#also noticing after just experienced shattered memories that no one talks about shattered memories harry lmaooo

[lunchboxart]

Was trying to wrack my brain why everyone on that silent hill poll was clicking James and Henry as the relatable ones and then i remembered what James and Henry were like and then i remembered what website I'm on.

Anyway so it's the anxiety.

[danijimenezv]

Who We Used to Be

Prompt/Summary: Based on “Two Ghosts” by Harry Styles

Pairings: Tony x female!reader

Warnings: angst, bittersweet moments, implied smut

Word Count: 2260

A/N: I wrote it for Bella’s Cool Times Summer Jamz Mix Writing Challenge ( @whothehellisbella ). This takes place at the end of Captain America: Civil War. I didn’t exactly include the lyrics of the song, but I did make sure that it fits the plot :)

It had been a while since he had thought about her. Until that Friday afternoon, Tony Stark actually hadn’t thought about her for years, not really.

Tony had been working at the New Avengers for days, trying to come up with something to help Rhodes. To say he was going out of his mind was an understatement, especially after the events with Steve and the Winter Soldier. That’s why he found himself wandering around Fire Island beach, after hours of driving. He didn’t even know why exactly he had ended up there, he had just driven mindlessly.

The sand underneath his feet and the calm environment of the beach helped him think, and he found himself mulling over everything that had been happening lately, not only with Steve and the rest of the Avengers, but also with Pepper. Tony and Pepper were giving each other some time, being Iron Man finally taking its toll on her. He was so deep in his thoughts that he didn’t even notice the person approaching him. It took him a few seconds to finally register the face that was in front of him.

She looked exactly how he remembered, even if it had been more than a decade since they last saw each other. Her hair flowed freely in the wind, giving off the vibe of freedom, and her eyes sparkled as she too recognized him. She was still as beautiful in his eyes as ever; the only difference being the small crinkles by her eyes, and the way they seemed to hold a new world of knowledge and experience. Tony’s heart picked up its pace as he continued to gawk at her, and both stood in absolute silence for some minutes, studying each other with their stares. Finally, the woman broke into a friendly smile.

“I didn’t think I’d see you here again, Stark.”

“Y/N.” he sighed, “It’s been a while.”

“Indeed.”

“How have you been? I haven’t heard much about you these past years.”

“Can’t say the same about you, Iron Man.” she pointed out, laughing softly, “I’ve heard plenty of you. Every time I turn around, there you are, in the news, in some paper, or in a kid’s costume.”

Tony smirked, “Don’t pretend you don’t love seeing me so much.”

“Guess you’ll never know.” her face was a mask, and Tony was unable to know if she really did or didn’t at all, “I’ve been relatively good.”

“Still working as a doctor?”

“Forensics, yeah.”

“Kinda CSI, huh?” Tony chuckled under his breath slightly, but squirmed uncomfortably as her steely gaze seemed to look right through him, bore into his very core. As their eyes locked, Tony felt a wave of feelings washing over him, teleporting him back to the day they had first met, back to when he was barely 18.

“How bad is it?” her voice brought him out of the flashback.

“Bad? No one said anything about-”

“You can lie to anyone else, Tony, but not to me.”

She was right. Tony was used to keeping everyone at a certain distance, but Y/N practically knew him from the very start, and they had been together for years. There was no way he could hide anything from her, no matter how much he tried or how long it had been. Y/N frowned, one of her hands reaching up to cup and caress his cheek, but she suddenly became aware of what she was doing and retreated her hand slowly.

“Sorry, I know it’s been a while. I don’t want to overstep my boundaries.”

Tony simply dismissed the situation with a nod. He was oddly silent, uncharacteristic of him. Y/N had never seen him like that, not in the eight years they were together. He was different from the Tony she once knew; he had seen and experienced far too many things for her to even start to comprehend what changed him. Still, that didn’t stop her from trying to reach out to him, to be there for him, not baring how in despair he looked.

“Come on, I’ll take you to get a drink. You seem like you need one.”

“I don’t want to be anywhere public.” he scratched the back of his neck.

