequency, different sets of reality can be perceived, depending on the frequency zone your mind is tuned into.

Recall how the chair you're sitting in is mostly empty space, from a sub-atomic point of view. What keeps it solid? Deep-down, reality consists only of waves (patterns of numbers) and frequencies (vibrating energy). Everything is energy vibrating at different frequencies. That chair looks solid because our minds are able to scan this blur of frequencies, tune in and turn the frequency into one of the familiar material objects that make up our world. This is like a television tuning into a specific frequency and converting it into images. We are able to sit in a chair because we are a part of and share the same frequency zone as the chair.

Recall that when we look at a person, the image of the person is really on the surface of our retinas, yet we don't perceive the person as being on our retinas. What we are doing when we observe something on the retina is transforming the timeless, spaceless world of wave frequencies into the three dimensional world of space that is familiar to us. We don't see objects per se, but only the wave information. Our minds convert that information and we are able to construct an image of the world.

When people have their leg amputated, most will still feel the leg, as if it were still there. The brain is doing something similar in interpreting frequencies and projecting them into objects.

This is not to say your chair is not there, but there are two very different aspects to its reality. Without tuning into the Earth's frequency zone, the chair would just be a blur of frequencies and mostly empty space. Once tuned in, humans are able to transform the blur into a solid chair and sit in it because we, too, are a pattern of similar frequencies.

So which is real, the chair or the blur? Both, depending on whether you are a human being or a Spirit. Put another way, it depends on which frequency zone you are tuned into. Humans can sit in the chair, whereas Spirits cannot. Spirits can perceive the mental form of a chair, but without sensory apparatus, they cannot touch it and move right through it.

Dr. Michael Newton, a hypnotherapist, who has heard hundreds of accounts from people about life after death, has said this:

"I see the soul as intelligent light energy. The energy appears to function as vibrational waves similar to electromagnetic force but without the limitations of charged particles of matter. Like a fingerprint, each soul has a unique identity in its formation, composition and vibrational distribution."

A Spirit is pure consciousness. It has different capabilities, in terms of awareness, depending on what frequency zone it is in.

As mentioned previously, there are frequencies from other realities which are crisscrossing our existence in our everyday lives. Some people can tune into these. When properly tuned, these frequencies can lead to different states of reality and Expanded Consciousness. One example of this is called "Remote viewing." Remote viewing is when humans are able to accurately describe what's going on at a distant location. It's possible, in other words, for the mind of a remote viewer to "travel" to any location in the universe and describe that location.

Remote viewing combines elements of meditation and extra sensory perception. It was originally developed in laboratories funded by the United States military and intelligence services and was used for espionage purposes. This phenomenon can now be reliably demonstrated in both laboratory and operational settings.

In one of the early experiments, conducted at the Stanford Research Institute, a remote viewer (a retired police commissioner) was sequestered in a special double-walled, copper-lined room designed to prevent any radio contact. Then a team of two men was given a location to travel to that was chosen by random selection. After the team arrived at the location, about half an hour away by car, the remote viewer was asked to describe where they were. To give you an idea of what he perceived, this is part of the remote viewer's description:

"What I'm looking at is a little boat jetty or little boat dock along the bay. It is in a direction about like that from here (points in the correct direction). Yeah, I see the little boats, some motor launches, some little sailing ships, sails all furled, some with the masts stepped and others are up."

Remote viewers often do not have complete control over what they are viewing. For instance, in another session the former police commissioner accurately described a swimming pool complex in Palo Alto – except for one detail. He insisted there was a water purification system with two tanks at the location, but it was not found. The researcher assumed he simply got that detail wrong. Several years later, however, other researchers happened to come across an old photo of the site and discovered the two water purification tanks in the exact location the remote viewer said they were. The water purification plant had been replaced by a swimming pool complex. Apparently what the remote viewer got wrong was the time span he was viewing. He was looking backward in time.

Remote viewing experiments have been repeated by numerous other test subjects who were also able to describe the remote locations accurately. Many remote viewing studies have been performed by other research groups and they have duplicated their results many times.

Remote viewing is not limited by distance. Nor is it limited to those who claim to have psychic abilities. Some of the best remote viewers had little or no previous experience with the paranormal. Researchers concluded from this that a remote viewing capability (Expanded Consciousness) is no doubt a latent and widely distributed perceptual ability found in any population.

The researchers argued against the hypothesis that the remote viewer was telepathically tuning into what the team at the location was seeing. This was because the remote viewer would often describe the location not from the perspective of human eyes, but from a vantage point high overhead, sometimes several thousand feet overhead.

During President Carter's administration, a Russian Tu-22 bomber crashed in the dense jungle in Zaire. When satellites failed to locate the plane, the Air Force and CIA enlisted the help of remote viewers. Years later, Carter described the event by saying, "She [the remote viewer] went into a trance, and while she was in a trance she gave some latitude and longitude figures. We focused our satellite cameras on that point and the plane was there."

In another event, a remote viewer described a then-unknown ring around Jupiter. Scientists were skeptical and thought the remote viewer had perceived Saturn until the NASA Pioneer 10 flyby confirmed the existence of the ring.

Researchers have also tried a very unusual twist to their normal methods of experimentation. Instead of having the remote viewer try to describe the targeted location after it was chosen, they decided to see if the remote viewer could describe the location before it was chosen.

In one study, the location person was given nine sealed envelopes and told to drive around aimlessly. The remote viewer was then asked where the location person would be in half an hour. The remote viewer answered, "I got a quick flash of a black pointed area, like a, like a head of an arrow. He walks into it. It's like a triangle that he walks into." The remote viewer then heard sounds. "It's a rhythmic kind of squeak, like a rusty pump, or a not-well-oiled piston. Just a very rhythmic squeaking."

Half an hour later, the location person randomly opened one of the sealed envelopes and traveled to the location. It was a small park in which there was a black triangle in the form of a child's swing. The location person went into the black triangle, sat down, and started to sway back and forth in the rusty swing, which made a rhythmic squeaking sound. This was the same sound the remote viewer had heard half an hour before the actual – and randomly chosen – event occurred.

The precognitive ability of untrained individuals to describe a remote site where an agent would be at a future time before the target location was chosen has been replicated.

Ingo Swann, working for the CIA, described a failed Chinese atomic bomb test, which included drawings of the destroyed test site. This is noteworthy because it was done three days before the actual test. The CIA had given Swann the coordinates and told him "We would like to know what is going to happen at these geographical coordinates this coming Thursday."

These examples illustrate that Expanded Consciousness is not constrained either by the limits of space or the one-way flow of time that we experience in a material world.

There are other experiments where the remote viewer would attempt to gain information about what a person was actually seeing at a location. In over 330 experiments, the observations were significantly accurate. The odds of such accuracy are a billion to one against pure chance. Interestingly, when the remote viewer and person-on-site were bonded emotionally, the accuracy improved dramatically.

Remote viewing is just one example of Expanded Consciousness and it has been extensively studied. The results of these studies have been published in reputable scientific journals, including Foundations of Physics, Physical Review, American Psychologist and Psychological Bulletin.

In 1995, the U.S. Congress asked that previously classified psychic experiments, performed for the CIA, be reviewed. One of the main reviewers, a statistician, concluded that "the statistical results of the studies examined are far beyond what is expected by chance. Arguments that these results could be due to methodological flaws in the experiments are soundly refuted." She continued:

"Effects of similar magnitude to those found in government-sponsored research...have been replicated at a number of laboratories across the world. Such consistency cannot be readily explained by claims of flaws or fraud.... It is recommended that future experiments focus on understanding how this phenomenon works, and on how to make it as useful as possible."

One reason some are still skeptical of remote viewing is due to their ultra-materialistic bias, which drives them to conclude that remote viewing is not only improbable, but downright impossible. In 18th century France, skeptics also denounced reports of "stones falling from the sky" as impossible because, the skeptics explained, there simply are no stones in the sky! What we now call meteorites was condemned as a delusional absurdity. Even after farmers brought samples of meteorites that had fallen in their fields to the French Academy, the farmers were summarily dismissed as ignorant, superstitious peasants.

Remote viewing is a 20th century version of stones falling from the sky. It is simply an example of our mind tuning into a different frequency that expands awareness. This sort of Expanded Consciousness has also been described in accounts of the afterlife. Recall the description of death at the beginning. Below is an abbreviated version:

You suddenly become concerned about your wife. And just as suddenly, you are in her office. You can see her sitting behind a desk. She's on the phone speaking to someone. Everything looks normal. She has not received news of your demise.

Your concern turns to your son, Carl. Within a blink, you are in his veterinarian office. He is operating on a squirrel who had been hit by a car.

Your thoughts turn to your daughter, Peggy. Just by thinking of her, you are in her office, a large corner office in a New York City high-rise.

Your thoughts return to your own situation and, instantly, you are back at the scene of your death.

Out-of-body experiences (whether associated with near-death or not) are another example of Expanded Consciousness and much more common than you would expect. OBEs have been reported throughout history by the ancient Egyptians, the North American Indians, the ancient Chinese, the ancient Greeks, medieval alchemists, the Oceanic peoples, the Hindus, the Hebrews and the Moslems. Ancient religious texts such as The Tibetan Book of the Dead, the Bible, and the Koran describe NDEs which remarkably resemble the descriptions given by modern people. The oldest surviving explicit report of an NDE in Western literature comes from Plato's Republic, in which he discusses the story of Er, a soldier who awoke on his funeral pyre and described his journey into the afterlife.

As of 2005, 95 percent of world cultures have been documented as making some mention of NDEs and OBEs. In various surveys, it's been conservatively estimated that around ten percent of populations throughout the globe have experienced OBEs.

OBEs are not dreams or hallucinations because so many events witnessed during OBEs turn out to be real and have been validated.

Scientists at the University of Southampton spent four years examining more than 2,000 people who suffered cardiac arrests at 15 hospitals in the UK, US and Austria. They found that nearly 40 per cent of people who survived described some kind of "awareness" during the time when they were clinically dead before their hearts were restarted.

There are hundreds of documented cases of people "floating" above their bodies during operations. In one case, a comatose man was brought into the coronary care unit of a hospital. In order to intubate him, a nurse removed his dentures and put them in a cart. After spending some time in intensive care, the nurse who removed his dentures stopped by to give him his medications. He then told the nurse where his dentures were. "...there was this sliding drawer underneath [the cart] and there you put my teeth." During his deep coma, the man had an NDE and witnessed everything. He correctly described details of the small room, the people present and many other small details, including where the nurse put his dentures – something that would have been impossible for him to have seen.

Speaking of seeing things, studies have been conducted of verifiable events seen by blind people during their OBEs and NDEs. As a result of their research, the authors coined the term "mindsight" and wrote a book to describe a way of perceiving reality that does not depend on the senses.

In one particularly interesting OBE, a man suddenly found himself in another dimension where he sensed other discarnate beings, who turned out to be Spirits. One Spirit came close to him and they began communicating telepathically. The Spirit asked the OBEer to please contact his parents, who lived in the Moravian city of Kromeriz, and let them know that their son, Ladislav, was fine and doing well. The Spirit then gave the OBEer his parent's contact information.

After the OBEer returned to his body, he described the experience to Dr. Stanislav Grof, who was chief of psychiatric research at the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center and an assistant professor of psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Grof had induced the man's OBE using LSD.

While the contact information meant nothing to Grof or the OBEer, Grof decided to call the telephone number out of curiosity. When he asked to speak to Ladislav, the woman at the other end of the line began crying. She told Grof that "Our son is not with us anymore; he passed away, we lost him three weeks ago." Much to their astonishment, Grof then conveyed their son's message to his parents.

After studying over three thousand OBE sessions Grof had personally supervised, including the records of more than two thousand sessions conducted by colleagues, Grof stated the following:

"There is at present little doubt in my mind that our current understanding of the universe, of the nature of reality, and particularly of human beings, is superficial, incorrect, and incomplete."

It should be noted that some would label such OBEs as simply hallucinations because drugs, such as LSD, were used to induce them. This might be a valid criticism, except for one thing: the verifiable facts during OBEs show these were not hallucinations. Moreover, Dr. Stanislav Grof is a highly respected and credentialed psychiatrist who was simply researching the outer limits of the mind.

Animals have also been used in OBE experiments. Dr. Robert Morris, director of research at the Psychical Research Foundation in Durham, North Carolina, used animals to detect out-of-body visitations. In one experiment, a kitten belonging to an experienced OBEer, Keith Harary, consistently stopped meowing and began purring whenever Harary's consciousness was present, i.e., whenever he visited his cat in an out-of-body state. Numerous other experiments have been conducted with people in out-of-body states.

During an NDE, people often have a hard time believing they retained consciousness, lucid thinking, memory, emotions, and their sense of personal identity. In fact, these processes are normally heightened. Thinking is vibrant, hearing is sharp and it's often reported that vision can extend to 360 degrees. Free of their physical bodies, they are able to penetrate solid objects, such as walls and project themselves wherever they want. They also report the ability to read people's thoughts and communicate with other Spirits through telepathy.

You have no doubt read some weird stuff about OBEs, such as the priest who claimed to have had an NDE and during that experience met with a female God. The story was picked up by several news outlets and it circulated widely. This tall tale was a complete work of fiction. There was no priest or NDE and the story originated at a news site that makes its money selling fake "news" articles.

The story does, however, bring up an important point about OBEs in that invariably people interpret what they perceive during an OBE. This is no different than humans interpreting things they witness on Earth because the mind tries to force new experiences into familiar patterns. For example, a Christian experiencing an NDE may encounter a Spirit who he interprets as being Jesus Christ, whereas a Muslim may perceive that Spirit to be Allah, while a Buddhist will meet up with The Buddha. Those in the Western world tend to pass through a tunnel or funnel to the Spirit World, while those from other cultures might walk down a road or pass through a valley or over a body of water.

Interpretations are also true of material projections (also called "thought forms") in the Spirit World. OBErs will mentally project themselves as having bodies, complete with clothing. In the Spirit World, Spirits will also do the same thing. Those confined to wheelchairs on Earth will project themselves as having healthy bodies that can run and dance. Amputees will regain their limbs. The elderly see themselves as young again, while children will project themselves as adults. Other Spirits, however, will simply be "themselves" or "their mind" and do not project any forms onto themselves. They have described themselves as "a cloud of colors," "a mist," "an energy pattern," and "an energy field."

