Once the table of six spirits had shown up, I knew that I had entered the next step on whatever this journey was that I was on now. I was a little scared, but I also felt ready. They told me that I was about to enter my life review. My immediate thought was, “What the fuck is that?” It wasn’t like they rolled out this scroll and said, “Welcome, Erik. Here’s how this is going to go down.” There really weren’t any verbal instructions because the spirits didn’t have voices. They seemed to transmit thoughts straight into my head, and those thoughts felt very supportive. The spirits told me that during my review, I was going to be shown things. I wasn’t given the option to do or not do my life review. I was just told it was going to happen and that it would help me understand who I was and how to forgive myself.
I didn’t even realize that I was looking for forgiveness until they told me I’d be shown how to look for it.
The table had a screen on it that I could look down on, but I could also see everything 360 degrees around me. Then the table changed shape, morphing into what seemed like one of those theaters where the screen wraps around you, but it wasn’t like I was sitting down in a movie theater, staring straight ahead at a screen, eating popcorn and drinking a Coke. As I was contemplating this whole setup, something unexpected happened. All of a sudden, everything from when I was a tiny, tiny baby to the moment I died—the good, the bad, and the ugly—came flying at me from all directions.
First came my birth. I felt myself being squeezed out of my mom. I felt her joy and her pain. I felt my family’s excitement. What followed was intense, to say the least. As my entire life unfolded before me, I was not only experiencing every single moment I ever lived but I was also observing and feeling what everybody else in my life went through in reaction to whatever I said or did to them. I felt their joy, their hurt, their disappointment—shit like that. I saw their reactions to when I lied, when I withheld my feelings, when I didn’t help someone who needed me, when I was mean, when I gave too much and when I gave too little. I also got to see and feel all the good things I said and did too. Seeing how everyone chose to interact with my choices was fucking powerful. Not only could I feel the emotions they had in response to my actions but I could actually see things from their perspective. It was like I was them. I got everything down to the smallest little detail, like how many times that person blinked and how many times they swallowed in their lifetime—all experienced simultaneously. That’s how detailed it was.
I wasn’t in control of the review. I couldn’t change it, and I couldn’t fast-forward or rewind through any of it. I wasn’t thinking, “Oh, you know what would have been better? Let’s hit the rewind button and watch that nice thing I did when I was five again and then skip through that shitty thing I did when I was fourteen.” Nah, it just came at me. Man. I would have paid to have had that ability while I was alive because I probably would have navigated through my life differently. It’s the most powerful experience that you could ever have because whether we’re dead or alive, we crave an understanding of our choices. I got that with my review. I didn’t ask for it; I just got it.
One of the great things I remembered during my life review was when I was given my first motorcycle, a dirt bike for motocross racing. I couldn’t have been more than nine or ten, but that was the time I knew my mom and dad really trusted my abilities. They knew that no matter what situation I came across, I’d be able to handle it. That was a huge moment for me. I was so proud of myself.
The other memory in the review that made me happy was when I became an uncle. I got to go back to that moment when I held my niece, Arleen. I was afraid of holding someone so small. I was scared that I’d drop her or hold her the wrong way. I thought, “Why would they trust me to hold her?” because to me, I wasn’t someone I’d trust. I looked down at her and realized how tiny she was and how big my arms seemed in comparison. She didn’t even cry. She was just so happy to be in my arms. It was the first time I cried tears of joy.
I remember really clearly one time when I was kind of a dick to a friend. He was jerking me around a little bit. He’d tell me to come over but wouldn’t be there, or he’d tell me I was his friend but not step up when I needed him. So I let him have it. It wasn’t physical and I didn’t call him names or insult him; I just said some mean things. I lost my shit because I couldn’t see that all I had to do was walk away. After I blew up at him, that dude was never the same. If I had handled the situation differently, maybe things would have been different between us or he would have turned out differently. Now he’s afraid that the things he says might cause him to lose a friend in the same way he lost me. Fear is what keeps him in line now, and I wouldn’t wish that on anyone.
During the review, I learned that that friend bullied me because he himself was abused and beaten down. It wasn’t my intent to do the same to him. Even though I was just putting him in line for the shit we were going through, it triggered that part of his past. You never know how your words or actions might affect someone. It was fucked-up intense to feel his sense of belittlement, fear, and inadequacy firsthand. He felt small, but he didn’t show that on his face, so I never knew. With my review, I was able to see his authentic emotions, his authentic self.
From that part of my review, I learned that responsibility is never only on one person’s shoulders. It’s meant to be shared. Yes, I had to be accountable for the things I’d said to my friend, but I couldn’t be responsible for how he reacted. He had to be responsible for that.
