GOOD VIBRATIONS PODCAST. VOL. 247: CHRISTIAN SUNDBERG - LIFE BETWEEN LIVES

Good Vibrations
Welcome to episode 247, and my guest today is Christian Sundberg. Welcome on, brother.

Christian: Thank you very much, Mark. Thanks for having me.

Mark: Well, I thought now could be a good time to have this conversation, as I've been going through a bit of a spiritual crisis of faith of late, you might say. As my regular viewers of my videos will know, just to fill you in, I've been through various different phases in my life. I went through a childhood where I was raised in a Christian Church of England school. I didn't really think much of it beyond that. In my early 20s, I felt differently about the world, and it felt like something had happened.

I just didn't know what, and I allowed myself to be guided into a Christian Evangelical Church, where I stayed for four years. I left that after that period, feeling somewhat disillusioned and jaded by the whole experience. I became an atheist for about 15 years, then I shook myself out of that and came to accept that, of course, there is a supreme creative force behind all things. I went through a spiritual phase, which lasted another best part of 15 years. But just recently, I've been really starting to question the true nature of what we refer to as God.

In a video that I put out the other week, I was questioning whether God is a benevolent, loving being or force which wants the best for us, as we prefer to think, or whether it could actually be the opposite—some kind of demonic force, some kind of demiurge, a lesser god. Because there's all kinds of evidence to suggest that this is a realm specially constructed for pain, suffering, and fear. So maybe you can help me out with that.

Just for the listeners, perhaps you'd like to get into what you generally talk about in your interviews and broadcasts, and some of the interesting experiences that have happened to you in this lifetime. We'll just sort of set the scene there and see where it takes us.

Christian: Yeah, sure. Thank you, Mark. So, I am coming from a place where I have had a pre-birth experience and also out-of-body experiences. Pre-birth experience meaning, at the age of 30, I spontaneously had memory of the incarnation process returned to me. I remember existing in the state prior to the human experience, and I remember choosing this life and why. So, that's the main context.

But it's broader than that. That's just the part that people tend to focus on. I've also had out-of-body experiences, and now our higher nature is very normal to me. The human experience is arising, and it's a highly strange and limiting experience, but it is non-native, and it's not what we really are. I kind of see through that and feel through that. I've had some energetic sense that has arisen since my awakening about 13 years ago.

I wrote a book called A Walk in the Physical. It's available for free on my website. It's not about money. Through it, I wish to share what we are doing here on Earth, what is the meaning and value of the human experience. Those have been my questions. That's my main passion—sharing what is the value of this experience, why are we here.

Your question that you kicked off the discussion about, regarding whether God is a benevolent force or the opposite—yeah, wow, okay. So, very much unconditionally loving is the nature of the source from which we come. So loving that we have the choice to engage in deep contrast for the purposes of the expansion of what we are, if we so choose. We do choose to come; it's not forced upon us.

The problem is, there are only really two major issues: one is ignorance, which just means we don't remember what we are, and the other is fear. Fear just means that we have yet to evolve this. There's some aspect of these extreme constraints that we yet reject and push away and have a problem with. When fear is there, ego arises, and all sorts of shenanigans arise out of ego and fear—all sorts of nastiness. But that's just our own fear giving rise to that because of the extremeness of the constraints that we've agreed to come experience here on Earth.

I touched on a lot there, but just at a very high level, we can kick off the conversation with that.

Mark: Sure. Well, that sets the scene nicely. So, what happened to you at age 30 to spark that experience? Was that a singular moment of epiphany, a singular event?

Christian: Not so much. I had some pre-birth memory up until the age of five when I was a kid, but I forgot it by five or six. So, in my early adult life, I had no awareness of it at all. Then, at age 30, I took up a long-term meditation practice, and after a few months, I had my first non-physical experience. It was so eye-opening. It was like, "What the heck? Something's really going on here.

I've got to keep going." So, I continued meditating, and one day, it was just there. It wasn't like a big epiphany. It was like there was just so much I was aware of, I guess is the best way you could put it. I could see and remember things I hadn't been aware of or seen before. It was like someone had just blown leaves off the ground, and there was the grass. It was the most normal thing in the world.

In fact, when the pre-birth awareness returned, I didn't think of it as strange at all. I was sharing it with somebody one day, and they said, "You know, that's really extraordinary. You should share that." It hadn't even occurred to me that it was extraordinary because, when you are at that level of awareness, the higher context that we've experienced is very normal. It's not strange. It's not unusual. The human experience is the strange thing, actually—these extreme constraints that we've agreed to experience for a while on Earth. That's the strange thing.

Mark: Why is it that some, such as yourself, have the ability to remember past lives, but the vast overwhelming majority don't?

Christian: Yeah, so I'm not special in some way. It's not like that. In part, I did ask in my pre-birth experience to have a small amount of memory this time, to not forget everything. The veil—the constraints that are in consciousness that go along with being physical and not remembering—that's just part of the game here. Not remembering is built in, you could say, to the simulation. Like, if you really want to be a human, you've got to be the human. You can't be all the experiences of the whole universe. You need to be just you. Like, if you want to experience getting up and eating your breakfast, then you need to be the human that gets up and eats the breakfast.

But I did remember asking for a small amount of memory. It still did lead me by five or six, even though that's true. I know that I'm not special or unique in some way. We all have access to our deeper selves when we are willing to let go enough of everything that we're not. Right now, what happens is we get really lost into identification with form—form meaning sensory data, thoughts, stories, the world, the objects, the places, all the stuff that's arisen that the mind is so focused on. That's not really what we are. Even the thoughts that arise in our minds are like little dreams. Each thought is like a little dream. It's not really the full you.

