I was fully awake when my heart stopped beating and my last breath passed my lips.<\/p>\n
In the Spring of 2003, a genetic time bomb went off and my body’s time came to an end.\u00a0 The moment of death was upon me at age fifty-three and I found it a curious thing indeed.\u00a0 People around me grew quite excited but an untroubled calm came over me, carrying me further and further away from the scene, as if moving me to an invisible but familiar place just sideways to where my body lay.\u00a0 The sirens of the ambulance were soft and melodic, the questions of the emergency room doctors sounded like a different language.<\/p>\n
Minutes after they placed me on the emergency room table and fit an oxygen mask over my face, I felt my heart stop beating and I sighed my last breath.\u00a0 There was the briefest pause while my personality puzzled that I did not gasp for breath nor seem concerned that my body had just died\u2014and then it was suddenly cradled in my higher soul and I was catapulted, for that is the only word for it, catapulted, wide awake, out of my body and into the Sphere of Universal Communion<\/em>.<\/p>\n My whole life, it turned out, had been practice for the moment of dying:\u00a0 my higher soul stepped forward, speaking reassuringly about how it had been through this so many times before.\u00a0 While my lower soul, this lifetime’s personality, went mute in the face of the vast Unknown, my higher soul catapulted into It with one last sigh of joy and gratitude, What a glorious Creation!<\/em><\/p>\n I was fully awake when I entered the Sphere of Universal Communion<\/em>.<\/p>\n How do I know that is it’s true name?\u00a0 I don’t.\u00a0 I’m not even sure it’s possible for it to have a single true name.\u00a0 But the Sphere of Universal Communion<\/em> is what I saw and what I felt and it’s the only true name I can imagine, the only one I can use to describe it at all.<\/p>\n It appeared to me as a sphere of light, but light that is aware.\u00a0 Light that is awareness.\u00a0 Not something so much seen\u2014since we have no physical eyes without a body\u2014as sensed.\u00a0 Something like the warmth of sunlight even when your eyes are squeezed shut.\u00a0 But with the additional sense of someone present, close by, their attention resting on the edges of your awareness gently.\u00a0 An aware light that is both the substance and the medium of communion within its own spherical spatiality.\u00a0 An aware light that creates and sustains the possibility of shared awareness on a universal basis.\u00a0 Within its infinite spatiality.<\/p>\n I was fully awake when I realized I was myself a sphere of communion.<\/p>\n A sphere of aware light.<\/p>\n Surrounded by an infinite number of other spheres of aware light.<\/p>\n So, as I experienced it, the Sphere of Universal Communion<\/em> is an infinite space of aware light that is occupied by all the individual spheres of aware light that ever have or ever will exist.\u00a0 As if it were the One Mind, occupied by all the individual Ideas it ever has or ever will conceive.\u00a0 Or the timeless, dimensionless, Oversoul, occupied by all the individual souls that ever have or ever will enter the realm of time, space, and personality.\u00a0 As I said, I do not pretend to know what it’s true name is, but the relation between the Whole and its parts\u2014and between parts and parts\u2014this I know and can still see with diamond clarity.<\/p>\n What can I still see of that bodiless state?<\/p>\n Each of us, as an individual sphere of communion<\/em> is the embodiment of two complementary halves:\u00a0 Understanding and Memory.\u00a0 While Understanding is the principal characteristic of the higher soul, Memory is the principal characteristic of the lower soul.\u00a0 Understanding is our individual portion of the limitless Knowledge of the One Soul, the evolving insight we possess into the Way of the One, our individual spark of immortality.\u00a0 Memory, on the other hand, is the accumulated impressions of all the lifetimes we recall, the sum of all the personalities we have yoked to our soul, our enduring storehouse of mortal treasures.<\/p>\n Each of us, as an individual sphere of aware light, then, dwells in the Sphere of Universal Communion<\/em>, a unique fusion of soul and personality, Understanding and Memory.\u00a0 After the death of the body, the higher soul catapults back to the Sphere of Universal Communion<\/em>.\u00a0 If it is not yoked to the lower soul at that time, then it returns without any memory of that lifetime.\u00a0 It has Understanding, perhaps greatly evolved by its experiences of that lifetime, but no direct Memory.\u00a0 The personality, likewise, must be yoked to the soul at the moment of dying if its Memory is to accompany it to the Sphere of Universal Communion<\/em>.\u00a0 Otherwise, it wanders without Understanding, lost and confused among all the other disembodied personalities, unaware that they no longer have a body and are only reliving the Memory of their past lifetime.