But still very relevant.
“Your life in retrospect has much more coherence that it does as you’re living it.”
Harvard psychiatrist John Mack, in a talk given at the International Conference on Altered States of Consciousness in Albuquerque, New Mexico in October 2002.
John Mack got a laugh with that line in his presentation, because he was referring to the professional character assassination that he endured when he started writing about people who had alien encounters and “the transformational aspects of extraordinary experiences”. In the context of my work, I would add that it also applies to our past lives. We get to be the biographers of our previous incarnations, objectively seeing the entire arc of a life and how it relates to our present life and what came before.
The synopsis of the lecture reads: "UFO encounters, near death experiences, shamanic journeys, and spontaneous religious epiphanies* all have the power to bring about a significant transformation of consciousness. By this is meant that the experiencers’ worldview, as internalized in the course of their upbringing and inculcation in this culture, is shattered. This, in turn, results in the potential opening of heart and spirit to a wider appreciation of reality and a (re)connection to realms of the sacred and divine.’
*I would, of course, add past life and between lives explorations to that list of transformative experiences.