So, it's a matter of taking the time and the focus to return your awareness to what you really are, very objectively. Not trying to make anything up. This is not about a new story or a new neat thing. No, this is about a personal experience of what you really are—turning your awareness back towards your awareness and exploring it very objectively and with great alertness. In that, non-physical experiences can very naturally arise, kind of on their own. It seems like on their own because it's not the doing human portion of us that's doing things on Earth. It's not really who we are anyway. It's really just that we're looking away from the movie screen such that we spontaneously become aware that we were always in the movie theater. That's a metaphor, of course, but it's the best way I can think to put that.

Mark: Okay. So, what I was most interested in was whether, in the spirit realm before we incarnate into these meat-suit bodies, there is consent. You've already answered that by saying there is, so we fully agree to come into these lives. Do we know exactly what we're letting ourselves in for—the challenges that we're experiencing?

Christian: Actually, we do. First of all, let me speak to the consent part here. The soul is a part of God. So, what I mean is, you are a drop in the ocean. You're like a piece of God. You could think of it that way at the soul level, at the deepest level. So, what has greater authority than that? Nothing. There's no such thing as something that has greater authority than that which is the fundamental substrate of what is. It's the ultimate authority. It doesn't have a greater thing.

The only way that it can seem to be so deeply veiled to itself is to surrender itself. The primary portion of my pre-birth experience that is on my mind commonly, and that I've shared about, is that I remember so vividly actually for two lives—this one and a preceding one—the acceptance of the veil. The process of surrendering my control, surrendering my power to a cloak, or something. I don't know how to articulate it, but it's a surrendering of oneself to the limitations, a giving over of oneself to the limitations.

In a previous experience, I had actually accepted the veil, but then when I got here, I was like, "I'm not doing this. This is not happening." I had so much fear rise up as soon as I was bodily, even though I was still in the womb. In that experience, I rejected the veil because I thought, "I'm not doing this. I know that I'm stronger than the veil. I'm going to fight my way back out." And I did, but in doing so, I killed the fetus that was to be my body.

I'm just lifting that up because I experienced fear upon arriving, even though I had positive intentions for that life, because I personally wasn't fully prepared for the level of challenge that this level of constraint offers. The veil is like a plummeting in vibration of one's being from being all that is and connected in the most blissful, ecstatic, fully knowledgeable way, down, down, lower, lower. I could say the word "lower" a hundred times, and it would not do justice to the ridiculous plummet in vibration that one feels in the body of one's awareness down into these ridiculously extreme constraints that we experience here on Earth. Being bodily is like being shoved inside of a tiny tuna can. It's really uncomfortable, but that can only happen in a surrendering to the constraints, to the veil.

We do that because, pre-life, we see the amazing opportunity. Now, the ego does not like that, of course, because we've got all sorts of pain and all sorts of rejection where we reject and have pain, which means we have fear. We don't want to hear that. No, we don't like it. We just don't like this. But the thing is, we have actually chosen to be engaged in something that can challenge us. What else can challenge God, you could say, other than to create something so dense that we are trying?

Here we are. I'm not making light of the difficulties of the world. I'm really not. I've suffered a lot of trauma and pain and sickness in this life, and I knew that I would pre-life. But I knew then, and I know now, that the great limitations, the great constraints, the great pain—it actually has an incredible opportunity that it presents to us. It's not that pain is good. It's not what I'm saying.

Pain is not like that at all. It's just that, as a metaphor, because we have to rely on metaphors because this is so hard to describe in earthly language, it's like, why would you lay down on a weight bench and actually push up 200 lbs rather than 10? Why would you ever do that? That's hard. It's heavy. It could crush you. Yes, it could. It's very heavy. But we do that because, man, you can grow in ways that are just not possible with less constraints.

We see that opportunity, so we agree to dive in and get our hands really dirty. And here we are.

Mark: Right. I mean, people will ask, why would anyone choose to come in as a sexually abused child, or a torture victim, or to be blind, or to spend their life in pain in a wheelchair, or die of cancer at a young age? These sorts of things, when others choose to come in as millionaires and live lives of luxury and wealth and great pleasure. It seems to be unfairly skewed.

Christian: It's important to keep in mind that a given earthly circumstance is not already charged. It's not like a millionaire is always being better than being a non-millionaire. That's not how it works. Consciousness has to apply the meaning to the context and then work with it. For some people, even being a millionaire and having very few health challenges, for example, that might be a very challenging life for them, for whatever reason. Whereas someone else might choose to engage a circumstance which, to another person, might seem unfathomable, but they're strong, and they can process it, and they can really learn something through it.

Now, when I say "learn," I don't mean intellectual learning. I mean there's intellectual learning that happens, of course, here on Earth. I'm talking about a learning of the being by being something—by actually experiencing some perspective. It's often in the opposite perspectives of some spectrum that we learn the most and that we can grow the most.

As an example, let's say that you, as a soul, forever want to know what it's like to be powerful and to really enjoy the power that we really are. You might choose a life of great powerlessness. Perhaps that helps you understand power. Perhaps it's an aspect of a long pattern. There's a lot of different avenues it could go down, but it could be a way for you to integrate some experience and even grow some quality through it. Perhaps you're trying to really evolve a certain kind of fortitude, for instance.

Now, that's very difficult for the ego to understand because it's just upset. It's just pissed. I experienced trauma when I was 22. I had a health condition in Chongqing, China. My nervous system was burned out by a potassium overdose, and I was in neurological agony for months. I did nothing but cry and shake back and forth. I had no memory up until the age of 22 for about five or six years. I was very traumatized, went through years of counseling, and found this incredible fear at the bottom of it.

I know now that that fear is what I came to process. I came to process that fear. I came to experience that because the opportunity to serve the whole by integrating that—by really coming all the way down into that very low vibration and to really actually integrate it and not reject it, to actually feel it, to actually face the darkness all the way, man, all the way, with vulnerability, with humility, with patience, with willingness to feel—it's about the quality of intention that we bring into these things. It's not about the circumstances. It's all about quality of intent.

