Insights on Life Purpose from Pre-Birth and NDE OBE Experience

Today my guest is Christian Sundberg, and you guys, on a scale of one to ten, I am an 11 excited to talk to Christian because it was over three years ago that I encountered an interview unlike any interview I had ever heard before, where he was talking with Mayor Kelly. I'm gonna post this up here if you want to connect to Christian's longer full story. He's going to tell a little bit of an abridged version of his story today because we have so many questions I want to be able to ask him. He has also written a book called A Walk in the Physical, which I have read and I highly, highly recommend, and I'm going to share a way at the end that you can even get it for free.

Welcome! I am so excited to have you here. Thank you for joining me.
Thank you so much. It's great to be here.

Thank you. So, Christian, I'm gonna let you just go ahead and tell your story in whatever way you would like to share it because Christian is very unusual. He remembers his pre-birth, prior to coming to this earthly incarnation. He remembers many things about his soul before his incarnation on Earth, and I'm just excited to hear the story.

Sure, thank you. So, like you said, I'll try to be brief because it's a long story. But before I start, I also want to say that words cannot possibly articulate what I'm going to attempt to say. That's really important to state up front as a disclaimer because words are form. You know, they're symbols that belong to our local context, and they're based in the assumptions of our context here on Earth, like linear time and discrete location and all these things that we take for granted. Our language is based on that world, and we transcend it fully. So there is just no way that any language, any utterance, can possibly touch our higher natures or the higher spiritual context from which we come. So I just have to say that first.

Okay, so my body is 42 years old right now. When I was 30 years old, I took up a long-term meditation practice, and much to my surprise, after several months of meditating, I began to have non-physical experiences, out-of-body experiences, and I also began to have pre-birth memory return to me. I remember choosing this life and why, and it was just like the most normal thing in the world to have this come back to me. It was like someone had just blown leaves off of the ground, and there was the grass. It was just so normal, unexceptional, and yet it was so powerful.

So I'll try to share just at a high level, but again, it's just so impossible to put into words. So I remember long ago, and when I say long ago, I mean like eons and eons ago, and yet simultaneously right now. I know that sounds strange, but this memory is like a living state of being almost that occurred so far in the past and yet is occurring now.

I remember coming across a being who had been physical, and this was before I had had any physical incarnations. I was deeply, deeply inspired by the quality of his nature, his essence, who he was, like what he was. And I was like, "My goodness," because in that state of being, you can feel and share all of our natures. Our natures are telepathically exchanged and shared because we are ultimately one. So even as we're individuated, we feel and know what it is to be the other person in ourselves too because they're a part of us.

And so I asked him telepathically, "Oh my goodness, how did you become this? Do you feel as much joy and freedom and power as I feel that you feel?" And he shared, "Yes." And I felt in him all this amazing depth of being, this quality of being. And I said, "My goodness, what could you possibly have done to be this and to experience this?"

Well, he shared many things, but one of the things he shared was that he had been physical. He shared one physical experience in particular in which he had been suffering from a long-term illness of some kind, some kind of pain that stuck with him for many years. The quality with which he met that pain and that limitation allowed a certain refinement of his being. I don't know how else to describe it. And I was so inspired. I said, "Okay, I want to do that. I want to do that."

And you know, at first, he kind of brushed me off almost, like not in a negative way, but kind of like, "Yeah, that's what they all say. You don't know how hard this is. Hard in a way that you just don't understand. You just haven't been exposed to this. You just don't understand what this means." I said, "No, I mean it. I want to do this." And he said, "Well, go talk to your guides."

So I did, and I don't remember right after that, but I know I lived many times after that experience. Okay, so then the majority of this pre-birth memory is of a time somewhat immediately preceding this life. I had lived before, and I had taken a long break. I remember this guide coming to me over and over again and asking me if I was ready to go back yet. "Are you ready to go back yet? Are you ready to go back yet?" Just every once in a while, and just responding, "No, no, I'm not ready." Like being hesitant to, you know, end a long weekend or something. I don't know. I mean, it's a bad analogy, but like I was just not ready yet.

And eventually, I said, "Okay, I'm ready. I'm ready now." And I reviewed with this guide what I can only describe as my state, like who I am and who I've been, and like the qualities that I know. I don't want to say like possess. It's not like that, but there are areas that I have experienced and grown and integrated and evolved, and others that I had not. But there was really one obvious thing that I could see, just very matter-of-fact, that I needed to work on. I don't like the words "work on" either because that makes it sound like it's like a to-do list or something. It's not like that, but I could see that there was this profound opportunity for growth and expansion in one certain direction that before had bested me and overcome me.

The best way I can describe it is it was a specific fear that in the past had overcome me. There was a lifetime that it had overcome me, and I had become a very egoic person, and I had damaged many others in that experience. And so I could see even from there, like the depth of the lowness of the vibration of the sphere was so low that I was like, "Is it even possible? Is it even possible to integrate a vibration that's that low, to really integrate and come to a state of being, an integrated state of being, that's that low?"

And I was shown, "Yes, and you have all time available to you to do so. There's no hurry." And I just knew in my being, "Well, if it can be done, I'll do it. Like, if it can be done, I will do it." Like, I just knew my strength, my immortality, my freedom, my power, my life. I knew it could be done, which, you know, sounds strange to the human part of me sometimes, knowing what I've experienced.

But anyway, so I knew that that was an incredible opportunity. So they brought me a life that was appropriate for that intention, to meet that fear and to integrate that low vibration. And I reviewed that life, and I accepted that life. And then I accepted what we call the veil, which is just a term for the limitations in consciousness space that go along with being incarnated and having a body.