In the Spirit World, one's environment is largely a reflection, and sometimes a projection, of each Spirit's thoughts and expectations.

Shared Consciousness

Another aspect of Expanded Consciousness is shared consciousness.

Paul McCartney was once asked where his songs came from. His answer: "I don't know, they seem to come out of the air." John Lennon said something similar: "When real music comes to me – the music of the spheres, the music that surpasses understanding – that has nothing to do with me, because I'm just the channel."

When asked where they got the idea for something, people will often say they were inspired, or they dreamt it, that the idea came to them in a flash, and so on. What great, creative ideas have in common is that they often seem to come from outside of our own minds. In fact, there has to be some outside influence simply because quite often the exact same idea has come to many different people nearly simultaneously.

This isn't coincidence.

"Calculus, the electrical battery, the telephone, the steam engine, the radio – all these ground-breaking innovations were hit upon by multiple inventors working in parallel with no knowledge of one another...."

"Simultaneous discovery" – or what science historians call "multiples" – turns out to be extremely common and is far more prevalent than most think. As of 1922, 148 different major scientific ideas or discoveries have been documented as occurring nearly simultaneously by multiple people.

The law of the conservation of energy was independently formulated by four different people in 1847. There were six different inventors of the thermometer and nine claimants to the invention of the telescope. And, of course, there are the cases – and lawsuits – where a brilliant book or script idea came to several writers within days of one another.

On a larger scale, language developed at about the same time everywhere on the planet. Inventions, styles of music and art have also come to people at about the same time. "The great breakthroughs of classical Hebrew, Greek, Chinese and Indian culture occurred almost at the same time [750 to 399 B.C.] . . . among people who were not likely to have been in actual communication."

How are such events possible? They're possible because our consciousness is not alone, but connected to a shared consciousness which we use, at least to some degree, when we think.

There seem to be two levels of consciousness. At the highest level, there is the consciousness of the Creator. This is what mathematicians tap into when they discover formulas which describe nature so well.

Another level tends to be species-specific shared consciousness, which is a repository of shared knowledge among a species. Recall this passage from the description of life after death, in the beginning of the book:

"Your life review is kept in a knowledge library, which has the life reviews of every human being who ever lived on Earth. You will be visiting the library frequently in order to study not only other lives, but your own past lives, in order to learn from them."

As humans, we are sometimes able to access this repository, which contains all the memories of all mankind. One of the earliest pieces of evidence for this came in 1906 when Carl Jung was involved with a patient who suffered from paranoid schizophrenia. One day Jung found the man standing at a window staring up at the sun. He was moving his head from side to side in a curious fashion. He explained to Jung that he was looking at the sun's penis and when he moved his head, the sun's penis moved and caused the wind to blow.

Jung, of course, thought the man was hallucinating. Several years later, he changed his mind when he happened across a translation of a two-thousand-year-old Persian religious text. The transcript contained rituals and invocations designed to bring on visions. One of the visions described looking at the sun and seeing a tube hanging down from it. When the tube moved from side to side, it would cause the wind to blow. Since it was extremely unlikely this man had come into contact with this ancient Persian ritual, Jung concluded his patient's vision was not just a product of his own unconscious mind, but a product of the collective or shared mind of the human race itself.

It has been suggested that tapping into the knowledge stored in this shared repository is what savants are doing with their narrow brilliance. A "calendar" savant can tell you what day of the week June 30th, 2139 falls on, despite the fact he cannot add six plus six. An "automobile" savant can take one look at a parking lot and tell you the make, model and year of every car in it – despite the fact he cannot even read. An "encyclopedia" savant can have a conversational vocabulary of only 58 words, yet he can accurately give the population of every city and town in the United States with more than 5,000 people, the names, number of rooms and locations of the 2,000 leading hotels in the U.S. and the distance from any city or town to the largest city in its state, as well as countless other facts.

How is this possible?

In an attempt to explain some of these things, scientists have attempted to play the "gene card" and explain odd memories as simply the genetic transfer of knowledge. Unfortunately, genes are being asked to explain far more than they are capable of and this represents a lame attempt to keep the brain and genes in charge of memory. In the case of the encyclopedia savant, how would it be possible for genes to transmit information about a hotel that was built after the savant was born? How would it be possible for facts to be stored in a parent's genes – before the facts even existed?

What these savants are doing is perceiving information from the knowledge bank of our shared consciousness. Because we (humans and animals) not only perceive information from a shared consciousness, but also contribute our experiences and knowledge to it, our shared consciousness is something that is constantly evolving.

There are many other examples of shared consciousness, not just in terms of tapping into the knowledge bank, but of communicating with others and having psychic experiences. Such experiences have been documented in all cultures throughout history and at all ages and educational levels. The most common of them seem to be intuitive hunches, gut feelings, the sense of being stared at and knowing who's calling when the telephone rings.

An example of communication via shared consciousness was given at the subatomic level when we described entangled "twin" electrons which behave identically and change their behavior instantly in synchronization, regardless of the distance between them.

We also have examples of entangled human twins. In one case, the identical twins, Jim Springer and Jim Lewis, were separated in their infancy and adopted into separate working class families in Ohio. When they were reunited at the age of 39, it was like the "Jim twins" were looking at a mirror. Their adopted families, without knowing each other, had named each twin James. Both Jims married a woman named Betty, divorced her, then married a woman named Linda. Jim Lewis had three sons, one of whom was named James Alan. Jim Springer had three daughters and a son, who he named James Alan. Both twins had previously owned a dog named Toy. Both Jims were firemen and each built a circular white bench around a tree in their backyards. Both Jims preferred Miller Lite beer, chain-smoked Salem cigarettes, drove Chevys, disliked baseball, loved stock-car racing and chewed their fingernails down to the nub. They smoked and drank about the same amount and got headaches at the same time of day. They had voted identically in the previous three presidential elections and had a preference for always flushing the toilet before using it. They shared many other things including medical histories and psychological tests with results so close it was like the same person had taken them. Not surprisingly, their brain wave tests were like carbon copies.

It would be nice and very convenient to explain all this by playing the gene card and many have tried but, simply put, genes don't make people flush the toilet before they use it or create a fondness for scaring others with an explosively loud sneeze.

The Jim twins, in fact, illustrate "entangled minds," not genes. How do we know that? We know because over a dozen experiments spanning some 40 years have been performed by independent groups studying psychic communication between identical twins. Using instrumentation ranging from EEGs to fMRIs, when something was done to one twin it had the exact effect on the other geographically separate twin – instantly. For example, when one twin was asked to close his or her eyes, which causes the brain's alpha rhythms to increase, the other twin's alpha rhythms also increased. These tests have been repeated many times with the same results.

It's understandable that we would think twins would be more likely to have telepathic communication because of their biological origins, but such communication happens all the time between related and unrelated people – and sometimes in a very dramatic fashion.

Early one morning Arthur Severn went to a lake for a sail, while his wife remained in bed. She was suddenly awakened by a severe and painful blow to the mouth which had no apparent cause. When her husband returned from sailing, he was holding a cloth to his bloody mouth. A sudden wind had caused the boom to hit him in the mouth. His wife felt the blow at the same time.

There are many documented stories in which someone close to a victim actually feels the physical trauma the victim is experiencing at the time the victim experiences the event. In other cases, someone close to the victim may not feel the trauma, but knows the victim is in trouble – and at the time that trouble occurs. Trouble often occurs in dreams, causing a relative to wake up in the middle of the night in distress. They will later find out another relative had been injured in an accident or died. Such cases demonstrate what's been called spontaneous telepathy, which is often associated with intense emotional distress.

If our thoughts are truly confined to our brains, this sort of communication could not be possible. Dean Radin, in his book Entangled Minds, reviews the results of over 1,000 psychic, or psi, experiments and concludes "...that these studies provide repeatable, scientifically valid evidence for psi." Most of these experiments were conducted under highly controlled conditions and involved comparing what subjects selected, based on their psychic communication, versus what would have been selected by random chance. All the tests reviewed were highly successful and demonstrated, in a scientific way, that psychic communication was taking place. In most cases, the odds against chance were millions (often much higher) to one.

Other experiments have shown someone feeling another's physical pain. Dr. William Braud attempted to transmit his thoughts to a student under hypnosis. When Dr. Braud pricked his hand, the student felt pain. He placed his hand over a candle and the student felt heat. When he stared at a picture of a boat, the student made comments about a boat. And so on. Distance did not matter.

It should be noted that these were all relatively simple tests in that variables could be controlled. More "real world" tests, where variables are not controllable, are more problematic. Often when people try to set up these experiments, they also try to set them up to be as "scientific" as possible, instead of conducting them in the natural environment of the subjects. When done in a "scientific manner," the results are often less than positive because of the artificial surroundings. In other words, for the most realistic results (or what's called "ecological validity") tests should be allowed to unfold as they do in real life.

Shared consciousness is often communicated in dreams and can be quite dramatic. That was the case with Steve Linscott when he awakened from a dream about a man beating a girl on the head with a blunt object. The next day, he noticed police cars near his home. After relating his dream to his wife and friends, they urged him to report his dream to the police. A murder had, indeed, occurred at the time of his dream. After giving the police a detailed account of what he saw in his dream, he was later arrested for the murder because he knew too many accurate details for the dream to have been coincidental. Incredibly, Linscott was convicted and sentenced to 40 years in prison. Only after several appeals by his defense attorneys was the case finally dropped by prosecutors.

Dreams can be a very rich source of shared consciousness. One aspect of dreaming is precognition, or the perception of an event in the future, before it actually occurs. This will be discussed in a later section because it ties in closely with the afterlife.

Shared Consciousness Among Animals

It was mentioned that shared consciousness tends to be species-specific. There are many studies of animal behavior which provide insight into how shared consciousness works in their domains.

The past habits and behaviors of any given species are retained in their shared consciousness and will affect the habits and behaviors of future members of the same species. It essentially boils down to this: the more a species performs a certain task, the easier it becomes for members of the species to learn and perform the same task in the future because that task becomes a memory and a part of their shared consciousness.

A simple illustration of this is the rat maze experiments conducted by Harvard psychologist William McDougall over a 34-year period. What he found was that later generations of rats completed the difficult maze more quickly than preceding generations. The twenty-second generation of rats completed the maze ten times faster than the first generation. The rats, however, were not passing on their learning through genes. When he bred only the slowest learning rats in each generation, the increase in learning remained. He even bred rats from untrained genetic lines and they started where the last generation left off.

Francis Crew, a skeptical Scottish researcher, set out to disprove McDougall. Much to his shock and surprise, when he began the experiments the performance of his rats were about where McDougall's rats had left off. Whereas it took McDougall's rats hundreds of tries before they could negotiate the maze, Crew's rats learned the maze immediately.

Another researcher in Australia, Wilfred Agar, also set out to disprove McDougall and encountered the same results. The rats in both Crew's and Agar's experiments were from completely different genetic lines than those used by McDougall, proving the maze skills could not have been passed on genetically.

The conclusion: the skills were passed on through their shared consciousness or shared memory, which spanned not only countries, but continents. As Rupert Sheldrake has said, "...if rats learn something in one place, then rats everywhere else should be able to learn the same trick faster." The reason is because the skill is now a part of the species' shared consciousness, which is not confined to any location.

Another example is the well-documented spread of a learned behavior among the British blue tit. A small number of these birds learned to peck holes in the cap of milk bottles delivered to homes, tear the foil back and drink the milk. This activity was first reported in Southampton, England in 1921 and its spread was recorded regularly in Scotland, Ireland, Holland, Denmark and Sweden. Normally, one could argue that the spread was due to simple imitation, except it's not that simple. First, blue tits do not travel very far from their breeding area, yet the opening of milk bottles was recorded long distances from the original reports, including countries on the European Continent. One particularly telling instance was seen in Denmark where milk bottles disappeared during World War II, but reappeared in 1947 and 1948. Few blue tits would have lived long enough to carry the habit through the war, yet the practice immediately reappeared when milk bottles made their comeback in Denmark. The milk bottles disappeared, but the repository of knowledge in their shared consciousness did not.

Shared consciousness is very much in evidence in ant (or bee, etc.) colonies, as well as other social animals which move together in herds, flocks or schools. Much has been discovered about the sensory aspects of social animal communication which ranges from chemical exchanges and trails to the waggle dance of honeybees. However, there is another aspect to their communication which the senses cannot account for.

Termites, which are blind, provide some insight, so to speak. They communicate through scent trails and by knocking their heads against hard surfaces. The amount of information that can be conveyed through such crude means is extremely small. A scent trail may lead to a goal, but it cannot tell the termite what to do once that goal is reached. Head knocking is simply used as a warning signal that tells others to move into the interior of the nest for protection. But what guides the termites in their building and maintenance activities? How do they know where to construct passageways and chambers? Where the ventilation shafts should be placed? How to develop the overall shape and size of the nest? This cannot be explained by sensory information exchange. How do they know the master plan that controls their activities and results in such magnificent structures? As Eugene Maris, a South African naturalist has stated, "We cannot escape the ultimate conclusion that somewhere there exists a preconceived plan, which the termites merely execute." That plan is contained in their shared consciousness, which allows them to act as one and coordinate their activities for the benefit of the whole community.

An illustration of how learning is incorporated into shared consciousness comes from a remarkable experiment with honeybees by James L. Gould, a renowned Princeton ethologist and expert on honeybee behavior. His purpose was to see how honeybees locate new food sources. He provided honeybees with new food stations he had set up. Once they became accustomed to feeding at the stations, he moved them exactly 1.25 times the distance of the previous station. What startled Gould was that after just a few moves, the honeybees no longer had to search for the new location. What he found was that the bees were circling the new location, waiting for their food, before Gould had moved the food stations. The bees were able to logically deduce from their past experience where the next food source would be. When Gould was asked if he could explain how the bees could accomplish such a feat, this expert on bee behavior was at a complete loss and replied, "I can't. I wish they'd never done it!"

Since we're on the subject of bees, an anecdotal example of shared consciousness is an ancient custom of "telling the bees" which involves letting the bees know when their beekeeper has died. In 1961, after the death of Sam Rogers, a beekeeper in England, his children walked around his hives and told the bees of his death. Shortly after his relatives had gathered at his gravesite, thousands of bees from his hives, more than a mile away, came and settled on and around his coffin, completely ignoring the blossoming trees close by. After half an hour had elapsed, they flew back to their hives. Many similar examples of this kind of bee behavior have been documented.