“My place sounds fine for you?” she asked, and Tony could see the sincere concern in her shining eyes, something that, still after more than a decade, still disarmed him completely, “I’ve got booze and it’s not out in the public.”

“I’d be worried about your life decisions if it were.” he joked.

They drove for about half an hour, just two people joking and reminiscing about the past. No one would have suspected they hadn’t seen each other in years; probably because, deep down, they never stopped thinking about the other. Once in her house, they settled down fairly quickly, as if being together was an old routine they remembered well. Tony got out two glasses from one of the kitchen cabinets, while Y/N gathered a bottle of whiskey and a bucket of ice. For the following hours, all they did was exactly the same they did in the car, remember moments they lived together and the best of those years. Some memories were happy, some were sad, and some were absolutely ridiculous, but each and every one of them reminded him of a time where everything was much simpler than the problems he was now facing at the moment with the Avengers. Tony honestly couldn’t point out the exact moment he had last felt as carefree and on ease, nothing comparing to how she was making him feel in that moment.

“Come on, gulp it down. I dare you.” Tony smirked, making Y/N gasp in offense.

“You think I can’t hold my drink?”

“Sweetheart, this is the third glass of whiskey you’ve had in the past two hours. I think you can’t handle any more, much less in one gulp.”

“Watch me.” she did as she was dared, not looking unfazed in the slightest, which surprised him deeply, “See, Stark? I told you I could.”

“I just have one more question.”

“Which is?”

“How did you manage to get whiskey on your nose?”

A deep, scarlet color adorned her cheeks, but as Tony laughed at her expression, he leaned forward to clean it for her. That was the mistake, or maybe that was exactly what he needed to do. Before he could stop to think about it, he just let go of his inhibitions and followed his instinct. He crashed his lips against her in a matter of seconds, and he was relieved as she returned the gesture with as much fervor as him. The kiss was full of desperation, lust and unspoken promises, and it filled both of their veins with adrenaline. They continued kissing, their limbs ending up tangled together as their tongues messily danced together, their mouths practically clashing together as the two of them chased their own desires.

“Bedroom?” he asked in a strained voice, barely separating from her.

She panted heavily, “Down the hall, last door on the right.”

Tony woke up in the middle of the night, stretching a bit and feeling the other side of the bed cold and empty. He reached out for his discarded boxers and his pants and put them on, somehow knowing, or more like hoping, that Y/N was wearing his shirt, just like the old times. He wandered around the halls for a few minutes, before he heard soft humming coming from the kitchen, and made his way there. Easily enough, he found the woman, hunched slightly as she searched for something in the fridge.

“Want anything, Tony?” she asked casually, startling him, as she retrieved a bottle of water.

“I’m fine.” he brushed off and took a seat at the table.

“Suit yourself.” she shut the fridge door closed.

Even without the house lights or the white light from the refrigerator, the moon was intense enough to light them. The moonlight made her silhouette stand out even more, and Tony couldn’t help but admire her beauty. He wanted to say something, but what? He felt a huge lump in his throat and his tongue tied in an impossible knot, making him unable to even utter a single word. Still, even if he didn’t feel as physically incapable to talk as he was feeling right then, he didn’t know what to tell her. ‘Thanks for tonight, I’ve gotta go’? He couldn’t be a jerk to her, not after everything they had lived together. Tony yearned with all his heart it could be as simple as he used. He wished he could tell her he still loved her as much as he used to, and that they could be together again. A happy, fairy-tale ending. However, no matter how much Tony tried, the same thoughts about her fluttered around in his mind. Y/N was a throwback, a beautiful one at that, but still a throwback to a time when he was young, unburdened and definitely not scared of love and loss. She was all he had back then, and he would always love her. But the heart-shattering, ground-rumbling love he once felt for the woman in front of her, that was gone, turning her simply into a beautiful memory, meant for him to remember some of the best time of his life by her side.

“I know what you’re thinking.” Y/N interrupted his line of thoughts.

“I don’t think you do, sweetheart.” he chuckled, trying to hide the bitterness with his wit.

“You’re thinking the same thing I am.” she stated, and somehow, he knew she was telling the truth, “It’s not what you expected.”

