As I have written about a few times before, as a kid I remembered life before this incarnation.
FLASHBACKS TO THE TIME BEFORE INCARNATION
I would have flashbacks, often when I was outside and saw the light filtering through leaves, and I was brought back to the time before this life and also experienced a longing for it. It was a time with no physical body, where everything was light, and there was a profound and infinite sense of love and being home. There was also a sense of timelessness with a slight sense of time since some things did happen. At times, there were also other beings there with wordless communication and a sense of infinite wisdom.
I didn’t talk about this to anyone and didn’t really have any labels for this or thoughts about it. These flashbacks happened only in the years before school age.
During this time and later, I would sometimes wake up with a deep sense of longing which couldn’t be satisfied with anything around me – family, friends, favorite activities, and so on.
AWAKENING SHIFT IN TEENS
When I was sixteen, there was a shift into oneness and a profound immediate sense of all – all of existence – as the divine. When this happened, I realized that this was what the flashbacks were about. All as the divine. All as God. All as Spirit. Everything, without exception, is God.
Even this human self and any sense of fundamentally being a separate self is God taking on that form and having that experience for itself.
This obviously turned my life upside-down and inside-out, and it’s been the context for my life since.
FINDING IT HERE AND NOW INDEPENDENT OF STATES
There is a third phase or aspect to this.
The essence of the flashbacks and the awakening shift is the same, and it’s available here and now.
The invitation is to find this here and now, independent of any particular states or content of experience.
I can find myself as capacity for the world as it appears to me. I can notice that all my experiences – of this human self, the wider world, and anything else – happen within and as my sense fields. I can notice that all my experiences happen within and as what I am.
FLASHBACKS, AWAKENING, FINDING IT HERE AND NOW
For me, these three are aspects of the same.
The flashbacks point to an existence before this life, and perhaps between lives, where all is the divine.
The initial awakening shift revealed all as the divine.
And through inquiry and noticing, I find that the world and everything happens within and as what I more fundamentally am, and appears as consciousness and what we can label the divine.