In studies of flocks of starlings – some flocks as large as 2,600 birds – it was observed that they flew as if they were a single bird while making radical in-flight maneuvers. Much study has gone into the maneuvering capabilities of various flocks, but no study has been able to fully explain how they do this based solely on sensory information. The authors of one study stated their observations supported the notion of a collective mind. The same can be said for the often spectacular maneuvers of schools of fish and other social animals.

As a general observation, it would seem that shared consciousness governs the lives and behavior of "lower" animals, such as ants, termites and bees, to a greater degree than it does with higher animals. As you move up the evolutionary ladder, so to speak, shared consciousness is present and evident, but groups do not act like a single unit with a group mind, as is the case with lower animals.

Shared Consciousness Among Animals and Humans

Although shared consciousness tends to be species-specific, there are many examples of shared consciousness between humans and animals. Ginger, a part-Chow, turned up as a stray in a hospice in North Carolina. She was much loved by patients and their visitors. When a patient was about to die, she would lie under the bed until the person passed away, then move on.

A very similar story is about Oscar, a cat, whom a nursing home adopted as a kitten from an animal shelter. Oscar was not the friendliest of cats, but he got into the habit of making his rounds and visiting 48 patients. He would stop briefly, and then go on. The only times he would stay with a patient were if the patient was very close to death, usually within a few hours. Oscar would then settle in with them and stay until they died. At last count, Oscar's accuracy was 25 consecutive death "predictions."

Of course, conventional scientists have speculated that people who are dying might give off some "mysterious" scent only cats, such as Oscar, can smell. That's pretty lame. Recall the earlier account of an OBEer whose kitten consistently stopped meowing and started purring whenever just his consciousness was present. As most guardians know, animals can "sense" much more than scientists give them credit for.

For those who work closely with animals, psychic influences are taken for granted. The British dog trainer Barbara Woodhouse has said this:

"...the dog picks up your thoughts by an acute telepathic sense, and it is useless to be thinking one thing and saying another; you cannot fool a dog. If you wish to talk to your dog you must do so with your mind and willpower as well as your voice... A dog's mind is so quick at picking up thoughts that, as you think them, they enter the dog's mind simultaneously."

Rupert Sheldrake has collected thousands of cases of domesticated animals who know when their guardians (owners) are coming home. He has set up experiments to demonstrate this and gone to great lengths to explain why possible sensory clues or cues do not account for this uncanny knowledge. As Sheldrake has stated, "Telepathy is natural, not supernatural, normal, not paranormal, and is an important aspect of animal communication."

There are a vast number of stories about animals becoming lost while they were on vacation with their guardians, then traveling thousands of miles to reunite with them. How did these animals do it? Sensory cues fail to account for these extraordinary feats. A shared consciousness, mediated by the emotional bond between the animal and owner, is what allowed these animals to get home.

It also works the other way around. Jim Harrison was visiting New York City and called his wife in Michigan. She was upset because their neighbor's dogs had been missing all day in the midst of a blizzard. That night, in New York, Harrison had an exceptionally vivid dream about the path the dogs had taken. The next morning, he dismissed the dream and boarded a flight back to Michigan. When he got home, his wife told him the dogs were still missing. He immediately got into his car and began following the path he had dreamt about. He soon found the dogs huddled behind a large snowdrift and brought them home.

There are countless cases of animals reacting to their guardian's death or an accident. There are also cases of humans waking suddenly in the middle of the night at the time their beloved animals were killed.

The shared consciousness we experience as humans, be it with the Creator, other humans or animals, is a fleeting awareness of and access to a vast repository of knowledge about the past, present – and future.

Remembering the Future

"It's a poor sort of memory that only works backwards."

– The White Queen speaking to Alice

Humans have the ability to perceive the future during brief periods of Expanded Consciousness. Descriptions of the future are often fragmentary and just as often unreliable. Some descriptions, however, are highly accurate and full of detail.

Previously, we described how a remote viewer described two water purification tanks in a swimming pool complex that were not there – because he was looking backward in time, i.e., the tanks used to be there but had been removed. Conversely, whenever Dr. Alex Tanous, a talented OBEer, attempted to describe test objects that were placed on a table, he had a tendency to describe items that were placed on the table a few days into the future.

The one-way flow of time is something that is unique to a material world. It does not exist in the Spirit World, nor does it exist in a state of Expanded Consciousness. Just as Spirits are able to tune into different frequency zones in order to experience different realities, the past, present and future are encoded with different frequencies. Most humans have not mastered the "tuning" and sometimes end up in different "time zones" without intending to do so.

Just as a computer has random access to data, the data encoded in the past, present and future can also be accessed randomly in a state of Expanded Consciousness.

Perceptions of the future can be experienced by your unconscious in dreams, during hypnosis and sometimes they will occur in a brief instant without warning, such as when people experience a premonition.

Dawn Wanzo had an extremely dramatic dream that her close friend, Lisa, was killed in a car accident. She awoke from the dream very disturbed. Later that day, she told Lisa about the dream, but did not tell her that she died in the crash. A week later, Lisa was, in fact, killed in an auto accident. When Dawn saw the demolished car, it looked exactly like it did in her dream.

Amanda, a young mother in Washington state, was awakened one night after she dreamt that a chandelier had fallen into her sleeping infant's crib, crushing the baby. In her dream, the clock in the baby's room read 4:35. She remembered that wind and rain were beating against the windows. She awakened her husband and told him about the dream. He thought she was crazy and told her to go back to sleep. Still frightened, Amanda retrieved the baby from the crib and brought it back to bed with her. Two hours later, she was awakened by a loud crash in the baby's room. She rushed to the room and saw that the chandelier had indeed fallen on the crib and crushed it. The clock in the room read 4:35. Wind and rain were beating against the windows. What she had experienced in real life was an exact replay of what she had dreamt just hours before.

Hypnosis can also tap into our Expanded Consciousness and reveal the future. A French actress, Irene Muza, participated in a hypnosis-precognition experiment. When she was hypnotized she was asked if she could see her future. She replied, "My career will be short. I dare not say what my end will be. It will be terrible." The experimenters decided not to tell Muza what she had said and gave her a posthypnotic suggestion to forget everything. When she came out of her hypnotic state, she had no memory of the session. A few months later, her hairdresser spilled mineral spirits on a lighted stove, which caused Muza's hair and clothing to catch fire. Within seconds, she was engulfed in flames. She died in a hospital a few hours later.

Other dreams about the future can be seemingly trivial. One woman told friends over breakfast that she had dreamt that a farmer arrived with 33 eggs in a bucket, just as they were finishing their breakfast. Later, as she was standing halfway up the stairs, three more eggs were handed to her. That was the dream. Shortly, after actually finishing her breakfast the next day, a farmer showed up with a bucket which he said contained three dozen eggs. She put the eggs in a basket and paid the farmer. A few minutes later, her husband told her the farmer was short by three eggs. As she was counting the eggs herself, she was called from below by a man who met her halfway up the stairs and handed her three eggs. He explained they had been mistakenly removed from the bucket.

President Abraham Lincoln dreamt about his own assassination a week before it actually happened – and told friends about the dream. Immediately before he was assassinated – at the time the curtain was rising at Ford's Theater – Lincoln's dog went berserk. "The usually quiet and gentle pet started barking uncontrollably for no reason, as if seized by a sudden fear for its life. The dog began running around the family quarters in a frenzy looking for its master, the president." The dog would not calm down and no one on the staff could get him under control. Lincoln's dog finally stopped running around, threw its head back and began to wail. Everyone present thought something terrible had happened and that the President's life was in danger.

Premonitions are a product of our Expanded Consciousness. A premonition is a strong feeling that something meaningful is about to happen, often something emotional or unpleasant. We have all heard of these and many have experienced them. The literature and news is full of instances where people had premonitions of a plane crash, for example, and avoided death by not boarding the doomed plane. There are others who had a premonition of people drowning in a flood and moved their families out of the way just in time. There are 19 documented cases of people who had premonitions of the Titanic sinking. Some were experienced by people who paid attention to their peek into the future and survived the sinking; some ignored their forebodings and drowned; still others canceled the trip altogether.

In one study of serious train accidents, it was found that significantly fewer people took trains on the accident days than they did on the same day in previous weeks.

A woman suddenly developed a feeling that her son was in serious danger. She tried to ignore the feeling, but it became stronger. All of sudden, an obscure string of numbers popped into her head. She had an irresistible urge to pick up the phone and dial the numbers. She connected to an emergency room at a major hospital. After some back and forth, she found out that her son had been in a car accident and was seriously injured.

On June 1, 2009, Air France Flight 447 crashed in the Atlantic Ocean killing everyone on board. Immediately following the crash, Stefan van Oss, a man living near Amsterdam, was interviewed on Dutch TV. A close friend of his had a very bad premonition about the flight. Van Oss ended up canceling his reservation and saving his life.

An 11 year old boy named Miguel had been agitated for days prior to his trip with his brother on the ill-fated Malaysia Airlines Flight 17. He had been asking his mother questions about death, about his soul and about God. A day earlier he had asked, "How would you choose to die? What would happen to my body if I was buried? Would I not feel anything because our souls go back to God?"

As Miguel walked toward passport control, he ran back to his mother and threw his arms around her. "Mama, I'm going to miss you," he said. "What will happen if the airplane crashes?" She reassured him that everything would be all right. She watched as her two sons walked away. But the 11 year old kept looking back at his mother with sad eyes. Then he vanished from view forever. Flight 17 crashed just two hours after takeoff. After she learned of the crash, the mother kept saying, "I should have listened to him. I should have listened to him."

Barrett Naylor was a hard-headed Wall Street executive with no interest in psychic phenomena until one morning in 1993. As he stepped off a train in New York's Grand Central Station, he had a feeling he could not describe. Something was telling him he should turn around right there and go straight home. He followed his feeling and was glad he did. That day the World Trade Center was bombed.

Naylor got the same feeling eight years later, on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001. "Something told me ... that it was time to go home," he said. "I should just turn around and go back home." And so he did. His only regret was that he did not share his feeling with others because it may have saved lives.

There are thousands of others who claim to have had premonitions of the 9/11 attacks. In fact, that event generated the largest outpouring of premonitions of a national disaster ever received by the Rhine Research Center in North Carolina. These premonitions peaked just two hours before a hijacked jet crashed into World Trade Tower 1. In addition, hundreds of people sensed they should not fly that day. Indeed, the four doomed planes were over three-quarters unoccupied. Perhaps one unusually empty plane could be explained away, but all four?

Sometimes, people can see many years into the future. In the late 1920's, an American woman surgeon worked at a mission hospital in Wuchang, China. She was suffering from depression. During the course of her therapy, she told her psychiatrist about a dream in which she had seen a wing of the hospital destroyed. Before returning to the States, her psychiatrist asked her to make a detailed sketch of the damaged hospital. Years later, the Japanese attacked China and bombed Wuchang Hospital. The woman sent her psychiatrist a copy of Life magazine which contained a photograph of the partially destroyed hospital. It was identical to the drawing she had made for him nine years earlier.

There have been hundreds of studies on precognition, or perceiving the future. Dean Radin devotes an entire chapter to reviewing such studies. In one of the experiments, electrodes were attached to the participants to measure tiny fluctuations in skin conductance. Participants sat in front of a computer screen and were shown photos randomly. They were either calm photos, such as landscapes and nature scenes, or were emotional photos, such as erotic, violent or accident scenes. What they found was that the body (unconscious) responded before the pictures were presented. The emotional photos produced the larger responses.

In one of these experiments, Radin had an opportunity to demonstrate the experiment to biochemist and Nobel Prize laureate Kary Mullis. A few weeks later, Mullis appeared on National Public Radio's Science Friday program and described his experience. He stated, on the air, that "I could see about three seconds into the future." He then added:

"It's spooky.... There's something funny about time that we don't understand because you shouldn't be able to do that."

The idea of premonition assumes our Expanded Consciousness is continuously scanning our future and preparing to respond to it. The body (unconscious) responds before a future event has occurred in proportion to how emotional that future event will be. A premonition is something scientists do not understand and do not like because it challenges our commonsense beliefs about time and causality.

There is a growing body of scientific evidence showing our unconscious minds are making decisions for us before we are even aware of it. Scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences created an experiment that revealed even our most basic decisions are made seconds before we are consciously aware of the decisions.

In the study, participants could freely decide if they wanted to press a button with their right or left hand and they had to remember when they made the decision to use either their right hand or left hand.

Using fMRI, the researchers scanned the brains of the participants during the experiment in order to find out if they could in fact predict which hand the participants would use before they were consciously aware of the decision.

By monitoring the patterns of activity in the front polar cortex, the researchers found they could predict which hand the participant would choose seven seconds before the participant was even aware of their own decision.

By simply monitoring their brains, the researchers knew what the participant was going to do even before the participant knew.

This indicates that your unconscious mind (Expanded Consciousness) is in control, not your conscious mind. Our unconscious mind is making decisions we become aware of after the fact. In the larger picture, it is your unconscious mind that is leading you into the future. This should not be surprising because your future life, as expressed in your Life Plan, is stored in your unconscious mind and that Plan is unfolding. (Parenthetically, it's been estimated the unconscious mind is a million times more powerful than the conscious mind.)

Déjà vu is the feeling of having already experienced a situation. From our perspective, this happens because you were able to briefly recall a memory of the future the moment that memory entered your consciousness. In other words, you were able to perceive the future just as it turned into the present.

In the movie Casablanca, Humphrey Bogart has a famous line when his ex-lover, Ingrid Bergman, suddenly appears. It goes like this:

"Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine."

This simply emphasizes that life is full of coincidences. Or was it a coincidence? Some coincidences are simply meaningless. Other coincidences, however, are meaningful – so much so that they beg for another explanation. That explanation can be found in how Life Plans intersect.

A Life Plan means that a good deal of the future is predetermined and there is much in your life that is not in your conscious control. However, when a meaningful coincidence occurs, it may present you with the opportunity to make an important decision that could alter your future.