“Y/N, I-”

“I’m under no pretense here, Tone.” she sat down in front of him, taking his calloused hands in her soft ones, “ I know last night was a one-time thing only. I know how it is. After all, everything has changed.”

“Why do I feel so broken, then?”

“Because, deep down, you and I both wanted it to be just how we remembered.”

“I thought you were the one for me all along.” Tony continued stubbornly, “Meeting again after some years wasn’t supposed to work like that.”

“Oh, Tony. My Tony.” Y/N chuckled, “Not everything is like in the movies, no matter how much we want it to be. Don’t think of us as a failure. Think of us as a beautiful experience. Now, you can put that small bother in the back of your mind to rest. Maybe it’s just not meant to be. We can finally leave it in peace, in the past, and move on to whatever life has in store for us.”

“I felt like I used you, and I definitely don’t want you to feel or even think that.” he shook his head vehemently.

“In a way, we used one other. We were both trying to relive the past, trying to feel again how that was like.” she shrugged, “Please, Tony, I knew the existence of this possibility, of things ending this way. I knew what I was getting into, so you don’t have to worry about me.”

“You were too important for me.” he kissed her forehead, “You still are. I’m sorry I didn’t realize that sooner.”

“Not your fault. We were young, just experiencing life.”

“Still, I shouldn’t have given up on us. What if-?”

“You and I...” she whispered, caressing his cheek lovingly as she stared softly at his warm brown eyes; the same eyes she had fallen in love with back all those years, and the same eyes she would always love no matter what, “You and I will always be unfinished business, just a torrent of ‘what if’s that never came to be. It’s too late now, but I don’t regret a thing. I love you, Tony.” she clarified, “Always have, and probably always will. You’ll always hold a special place in my heart… but I’m no longer in love with you. We’ve grown apart into two very different people, and we still have a lot to figure out on our own.”

“I’m sorry.” Tony held back a sob, “I’m sorry for what we could’ve been.”

“Me too.” she sighed sadly and, in a bold move, leaned towards him and placed her lips on his, in a last, cherishing kiss, “But do me a favor.”

“For you, anything.”

“Try to be happy once again.” she practically begged him, “That’s all I want for you. I don’t know how bad things are within the Avengers, but I’m asking you this because I care about you, Anthony Edward Stark, not Iron Man, not the infamous Tony Stark.”

“I never deserved you.” he let out a breathy laugh, standing up and pulling her to him as well, his strong arms snaking around her waist almost immediately, as if it was the most natural thing in the world.

“On the contrary, you always did.” she snuggled further in his embrace, trying to remember every little detail, from the way his arms held her tight with strength but still delicacy as if she was his whole world, to the way he smelled like the home she used to know, “That’s why I’m still here, and I’ll always be.”

“In my heart is a memory, and there you’ll always be.” he quoted, remembering one of her favorites, which, in turn, made her grin breath-takingly.

Their love story was over, but Tony Stark could brag he had the most epic and spectacular love story to ever tell with the one and only Y/N Y/L/N.

Tags: @whothehellisbella, @thinkwritexpress-official, @buckysberrie, @sebbytrash, @bovaria, @maybe-mikala, @a-little-hell-to-raise , @hunters-from-stark-tower

[spirit-science-blog]

Imagine you’re on the operating table, you’ve been put into a state of deep sleep and have some kind of surgery. All of a sudden, there are some strange singing bowl-like sounds. You become aware of vibrations, and suddenly you’re up and about, standing in the room.  Looking around, everything seems brighter...more vibrant, and full of life.  You turn around to get a better look, and the next thing you know, you see yourself right in front of you, lying on the table. Welcome to the weird and wonderful world of Near-Death Experiences!

NDE’s are one of the more curious phenomena of our life experiences here on earth, much like psychedelics, they take us out of the mundane world and into something mystical. People who have survived encounters nearing death, or even those who have technically died and been revived, seem to share similar lucid experiences that relate to going beyond their physical body, into another world, a world of light. The whole “light at the end of the tunnel” and ‘life flashing before your eyes’ originated from psychiatric research on the subject way back in the 70s, but the truth is, there’s a tremendous mystery here, one that today… hasn’t been solved.