The contexts change. The physical changes. The body changes. Like, your 5-year-old body is gone. You're still here. It's not who you are. You're not this body either. When this body's over, you'll still be you. But what you always are is you—your consciousness. And consciousness, what does it do? It wields intention. It makes choices.

So, what we're here to do is to refine and grow our ability to wield a quality of intention, which means, can we really choose love rather than fear, even when it's hard, man? Even when the constraints are off the charts. It's one thing to be on the other side and say, "Oh, I'm kind. I can be kind in any circumstance." It's another thing to be here and have someone flick you off on the street after you've had a long day, and then you see that. That's the value.

So, it's not just that the circumstances themselves, we apply the meaning to it all. Also, part of what we're learning to do is, how do I frame what I've experienced? How do I use it? How do I realize and feel and know that I'm deeper than the constraints and the circumstances that have arisen? That's a very personal process.

Mark: Right. So, when you abandoned the new life that had been lined up for you, and you caused your mother to have a miscarriage, and you went back to the spirit world, could you have called it a day there if you'd chosen and just said, "I'm never going back"? You obviously chose to come back, but could you have made the decision to not incarnate into this world anymore?

Christian: Yes, but the thing is, this is hard to describe. The answer is yes. We never have to continue. It's like going to college. It's like, you don't have to go if you go Monday, Tuesday, this week, next week, the month after. You could just stop on any given day. I mean, you don't have to go back. No one's really making you, except in this metaphor, it's pretty bad because you're not taking out a bunch of money to go to college. You can just stop when you like.

But the thing is, you know who you are now, and we call that karma. Karma just means you are who you are. From that side, you can see, "Oh, wow. I am the certain person in these circumstances. Wow, I chose that. I chose this certain thing. Hmm, wow. I could really grow and balance out, might be a good way to put it. If I could reface that and reintegrate that, that would be a great service to the whole." And then, you know, that would be helpful.

We make the choices from love, not from "must do." There's no "must do." There's nothing, in fact. Right now, no matter who you are listening, no matter what's going on in your life, at the deepest level, there is nothing you need to do. Nothing. The need to do something doesn't feel good because it's not the truth. The truth is, you're completely free. You're completely free, and you're completely understood. You're completely loved. Totally loved. That's the starting point.

From there, we may choose even to do something as crazy and extreme as committing ourselves into a veil where we don't remember who we really are, to see what we choose, how we do now that we're here. We upset most of us because, what the heck, this world can be pretty dark at times. But that is just an indicator that we have yet to grow. We have yet to learn. We have yet to actualize our true loving nature, even when the constraints are this high. It's about love, you know?

Mark: Right. So, there's no judgment waiting for us when we exit these lives. I mean, I've heard David Icke express it as, "There's no God with a machine gun saying, 'Get into that body, or else.'" So, we are choosing, right? We are choosing ourselves to come here. And if there is any kind of judgment, it's us effectively judging ourselves from a higher state of consciousness.

Christian: Yes, that's exactly right. We judge ourselves. It's all understood. Not only do we judge ourselves, but when we have our life review and we review a life, we are often offered huge amounts of love and comfort and caring and comforting because they know that we're going to see we made some fearful choices and hurt other people. It might be hard for us to see who we've really been. That's how much we're loved.

It's not like you're punished because you made some choice. It's like, no, you just see who you were, but you also see the entire context. So often, when you see, okay, so from the other side, if someone else hurt you, you also see their full context. So many times, we hurt others because we've been hurt. From that point of view, you can see, "Oh my gosh, they hurt me because they were hurt by all these other people in this chain." And not only were they hurt, but, "Oh my, they are such brave and strong, you know, they're brave and strong themselves." And you see their qualities and how they're doing their best with what's been given to them.

That's how we see each other, and that's how spirit sees us. But then, when we look at ourselves, it's not that wisdom is automatic either. We look back, and we feel exactly how we affected others. We feel exactly who we are. We know who we are. We still have to make a decision about how to use that information—if we choose to come back and do something about it or not, or whatever. It's all about free will choice.

Mark: Eric Dubay put out a brilliant video just the other week, likening this life experience to a boat at sea. The analogy was, there's a bunch of people on this boat. Nobody on the boat knows where they came from. They don't know where the boat's headed. They've got no recollection of how they got there, and nobody seems to have all the answers for anything. All they can see around them is just endless ocean—no land in sight. There's no guidebook, there's no charts or maps. And I thought, that's a pretty good metaphor for these lives.

So, what is the point of the memory wipe? What's the point of us coming in and forgetting everything that we previously learned in prior incarnations? Because while you seem to have some recollection of your previous lives, most evidently don't. So, people will ask, how are we supposed to grow and evolve if that's what these lives are for, if we can't remember what we previously did and learned? Wouldn't it make more sense for us to be able to pull that accumulated knowledge in with us with each new life?

Christian: So, let's not call it knowledge because if you're thinking that the learning is behavioral or intellectual, then yeah, you would need the knowledge. But that's not the type of learning that we're doing. It's a learning—a growth of the being by being something. A growth of the being means a refinement of its quality of intent, and that you do keep. Your quality, your virtues, you could say, you keep.

You grow in that way. You might have to relearn new context, but if you want to be sailing on the ocean out in the middle of nowhere, and you want to see how you do, you've got to be sailing on the ocean. You've got to be out on the ocean. You've got to have no guidebook. That's the name of the game. That's what makes it like that. That's going to be scary, right?

Well, now that it's prompting fear, that is the opportunity. You see, the fact that now you're on an ocean, you have to decide what to do. That is the offering. I don't want to use the word "excitement" because I don't want to make it sound like some masochistic thing. It's not masochism, but that is the offering—that you don't know.

And then, from life to life, you do keep what you've learned at the being level. It's not about intellectual learning, though intellectual learning might occur. It might reoccur. You might be back in a human context and relearn things, and you might actually learn them faster because you've actually done this before, even if you don't remember it. Your being knows.