In the first part of the book, it was related how a Spirit can review their Life Plan to make sure it will optimize their learning experiences on Earth. We said this:

You are not able to see or experience your entire future in a Life Plan, just glimpses of it. Your Life Plan includes many significant parts of your life on Earth, including when you will be born, when you will be married, have children, your career choices and when and how you will die. The Life Plan serves only as a road map for your next life and does not imply that every detail of your next life is predetermined. If that were so, there would be no purpose to living on Earth as you would have no decisions to make that would advance, or regress, your spirit.

Our existence in the Spirit World predates our birth on Earth. Our Spiritual history has positioned us to work on certain specific issues in this life, which is guided by our Life Plan. Since everyone has a Life Plan, if you look at all of them together, they form an enormous web of connections unfolding into the future like a vast kaleidoscope. Some of the connections are the result of knowing someone in a previous life. These Spirits have also been reincarnated and you will make contact with them. Others will be new connections. Your Life Plan includes a wide assortment of people – both friends and enemies – who you will meet at strategic points in your life. It is the interweaving of other Life Plans with yours that will present opportunities and seeming coincidences.

The reasons for having most people in your life have to do with the challenges you are working on. Some of these people are very good at creating issues you have chosen to work on in this life. Others are in your life so you can learn from them.

When people see into the future, what they see is the unfolding of significant events in Life Plans, which sometimes include important world events. These are usually emotion-laden events ranging from danger or death to weddings and celebrations. It is Life Plans which make precognition possible as we are able to briefly glimpse into them, be it our own Plan – or someone else's.

In one case, Philip K. Dick, a famous writer, wrote a novel entitled Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said. After Dick finished the novel, the author met a 19 year old girl named Kathy, who turned out to be a drug dealer. Her boyfriend's name was Jack. The author spent months trying to get Kathy to give up dealing and warned her she would get caught. One evening, as they were about to enter a restaurant, Kathy stopped and said she could not go in. There was a police inspector inside the restaurant. It turned out that she was working with the police and, she confided, had a relationship with the inspector.

The girl's name, the boyfriend's name and the fact she was a drug dealer who had an ongoing relationship with a police inspector were all part of Dick's novel and formed the basic plot structure. The novel was pure fiction – until the novelist met up with Kathy – after he wrote the book.

In a state of Expanded Consciousness during his writing, Philip K. Dick had read Kathy's Life Plan and incorporated it into his book. Thereafter, part of Kathy's Life Plan actually became part of his Life Plan.

Edgar Mitchell, the former astronaut and sixth man to walk on the moon, made the following statement:

"We create our own reality because our inner emotional – our subconscious – reality draws us into those situations from which we learn. We experience it as strange things happening to us [and] we meet the people in our lives that we need to learn from. And so we create these circumstances at a very deep metaphysical and subconscious level."

When Mitchell talks about our subconscious drawing us into situations, he is talking about our Expanded Consciousness (or unconscious mind) following our Life Plan and drawing us into learning situations. Your Expanded Consciousness is guiding you through life in order to fulfill your Life Plan. The tools used by your Expanded Consciousness are intuition and emotion. You will be drawn in a certain direction and you won't be able to explain why. Your unconscious will pull you into situations where you have to make a decision which will alter the course of your life. The most dramatic decisions are those which will determine the course of your life for a considerable period of time. What career will I pursue? Who will I marry? Will I forgive someone or retaliate? Will I help a stranger in need, or walk away and avoid involvement?

It is in these moments of decision that your spiritual destiny is shaped.

Life Plans bring together people and circumstances that create opportunities for learning and growth. In this life, there is a larger, hidden pattern that underlies events and that pattern comes from your Life Plan. Most people look for an obvious "cause" to an event, such as accidentally meeting someone who changes your life or picking up a book at the library that influences you. If people cannot find a "cause," they dismiss it as pure coincidence. If it is a meaningful "coincidence" then it is no coincidence at all, but a part of your Life Plan. There is, in other words, no such thing as a meaningful accident.

The connectedness of Life Plans saturates our life and includes all the people who belong in our life and in whose lives we belong. It includes connections to specific people, places, circumstances and the "accidents" of history that interact to create our personal destiny. With some people, we may immediately feel a depth of connectedness that is completely inappropriate to the circumstances. With others, we may feel an immediate threat the minute we enter their presence. This is due to experiences we've had with these Spirits in past lives.

Life Plans may also include one's "Spirit family" with whom you have shared experiences over many lifetimes. This family would include Spirits you have come to know, trust and love through previous lifetimes, as well as those you have wronged. Our Spirit family during any given lifetime includes those people you are working with in your current life. They are the cast in your Life Plan.

Is Our Existence a Simulation?

There is more than enough evidence to show that humans are capable of briefly looking into the future. The ability to perceive the future and act on that perception, such as the mother who saved her baby from a falling chandelier, has staggering implications. It means that the future, at least a good part of it, is already in place. Otherwise, how could we possibly perceive it?

This leads us to a startling question: If a good part of the future is already in place, is life on Earth a simulation?

When you reincarnate, your spiritual identity never completely leaves the Spirit World. Spirits are able to split their energy in order to create a duplicate Spirit. Your "cloned" Spirit will leave for Earth, while the core Spirit remains in the Spirit World. The Spirit that is left behind is more dormant because its energy is less concentrated as a result of the split.

It's also possible for Spirits to split into more than one Spirit in order to become multiple Earthlings. This can greatly diminish their energy level. As one Spirit said, "It is as if they are sleeping on autopilot...." because they radiate only a dim light with low, pulsating energy patterns.

Now, if an image from the movie The Matrix crosses your mind, you're not alone. In the movie, the "reality" that Neo knew was a computer simulation. Indeed, Neo himself was a computer simulation projected from his real self, which was on autopilot and wired to tubes.

There is a large and growing body of literature which hypothesizes that the world as we know it is nothing more – or less – than a "numerical simulation." Even the popular astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, director of the Hayden Planetarium, says the likelihood of the universe being a simulation "may be very high." In his words, "...it is easy for me to imagine that everything in our lives is just a creation of some other entity for their entertainment." ,

The Universe and our existence is not a projection of some sort of advanced computer (see the previous footnote). It is, however, very much a projection of the Creator's consciousness. This "Earth School" we inhabit was specifically created not for entertainment, but to help Spirits evolve. Each one of us has a Life Plan and most of it was determined before birth – and, as Spirits, we took part in designing it. Humans can exercise free will, but it is within the context of a Life Plan that has predetermined elements. In that sense, we are indeed living in a simulated environment and our unconscious minds are leading us through our Plans.

When humans perceive the future, they do so in glimpses. A glimpse may have a dream-like quality, it could be extremely vivid or it could be a feeling or intuition. In all cases, it is still just a brief look at a future event – a plane crashing into a skyscraper, the dead body of a friend inside her wrecked car, and so forth. Even as a Spirit creating a Life Plan, you are only able to see glimpses of the life you are considering.

Why just glimpses?

Because every single aspect of the future is not strictly predetermined. If it were, we would be living the life of a robot and there's no point in that. The future represents potential. Future events have a probabilistic nature and are fluid. Chance does play a role and future events can be changed. Thus, when someone has a glimpse of a friend being killed in an automobile accident, what they are seeing is an event which has a high probability of taking place.

Hypothetically, let's say the friend was warned that she would be killed in an auto accident and, as a result, the friend avoided all travel in automobiles. Several weeks later, however, the friend slipped while climbing a ladder, broke her neck in the fall and was killed. In this case, the friend's death on that specific day was highly probable. Death in an automobile accident also had a high probability – until the friend stopped traveling in automobiles. By avoiding automobiles, the friend altered the probabilities of how she was going to die and thereby changed the future. It did not, however, alter the probability of dying on a specific day.

There are certain things in your Life Plan that have a very high probability of happening, one of which is the date of your death. Other than significant milestones in your life, everything else is probabilistic. Frequently, after arriving in the Spirit World, those who have had near-death experiences are told "it is not your time yet," and are sent back to Earth. This illustrates that the date of your death is one of the most certain events in your Plan.

The events in your Plan all point in a definite direction, but your actions can alter that direction. The reason we can only glimpse into the future is because it is only in draft form. You will write the final proof by the decisions you make.

Every human on Earth is following a Life Plan that was created in the Spirit World. What we have are billions of people following their Life Plans into a future in which all kinds of events are probable and often dependent on how Life Plans intersect. For example, the stranger you accidentally meet while shopping – who turns into a lifelong friend – was no accidental meeting at all but highly probable because the two Life Plans were synchronized with each other. Although it appeared the meeting was coincidental, that person ended up having an influence on your life and was a part of your Life Plan.

The important events in each Life Plan have a very high probability of happening, but there is also a broad array of decision points which represent opportunities for learning and spiritual evolution. The decisions you make will impact not only this life, but your spiritual life, as well as your next life on Earth. These are forks in the road of your Plan that will contribute toward determining your spiritual destiny.

Take a hypothetical case of a shooter who is contemplating killing a large number of students in a college library. His decision point is whether to commit to this killing spree, or withdraw from it. This is a point where he can change his future as well as the interlocking futures of his potential victims. The future Life Plan script is dynamic and will respond to events and orchestrate itself with other scripts, accordingly.

If the shooter decided to put his guns down, this would be recorded as a good decision and contribute toward his spiritual evolution. He will have created a new future by this decision. It would be the subject of discussion in his Life Review when he returns to the Spirit World.

If, on the other hand, he decided to kill a dozen students in the library, he has obviously taken the wrong fork in the road, ethically and spiritually. He has not only created a new future for himself, but the students he killed. The futures of all lives involved in this event would be altered.

This would include the young woman who woke up with a "weird feeling" that day when the shooter decided to pick up his guns. She had planned on studying in the library, but something in her gut told her not to go. Instead, she went to the gym for a workout. Later that day, she heard about the shooting and when it occurred. Had she not changed her plans, due to the feeling in her gut, she would have been in the library when the tragedy unfolded. Her intuitive decision changed her future and possibly her life.

What she experienced was a kind of premonition. Premonitions offer a lot of false positives and have to be evaluated very carefully. What they do offer is a glimpse into a "possible" future. These are warnings which give you an opportunity to act and alter your destiny.

Recall Amanda, who saved her baby from a falling chandelier due to a premonition. In her dream, she saw the chandelier crush the baby's crib, with the baby still in it, at exactly 4:35 in the morning. She awoke from her dream and discussed it with her husband, who abruptly dismissed it as just a dream. Amanda faced a decision point where she could alter the future – not only her future, but the future of her husband and most importantly, her baby.

If she did not act on her premonition, not only would the baby die, but she and her husband would be remorseful for the rest of their lives. She would have created a future with very dark overtones. She did act and removed the baby from the crib, thereby creating a better future for all involved.

Why certain people receive premonitions and others do not is a mystery. What premonitions do is provide opportunities to alter their future.

At each decision point, the future is adjusted around the choices you make. The future is dynamic and changes, depending on your decisions. New opportunities are created and old ones are modified.

Lives Within Lives

A key experience that unites the Earth with the Spirit World is reincarnation, which is universally reported in accounts of past lives over a wide range of demographics, religions and time. The phenomenon of reincarnation is so pervasive, unquestioned and obvious in these accounts, it is assumed to be an integral part of life.

Although billions of people throughout the world have believed in reincarnation for centuries, it is far from a mainstream belief in the West. In fact, any mention of reincarnation in Western countries will usually produce cynical looks – and from the same people who believe in the Resurrection and Virgin Birth. People who casually dismiss reincarnation have simply not bothered to investigate the staggering amount of evidence supporting it.

There are a lot of misconceptions about reincarnation and associated tenets such as karma. Most are borne of a simple lack of knowledge. Others reflect differing interpretations. The purpose here is not to rehash differences, but to examine the core principles in light of what they mean for our existence, both on Earth and in the Spirit World.

Dr. Ian Stevenson was a pioneer in documenting cases of reincarnation. He was a psychiatrist who worked for the University of Virginia School of Medicine for fifty years. Out of the thousands of cases he investigated, he selected just a few and wrote the book, Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation (1966). He meticulously documented these cases and concluded that reincarnation was the only explanation that could possibly fit the facts of these accounts. To this day, this work has never been credibly challenged and has silenced critics who took the time to read it. These were twenty cases of young children who were unexpectedly able to describe previous lifetimes, some as soon as they learned to talk. Since its publication, there has been a growing body of cases (both children and adults) where people have been able to verify evidence from a past life.

When children recall a previous life, it is normally before the age of five. The memories vanish from their minds typically by the time they are eight to ten years old. Recall that at birth an amnesia block is imposed on you so that you will remember nothing of your past lives or your life in the Spirit World. Memories of past lives and the Spirit World exist, but they are kept at deeper levels of the unconscious, which are not easily accessed. Considering that some children can temporarily recall a past life indicates the amnesia block is presumably not perfect and there is sometimes "leakage."

One popular criticism of reincarnation is that people only seem to remember being a famous person during their past life, the implication being that these people are delusional. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Dr. Helen Wambach, a psychologist, conducted a 10 year study with over 1,088 subjects and many more volunteers. Her initial reason for getting into this research was to discredit the idea of reincarnation. As she delved into the subject, however, Wambach became convinced that it was true.

She asked her subjects very specific questions about the time periods in which people lived, such as the clothing, footwear, utensils, money, housing, etc. Their recollections were amazingly accurate. Wambach wrote that "...fantasy and genetic memory could not account for the patterns that emerged in the results. With the exception of 11 subjects, all descriptions of clothing, footwear, and utensils were consistent with historical records."

She also found that 50.6 percent of the past lives reported were male and 49.4 percent were female, which is exactly what one would expect.

Ninety percent of her subjects reported lives as peasants, laborers, farmers and primitive food gatherers. The vast majority lived grinding, monotonous lives in a state of poverty. Less than ten percent reported being aristocrats and none remembered being anyone famous. The number of upper class lives exactly mirrored the estimates of historians about class distribution in the periods examined.

Reincarnation has a purpose. In a phrase, it is to advance your spiritual awareness, not as a human being, but as a Spirit. You might be asking, "Why are human problems a testing ground for spiritual beings?" To put it quite bluntly, there is too much love and empathy in the Spirit World. You have to exist in a material world, such as Earth, in order to learn to reject negative traits, such as selfishness, greed, prejudices against others and so forth. In a phrase, you have to be challenged in a way that's not possible in the Spirit World.

