There is an interesting relationship between my before-life experience and the oneness shift that happened when this human self was sixteen.
I have written about it before, but thought I would revisit it here.
BEFORE-LIFE EXPERIENCE
As a kid, I had flashbacks to the time before this incarnation. It was of all as love and a profound sense of being home, beyond what can be touched with words.
At the time, when these flashbacks happened, I was maybe 4–6 years old and didn’t reflect on it. I just knew it had been my life before this life, and it came back to me now and then in flashbacks. I never mentioned it to anyone. I wouldn’t have known what to say.
Later, I consciously realized a few more things about it. It was a recognition of myself as consciousness and all of existence as consciousness. The essence of it is what many describe from near-death experiences, and when I listen to people describing their NDEs, it’s profoundly familiar to me.
MY NATURE NOTICING ITSELF
I would often wake up with a deep longing in later childhood and early teens, and I didn’t understand what it was about.
At fifteen, it was as if the world went very far away. This happened during the course of a few minutes during the afternoon of January 1st, and it was profoundly disturbing to my human self. Doctors and specialists couldn’t figure out what was going on.
That summer, I started seeing energies. First, around the leaves of the birch trees in the garden against the blue sky, then around everything – including inanimate objects.
Almost exactly a year later, between Christmas and New Year when I was sixteen, I walked along the dirt road up to the house at night. A big wind blew through the landscape, and I looked up at the many stars in the dark sky above me. Suddenly, there was a dramatic shift. From taking myself as this human self filled with teenage angst, I recognized myself as everything and everything as the divine.
Everything without exception is the divine. This human self is the divine, the whole of existence, temporarily and locally taking that form, and either taking itself to be this human self – or anything at all within the world – or recognizing itself as the whole of it all.
In this case, it recognized itself as the whole and that stayed. In the following years, enormous energies ran through the system of this human self, there was an enormous flood of insights and inspiration for art and music, and much more.
Just about everything I write about here, in these articles, came to me during that time.
This human self had been a self-described atheist since elementary school and lived in a small town in Norway before the age of Internet, so all of this was profoundly surprising at a human level. Everything was turned upside-down and inside-out.
I had nobody in my life even remotely interested in this, and there were no books about it, so for a few years, I explored the terrain on my own. That was a blessing I am very grateful for now.
SETTING THE STAGE FOR THE SHIFT (?)
In the oneness shift, I realized that what the deep longing was about. It was for this.
It was for coming profoundly home to all as the divine. It was for the divine I am and all is to recognize itself and live within and from that recognition.
I also realized that the flashbacks likely had primed my system for the later oneness shift.
I realized that the sense of the world being infinitely far away also primed the shift. It was an identification as the observer, with everything observed (apart from the sense of observer) infinitely far away. In the oneness shift, the sense of observer – as part of the content of experience – was also recognized as happening with the content of experience. Identification was released out of it.
SIMILARITIES BETWEEN THE FLASHBACKS AND THE ONENESS SHIFT
When I look at the flashbacks and the oneness shift, I notice both similarities and differences.
In both, all – without exception – is recognized as the divine, as consciousness. All is consciousness, taking all the forms of the world and the universe.
In the flashbacks, it happened without any reflection on it. It was not reflected in thoughts, apart from images. There was no story about it, other than recognizing that this was life before this life.
In the oneness shift, there was reflection on it. Thoughts tried to put it into words, and it was clear that it was impossible. Words cannot touch it.
At the same time, it’s difficult to not try, and after some years, when I found others that lived from the same and knew the same terrain, I realized that words can convey it if the other is familiar with the same terrain.
Words are hopelessly ineffective in describing it, and yet can point to it, and if the other is familiar with the same, then the words are sufficient as pointers.
WHY DID THE SHIFT HAPPEN?
Why did the oneness shift happen?
I don’t know, and thoughts can come up with some guesses.
I suspect that the oneness shift served as a kind of safety valve for this system, overwhelmed with tension and teenage angst. Many years later, I saw Douglas Harding say that “Douglas became unbearable” which triggered the shift, and that seems accurate in my case as well.
It’s also possible that the flashbacks somehow set the stage. They may, along with other things, have primed my system for the oneness shift.
It’s also possible that the conditioning in my system may come from a long series of previous lives1, which somehow set the stage for this shift. That conditioning may include a previous focused and conscious explorations of my nature. I don’t know.
SINCE THEN
Since the oneness shift, the process has largely been to continue to explore that terrain. It has gone through many phases, although so far on themes revealed during the initial shift.
The most challenging has been when what’s unaligned with oneness (=operates from separation consciousness) surfaces in my system, likely because much of that is in the form of early and relatively strong trauma. I still have a lot to (viscerally) learn about how to relate to that.
NOTES
- If that’s the case, it’s the patterns that reincarnate. What I more fundamentally am – consciousness and even more fundamentally capacity – forms itself into all of it. It and everything else happens within and as what I more fundamentally am.
The image is a drawing I made a few months into the oneness shift, from the huge influx of insights and inspiration that came with it. I had little experience and no formal training in drawing at the time.