So, that growth of the being is definitely retained. It's just that that doesn't require the content in the game to be updated. So, metaphorically, if you go into a video game, let's say you reload and start over, your character doesn't have anything when you start over. It starts at blank, but you, the player, actually are better at playing the game now. So, in our case, that's true, even if that means you don't remember.

Mark: Okay. So, we're going to be surrounded by people who have potentially been here hundreds of times before, and others who've been here just a handful of times before, and presumably some that are here for the first time, right? And we're sort of mingling with these people at different stages of development and experience.

Christian: Definitely. Absolutely. So, when we see, and then we have to be subject to—I'm not differentiating between a person with one experience or a thousand lifetimes. But I'm just saying that this is kind of like an equalizing context. And that now, if some person makes some decision to harm you physically, now you have to deal with it. You see, so even because the reason I say that is because, in higher realms, there is like a vibrational geography going on—a geography that's based on nature of being and quality of intention and focus of purpose.

It's very much like we basically go where we resonate. That's a simple way to put that. Whereas, on Earth, this is the place we come if you want to shove a bunch of people that might not resonate together and see what happens.

Mark: Right. Might that explain the concept of what people refer to as NPCs—non-player characters, or normies? You know, regular members of society who just go along to get along, and they behave the same as most other people, and go shopping, and watch TV, and eat junk food, and all this. Would those be people who might be early on in their developmental stages, and maybe they've not had that many previous lives, and they're learning their lessons that they came for slowly and gradually, versus those who seem to have more meaningful lives who perhaps are more advanced on the scale?

Christian: Well, we can't judge. Yeah, it does make sense. We can't judge the meaning of a life based on whether someone did this thing or not that other thing. But I will say that, when you use the term NPC—non-player character—in the truest sense, the way I interpret that term would be, is there anybody walking around that's an avatar that no soul is playing? Right? So, part of the simulation.

I think that actually does happen, but I think it's very rare. But anyway, to your question about normies, many people that are less awake is just because, in many times, where fear is greater, which means, in general, experience is less in a given area. I'm not judging and making this a new duality because we transcend all duality. But where experience is less, then there may be less awakeness, and less awakeness tends to yield a conventional, non-alert lifestyle.

But that's not judging. I'm just saying that level of experience does impact how someone is going to react to the societal norms and what their soul is calling them to do. As we awaken and grow, awakening and spiritual growth tend to be synonymous. As that occurs, we tend to have increased awareness about possible decisions we could make, and we tend to make those decisions in the direction of love, in whatever that means for the individual. And that can mean many different things. So, I'm trying not to be too specific because I'm not judging a given lifestyle.

Mark: But yeah, so you mentioned the simulation just there. Do you place any stock in this idea, which is becoming ever more popular, it seems, that this may not be original creation? This might be some kind of overlay or copy of what was there before.

Christian: What do you mean by overlay or copy?

Mark: So, the idea is that we might not be living in God's, if you want to use that term, original creation, but that it was somehow hijacked by some other kind of entity, which people often refer to as a demiurge, which might have steered it off in other directions. And so, we're living in a sort of virtual reality copy of what was there previously. This is not our natural state. It's bastardized and unnatural in some way.

Christian: Well, yeah, that makes sense. So, I've heard that. To me, that starts to fall into the soul trap category.

Mark: Yeah, exactly. It goes hand in hand with the idea that our souls have been tricked into this trap.

Christian: Yeah, right. I very much do not agree with that, and I think that's a really good example of how we take earthly learned patterns like deception, entrapment, and then, because we are afraid of deception and afraid of entrapment, and because we experience it from each other here, boy, we'll impose that right up the chain. And now we're afraid that that's happening to us at a larger spiritual level.

Oh my gosh, it's kind of like the idea of hell. It's like, we're already feeling separate from the whole, so let's create an idea that you can be tormented forever if you don't pick the right belief. Oh my gosh, it's just not the truth. The fundamental truth is unconditional love and absolute freedom and love and joy and peace. It's just that's the truth. And from that deepest layer, there's no deception. In fact, there's no separation.

So, your question kind of implies that there's such a thing as this original universe, and now there's a new one, and that this second one has got all messed up. There is no separation at all. There is no distance. What I mean is, there's only the experience of a virtual set of form—locations, ideas, objects, sensory data, sight, sound, touch—arising within consciousness. And consciousness is already one. It's already whole. It's already perfect, you could say, even though we're simultaneously growing. It's already the one thing. It doesn't need anything.

So, I'm lifting that up because, yeah, as soon as we start falling into an idea of, "Oh, now I'm in a new well," we feel like we're in a prison here, so we create another idea for a prison. And it's actually doing us ourselves a great disservice because we are powerful creative beings, and what we believe is what we tend to create.

So, in the astral, for instance, people who believe in imprisonment, they're going to experience some kind of exemplification, actualization of imprisonment. And so, now we're kind of sharing these scary ideas with each other. We're all running around like, "Oh my God," like a big fear orgy. That's irresponsible to have. I'm just saying, at a large level, for the powers that be to share fear all the time, like on mainstream news, for instance, it's not very responsible to fill our mind space and our focus with the negative when we are powerful creative beings who are giving rise not only to our world but to other non-physical reality systems as well.

Mark: Right. Yeah, that's the whole thing about that soul trap, tricked by the light idea. I think we spend our lives being deceived and lied to here, as you say. It's tempting for some to imagine that that continues beyond this realm, back into the spirit world, which is a horrific thought. That's absolutely nightmarish—that even when these lives are done, we can still face monumental deception and duplicity.

Christian: Yeah, it's not the case. So, like, there's a simple—I don't mean to oversimplify this, but this is a pretty good litmus test: if you consider an idea, and deep down in your bones, it doesn't feel good, it's not the truth. I mean, honestly, does it feel good, the idea that if you die, you're going to get stuck in an incarnation trap? If that doesn't feel good, it's because you're buying into a perception that is not in alignment with the truth. The truth feels good. The truth is unconditional love and total freedom and total joy and total peace.

