This message isn't probably going to make much sense to anyone.  Maybe I'm
talking more to myself than anyone else, but just in case I just wanted to
share it.

Ever since I went into a coma or whatever for three days last year I've been
trying to find the words to describe what I experienced in what seemed to be
dreams.  And the word just came to me as I was watching one of my favorite
movies, "Brainstorm" (with Christopher Walken and Natalie Wood, the last
movie Natalie Wood made before drowning).  In this movie, a team of
scientists discovers a way to put thoughts, sensations and emotions on a
sort of videotape (a new technology at the time the movie was made) so that
whomever played back the tape with a headset could experience all of the
physical, mental and emotional experiences the person experienced while
recording the tape through their headset.  One of the team members dies of a
heart attack and as she is dying, she starts the machine in the lab and
tapes her experience of death, so that this tape contains a recording of
what it feels like to die, as well as her thoughts and experiences in death.
One of the other team members spends the rest of the movie trying to get
that tape and experience it (with the physical pain of a heart attack
removed) to see what death is like. When he finally plays it back, she
raises out of her body, floats through spheres of past experiences, and
bizarre scenes, finally floating out into the stars, past the constellations
to angel-like stars with wings flapping, then the man experiencing all of
this gets sucked back into his body at the calling of his wife.

Anyway, the movie made me think back to my dreams.  Most of them seem to be
a filtering of what was going on around me which seemed very real at the
time but when I woke up I realize couldn't have happened.  One part was my
MP friend wearing a Korean hat and telling me fortune cookie like sayings
that were very wise yet the funniest things I'd ever heard and just had me
laughing hysterically.  I still can't remember any of them, but realize now
that they were so funny because my own mind was telling me what I thought
was funny.  Couldn't ask for a better audience than that.  Smile.

But the core of the experience that I still think about from time to time,
and frankly am nervous about thinking about too much or I'll re-experience
it because it seemed so real, was of my soul being a bi-plane, you know one
of those old-fashioned airplaines with two sets of wings?  If you were
sighted as a child you might remember cartoons of them with little faces on
the front.  It was like I was one of these planes out among the stars and
parking in a sort of space station with many other little planes like
myself.  Once inside, I saw there was a sort of mission board, a chalkboard
with my name on it (not the name I have in real life) as well as all of the
others.  And there was a time clock, the kind that you punch in and punch
out of work with in the old days.  This is the most memorable part, because
the clock changed.  It went from an old fashioned clock and morphed into
later and later models of clocks, and there were wooden numbers, and roman
numerals which went into the clock and turned to sawdust.  Time was passing,
eons of time, time upon time, age upon age past all of the civilizations of
little planes that I'd known beyond generations and then beyond time itself.
Ages upon ages into agelessness.  Then I slowly drifted back into scenes of
the hospital (or what I thought was the hospital) on a trolley car and
slowly came around to consciousness.  Never anything scary or painful,
really.

But now I realize the word I was looking for that I was experiencing during
these dreams, especially the one about the clock, is transcendance.  We've
all probably heard of Transcendental Meditation, a program the Mahareshi
Mahesh Yogi cooked up years ago to experience a fuller life, more energy,
etc. by getting beyond the mind and body.  Just a way to market a form of
Buddhism, really.  (TM is now trademarked and costs money to learn.)  But
like all of the tricks of the enemy, this is a twisted form of the truth.
Transcendant Life is just what JESUS promises us.  That's what He means by
having Life and having it more abundantly.  But it's not the "Live stress
free and lower your blood pressure" guru garbage.  This is Life beyond time
and space, and JESUS is the only way to it because of what He has done for
us in overcoming death for us.  THat is why He is the Door, the portal, the
tunnel, the Way, the Truth and the Life.

Well, as I said, I didn't expect to make sense here.  Smile.  Especially
within the limits of an e-mail.  But I just wanted to say that JESUS offers
us transcendant life beyond all limits, all time, and all circumstances you
are experiencing now.  No matter how confusing Life gets, follow Him and He
will bring you through this life into True Life and Eternity.

Paul