Sharon’s Healing Space

The Light That Was Not God, or Was It?

1. The Encounter I Never Expected

During my near‑death experience, I did not meet God.

I did not meet Jesus.

I did not meet Buddha, Krishna, Confucius, or even William Shakespeare.

What I met was far more intimate—and far more destabilizing.

I met myself, but not the self I knew.

My consciousness dropped straight into another woman’s body, mid‑sentence, as if I had been living her life all along. There was no tunnel, no angelic choir, no cosmic figure waiting with open arms. There was only her—this woman whose breath I suddenly shared, whose thoughts I could hear as clearly as my own.

I didn’t know whether I was living for her or with her.

Even now, I’m not sure which phrase is more accurate.

But I was there. Fully.

Her emotions, her memories, her relationships, her routines—everything felt as real and textured as this life.

It took nine years, and eventually meeting an Awakened Zen Master, before I understood the significance of that encounter. Only then did the experience stop being a mystery and began to reveal itself as a teaching.

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2. Buddhism: The Self That Is Not One

In Buddhism, the self is not a fixed entity. It is a flowing, ever‑shifting constellation of consciousness, shaped by causes and conditions. The Buddha taught that what we call “I” is more like a river than a stone—continuous, but never the same from moment to moment.

My NDE forced me to confront this directly.

When I slipped into that woman’s life, I didn’t feel like an intruder. I felt like a continuation. As if consciousness itself had simply changed channels, tuning into another expression of the same underlying awareness.

The Zen Master later told me:

“You did not meet another person.

You met another configuration of the same mindstream.”

In Buddhist terms, this is not impossible.

Consciousness is not bound to one body.

It is not owned.

It is not singular.

It is a field.

And sometimes, under extreme conditions—like death—it reveals its true nature.

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3. Reincarnation: The Many Lives of One Mindstream

Before my NDE, reincarnation was a concept I held loosely, like a story that might be true but didn’t feel personal.

After my NDE, it became personal.

Reincarnation is often imagined as a linear sequence: one life, then another, then another. But many spiritual traditions—Tibetan Buddhism, Hinduism, mystical Christianity, and even some Indigenous cosmologies—teach that time is not linear, and therefore reincarnation is not linear either.

Lives can overlap.

Lives can run parallel.

Lives can influence one another across dimensions of time and space.

What I experienced was not a past life and not a future life.

It was a concurrent life.

A life happening at the same time as mine.

A life that shared the same root consciousness but branched into a different expression, like two limbs of the same tree reaching in different directions.

This is reincarnation not as a sequence, but as a network.

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4. Parallel Lives: The Multidimensional Self

Modern metaphysics, quantum theory, and mystical traditions all point toward the same possibility: consciousness may express itself in multiple forms simultaneously.

Parallel lives are not science fiction.

They are a natural extension of a multidimensional universe.

In this view:

• You are not one self.

• You are a constellation of selves.

• Each life explores a different facet of the soul’s curriculum.

• Each life contributes to the evolution of the whole.

My NDE was not an accident.

It was a crossing point—a moment where two branches of the same consciousness touched.

The Zen Master explained it this way:

“You met the version of you who needed you,

and you met the version of you that you needed.”

This was not a visitation.

It was a reunion.

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5. Why I Met Her

For years, I wondered why I didn’t meet a deity, a guide, or a cosmic being. Why I met her instead.

The answer came slowly, like dawn breaking through fog.

I met her because:

• She was a part of me I had abandoned.

• She was living a life I needed to understand.

• She carried wounds I had not yet healed.

• She embodied choices I had not made but still lived within me.

• She represented a karmic thread that needed integration.

In meeting her, I met the parts of myself I had never acknowledged.

I met the unlived life.

The unspoken grief.

The unchosen path.

The shadow and the light of another version of me.

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6. The Teaching Hidden in the Experience

The Zen Master told me:

“You were shown that consciousness is not local.

You were shown that identity is fluid.

You were shown that death is a doorway, not a destination.”

My NDE was not about meeting a divine figure.

It was about meeting the truth of consciousness itself.

The teaching was simple and profound:

We are more than one life.

We are more than one self.

We are more than one story.

And the boundaries we cling to—my body, my identity, my life—are permeable, temporary, and ultimately illusory.

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7. Integration: What This Means for My Life Now

Understanding the experience changed everything:

• I no longer see myself as a single, isolated being.

• I no longer fear death as an ending.

• I no longer assume my consciousness is confined to this body.

• I no longer believe healing happens only within one lifetime.

• I no longer see my challenges as personal failures—they may be echoes from other expressions of me.

Instead, I live with the awareness that:

I am part of a larger tapestry of selves.

I am a node in a vast network of consciousness.

I am both the dreamer and the dreamed.

And the woman I met—whoever she was, wherever she is—remains a part of me. A reminder that the soul is not singular, and the journey is not linear.

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