My life review made me feel like I had been cast in a role and played it, and when it was over, I got to read the reviews, knowing I was just a character in the play that was my life. It’s weird. It’s not like I thought, “Bro, give me a red pen, I gotta make edits to that character,” because I knew that whatever choices I’d made were just a part of that play. As a human, I was playing myself. As a spirit, I truly am myself, and I’m looking back at the part I played.
During my review, I started having these epiphanies of exactly who I was through the role I played. All the questions like, “Why did I behave like that?” “Why was I a dick to that person?” “Why did I make that decision?” or “Why was I nice to that person?” became part of the bigger picture of what and why I was here to learn. These lessons were all related to my intent, whether it had to do with something constructive or destructive. For instance, let’s say one day I decided to stomp on a bunch of ants. That might be a lesson for me to understand that ants have feelings, and by hurting the ants, I also hurt myself. We all live as a collective—animals, plants, humans, all living beings—so the lesson I would have gotten from killing those ants would be that we’re all connected, and when we hurt others, we hurt ourselves. Every action has a reaction. Those kinds of epiphanies during a review can be very profound. They definitely were for me.
My life review also allowed me to see every possible outcome for every choice I’d ever made in my life, and, as you can imagine, the possibilities are infinite. For instance, if I hadn’t consoled my sister, Michelle, when she had a bad breakup with a boyfriend, things might have played out differently. If I had been an insensitive prick instead, she might have ended up in bad shape, and I saw that if she and I hadn’t been so close, my niece might never have been born. Every single moment is affected by every other moment. Life is like a long, twisting line of dominos, and our choices dictate which ones fall where.
Throughout my life review, sometimes I would drop my head down on the table and cry, and other times I would fling my head back and laugh, but I never felt judged by those six spirits, and I never had that feeling that I’d done something wrong. It’s weird to explain, but that was the first time I understood that there is no right or wrong. I wasn’t feeling judged because there is no concept of judgment or shame here. I looked at each moment, each experience, for what it was—a valuable lesson, no more and no less—so I had no need or desire to fix or take back anything I’d done.
When you’re alive, you usually live by a set of morals and values and parameters that you either set for yourself or that society or religion sets for you, and that’s mostly a good thing. In general, people need codes of ethics to live by in order to function in society, and those codes often dictate how we react to situations—with joy, with fear, with shame, with anger, and all that stuff. Here, it’s not like we’re lawless beings running amok, messing with shit just because we feel like it. No, it’s more like we’ve transcended concepts like right and wrong, good and bad, and all that, and entered a plane of existence outside the definition (and the need for the definition) of concepts like that.
Anyway, at the very end of my life review, I came to the moment when I died. Even though I knew no one was judging me for taking my life, I kind of cringed inside because I knew how much pain it was causing for the people I love, but that feeling of non-judgment comforted me. That’s when I started to forgive myself. That forgiveness would become one of the biggest parts of my healing.
How long did my life review last? Two seconds? Twenty-four hours? I really don’t know because there’s no linear time here, but everything seemed to happen in an instant. Think of those movies where visuals flash by really quickly. (What’s that called? A montage?) It was kind of like that, but even that’s linear, just at a fast frame rate. I got a sense of everything in one quick flash—an instant download from beginning to end.
After my review was all over, there I was, still in this white room. That’s when the six spirits explained to me that the purpose of exposing me to what I’d just witnessed was to gain something from my experiences as a human. They also told me that, whether I knew it at the time or not, I, along with the other spirits that had crossed my path, had designed everything in my life. My life had been about creating contrast. For example, they told me that in order to completely learn about forgiveness, I’d had to betray myself or someone else. In order to learn the value of relationships, I’d had to go through some shitty ones or not have many at all. It was a rough way to learn important lessons, but that’s the way it was meant to be for me, and I see that now.
Man, there’s so much that happens in your life review. The main thing I got out of it was that deep understanding of right and wrong. Like I said, you’re no longer ruled by “right versus wrong” guidelines, and there’s no self-judgment like there is in human life. Without that judgment, I was able to forgive myself. Like I said, that was definitely the most powerful part of my life-review experience.
After it was over, nobody really took my hand and showed me the way out. It wasn’t like some movie was over. No curtain closed, I didn’t walk down the aisle with popcorn sticking to my feet, and I didn’t have to wait in a long-ass line for the bathroom. Instead—poof!—the space started to disappear pinhole by pinhole a thousand times—a million times—until it just kind of evaporated altogether. If I could have still held my breath, I would have.
I wondered what was going to happen next.