Learning happens through lessons built into your Life Plan. These will teach you how to be more tolerant, generous, humble and loving. How a person reacts to the challenges in life will determine the success or failure of learning that lesson. If you do not complete a lesson successfully, you will be required to reincarnate again until you complete the lesson. This is like repeating grades in school until each grade is passed. This is why many Spirits refer to this planet as the Earth School.

As an Earthling, you may not think of yourself as a Spiritual Being, but that's really who you are. That is your primary identity. Your temporary Earth identity is designed to test and teach your Spirit in order to make it more perfect.

Reincarnation can actually be viewed as an expression of the Creator's compassion. Despicable actions by humans are, unfortunately, quite common but nothing anyone does to other biological beings on Earth could possibly warrant eternal damnation and alienation from the Creator. No actions on Earth have genuinely permanent consequences in the Spirit World, other than the lessons that were learned. In this way, reincarnation preserves accountability and offers an evildoer on Earth an opportunity to correct his or her acts in another lifetime.

Parenthetically, there is no place such as "hell" or eternal damnation in accounts of the afterlife, even from people who were accustomed to thinking in those terms. When stories of evil actions on Earth are given to Guides or the Council of Elders, they are met with thoughtful consideration, not anger or rage.

Ultimately reincarnation provides us with the opportunity to learn enough lessons and gain enough experience from our Earth lives so that rebirth will no longer be necessary and we can move on to eternal life in the Spirit World. While the goal is to overcome the cycle of death and rebirth, is it precisely this cycle which gives us the means to escape the cycle.

The two main goals are enlightenment and learning to love. When all Spirits are perfect, when all Spirits are joined together, then reincarnation itself will end and the learning process will be over for everyone. Once that is over, the goal in the Spirit World is to move to the World of All Knowing and to seek unification with the Creator.

Karma?

The "law" of karma has always been an integral part and guiding force of reincarnation. This is unfortunate because the word is not only misunderstood, but the meaning of karma has changed radically over time. This is because the "law" of karma, as we have come to know it, was written by human beings, not gods. As such, it is no better or worse than any other religious text written by human beings.

Ancients taught that karma is discharged according to "an eye for an eye" philosophy, which maintains that sooner or later, people will experience for themselves the circumstances, both good and bad, they created for others. An eye for an eye simply reflects a primitive cultural sense of justice, not a spiritual sense, because there is no learning or spiritual development involved by simply gouging out the eye of another in retaliation. Some favorite modern expressions of this are "what goes around comes around" and "one reaps what one sows." This interpretation of karma reflects the ethos of a human culture, not a spiritual world.

We now have accounts from the Spirit World that give a very different meaning to the word. To fully understand karma, you must see it from the perspective of a Spirit, not a human being. How you wish to redeem yourself for a bad act, for example, is up to you and your advisors when you create your next Life Plan. It is not up to some impersonal "god" or "law" that is imposing a karmic punishment. Karma happens within the context of learning in order to improve oneself spiritually. To take a simple example, if you deliberately blinded someone in this life, you may choose to be born blind in your next life in order to experience for yourself what you did to that person and, more significantly, learn from that experience. The important point is that the choice is yours, not some impersonal law of karma. As a Spirit, you create your own spiritual destiny, not some karmic law.

In the Spirit World, all Spirits strive to become more perfect so they can ultimately unite with the Creator. There are different levels of Spiritual beings. Some are more perfect than others and therefore closer to the Creator. Perfection is not something that is granted, but must be earned. Those who are closer to the Creator are those who have spent many incarnations on Earth, or other places, in order to work on spiritual challenges.

Ultimately, the goal is not justice, per se, but improving oneself through learning. The challenge is to overcome the worldly temptations of life on Earth.

There are a few key phrases which summarize the actions Spirits can take while visiting Earth that will further their spiritual development. The first is the Golden Rule: "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you." The second is "When you help another, you help yourself." The third is "Love another as yourself."

When we intentionally injure someone, we are actually injuring ourselves. When we help someone, we are helping ourselves. How we treat others comes back to us not on Earth, but in the Spirit World. Karma is ultimately in your control as you plan the challenges you will be facing in the next incarnation. In a phrase, you create your own karma.

If you commit a murder you will set in motion events that may not necessarily mean having to be a murderer's victim in this or another life. It will depend on what you and your spiritual advisors think would be the best learning opportunity. Perhaps the best learning experience would be putting yourself in a situation that would require you to withstand extreme provocation without resorting to violence. And, if you did not revert to violence, it would move you into a higher level of consciousness. Whatever is decided, your Life Review and debriefings will teach you that destroying another biological life has only been self-destructive because you have retarded your spiritual progress. In the larger scheme of things, you have hurt yourself far worse than your victim. "An eye for an eye" may bring earthly satisfaction, but it does not promote learning or spiritual progress.

On the other hand, if you cannot move beyond the negative energies you created in previous lives, it may be decided that the best course of action would be to actually re-experience those situations in one form or another. In other words, if you murdered someone in a previous life, it may be determined that you should be murdered in your next life. The point is, there can be many different outcomes and they are all tailored to the specific learning needs of each individual Spirit.

Whatever path is chosen, it should be clear that if we think we can hurt another person or another living thing without hurting ourselves, we are mistaken. You cannot get away with murder because your Spirit will pay for it.

By following the Golden Rule, we can ultimately break the cycles of reincarnation. The higher Spirits who have followed this rule are those who have completed their cycle of incarnations.

This was said by one Spirit:

"There are people I didn't treat too well in my last life, and I have to go back to the Earth plane again and work off that debt. This time, if they hurt me in return, I'm going to forgive them because all I really want do to is go back home. This [the Spirit World] is home."

One of the big misconceptions of karma is that it somehow sanctifies the practice of blaming the victim. After all, if what goes around comes around, then the disabled child or poverty-stricken peasant must have done something in a previous life to bring their situation on themselves.

Again, karma is about learning, not retribution. When making Life Plans, Spirits have many choices of who they want to be and why. There could be any number of positive reasons why a Spirit should choose to be a disabled person or a destitute peasant because these lives offer rich opportunities for learning and spiritual advancement. The reason behind a current life on Earth has to do with working out the karma of past lives in our current life so we can transcend the consequences of our choices in a previous life. Each life is a link in a causal chain. Each link is a learning experience moving each Spirit to either greater or lesser perfection. What karma does is propel us forward by teaching lessons. Our future destiny is influenced by a past from which we cannot escape, especially when we injure others.

There is no impersonal karmic law consigning you to the life of a disabled person. This is a very personal choice because it is your choice. As a Spirit, you have chosen to be the person you have become in order to work on a lesson plan.

Karma has also been misinterpreted to justify social passivity. For example, "Why should I bother helping someone born into a disadvantaged life, since it's their karma." If it's someone's karma to be born into suffering, it's also the karmic responsibility of anyone who witnesses it to try to lessen that suffering. One person's karmic burden is another person's karmic opportunity. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

Karma is described as the principal of moral reciprocity, perhaps best represented by the Golden Rule. By following this dictum, we strengthen our awareness of the underlying oneness of our existence. In a material world, we are distinct and separate entities. Pursuing an individual good at the expense of others works very well – but it is the exact opposite of the Golden Rule. The task is to overcome such actions. We follow the Golden Rule not for some harebrained idealistic reason. We follow the Golden Rule for our karma, our learning. We follow the Golden Rule so we might discover in a single lifetime the primary truth of our existence – that the separateness imposed by the material world is ultimately an illusion. Everything is interconnected and we are all ultimately one. Our deepest and truest identity is an identity we share equally with all Spiritual Beings.

Problems with Karma and Predestination

Historically, karma, reincarnation, predestination and free will, or the lack thereof, have been inextricably related. The popular definition of karma requires that the future be completely predetermined so karmic justice will definitely take place. If the future were not predetermined, then a killer could get away with murder without any consequence in the next life.

When so-called experts talk about the future being predetermined, it is invariably about the victim of an act, not the perpetrator. For example, you will die at the hands of a assassin. Or, you will be killed in an automobile accident because a drunk driver will smash into your car.

This brings up some problems with the concept of a totally predestined future. If it is predetermined that you will be murdered, then the murderer did not have any choice in his actions. It was predetermined that he would kill you. But if this were true, he did not have free will. If he had no free will, this means he should not be punished. Punishing someone for doing something they had no control over is not just and does not compute either on Earth or in the Spirit World. There is no karma if someone has no free will.

Such problems with karmic justice are because human beings have been spinning tales about the ethics of living on Earth, when karma really concerns your life as a Spirit.

In another context, when a killer says it was his karma (fate) to kill someone, he is simply using this misinterpretation of karma as an excuse for his actions. The killing was the result of the killer exercising his free will. It had nothing to do with his predetermined "fate" that was decided by some abstract law of karma. What the killer did was impede his own spiritual progress and he himself – not some impersonal law of karma – will have to find his own path to redemption.

Life Plans

Before you reincarnate, you have many choices to make about the life you are about to live on Earth. These decisions will be made with the assistance of other Spirits. Your life on Earth will follow an unconscious script. You will choose your parents, your socioeconomic status, sex, the length of your life and other major characteristics.

It is the meaningful life choices you make which hold the lessons for you and create your destiny on Earth. The choices you make have consequences, not only for yourself, but for others. The Life Plan you create before you reincarnate restricts the options you have in your Earth life, but there are still many choices within every life.

Some have compared a Life Plan to a golf course. The holes are predetermined, but how well you play them is entirely up to you. Others have compared the Life Plan to a maze which we enter at birth and exit at death. We don't know where we are going or where we will end up. That will depend on the decisions we make. Wrong decisions may lead to dead ends, while correct decisions lead to progress. And, occasionally, a wrong decision may turn out to be the right decision if it presents us with learning opportunities that raise our awareness.

In order for a Spirit to advance, the Spirit must be challenged. These karmic challenges can take many different forms and they can range over many different Earth lives. That is to say, you may want to be a specific type of person in one life in order to set up a challenge in the life that follows. Selecting a hard life is not necessarily a sign of making amends for past failings in a previous life, but may be part of a plan for your life in the future.

Life Plans cannot be viewed just within the context of one life, but must be seen within the context of many different lives as each has its own lessons to be learned. For example, choosing to be a homosexual presents a difficult road in life and can often be traced to a need to understand the differences in gender identity as they relate to events in a Spirit's previous life.

Life Plans include karmic tests at key points in our lives. Steve Logan, for example, felt extremely hostile toward his father and would seldom visit him in the nursing home where his father was extremely ill. One day Steve felt that, for some inexplicable reason, he needed to visit him. He felt that "something was at stake." When he entered the room, his father was having difficulty breathing. Steve saw the air hose supplying oxygen to his father had become dislodged. Steve knew he could turn his back, walk away and let his father die. He thought about it, but then called the nurse, which allowed his father to live.

Several years later Steve was in a serious bicycle accident and miraculously escaped with just a fractured femur. Ten years after that, under hypnosis, Steve learned that these two life and death events were causally connected. As a Spirit, he had set up the incident with his father as his own karmic test. In Steve's words:

"My karmic script clearly stated that the life-or-death incident with my father was most definitely a very important test that I had set myself. If I could forgive him his transgressions against me – which appeared to extend over several lifetimes – I would not be killed in the bicycle accident. The expectation was there in the plan that because of my past conduct I would allow my father to die. But I passed the test and, after my accident, the plan was at an end! I learned that sketchy plans for future lives had been brought forward to operate in the current life."

This test illustrates how our lives can take different directions, depending on how we respond to critical choices.

Life Plans allow you to set up challenges for yourself during your Earth life. The individual seeks out challenges and ordeals, knowing that they contain the greatest opportunities for learning and growth. Becoming an alcoholic or hard drug addict would obviously be a challenge. How you deal with that challenge not only affects your life on Earth, but your Spiritual life as well. If you succumb to the challenge and let drugs take control of your life, you will have failed. Your spiritual progress will be halted and you may have to relive this lesson in another life. If, on the other hand, you overcome your dependence on drugs and turn desperation into a passion for life, you will become more enlightened and move closer to the Creator when you return to the Spirit World.

Unconscious inclinations move us through the maze of our Life Plans and into learning situations in which decisions are made. Many events in our lifetimes will appear to be accidental and without a cause, but the cause is often buried deep in the fabric of our spiritual history.

Conclusion

Earth is not our home, but a way station in our journey as Spirits. When we are Home, we exist as pure consciousness. A precocious, terminally ill, seven year old boy summed it up perfectly: "Death is like walking into your mind."

The traditional definition of "life" should be changed due to the simple fact that "life" continues after biological death. I would argue that life should be defined as consciousness. Our current Earthly life is just a small link in a succession of lives we have led on this planet. Biological death simply means the fulfillment of our purpose here on Earth. This lesson is over. You now move on to the next lesson until you graduate from the Earth School.

Picture the entire human race at work in a cosmic classroom, each of us working on our own lesson plans. We know that living in an imperfect world will help us to appreciate the true meaning of perfection. We cycle back and forth between the physical and spiritual worlds on a journey that continues until we complete what we came to Earth to accomplish.

We don't know when our cycle of reincarnation will end. That will depend on how we live our life on Earth.

Why is this a better view of the world?

For one thing, it means you can look yourself in the eye in front of a mirror and say "I will always exist." You can banish the fear of death and lead a much happier life because of it. Yes, you will lose your body, but you won't lose your mind because you are already immortal.

Some people are concerned about the inevitable death of the universe. Everything we have worked so hard to create on Earth will be destroyed. So why do anything at all? But, in fact, you will exist – and the knowledge bank humans have created will continue to exist – even when our material universe ceases to exist. Universes come and go. You do not. You have bigger fish to fry.

You can also look around you – at your spouse, your children, extended family, best friends, work colleagues, the plumber who fixed your bathroom sink, the newscasters you watch on television – and realize they have all led previous lives and are here on Earth to learn as spiritual beings. To see humans as Spirits means you can be more understanding and compassionate toward them.

It's a better view because we know that we're safe and that nothing could possibly separate us permanently from the source of life. We know that the rigors we face in this Earth life are ultimately for our own benefit. Not in this life, but our spiritual life.

It's a better view of the world because we can understand the stage we are on, the play we are all part of and that Earth is a temporary learning laboratory, a place where we come in order to improve ourselves and others as Spirits.

