Life Is A Stage Play NDE Rich Kelley - ריץ' קלי - החיים הם מחזה

I died when I was 15 years old. I drowned out in the ocean. More specifically, I was out beyond the waves on a blowup raft. It took some energy to get out there, so I turned around and I was facing the beach. Since it was my first time in the ocean, I didn't realize that waves come in sets and they break progressively closer to the shore, and then after seven waves it goes back and breaks further out again. So I'm sitting there watching these waves breaking further and further away from me, and I'm thinking I'm just fine. I'll sit here and bob up and down and watch the world rotate for a little while. When all of a sudden, I've got this wave wall of water coming down over the top of my head and falling in front of me. It hadn't broken yet, so it didn't make any noise. I had no forewarning that there was going to be any kind of water involved coming down on top of my head. I didn't have a chance to catch a breath of air, hold my breath, nothing. I just suddenly found myself underwater. I opened my eyes and saw nothing but sand swirling everywhere. I had no sense of up and down. I couldn't see anything. I wouldn't have known which way was up except for the fact that I wound up landing face first in the bottom of the ocean. When my face hit the sand on the bottom of the ocean, then I knew which way was up. So I turned around, pushed off the bottom, and bolted for the surface. Mind you, I hadn't had a big breath of air to hold me. I broke surface and caught a breath of air, only to see another wall of water come down on top of me again. It got pushed right straight back down to the bottom again. It didn't take too many of these trips and I was pretty worn out and starting to get extremely panicked, which of course depletes your oxygen, and you don't have enough, and that whole thing kind of spirals. I'm not sure how many times I went down, but I do know that I went down one time finally and said, you know, I don't have the energy that it takes to swim to the surface again. If I don't get to the surface this time and get air and stay on the surface, I can't do this again. I don't have enough energy left. And I broke surface and got some air, and sure enough saw the wall of water starting to come down over my head once again. At that point, it was as if things went into slow motion. Probably the most accurate way to put it was that my mind raced because it seemed like time slowed down. I knew this was the last I was going to see of planet Earth, and I took a good long look up and down the beach and said, enjoy the view, 'cause it's the last you'll see of it. And literally, I relived my life at that point. Only 15 years of it, but I relived the whole thing. That's how much time slowed down. I went down for the last time, and I knew it. I just didn't have the energy. There was no energy left in me to fight it.

At that point, this incredible, profound sense of peace overcame me. Somehow I had this sense that I was going to be okay, no harm was going to come to me. This distinctly a feeling that I was loved, which begged the question, by whom? At that point in my life, I was a profound agnostic. I just couldn't tell you if there was a God or not. As far as I was concerned, I didn't have enough information. So it wasn't like I carried with me this belief in God, that God was going to make everything okay, which makes it all the more interesting that I had this sense of profound peace and the feeling of being loved, 'cause it begged the question, by whom? Well, I knew I was leaving the Earth. And just as if I were to say to you, picture yourself on a lake, you would draw a mental image in your mind of being on a lake. You're not physically there, you don't see it, but we tend to operate this way. We use words and then we draw pictures in our minds. If I say the word tree to you, you bring to mind a picture of a tree, and that tree is probably one of or a composite of every tree you've ever seen. Well, just like that, I pictured myself leaving the Earth, and I pictured myself out in space, looking at the Earth from not a considerable distance, but you know, there's the Earth right in front of me. And what was so strange about looking at the Earth like that was that at that moment, you could have asked me any given moment in my life, 'cause I just relived it, but you could have asked me any given moment in any person's life on that planet, and I could have told you all of that information was right there. It was available. Not just any person living there now, any person that had ever lived there or ever would live there. All that information is all available, it's right there. And what kept going through my mind at this point was, oh, of course. I was, if you will, remembering what I had forgotten very intentionally in order to be on this planet, which is what we all do. In point of fact, I don't think that this planet exists. It's a figment of our imagination, if you will. And we have a very good imagination. We are incredibly creative beings. But whether or not it's for real doesn't really matter. The truth of the matter is that we know things when we're not here that we choose to forget while we are here. I make the analogy, because I think it works so well, it's like when you're sitting in a chair reading a book that's a really good book that you're really involved in, somebody could walk in the room and talk to you and you don't know they're there. Your focus of attention is on the book, the story in the book. And you can get so preoccupied with that you lose track of everything around you. You just tune all of that out and you focus on one thing. Similarly, you know everything about what your life's going to be like here, from beginning to end. You knew it before you got here, and you will know it again when you leave here. But while you're here, you're focused on it, and you're focused on each given moment in it. And when you leave here, it all comes rushing back, and you say, of course, yes, that. And it's also simple, it's very simple.