So, when you are in alignment—when your perception, your alignment, your identification is in alignment with the truth—you feel good. Whereas, when we make up scary ideas and then scare the crap out of each other, it doesn't feel good. And that's a really clear gauge. Like, yeah, you're buying into a perception that is not in alignment with the truth.

Mark: The idea of reincarnation really does not appeal to me. The idea of coming back to this place and going through all this stuff all over again really is not of great appeal. I find the concept of reincarnation to be quite horrific myself.

Christian: If I may, it's probably because you find this life to be horrific.

Mark: Yes, I do.

Christian: So, that's the issue, right? It's not that reincarnation is horrific. It's that this life is horrific.

Mark: I find this world to be hell—a living hell.

Christian: Yeah, so I'm not making light of that, and I'm not speaking for any other person. I am not making light of it at all. But I will say simply this—and this is not a challenge—it's just that fear is what's hell. Fear meaning our rejection of the circumstances that have arisen—rejection of the pain, rejection of not being understood, rejection of a society that doesn't understand us, or having to work all the time, or having a disease, or having to suffer. The rejection itself is the suffering. The vast majority of the suffering is our rejection.

Now, we don't typically take ownership for that because that's very hard. The ego's first job is to blame the world. So, I'm not making light of the comment at all, even as I say that, because I've gone through incredible amounts of pain, and I'm not making light of that. I'm really not. And I know that that might scratch someone's ego the wrong way, and that's okay. You know, if it happens, it's fine. It's okay.

I'm just lifting up that we actually have the power. This is like the world is like Earth is like a big mirror that's very, very dense. It's like a very challenging mirror, but it's neutral. But it's very high constraint. And so, now you're looking in the mirror. What do we see in the mirror? We see only how we are relating to the world. Like, if you look at your own face in the mirror, you can't make the mirror smile. You have to smile. The mirror can't do anything but be there.

It's kind of like how the physical is. Consciousness is first. So, we have a lot more authority and a lot more sovereignty and a lot more power than we typically believe. And the claim of the ego of rejection is like a temporary false power. True power is actually an acceptance. And I know that's very hard. I'm not making light of it.

Mark: Okay. Well, your answers are very similar to ones that I got from a dude that I interviewed many years ago by the name of Dannion Brinkley. You know about him?

Christian: Yes.

Mark: He was a guy who, if I recall correctly, was struck by lightning, and he says he clinically died for a few minutes. He's got memories of going outside of his body and looking back down and seeing himself on a hospital stretcher and such. And then, in the spirit realm, he made the decision to go back into his body and continue his life. His name's quite interesting—Brinkley—because he was like on the brink.

Christian: Oh, was that the name of his book? Back from the Brink or something?

Mark: Maybe. I don't remember.

Christian: It could be.

Mark: So, his response was very similar to what you've said there. So, you know, he claims to have had similar experiences.

Christian: So, let me just give a brief example. Okay, so my gallbladder collapsed—failed—a few years ago. I had a lung collapse when I was 26, and I had 10 days in the hospital with a tube in my chest. That was very painful. And then, my gallbladder failed a few years ago. That was very physically painful. These are just some examples of very high pain experiences.

There's a profound difference between the two, though, because I rejected the lung collapse. And when my gallbladder was failing, I spent six weeks doing nothing but crying all day. It hurt so bad, and it took a long time to get into surgery. But the thing is, that wasn't automatically charged. Like, pain arises within consciousness. We still get to decide what to do with it.

Now, I know that it's very alarming to the body, but the thing is, consciousness is always first. There's nothing that takes place outside of consciousness. And consciousness is the author, the experiencer. It has the ultimate power. So, we can actually use the challenging circumstances that arise to see how we are relating to them. Can we accept them rather than reject them? What meaning are we putting on them?

And even then, you know, we can find that our consciousness is actually deeper than all that crap. It's not necessarily easy to find when we're in rejection. This is the place that tests us to that extreme where we get traumatized, man. We get hurt to high heck, and we have so much fear and rejection. Trauma is the key. Trauma is just happening an awful lot because fear is trauma, and we have a lot of fear.

Mark: Are there consequences for taking the option of suicide?

Christian: So, every choice has a consequence. Every choice, every thought, every intention. And we are responsible for every single one of them. What I mean by that is not judgment. It's that there's a perfect cause and effect balance going on. So, we can call that karma. It's a simple word that simply means you are who you are, like I said, and you are responsible for exactly who you are.

Suicide tends to be very damaging for oneself and others, of course. One's own body, by definition, it's a killing of one's own body. And so, that is like not an automatic escape. Some individuals may actually have that as an exit point, maybe even in the plan, potentially.

I'm reminded of the book The Afterlife of Billy Fingers. Maybe that was—I don't remember exactly, but something I remember him sharing something in that book about how the way that he died was planned. Anyway, so I'm just saying that we can't judge it based on the action itself. It's again the intention—the quality of the intention. Why are we choosing what we're choosing?

And often, suicide is done out of incredible fear that has our decision space—a Tom Campbell term—getting smaller and smaller and smaller. We feel more and more and more limited. We feel more controlled. We feel more depressed. It keeps getting worse and worse to the point where we see no other way out. Or, you know, the decision space has gotten so small because that's the nature of fear. It's reductive, contractive, rejecting. And in the end, wow, we'll even reject life itself.

That's as extreme as it can get. When you've reached that point, you're all out of other options.

Mark: Yeah, I mean, I can't judge based on a given circumstance, but generally speaking, yes.

Christian: It's just I'm saying that because the extremeness of one being's experience is not known by another. Some people here are experiencing some ridiculously difficult challenges that other people might not even be able to conceive of.