It's a better view of the world because we realize that in a previous life, we could have belonged to a religion we now despise, to a race we now loathe, to a gender we now look down on. And because of that, we realize we should no longer scorn those of a different religion, race, gender, sexual orientation or ethnicity. If we did, we could be despising not only our own past but possibly our future as well.

If you detested Jews in one life, it may very well be your chosen destiny to be a Jew in another life. If you have only contempt for blacks in one life, you may find yourself wanting to live the life of a black man or woman in the next life.

Your past lives represent a rich tapestry of experience in the human race and you could have been a wealthy banker, a poverty-stricken peasant and a prostitute in various time periods.

You could be living next door to someone who was famous or infamous in his or her past life. You will read the newspaper differently now – and the obituaries.

There has been a lot of talk about saving the planet for future generations. But what if we realized that we will be part of those future generations? The world of our next life is the world we are creating right now.

Time after time after time again, the message coming from the Spirit World is that we need to learn to love each other. This is one of the key reasons we are sent to the Earth School – to see if we can learn to love. Many Spirits have said that the ultimate purpose of human existence is to love.

Many who have had mystical experiences report a "conviction that love is at the center of everything" and it entailed "a feeling of deep and profound peace."

Those who have had near-death experiences are almost always profoundly changed by the journey, becoming happier, more optimistic and less concerned about material possessions. Their capacity to love expands enormously as they become more spiritual. They have a sense of living in a compassionate and intelligent universe. They have a sense that a loving presence is always with them. They have a sense of never feeling alone.

A researcher of near-death experiences concluded, "The message is universal love. Every near-death experience is convinced that the purpose of life is to grow in our ability to give and receive love."

The second most important thing, after learning to love, is to acquire knowledge, especially knowledge as it relates to self-growth and the ability to help others.

Your ability to love and your ability to acquire knowledge are two key components that are looked at during a Life Review.

One of the key components of love is its expression through emotion. One way our emotions express themselves is through empathy. In fact, the spread of empathy among humans is the surest way to raise our consciousness and understanding of one another. One way to raise empathetic feelings among humans is to realize that we're all Spirits sent to Earth, trapped in bodies, trying to do the best we can to work on bettering ourselves. Empathy is the glue that can potentially connect us all.

Living life and death to the fullest is quite different than the usual clichés about living life on Earth to the fullest. This means we must always be aware that our spiritual selves are an integral part of our biological selves and our deepest spiritual identity is one we share with all others living on Earth. When this awareness exists, it profoundly changes what living to the fullest implies. Regardless of your situation on Earth, living life to the fullest means you must be aware of and work on your spiritual destiny. Regardless of your Life Plan, you can work on your spiritual destiny by simply following the key rules outlined in the last few chapters and summarized below:

Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

When you help another, you help yourself.

Love another as yourself.

Ultimately, living life and death to the fullest means to take all steps you can toward gaining enlightenment and learning to love. Here are a few quotes from Mother Teresa about love, which casts light on what it means to live life to the fullest.

"If you judge people, you have no time to love them."

"Kind words can be short and easy to speak, but their echoes are truly endless."

"The hunger for love is much more difficult to remove than the hunger for bread."

"Spread love everywhere you go. Let no one ever come to you without leaving happier."

"Let us always meet each other with a smile, for the smile is the beginning of love."

Our collective goal on Earth, as humans, is to advance human consciousness and living according to the key rules is a sure way to advance and expand it. The ability to experience and learn about the Spirit World through near-death experiences and other means is an important part of the evolution of our shared consciousness. In successfully working on the evolution of our own Spirit, in an Earthly setting, we cannot help but further the collective human spirit as well. Life comes back to us in our treatment of others in order to teach us that although we are physically distinct, we are ultimately one.

Notes

A Humane God?

One of the problems most religions run into is trying to reconcile a humane and compassionate God with all the suffering innocent human beings endure on Earth. Here is a typical comment:

"Why would a benevolent and omnipotent guy like they claim God to be, allow a child to be born sick (Down's syndrome) in the first place? Doesn't He have the power to prevent this sort of thing?"

Authorities in religious orders have strained the limits of logic to answer the question of human suffering, particularly among the innocent. Ultimately they end up throwing logic out the window and resign themselves to having faith that despite the massive misery throughout the world, God is all-loving, all-powerful, and all-knowing. In the end, all this suffering will be rewarded in the afterlife. This, of course, does not explain why the suffering had to occur in the first place.

In traditional religions, God is capricious and either permits or wills His creations to suffer inexplicably. Wrongdoing in a short, single lifetime will result in an eternity of suffering. How could such a God, who allows humans to live in such disparate circumstances, where some live lavishly rich lives and others are on the verge of starvation, possibly be a loving and just God? How could such a God be moral?

Unable to recognize the logic or purpose in suffering within a single lifetime, religions put the blame on the inscrutability of God. There is a higher logic at work we cannot comprehend. The problem of suffering thus becomes part of the mystery of God.

And there it sits today.

Of course, the problem of human misery in the face of an unfathomable God has been forced on religious orders by the assumption that we only live once on Earth. When we look at the larger picture of living multiple lives and that we, as individuals, had a great deal of input in choosing the type of life we would lead, human suffering becomes not only more complex, but also more understandable. Reincarnation so expands our perspective that it makes traditional religions seem like old, tired institutions which proclaim only their religion has the truth and all others speak falsehoods.

Instead of a universe without order that we cannot trust because it is ruled by random chance and an inscrutable God, we can see a universe which has logic for each individual's existence; where the consequences of choices made in one life will register in another. The actions of a short, single life on Earth will not cause an eternity of existence in either heaven or hell, but will reverberate in the next life as we are given another opportunity to further our spiritual evolution. Through our suffering on Earth comes learning and wisdom that our Spirit takes with it.

The Creator arranged it so that a Spirit's chances of attaining perfection are maximized by giving Spirits multiple opportunities to purify themselves. This is not possible to do in just a single life. Reincarnation gives suffering meaning, mercy and compassion.

Although choosing to suffer during a lifecycle makes karmic sense on an individual basis, the question of intentional mass genocide – such as the slaughter of millions of people – does not.

From a human perspective, the Nazi genocide (and other holocausts) is incomprehensible. From the perspective of a Spirit, however (and as bad as this may sound), it must be remembered that only beings of flesh were affected and humans are essentially pawns in our spiritual evolution. Instead of a horrific permanent end to millions of human lives, this was but a single chapter in the continuing saga of these Spirits. In the next life, these Spirits – now wiser and kinder for their ordeals – may choose to live happy lives that turn their tragedies in one life into joyful lives in another.

It should also be kept in mind that every year, over seven million people die of hunger or hunger-related diseases. Millions more die in horrific ways such as accidents, illnesses and war. These events represent something of a systemic holocaust that is built into the human condition which all of us must contend with.

The horror of holocaust memories is in our shared consciousness and will, hopefully, contribute toward eliminating such terror at some distant point in the future. These are memories will contribute to the continuing human struggle to overcome fear, ignorance and prejudice.

An Animal Afterlife

It can be argued that animals use their Expanded Consciousness far more than humans. We have given just a few examples, such as when a dog and a cat knew when someone was dying and stayed by them until death. There was also the case of the kitten becoming aware of his guardian's presence even though his guardian was in an out-of-body state at the time. We also discussed shared consciousness among social animals.

Unfortunately, we can't speak directly to animals so we don't know if they've had NDEs or OBEs. We also can't put them under hypnosis and delve into their unconscious minds to see if they have lived previous lives and if they exist in the Spirit World.

Although our knowledge is very limited, there are brief descriptions by Spirits about animals in the afterlife. According to these accounts, animals live in their own "Animal Spirit World." In the Spirit World, an Animal Caretaker, or tracker, can find the Spirit of a pet from a previous life and bring the pet to you so you can be with that pet whenever you want.

Through animal communicators, there is evidence that animal Spirits reincarnate and can come back as different animal species. There is also evidence they can decide the people and life situations they want to experience during a lifetime, which indicates that animals, too, may have Life Plans. Have you ever had an animal come into your life unexpectedly? Or wondered what drew you to an animal in a shelter? It may be the intersecting of your Life Plan with the animal's Life Plan.

According to Spirit reports, there is a strict delineation between the two spirit worlds in that animal Spirits cannot become human Spirits and human Spirits cannot become animal Spirits. According to these accounts, when energy is first created, it is assigned to certain mental forms and once assigned, a Spirit cannot move between these forms. This should not be taken to imply that humans are more important than members of other species. They are just different, according to Spirit accounts.

There are those who argue that people who kill and eat animals will become animals in the next life. Some cultures have constructed elaborate systems that tie specific moral failings to animal incarnations as a form of punishment. Many primitive folk beliefs propagate the same threatening message: "Do this and you will come back as an animal!" According to Spirit accounts, this is not possible.

When animals die horrific deaths at the hands of humans, some people will say it was the animal's karma, implying that a Spirit who was previously human came back as an animal and met his or her karmic fate. This "karmic fate" attitude is often used as an excuse for not doing anything in the face of animal cruelty.

Animals are spiritual beings having an animal experience on Earth, just as humans are spiritual beings having a human experience. The bottom line is that we are all, foremost, spiritual beings. Think about that the next time you hear someone say, "It's only an animal."

For the Skeptical

"There are two ways to be fooled. One is to believe what isn't true; the other is to refuse to believe what is true." – Soren Kierkegaard

Modern science bases proof on measurement and observation which is designed for a material – not immaterial – world. Proof of an afterlife exists, but such evidence cannot be physical since, by definition, death brings physical life (and measurement) to an end. What we are dealing with is a range of experiences that simply cannot be controlled, measured or tested.

Skeptics of our subject matter tend to be overwhelmingly of the materialist persuasion. Materialists assume that only phenomena or objects that can be measured exist. Or, to put it another way, only phenomena or objects that exist can be measured.

As we have seen, physics has shown this assumption to be false in that objects in the subatomic realm, such as electrons, do not exist unless they are being observed, i.e., the existence of objects is observer-dependent. Quantum mechanics has also proven that an object does in fact exist in a state of pure potential, and in that state it cannot be measured. This presents a paradox for materialists which they cannot resolve.

Materialists ask, "How can an immaterial, mental substance act upon matter?" Well, one answer that is indisputable comes from the double-slit experiment which has proven our consciousness turns immaterial waves into matter. In other words, the materialist assumption that matter is all that exists has been scientifically proven to be wrong beyond a shadow of a doubt.

Without a measuring device to guide their beliefs, materialists are awash in a sea of denial. Scientists have long stated that "If you cannot prove it, it does not exist." The problem is that if scientists ever admitted to the reality of an immaterial world, there would be nothing to prove because their chosen instruments of proof, e.g., measurement in traditional time and space, would be useless. Experiences in the immaterial realm are far beyond controlled scientific testing, which is simply not up to the task.

Science has its place in the material world, but there is much more to reality than simply things that can be measured. Everyday examples are human thoughts and feelings – consciousness and love, for example – which cannot be adequately described as material phenomena. Sure, you can wire up someone and measure the effects of love, but you're not really measuring the phenomenon of love. And, while we're on the subject, materialists are at a loss to explain how subjective inner experiences, such as love and spiritual epiphanies, arise from physical processes in the brain. Or, how do you measure telepathy? The skeptic's answer is that you can't because such things don't exist. Or, more to the point, such things don't exist because you can't measure them.

There was recently an article about shared death experiences and, of course, a skeptic was interviewed about such claims. Here is the skeptic's reply: "...people who claim that a soul persists after death would have to answer other questions: What particles make up the soul, what holds them together, and how does it interact with ordinary matter?"

This is an example of how badly skeptics are mired in materialism. There are no particles in the soul because the soul is immaterial. Life after death cannot be physical since, by definition, death brings physical life to an end. This skeptic is trying to deny that an immaterial phenomenon exists by asking questions about its material properties. The soul does not have material properties and obviously the skeptic either doesn't understand that or won't accept it.

In a nutshell, the scientific method can successfully deal with a slice of reality that we happen to live in. It is not capable of dealing with those other slices of reality that exist beyond the material world.

Little data exists to help explain the cause of NDEs, i.e., why some people experience them and others don't. One physiological explanation attributes NDEs to decreased oxygen or a complete lack of oxygen. In both cases, however, such conditions generally produce agitation and/or belligerence, which is very unlike the common peaceful near-death experiences people have actually documented. More to the point, those who have experienced NDEs do not have lower oxygen levels than those who do not have them.

Another explanation attributes NDEs to the medications given to the dying. Although some drugs may induce some similarities to NDE experiences, comparative studies have shown that those who received medications actually report fewer NDEs than those who received no medication.

There are other speculative explanations attributed to neurotransmitters and activities in specific locations of the brain but there is no evidence to suggest these are causal mechanisms.

There are also numerous psychological models, including wishful thinking, retroactive confabulation and expectations, but none of these are supported by any evidence. And, while expectations can influence certain features of an out-of-body experience, they do not influence the experience itself. For example, children too young to have expectations about an afterlife describe the same NDE as adults. Also, cross-cultural studies show few differences in the NDE experience. In other words, the sharpening of mental functioning during an NDE, at the very time the brain is impaired, cannot be explained by these scientific models.

Many have also declared that NDEs are simply meaningless hallucinations. However, even hallucinations register on an EEG. In the many cases where people had NDEs and a flat EEG, had their experience been a simple hallucination, it would have been recorded on their EEG, but it was not.

Some have tried to explain accurate accounts of the goings-on in operating rooms during out-of-body experiences by suggesting the subjects were actually semiconscious and therefore able to recall everything that happened. Memories of surgical procedures by semiconscious patients almost invariably tend to be of conversations between doctors and nurses – as opposed to being visual. They also tend to be disjointed and dreamlike, compared to the highly lucid descriptions offered by near-death patients who are having an out-of-body experience. In addition, such memories are frequently unpleasant and wrought by an awareness of pain, whereas out-of-body experiences are almost always described as extremely pleasant and totally devoid of pain.

Some skeptics have also tried to argue that mystical experiences are the result of temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE). People having TLEs typically report visual and auditory hallucinations, among a host of other symptoms. Very rarely, however, do they report spiritual experiences.

