You Are Not Book.indb - Stephen H. Wolinsky Ph. D.

146 / You Are Not
Later that evening, however, within the EMPTINESS,
while “I” was sitting in the living room of our apartment,
there appeared the much less condensed consciousness called
Christian.
That consciousness was floating in EMPTINESS, and
that consciousness did not know it had died, and hence was
in shock.
“I” spent some time with him (his consciousness,
which was thinning out) letting him know what had occurred.
Over the next 24-36 hours, “his” consciousness was
around until it thinned out within the B1G EMPTINESS and
was no more.
It was not until that day that “I” understood the saying
in India, “That the most important time for a Guru is at
the moment of death.”
Why? To best illustrate this, let me begin with the
story that took place many years ago, a story of a man, a
retired flight engineer, who was a trainee of mine in the
mid-1980s. He told me that as a flight engineer, his plane
had been shot down over North Vietnam. As he was automatically
ejected from the plane, there was a short interval
of, let’s say, 10 seconds, before the parachute automatically
opened. In that “short” interval, what he told me was that
time slowed down so much, that he saw his whole life. In
that mere ten seconds, he forgave his parents, said goodbye
and apologized to his wife and baby, saw himself as a child
grow into an adult—he saw the entire tapestry of his life.
He did all of what we would call “personal” therapy within
only a few seconds. Then suddenly, the parachute opened
and he was back in “normal time.” For this reason, we could
say that for “me” in “normal time,” it was only 24-36 hours
for “Christian’s” consciousness to thin out and dissolve, but
“subjectively,” for “him,” “I” cannot say how long it was.