14.

A Special Kind of NDE

The true    value   of  a   human   being   is  determined  primarily   by  the

measure and the sense   in  which   he  has attained    liberation  from    the

self.

—ALBERT EINSTEIN    (1879–1955)

When I was initially in the Realm of the Earthworm’s-Eye View, I had

no real center of consciousness. I didn’t know who or what I was, or even
if I was. I was simply . . . there, a singular awareness in the midst of a
soupy, dark, muddy nothingness that had no beginning and, seemingly, no
end.
Now, however, I knew. I understood that I was part of the Divine and
that nothing—absolutely nothing—could ever take that away. The (false)
suspicion that we can somehow be separated from God is the root of
every form of anxiety in the universe, and the cure for it—which I
received partially within the Gateway and completely within the Core—
was the knowledge that nothing can tear us from God, ever. This
knowledge—and it remains the single most important thing I’ve ever
learned—robbed the Realm of the Earthworm’s-Eye View of its terror
and allowed me to see it for what it really was: a not entirely pleasant, but
no doubt necessary, part of the cosmos.
Many people have traveled to the realms I did, but, strangely enough,
most remembered their earthly identities while away from their earthly
forms. They knew that they were John Smith or George Johnson or Sarah
Brown. They never lost sight of the fact that they lived on earth. They
were aware that their living relatives were still there, waiting and hoping
they would come back. They also, in many cases, met friends and
relatives who had died before them, and in these cases, too, they