You Were Dead
My friends kept referring to the 'time period' my spirit was outside my body as the 'time I was dead.' This reference confused me in 1988. I couldn't think of 'myself' as being dead. I was so in tune with the identity of life as belonging to a spirit. I couldn't think of myself as a physical body. They kept identifying life as the physical body and it was hard for their minds to comprehend the fact that life could exist outside of the physical body.
I was still used to the decade I had spent studying the difference between the physical realm and the spiritual realm. I had only known this group of friends a short time and they were blind to my past. They had no idea this was a part of my history. I wasn't used to having eyewitnesses that were outsiders from my own family. It had been many years since I was shuffled off to a bedroom to have my near death experiences in private. I didn't like talking to my family after a while. It was too hard to relate the mysteries of 'beyond' to a rational and logical mind. People who had their sight and focus on the physical realm seemed to argue and debate - more than they could listen.
So when my friends kept insisting 'you were dead' - I knew I was in for a debate with their earthbound rational and religious thinking minds about the reality of life and death.
I tried to explain to them that the physical body was just a shell which contained the essence of life but that life was not dependent on the physical body once it departed. In my childhood - I often used the reference to a 'shadow body.'
As a child, I once had a 'divine messenger' use a parable to metaphorically explain how life existed within the 'shadow' of the light the soul is. I had tried to explain it to my family with a flash light.
I felt the 'spirit' was the 'beam' of light that was cast from the 'body of the soul' much like the flashlight was a source of light from an 'energy cell.' I had my friends each line up and catch shadow puppets upon a wall. I told them that while we were in the human form and human mind - then our focus was on the shadow itself and that we were 'blind' to the source that caused the shadow to be cast. It wasn't anything new. I had used it as an eight year old - but years later I found out that Plato came up with an allegory with much the same elements contained in the tale.
In the Bible - there is a passage written about the body (soma) spirit (pneuma) and soul (psyche.) The 'soul' was the source for the 'light' that radiated and animated the physical shell within the region of the physical plane.
I told my friends that the 'breath of life' didn't originate with the physical body as much as it originate from the 'soul body' created in the image of the Creator of all things. When my 'breath' (spirit) withdrew from the physical shell then it went back to the source of the soul that had 'breathed' it into my body from the beginning.
The English word spirit comes from the Latin "spiritus" ("breath") and has several interrelated meanings: Metaphysically, a spirit is an incorporeal energy force that is present in all living things but distinct from the soul. New World Encyclopedia See also: Greek (Spirit) πνεῦμα
To me - the life that we are isn't the body that we inhabit as much as it is the breath of us while in the physical body. The 'breath' (spirit) existed whether in a physical body or out of a physical body.
The physical body was 'dead' for a temporary time - but the 'life of me' which is in spirit - still had an invisible existence beyond the normal sight of the physical five-fold sight range.