Stories of strange and mystical experiences surrounding NDE's are not anything new. As far back as the sixth century, A.D. people were fascinated by similar stories in Pope Gregory’s “Dialogues” of Jesters and businessmen visiting the Christian Hell after having accidents.  Why the hell and not heaven? Maybe the Jesters told terrible jokes or the businessman made shady deals. Idk.

Either way, individuals who come back from these early NDEs report similar experiences to what is currently being studied today, such as meeting other-dimensional beings or lost loved ones, along with a feeling of permanent transformation.

If people were writing about this kind of stuff in the 6th Century, it seems that our interest in NDEs has stayed pretty constant. However, as usual, the scientific community had largely written off the events as hallucinations until the late last century. One of the enormous icebreakers for this shift in mindset was the experiences of a woman named Barbara Harris in 1975. Nowadays, Barbara is a therapist specializing in the study of NDEs, a successful author, and was on the faculty of Rutgers University's Institute on Alcohol and Drug Studies for 12 years.  Now Barbara certainly had more than her fair share in terms of experience, having not one, but two, profound NDE in a SINGLE week.

In a nutshell, she was born with a bad case of scoliosis -a crooked spine that she struggled with throughout her life. But in 1975, it became too much for her, and she was admitted for surgery to correct it. After a 5 hour operation, she was left in a full-body cast, unable to move on her own. Two days after surgery, her life support system began to fail, and she found it difficult to breathe, she lost consciousness as the support staff ran in to help her. I imagine it probably happened in slo-mo as well.

So that night, Barbara woke up in the middle of the night, standing in the hallway. After worrying, the nurses would be mad at her for standing up....(yeah, STANDING up...) she made her way back to her room and noticed she was floating level with a speaker that she remembered to be mounted on the ceiling.

She looked down and saw herself lying on the circle bed, and as she looked at the woman in the bed, she was overcome with a profound “knowing” that the person there wasn’t the real her. As if her soul was identifying her ego and understanding this, she was overcome with a deep sense of peace.

Then, Barabara felt this connection with her deceased Grandmother and began to be transported away. She became overwhelmed with a feeling that what was happening to her was more real than anything she had experienced in her life up to that point. She said that as she gave in to this belief, she felt a tremendous toxic energy release from her, and simultaneously was beginning to relive every moment she had had with her grandmother in the 19 years they shared on Earth.

Barbara emphasizes that she didn’t just remember stuff - she was reliving each moment of her life she spent with her grandmother. At a talk she gave in 2015, she recalls spending dinner with her grandmother when she was only three years old, with stunning detail. Play clip. It’s like they were sharing memories! After this journey through her past, she witnessed what she could only describe as a tunnel, and saw a light glowing. She felt herself expanding, and moved towards a droning noise -sounding kind of like a singing bowl until suddenly she was back in her physical body again.

Now, we won’t go into the details here, but about a week later, it happened again. A complication with her bed left her unable to breathe, and she entered another NDE. Ironically, despite being an atheist her whole life, Barbara’s complete inability to describe this energy she felt led her to later refer to it only as God. She often still says that “It wasn’t an old man with a long white beard. And it took me a long time to use the word, God.”

She describes that she experienced her past at breakneck speed, and with all of this information coming to her about her life, it allowed her to transform her experiences of herself and her life from self-judgment into love. As she understood her life through the lens of love, a mantra appeared in her head, “no wonder.” No wonder she was the way she was. She understood entirely now the impact her mother’s drug addiction and her father’s absence had on her childhood and how it shaped who she was today so strongly. She understood profoundly how her own mother’s pain and neglect from her childhood shaped her into someone who didn’t know how to love. The full story is moving and profound, and we’ll link her writings in the description below.

Now, there is one more exciting thing here. Before she returned to her body, she found herself behind the nurse’s station, talking about her. She overheard them talk about the nurse on duty who had to be sent home after feeling responsible for Barbara’s incident. She also taught that they were planning on lying to her about how long she would have to spend in a body cast so that she wouldn’t be even more stressed out.