It's like, and this is so hard to describe, but it's like wearing a cloak or something that erases all of your memory and makes you feel disconnected from all knowing and disconnected from everything else. And I like to describe it like a shift in vibration down from a very, very high state of being down to a low state. Like if you had an amplifier or that's not the right term, but you know, some box that produces a pitch, and then you turn down the dial to the bottom, and then when you get to the bottom, you turn some more, more and more and more, lower, lower, lower, and then more, and then turn a lot more, more, more, more, more. That's how it felt in the body of my awareness to go from this state of incredibly high vibration down, down, down, down, lower, lower into the state of being that felt like arriving to a vacuum, like the vacuum of space, and yet simultaneously very dense and small and just incredibly dense.

So I had that experience for this lifetime I'm describing, but it wasn't this lifetime. It was just before this. And I arrived there, and within moments, I was like, "I am not doing this. There is no flipping way I am going to endure this. This vibration is so low. I don't feel like myself. I've lost everything." And I had a whole bunch of fear rise up. I just had so much fear.

So I summoned my might, and I smote the veil. I smote the limitations, and I fought my way back out. And I became aware that I had killed the fetus that was to be my body. I had a life review. I could see how the fear that I had acted upon and brought into that experience affected not only the mother, who was in grief, but hundreds of other people, like in ripples away from the mother, whose journeys all were made more difficult because of my fear.

And like, I had all these great intentions, but I could see and feel very plainly that I had only made their journeys more difficult. And I respected and loved them so much, and I had only made it more difficult for them. You know, and I thought, "Oh man, I mean, from that side, you know, that everything is okay. Like, you can see and feel, and you just know it's okay. Everything is okay. It's just like a big play. Everything's fine." But yet, objectively, I could just see, "Oh my gosh, I've got a lot of fear. I got to do something about this."

So then they brought me this life after, after a time. I spent some time practicing surrendering to a veil in like a simulator, and then they brought me this life. And this life was not as optimum as the first one would have been, but it was still pretty good. It was good enough. It was good for the purposes, but I just knew that it wasn't quite as optimal as the first one would have been.

And I reviewed this life in incredible detail, like millions and millions of possibilities. It was like a flowchart. Language is so limiting here, okay, but it was like a vast flowchart of millions of branches, energetic branches. And it was like if you took a tree and laid it on its side and started at the trunk and worked your way out to the branches.

It was like that, except these were probabilities, like there were paths that were more or less probable. And the thing that made them more or less probable and that could affect their outcome is free will—my choice-making and the choice-making of everybody else in the whole simulation. It was all a part of it.

But there were certain energetic seasons and patterns happening. I could see and feel like the human race is going through a certain energetic pattern, and my life would have a certain energetic pattern. And I knew that it was likely that a trauma would befall me in my 20s and crush me and give me the chance to re-experience that fear. And that did happen in this life.

So I reviewed the life in detail, and then I was in a waiting area. I remember the guy coming to me and saying, "Go now, like right now. Right now, you gotta get on Earth time." And then being in this place I can only describe like a technician's shop or like an auto shop, but it felt like it was up in space. There was this shaft in the middle, and where the Earth was below. And I remember the guy, these beings—I don't know if I call them guides or more like technicians or something—saying to me, "Are you sure? This is like the last chance button. You say yes here, you're strapped in for the ride kind of thing."

And I said, "Yes, I'm ready." And then once again, feeling that incredible plummet of vibration down, down, down, lower, down, lower still, more and more, more, and having all of my knowing be cut off and feeling dark and separate and alone. And I can't describe the density and simultaneous emptiness of this state of being by comparison.

So I arrived here in the physical. I was just basically trying not to fight the veil this time because of what I experienced last time. And after just letting it be and letting it overcome me, eventually I sent a message back to the technicians, "Did it take? Did the veil take?" And they sent one message back, "Yes." So I knew I'd made it, which is like already a huge accomplishment. Like, I knew even just making it here and being incarnated was like, "Oh, that's awesome. I made it. I made it."

So I was here for a while, and then eventually, I was like, "You know what? I am not doing this once again." It was like, "This is not happening. This is so dark. This is so low vibration. I have lost everything that I am. I am not doing this." And that fear rose up once again. And so I was preparing to find my way out again when I had the most holy and beautiful moment of my life.

I felt the great power, the Great I Am, the source of all that is—what we call God for a profound lack of term—come to me and expand me back out and show me all of the universe. And I felt it all within me, and I felt all the galaxies and all the stars, and I felt the churning of our sun, Earth's sun, and the bliss of being that the sun was—the churning bliss of being.

And the spirit said to me, "This is still what you are. You can never not be this." I just knew it in my being, and I was like, "Oh my gosh, that's wonderful." I knew that I had nothing to fear. Like, if this is still what I was, I hadn't lost everything that I was. Like, that was what I was afraid of and rejecting—this state of being in which I felt like I had lost all that I am.

So that calmed me. I was okay. That's wonderful. And so I let go and settled back into the experience of being in the womb. And the next memory I have is of being born. I remember the shock, the brightness, I remember the cold, I remember being touched, and just being overwhelmed with sense data but having no idea what was going on. Just like, "What is happening?" But being super curious. I remember looking up at the nurses and wondering, "Who are these beings that are taking care of me?" But just having absolutely no idea what was going on and staring very intently and trying to analyze everything.

I remember that, and it's funny because my father has told me that since I've shared the story, he said, "Oh yeah, your eyes were wide open. You were staring at that." Like, he's like, "I never saw such an intense gaze." And he said what occurred to him was, "Who is this being who has come, you know, as a human?" Because, you know, to most people, they don't think of the idea that we pre-exist right before being physical.

But I remember that curiosity and that intensity, and then not much after that. But then as I grew in the first few years of my life, I had memory of this, and that memory left me by the age of like five or six. But until that age, I assumed everybody knew we weren't from here. I just had this knowing, this sense, like, "This is just a play. We're just coming to do a neat thing. Everybody must know it, but nobody talks about it." You know, so I didn't talk about it, but I had certain assumptions that I carried with me that I assumed would be true here because of how things are in the higher realities.

Just as an example, I remember feeling that it would make sense. It should be that people in positions of authority or leadership or teaching should be loving and wise. You know, so the higher you were in society, you must be a more loving and wise being. You know, well, that's not always how it works on Earth. I have to remind myself of that.

