Oxygen + Earth = memories
During my NDE experience, the formula stood plain: Oxygen + Earth = memories. Breath binds us to the planet; air braided with soil and story gathers into the ledger we call memory. When the breath thins and the tether loosens, that ledger begins to empty. The tunnels of light — far from being mere speculation of lights, angels and tunnels — are the corridors through which that unbinding of memories is wrought. They are artfully beautiful, religiously arranged and praised on this side, and intentional channels: having gentle mechanics of release of memories from the self, performed by whatever intelligence guides the crossing.
There, in the careful dim and the increasing brightness, the other side eases the relinquishing. Oxygen is drawn away like a key pulled from a lock; images, names, hurts, and joys peel off like leaves and are carried beyond the threshold. The result is mercy and design: a clearing of memory so the returning self may begin again unladen, tender for what is next.
It is both a consolation and a strange artistry — to think that forgetting might be as purposeful as remembering, and that the cosmos would itself insist we pass through such a precise, cleansing doorway before a new life is written. This is the cycle of reincarnation.
Breath is the tether; earth is the archive. Together they stitch life to recollection. When breath thins and the tether is eased, memory peels away — not violently but like petals shedding in a gentle wind — and the other side guides that unbinding through corridors of light, precise as a ritual, merciful as a tide.
That same merciful design explains the small miracles that sometimes arrive wrapped in new born clothes: children who touch a piano and play like someone who remembers entire concertos; toddlers whose fingers find a guitar’s secrets as if they had once lived by strings. The forgetting is not absolute; some pattern survives the cleansing — a shard of skill, an echo of habit, a filament of knowing left behind like a seed.
However, let’s look at this two different ways:
Gentle / contemplative
Sometimes a bright shard of skill slips the net and survives the clearing — a child’s hands knowing a piano as if rain had taught them. But perhaps not all gifts are meant to pass. The other side works by design, and there are limits to what can be carried forward. And yet there is another truth: occasionally a returning soul is aware as the unbinding begins and refuses. It holds on to a single melody, a single blade of memory, not from theft but from love — an insistence that this thread belong to them. In those tender refusals the cosmos negotiates: sometimes mercy loosens the grasp, sometimes a stubborn strand remains, and the new life carries a curious echo, neither wholly given nor wholly kept.
Dark / mythic
There are rules to the clearing. Breath and earth conspire to strip the ledger clean, and the tunnels of light are stern artisans of forgetting. When a talent slips through, it is an exception — a lost note smuggled back into the world. But occasionally a soul wakes mid-release and clamps its hands around a remembered gift, demanding it live on. Such refusals are not without consequence. The unspent memory tugs at the new life like an unquiet ghost, bringing brilliance braided with an ache: skill sharpened by exile, a talent carried like contraband across thresholds. The result can be brilliant and brittle both — a star born of resistance.
Wrapping up a hard lesson…
Oxygen + Earth = memories.
Breath is the tether, earth the archive. Together they weave our lives into recollection. But when oxygen is removed — when we leave this body — the tether loosens, and memory begins to fall away. The tunnels of light are not mere spectacle but channels of release, corridors through which the other side cleanses memory so that we may return unburdened, ready to begin anew. This is reincarnation’s quiet machinery, the cosmos erasing what would weigh us down and clearing the slate for another chapter.
My Art
Why do I know this?
I don’t know.
My Near Death Experience Arts and Thoughts 