Since my life review and my therapy, my perspective has changed. Instead of being egocentric, where all my awareness is on me, everything feels geocentric because all the focus is on everything around me. This makes me feel an incredible connection to everything.
Let me explain it this way: When I was human, chilling in a park, I’d think, “I’m in a park next to this oak tree.” Now I’d think something like, “That tree is near the playground, and the playground is in the park, and the park is in the city, and the city is in . . .” You get the idea. That’d make me feel a connection to the tree, the playground, all the other things and people in the park, and the space in between them instead of how the texture of the bark felt against my fingertips, how the waistline of my pants was bugging the shit out of me, or that I was playing hooky so I could have a smoke off the school grounds.
Being geocentric instead of egocentric doesn’t mean you surrender your identity completely just because you feel like you’re connected to everything. You can acknowledge your identity, but you can also acknowledge that the space around you has equal value to you. Imagine walking down a street and there are people holding umbrellas, traffic lights changing from green to red, cars passing by, and buildings all around. Now imagine arrows pointing from you to every life force—every animal, tree, whatever’s alive. These have the same value as the “I.” Instead of “I am moving forward,” it’s more like “I am moving in unison with all this.”
Most people can feel that for fleeting moments, but if you work on it, you feel it all the time, whether you’re a spirit or a human being. That means you have to change your language and the way you think. Humans usually have egocentric language. They think, “I’m sitting behind a desk,” which emphasizes that the most important thing is you and your location related to the desk’s. If you broadened that view, it’d be more like your presence in the environment as part of a whole. You could see yourself in the south side of the room instead of your specific location in association with the desk in the room. You’ll be aware of the space of the room rather than the item in the room. Then the language is going to change. You’ll be like, “The desk is in the southern part of the room,” instead of, “I’m sitting at the desk.”
The shift in my consciousness also switched from my head to my heart. My head isn’t running the show anymore. There are no thoughts racing around in my head like, “Did that shit really happen? Yeah, that really happened,” or “Oh my God, is that girl looking at me like she likes me or like she thinks I look like an idiot?” It’s so weird how I don’t rely on just the thoughts in my brain anymore. I mean, I don’t have a brain now, but I’m just using that word to explain what I guess I’d call “head consciousness.” Now my entire body communicates in a different way. It’s through my heart. It’s hard to explain, but my heart can now communicate independently from the voice in my head and has this whole conversation in and of itself. I’ll call it “heart consciousness.”
Heart consciousness is hard to define because it’s so nebulous. It’s easy to grasp head consciousness because you can hear that inner voice in your head, word for word. As a human, it was what I was used to, but this new type of consciousness is more emotional. Now I lead with my heart. I lead with my emotions. I feel first and think second. I feel an emotion, then that triggers a thought, and then that determines the choices I make. As a human, I had it all backward. I had a thought that triggered an emotion, and then the emotion caused me to act or react in a certain way.
That shift to heart consciousness helped me heal by letting my heart take the front seat to my head, so that my negative thoughts don’t get in the way anymore. If I had to give that heart-centered consciousness a sensation, I would say it’s like that much-needed sleep after you’re physically, emotionally, and mentally exhausted. A deep, healing, relaxing sleep.
When it comes right down to it, I think that the biggest shift in my perspective once I became a spirit was the realization that a lot of the pain I suffered when I was alive was a result of not listening to my heart and my emotions and letting my brain run away with itself. As soon as I was able to think with my heart instead of my head, I got it. I even understood the true nature of suffering. I understood that suffering is caused by resisting what you’re struggling against or stamping it down or ignoring it. Thinking only with your head makes you resist stuff.
Resistance comes in many forms. It might be looking away from the pain or denying it. It might be blaming someone else for it or trying to bury it in drugs or sex or whatever. If I had listened to my heart more when I was alive, I’ll bet I would have been a lot happier, even though I would have still been sick and I know that things probably would still have turned out like they did. Maybe I would have reached out more or listened more or just loved more. All I know now is that if you use your heart and embrace it for what it has to offer instead of just using your brain to resist what you struggle with all the damn time, you’re gonna be a lot better off—mind, body, and soul.