Mark: So, would you say that there's an interplay between pre-planned circumstances in life—so, before we come in, we have a loose idea of who we're going to be, what part of the world we're going to be born into, who our parents and family are going to be, what kind of thing we're going to do for a living—and free will? So, free will is at play in terms of the individual decisions we make on a day-to-day basis, but the basic framework of what we're going to do is already decided. Is that correct?

Christian: Yeah, right. We sign up for the context, and then we make choices, and then we see. Like, in my pre-birth experience, I reviewed a huge—I can only describe it like a flowchart—starting at the time of my incarnation and working out all the way to possible exit points. It was like laying a tree on its side and starting at the trunk, and the tree expanded out into the branches.

So, what was the thing that decided which branch of the tree would actualize? My free will choice-making and the free will choice-making of every other player in the game. So, that wasn't certain, but there was a very clear knowing of the probabilities—actually like a probability tree, you could say—where certain branches were very thick and likely, and others were less thick and less likely.

And that was not only the context, which includes the body, all its biological constraints, all the societal constraints, all the context is seen and known and understood, but then also the choice-making for myself and others that would guide which path I would actualize.

Mark: Okay. What happens to us between lives? Because I've heard you say that you've got some memory of this.

Christian: So, it's difficult to comment categorically because it's a little like if you asked a video game character in a video game what happens on Earth. Well, there's a lot of stuff that can happen on Earth that a character in Minecraft couldn't possibly even conceive of. Right? Like, if you tell a character in Minecraft, "After this game, I'm going to go get a burger," they don't know what that might mean.

I'm just framing it that way first because we're talking about a huge multi-dimensional creation, and the soul already transcends that creation. So, the way I interpret your question is, what does the personality portion of the self do after physical death? And that is a very personal question. It's unique to each individual, depending on their nature, where they are in evolution, what forms they're associated with.

Like, someone who is very deeply associated with some form—like, say, going to work—they might choose, whether they know that they're making the choice or not, to temporarily experience a thought-responsive reality system in a lower astral realm or something, where they go to work for a while until they're ready to realize, "Oh, there's a much bigger picture going on here."

But some people don't need that. Some will go directly into much higher levels that vastly transcend this local context. I can say at least that I experienced a realm of golden light that was blissful, and I could travel at will across our universe and beyond. And that I was super full of freedom. I don't know how to articulate this. It's like frolicking—just expressing one's being in a movement of consciousness that has outcomes or activities that you couldn't possibly even describe here on Earth.

Mark: A big part of this sort of "tricked by the light," soul trap idea, which is really popular right now in conspiracy circles, it seems, is people say that they go through this tunnel of white light or towards this tunnel of white light, with loved ones beckoning them in. Is that something of which you've got any conception or memory or experience?

Christian: I only have one memory of seeing the light after a death, and there were no loved ones for me at that time in my experience. But my general comment would be, don't avoid the light. Like, why are we scaring ourselves? The light is a representation of the source of all love and beauty and joy that we are being vibrationally beckoned back towards because it's who we really are.

So, it's good. I mean, our true nature is so freaking good and so free and powerful and loved and loving and joyful. I mean, eventually, we're all going to get back there. There's no way to avoid it forever. We will find our way back to the wholeness of what we are, no matter what we choose for a time. That's because that's just what we are. We can't avoid it. It's our birthright to end up back into the wholeness of the bliss and joy of being. That's just where we all will end up, one way or the other.

Mark: Another thing which many will ask is why there's so much pain and suffering in this realm, and why so many bad things tend to happen to good people. Because there seems to be a direct correlation between the amount of good that you try and do and the amount of suffering that you reap as a result. And that really seems to be ramping up in these times. So, to many, this kind of reinforces the notion of a malevolent god. But it does seem as if things are unfairly skewed in this realm towards pain and suffering and hardship, rather than joy and happiness and bliss, despite, in many cases, people's best efforts. So, what's that all about?

Christian: So, there's only one way this reality is skewed, and that's towards limitation. It's not skewed towards pain and misery. Fear, rejection, ego—that's pain. Now, if you go to a thought-responsive reality system and you have fear, you might create a fearful, hellish reality for a time. If you come to Earth and you have a lot of fear and rejection, you may create a pretty hellish experience for yourself too. And then, of course, the ego will blame the world because that's what ego does. That's what fear does.

I don't agree with the statement that the more good we do, the more pain we experience. Actually, the more we act from love—loving intention—the more joy we experience. It's not about action. Action occurs. Intention means action. We will take action based on our intention. But it's not specific to action. It's specific to our intention.

Are we choosing freedom? Are we choosing love? Are we choosing compassion to the person next to us? Are we choosing kindness? Or are we choosing rejection, self-service, running away? The universe hears exactly what our actual intention is. Like, one of the essays in my book is called You Can't Trick Your Intent. What I mean is, you can tell yourself on the mental layer anything you want. Your actual reason for why you're doing what you're doing is what will yield either bliss or misery, in general.

I mean, there's certainly physical pain that will happen no matter what in the earthly experience. But I'm identifying that the physical pain is a very small portion of the negative that we experience here. The vast majority of our negative is suffering, which is our association with negative self-perceptions, the negative meaning we put on the world.

Like, two people could see the same circumstance and see something very different, experience it very differently, maybe even react differently, maybe wield different intentions. And maybe the one who acts in love still experiences the bliss and love and peace of being, even in a difficult circumstance.

See, consciousness is always first. As soon as we lose ourselves in the idea that there's this all-powerful external world, we have already misunderstood because that's not how it works. Consciousness is first. The world can't exist without consciousness.

Mark: Yeah, I mean, I was just going by the experiences of many people that I know who I would describe as good people with good intentions. They're trying to stand in right action and trying to bring something beneficial for others and for creation itself, and they just seem to be reaping a whole load of suffering and hardship in their personal circumstances as a result. And the more good they try and do, the tougher things seem to get for them. So, that's where that question was coming from.