What is your life like when you're not here? If you try to define it, you run into problems because it is so simple that it's best described in English as this: you are. Stop. The minute you say anything other than that, you're talking about something earthly. We don't have English for other things. And probably more important, everything there is simpler than what it is here, not more complicated. At that moment, I no longer had any awareness of any of my senses. I didn't have a body. I didn't see anything. I could picture the Earth in my mind, but I didn't see the Earth. I didn't see blackness, you don't, that's seeing something. I saw nothing. There was no sight, there was no touch, there was no taste, there was no smell, there was no feel. I didn't have any of those senses at all. And yet my brain was functioning, my mind was functioning, that which occupies my brain was functioning. And certainly you could still think in English, although English became quite irrelevant at that point because it didn't describe anything of what was going on. And of course, foremost on your mind is that all of your senses have just been cut off. Well, not quite all of your senses. Your sixth sense is still working very well. I say still working because your sixth sense is working while you're here. It's one of the things that you choose to ignore to be here. You choose to, because it makes the experience of being here have more depth, more intensity, if you will. It takes on a more realistic look to it. If your psychic sense is working, if you're still picking up on what everyone else is thinking, including yourself and what goes on outside this planet, you're not as focused on the book. So people have often asked me, how do you become psychic? And I just have to laugh. No, no, you don't become psychic. You are psychic. You forget that you're psychic. You let go of your senses here and your sixth sense is still right there, and you have got it at all times. It is not something that you do, it's that you stop doing this. So people look to try to figure things out psychically, and they think there's some effort you have to make. No, you stop making an effort. It's the exact opposite of what you would expect. You stop thinking about focusing here, you stop thinking about your sensory input here, you stop thinking about a whole frame of reference of being here. Meditation is wonderful for this. It centers you, if you will, in source. You let go. Basically, when people tell you to meditate, they'll say you just sit in one place, close your eyes, try and just ignore all sensory input, and say, I am. Excellent, that is source very definitely. And don't be too terribly disappointed if you find that you cannot turn on the psychic charms and become the world's renowned psychic overnight, because you lose a lot of depth of what's going on here if you choose to do that.

For the moment, back to where I was. I'm out in space and I'm looking at the Earth, and I'm knowing what's going on with everybody's life in it. And then, because everybody is always told me, and I'm still somewhat referencing things of course, but in earthly terms, I'm looking at it saying, well, I guess it's time for me to move on and go to the other place. So in my mind, I pictured turning away from the Earth and going out into space. In point of fact, I did not go anywhere. I was not in space. I was not out in space. I did not head for some planet. That's the way I pictured it in my mind because all of a sudden, all your senses are cut off and you feel very disoriented, so you try to reference things in a way that you're accustomed to. And of course, you're wondering, where am I going next? I don't have a direction. I don't know that I'm in space. I don't know where I would travel to if I was. So where is it I'm going? And at this point, the expression the white light in the tunnel plays in now. Mind you, you don't have any senses. You don't see anything, you don't hear anything, you don't smell anything. You don't have any space and time. Nothing exists as far as that goes. For you to go through a tunnel is patently absurd. But how else do you describe what is a psychological tunnel? Very definitely, because all of your inputs just gotten cut off. Not all of it. I sensed that I was loved. I sensed that I would be fine. Where is that coming from? And how do I go to that? And of course, when you first start thinking about that, it is an idea, a feeling, and an idea that has no space and time, no location, but you want to go to it. Well, initially, that's a very small thing, if you will. And yet, as you try to turn your focus on it, and I don't mean your visual focus, but you focus your mind on that and wanting to go there, it becomes bigger. And so it's as if it is a little array of light off in the distance with dark all around it, which could easily be described as a tunnel. But it is a psychological tunnel. And it is a tunnel. Your input just all got cut off except one little bit of input, and it's very profound, but it's relatively small. It somehow seems distant, although it seems to be getting closer because with all your other input cut off, you focus on it more. It's the only thing you have left to focus upon. And so you, if you will, move through the tunnel and towards the light. And I won't say that you're greeted there by some people who walk up and say, how you doing, Fred, and shake your hand. No, there's no bodies there. There can be, you can picture them that way. You pictured them here, and you can picture them there if you want to. This gets really confusing because we are creating our reality here on this planet, every last bit of it. We're creating it in our mind. Our images that we create are all our images. And science is starting to bear this out. If you've seen the movie What the Bleep, the quantum physicist will tell you, you look at water and you change its molecular structure. Without someone looking at it, we don't know what it would be because how do you do that? Very difficult. But you're creating your reality here.

