ROW Episode 36

In this episode we take some time to reflect on the insights to be gleaned from the near-death experiences of others as a means of reminding ourselves of what life is really all about and refocusing our energies on what truly matters.

Transcript

Sovaida: 0:08

Hello and welcome to Reimagining Our World, a podcast dedicated to envisioning a better world and to infusing hope that we can make the principled choices to build that world. In this episode, we take some time to reflect on the insights to be gleaned from the near death experiences of others as a means of reminding ourselves of what life is really all about and refocusing our energies on what truly matters. Here we are in 2023 and the onslaught of cascading crises that beset our world continues to be relentless. We have wars and security crises. We have energy crises. We have stubborn and rampant inflation. Food crises. The climate crisis continues. The balkanization of the world has really taken root into two opposing camps, with an accelerating global arms race and the looming specter of a global war that could well include nuclear weapons. I don't know about you, but I believe that we deserve a better world. And goodness knows, I think most of us want a better world. All of us, no matter whether we're American, Russian, Ukrainian, Chinese, Latin American, African, Asian, or Middle Easterners, we want a world in which we are free to develop our potential and enjoy the basic human rights, including freedom of belief and speech, freedom to express ourselves, freedom of education, adequate housing for ourselves and our families, healthcare, really the basics, access to clean food and water. But to have a better world, we need to make different choices, because clearly the choices that we've made to date have not served us very well. But here's the thing about choices. We often know exactly what we need to do and yet we don't seem to be able to muster the will to do it. We lack the requisite motivation. It's like knowing you need to lose weight because the doctors told you you have high blood pressure and you know you have an autoimmune disease that's developed and obesity is bad for it but somehow you can't keep away from those delicious desserts. In our collective life, we know that war is not only futile, but profoundly destructive. All the evidence is that the current war in Ukraine is going to decimate the global economy, not just in the near term, but for quite a while to come. And in fact, lately, some global leaders have been saying,"Gosh, you want to solve poverty and climate change and all these major problems. But let's be clear, unless we solve our security problems, there's no way that we're going to be able to solve these other problems." So it's the cornerstone. We know that we need it. And yet, here we are: unable to stop this war. The Ukraine war has actually been a really wonderful lesson, if we would just learn it, that it is time to take a different kind of action. Yet our leaders have not been able to muster the will to collective action, nor have they discovered the secret of unity. Each country, by and large, with the exception of a few, is continuing to calculate based on a national self interest that in today's interconnected world frankly doesn't make sense, because the reality is that we sink or swim together. I've been reflecting in this new year, 2023, on what we can do to motivate ourselves to take the steps that we know that we need to take. For instance, to stop this senseless and brutal war. The backdrop against which I undertook this personal inner journey of reflection was the truth that we all die, and when we do we leave behind all these things that we so desperately fought to acquire, including tracts of land in other people's countries over which we shed so much blood. My starting point for this exploration was to ask, what is this business we call life all about? Because I believe the answer to this question for each of us is the key to making better choices for ourselves. Depending on what we believe, so will we live our lives. The choices we make about our lives depend to a large part on these underlying and often subconscious beliefs that we hold about how these choices fit into what we view the purposes of our life to be and why we're here. On the other hand, if we're being really honest with ourselves, many of us are uncomfortable with this exploration and choose to keep ourselves really busy all the time, flitting from activity to activity so that we don't have to really stop and think about what is my life all about? If we believe that this life is all that we have, then of course we're gonna fight tooth and nail to get the best we can for ourselves, for our families, for our children, even if it's at enormous cost to others. And we do the same for our nations. My nation comes first, at the expense of others if necessary. That's nationalism, as opposed to a sane patriotism. If, on the other hand, we believe that there's more to this life, then the question becomes more interesting. What is that more? What is it for? And therefore, what is the true purpose of our lives here? I think this is a question that we all owe it to ourselves to think about, reflect upon, and go out and start a quest. For the purposes of today's sharing, I want to tell you that I started my own quest, using some of the tools that we've talked about in this series, Reimagining Our World. One of the tools you'll remember we talked about was the skill of unfettered and independent investigation of reality. My own private hope was that I would find some insights that would help me, for myself, answer this question. Obviously, we're sharing here. I'm not trying to impose any views or thoughts on you. I'm just sharing with you some insights that I learned, actually, from other people. These are not even my own insights. So I went looking for insights in the experience of other human beings, mere humans like myself, and I was not disappointed. In fact, what I found was a source of such clarity that I thought today I would take a few minutes to share it with you in the hopes that you too will find it empowering, eye opening, thought provoking, and maybe even a