I've got another one for you, which I'm not sure you'll be able to answer, but I'm interested in everyone's viewpoint on this. And this is, why is the natural world so brutal and horrifying in terms of the food chain in the animal kingdom? So, you know, you have creatures who are dependent on murdering other creatures every single day to the tune of several billion, just in order to survive. And if there really were a benevolent, loving God, couldn't it have designed a realm without this amount of suffering, pain, and death being necessary every day?

Christian: Yeah, so to your last comment, it's not like there's a great judge sitting down at the table, rolling up their sleeves, and rubbing their hands together, saying, "Let's come up with something really horrifying here." That's not it. It's more, how much limitation can we engage and still shine and grow through it?

Now, the limitations of the physical mean that, on our world at least—and this is not always the case—actually, I know this sounds crazy, but in our universe, it's actually not even always the case that animals need to eat each other's bodies to sustain physical energy. But that's how it works on Earth, and probably on other systems in the universe too, that there's a transference of physical energy from one body to the next. That's a part of the limitation set.

Even that is to start neutral. So, like, as an example, we say, "Okay, but that's horrifying for the zebra, right? The zebra gets eaten by the lion." In the Seth books, Seth talks about how, on the psychic level, on the consciousness level, there is actually a loving relationship between even the zebra and the lion. And the zebra knows, in some way, it even gives itself, you could say, so that the lion may continue its existence another day.

You see, it's an act of love. How can we—the ego does not like that, right? We only see pain and suffering and death. But when we accept even the great limitations, and even a system where energy seems to constantly deplete physically, you know, and we have this predatory environment that our species has grown up in over thousands and thousands of years—I mean, you're right to point out that very much that, man, we've evolved in a predatory world. We have so many "us versus them" systems that have arisen because, in part, this is a predatory world, and we've normalized predation.

Well, guess what? Predation is not native to the spirit. In the sense, it's not serving of the other. It's not the ultimate. It's not the optimum way. So, the question is, now we, as spirit, what do we do now?

I'm reminded of a documentary I watched about breatharianism, where they did some medical examinations of some gentlemen who basically don't eat at all—eat or drink. I guess there's a few thousand of them in the world. They did studies of at least a couple of them where they confirmed these people do not eat a single thing or drink a single thing for like weeks, and they're fine. They apparently don't eat for years at a time.

I couldn't do that, but I'm just saying that the limitations can be surpassed because consciousness is deeper than the limitations. So, again, it's what does consciousness do with the context? Like, even how do we eat? How do we give thanks for or how do we honor even that passing of physical energy? Like, what do we do with it? It's the what and the why and the how. It's not automatically charged.

Even death—oh, we do not like death, man. We don't like dead bodies. We don't like it when our loved ones die. They don't die. It's an illusion. It's not even real. So, you know what I mean? It's hard to see that clearly when we're really, again, like I said in the beginning, when we're form-associated, when we associate into the form and we lose ourselves in the scary story, that's already the mistake. It's not even fundamentally real. It's like a huge, rich virtual illusion that we've then had the opportunity to lose ourselves in. And that illusion includes a context of predation.

Mark: Even yeah, I mean, we just hear that our natural state is that of love and goodness. That's where we come from, and that's the true nature of God, quote-unquote. But I just can't see why it would have been necessary to design a realm where that daily bloodbath is a necessity. It just seems like it would have been quite simple to have designed an alternative where that kind of experience just would not be necessary for all those creatures that undergo it every day.

Christian: So, it's not necessary to design a system of this high constraint any more than it's necessary for someone to go to Mount Everest and climb Mount Everest. Now, metaphorically, you're on Mount Everest right now, and it's really cold. And why on Earth would we have Mount Everest, you proclaim?

I mean, I'm not saying it's not cold, and I'm not saying there's no air up here. I get it. It's crazy. But the thing is, that's not why we go to Mount Everest. We don't go because we want to create cruelty. We go because we want to climb the mountain, and we want to be more, and we want to come down off the mountain because we know our higher natures. We know that we aren't just a world of eating and a world of pain. We aren't. We know that we're more. So, we know that we can take from that experience something that lasts—a new perspective, a new quality, a new creativity, a new way of being.

You know, we don't judge somebody for climbing halfway up Mount Everest and saying they fail. No one here fails either, even if they die in one day or less before they're even born. That's not how it works. It's not a failure.

So, it's just important for us to recognize that because, again, it's precisely losing ourselves in the illusion—the identification with the thing that we're not—that hurts. Like, Everest is a gift. Everest is not meant to be cruel. And yeah, only like a—I don't know what percentage climb Mount Everest—probably a 10,000th of a percent or less. Like, a millionth of a percent or something of the human race. A very small percentage of souls will come all the way down into this great experience of limitation to experience this much separation, this much darkness.

This is extreme sports we're doing here. And now that we're here, we're ticked because it's too extreme, right? But we signed up for it because, basically, unconditional love is so loving, it will even let us choose this if we wish. It's always with us. We can't actually fail. It's with us throughout the entire journey. We may, and you know what, it even understands that we're upset, that we're raging against the machine. It even understands that.

But here, this opportunity has been given to us, and it's up to us to decide what to do with it.

Mark: Right. Various teachers and scholars will tell us it's necessary to attain some kind of enlightenment or spiritual advancement in order to transcend physicality. Or they'll say, if you don't meditate enough or develop this practice or whatever, you're never going to earn your way out of here. But your message is that you can check out anytime you like. It's a voluntary procedure.

Christian: So, it is a voluntary procedure at the deepest level. But what happens at a practical level is that the given personality might seem to get stuck in orbit for a time because it gets very form-associated. So, what I mean is, you go around the Earth once in this orbit—metaphorically, it's one lifetime—and the form density in your association with it has pulled you in because you haven't fully integrated it all the way. And you go around again real quick.