I feel like even today, I still am trying to come to terms fully with what this Earth experience really is and where our society really is at. But anyway, so that's just, you know, a short sharing of that story. I know people are interested to hear the story. I'm happy to share it, but I don't really think it's the most important thing that we can talk about, that we can share. I think what's far more important is to share with each other a reminder of who or what we really are.

You know, everyone listening today, this is about like every one of us is on an incredible journey in the physical, and who we really are vastly transcends the physical context and the physical limitations. We are immortal beings of love. We are multi-dimensional, creative, powerful, loving beings, and that cannot be emphasized enough. You know, we get super veiled while we're here. We get super dense. We don't see it in front of our faces every day. We're very associated with the form—the form of Earth, the visual experience, the shapes, the ideas, all the ideas, all the news, all the consumers, and all the food, and all the things. We're really deeply associated with that, but that's not what we really are.

You know, we really vastly transcend the story of the human condition. It's just a story that we embark upon for great purposes, for the purposes of the expansion of love and joy. It's a wonderful process.

Yes, oh my gosh, Christian, thank you for sharing that story. First of all, I'm glad that you brought that up about the beauty and the magnificence of what we are. People who watch my channel, if you've seen my videos, you understand that I've had experiences that have actually proven that, so it's not a faith thing about the magnificence of what we are. But one of the things that I've talked about a lot is that I feel like the souls who choose to come to Earth—because I know it's not all souls—are considered on the other side. We are looked at as like the daredevil souls of the universe because so many souls will not take on that veil because it's unfathomable to be disconnected from what we are, which is not an experience of love. It is actually a state of being of being loved.

So can you speak to that a little bit about the daredevil souls and how rare you feel it is, on a soul level, for souls to incarnate here on Earth?

I agree completely with what you just said. I don't know the prevalence. I couldn't put a number on it obviously, but I do know that it is the minority of souls that would undertake something this extreme. You know, because the state of being that we're in right now is extremely separate—extremely separate. Like, we feel separate. We actually individuated. We made it all the way as far as we can take it into separation.

Right, we've come so far that, like, the listeners today, probably whoever you are, you may assume we are separate people. Like, that's just so, you know what I mean? Like, these objects are separate. I got this object, this, but the thing is, that is just going very, very far in a certain extreme experiential direction. It's not really native to what we are. It's like putting on an astronaut suit or something and going into an extreme environment.

Like, not everybody wants to go into space. You know, not everybody wants to wear an astronaut suit and go into space and get cramped and maybe live on a space station for three years and eat food out of a tube and, you know, put poop in a bag or whatever. Like, not everybody wants to do that, go to outer space and do that. We did choose to do that, and it is the minority.

So I agree, we are seen in a way like there's a near-death experience or named Amy Call. I really love her NDE. Fantastic NDE, and she says something to this effect that from the other side, we're seen as superheroes. And I think it was Natalie Sudman, actually, another near-death experiencer, who said that we're seen like fighter jet pilots who, I think she said, was like flying a fighter jet upside down 30 feet above the ground.

You know, well, yes, I agree with that, and it's because the extremity of the limitation that we've agreed to experience here is so extreme. It's like not everybody on Earth is going to go climb Mount Everest. Like, no, I personally have no interest in attempting that level of difficulty. It may be like that a bit.

Now, you might say, "There's billions of people on Earth." Well, there are a lot of souls. I don't know how many souls, but it's far, far more than avatars available on Earth to play. Definitely. Well, so then that's kind of an interesting thing also. So the population hasn't decreased over time; it's increased, which means if we have multiple lives, everybody here couldn't have all had multiple lives. There haven't been that many people that have been on Earth.

So one of the things that I was shown, and I'd love to hear your take on this, when I was on the other side, I was with a being who showed me the Earth, and the Earth looked very far away. And the being was explaining that the Earth is evolving, and there's an evolution level, and about—and I'm going to put a percentage on it because it's how I, it's only the way it can again work completely difficult—but 20% of the souls are very highly evolved souls that are here to kind of wake up the rest of the planet, and the other 80% are newer souls who have not had very many physical incarnations, are coming here for the first time.

And I think that it makes sense, and it's not an ego thing. Please do not mistake this for an ego thing because it's easy when you talk about this to say, "Oh, so somebody who's here is better." There is no good, better, or best on the other side. That doesn't exist. But would you agree that maybe a lot of the people who are on this planet right now are what you would refer to as newer souls or souls who have not incarnated hundreds or thousands of times like some of the other souls?

I have no idea, but I would say that there are those who have a lot more experience, higher evolved souls who have come to help. I remember knowing on that side that the awakening was happening. Can you talk to that a little bit?

That's so interesting because, yeah, so I mean, like, that's like kind of a, yeah, that's kind of like a new age term. I don't mean it like in any specific way, but it was just seen matter-of-fact that the human race is going through a huge change, and this is a very exciting time but also a very challenging, potentially, time because of the amount of—so the collective consciousness of humanity has momentum to it. It has density. It's like a—like thoughts are things in the higher realms, so there's a huge amount of history that the human race has built up that's based around fear-based intention and fear-based ideas and beliefs—all the ego expressions of fear that we have kind of enshrined into our cultures and lifestyle.

So, you know, we have a lot of that momentum that's in there, and part of awakening has to do with rising our vibration in that we face that all momentum, we process it, we integrate it, and we allow ourselves to move closer and closer to our true nature, which is a true nature of love.

So, anyway, so I won't—I don't know if I can guess what percentage have less experience. I don't like to refer to souls as new souls just because Earthly experience—yeah, maybe new, yeah, absolutely. Because, like, that's what I was going to say is the Earth experience is just one type of experience, and in fact, our entire universe is just one. The context from which we come is huge, mind-bogglingly huge, and the Earth is just one tiny little corner of our universe, but a very precious and high-potential little corner.