If I was going to try to describe what I believe we are at our source, what we are like, we are extremely creative beings. We can sit and do absolutely nothing and be as little as possible if we want to, but it just doesn't seem to be in our nature. We like to create things. And if you made the analogy that your life was like a movie that you made, where you picked all of the characters and actors to play in your movie, and you wrote the script out and said this is what I want to have happen and how I want it to be, that would be a very good analogy. And that's where it gets really interesting, because from this perspective, we're very much used to the idea of looking at things and judging things. I like that, I don't like that. Well, so we say this is good, and we say this is bad, and we of course assume that there is a universal good and bad out there. I agree there's a universal good and bad out there, but here's the strange twist to it. The universal part of it is the fact that good is what you like and bad is what you don't like, and it's different for everybody. And that's where life gets really strange because people then say, well, but there's no universal good or evil. No, there isn't. Well, what about the guy who kills people? Well, what would you tell me about the actor in the movie who plays the serial killer and goes through the movie killing a series of people? Is he a bad person? No, you judge the character that he plays as a bad person. Did anybody really die? No, you got caught up in the story and decided to believe that killing people was bad to experience the drama of the whole thing. Well, what about good and bad? There aren't any. That sounds kind of harsh and really twisted from what most people think because we're all pretty much brought up to believe that there are good things and bad things in life. Well, that's true from any given perspective, but not universally. If this is all a stage play and none of it's real, none of it truly exists except in our minds, and we are all co-authoring each other's plays as well as our own, and getting together and putting this play together, then what happens here is all an experiment in what it's like to focus on a given set of circumstances of our own making. And it's okay. It doesn't make any difference how it turns out. It doesn't make any difference what you do. You came here to experience those things. Well, it has the distinct disadvantage that you don't get to blame everything that's gone wrong in your life on God or the devil or whoever it is you want to try to put in that little slot, if in point of fact you're the author of it all and that you agreed to it all long before you came here. It has the distinct advantage that you can never be a victim unless you chose to be one, and even then you aren't truly a victim. You're experiencing what it feels like to be one, but you aren't. This has a real distinct advantage to it if you think about it, because you have nothing to fear, which is a lot better way to live your life than running around scared all the time that you could become a victim. There are things out there that could happen to you that are beyond your control. Well, in the first place, what my experience tells me is that that's not the case. But just as a practical matter here, we both hope that that's not the case because if it is, you could be a victim, and in my world I can't be. Which world would you rather live in? As a practical matter, I'd rather live in my world.

Now these things were obvious to me when I was there. No, I didn't get mad at the pearly gates. No, I wasn't in heaven. No, I wasn't in hell. No, I wasn't in purgatory. I was in a wonderful place. I felt completely loved. I was in touch with a vast array of other beings. I was part of it. They were part of me. We're all one. If I was going to try to address the question of whether or not there is a God, I would say to you that if there is a God, first off, what you're doing in your playtime on this playground, he doesn't care about any more than your mom worries about what it is you're doing on a playground. If you're simply out there playing a game of ball and nobody's getting hurt and there's no problems, she didn't care about every little detail. It doesn't make any difference whether you hit the ball directly into center field or off into left field. Doesn't matter. Similarly, if there's a God in the universe, I would describe it this way: it's like we're all branches and leaves on a tree, and God would be the root. And the tree don't worry too much about where the leaves are blowing. It's not his part of the deal. And so I'm on the other side, and I'm in this sea of beings. And all of a sudden, I felt somebody grab my arm, which at this point threw me because I didn't have an arm anymore, and I just kind of gotten used to the idea that I didn't. And I felt my body get tugged, which I didn't have, at least I didn't a moment ago. And the very first thing that I saw right after I felt that was my eyes open looking at the beach, and I'm in a wave and being pushed towards the beach. And my arm has been released. I didn't feel my arm being held while I was seeing this side. So I felt somebody grab my arm while I'm on the other side, and the next thing I know, I'm opening my eyes and I'm in a wave and headed for the beach in a wave, and no one's got a hold of me. And I started swimming. And when I got to the beach, I didn't have the energy. I was just totally spent. I didn't have the energy to get up and walk up onto the beach. I kept swimming until my hands were hitting sand on the bottom of the ocean, and I crawled up onto the beach and laid there in a heap for I don't know how long, probably 15, 20 minutes. And I've had many people ask me, so who pulled you out? I don't know. Well, was it someone in this world or on the other side? I don't know. More importantly to me, within me it doesn't matter. It makes no difference. It was my time to go, and then, no, it isn't your time to go. It's your time to go back. Okay, fine. If there was someone on this side, I cannot help but believe that they would have followed me to the beach and made sure I was all right. They would at least have watched to make sure I got to the beach all right. And when I crawled up onto the beach and laid there still for 15 minutes, I think they would have gone to check on me. I mean, if I had pulled somebody out, I would have. Now, I don't know. I never checked the headlines the next day. It could be that the guy, you know, somebody grabbed a hold of me and threw me towards the beach, and he proceeded to get caught in the cycle and he went down and died, and he was in the next morning's headlines, man dies drowns in ocean. I don't know. But that would be about the only way that I could explain that somebody didn't follow me to the beach and say, are you okay? Because it seemed to me if somebody saved you, they would have gone to check. And no one did. I can tell you, I've never looked at life the same again.