The big problem is that the vast majority of people who have had mystical experiences are not epileptics. If TLE really produced such experiences, all or most people suffering from this disorder would have hallucinatory mystical experiences. They have not.

All of these efforts to discredit the near-death experience do not even touch on the striking similarities of near-death experiences across ages, cultures, races, continents and centuries.

Skeptics also attack the use of hypnosis as a source of evidence for past lives because, according to them, there is too great a chance the therapist could contaminate the data through suggestion.

While it's possible this could happen with some home-grown hypnotist who doesn't know what they are doing, it is highly unlikely a professional therapist would be so naïve as to plant such suggestions. This also grossly overstates the suggestibility of the hypnotic subject. This criticism is based on the outdated concept that a hypnotic subject surrenders complete control of his or her consciousness to the therapist, which is rarely the case.

More importantly, how does a therapist plant a suggestion that unlocks true, verifiable information that was unknown to either therapist or subject?

Furthermore, past life memories surface in a wide range of therapies well beyond hypnosis, including sensory isolation, holonomic integration and the psychotherapeutic use of consciousness-expanding drugs, such as LSD.

Many hypnotists got into past life regression quite by accident because their clients would bring up a past life experience on their own during a session that was not in any way aimed at past-life recall. Frequently, the client would stumble upon a past-life memory, which would catch the therapist completely off guard. Often, in fact, the therapist would be philosophically opposed to the idea of reincarnation, but when past-life memories kept popping up with clients, they had to learn to deal with them, regardless of their philosophical inclinations.

When so many people report having very similar experiences, such anecdotal accounts should be viewed as real evidence which points to something going on we do not understand. We accept many things which cannot be proven only because they fit into the prevailing scientific paradigm. Just one example is the "big bang" theory of how the universe began, which has never been proven to be true. The idea is supported only by circumstantial evidence and speculation.

The bold assertion that something as vast, massive and complex as our universe could be created from sheer nothingness is far more absurd than the belief of our consciousness surviving death, which is supported by testimonials and other evidence.

Skeptics will also claim that many of these experiences are statistically unlikely. Unlikely doesn't mean these experiences are false. Many things that are real are rare. It's a very rare event for a basketball player to score 100 or more points in a game, but it happens and it's real.

Virtually every advance in our knowledge that did not fit into mainstream thinking had skeptics opposing the idea. Opposition to new ideas has ranged from having surgeons wash their hands before surgery in order to prevent infection to dismissing the Wright brothers claim they could get a heavier-than-air flying machine off the ground. There are literally thousands of examples. The history of skepticism is checkered, to say the least.

To be sure, there's a long history of fortune-telling charlatans seeking to turn a buck, but let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater when the evidence is so compelling.

There is a place for skeptics. But when their arguments are essentially based on ideology because they see something to be simply impossible – despite the evidence – it's time to be skeptical of the skeptics.

That current science cannot explain certain phenomena is not a criticism, per se, unless that same science is dogmatic enough to claim it can explain everything in the universe. Therein lies the problem because advocates of scientific materialism make exactly this claim. Such a statement turns science into the very thing it abhors – a religion based on an unfounded faith that it can explain everything.

During Galileo's time, the church bishops refused to look through his telescope because they already knew his discovery was impossible. When modern science admits there are aspects of reality that are beyond scientific explanation, it will represent a great step forward in our quest to understand the world we live in.

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# About the Author

Mike Anderson has written books and scripts on a wide variety of subjects over the years with an energetic, thought-provoking style. Mike can be reached at mikeanderson@ravediet.com.

Footnotes

1. For more on related problems with traditional religions, see "A Humane God?" in the Notes section.

2. For example, "Near-death experiences (NDEs) 101: How many people have NDEs?", Examiner.com, July 25, 2009.

3. Pim van Lommel, Consciousness Beyond Life, p. 9.

4. Although there are many similarities to what mystics have experienced, NDEs do not occur in the context of a search for meaning or a spiritual crisis. They simply happen spontaneously.

5. For those who wish to explore the topic further, I would recommend Michael Newton's books, Journey of Souls and Destiny of Souls, in that order, as well as Life Between Life by Joel L. Whitton and Joe Fisher, Life Before Life by Helen Wambach and Raymond A. Moody's classic, Life After Life. Another book which details over 100 cases of NDEs that were verified by independent sources is The Self Does Not Die: Verified Paranormal Phenomena from Near-Death Experiences by Titus Rivas, et al.

6. The term "waveform" is used to describe Spirits in the book Far Journeys by Robert Monroe.

7. Mental projections have also been called thought forms.

8. The words soul and spirit are used interchangeably. In general, the word soul is used to describe an embodied spirit, whereas a spirit is disembodied. I capitalize the word Spirit in an effort to emphasize the primacy of that existence.

9. Others have called this Spirit the Oversoul.

10. Michael Newton, Journey of Souls, p. 124.

11. Joel L. Whitton and Joe Fisher, Life Between Life, p. 47.

12. The Creator and other terms are used interchangeably with God. The term God is avoided only because it has so much anthropomorphic baggage.

13. Not much is known about "higher level" spirits since they have finished their cycle of reincarnation and no longer visit Earth. Because of this, they are obviously not available for interviews via psychotherapeutic methods. What we do know comes from "lower level" Spirits who are still in their reincarnation cycles.

14. Based on what hypnosis subjects have said, ten months is the shortest interval between reincarnations while the longest is over 800 years. The average stay in the Spirit World is around 40 years. From Joel L. Whitton and Joe Fisher, Life Between Life, p. 52.

15. It is possible to reincarnate without an "approved" Life Plan, but to do so you will live a life of improvisation and unpredictability. Spiritually speaking, it will more than likely be an unproductive and wasted life, which would result in another incarnation.

16. This is according to Michael Newton's account in Destiny of Souls. Other reports suggest the soul can enter the body shortly before birth, shortly after birth or at the moment of birth.

17. As told about Robin Hull by psychiatrist Adrian Finkelstein in Your Past Lives And The Healing Process.

18. For the story and a video – http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/boy-lived-life-woman-killed-chicago-fire-article-1.2121264

19. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shanti_Devi

20. As told in Children Who Have Lived Before by Trutz Hardo.

21. Bruce Leininger and Andrea Leininger, Soul Survivor: The Reincarnation of a World War II Fighter Pilot.

22. Typical of the items she got wrong were the fact her father wasn't bald (but her grandfather and uncle were) and she confused her father's name with the name of her cousin. As documented in Ian Stephenson, 20 Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation. Sri Lanka was formerly known as Ceylon and referenced as such in Stephenson's book.

23. Tom Kovach, "Out-of-Body Survey," Omni 4, No. 11 (August, 1982), p. 94.

24. David Osselton, "Making a Monkey of Shakespeare," New Scientist 104, No. 1,428 (November 1, 1984), p. 39.

25. From CODATA 1998.

26. Because modern science cannot explain how these constants came about through random chance, proponents of intelligent design have seized on this as a defense of their religious theory. The intent here is not to defend any religious theory.

27. Fred Hoyle, The Intelligent Universe, p. 219.

28. For our purposes, mind and consciousness are used interchangeably. There are entire books written on the subject and definitional disputes are great. Instead of trying to split hairs, we conflate them.

29. Some have argued there was a "precursor" universe with physical characteristics similar to our universe, which our universe inherited. But that just begs the question: What existed before the precursor universe?

30. This behavior isn't confined to the subatomic world. Scientists have been able to transform a solid cluster of 60 carbon molecules, known as a fullerene, or buckyball, directly into a wave. See "Wave-particle duality of C60," Markus Arndt, Olaf Nairz, et al., Nature 401, October 14, 1999, pp. 680-682; "Diffraction of Complex Molecules by Structures Made of Light," Olaf Nairz, et al., Physical Review Letters 87, 160401 (2001).

31. For a fascinating discussion of this, see Lothar Schafer, Infinite Potential, Chapter 1.

32. This is somewhat similar to Plato's thesis that all material structures are actualizations of invisible forms.

33. This would be what's referred to as the Copenhagen interpretation, which is widely accepted. Other, more exotic interpretations include the "many worlds" interpretation which states that everything is always a particle, but whenever there are multiple possible outcomes, they all happen, just in different worlds (or different minds, which is the many-minds interpretation, an extension of the many-worlds interpretation).

34. Although we see this as a new concept in the West, only because science has proven it, mystics have been saying this for centuries. The Hindu concepts of nada and bindu are virtually identical to the idea that reality can be both wave and particle. The new understanding of ultimate reality, as discovered by quantum physics, is essentially confirming many concepts that mystics and some Eastern religions have embraced for a very long time.

35. More on the wave-particle duality here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wave-particle_duality There is also an excellent short video of the experiment on YouTube (if the link is still good): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DfPeprQ7oGc

36. Observation would include any human presence, e.g., measuring the experiment with some device, just looking at it or even thinking about it. Some might say that it's the measuring device doing the observation. A machine measures, it does not observe. It's simply an instrument without awareness. It should be added that waves cannot actually be observed; only their effects can be observed.

37. This is not to say that large objects, such as a chair, vanish in your absence. Larger objects persist. For a discussion of some recent experiments which explore this "disappearing act" at the subatomic level, see Dean Radin, et al., "Consciousness and the double-slit interference pattern: Six experiments," Physics Essays 25, 2 (2012).

38. David H. Freedman, 'Weird Science,' Discover, II, No. II (November, 1990), pp. 66-7.

39. Michael Talbot, Mysticism and the New Physics, p. 150. See also, Los Angeles Times, March 17, 1990: Physicists Catch a Paradox in a Jar: Reaffirming a theory named for the philosopher Zeno, researchers demonstrate, in effect, that a watched pot doesn't boil.

40. Freeman Dyson, Disturbing the Universe, p. 249. Emphasis added.

41. As quoted in The Holographic Universe by Michael Talbot. The quote was from a private conversation with Talbot on December 16, 1988. Emphasis added.

42. Sir James Jean, The Mysterious Universe, p. 137.

43. Albert Einstein, Sidelights on Relativity, trans. W. Perret and G. Jeffery.

44. John Tierney, "Quest for Order: S. Chandrasekhar Meditates on Black Holes, Blue Skies, and Scientific Creativity," Science 82 3, No. 7 (September 1982), p. 189.

45. Robert L. Van de Castle, Our Dreaming Mind.

46. In experiments, the communication between entangled pairs happened at least 10,000 times faster than the speed of light.

47. One paradox: you could go back in time and kill your parents and ancestors.

48. David Bohm, for example, in his book, Wholeness and the Implicate Order.

49. Robert Temple, "David Bohm," New Scientist, November 11, 1982, p. 364.

50. Correlation does not show cause. For example, night always follows day. The correlation is 100 percent. But that does not mean that day causes night.

51. Paul Pietsch, Shuffle Brain: The Quest for the Holgramic Mind.

52. "Learning in the octopus," B.B. Boycott, Scientific American, 212 (3), 42-50.

53. "Retention of memory through metamorphosis: Can a moth remember what it learned as a caterpillar?" D.J. Blackiston, et al., PLOS ONE, 3 (3), e1736 (2008).

54. "Is your brain really necessary," R. Lewin, Science, 210,1232 (1980).

55. Anthony Smith, The Mind, p. 230.

56. J.F. Edwards, et. al, "Hereditary hydrocephalus in laboratory-reared golden hamsters," Vet Pathol., July 2006; 43(4): 523-9.

57. Claire Sylvia and William Novak, A Change of Heart.

58. As related in Paul P. Pearsall, The Heart's Code: Tapping the Wisdom and Power of Our Heart Energy. A discussion of other cases of memory transference with transplants can be found online: http://www.namahjournal.com/doc/Actual/Memory-transference-in-organ-transplant-recipients-vol-19-iss-1.html

59. Donald D. Hoffman, Conscious Realism and the Mind-Body Problem, p. 90.

60. For our purposes, we don't make a distinction between the preconscious, the subconscious and the unconscious. We will simply use the term consciousness and describe it in terms of Limited Consciousness (the normal human immediate awareness) and Expanded Consciousness (a Spirit-like awareness). Expanded Consciousness would include unconscious (subconscious) perceptions, particularly the ability to access past life and Spirit World memories, as well Life Plans that are stored in the unconscious mind. This usage will become clearer as we move forward.

61. Dr. Eben Alexander, Proof of Heaven: A Neurosurgeon's Journey into the Afterlife.

62. "Jill Bolte Taylor: Her Stroke Sent Her on a Dazzling Head Trip," Huffington Post, 6/24/2008. Also from her talk on TED: http://www.ted.com/talks/jill_bolte_taylor_s_powerful_stroke_of_insight/transcript?language=en

63. Joel L. Whitton and Joe Fisher, Life Between Life, p. 2.

64. Ibid., p. 26.

65. The term "energy wave" or "energy field" has been used by OBE'rs, NDE'ers and those who have been psychologically regressed to describe a person's mind after death. Obviously, the "energy" is quite different than the energy we experience in the material world on Earth.

66. It would also explain the placebo effect. It's been shown, in fact, that the mind penetrates the body right down to the subatomic elements of DNA. Experiments have been conducted showing that our thoughts directly affect even the winding and unwinding of DNA, which has a direct impact on the healing process. For more on this, see Glen Rein, "Effect of Conscious Intention on Human DNA," Proceedings of the International Forum on New Science, October 1996. www.item-bioenergy.com/infocenter/ConsciousIntentiononDNA.pdf.

67. This is similar to Karl Pribram's "frequency domain." We use the word "zone" to be consistent with how it has been described by Spirits in the afterlife. For more information on Karl Pribram's concept, see Karl Pribram, Brain, mind, and consciousness: The science of neuropsychology.

68. Hans Jenny, Cymatics: A Study of Wave Phenomena & Vibration.

69. Michael Newton, Destiny of Souls, p. 85

70. For more information on remote viewing, visit the International Remote Viewing Association, www.irva.org.

71. Russell Targ and Harold Puthoff, Mind-Reach: Scientists Look at Psychic Ability, p. 51.

72. WGBH Television Station, Nova transcript, "The Case of ESP," January 17, 1984, p. 16.

73. Jim Schnabel, Remote Viewers, p. 215. Carter's account is oversimplified in that two remote viewers were involved and it took several sessions to match the remote viewers' drawings with the photographic map imagery.

