Here's something that I found interesting in relation to the topic of my last post. I've been reading Dying to be Me, by Anita Moorjani, her account of her powerful NDE and subsequent "miraculous" healing from cancer. The book, though a bit overlong and occasionally repetitious, is clearly a labor of love, and I don't doubt the author's sincerity. Her rapid and medically inexplicable healing seems to be well documented, and the NDE itself has many classic features while also offering a certain novelty.
What makes it relevant to the previous post is her description of time as experienced — or not experienced — during her astral adventure.
In one passage recounting her NDE, she writes,
I reached a point where I once again strongly sensed the comforting presence of my father surrounding me, almost as if he were embracing me.
Dad, it feels like I've come home! I'm so glad to be here. Life is so painful! I told him.
But you're always home, darling, he impressed upon me. You always were, and you always will be. I want you to remember that.
This struck me as similar to the notion I advanced in my last post — that the higher self, existing outside of time, is always on the 4th Plane (or however you wish to describe it), even while the ego associated with ordinary consciousness is incarnated on earth.
She goes on to write,
What subsequently happened is incredibly hard to describe. First, it felt as though whatever I directed my awareness toward appeared before me. Second, time was completely irrelevant. It wasn't even a factor to consider, as though it didn't exist.
This is not an unusual feature of NDEs, but I point it out because, again, it suggests that the higher self exists outside of time — at least time as we understand it.
Later in the book, Moorjani expands on the idea of timelessness in connection with reincarnation (all emphases in the original):
… the concept of reincarnation in its conventional form of a progression of lifetimes, running sequentially one after the other, wasn't supported by my NDE. I realized that time doesn't move in a linear fashion unless we're using the filter of our physical bodies and minds. Once we are no longer limited by our earthly senses, every moment exists simultaneously. I've come to think that the concept of reincarnation is really just an interpretation, a way for our intellect to make sense of all existence happening at once.
We think in terms of “time passing,” but in my NDE, it felt as though time just is, and we're moving through it. This means that not only do all points of time exist simultaneously, but also that in the other realm, we can go faster, slower, or even backward and sideways.…
… time, space, and solid matter don't always exist as we normally think of them. During my NDE, I felt that I could focus on any point in time that I needed to access.
Because of this, I believe that when someone has a glimpse of what have previously been interpreted as “past lives,” they're actually accessing parallel or simultaneous existences, because all time exists at once.…
… all time and space exist right now, and we're simply moving through it …
This perspective of timelessness is clearly bound up with her identification with the higher self, which (in my scheme) occupies the 4th Plane at all times, because it exists apart from time:
I often use the phrase infinite self in place of terms such as higher self, soul, and spirit. In order to be a little clearer, understand that I'm referring to the part of me that was aware during the NDP that I'm not just my body–the part of me that felt I was one with every single thing. I was merging with pure consciousness as an infinite, magnificent being, feeling the clarity of why I'm in this body and life at this point in time. This is also the part of me that understood that the illusion of separation is created by identifying too strongly with the external.…
In truth, I'm not my body, my race, religion, or other beliefs, and neither is anyone else. The real self is infinite and much more powerful–a complete and whole entity that isn't broken or damaged in any way. The infinite me already contains all the resources I need to navigate through life, because I'm One with Universal energy. In fact, I am Universal energy.
Moorjani's "infinite self" or "infinite me" is what I think of as the higher self of the 4th Plane (and higher planes). Note that she experienced her father as being free of the prejudices, judgmentalism, and repressive tendencies he exhibited while on earth. Yet he was still identifiable as her father. I suggest that she encountered her father's higher self, which never suffered from earthly limitations, and that she was able to recognize him because there is a continuity of existence and experience from the earthly person to the higher self — just as there is a continuity between the triangular base of a pyramid and its other sides (to recycle the image from last time).