So much so that being given the opportunity to play a human is like a huge gift. It's like winning the lottery. I mean, that's kind of like the feeling, but it's like winning the lottery in a sense of feeling honored, actually. Like, I felt honored that I was being given the opportunity to play a human life in part because it meant that I—and I completely agree, I don't want to make this sound like a hierarchy or better or anything like that. It's not like that. That's a challenge. Yeah, it's hard to say it without making it sound like that, but yeah, but it meant that, like, okay, the guides, like in spirit, see potential.

Like, it's seen that I—that there is actually potential for me through this experience. You know, I mean, like, because the system is very efficient, and so if you're allocated the opportunity to play a human life, it is an incredible gift, and it means that it's kind of anticipated that there may be a very fruitful potential for you and for others. You know, if you have that experience, and that's true for all of us. You know, we evolve. Like, it takes a certain level of skill, you could say, to even play a human.

You know what I mean? Like, not everybody—you don't go straight into college, you could say. You know, you just don't. It's not going to be beneficial. It's not at all, but there may be those who have less experience in college or more or—I don't know. This metaphor has limits, but yeah, anyway, I think you understand what I'm trying to communicate is that, yes, there is difference in level of experience within the souls that have come to Earth, and I do think it's probable that a large percentage of the Earth has yet to awaken to who we really are. But I think that's changing. I think it's definitely changing.

Can you go back and talk about the being that you encountered because this is always fascinated me? It seems unusual, for my human perspective since I'm here and all of us are here, to even imagine that you could be traveling through the vastness of what exists outside of this place, and you would come upon a being that had this quality of being—had encountered physical lives, but that you hadn't encountered that before on a soul level. So does that speak to like a rarity of the fact that few people, few souls, have these incarnations?

I don't know. That may be an implication. I can't draw direct inference there, but I do know that there was a moment at this point. I would even again not to use dualistic spectrums. I think we've disclaimed that enough, but I felt I was young. I was a young soul at that point at that time. I did not have the level of experience, and this being though he did.

You know, and I was with a large group of beings in what I could describe as like a landscape of light, living light, and we were all moving together across this light. Some people have made fun of this word, but I like the word frolicking—just bounding forward and expressing joy and exploring joy and creativity in a new way. And we were going to do something. I don't remember exactly what, but I remember there being many, many other beings, and this being—I remember he caught my attention because the quality of his vibration, his energy, his sound even, you could say, was unmistakable.

You know, it was like a brilliant golden light. I don't know how else to put it. So, I don't—I won't draw any inferences too much from that because then we're in linear time right now, so for us, and we're also in a place of discrete locations, so we like to separate things. That's how we understand things generally. Difficult to do because our higher nature is very unified. All time is within the one now.

You know, so it's difficult to really draw too many inferences, but yeah, I don't know if I answered your question, but that was so inspiring there. It was a moment. I mean, it was one of those moments of like, I set a soul intention. Like, I as a spiritual being was like, "I am gonna do that." And, you know, what's funny is because I've shared the story a number of times, and it was only after I shared it that I came across a Bob Monroe video a few years later where I heard Bob Monroe—he's an out-of-body explorer who wrote a number of out-of-body books and founded the Monroe Institute—and I heard a video where he said most of us who come come because we become inspired by a being who has come, and we see the potential expansion of being that is possible by coming.

And when I heard that, I was like, "Oh my gosh, like, I've never heard anybody say that like that, but that's exactly what I experienced." Like, I was deeply inspired to do this.

Yeah, so then you talked about having—I'm going to call it a blueprint, and a blueprint may even simplify it, but I think that elicits a thought of what something could potentially look like. But you said it was a living, breathing energy of millions of different choices that you could make, limited by free choice, but you likened it to a tree. So let's talk about the tree.

So the tree starts in a trunk, and then it has a couple of main branches. So are you alluding to kind of how I believe is that you have certain things that you set aside for yourself that you are going to learn—that you want to experience and learn again? I hate to use that word, yeah, the word learn. Yeah, more experience is I think a better word to use, but certain things that you've come here you want to experience on this human plane.

And so the trunk starts at these two or three branches, and are those much more likely to happen or almost like set into motion so that you can then experience some of the things that go into smaller branches and then into twigs and then into leaves? And does that also mean then that we have contracts with certain people because I believe that you can only truly learn about yourself through your experiences with others?

If you are on a deserted island, you might learn that you were resourceful and you could survive, but you wouldn't learn a lot about yourself. It's through your interactions with other people that really help you learn and grow. So in order to do that, you almost have to contract with certain people that, "This person, if they come into my life, is going to help me elicit this experience, and this person—they all have free will, so that's why it may or may not happen—but do you believe that we have certain people that we are contracted with, that it's almost like we couldn't help but meet them?"

Yes, so we do make pre-arrangements for the context. In my case, my intention for this life was not specific to a given individual because of the specificity of the vibration I have. I'm attempting to integrate. Like, I know even now it's a living activity for me that I'm doing.

So, for but for like in my case, I knew that the parents would be very important because I knew that, for instance, my father would instill a certain confidence in me, and that I needed that confidence in order to have a rock to stand on when the fear rose. You know what I mean? And I knew that my mother would be very loving, and that basically, I would be loved, and that was like if I was going to go do this and meet this certain fear, like that had to not be a problem. Do you know what I mean?

But to your question, I do feel that yes, we do make plans. We do make sometimes what we call soul contracts with others depending on what we want to experience. I'm also careful about the word learn because learn implies an intellectual process. Yeah, I like to say we're not here for intellectual learning, though that's a part of it. We're here for a learning of the being by being something, by experiencing something.

And so that pre-arrangement is like a context pre-arrangement, and you can arrange certain things in it. Like, I asked certain questions, for instance, I asked, "Can I be intelligent again?" because I knew that I had been intelligent in several immediately preceding lives, and I wanted to retain that quality. I was like, "I don't want to do a non-intelligent thing. I'm not doing that. Can I be intelligent?" No, it wasn't like a goic thing though. It was just like, "I don't prefer that. It was just I don't prefer that. I prefer to be enabled in that way." I mean, that's the best way I can put it, and they said, "Yes, you can do that."