<\/p>\n It is for this reason that it is so important to unite the higher soul and lower soul during this lifetime, before the moment of dying arrives.<\/p>\n I was fully awake when I realized that whenever another sphere of aware light came into contact with me, there was an immediate and spontaneous exchange between us of our respective Memory and Understanding.\u00a0 This is why I say we are individual spheres of communion<\/em> within the Universal Sphere of Communion<\/em>.\u00a0 Because when we come into contact there, all that we know and all that we are passes uninhibited between us in a natural and open communion of shared being.\u00a0 Spheres of aware light touch and so exchange the totality of their experience and assimilate one another’s experience into their own.<\/p>\n So I have come to believe from those experiences that all the individual spheres of communion<\/em> are reflective<\/span> of one another.<\/p>\n I was fully awake when all the individual spheres of communion<\/em> came into contact with one another at the same time, breaking through every dam of individuality and flooding us all in the totality of our shared being.\u00a0 This is why I suspect its name is the Sphere of Universal Communion<\/em>\u2014because when all the individual spheres of aware light periodically come into contact at the same time, every individual awareness that ever has or ever will exist is spontaneously and immediately At-One with the One.\u00a0 I cannot say what it is that periodically draws all of us together at the same time but, cause aside, its effect is the complete and overwhelming experience of every drop of awareness in the ocean suddenly merging into the single sea of awareness.<\/p>\n So I have come to believe from those experiences that all the individual spheres of communion<\/em> are relative<\/span> to the Sphere of Universal Communion<\/em>.<\/p>\n How have I come to believe these lessons?<\/p>\n Through my first-hand communion with other individual spheres of communion<\/em>\u2014and my first-hand communion with the Sphere of Universal Communion<\/em>.<\/p>\n My body was dead for two minutes but for me, the time passed as if it were many years.<\/p>\n Other individual spheres of aware light, many of great depth of Understanding with the Memory of thousands of lifetimes, generously taught me lessons to bring back and place into the stream of time.\u00a0 Such is the work of the great-souled ones, who care mightily that this era of transformation is one of metamorphosis and not one of atrophy.<\/p>\n There is one last thing I have come to believe since returning to this realm of the body and its five senses\u2014<\/p>\n Although it is much more difficult to perceive here than in the Sphere of Universal Communion<\/em>, we are no less individual spheres of communion<\/em> here than we are there.\u00a0 Once I had experienced what it feels like to recognize myself as a sphere of aware light in the bodiless state, I found I had become sensitive enough to perceive myself as that same sphere of communion here with a body.\u00a0 And sensitive enough to recognize that everyone else is a similar sphere of aware light, as well.<\/p>\n Moreover, although it is more difficult to perceive the spontaneous and immediate exchange of Understanding and Memory that occurs when we individual spheres of communion<\/em> come into contact here<\/span>, it occurs nonetheless, even if not in our conscious awareness.<\/p>\n I have, in other words, been a wayfarer with a body and been a wayfarer without a body and have not ever found any essential difference.<\/p>\n So what I have come to believe moving from birth to death to rebirth is this:\u00a0 just as learning to live is actually preparing to die, it is clear that preparing to die is actually learning to live.<\/p>\n It’s been nearly seven years since I died and I have been reticent to speak about it too soon, for fear of coloring my account with the profound emotions of the experience.\u00a0 I have, of course, dedicated the remainder of this lifetime to giving expression to the lessons I learned in the Sphere of Universal Communion<\/em>.<\/p>\n The Toltec I Ching<\/em> is the first published work of that project.<\/p>\n ~<\/p>\n The Toltec I Ching<\/em>, by Martha Ramirez-Oropeza and William Douglas Horden has just received a Silver Award in the 2010 Nautilus Awards<\/a>.\u00a0 It recasts the I Ching in the symbology of the Native Americans of ancient Mexico and includes original illustrations interpreting each of the hexagrams.\u00a0 Its subtitle, 64 Keys to Inspired Action in the New World<\/em> hints at its focus on the ethics of the emerging world culture.<\/p>\n Click here<\/a> to go to the main site to see sample chapters, reviews and the link to Larson Publications<\/a> for ordering the book.<\/p>\n ~<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I was fully awake when my heart stopped beating and my last breath passed my lips. In the Spring of 2003, a genetic time bomb went off and my body’s time came to an end.\u00a0 The moment of death was … Continue reading