Hi all,
Sorry about the delay in replying, but am still without internet at home...
Stardis, I can fully appreciate the difficulty in wrapping the experience around an understanding. It seems that the example you gave was an OBE, an out-of-body experience in which you could see yourself. You say you had your head down. Were you conscious or did you perhaps doze off? Deborah told of a similar experience in which she was OBE and could see her physical body sleeping and her ethereal body reading while she was in light-form. It seems that such can occur either by "bi-location" or by "expansion" of the consciousness, but both are usually temporary and of short duration. The point is, your Consciousness was OBE, but NOT simultaneously OBE AND IBE (have I created a new term for "in-the-body experience"?

) Terminology is a tough one for experiences that are new, aren't they? Perhaps I should have used the term "means" rather than "instrument" when I was referring to the accessing of the Akashic Records.
Is it a piece of technology or a natural function of Creation?
A natural function of Creation, of course... :thumbsup:
There are other instances and unless I am just mentally ill, I find that these experiences support my belief that my self - I am going to say higher self because I have used that term for decades now - is experiencing this incarnation at the same time that I am experiencing others - one soul, many lives.
Certainly you are not "mentally ill"...

It just seems that you, like Deborah, have a rather rare capacity of going OBE and accessing the Akashic Records. But when you say "one soul, many lives", of course I agree, but not that they are all simultaneous. To answer Susie's question, if all our incarnations were simultaneous, this would also necessarily imply that our "future lives" are already occurring also "in the now", which would make changes in destiny brought about by the application of our free-will impossible. I really cannot agree with this...
As Nightrain was saying, I am quite ok to understand that 1:00 am comes before 2:00 am, and not simultaneously. Just to use another analogy, we can discover Mayan ruins of 1000 years ago, but obviously we could never find ruins of New York 1000 years ago. Although "physical time" and "spiritual time" may be different, there is nevertheless always a "linearity" to them. According to Einstein (although certainly not the same laws of physics apply in the spiritual realms), Time = Space. If there were "no time", there would also have to be "no space".
So I can't imagine my existence as being apart from an Original Consciousness who I imagine sustains me with Its thoughts.
I would tend to agree, but IMO the only Original Consciousness that would be capable of doing so would be the Universal Consciousness/God, and not our own. Ours, IMO, "sails through time", constantly creating at every "instant" or "now", eternal, indivisible and indestructible...