So I feel like that was worked in, but the main intention of facing this fear was intrinsically tied to a biological limitation that this body has that other bodies don't. And I actually knew that this body is an experience that other beings would probably pass up, just because there was like a certain biological something missing that would make day-to-day experience difficult.

And that was important. This sounds, you know, like to the human vantage point, we get up—why don't we do that? We get up in our ego, and it's quick to defy and proclaim a righteous judgment, but in any case, I knew that from that perspective, that this limitation would basically—I don't want to—these words are bad, but keep me humble because basically, I knew that it would make it difficult day-to-day in a way that I really wouldn't be able to go down an ego path because I would be suffering a lot.

Now, I know that that sounds like, you know, pain is good. That's not what I'm communicating—that pain is good. I'm just saying that from that perspective, I knew that this context had value, and that through that limitation that I would experience day-to-day, that would kind of support the likelihood, the probable very probable outcome, that I would be crushed and traumatized in my 20s.

And the way that that physically actualized was I tried to move to China after college. I tried to move to Beijing because I studied in Beijing in college. I tried to go to a jungle city called Chengdu. It was 110 degrees. I had a heat stroke. I spent four days in the Chinese hospital, and they gave me bag after bag of potassium. And something about that interacted with my biology in a certain way that caused an absolutely agonizing, terrible, terrible neurological pain suffering that was just unrelenting and horrible, and I could not escape it. And it lasted for weeks and months.

And it was just—I had post-traumatic stress after this experience for a number of years because it was so painful, and I locked it away. I couldn't even remember up until the age of 22 barely, you know, like my—because that's just what happens with trauma. Your psyche is too big. It can't handle that. It's too big. I'll put that away in a corner. We're not gonna deal with that.

Well, through EMDR therapy and counseling and through a spiritual awakening, which actually happened as a result of this really, I think I went and I faced that. I found that fear, and that fear was not just originating in that hospital bed in Chengdu. It was from before. It was this deep, deep, low, low, low vibration—a staggeringly low vibration that in the past had bested me, and here I am now facing it even now as I talk about it, seeing it, feeling it. It's okay, you know?

And I knew that the context, this limitation set, would enable that opportunity. It's not about suffering. It's not about signing up for suffering. It's about signing up for the context for an opportunity to have the opportunity. That's a huge distinction. It's an important distinction. You know, as people who are suffering so much and who reject so much of our lives, we—it's not like we're masochists.

It's not like we come because we want pain. It's just that contrast is a very useful tool, and this is a high-contrast simulation and therefore a high-opportunity simulation. So the opportunity is to overcome the fear.

Is that the biggest one of the biggest opportunities we have in taking on these roles and experiencing that duality of what we are, which is love, right? Yes, and so the opposite of that would be fear and lower vibration, right? Yes, so love is what we really are always. Everything that we are doing ultimately comes from love and returns to love. Everything, which is hard for people to understand because it seems like there is a lot of chaos in this world.

And I liken the analogy that you bring about that—yeah, right—when I refer—I mentioned it before we started recording today—I referred to the Earth as like a kindergarten, and we're all a bunch of kindergartners running around with scissors. What I meant was that we—the quality—okay, it all boils down to the quality of our intent, our intention. That's a Tom Campbell term. He's a physicist and consciousness explorer. His work is really what helped kick me down this path to awaken, and he has this term that I adore—quality of intent—and it means what is the real why behind the choices you're making.

What is the quality of being that you're bringing into your life choices and into your context? Is it love or is it fear? So, that's what I mean by fear when I use the word fear. I don't just mean the emotion of being afraid, though that is of course one of the chief ways it expresses. I mean that which we reject, that which we yet have to come to terms with, that which we have to integrate.

When we come into an experience of limitation like this, what happens is we buy into perceptions that are not in alignment with the truth of who we are. So, like, some big, big ones are we buy into the perception of powerlessness—"I have no power"—or victimhood—"I am a victim"—or "I am unworthy of love." That is a huge one. So many people in this world think they've got to do things. They've got to earn the money. They've got to prove themselves. They've got to do all that they've got to do so that they can create a resume to themselves to explain to them so the ego can say, "Look, you have value because look, you have money," or "Look, you have value because you went to this Ivy League school," whatever it is.

That's all happening because we have value. That's right. The truth is our nature is already that we already have intrinsic value. It's just that the ego is trying darn hard to fix the problem and fill the hole. Like, we have this big gaping hole now. We came into the experience of separation. Oh my gosh, now there's a huge problem because now I don't feel connected anymore. I'm missing the thing that I'm looking for. So we could say we're searching for God all the time, and we try to fill that hole with everything we possibly can, and it doesn't work. And we try really hard, and the ego tries harder and harder.

You know, so when I say we're running around like kindergartners with scissors, what I mean is we have a lot of fear. That's really what's happening, and fear is just another word for yet unevolvedness. It just means we're committed into a context of such extremity, such limitation, that we have not yet fully integrated this such that we can shine our love even here.

Yeah, we are all, but you could say that the human race is a bit of an orgy of fear. You know, we're just constantly stimulating each other's fear with the news and consumerism and the ways that we pass down fear through our belief systems and all the rest.

Yeah, sorry, no, no, no, I didn't mean to interrupt you, but this is a big thing. So I don't know about you personally, but I haven't watched the news in almost seven years. I don't consume it on the radio. I don't watch it on any type of TV. The only way that I hear about what's going on is when people tell me, and believe me, you have plenty of people in your life who will tell you.

I'm curious as to what your stance is on that, and the reason I do it is because I feel like I can't control what is being fed to me, and it lowers my vibration. In order to stay at a higher vibration, I have to consume it in the only way that it makes sense, which is an emotionally charged—yeah, like, I have a similar experience. I have not watched the news in a concerted way since my awakening 12 years ago.

