The eternal in man – an essay on consciousness
20. aug 2021 | Blog på engelsk
Blog post by Lars Muhl from 20 August 2021
My first out-of-body experience was in 1969 in Tel Aviv when I was with the band Daisy on tour in Israel. It was the day before going back to Denmark and I was in town to do the last shopping for the trip. On the way back to our apartment, I sat down at a sidewalk café to enjoy one last cup of coffee. Suddenly I heard a short sound coming from the middle of the crown, as when you pull a stopper out of a bottle, as well as a shysss sound comparable to the sound of a computer when sending an e-mail today. In the same second, I found myself hanging about 20 feet up in the air, from where I could see myself sitting down on Ben Yehuda Street with my coffee. While hanging up there, I did not feel anything, I WAS a deeper understanding that the life, or the incarnation we are in right now, is just a moment in relation to our real life, which extends over many incarnations, and will continue forever. Not necessarily here on Earth, but in other galaxies, in other universes, and on other, higher planes of consciousness.
The second time I had an out-of-body experience happened when in 2006 I was on my way home from Mount Montségur in the French Pyrenees. I had just passed a busy season and was outside the northern French city of Dijon when I woke up after hitting the crash barrier at 140 km per hour. At the same time, I felt like I was being torn from my body and thrown forward at breakneck speed through a white tunnel. The body was left to its own desperate struggle to survive in the car, which, according to witnesses, not only rolled sideways around but also somersaulted before disappearing through a fence and falling two meters down into a field.
When I got back to the body, it happened through the crown in the middle of the crown. Again with the same sound that I had experienced in Tel Aviv many years earlier. Fifty yards away stood the car, crumpled in the drizzle, and the first thing I thought was that I was dead. There was a wonderfully peaceful silence. Then I looked up. Ten meters from me stood a young girl, shining and smiling. Around her neck she had an equilateral cross. 'When you can survive this, you can survive everything!' She said.
Then I discovered the worried German man squatting by my side. He told me that I myself had gotten out of the car and had laid down a few meters from it. He had helped me further away, for fear the car would explode.
The man and the young girl were at no time in contact with each other. It was as if the German man did not notice her at all. The last words I heard when the rescue squad came to pick me up was the young girl who cheerfully said, 'Don't worry, everything has been taken care of!'. The last thing I saw through the rear window of the ambulance was her, waving at me with a big smile.
At the hospital, one could see that apart from the muscles in my body that were as sore as if they had been exposed to ten laps with Mike Tyson, I had not suffered any harm. The rescuers who had seen the car told me it was a minor miracle that I had survived the accident at all.
To me, there is no doubt at all that the young girl was a manifestation from a parallel universe, or from a higher plane of consciousness. I call her 'my guardian angel'. Since this experience, I have felt her presence many times.
Out-of-body experiences are reported around the world, usually in connection with near-death experiences. The reports on this are mostly in agreement. Yet there is generally great skepticism about such paranormal events. Thus also with the neurosurgeon Eben Alexander, who through his work had operated on many patients who, despite having been declared dead, had returned and were able to report the most incredible things. However, like most scientifically oriented people, Eben Alexander attributed such experiences to being brain activity, which as a survival mechanism is initiated by life-threatening circumstances.
Then, however, it happened that the same Eben Alexander in 2008 himself was afflicted with a rare and aggressive form of meningitis, a course that ended with Alexander being declared brain dead. Against all odds, Eben Alexander came back to life, where he could recount how he had experienced being thrown back into a form of microbial life in mud. From here he began a journey, up through the spheres, until he was enveloped by a light and a consciousness, which he later described as being the consciousness we call God. Along the way, he had a number of consciousness-expanding experiences that, among other things, put him in touch with a sister he was not aware he had. The essence of the experience has been described by Eben Alexander in his book 'To Heaven and Back'. The explanation that such experiences are merely brain activity had to be scrapped. One could have observed by oneself that there had been absolutely no brain activity, while Eben Alexander was apparently on a 'journey' in a higher and unknown form of consciousness that did not appear to be conditioned by the physical body.
Today, Eben Alexander travels around the world giving lectures on his 'journey' to Heaven / Heaven, and how this event completely changed his attitude to what a human being is and what hidden abilities and possibilities it possesses.
In my work on the Aramaic language, which was the language Jesus spoke, I have found deeper meanings in some of the words and concepts assigned to Jesus in the New Testament. Among other things, the concept of 'Kingdom of Heaven'. What size is it and where is it located? Jesus himself gives this instruction in the Gospel of Luke, where he tells us that the Kingdom of Heaven is within each of us.
To understand the scope of this statement, one has to resort to the Aramaic translation.
HEAVEN in Aramaic reads as follows: MALKOOTA D'SHMEYA.
MALKOOTA means Kingdom, or more precisely QUEENDOM, while D'SHMEYA directly translated means HEAVENLY.
However, one has to dive deeper into the words. All Aramaic concepts are derived from so-called root words. The root of MALKOOTA is MLK, from which also MALACHI (Angel, Messenger) originates. The root word for SHMEYA is SHM, which precisely means LIGHT, CONSCIOUSNESS, IDENTITY (The image of GOD in which we are created), SOUND, LIFE POWER. The suffix in D'SHMEYA = EYA, means WHICH IS FOREVER.
So, when Jesus tells us that the HEAVENLY IS WITHIN US, it means that we carry around an eternal power, a consciousness that can never pass away.
Once we understand the extent of such an insight, we will need to reassess our basic perception of our existence and what opportunities this offers us. We have come a long way with our technological inventions. But in the effort to solve all problems along this path, we have more or less turned our backs on man's own inherent, creative forces. It is clear that in order to embrace such an insight, one needs to have the courage to let go of many of the old perceptions that hold us back to old habits and norms, and that limit the real progress that man has to implement in order to solve the problems it has put itself in.
This is where religion or spirituality in the form of spiritual science comes into the picture. Not religion as we know it. The concept of religion is called in Latin re-ligare, to re-connect. Religion should therefore be all about a process that involves a reconnection to the aforementioned consciousness, which was also formulated thus by the father of quantum physics, Max Planck: 'In my work as a physicist, I have learned that behind everything created is an overall intelligent force that controls everything'.
May such an insight bring new hope to humanity and the decisions we make in the future. That they are not taken in fear or in panic, but in balance, knowing who we are, where we come from, what we are doing here, and where we are headed.
A few links about near-death experiences
Jayne Smith's near-death experience: https://youtu.be/vCOpzLBYeto
Lecture with Eben Alexander: https://youtu.be/qbkgj5J91hE
Eben Alexander: 'The Journey to Heaven and Back Again'
Raymond Moody: 'Life after Life'
Lars Muhl: 'The Moment of Freedom'
Raymond A. Moody, Jr. is a philosopher, psychologist, physician and author, best known for his books on life after life and near-death experiences, a term he invented in 1975 in his best-selling book 'Life After Life'. Raymond Moody's research includes thousands of people who have had near-death experiences, trying to explain what happens when a person dies.