busyAt the age of 16, when Tony Kofi was an apprentice builder living in Nottingham, he fell from the third story of a building. Time seemed to slow down massively, and he saw a complex series of images flash before his eyes.
One aspect of the phenomenon is the emergency itself. This has two elements which can come into play:
1) Time dilation in an emergency is a common experience. In fact, people can practice enough to gain some control over it. Part of that comes from the biochemical "fight or flight" mode and part from the shifting state of consciousness. If you want to explore this, there are meditative and martial arts traditions that teach it. Some first responder programs teach it more clumsily.
2) The brain has a search function to solve problems. In an emergency, sometimes that goes into overdrive. It can do so because other ordinary processes get turned down or even off, which frees up processing space for life-sustaining actions. Reviewing past events can reveal solutions to present ones -- or simply provide the mind with motivation to survive, thus improving the odds.
Another aspect is that, in moments of extremity, the veil between realms can thin. This allows some incarnate souls to access things which are not typically accessible to them.
One is that the temporal gravity well loosens its grip on them, allowing them to experience nonlinear time.
Another is that they come close enough to the spiritual realm that the incarnate part of the soul can touch the eternal part. Most people can't do wet downloads; they only have what they chose to bring into this life. But sometimes extraordinary circumstances give people a chance to update with new choices.
When he came to at the hospital, he felt like a different person and didn't want to return to his previous life.
Now this is very interesting, because it touches on a different phenomenon which the author did not mention (and may not have encountered).
A walk-in is a soul who takes over a life in progress, changing places with the original soul who wishes to move on. Among the key symptoms are feeling like a different person (because that's true) and making dramatic life changes.
Over the following weeks, the images kept flashing back into his mind. He felt that he was “being shown something" and that the images represented his future.
Again, any of several things could be active here.
1) A destiny directs everything toward a specific outcome. There is debate over whether everyone, some people, or no one has a destiny. The proportion of belief varies across cultures.
2) Another common belief is that the future is mutable, and people have different paths they could take. These can be more or less probable. At any given time, there are usually a few most likely ones. Some people are generally good at parsing these, while others are unaware of them. But extraordinary circumstances can give anyone a glimpse of one or more possible futures -- likely or unlikely.
3) People come into this life with a set of goals, sometimes called "life purpose," aka soul purpose, back-pocket list, or butt-pocket list. It can be one main thing or a cluster of related things. In some cultures, most or all people know theirs, as the culture provides methods of discovery. In other cultures, very few people know theirs, because they don't have those tools. A few folks just naturally remember theirs. Anyone can figure it out from clues. It will always be something you are somehow equipped to do -- kind of like if you looked in your suitcase to learn about your vacation, swimsuits and shorts would suggest a beach while sweaters and snow goggles would suggest a ski resort -- based on your innate potential, even if it also requires you to get special training of some sort. Regardless of cultural context, people unaware of their life purpose sometimes get a glimpse of it during extraordinary circumstances, which as mentioned above can thin the veil enough to notice things not usually discernible from the material realm.
But what explains this phenomenon? Psychologists have proposed a number of explanations, but I'd argue the key to understanding Tony's experience lies in a different interpretation of time itself.
I am surprised and pleased that someone else noticed this option. Most people think of time as fixed and purely objective, despite generous evidence to the contrary.
Perhaps surprisingly, given how common it is, the “life review experience" has been studied very little.
That's because science excels at studying things which can be replicated, especially in a lab. It is much less equipped to study unpredictable phenomena like ball lightning. Doesn't help that the brain is still largely a black box, despite extensive attempts to study it, and the mind is even more slippery. Most scientists prefer to study things they can pin down. Conversely, most people who like studying enigmatic and unpredictable things do not become scientists but rather mystics, clergy, philosophers, etc. Those of us who study both, and learn the techniques of both, and combine them, are not only rare but usually disliked by others on both sides. But you can learn a lot more that way.
For example, a group of Israeli researchers suggested in 2017 that our life events may exist as a continuum in our minds, and may come to the forefront in extreme conditions of psychological and physiological stress.
Well, it's sort of a continuum. The things in the recent past are usually recalled in sequential order. But older memories are more jumbled and take some effort to sequence. You may be able to sort them based on people or places appearing (e.g. Grandma was alive, or we lived in a brown house), or by size (changing height in childhood), etc. But most people can't easily sequence things that happened years ago rather than the last few days.
The past comes to the forefront in extreme conditions because humans use timebinding to solve problems and stay alive. That includes learning from personal experience, learning from others' experiences, and also teaching about things. When things go wrong, sometimes the brain dumps a lot of stuff into the foremind: "Here I brought you some references will this help?" Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn't. It's more likely to help if you have made a habit of studying your consciousness and analyzing your decisions over time.
Another theory is that, when we're close to death, our memories suddenly “unload" themselves, like the contents of a skip being dumped. This could be related to “cortical disinhibition" – a breaking down of the normal regulatory processes of the brain – in highly stressful or dangerous situations, causing a “cascade" of mental impressions.
