Planned Deaths

Many mystics and NDErs say that one’s time and manner of death is chosen prior to incarnating. While quick to point out that free will is always a factor that can alter the plan, they say that most of us do, indeed, have such a plan.

Of all the paradigm-stretching concepts I have heard from the NDE community, this is among the most fascinating to me.

It makes physical life more and more like movie production. Our souls, the scriptwriters, concoct our lives as if they were writing a screenplay. They plan for us experiences that will teach us lessons we decide between lives that we need to learn. They create characters for us to interact with, both as good guys and bad guys. We physical humans just go along for the ride that our higher scriptwriter selves chose.

As free will agents, we physical humans take the hands our souls dealt us and respond to the milestones created in our life script. Then to make it more challenging, we are born into this life with amnesia about that whole design thing. Most of us remember nothing and question our sanity for thinking such weird thoughts.

If you have written any fiction, you probably experienced how even though you create characters for your stories, they take on lives of their own. They tell me what they think and what they want to say. I may put them in a situation of my choice, but they often choose their behaviors, a choice clearly different than I had originally intended. I think that is the same relationship we have with our souls/higher selves.

If our deaths are planned like the plot points in a movie, it would sure make a difference when that knowledge reached critical mass. And that is the philosophical raft upon which I float. I wonder about what would happen to our world view if we ever reached a place of accepting that we come and go on cue.

If we knew for sure that death meant transition, not termination, than all those people who perished in the recent earthquake and tsunami cataclysm have a much different fate than those imagined and described by the world press.

“Hundreds of Indians have scattered flower petals at sea and sacrificed chickens to pray for the safe return of those carried away in a tsunami as aftershocks hit some areas.

“Groups gathered on beaches in southern India as dawn broke on Monday to light incense and pray for thousands of missing.

“But while some held on to fading hope, others broke down as they discovered loved ones among the loads of dead ferried to hastily erected open-air morgues and authorities gouged out mass graves to bury bodies already rotting in the tropical heat.”

It also fascinates me to think that all these victims (if we wish to continue using that term) knew at some level of consciousness that it was a good day to die. They had chosen this exit point. It must have been a busy day at Afterlife Admissions Central.

Closer to home, NDE researcher PMH Atwater, who’s had three NDEs herself, describes what she saw on September 11, 2001 on the "inner planes" over New York City while she was there in spirit form as the second plane hit the North Tower of the World Trade Center. She wrote a 28-page report on her observations that you can download.

My friend Treesha, whose NDE account is included in this blog, said of her car crash, “Before my head went through the windshield of my vehicle, I was already out of my body, up above, watching the ‘accident’ down there continue.” I get comfort from that, especially in thinking of all the victims of the aforementioned disasters.

I just learned that an acquaintance of mine died from a fall at home. A fall is an accident, but NDErs say there are no accidents; they say there are plans.