catalyst for renewed optimism, vigor, and most of all, making a different set of choices. What I came across was one woman's near death experience, which I found particularly inspiring and illuminating. I'd be very curious to know, What do you think? She was a teenager at the time this incident happened. She was involved in some kind of motor accident on the side of a mountain. And here's some thought provoking and soul stirring elements of her story. Obviously, I'm not going to relay everything in full detail, but I'm going to relay enough so you get a picture, and then the lessons or insights that I gleaned from her sharing. So the first thing is, the accident happens and an ambulance comes to get her, and as she waits, lying there for it to come, she notices that she's seeing her body lying there. It's almost like she's become disembodied, and she's fascinated by this wrist that she sees, which looks very familiar to her. She realizes after a while that she's actually spent her entire life, all, I think it was 16 years of it, associating herself very strongly with this wrist. And she, as she conveys this, she says she was amazed that this had been so, because she said,"I thought that this wrist is in no way an essential part of me." The first lesson that I came away with from this sharing was the question, are we placing inordinate emphasis on our bodies and on the material aspect of life? And if we are, that may be a misguided approach. The next thing that happens is that her mother hears about the accident, arrives, and is understandably completely distraught. Her daughter is trying now, in this state that she's in, to communicate with her mother and assure her and say,"Hey, actually, I'm fine. You don't need to be so upset." But because of the level of her mother's emotional distress, she can't get through communication wise. It's like the emotional distress is clogging the channels, the communication channels interfering with the radio frequency, if you like, and her ability to receive information from her daughter. The lesson that I took away from this was that death may not spell an end or the kind of end that we have come to believe it does. And that we continue to maintain awareness and connection, possibly to our loved ones, if one were to take the story and really sit with it. And that beyond that, maybe we can still communicate with each other. Consequently, we don't need to approach death of ourselves, of our loved ones, with the dread of this permanent separation, which I think is the reason why many of us fear death so much. What if we remain connected radios on the same frequency? By the way, the reason I went looking for this kind of material was that lately, I don't know about you, but I've lost a number of people, not to COVID, but I've known a number of people, been close to a number of people who have passed on from this earthly plane. So these questions are ever present in my own mind, and it made me think, I'm sure they're very present for others. And to the extent that the way we answer this question determines the quality of life that we choose to live here, either individually or collectively. Okay, now, more fun. Once she gets to the hospital in the ambulance, she finds that she's taken into this room and there's a doctor who's on call, the emergency room doctor, and he's trying desperately to revive her but at some point he says,"Ah, she's dead, she's gone, no point, I'm giving up." she's aware of all of this activity. She says, it's like she could look down and see it. And then she said something very dramatic happened. Her own personal doctor burst through the door and says, No. I'm going to revive her." She said she could see his motivation. He was completely committed to reviving her. He was not about to give up, and he was annoyed that the other doctor was going to give up. So he continues trying to bring her back and at this point she says she was trying to say to him look just let me be I'm happy where I am but no he's trying and meanwhile she's also able to experience things that are going on in other rooms in the hospital that she's not physically ever entered. She heard conversations between nurses which she was able to relate to them afterwards and they were shocked and horrified and surprised that she was aware of all the goings on in different parts of the hospital, because she had not physically been in those parts. So that brings us to a third insight, which is sorry it's this actually a continuing insight about the connectedness, that what if awareness, so not only the fact that we may be able to communicate with our loved ones after they've departed from this life, but that they continue to be aware of everything that's going on with us and to be cognizant, aware, and even communicate. My mother in law passed a number of months ago, and I remember having a conversation with her towards the end, and her sharing with me that one of the her biggest dreads was that once she was gone, what if she would never be aware of what was going on in her children and her grandchildren's lives and that brought her untold sorrow. As you can see, I had my own personal spurs for wanting to pursue this topic. Okay now we move on to the next point, which is another beautiful point. This lady starts to realize, oh my gosh, there's all this havoc in the hospital. My mother's distraught. The doctors are running around like chickens without their heads. They're trying to revive. We have now been clinically dead for quite a while, and so they're arguing amongst themselves. She realizes that she needs to start moving away from this sphere, this planet. And as she does she finds that the earth, so she zooms farther away, removes herself, she finds that the whole earth seems to be singing or producing this amazing music, a single song. And that each of us is a note in this symphony of the earth. That to me honestly resonated. Probably more than anything else. The idea that each of us here consists of a note, a note that we get to play in tandem as part of this amazing symphony. And that really our only job, our main job here, is to play this note the best possible way we can. Play it on pitch, make it clean, make it beautiful, make