The vibration is not helpful in general. Now, I am interested in facts. I'm interested in what's going on, so sometimes I will seek out information. Yep, right, because there's always an agenda behind that. Yeah, the quality of intent behind the news is important. You see, everything, the way, the reason, and the why that we're doing it is important.

So, is the news trying to just get hits and stimulate you know, six o'clock evening news fear? That is not helpful. And part of the reason it's not helpful is we are each—we're each creative beings. Okay, this is really important. We are all powerful creative beings, and what we're focused on and the vibration that we're coming from is very important because we're like little antennas or something, and we're communicating to each other all the time.

So, if you have like everybody focused on, you know, like let's take a kidnapping. It's terrible. One happens, and now five million people hear about it. So now the fear, the ultimately ego decision, egoic-based decision of one individual, has now been amplified to affect five million people when, in fact, there's so much good in the world that we don't focus on because we have so much good in the world.

So, like, I had—in my family, we—my father had a second family, and I had a half-brother who was three years old, and he ended up passing from brain cancer. That's okay—2005 or 2006, I'm sorry, I don't know the date, but it was a while ago. I was 26 I think at the time. The amount of goodness that came out of the woodwork from thousands of people that we didn't even know was overwhelming. Wow, that's not what the news focuses on.

No, and I'm not saying we should turn a blind eye to the negative that's happening. I'm not saying that. What I am saying though is that the quality with which we not only transmit to each other but receive and process information is very important.

Okay, so that actually brings me to an amazing segue—something you brought up before that I wanted to come back to—and you talked about the power of our thoughts. I listened to lots of near-death experience videos, and I had one that I listened to recently, and she was a nurse, and she got into a situation where this woman that she was working with, she felt wasn't doing a good job, and so she didn't gossip about it or tell anybody else, but internally she had all these thoughts about this woman, and she was resentful that this woman wasn't pulling her weight, and she wasn't very nice, and didn't have a good bedside manner.

And then she died and had a near-death experience, and she was shown that her thoughts were actually heaping on more negative energy to this woman and not—and to prove the point, she was shown the entire life that this woman had lived up until that moment, and she had been shown abuse that she had endured from many people in her life, and that she was choosing to try to get out of her situation by giving back and becoming a nurse, but she wasn't very good at it. But by this woman's thoughts heaping that on this other woman, it was causing a disservice.

And I'm going to put it into a context that probably everybody can understand that I've thought about for a long time. I think about Oprah Winfrey trying to lose weight with billions of people saying to her in their minds or talking about her about that she's fat and that she can't keep it off, and I actually believe that there is probably some factor with her that has not allowed her to do what she wants to do because she is such a public figure and so many people have heaped on their thoughts that are very powerful.

So those are just two things, and I'd like to know your thoughts about that.

I agree 100%. Our thoughts are things. They have a mass in—you could say not physical mass obviously, but well, they can eventually have physical mass, but they are like—you could say that the realm of thought precedes the non-physical realms that are thought-responsive, precede the physical manifest realm, and every intention—actually, not just every thought—thoughts are like forms, thought forms, forms of the mind. They are like things. They're that form. They're that specific thought. That vibration that is that thought is what a thought is, but it came from somewhere deeper even.

So, in the case of the example you said, you know, when we have fear, it's our own fear that gives rise to our own ego patterns where we think we can reclaim a little bit of power if we just identify that person as the enemy. You know, that person's doing a bad job. See, now I feel just a little bit—my ego is popping me up a little bit, a little bit better. It's not real power. There's no real power in that, but it came from fear.

So, also, once again, I feel it boils down to that quality of intent. Whereas even in your own mind, there's not—how do I put it? Love is what we are, so it's not about like babysitting yourself in a negative way. It's just that when you know the peace and the love of being, there is only love for that person. That's the only way I can put it.

So, when we catch ourselves though, like, okay, getting into that pattern, it can be helpful to be humble enough and brave enough to find our own fear. What fear do I have that's giving rise to those thoughts? This is a challenge for me. You know, I have a new work environment right now, and sometimes, you know, that happens. There's ego patterns that might get passed around.

A lot of humans do this on a day-to-day basis. We don't even—a lot of people are unconscious with how what they're producing, how they're affecting others. Mm-hmm, and it can be difficult. It's like a soup of vibrations at a certain vibrational level, and now you have to respond to this soup, and how do you—you know, that and that, and it seems like, "Oh, I don't have much power." No, you do have power. One awakened person is very powerful, disproportionately powerful, actually, to not only stop the chain of that egoic crap that gets passed around through thoughts and through actions but actually to shine a light vibrationally because they may not visually see it or understand even at a conscious human personality level what's going on, but that vibration of acceptance and love has an impact. It shines a light.

You don't even have to be around other people. Meeting your own fear in the quiet of your own house, loving your houseplant, enjoying the sunlight coming in your window, and letting go of the fear of this disease you just found out you have—yeah, wow, you are affecting the whole human race. You just don't see it. It's that powerful.

Right, we are not without power. You know, it's one of those things like, you know, we—with the news, back to the news topic—you know, we think, "Oh, there's these big governments. They have all this power, and there's these big people. They have all this power, and ah, no, actually, no, actually, you have the power." Like, I don't just mean that in a facetious way. Like, you are a creative, powerful, immortal, multi-dimensional being, and so am I.

Yeah, and when we can be that—and that just means living joy now, meet your own crap now, own your own crap, do your best to be your real self here now. You hear someone, you know, tell you something negative. How do you respond? You know, that there's a lot of power in that. I know it sounds small, but the small stuff is the big stuff. It's one of the essays in my book. I think it's so important. The small stuff is the big stuff.

