By Celia Coates
Elmer Green taught that we have “two minds” – a this-side consciousness and an other-side consciousness. On this side we tune in to our material world and with our other-side mind we connect with the non-material realm. The brain and the physical body manufacture a concrete reality and, although it is real, it is only one of many possible realities. Some people are born with a well-developed ability to be aware of the subtle levels of being, but we can all work to develop this awareness even when it’s not a natural gift. Elmer’s lifelong focus was on exploring – and then teaching about – the continuum of states of consciousness involved in our two kinds of mind.
Elmer first had contact with the other side when he was three years old. A future post will tell this part of the story, but for now I’d like to tell you about what happened in 2011 when Elmer had a bad fall. One evening in November he was rushing into his house while carrying some heavy bottles of water when the toe of his shoe caught on the threshold. He had a lot of forward momentum and he fell hard, hitting his head on the rug-covered cement floor of the hallway. It knocked him out. He found himself immediately on the other side and not in touch with his this-side consciousness. Elmer said, “I wasn’t ‘unconscious’. My body was unconscious but I was awake and I was on the other side.”
Elmer taught that the real truth is that “we” don’t die: the body dies but we go on. This can be confusing to those who are moving between life and death. At first, in the four or five minutes when his body was unconscious, he himself had to find out whether he was alive or dead. In the other-side state of consciousness it is possible to ask questions and get answers (another future post topic). When he asked, he was told that he was not yet dead and that he could choose whether or not to go on with his life. He thought about papers he had been writing and decided that he wanted to stay to complete them. As soon as he made that decision, he heard clearly that he should wake up, get up, and close the front door.
It turned out that the fall had caused more damage to the body than he knew and after a few days he had to go to the hospital. That was the beginning of a time of new discoveries. To the people around him he seemed to be out of his mind, out of touch with ordinary reality in a way that is usually diagnosed as psychotic. That was true – he was not in his this-side mind, but he was not crazy. He said that what was really going on was that he was floating around above his body. He described being able to go everywhere in the hospital and to be aware of everyone. Some of the people he saw were also not in their bodies and he could talk to them. But 99 out of 100 of these people could not respond to him because they did not know how to deal with the other-side state of consciousness that they were in.
Once in a while, when he met somebody who could hear him, the two of them might have a conversation. He would ask what they were planning and let them know that if they wanted to, they could get back into their bodies. Some told him that they were trying to leave but couldn’t get rid of the physical form. Elmer would ask if they knew whether it was time for them to leave and if they said yes, he’d explain that they needed to surround their bodies with golden light and make this request, “May that which is best for everyone, may that come about.”
Sometimes that means going forward into death and leaving the this-side state of consciousness behind.
While Elmer was centered in his other-side mind, other things were going on with his body. Elmer said that the brain is a “machine” and with the fall it had been so jarred that its circuits were all mixed up. He was speaking from a high level of consciousness but the transmission was scrambled and what he was saying did not make sense to the people around him. His ability to activate his body also faltered and he had to tell it exactly what to do, detail by detail, so that he could move his hands, turn his head, or walk. Gradually his body remembered what to do on its own.
In his book, THE OZAWKIE BOOK OF THE DEAD,Elmer wrote,
“When the mental-emotional-physical structure called the ‘personality’ drops the physical structure at ‘death,’ the mental-emotional structure that remains, called the ‘soul,’ is the out-of-the-body body in which we previously found ourselves in dreams. In other words, when we have a ‘body’ the world is in the conscious and dreams are in the unconscious, but when we ‘die,’ everything is reversed. The physical world becomes the unconscious and what we now call ‘dreams’ become the conscious. That’s why it’s important to become a lucid dreamer – so you’ll know your way around when you ‘get there.’ ”
He also wrote that, “…human problems in this world and in the next world are so remarkably similar that it is useful to develop certain abilities of mind and emotion in advance….”
What Elmer experienced after his fall is not unique: many people have spoken or written about their Out of Body Experiences (OBEs). Although his encounters with others in the hospital and his experience of a wounded body included some new information for him, Elmer had been having other-side mind experiences since he was young. He said that although we might not be aware of it, we all spend time on the other side when we are sleeping. He taught that we must use our own other-side experiences to learn how to navigate that reality, to prepare for times in life or after death when the material, this-side mind is absent or not in control. He said that we have to wake up to the truth that we have these two minds and we have to figure out other-side consciousness now, and here on this side.
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This post came from a conversation Elmer and I had several years ago.
If you would like to learn more about Elmer Green’s life and what he had to teach, please go to: http://www.consciousnessandbiofeedback.org