it resonant. If you've ever been to choir practice or singing symphony or orchestral practice, you'll know what I'm talking about. You know the violins trying to make sure, first of all, that their instruments are tuned so that when they're playing on pitch with others. Otherwise, the sound is dissonant. If my E is different from someone else's E and we're playing at different pitches, it sounds awful. We want to harmonize ourselves, but it starts by making sure that each of us is producing and being that note. Now, how amazing and liberating is this insight? First of all, we get to let go of this horrible business that we've all gotten enmeshed in, which is the business of comparing ourselves with each other and others. For instance, through the use of social media. There is no better or worse note. All notes are important in a musical piece, or in a symphony. What matters is that they're played well. We also are liberated because we no longer have to worry about fixing everybody else or the world. We can start with something manageable, which is just ourselves. What sort of person am I? What quality of character do I have? How do I treat my fellow human beings? Do I work in harmony with others? Am I somebody who builds unity? Or am I somebody who brings division? We can also let go of a lot of competition, whether it's individual competition or nationalistic competition. And, we can also revel in the knowledge that we are at once unique as individuals and as notes in this symphony, and yet interconnected and part of an indivisible whole. It therefore makes no sense, it is counterproductive, to create division based on meaningless prejudices, on the basis of gender or race or ethnicity or nationality. It's just all really silly, because we're all part of this piece of orchestral music. Now, the next point is this. As she continues to move away from the earth, she starts to become aware of all the actions that she's taken in the course of her short life. She was still a teenager. Interestingly, the most important thing is this one incident that she relays, which again really struck me. She said the most important thing she'd done was that one summer, in a camp at which she'd been a counselor or something for a camp for disabled children, she had seen a little boy who was thirsty and she had gone and asked him if she could offer him some water and had gone and brought it to him. That act, that selfless act of unconditional love not wanting anything in return, not expecting anything in return. There were no deals to be made. There was no quid pro quo. That act was the most important thing this young woman had done in her life. Wow. That really, to me, puts our lives in perspective. So it made me start to think about are all these material accomplishments on which we place such inordinate emphasis. Do they actually count for that much? Not that they're not important, don't get me wrong, but in the scheme of life, are the grades we get in school, and the degrees we amass, and our desire to go to the right schools, or the Ivy League schools, the kind of job we have, the status, or the label that I have, the salary that I want, the vacation homes, the cars, the club memberships, not to mention our looks and all the plastic surgery we do to make ourselves look perfect and the clothes and jewelry we amass. Are these really that important? Sure, we can enjoy them while we are alive. None of us can live forever. We will eventually have to leave them all behind. And so we need to put them in perspective and accord them priority. They're wonderful enablers for us. They help bring a touch of joy. They make life easier up to a certain point, but what if the real work we're here to do is to hone our qualities of being, our qualities of character, our virtues, in order to prepare ourselves for a continuation of the life of a soul, for instance? What if we are souls temporarily here in a physical body that continue to live in other worlds that we're not cognizant of but that are real nonetheless. Our lack of knowledge of something doesn't mean it doesn't exist, right? So that's a really important factor to also take into consideration. So what if it is these acts of selflessness and service and qualities like honesty and truthfulness and compassion and self abnegation? What if these are the things that will end up on the resume and that are actually essential to our growth. So this is just a question to ponder, because depending on the conclusion we arrive at, that will determine the choices that we make as a society and as an individual. The next point was another really fascinating one. She says she saw all the acts that she had done in this life and she noticed that each act was like throwing a pebble into a pond. It had ripple effects with ever widening circles that never end. And so we think that things we do, very often we make decisions and choices in our lives and we think,"I'm entitled to make this decision because it's my life and I'm not affecting anyone else and I get to do what I want to do." Very individualistic, especially in Western societies. But the truth is that we are interconnected, and when we do things, they do affect other people. Whether we like it or not, it just is. This is acceptance of reality. And it's good to just know that, and pause, and accept some responsibility, and maybe inject some compassion before we make decisions, into what, how are my decisions affecting others? Interestingly, our world has been given a lot of opportunities in the last two or three years to learn this lesson. We were given the opportunity with COVID to recognize that we're only as safe as everybody else is, that it's important to get enough vaccines out there, that it's important to mask, to protect others, that we need to think about others who may be immunocompromised, and for them when they get COVID, it may not just be a cold or a flu; it could be deadly. We're still getting to learn this lesson with climate change. The opportunity is still very present that all of us need to pull together. We can't sit this one out, because everybody has to pull. The Ukraine war has been another amazing demonstration. It's no longer a war in that part of the