And that's why some people may seem, at the personality level of the self, to not have a choice about returning. There's always a choice at the soul level—always, always, always. But at the personality level, where there is still something—still some horse we want to ride, still some itch we need to scratch—until we realize we don't need to scratch any more itches, we don't actually need to ride any more horses. It's actually cold on Mount Everest. I think I'll go back down now.

Until we reach really, really know that experientially, we might continue to choose to come back.

Mark: I don't know if that speaks to your comment.

Christian: Sure.

Mark: Yeah, I've heard people who have had near-death experiences say that they didn't even realize that they died. They've said things like, in that Dannion Brinkley example, you know, he's floating above his body, looking at this meat suit on a stretcher in the hospital, thinking, "Well, what's going on here?" Because it's seamless. You're just going from one form of consciousness to another. So, you could be on your deathbed, and your family sees you slip away, and then they just see a dead body on the deathbed. But you yourself, as the spirit concerned, have just moved on to whatever lies beyond. So, it's like a seamless process. There's no such thing as death in that regard.

Christian: Absolutely. Yeah, it's very seamless. I once had an out-of-body experience where I was walking down the steps in my house, and I thought I was awake. It was so normal. It was so lucid. It was just completely normal, like a completely normal morning. And then, I was getting towards the bottom of the stairs, and I noticed the quality of the light was blue-gray, a little bit, in a way that it's not normally.

And I asked myself, "Am I out of body?" So, I started feeling the carpet underneath my toes. Yes, I had toes. I started feeling the crack in the wall next to my hand. I got to the bottom of the stairs, and I concluded incorrectly that I was not out of body. And then, I felt stupid for questioning whether I was out of body. But then again, it still was just a little bit off. So, I said, "All right, what the heck? If I'm out of body, I'll be able to walk through my front wall."

So, I walked through the front wall of my house, and I was in my front lawn. I could see the sun rising, and I was like, "Oh my gosh, I'm out of body." And I suddenly was in my bed. Now, it wasn't like waking up in my bed was more real. It was the same level of realness in the front lawn with that astral body as it was in my bed. It was very seamless. I couldn't even tell the difference.

So, like you describe, many people who die, they don't even realize they've died, right? Because it's such a seamless transition. They just are suddenly looking down at this body and thinking, "That can't be me because I'm standing right here." We're not used to being the body over here and I'm over here. We're not used to two things. We're used to one—I'm in the body.

Mark: Right. I've also heard people that have been in a lot of physical pain, and then they pass over, and suddenly the pain's gone, and they don't realize they've died. But they're like, "Wait, where's the pain gone? I'm not in pain anymore."

Christian: Exactly. Yeah, exactly.

Mark: So, have you got any conception of where you might be going next? This life is complete?

Christian: No, I wouldn't dare to try to understand from this level of perception. I'm just interested in fully experiencing this human condition all that I can. I know that I'll have a much better vantage point then. So, I don't like—there's no reason for me to worry because that's not like—if I can meet this experience, this is the hard thing. Being human is the hard thing, man.

If I can fully be here and accept this, that's mastery. Like, what else is there that can challenge you then, if you can fully accept being here? You see, so this is the opportunity.

Mark: All right, then, Christian. Well, we'll start to wrap up there. Is there a parting message that you'd like to leave listeners with, just in summing up?

Christian: Yeah, no. So, I would just say, no one's probably ever thanked you for being human before, but thank you for being human today. And also, please be reminded, there's nothing to be afraid of. There's actually no real reason to fear. Fear only arises out of the negative self-perceptions that we think the world is proving to us have to be real.

Actually, we are multi-dimensional beings of love, and there's nothing to fear. And that's true even today, if you're listening to this on a Tuesday or a Saturday. It doesn't matter what day it is. You are a multi-dimensional being of love, and you can make decisions today—choices that are of love and freedom and joy. Like, you can dare even to do that. And even a small choice in that direction here on Earth is so powerful. It's so important that we do that.

So, that would be my closing message.

Mark: Okay, cool. Well, I'm really glad we had the conversation today. I think it's very worthwhile. So, you've got your book, A Walk in the Physical. Are there any other books out there of yours? Are there any podcasts or interviews or lectures or anything of that nature that you'd like to tell the listeners about?

Christian: Yeah, thanks. My website is awalkinthephysical.com. There are many talks and interviews listed on that website, and you can copy the book online. Also, there's links to the print, ebook, or audiobook for the book. I'm just happy to share with everybody. You know, I'm passionate about us reminding each other of who we are. That's it. It's all about that. So, yeah, I hope that can be helpful to someone. And reach out with any questions.

Mark: Sure. And you've been pretty busy as well. I think you do a whole ton of interviews because I reached out to you quite a few months ago to get this date in the diary, and it's kind of like that for me because I talk about the shenanigans of the music industry, and I get a lot of requests to do interviews and podcasts and stuff. And you know, I'm booking sort of six to eight months ahead. So, you're pretty busy with all this stuff, right?

Christian: Yeah, no, that's true. I definitely have probably 50 requests right now, but I just try to stagger it as possible to respect my own bandwidth and try to follow the spirit. And you know, I don't give precedence to channel size or who somebody is. I'm really passionate about sharing this because this is what we really are. And if one person can feel more light and more empowered, then that's awesome. That's all I want because, when this is all over and we look back, the love is what matters.

You know, I'm happy. I mean, I have my own stamina issues. I work full-time at a challenging job. I have kids. I'm engaged in some community activities. And I also get a lot of emails, and I do one-on-ones with people on the spiritual content. So, I am very busy, but it's my passion. It's my love. You know, if you do what you love, that energy just arises. It comes from somewhere.

Mark: Yeah, it's important we do that. Well, that's how I view this conversation today. It would have been a wasted opportunity to get to the end of my life and not have had this chat. So, we've done it now. So, appreciate you coming on today. Thanks for that.

Christian: Thank you so much, Mark. I appreciate the opportunity. Have a great day being human today.

Mark: I'm picking up vibration. I'm picking up vibration. I'm picking up vibration.