This idea ties in with what has been called the imaginal realm, a sort of twilight zone midway between physical and spiritual reality. A certain tolerance for ambiguity is, I think, necessary in carrying out these highly subjective experiments.
Before I go on, I should point out that none of the information contained in this exercise was new to me. It could easily have come from my unconscious mind. I had encountered this imagery before, in reading about life after death. The only thing that makes the experience seem like more than a regurgitation of stuff I'd read is the fact that it packed an emotional punch.
I was shown an image of a diamond, brilliant and multifaceted. But this was no ordinary diamond. It was alive. The facets, which were far more luminous than any real-life diamond's, were in constant motion. They were constantly shifting positions like the pieces of a mosaic, creating patterns that were intricate and harmonious. It did not appear that there was anything random about these patterns; rather, they seemed to involve the working-out of some larger scheme, much in the way that notes of music can be used to work out the themes and melodies of a musical composition.
I was told that this diamond was my true soul, and that the individual facets were merely contributing elements. The real me, the eternal me, was the diamond as a whole, even though I wasn't aware of it in everyday life.
These living and moving facets each represented some persona that my larger soul had adopted – presumably in some previous (or perhaps future) earthly incarnation. The sum total of all these facets made up the diamond itself.
Let me expand on this a little. The diamond could be seen as the so-called "group soul" often discussed by metaphysical writers. But I was given to understand that the "group soul" is something of a misnomer, because actually we are talking only about a group of personae; the diamond/soul itself is our own personal soul in its purest and highest form. To think of it as a group soul is to imagine that our individual self is just one of the facets of the diamond, when in fact our soul consists of all the facets and more, because it includes the core of the diamond as well. Thus we are much greater, much more all-encompassing, than we might think.
What was most strongly impressed on me was the sheer beauty of the soul. It seemed to me that this soul was the most beautiful and precious thing in the world. Of course, I'm not just talking about my own soul, but about any human soul. The impression I had – and this is where the emotional impact came in – was that if we could only grasp the magnificence and perfection of our own souls, we would have a whole new perspective on life, and negative things (such as the illness I was experiencing) would pale into insignificance.
Again, while I cannot really convey the feeling I got, I came away with an extraordinarily strong impression that our soul – mine, or yours, or anyone's – is an object of exquisite beauty, unfathomable complexity, and ultimate perfection. Even the flaws that we perceive in ourselves are not really flaws, but elements necessary to a larger harmonious whole.
Let's say that this oversoul has incarnated three times, first as Enos, a peasant; then as Redbeard, a pirate; and currently as Dave, a podiatrist. In this case the diamond has three facets. They are separate and distinct from each other, but they are all part of the diamond itself.
I'd add to the above that one possible explanation of the divine figures seen by NDErs is that they are symbolic representations of the experiencer's own higher self. So there may be a consistent tendency, whether one is incarnate or discarnate, to objectify and misinterpret the higher self as an outside entity.
...To extend the diamond imagery, we can imagine these various diamonds as parts of a continuous chain – a diamond bracelet or necklace, so to speak. The total string of diamonds, which may be unimaginably vast, presumably equals the totality of consciousness in existence and is therefore equivalent to "God."
Now here's the tricky part. The diamonds exist outside of our space-time cosmos. They are not bound by temporal linearity. So what they will do, they have already done, and what they will become, they already are. The journeys undertaken by the component psyches have all been accomplished, and the stringing-together of the diamonds into an unbroken strand has already been done.
But the journeys were and are necessary to inform the diamonds. And the journeys were and are bound by linear time.
In other words, we can look at the situation from two very different perspectives – the perspective of linear time, with which we are personally familiar, and the perspective of existence outside of time, about which we can only speculate. Our own perspective, as incarnate beings here on earth, is limited, while the perspective of the total self is unlimited or at least radically less limited. And each perspective is correct in its own terms...
In the third and final scene, he was an African-American male jazz singer in 1920s Chicago, singing on stage during the climax of his favorite song. I couldn’t imagine anything with more vitality and verve. The band played behind him while people danced all around. He saw his white girlfriend in the front row looking at him with eyes so filled with attraction and passion, they could have been the only two people there. Obviously, the love between these two was set against the backdrop of racism, segregation, and prejudice that we are still resolving today. I asked “What is different about this singer from the woman in the village or the young wife in the garden?” and he said “He loves himself.”
