I am much more fascinated with near-life experiences, however. I do not know what happens when we die. I have a sense of it, yet no deity or God has told me to tell you what happens for sure. As a spiritual leader, I am going to continue to leave that mystery to my Creator. I am more interested in what happens while we are living than I am in spending my life in the unknown of what happens when we die.

I am more interested in not dying while I am living. I am more interested in teaching and facilitating processes that encourage people to have more life experiences rather than near-life experiences, or almost fully living experiences.

Near-life experiences are the times you wanted to say how much you loved someone but were afraid of what he or she would think of you. Near-life experiences are waiting and waiting before you truly share with another human being who you are, because you are going to wait and see what the other person will do first. There are so many men and women who never reveal what they mean to each other, for they are waiting to see if they are safe or secure, and they never get to experience the joy of the present moment.

Near-life experiences are all the times you edited yourself or held back out of a concern of what someone might think of you. Near-life experiences are endured by the writers and singers and artists who are waiting for “someday”—you know, the day that never comes—in order to express their gifts and talents. Near-life experiences happen to all the people who live their lives because that’s the way they have always done it. Near-life experiences are undergone by lots of people who have decided never to love a person again or never to have a pet again because they don’t want to have a broken heart again. They would rather develop hardening of the “ought-teries”—they are the rigid and the nearly dead.

Near-life experiences are accepted by people who live in square boxes rather than in the inclusivity of circles. Near-life experiences happen to people who talk yet do not walk their philosophy. Near-life experiences are the state of being of people who have stopped laughing at themselves and the self-made rules, who have stopped being childlike and are old long before they are even in their thirties. People who have near-life experiences are metaphorically like people who work in a government office that interface with the public and order others around with the tonality of a prison warden; they repeatedly remind you to stay behind the line. Near-life experiences mean that people have never learned how to color outside the lines or draw new lines in the sandbox.

Express Yourself!