world."It's their business. Let them duke it out." It has spawned a Global food crisis, a global energy crisis, a balkanization of the world unseen since the Second World War into two opposing camps, an accelerating arms race. It's the looming specter of nuclear war. We need to actually wake up and realize that we are interconnected and our actions do matter and do affect each other. Isn't it better that we come together in consultation and make collective decisions? All right, in the midst of this chaos, at one point this lady said that she was shown groups of people on planet Earth who were working towards a collective good of the planet, and were working for the betterment of the world, and working for unity, and apparently this was a good thing. The lesson here was that in the midst of the chaos, destruction, and disintegration that you and I and all of us are experiencing. There are groups of people who are working like the imaginal discs inside the caterpillar that is metamorphosing into a butterfly inside the cocoon, as the caterpillar starts to disintegrate and all that goop and mess, these imaginal disks start to multiply. They are correlated with the parts of the new butterfly, a new creation that's to emerge from the welter of all this chaos and disorganization. The question for you and me is, do I want to align myself with the forces of integration in this world or disintegration? Do I want to be a unity builder, or do I want to be the person who sows division? Do I want to lend my voice to amplifying racism, sexism, nationalism and, all these things that cause division that are just based on ignorance of who we really are as human beings and what this journey is that we're on, or do I want to be somebody who builds unity. The story ends with this lady being told that it was not yet her time to transition and that she needed to come back to earth. Even though she really didn't want to because she really liked where she was, she came, even though it was at a huge cost to her physically, because she'd been clinically dead for so long there was enough damage in the brain and various organs in her body that it took her a number of years to get well enough to be able to function and speak and so on. And yet she said something really interesting. She said every day she viewed life as such a gift to be savored because it is here for a purpose. We're not just here to while away the hours and count down the days until death comes. That is such a depressing way to look at life. And especially for those who maybe suffer with mental health challenges, this might be a thread of hope to cling to that life is an amazing blessing and a gift and that we get to use it in order to hone these qualities that we have and also to be in service to others and build bonds of unconditional love. The reason I chose to share this story of one person's experiences that I thought for me, it provided me with a lot of insights which I've shared with you. Obviously, you can take them or leave them. As I said, I'd be curious to know your thoughts. The main thing is that we all need to broaden our perspective and don a wider lens about the purpose of our lives. We tend to get stuck in the weeds. Another analogy is we lose sight of the forest for the trees. By adopting a wider lens and thinking of the purpose of our lives, we actually start to see that we have a broader range of choices that we can make, both as individuals, in what we think are very limited lives, or as societies, as collective wholes. And it puts the whole business of this carnage of war and our fears about each other in perspective. My biggest takeaway from what I've just shared, is that we're each at once both more unique than we ever thought and more magnificent and powerful, while at the same time being more insignificant than we think. Very interesting duality. The insignificance teaches us to be humble and not be so entitled and arrogant. Our sense of uniqueness and capacity enables us to let go of destructive comparison and endless competition, and to revel in our uniqueness and to cultivate it in service to others. Most of all, I think my biggest takeaway is that by acting together, we can make a difference and will overcome any challenge, no matter how large and intractable it may seem, including all the global challenges. There is strength in unity, and the answer to all our ills today is collective action based on a unity of vision. Once we truly grasp this, we'll be able to come together and take the steps that are necessary to ensure that we are free, finally, from the scourge of war, once and for all, of permanent peace. Okay, I hope you've enjoyed today's session. I really felt it was important. We focus on How do we build a new world? How do we create a global parliament of the legislature that can legislate on global laws? How can we resolve climate change? How? But before any human being has the energy or the inclination to take on the strategies to tackle the how, they need to have the motivation, which is the why. Why would I want to do this? Why would I want to expend energy? And this topic of what is my life about, what am I here to do, to me, galvanizes me, gives me the motivation to then do all the work that has to do with the what and the how. All right, I'm going to take a quick look to see if there are comments. Wonderful. Some of you who are present here have enjoyed today's presentation. I'm very glad. And please feel free to go and to type in the your comments. And if you like this program, please go to our YouTube channel, which is called CPGG, Center for Peace and Global Governance, and subscribe. It's free. That way you'll get notified about the programs as they come up once a month on different weekends because of my schedule. And I'd love to hear from you. So thank you again so much and take care. I'll see you next month. Bye bye. That's all for this episode of Reimagining Our World. I'll see you back here next month. If you liked this episode, please help us to get the word out by rating us and subscribing to the program on your favorite podcast platform. This series is also available in video on the YouTube channel of the Center for Peace and Global Governance, CPGG.