The End Is The Beginning

It has been a while since I reached out to you and I am therefore grateful and happy to write this new article from a warm and breezy small island in the Pacific Ocean on a Friday afternoon—“Life is good” as they like to say.

Travelling always seems to have a beginning (start date) and an end (end date). It’s like the expiration date of a carton of milk. The main difference is that after you decide to end your travels, you can’t travel anymore (otherwise you didn’t end it), but you can still decide to drink your milk after the expiration date, the chances are that it just tastes gross.

I have been fascinated with the brain’s linear perception of time and how that has become the foundation of so many truths in our society. But every time I spoke with someone with a so called ‘near death experience’ (NDE), they all claim the same: “There is no time and everything happens simultaneously.”

For more than twenty years, Dutch cardiologist Pim van Lommel has studied near-death experiences in patients who survived a cardiac arrest. In 2001, he and his fellow researchers published a study on Near Death Experiences in the renowned medical journal The Lancet. It involved 344 consecutive patients successfully resuscitated after cardiac arrest across ten Dutch hospitals. The study found that 18% of these patients reported an NDE, with 12% describing a core experience characterized by enhanced consciousness, including lucid thoughts, emotions, memories, and sometimes perception from a position outside their body during clinical death.

Van Lommel’s work suggests that NDEs are authentic experiences that cannot be simply reduced to physiological factors such as oxygen deficiency, hallucination, fear of death, psychosis, or the use of drugs. He argues that the clarity of consciousness reported during periods of apparent brain inactivity challenges the conventional materialistic view that consciousness is solely a product of brain function. His findings have led him to propose the concept of nonlocal or enhanced consciousness, which may exist independently of the brain during periods of clinical death.

Getting back to the end - which is the beginning

Last month, I ended my life as I knew it. It didn’t have an expiration date as far as I know, so the taste of the current days are fresh and sweet. We sold most of our possessions, including our house, and now it’s time to explore and to experience if the end really is the beginning. If not, then we’re kind of screwed, but I can tell you now, with enough confidence, that all comes down to our level of consciousness when we embark on a new journey after closing another chapter. And the nonlocal part mentioned in Van Lommel’s research is for us a nonlocal-uberlocal state since we are very presently local and begin to experience nonlocal at the same time. That might sound confusing…

Most folks of my age seem to have all of their focus on designing more comfort in their lives. They’ve worked hard and now it’s ‘payback’ time. But after professionally spending almost two decades in the field of emotional trauma and deeper understanding human consciousness, I know one thing for certain: “Humans do not grow and expand while being comfortable.” I have witnessed however, people effectively processing deep emotional trauma, who made giant leaps in their spiritual growth (not to forget my personal experiences). Those experiences have affected me deeply and they inspired me to do what I am currently undertaking. It has also taught me that the end is never the end—the end is always the beginning. It is up to us with what kind of energy and intention we fuel the moments with, as each moment holds all of the potential that is available on our beautiful planet. This very moment, for me, holds the same potential as for the young toddler I observed playing on the beach this morning. The way we direct our energy is everything. When we get ourselves in that state, the brain starts to calm down as it’s usually not our friend in these kind of processes.

Be no body, Be it all

It is my wish that you continue to tap into your imagination, to continue to be intrigued and learn, and to understand that we all have been and are playing small compared to our ultimate possibilities. Your dreams are not merely dreams, they are real experiences in a nonlocal reality and they become part of not only your consciousness but also part of your genetic expression. We can learn from these dreams. In the meantime, I am teaching myself the art of consciously designing new dreams. Not just dreams for myself. Dreams for humanity. What is it you are choosing?

To be continued.

Dirk