The Karma Harvest
Excerpt from Chapter 47 of The Journey Across Forever by Wayne Saalman
IN THE MOVIE, LIMITLESS, Bradley Cooper plays a writer named Eddie, who — thanks to a bad dose of writer’s block — has become down and out. He has become someone who is going nowhere fast. His girlfriend has left him and he is at wit’s end. In fact, he has no idea how he can turn things around in his life given the fallen state in which he finds himself.
Only, then, by pure accident, he happens to meet someone from his past out on the street and he is given a drug that utterly transforms everything for him. This illegal pharmaceutical, he is told, will give him access to ALL of his mind rather than to the measly 20% or less with which most of us average, ordinary souls are forced to make do.
Think of it this way: most of us are consciously aware of roughly 50 bits of information as we go about our business every day. This is out of the 11,000,000 signals that are processed by the body every single second!
In any case, once the little innocuous pill hits, Eddie immediately sets about cleaning his apartment and putting his house in order. When he finishes, he sits back on his couch amazed and amused. In narration he wonders, “What was this drug? I couldn’t stay messy on it. I hadn’t had a cigarette in six hours, hadn’t eaten… So abstemious and tidy. What was this? A drug for people who wanted to be more anal-retentive?” He laughs as befits the sardonic comment and then — his mind still sharp as a pin — says, “I wasn’t high, I wasn’t wired, just clear. I knew what I needed to do and how to do it.”
Indeed. With access to the whole of his mind, Eddie wowed his publisher with a full manuscript in four days and then moved on to the stock market, where he was soon wealthy beyond his wildest dreams. He also won back the woman who had given up on him in the past, joined the jet set and flew off to where the rich luxuriate and entertain themselves as only the wealthy can.
Inevitably, trouble set in and all hell broke loose.
Of course, all hell broke loose. It’s a movie! Wouldn’t it be something, though, if we humans did have access to more of our brain? Even 50%! Or imagine 75%! One hundred percent would be so utterly fantastic and dynamic that it would probably blow our minds completely!
We would then feel limitless, too.
The good news is that at death we may, quite possibly, be gifted with this very thing by the grace of God or by the natural colossal, collective field of consciousness itself.
Buddhist meditators and Vedic yogis say that when we pass from this world, we automatically gain a sevenfold increase in intelligence. That is a remarkable magnification of conscious awareness, one which apparently allows us to review our life and understand events at a whole higher level so that we may learn life lessons with unmistakable comprehension.
Likewise, near-death returnees tell us that the clarity that can be experienced at our moment of passing is nothing short of astonishing. The mind penetrates every aspect and facet of our former life and one feels every infinitesimal exhilarating twinge or excruciating cringe of emotion that has informed that life. Apparently, we not only feel that emotion from our own perspective, but also from the perspective of those with whom we came into contact. In other words, in the immediate aftermath of leaving our physical bodies, the range and depth of feeling and emotion to which we have access expands exponentially. Our minds literally explode outward in all directions to encompass all those around us and, in that moment, the way we made others feel is revealed to us in inescapably agonizing and almost unbearable detail.
In short, one’s life review is the ultimate trial by fire and we will all go through it whether we want to or not.
Perhaps, the life review, then, is where we really reap the seeds we have sown. Perhaps, this is where karma reaches its decisive turning point and rebounds back on us with such power and consequence that we cannot but finally fully understand with profound clarity just how interdependent and at one we are with all of our fellow human beings.
