Application of Impossible Things: A Near Death Experience in Iraq (3 page)

Chapter 2 - The Environment

I was in the truck, head on hand, half asleep, and then I was not. I’ll call this instantaneous movement blinking from one place to another, for lack of a better word.

In this new environment, I stood on an oval dais looking rather intrepid in my bloody and torn fatigues, slouching a bit, dirty and darkly tan, addressing thousands of white-robed beings or personalities. They were arrayed up and all around me, as if I stood in the center of a huge stadium, the dais on which I stood being perhaps twenty feet in diameter.

A logical place to start expanding on a description of the out-of-body experience might be to concentrate on aspects of the environment: the stage, so to speak, within which the actions took place and the personalities interacted.
By environment I don’t mean simply the location and appearance of the place that I found myself within but also some of the underlying qualities and assumptions that inform and order perception of and within that place.

Though recorded as such, I don’t assume that the thousands of personalities actually wore white robes and were seated in a stadium-like setting. When I revisit the experience, I’m able to perceive those personalities visually as points of light in space, sense them as separate energies, or hear them as separate tonal values. I’ve also seen them as individual crazy-looking monsters and as different animals.

Though happy doses of Percocet could have assisted in coming up with the idea of turning the personalities into monsters or animals, goofing around with imagination began as a sort of game intended to test the elasticity of perception and specific characteristics of the environment that I experienced. The exercise secondarily convinced me of the validity of memory. Although I can alter such visuals as the white robes and stadium, other details of the experience seem to be fixed. If I attempt to alter the tone of the Gathering, the way I look, the information exchanged, or the order of events, for instance, memory will either turn into a static two-dimensional sort of sensory snapshot at the point that I attempt the change, or my mind will go completely blank.

The ability to change some details while others remain fixed suggests to me that the fixed perceptions are
pure
, so to speak. It’s possible that the static scenes and blanks indicate mental blocks of some sort, but I don’t understand them as such. They belong to portions of the memory that are meaningless: why not allow change to the way I look? To be honest, I would enjoy playing around with making myself more attractive, more dramatic, more dignified. Why can’t I make the blood drip, add a dashing hat, pick that twig out of my hair, or change into digital cammie
s*
instead of appearing in the stupid brown BDUs
*
that are dumpy-looking and lack the wonderfully useful pocket placements of the digitals? Or why not change the gestalt of the experience since I’m a little uncomfortable with some of it? I could match it to others’ descriptions of near-death experiences or amuse myself by inserting a few pokes at the more personally embarrassing or regrettable experiments in my life so far while entertaining some suggestions on what to do differently.

But I can’t. I can only observe myself trying.

And in trying,
I’m able to discern
subtle differences that exist between the changeable and unchangeable characteristics. Those unchangeable portions carry a deep familiarity, like a mark of authenticity. This is a
feeling
that is not easy to describe. It’s akin to the difference I
feel
when closing a hollow-core door versus a solid oak door, or the difference I
feel
when looking at a photograph of Michelangelo’s
David
versus seeing it in person, or the difference I
feel
when touching a realistic-looking silk flower petal versus touching a real flower petal. The inalterable characteristics carry a feeling of being alive.

The alterable portions of the environment, in contrast, feel less substantial. They look just a bit more diaphanous, or I sense that they shift vaguely in and out of clear focus. They feel as if they’re missing breath.

One understanding of the alterable portions is that my conscious waking mind may have overlaid the base perception with something more comprehensible or acceptable. The thousands of personalities in white robes may be more fully and accurately perceived through some sense beyond what my physical body uses, so without some overlay or interpretation, they would be
indescribable
or incomprehensible to my conscious mind within the physical environment. Or their being-ness might be more accurately perceived as a smell that I don’t enjoy in the physical body (a rotten egg or a decomposing cow), or a visual that I’ve learned to think is creepy or weird (a cockroach or a slobbering bulldog). Those perceptions would have been a distracting nuisance, focusing all my attention on the revulsion or strangeness. Through the physically familiar tool of identifiable visuals, the overlay may provide a comfortable framework, freeing my attention for more important information.

Like perceptions of time and space.

This Blink Environment doesn’t exist in time and space as we understand it. That’s not to say that time and space doesn’t exist at all. Rather, they are vastly more complex and interconnect and operate with each other in more ways than that with which we’re familiar. Imagine tha
t
our familiar time-space is correlated to this book. We experience or read
the book
in a prescribed way: we concentrate on the printed symbols, reading from left to right, top to bottom.

In the Blink Environment there would be infinite ways to experience the same book. It could be read freely with full comprehension word by word from left to right, top to bottom. Alternatively, the book could be read paragraph by paragraph from right to left, bottom to top
,
or whole page by whole page in a glance. It could be read from the center out with a progressed comprehension, or it could be touched with the mind and, at once as a whole, understood in a single moment of digestion. It could be read by grouping
emotional content: all the tearful scenes absorbed first, then the neutral scenes, then the ones involving joy. Or it could be read from setting to setting, all scenes taking place on the street being read firs
t, then all taking place in a residential structure, etc. The spaces between the printed letters could be read. It could be read from between the fibers of each page, from between the molecules of the ink, or—well, imagine the possibilities. There would be as many ways to read the book as there are points in space.

