A friend fell asleep while driving and the car left the freeway. As a front seat passenger, I awoke to what looked like footage in a safari film; I remember the grass moving by quickly and the “picture” shown in the windshield was bouncing up and down. Instantly time seemed to slow down to almost a standstill as is usual with a person experiencing shock. The car began to flip over and I experienced an explosion of light in my head like fireworks.<\/p>\n
This I would later interpret as the subjective effect to my head hitting the top of the car. I felt the sense of tumbling and repeated flashes of light. The sense of terror and complete helplessness was voiced internally as “Is this it?” It was a shocked sense of having one’s life, that which one holds familiar and precious, coming to an end and with a suddenness which is unimaginable. With this sense of disbelief, I had a strong sense of wanting the tumbling and explosions of light to stop.<\/p>\n
The separation of “self” from the identity with my body was not a mental event that seemed unusual, now that I look back at it. Like slipping into an immediate dream when one lies down to sleep, but then snaps back to normal wakefulness, I did not have an awareness of any event of separation. What was totally unique was a strong sense of movement, that is, the “self” as a conscious entity was moving toward somewhere. I had a very clear sense of movement to another place. I had a sense that this place was inhabited by others and that it was a place with physical dimension but filmly as I now picture a subtler reality. The most important sense I experienced was the familiarilty of this movement. My experience was that of having made this passage before. There was a super- or hyper-real quality to this experience. At the moment of experiencing this sense of movement, I knew it was familiar. It seemed an instant later, the car came to a stop as if it were dropped from the sky. I was back in my pre-tumbling reality.<\/p>\n
From this experience I have taken a view of the separate “self” of mental continuum as well as an appreciation of the idea of previous lives.<\/p>\n
I offer this to you simply with the hope that it might reinforce some good quality mind.<\/p>\n
D<\/p>\n