The crazy thing is that people often only find this out after something intense like a heart attack, a mental crisis like burnout, or when it is really too late. After which they change course, if they still can.
Until then, they live a life in which they are never actually themselves. They are living someone else’s life. Living with a ‘mask’ on what used to be there and has never been taken off, or living under continuous anaesthesia of addiction.
An addiction that is the result of a search for something from outside – in the form of external stimuli – which has been present inside all along, but it sits in a place still unknown, or inaccessible to us. For that, in fact, we need to reconnect with ourselves.
Fortunately, this can be done even without a crisis, and sooner than the moment when it is too late to change …
By calling up tucked-away emotions and allowing them to be felt again, and by realising that no more adjustments or retakes are possible at ‘the real end’, you gain an iron-clad lever to make lasting change in life.
You will start making different choices. And choose for things that really matter, so that your remaining life time will not be wasted, but used to the fullest.
Trivial matters that were hitherto used out of environmental pressure or mindless routine, you will now be able to quickly filter and put aside. You will be able to focus on the core; on the essentials. That which really matters to you. Being who you really want to be. Being who you are.
In the book ‘Endless Consciousness’, Dutch cardiologist Pim van Lommel provides a scientific view of the near-death experience. The book is based on his research published in 2001 in the renowned medical journal The Lancet.
People who have experienced an NDE often suddenly no longer fear death after this experience and they believe in personal survival.
There is an increased appreciation and meaning of everyday things in life. Outward appearances like an expensive car, a big house, nice clothes, a job with outer authority and power, are becoming less and less important.
Heightened intuition often occurs; suddenly one senses others with razor-sharp clarity.
Because of the direct confrontation with death, a person is in a totally different position in life from that moment than before the transformation, which the NDE turns out to be in so many cases.a
Life suddenly turns out to be about very different things from superficialities and the illusion of the standard pattern of ‘more, better and bigger’, which are continually forced upon us by the consumer society in everyday life and which can so easily cause us to suffer from tunnel vision.
Of the false promise that something is needed all the time.
The rat race of society gave us no other view than that spinning wheel in front of us.
We didn’t know any better…
“The enormously mechanized and automated technology makes it possible to reduce labor effort and working time. However, that happens (too) rarely. We work (too) hard to make and buy what we don’t really need, just so we can keep working hard.”
Herbert Marcuse (German-American political philosopher and sociologist)
Astronauts who return to Earth after a space trip have something in common: they notice the enormous impact of the Overview Effect.
The American space philosopher Frank White published a book under this title in 1987 in which he describes this effect.
In his book he distinguishes three effects that astronauts experience during and after a space trip:
When you see the earth from space, only then do you deeply realize how fragile our world is.
It is through this Overview Effect that the great importance of sustainability and the environment really gets to the core of our essential awareness.
Dutch ex-astronauts the late Wubbo Ockels, and André Kuipers began to passionately dedicate themselves to this cause after their space travels. They felt the urgency, because they could now use a lifelong strong Overview Effect in the interest of all world citizens – as ambassadors of the earth.
They, like the people who went through an NDE experience, had experienced something unique that cannot be explained rationally. But it did change their entire perspective forever.
Vita Florentis ‘The Last Hour Experience’ gives you an experience that can recalibrate your life. Other priorities. Seeing things very differently.
Similar to the transformation that people go through after a near-death experience and that changes astronauts after a space trip.
ª Van Lommel 2008, p.67-90.
