Dear Reader

The week past, September 26 through 28th, I attended the first Aspen Literary Festival! I think it was a great success, but my take away may have been different than most. It was one of those classic Aspen fall days... And day 3 of the Festival!

The scene unfolds in the Aspen Community Church a block away from the Festival headquarters at the Red Brick School House! The interviewee is Sebastian Junger, author of: In My Time of Dying: How I Came Face to Face with the Idea of an Afterlife.

There in the church, Mr. Junger assures us that he is still an atheist! We laugh! Maybe not a bad thing when considering mortality. This from the book page on Amazon: "...while spending a quiet afternoon at the New England home he shared with his wife and two young children. Crippled by abdominal pain, Junger was rushed to the hospital by ambulance. Once there, he began slipping away. As blackness encroached, he was visited by his dead father, inviting Junger to join him. “It’s okay,” his father said. “There’s nothing to be scared of. I’ll take care of you.” That was the last thing Junger remembered until he came to the next day when he was told he had suffered a ruptured aneurysm that he should not have survived."

He talks of being suspended above a dark void. His father speaks to him from above and to the side. He see's this in his "dream." Does he take a rationalist approach? He does go on to relate that his father was a physicist, a man of empirical reasoning. He refers to his "dream," and this is where I started to question his interpretation, not the experience itself, but whether he experienced it somewhere other than in a dream state.

The Q&A was short and the hands raised, many, and I didn't get to ask my question: "Was it a dream or was it something else, another state entirely...what about that?" I hadn't read his book, but I have it on order now, and coming from Amazon!

But let's go deeper into this thing called near-death experiences or NDEs. Where to start? A quick Google search: "What is a near-death experience," turned up a lot of material. I wasn't going to go through all that material and paraphrase it, so I fell back on good old Gemini and asked the following: "In documented cases where people relate their near death experiences, how do they describe or characterize where they found themselves and came back from, and do these descriptions tend to agree with each other and those having the experience assume they are in a dream state or some other state that may not be a subconscious mind state?"

I turned that query and Gemini's response word for word, into a PDF document. I invite you to read it here! It's a remarkable document in my view...a pure collaboration between human and artificial intelligence, but let's cut to the chase. In section 3. Dream State vs. Conscious State, it says the following: "Experiencers almost unanimously reject the idea that the NDE is a dream, hallucination, or a subconscious trick of the dying brain."

And that gets me to one of the points of this newsletter, namely that: "Your mind is a place, it is not you!"

That is a major theme in all three books of The THING Trilogy. Let's read an excerpt from book one, Chapter 2. We are with Jason, and Arkan the alien AI in Jason's mind:

“So think of yourself as being a point, a point of being in a fabric, a time fabric extending from your point of being in all directions and that this fabric is like a wave going from or to your point of being.”

The image of a rock being thrown into a pool with the waves rippling out across the surface in all directions came to mind.

“That’s it,” he said, “Now, this point of being which is you is at the center of this wave time fabric, moving in time.”

“Wow!” I said.

“Yes, can you think of two cones whose points meet at your point of being?” I thought. “Yes, that is what I wanted you to see. So let us say the time fabric with your point of being at the same point where the cones meet is rippling at 90 degrees from the direction that time is moving.”

I tried to picture it. He waited. I thought…

“You mean that both cones are meeting point to point exactly opposite each other.”

“Yes.”

“Oh,” I said, “so we could think of a line or axis running through that point...my point of being, at 90 degrees to the time fabric?”

“Yes.”

“And that everything is moving...out...and forward...all the time,” I said, thinking, ‘You’re not so dumb as you thought.’

“You thought it, not me,” he said.

OK, so you get the picture. Now let's apply that to some things we might agree on, namely where we came from. Think about right after you were conceived. Were you now "you?" You have your unique DNA derived from both your parents. Yes, that's you! But just before you were conceived you were not you. Think of your moment of conception as your infinitely defined passage from before to after, something impossible to observe, yet must be so. Your quantum event! That is your point of being embedded in the fabric of time...your waypoint to all you will become and to all that lies beyond. And in near-death a glimpse of that beyond, to where you came from. And maybe to a universe of all possibilities if you let it.

OK, let's keep going. Think about it! Ha! You will not have even the rudiments of a brain until around 42 days into your mothers pregnancy. Your heart was formed and beating long before that. Both send out electromagnetic waves beyond the body! We've talked about this in newsletter #5 and will talk more about it in the future, but you were you long before your mind started collecting thoughts, and thereafter too, so let's face it, your mind is like a container. Your mind is a place, it is not you.

Your mind is a manifestation of you...but let's get back to Junger and his near-death experience. You see, it was the above discussion I would have liked to have had with him. Was it a dream or something else? In his mind is he rationalizing something that can't be rationalized? I'll let you know once I read his book!

Final thoughts! In my view, quantum events, superposition, point of being embedded in the fabric of time, and NDEs are all manifestations of the same thing, but as to why...I'm mesmerized by the mystery of it all...and as to how, I have hope, and faith that there are many ways to get there!

All for now, but lots more to come on this whole thing of quantum reality and superposition, on our "journey through the fabric of time."

Please check out my just released video Trailer for Thing FIRST CONTACT at: https://kendallwilliamsauthor.com/

And if you are new to the Newsletter, check out the Newsletter Archive at: https://kendall-williams-author.kit.com/posts

Quote from D.J. Kadagian, The Crossover Experience: “We talked, but without moving our mouths i.e. without words. How to say this? We communicated through our thoughts.”

Paradoxically, until next time, be well and safe journeys!

Sincerely,

Kendall Williams, Author

​kendallwilliamsauthor.com​

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