Revelations

Some conversations I had recently brought to mind the experience I had when I was 17 years old with an OBE (Out-of-Body Experience) or an NDE (Near-Death Experience).  I told the story in a blog post here long ago.

Rather than tell the entire story again, here's a quick summary:

Early morning, I'm asleep in my bed.  I'm still in high school, living with my parents (of course), two sisters and a brother, all younger than me.  I have a dream, but it can't really be a dream because it's too vivid - so vivid I think it's more real than my perception of the world when I'm awake and walking around.

I'm floating, but don't have any sort of sensation of floating.  It feels perfectly natural and ordinary.  I look down at my body lying in my bed, and have a sort of bemused thought, "Hmm, I think I'm dead".  No trauma, no fright, no concern, just a mildly detached sort of curiosity.

I feel the light coming up behind me before I see it.  It feels like a warm, loving embrace.  In that moment I experience a feeling of being enveloped in something that we earthlings have such an inadequate word for: "Love".  But it's really so much more than that.  It's a warm embrace, it's unconditional, it's universal somehow, but it's still personal and inclusive of little old Me.

Anyway, I am turning around to enter the light where I will be embraced by God and so many others who have crossed through the veil into heaven, all of whom love me and can't wait to welcome me into their realm.

But as I'm turning I can somehow see my Mother walking down the hall.  She's either thinking or saying, "I need to get Dan up".  The thought enters my mind something like, "I better not leave now, Mom's coming to wake me up".  Instantaneously I'm returned to my body, where I open my eyes as I hear the knock on my door and my mother saying, "Dan, time to get up".

But that's not what this post is about, at least not the story itself.  This post is really about what I felt as I felt the embrace of the light.  In addition to the feeling of love and supreme contentment, I thought I suddenly understood everything.  Not everything about any specific topic, but everything about, well, everything!

So after I returned to mortality, of course I also returned to my limited human mind and my limited understanding.  But there are some fundamental lessons I think I was able to keep with me from the experience.  Just a few examples:

Our planet is the tiniest speck within the vast universe we can see through telescopes.  But that universe is one small universe within many other universes we can't detect or perceive with our limited human understanding. 

Therefore, time is a human perception based on the movement of our planet through our tiny insignificant little solar system.  Seconds, Minutes, Hours, Days, Weeks, Months, Years, Centuries, Millenia are meaningless measurements of time to God, who transcends time.  Because he lives in his own universe that is very different from almost everything we insignificant earthlings can perceive.

So we've been endowed by God with that spark we like to call a soul that he first gave to Adam.  When we die, that spark is able to escape our physical body and can travel out of our physical universe into God's own universe.  That's what we call "heaven".  It's not a place like we think of like Indianapolis, or Chicago, or the Moon, or even Mars, Venus, Saturn, or Pluto.  It's like another dimension that exists right beside our physical universe, but it's not very much like our universe.  Because all of the sparks that live there don't require our physical attributes to move around or communicate with each other.

Yes, God created our universe.  He created us.  Darwin's evolutionary theories are OK as far as explaining how God's creatures are able to adapt to earth's changing environment over time, but fail miserably to explain the origin of our stars, planets, and life itself.  For that brief instant in the embrace of the light, I really thought I clearly saw and understood precisely how God brought our universe and our ancestors into being.  It seemed as if I could even explain it coherently in a way that even a child would understand.  But when I re-entered the limited shell of my body, I seemed to lose that insight to the limitations of my physical brain and intellect.

Too bad, I might have killed in Engineering, Physics, or Medicine at College if only I could have retained a small piece of that knowledge and insight.  But something that the experience did cause in me was an inner feeling of exasperation whenever I hear people talk authoritatively about almost any subject.  I often find myself wanting to blurt out, "You have no idea what you're talking about!".  I may instinctively know that's true, and even often feel an inkling about what the real truth of the subject may be, but my body's own limitations prevent me from explaining.

My overwhelming sense is that understanding our universe, planet, ourselves and others is simple.  I couldn't believe I hadn't realized it all along, it was so extraordinarily simple and obvious.  But the experience left me with the absolute belief that yes, God made our universe and he created us.  God made us so he could share his love with us and we with him, although again I must point out that the word "love" is so inadequate to describe what it really entails. I think that's probably why most members of our race don't really understand, because they've never experienced love in God's form. All I can say for certain is, we earthlings have no clue what that thing we call "love" really is in its purest, God-given form.  It's so much more than a simple emotion or a physical expression or giving and receiving pleasure, yet somehow at the same time it's none of those things.  Because paradoxically emotion and pleasure are fleeting physical things that only mean something to our inadequate temporal bodies, and they mean nothing when we leave our bodies behind to commune with God and our loved ones who went on before.

What I don't know anything about is Hell.  And I don't know if it's because that knowledge wasn't shared with me or if I lost it when I returned to my earthly shell.  I have nothing to share about the existence or nature of Hell, nor how bad a sinner I'd have to be to be sentenced to live out the rest of eternity there.

There's actually much more I believe I learned from the experience, but the nutshell is about what God wants from us.  It's so very simple, and can be confirmed by Jesus' words:  Matthew 32:26-40.

God wants us to seek him, love him unconditionally (all your heart, soul, and mind), and love your neighbors as yourself.  It is so obvious that these are really the only commandments we humans need to make our universe the best and happiest place.  But of course we fail miserably. 

Simple, but never easy.