Similarly,
Time and Space
in the Blink Environment can be perceived in many ways, existing in what would appear to the physical mind as a dizzying complexity of length and depth, as well as width, and beyond three dimensions. In capitalizing the words Time/Space, I refer to
the perception of time and space from the perspective of these non-physical environments,
as opposed to lower case time/space which refers to our
familiar physical earth
definition of time/space.

Within Time/Space resides the choice of limiting focus to our particular and familiar perception of time and space. Our understanding and experience of time and space might be understood as one strand, a subset, of whole Time and Space.

Although the choices and possibilities in what I’ll call the Blink Environment might seem chaotic and overwhelming from our physical mind’s point of view, any choice in perceptive pathways is simple to accomplish, as is making the choice itself.
Consciousness within the Blink Environment is expanded in such a way as to provide a radically and effortlessly broad basis for perception, including an awareness of complex and multi-layered structure and pattern.

In the context described as expanded Time/Space and expanded consciousness, the structure and patterns allow
the potential for a full awaren
ess of what we experience in the physical as past and future. Simultaneous experience is a base assumption, presenting no contradictions. As we understand time in the physical, I’m able to talk on a cell phone at the same time that I walk through space as we understand it. While walking and talking, I’m scratching my nose, avoiding running into someone, reading and following the signs directing me to Baggage Pickup, and worrying in the back of my mind about traffic on the way home.

In a similar way, in the state or place of expanded awareness I’m able to simultaneously hold an awareness of my body in the progressive physical experience of sitting in the Land Cruiser rolling down the road after being blown up, and of me standing intrepid on the dais with all its multi-progressive experiences. I am also
outside
both of those focal points while observing them, and am simultaneously experiencing other dimensions not described here.

I’m able to look
at
each of those “me’s”
and
at the same time
look
within
them from the outside and
out
of them from the inside. I’m able to comprehend them from within the cells, within the energy, within their (my) perceptive mechanisms, back from various futures, forward from various pasts, or from any other infinite number of focal points. Because Time and Space are multi-dimensional, I am also multi-dimensional. I’m able to perceive from and within any and all of these simultaneously and with varying degrees of awareness as I choose to focus.

And all of the perceptions make sense. Not to my physical, l
inear, logical mind right now but intuitively and from within the expanded consciousness.

Another aspect to the expansion in perception available within the Blink Environment is an awareness of energies, inert and active, available in the spaces
between
thought. Obviously, that there could even
be
spaces
between
thought implies that thought has form. We’re taught that thoughts are private, ethereal (without substance), and powerless until some physical action puts them into force. In the Blink Environment, however, thought is clearly understood as a force in and of itself. Thoughts have form when that is intended and otherwise exist as
energy with potential effect
, though lacking perceptible form. No form of any kind is possible without thought energy to instigate it.

The force of a thought isn’t confined to the environment it originates within; the thought permeates various vibrational levels and dimensions. My sense is that thought utilizes energies available
between and within
all
thoughts to activate or alter the force of itself, depending upon the intent of the originator. As a concept, the
energy between
is something I can only describe as
potential
. It both exists and doesn’t exist at once. Sorry, I know it makes no logical sense. Maybe it would help to think of it as the Easter Bunny, who exists but doesn’t exist. Those spaces between are understood and utilized in ways we don’t comprehend in physical existence because of our belief systems, just as the Easter Bunny is utilized or not according to our beliefs about Easter, bunnies, eggs, Jesus, candy, springtime, children, resurrection, or hiding objects.
(And people think the paranormal is strange …)

Sticking with the Easter Bunny analogy (I may regret this), imagine all the space between the items involved in an Easter egg hunt: the spaces between eggs, couch, table, carpet, ceiling (we’re indoors, in case you missed that), fireplace (in the north, I guess), draperies, walls, and windows. Imagine that all the space not occupied by those objects holds—or
is
—active energy. Imagine that the energy is used to hold the physicality of the chair, draperies, walls, and windows in their apparently solid forms. In fact, on the quantum physics level, the space is known to be occupied by energy. The particles that form our apparently solid reality are held together by energy. (In fact, the particles may be energies simply appearing to us as solids, but let’s ignore that for the moment for the sake of this illustration.) That energy
between
is an illustration of and perhaps a subset of the energy that I sensed in the
spaces between
in the Blink Environment.

For the sake of this analogy, imagine that the space between the molecules making up the apparently solid object behind which the Easter egg is hidden holds energies that could be used by our minds just as casually as we use a basket to hold the Easter egg. Every thought, drawing upon the energies between, would become a consciously utilized force itself, manifesting or creating whatever pattern or program was within that thought.

That
between
energy is what I sensed being used in the Blink Environment
-
and in our own environment
though
without conscious understanding. If we acknowledge that we use those same energies here in the physical environment, our concepts of reality might shift. If we knew how to consciously use and control the energies in the physical, the connections between particles could be tweaked and manipulated at will. The bonds could be weakened, causing a molecule to ooze or bend—or the millions of molecules making up an egg could be loosened, thus causing the egg to ooze and bend until it was as flexible as warm Silly Putty. We could each
be Uri Geller,
bending spoons at will. Alternatively, the bonds could be organized by thought into a table, a pony, a policeman, or an Easter Bunny. They could be organized to repair our own bodies. It’s possible that we could hunt for the Easter egg by shifting our focus to different locations within space instead of shifting our physical bodies, or we could create the egg behind any chosen object by simply thinking the egg into existence.