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October 4

A Life Well-Lived

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Mellen-Thomas Benedict is a man who, in 1982 and suffering from a terminal illness, had a near-death experience and was monitored for an hour-and-a-half showing no vital signs. When he returned to his body, he showed no signs of disease and since has spent his life researching the science of his experience and of consciousness itself. Deepak Chopra, in his book Life After Death, calls Mr. Benedict '...an encyclopedia of the afterlife.'

You're in a quantum state experience, and in that, there's no time, there's no space as we know it, and literally, if you don't watch, a hundred years can go by. And what I learned, and what I believe to this day is that the physical body actually gives us the most beautiful vehicle ever imagined to experience time and space and to experience the universe in ways that cannot be experienced in spirit...

There are people here who have pain, but I tell you, I have met people who would give you anything for the worst day of your life; for even the worst day of your life is filled with potential.

Mellen-Thomas Benedict in an interview with George Noory

In the Vedic world view, we know that 'heaven' is a body-dependent phenomenon. Having this body is indeed a great gift. We can know this ourselves, regardless of our circumstances, if we are able to find the proper point of view. For Mellen-Thomas Benedict, this involved going to the length of dying, passing out of this physical world, and from there being able to see the potential inherent in being alive.

We, too, have the capacity to change our point of view. When the facts of our life seem overwhelming, and it feels as if there is no reason to be alive, that things make no sense, that suffering is all there is to look forward to, if we take a moment and expand our sample size, look at our life from a point of view that takes in not only the myopic experience of the right now, but also the 30 or 40 or 50 years that have come before this moment, and the 30 or 40 or 50 years that proceed from this moment and beyond, from this expanded vantage point we can see that whatever discomfort or pain we are having will pass, we can remember those times when we experienced the world innocently and with a sense of possibility and wonder and we can look forward to a time when whatever it is we are going through can be seen as making sense, as having been in some way necessary. We will be able to see the pattern of our life. We will be able to experience the truism that any life well-lived will, in the end, resemble nothing so much as a great novel. If our life is a novel which we, ourselves, are in the process of writing, it becomes easy to see that it wouldn't be a very good book if always the characters knew things were going to come out well. Imagine reading a novel that began, 'It was a beautiful day and everything was good,' continued with, 'Things continued to be good,' and ended with, 'And in the end, it was good.' Life is an adventure, the greatest adventure, and the more we can see it as such, the we will be able so to experience it.

Today I will see my life as an adventure and find the way to see the facts of this life merely as challenges there to raise the stakes of my story and make things more interesting.

Pigeons,