My Near Death Experience Arts and Thoughts

But what if consciousness could branch—a person experiencing multiple futures simultaneously, aware of them as equally real? That’s not just parallel universes—it’s being aware of all your versions at once.

“Give me an example of But what if consciousness could branch—a person experiencing multiple futures simultaneously, aware of them as equally real? That’s not just parallel universes—it’s being aware of all your versions at once.”

Okay—let’s take that thought-experiment and bring it alive with an example.

Example: The Branched Self

Imagine you’re standing at a crossroads. In our normal consciousness, you pick one path—say, turning left—and your life unfolds accordingly.

But in branched consciousness, you don’t just turn left.

One version of you turns left. Another turns right. Another stays still. Another lies down in the grass and refuses the road entirely.

Now here’s the difference from “parallel universes”:

You are aware of all of them at the same time. You don’t lose any.

You feel the crunch of gravel under the feet of the left-walking you. You also feel the tension in the legs of the right-walking you. You also feel the coolness of the grass under the you who lay down.

All are happening simultaneously, inside your awareness, as equally real as your heartbeat.

Your identity isn’t a single “I” anymore—it’s a prism of selves, all shining at once.

What that does to your mind

Decision loses its meaning. There’s no anxiety, because every choice is already being lived. Memory becomes multi-threaded. Instead of recalling one past, you remember the tapestry of all your pasts. Morality fractures. You can no longer say “I wouldn’t do that” because one of you did.

It would feel like living as a constellation, not a point.

For examples:

Alright, here’s a mini-story that shows what it might feel like to live inside branched consciousness:

The Moment of the Cup

Sarah sat at the kitchen table. A white mug of coffee steamed in front of her.

In her old way of being, she would simply drink it, or not. But today, something fractured open inside her.

She reached for the cup.

And in that moment, she felt it all:

One version of her lifted the mug and drank, the hot liquid scalding her tongue, waking her mind. Another pushed it away, choosing water instead, the faint disappointment of skipping caffeine. Another sat perfectly still, her hand trembling inches above the handle, never touching it at all. Another knocked it over by accident, brown liquid flooding the table, dripping onto the floor, her heart lurching. And another poured it down the sink, a quiet act of rebellion against her morning ritual.

Sarah didn’t just imagine these futures. She felt them all at once—the heat, the bitterness, the regret, the wet cloth wiping the spill, the faint sense of victory at choosing differently.

Her consciousness became a web, each thread humming with the texture of another self.

She was no longer a person making choices.

She was the sum of all her choices, unfolding simultaneously.

And in that moment, she understood:

The “I” she had always believed in was just a narrow filter, a keyhole. The real her was the constellation—a radiant cloud of every path, every version, every heartbeat that could ever be.

However, she’s unable to turn off the branched consciousness and this might occur…

Alright—this is where it gets truly uncanny. Imagine if Sarah couldn’t turn off that branched awareness.

The Weight of All Selves

At first, Sarah thought it was a gift.

Every choice, every branch, every possible self—woven together inside her awareness like a vast, shimmering net.

But then the weight began.

She lay in bed one night and felt hundreds of her:

The Sarah who stayed awake scrolling through her phone. The Sarah who closed her eyes and slept deeply. The Sarah who never came home that night at all. The Sarah who, in another thin thread, never even existed.

Each of them was her, and each sent their full emotions into her chest. She carried their grief, their laughter, their boredom, their terror—simultaneously.

It wasn’t overwhelming in the normal sense. It was something deeper: a collapse of identity.

She couldn’t say: “I am this person.”

She could only say: “I am all of them, and none of them.”

The Dissolving Line

Walking down the street, she brushed against strangers—only they weren’t strangers anymore.

Her branched awareness began to bleed outward.

She felt the man hurrying past as both himself and as a version of herself who had become him.

She felt the child tugging at her mother’s hand as another version of her, impatient for ice cream.

She felt the sparrow on the wire, even, as a possible line she might have lived, feathered and weightless.

Every being became another branch.

Every moment, another fracture.

The Last Boundary

There came a night when Sarah stood in her kitchen again, staring at the same white mug of coffee.

She didn’t reach for it this time.

Because in that moment, there was no cup.

No table.

No kitchen.

The branches had spread too far—beyond her, beyond time, beyond matter.

She was no longer Sarah-who-chooses.

She was the branching itself.

Every outcome, every life, every universe humming through her like the fibers of a single infinite chord.

That’s the danger of permanent branched consciousness:

You don’t just experience all your futures.

You become the totality of futures, until the “you” that asked the question vanishes.

And now we could go on into her mind and thoughts, but I’ll stop here for now.

“And the cat came back it really was a goner…“