74. www.biomindsuperpowers.com/Pages/1973JupiterRVProbe.html

75. Ibid., p. 22

76. Ibid.

77. B. Dunne and J. Bisaha, "Precognitive Remote Viewing in the Chicago Area: A Replication of the Stanford Experiment," Journal of Parapsychology, Vol 43, March 1979. www.princeton.edu/~pear/pdfs/1979-precognitive-remote-viewing-stanford.pdf

78. Russell Targ, The Reality of ESP, pp. 25-26.

79. Dean Radin, The Conscious Universe, p. 105.

80. J. Utts, "An Assessment of the Evidence for Psychic Functioning," Journal of Scientific Exploration 10 (1996):3. https://www.ics.uci.edu/~jutts/air.pdf

81. With NDEs, most people report they don't remember anything during their brief period of being biologically dead. Interestingly, there are people who have been clinically dead on several occasions who report experiencing nothing on one occasion, then having quite involved experiences on another.

82. www.near-death.com/resources/scholarly/faq.html.

83. D. Scott Rogo, Leaving the Body, p. 5.; Twemlow and Gabbard Jones, "The Out-of-Body Experience: A Phenomenological Typology Based on Questionnaire Responses," American Journal of Psychiatry 139 (1982), pp. 450-55; S. Blackmore, "A postal survey of OBEs and other experiences," Journal of the Society for Psychical Research, 52: 227-244; J. Gackenbach and S. LaBerge, (Eds.), Conscious Mind, Sleeping

Brain, p. 373-387.

84. See Robert A. Monroe's books, Far Journeys and Journeys Out of the Body for particularly detailed accounts of not only his pioneering experiences but also what he went through to develop a way to expand his consciousness and leave his body.

85. "First hint of 'life after death' in biggest ever scientific study," The Telegraph, 8/24/2015; "Results of world's largest Near Death Experiences study published," University of Southampton, 10/7/2014; "AWARE—AWAreness during REsuscitation—A prospective study," Resuscitation, (Dec. 2014), 85:12, pp. 1799–1805.

86. P. van Lommel et al., "Near-Death Experience in Survivors of Cardiac Arrest," Lancet 358 (2001): 2039-45.

87. K. Ring and S. Cooper, "Near-Death and Out-of-Body Experiences in the Blind: A Study of Apparent Eyeless Vision," Journal of Near-Death Studies 16 (1997): 101-47.

88. K. Ring and S. Cooper, Mindsight: Near-Death and Out-of-Body Experiences in the Blind.

89. Stanislav Grof, The Adventure of Self-Discovery, pp. 108-9.

90. Stanislav Grof, Beyond the Brain, p. 31.

91. D. Scott Rogo, Psychic Breakthroughs Today, pp 163-64.

92. Karlis Osis, "New ASPR Research on Out-of-the-Body Experiences," Newsletter of the American Society for Psychical Research 14 (1972); also Karlis Osis "Out-of-Body Research at the American Society for Psychical Research," Mind Beyond the Body, ed. D. Scott Rogo, pp. 162-69.

93. www.snopes.com/media/notnews/femalegod.asp

94. Kevin Kelly and Steven Johnson, "Where Ideas Come From," Wired, Sept. 27, 2010.

95. Malcolm Gladwell, "In the Air: Who Says Big Ideas Are Rare?" The New Yorker, May 12, 2008.

96. E. Lazlo, The Interconnected Universe, pp. 1133-135.

97. Jung used the term unconscious mind.

98. Joseph Chilton Pearce, The Biology of Transcendence.

99. Darold A. Treffort, Extraordinary People, 1-2.

100. This was one of the behaviors of identical twins Jack and Oskar Yufe. They were separated after birth. Interestingly, one was raised Jewish, the other became a Nazi. http://www.latimes.com/local/obituaries/la-me-jack-yufe-20151111-story.html

101. J. Wackerman, "Dyadic correlations between brain functional states: Present facts and future perspectives," Mind and Matter, 2 (1), 105-122. Also, see Donald Jackson, "Reunion of Identical Twins Raised Apart, Reveals Some Astonishing Similarities." Smithsonian, October 1980, 48-56; Guy Lyon Playfair, Twin Telepathy; Lawrence Wright, "Double Mystery," The New Yorker, August 7, 1996: 45-62; Dean Radin, Entangled Minds, pp. 18-19.

102. Edmond Gurney, et al., Phantasms of the Living, Vol. 1.(2012).

103. Dean Radin, Entangled Minds, p. 99.

104. Lynn McTaggert, The Field, pp. 126-7. The author interviewed Dr. Braud regarding this experiment, in California, on October 25, 1999.

105. R. Wagner-Pacifici and H.J. Bershady. "Portents or Confessions: Authoritative Readings of a Dream Text," Symbolic Interaction, 1990; 16: 129-43.

106. For those interested in a detailed account, see Rupert Sheldrake, Morphic Resonance. It should be noted that Sheldrake does not use the term shared consciousness, but has his own term, 'morphic resonance.'

107. As documented in detail by Rupert Sheldrake in two of his books, A New Science of Life and Morphic Resonance.

108. William McDougall, "An Experiment for the testing of the hypothesis of Lamarck," British Journal of Psychology 17 (1927), pp. 267-304; William McDougall, "Second report on a Lamarckian experiment," ibid. 20 (1930), pp. 201-18; William McDougall, "Fourth report on a Lamarckian experiment," ibid. 28 (1938), pp 321-45.

109. Rupert Sheldrake, Morphic Resonance, p. 253.

110. E. Marais, The Soul of the White Ant.

111. Webster, B., "Are Clever Animals Actually Thinking?" New York Times, May 31, 1983, p. C1.

112. Reported by the Associated Press in April, 1961. B. Schul, The Psychic Power of Animals, p. 146

113. A. Cavagna, et al., "Scale-free correlations in starling flocks," Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 107, #11, 865–870.

114. L. Bossie, "Dog brings comfort to those facing death and those coping with loss," Sunday Gazette-Mail, November 16, 2003.

115. David Dosa, M.D., Making Rounds With Oscar: The Extraordinary Gift of an Ordinary Cat.

116. B. Woodhouse, How Your Dog Thinks, p. 54.

117. Rupert Sheldrake, Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home.

118. Ibid, p. 125.

119. J. Harrison, Off to the Side: A Memoir, p. 47-48.

120. Rupert Sheldrake, Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home, Chapter 6.

121. Bill Shul, The Psychic Power of Animals, pp. 142-43.

122. D. Scott Rogo, Psychic Breakthroughs, p. 161.

123. Nancy Clark, Divine Moments, pp. 244-47.

124. Louisa Rhine, Hidden Channels of the Mind (1961), pp. 177-178. It should be noted that Amanda is not the real name of the mother.

125. Arthur Osborn, The Future Is Now: The Significance of Precognition, p. 42.

126. J. B. Priestly, Man & Time, pp. 211-12.

127. Ward Hill Lamon, Recollections of Abraham Lincoln 1847-1865, pp. 116-117.

128. Joel Martin and William J. Birnes, The Haunting of the Presidents.

129. Ian Stevenson, "A Review and Analysis of Paranormal Experiences Connected with the Sinking of the Titanic," Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research 54 (1960), pp. 158-71.

130. William E. Cox, "Precognition: An Analysis I and II," Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research 50 (1956).

131. Roger Rapoport, The Rio/Paris Crash: Uncovering the Secrets that Changed Aviation History.

132. http://abc13.com/news/young-mh17-victim-has-eerie-premonition-of-crash/213527/

133. Eamon McNiff and Harry Phillips, "Disaster Predictions: People Claim Premonitions of Sept. 11 Attacks, Japanese Tsunami," www.abcnews.go.com/US/sept-11-terrorist-attacks-japanese-tsunami-people-claim/story?id=17553825#1, Oct. 25, 2012.

134. "Science and Synchronicity: A Conversation with C.A. Meier," Psychological Perspectives 19, No. 2 (Fall-Winter 1988), p. 324.

135. Dean Radin, Entangled Minds, Chapter 10: Presentiment.

136. Most of us assume that time flows in only one direction, but there's not a single experiment that proves this. In states of Expanded Consciousness, time does not "flow" because the past, present and future can be randomly accessed.

137. Ibid, p. 170.

138. Chun Siong Soon, et al., "Unconscious Determinants of Free Decisions in the Human Brain." Nature Neuroscience, April 13th, 2008. This mirrors a series of similar experiments done in the 1980s by Benjamin Libet. The BBC has produced a documentary on the subject entitled "The Brain Knows Before You Do."

139. The memory of the future may have also come from a precognitive dream you had. Many have written about precognition as the basis for déjà vu. The earliest seminal work was in 1927 by J.W. Dunne, An Experiment with Time. Of course, this flies in the face of modern psychological studies, but those studies have no credible evidence to back up their déjà vu explanations. They summarily dismiss the precognitive argument because they do not believe precognition is possible.

140. Taken from "How to build a universe that doesn't fall apart two days later," Philip K. Dick, 1978. This is available on the internet and worth reading as his description of the novel gets even more interesting.

141. Florence Graves, "The Ultimate Frontier: Edgar Mitchell, the Astronaut-Turned-Philosopher Explores Star Wars, Spirituality, and How We Create Our Own Reality," New Age (May/June 1988), p. 87.

142. From Michael Newton, Destiny of Souls, p. 2.

143. Michael Newton, Journey of Souls, p. 85.

144. See, for example, www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulation_hypothesis. See also Silas R. Beane, et al., "Constraints on the universe as a numerical simulation," The European Physical Journal, September 2014, 50:148. A good summary of computer simulation arguments can be found here: "What Are the Odds We Are Living in a Computer Simulation?" Joshua Rothman, The New Yorker, June 9, 2016.

145. 2016 Isaac Asimov Memorial Debate: Is the Universe a Simulation?

146. http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/are-we-living-in-a-computer-simulation/

147. The main argument from simulation advocates postulates that a future advanced civilization could use their immense computing power to run an "ancestor simulation" – essentially a high-powered video game which we are now a part of. There are two major flaws to the simulation argument. The first is the assumption that a computer can create the type of consciousness we humans experience. Their definition of consciousness is crude and boils down to simple self-awareness. This does not hold a candle to the many and varied states of consciousness this book has discussed, such as remote viewing, precognition, unconscious perceptions, shared consciousness and what happens to your consciousness when you die. These scientists are still in the simplistic mode of thinking that memories are stored in the brain and consciousness somehow mysteriously arises from that grey matter. The second major flaw is that there is not a shred of evidence to support the simulation argument. The argument arises from the realm of pure hypothetical theorizing without any real world evidence to support it. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that, but it's just entertainment.

148. This differs from synchronicity in that there is a cause behind seemingly coincidental events.

149. Some would argue that the premonition was already built into Amanda's Life Plan and she had no choice but to remove the baby from the crib. Her action, in other words, was just following her Life Plan script. But if that were the case, we're all just robots following programmed scripts and there is no point to that.

150. A 2009 Pew survey found that 24 percent of the American public overall believes in reincarnation and 22 percent of Christians. Similar numbers were posted for those who believe in astrology (25% of the public overall, 23% of Christians). Pew Forum/Pew Research Center, "Many Americans Mix Multiple Faiths."

151. See also, Ian Stephenson, "The Explanatory Value of the Idea of Reincarnation," The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, Vol. 154, No. 5, p. 233.

152. Some of this evidence is physical. Ian Stevenson found over 200 examples in which birthmarks or deformities in this life corresponded to wounds inflicted on the body in a previous life. In 17 cases, he obtained medical documents that establish the past-life individual was put to death in the way described by those claiming to have experienced that death. (See Ian Stephen, Where Biology and Reincarnation Intersect. Evidence can also be found on the internet: http://www.sinor.ru:8104/~che/birthmarks.htm). Health and psychological problems have also been linked to a previous life. Under hypnosis, once the source of a current problem was found to be in a previous life, the problem vanished immediately. Such problems can range from phobias, such as fear of heights, to physical ailments. Other indicators of reincarnation could be childhood interests and appetites that are very different than those of their families, unusual childhood skills they could not have learned or imitated, rejection of their parents because they are from a different family than the parents in a previous life and gender identity confusion.

153. Plato also wrote about reincarnation and the amnesia block some 2,400 years ago. He said that when visiting Earth, souls must travel over Lethe, the River of Forgetfulness, whose waters produce a loss of memory about our true nature (as Spirits). Other cultures have written about being offered the "fruit of forgetfulness" before rebirth. This is somewhat similar to a psychiatrist inducing posthypnotic amnesia so subjects cannot recall the unconscious memories they experienced during hypnosis.

154. Helen Wambach, Life Before Life.

155. Helen Wambach, Reliving Past Lives, p. 116; pp. 128-34.

156. Sometimes there are inaccuracies in the memories of a reincarnated life. For example, there are more "reincarnations" of Titanic victims than were actually on board when it sank. Ship wrecks were not uncommon during that era it is more than likely that people claiming to be on the Titanic, confused it with another ship wreck.

157. This would include suicide, which stops one from experiencing the lessons of a full Life Plan – and would result in another reincarnation.

158. Joel Whitton and Joe Fisher, Life Between Life, p. 44.

159. Having been a different sex in a previous life may explain why some men, for example, feel they are really females and are trapped in a male body – and vice versa.

160. Joel L. Whitton and Joe Fisher, Life Between Life, p. 47-8.

161. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, On Children and Death, p. 222.

162. New York Times Magazine, January 26, 1976.

163. Chris Carter, Science and the Near-Death Experience, pp. xv – xvi.

164. There are numerous documented cases of individuals who claim they were part of the Nazi genocide. Some of these accounts are described in Beyond the Ashes by Rabbi Yonassan Gershom.

165. Michael Newton, Destiny of Souls, pp. 298-302.

166. So named because they are experienced in tracking down and locating animal spirits.

167. A good introduction to this subject is Animals and the Afterlife by Kim Sheridan.

168. This would also apply to "physicalists," those who believe only matter (and energy) exists in the universe.

169. http://www.cnn.com/interactive/2014/12/us/shared-death/?hpt=hp_c3

170. For a good review of the issues involved, see Larry Dossey, "Consciousness: Why Materialism Fails," May 30, 2015. Available on the internet.

171. Some research has indicated that mild electrical stimulation to a specific point in the brain can produce hallucinated voices. The problem? This can only be reliably reproduced in epileptics.