But the life review is usually reported as a serene and ordered experience, completely unlike the kind of chaotic cascade of experiences associated with cortical disinhibition.
Well, there is a memory upload if death seems imminent but with at least a second or so of warning. That's because it's much easier to shift planes with warning than without. Crash translation really sucks.
And none of these theories explain how it's possible for such a vast amount of information – in many cases, all the events of a person's life – to manifest themselves in a period of a few seconds, and often far less.
Two aspects I mentioned above: expanded available processing because nonessential processes (like digestion or remembering to buy milk) shut down in an emergency, and altered states of consciousness that allow different perception of time.
An alternative explanation is to think of time in a “spatial" sense. Our commonsense view of time is as an arrow that moves from the past through the present towards the future, in which we only have direct access to the present. But modern physics has cast doubt on this simple linear view of time.
Indeed, since Einstein's theory of relativity, some physicists have adopted a “spatial" view of time. They argue we live in a static “block universe" in which time is spread out in a kind of panorama where the past, the present and the future co-exist simultaneously.
This is good progress.
Time is a lot like gravity. When you're on a planet, inside its gravity well, you tend to think of gravity as a force that sticks things to the surface of the planet. But out in space, it is much easier to understand gravity as a force that influences the motion of bodies in relation to each other. When you are incarnate, you tend to perceive time as linear, with a few exceptions. But when you're outside your body -- and thus outside the temporal gravity well -- your spirit experiences time more as a mass through which you can move.
Most if not all people have some experiences with nonlinear time. These include time speeding or slowing based on events, like "time flies when you're having fun," or conversely, slows when you're not. The mind can revisit the past, or with somewhat more effort, explore the future. Love is not constrained by time, distance, or even incarnation status. People are just as capable of learning the many effects of gravity. It's harder when you're standing on a planet, but still possible.
The modern physicist Carlo Rovelli – author of the best-selling The Order of Time – also holds the view that linear time doesn't exist as a universal fact. This idea reflects the view of the philosopher Immanuel Kant, who argued that time is not an objectively real phenomenon, but a construct of the human mind.
Oh for fucksake, get over yourself. If time were only a construct of the human mind, then seeds wouldn't know when to sprout. Of course time has an objective aspect. That just isn't all it has.
A good deal of previous research – including my own – has suggested that our normal perception of time is simply a product of our normal state of consciousness.
In many altered states of consciousness, time slows down so dramatically that seconds seem to stretch out into minutes. This is a common feature of emergency situations, as well as states of deep meditation, experiences on psychedelic drugs and when athletes are “in the zone".
The perception of time, and time itself, are not the same thing. The fact that you can alter your perception of time does not mean it is created solely by human consciousness ... unless you believe you're the only real thing in the universe, which is a perspective of some human minds that causes a lot of problems. Just because you go up in a space shuttle and fool around in freefall does not mean gravity stops sticking things to the planet below you.
But what about Tony Kofi's apparent visions of his future? Did he really glimpse scenes from his future life? Did he see himself playing the saxophone because somehow his future as a musician was already established?
It's possible to see a destiny, or one of several possible futures, or one's life purpose. Note that his success supports these explanations. Had his brain been firing at random, he might have seen something that he wasn't equipped to manifest -- but that doesn't seem to happen often. The emergency functions are there for a reason and they tend to work if the person doesn't actually die. Well, they work if the person dies too, but people here don't see that part as much.
If time really does exist in a spatial sense – and if it's true that time is a construct of the human mind – then perhaps in some way future events may already be present, just as past events are still present.
It is possible to experience at least some sense of time as globular, even in a temporal gravity well. I get ripples from major future events, but then the consensus timespace continuum has a very flimsy grip on me. Quantum mechanics is one good place to look for inspiration, especially if you favor science. Studying history is an excellent way to predict the future, albeit a pretty depressing one. If you favor mysticism, there are many more resources on the nonlinearity of time and how to perceive the future.
Admittedly, this is very difficult to make sense of. But why should everything make sense to us? As I have suggested in a recent book, there must be some aspects of reality that are beyond our comprehension.
Sooth. Not everything has to make sense. We can't understand everything all at once. Think how boring life would be with nothing to discover and no sense of wonder! It'd be like a library with only books you'd already read. O_O
After all, we're just animals, with a limited awareness of reality. And perhaps more than any other phenomenon, this is especially true of time.
We are animals, but we are not just animals, and it is the non-animal part that allows us to step outside the body and the temporal gravity well to contemplate things like nonlinearity, quantum physics, and souls. We are animals; we are spirits; these two things are equally true. Undertanding yourself requires grokking both concepts -- and then realizing that they're not separate, but integrated. Awareness is limited, but that's because we are limitless beings experiencing a limited facet of reality. And there are ways to surpass those limits, if you choose to pursue them, via science or mysticism or other routes.
The world is your oyster. Cook something awesome with it.