A lot of near-death experiences talk about how in their NDEs, they find out that these small little acts of kindness and love are what had the ripples. You know, like one NDE—and I feel bad every time because I don't remember the person's name—but they were a child, and they went to like a car stop, like a rest area, and their parents asked them to get some water from like a river in a bucket for their family, and this person filled this bucket of water, and they were walking back to the car, and there was like a dry tree out of the way, and all they did is go over and water this tree.

It's too heavy. The bucket was too heavy. Yeah, because yeah, yes, he had some of the water out. Yes, yeah, and then he took the rest back, and that was one of the most celebrated accomplishments of his life. How—I think it was a him. I don't remember—seven years old. I've heard that one also.

And so, we are so busy thinking about, "Oh, I gotta do these big huge things. I gotta, you know, I gotta change." You are changing the world when you act in kindness, even to yourself, even in this moment tonight, today. There's so much power in that. That's why when I say when you do something to someone else, you are actually doing it to yourself. Yes, because we are literally connected.

And I think that comes down to certain things like, you know, one of the things that plague a lot of people is they feel like they're a victim, or they feel like people have done things that are wrong, and it's very difficult to forgive somebody else, but forgiveness is never about the other person. It actually releases yourself so that you can change your own vibration and have your own control back, not let somebody else—yeah, because when you're in judgment, an ego judgment, you're in bondage actually because you're still—it's still fear.

Yes, judging someone else is freeing yourself, and it's the way of love. I mean, forgiving somebody else is the way of love, and it, you know, like, I hear a lot of people say, "Well, what about, you know, the judgment by God?" And I won't—I'm not gonna try to speak to God except to say that unconditional love is the nature of God, and with complete understanding, total understanding, total unconditional love, in that, how can there be anything but forgiveness?

You know, it's like when we know the other person, we love them because they're a part of us too. Like, we're all individuated, but we're also one. Those two things are not right. They don't preclude each other. They're not mutually exclusive. You are you, the individual, you are also one with everyone else and everything else, and in higher states of being, you can feel that and know it.

One quick example—yeah, I had an out-of-body experience a few years ago. So, at the time of this experience, I guess I had it about 12 years ago or 11 years ago. At the time of this experience, I was early in my awakening journey, and at the time, I was not a fan of my wife's ex-boyfriend.

And I hadn't—but I had an experience because I was still stuck in an ego interpretation, which was so crude, but at the time, I had this experience where I had—I felt and saw in this out-of-body experience who he is and who my wife is and how their beings overlap in a really beautiful way and how my being overlaps with his in a really beautiful way.

Like, what they shared was this knowing about quality of creative expression that I couldn't even comprehend, whereas he and I shared what I can only call an ancient honor. Like, honor was deeply precious to both of us. Like, our true nature, who we really are as souls, honor is something that is, you know, really important. It sounds so paltry to put it that way, but I felt it in thought and knew it vibrationally. It was like an ocean of color and vibration.

But I also experienced how this gentleman—he experienced almost no love in his life as a human. Like, such a small amount of love, and in fact, negativity that he was like if you took Plato and rolled over it with a car tire and made it super, super, super thin. That was what he was. That was how he experiences this reality, but he's still trying to create from that place.

Hmm, and I had so much respect for him, and I called him the next day, and I said, "I know this sounds a bit strange. I'm pretty sure I saw your soul last night. Let me tell you what I experienced." And I just shared with him everything I experienced. What did he say? He said, "Well, if I had to share who I really am with somebody, that's about what I would say."

And now, he's close to our family. He comes over, and to this day, I feel like kneeling to the guy. Like, I have—I cannot have another. How can there be any other response? And it seems so silly to me now that I looked back and thought, "Oh, I had some ego thing about this ex-boyfriend." No, love is—I think it would be like that with every person, right? If we—that's what I said—story—if we really knew everything that everybody had gone through in their life and all the experiences and emotions and the things that they told themselves and how they felt held back, I think we would probably never judge anybody anymore, and we would only feel empathy towards them and not hatred.

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. It is true. We—there is so much trauma on Earth. It's ridiculous. Yes, like, we're all traumatizing the crap out of each other to varying degrees.

Okay, so I have a really—this is really—this is gonna get kind of deep here. So, we come here to have these experiences, but the only way we can have this dualistic experience is to have negative experiences from others happen to us where we have a chance to respond in whatever way our soul responds.

So, is it possible that some of the souls who come here actually take on a very negative role? It's not who they really are, but it's like, let's say we're planning a life together, and I'm like, "Christian, as my close soul mate on the other side, will you please play this role with me and do these things?" And you're like, "No, I love you so much. I can't do that." And I'm like, "Please, please, I need you to do it." And you're like, "Oh, okay. I don't want to do it, but I'm gonna do it. I'm gonna come here, and I'm gonna do these horrible things to you so you can have this experience."

Is there some of that going on also in addition to people just having free will and going crazy with their fear and off the rails?

Okay, so we do sign up for roles. We do sign up to play roles for each other that, from a human perspective, might seem negative. However, I'm very careful about making that synonymous with agreeing to do harm. Okay, because our true nature is love. It's always love, and the ability to—okay, it's gonna go deep. No, it's okay. This is good.

Our own harsh context is what potentially damages us such that we develop ego and respond in fear and hurt others. So, when you went—like, so, if let's say you go into a family where you are abused, and so then as an adult, your tendency will be to abuse someone else because you've been hurt. You don't—you haven't experienced that love. It's what you know. You're just conditioning. There's all these things going on.

From the soul's perspective, the context is seen. So, it's seen, "Oh wow, that is—it's likely that I'm going to experience abuse, and wow," because you're picking. You see the context, and I know this is really hard for a lot of people because then the question that always comes up is, "Well, there's no way people would sign up to be, you know, starved to death in Africa kind of thing."

Well, I do have—I just want to say one quick thing. All experience is highly valuable. It has potential in it, and it's because we know we can't be harmed. We can't truly be harmed. We know we cannot truly be harmed, but it's—this is really important though—it's not just like I said, we're not masochists. It's that we see that the intensity of contrast cannot be greater than we are.

Say that again. Say that intensity—the intensity of contrast cannot be bigger than what we really are. I think that's so important, and so what that means is when we sign up for high, high contrast, we are—I don't want to be categorical because the soul is very complex and rich, and there's a lot that goes into it, but you could say we are thinking something to the effect of many times, "Can I shine love even into that? Can I heal that? Can I stop that chain of hurt?"

You know, it's not like, "Oh, I'm gonna come in and abuse you." Well, there may be a context in which there's possibilities for that, but I feel that it's never a case of a soul saying, "I'm gonna come in and harm you." No, no, harm is not our nature, but it is in—there is value though in signing up for deep, rich, difficult, high-contrast contexts, including contexts in which we might end up potentially creating contrast with someone else—contrast that's valuable for them.

You know, metaphorically, this—I really am not trying to belittle the absolute horror and terrible trauma that people experience in this life. Yeah, when I say any of these comments, yes, I'm not trying to belittle that. It's a little bit like, though, on the other hand, when you agree to sign up to play a role for somebody, it's a little bit like saying they're saying, "I want to lift a weight on a weight bench." A little bit like that. They want the counter-pressure because, through lifting the weight—that's just a metaphor—they get stronger in a certain way that is important to them.

So, let's take a specific example. Someone who is a master of kindness—I recently had a 101 where I shared some space with this person, and I felt the spiritual quality of kindness that this person had that was over the top—like, master-level kindness. You don't think of kindness as a superpower, but it is. Okay, and I don't know—in this person, I won't speak specific to this person for, you know, privacy's sake, but let's say you're a master of kindness, and so, let's say maybe in order to better learn and understand kindness, you want to experience a lack of kindness to respond to.

Or let's say that you will be kind, but you're going to do it in a context in which maybe you're limited in some way. Maybe you have a biological limitation, or maybe you're around people that are kind in one way but not in another way, and you need to understand that other way. Like, it could be anything. Like, our souls are so complex. We have so much history. We have so much experience. So, the specificity of what we come to learn might seem very strange to the human, and it might be that we come to be there for someone else in one simple way.

You know, if theoretically, you could come to live a whole lifetime just to be someone's friend for five minutes, knowing that they're going to be in a very difficult space and they're going to need you in that time, and you would need three experiences to do that in order to be there. Maybe you've already had those experiences. Maybe there's some reason that you—I'm just saying that the role, the things that we come to do, might seem strange to the human.

But so then people ask, "Well, how do I find that? You know, how do I find that in myself for my own life?" A very highly personal question. I can't categorically speak to it, but just one comment I'll make: Find the patterns in your life and find what you feel called to intuitively and what fears you seem to have repeated issue with because often it's the weak leg that we come to walk on.

I find that very much my own case. I have certain strengths. I'm not here for those. I'm here to do the hard thing for me—to really become vulnerable and limited and face biological limitation and pain that I can't escape. And by the way, then when you do that, it releases. It goes, but you know, we can process our fears at which point the love and the joy that is native to who we are expands and does measure like—the integration of fear and the expansion of being is a blissful process ultimately. It's not about torment and punishment.

Yeah, now I know you have a limited amount of time, so I want to ask you one more thing. Yeah, sure. So, you talked about the sun as a being—yeah, a magnificent being. Can we also assume that the Earth is a magnificent being? And if that's what you've been able—if you can remember any of that, can you explain a little bit of that to us because I think that the Earth is going through a process? I think we all see it, and I think a lot of us feel like we want to do something.

Well, I'm aware that the Earth has a consciousness of its own, but I didn't experience that directly in my experience. I experienced the sun directly, which had its own awareness. It's very difficult to describe—depth of being that is indescribable and beautiful but very, very different than a human point of view. But anyway, it had also a real consciousness. All still souls—boy, I mean, you know, like, it depends on how you define soul.

I want to be careful because of what the word soul means, but I can say that everything ultimately is of consciousness and is conscious, and there are definitely many different levels within that. And even our own individual souls have many aspects of the self. You know, like, it's all you. You're you. You're the you that feels like you to you, but that you that feels like you to you is not your name. It's not your body. It's not your story. It's not your pain. You have experienced other things. That's who you are.

So, there's different portions of us though that feel like—like, there's, you could say, like a fractal pattern of sub-levels of being. Maybe something right—almost like the universe itself only brings a portion of itself into this incarnation because it's actually happening inside. Yes, the higher self. Yes, exactly. Only like a—you could say an allocation of the self incarnates. Our full self is already on the other side right now. Right? You're not—it's so hard to grasp onto that, but that was what I was shown in my out-of-body experience is that the portion of me that is here in this body right now is like a fingernail of my pinky compared to the vastness and the power of my soul.

And since everything's happening at once, we could potentially be having multiple experiences in different time frames because that's an illusion. And migratory birds—as you experience your soul being one time—yes, so crazy. Okay, oh my gosh, this is like one last comment. So, like, the pinky—the pinky can draw upon the ring finger or the middle finger or the pointer finger. They're all one being. Absolutely. I'm just describing that because you're not just this. No, you are the other portions of yourself.

I think Seth talks a lot about that actually—drawing upon other personalities within a soul. Kind of beautiful, but I'm just pointing that out because exploration of the soul through meditation, which actually starts as a move—I don't want to get too much depth because we're running out of time—but which starts as a move not towards the form of this life but towards just the beingness that you are. You don't have to go seek anything specific. Just know the life that you are. Know the living awareness that you are, and in that, not even because you're trying, you may discover a treasure trove of being of what you are.

There's a great Rumi quote that I love that reminds me of: "You wander from room to room hunting for the diamond necklace that is already around your neck." Hmm, that depth of being that we are, that is a part of source, is here now. It's not in the other room. I mean, it will be when you go there. It's you. It's here right now. It's a beautiful thing.

We talked about so much today—so many different concepts. For the people that are watching, if there's just one thing that you could make them hear loud and clear, yeah, what would it be?