So naturally, when she returned to her body, she explained that she was in the halls during that conversation, and they, of course, didn’t believe her. Amused and slightly irritated, she told them to call her nurse, let her know she was okay, and not lie to her about how long she would be in the body cast. The nurses were well how you would react? *play reaction scene from Airbender*

Now you may be wondering why we spent so long going on about one woman’s case, Especially since NDEs are surprisingly common. But the truth is, Barbara Harris’s experiences invigorated public interest in the subject of near-death experiences. All of a sudden, people started becoming more interested in the stories of others who underwent NDE. What intrigued people aside from the prospect of life after death was similar themes in all the accounts. Leaving one's unconscious body, entering a beautiful, eternal glowing light or relaxing darkness seemed to be universal aspects of the experience. People commonly described the presence of an all-loving being or consciousness, giving them insights into their own lives.

Now, of course, this is humanity we’re talking about, and scientists are often rigidly skeptical, so formal research. Still, continually denying the entire idea, finally got the funding required nearly twenty years after Barbara’s experiences to produce collaborative research on the phenomenon and make some scientific insights. They couldn’t ignore the sheer number of claims without looking into it at least a little. So they hired this guy named the hap who kidnapped some people, killed them, and then revived them repeatedly in a secret basement and recorded their experiences… wait… hold on… Our hidden spirituality of the OA episode script must have gotten mixed up in here… Oops! Instead, this initial wave of research *that wasn’t illegal* was shared in a Psychology Today article entitled, Bright Lights, Big Mystery, and as always, you can find links to this in the sources of this video.

From this wave of research, it was discovered that 95% of the world’s cultures mentioned an NDE in some form… A crazy number to think about! Further, nearly seventeen percent of critically ill patients across nine countries are reported to have undergone an NDE. So NDE’s aren’t extremely rare; they are quite common. However, I suppose that it’s also quite paradigm-shattering, for if we globally took this seriously, Atheism might disappear entirely, and the fields of Science would never be the same…

One contributor to that research, Doctor Melvin Morse, examined thousands of NDEs' reports to learn more about them. What’s curious about Dr. Morse’s analysis is that despite having no way of proving anything that happened from people’s news, the reports he studied were so similar that he painted a picture of what a typical NDE might look like. From Independent reports, Morse found that “full-blown” NDEs share the nine following features:

A sense of being dead: the sudden awareness that one has had a 'fatal" accident or not survived an operation.

Peace and painlessness: a feeling that the ties that bind one to the world have been cut.

An out-of-body experience: the sensation peering down on one's body and perhaps seeing the doctors and nurses trying to resuscitate them.

Tunnel experience: the sense of moving up or through a narrow passageway.

Encountering beings of light or ‘glowing ones’ at the end of the tunnel.

The presence of a God-like or omnipotent figure or force of some kind.

Life review: being shown one's life by the being of light.

Reluctance to return: the feeling of being comfortable and surrounded by the Light often described as "pure love."

Personality transformation: a psychological change involving loss of the fear of death, higher spiritualism, a sense of "connectedness" with the Earth, and greater zest for life.

This was painting an exciting picture for scientists, but there was still some skepticism, and some questions: Was the cultural significance of an NDE shaping what experiences people were having? How do we know that people are actually having an NDE and not just exaggerating a dream or other dissociative experience? Is being near death necessary to undergo what is being reported as NDE?

If being near death wasn’t necessary to undergo the phenomenon, patients should report them even when they were never in mortal danger. A researcher named Dr. Stevenson located the medical records of forty patients who reported an NDE and found that more than half of them were never actually close to dying. This was starting to support the idea that the fear of death was sparking a purely psychological response.

But Stevenson wasn’t satisfied, and so he found a group of 58 people who reported NDEs, and like last time, 30 of whom had not been near death. He interviewed them and discovered something they couldn’t ignore: “A significantly greater number of patients who were actually near death reported elements of the core experience--including the bright light--than those who were not.” It seems that genuinely being near death IS necessary to encounter the established phenomena. Ironically, in the scientists' attempts to show the experience purely as an experience of the mind, they ended up showing the opposite….. At this point, someone probably got a raise… orrrrr was fired.

By this point, science has failed to do what it so often excels at: simplifying the world and squashing questions. In that failure lies so much wonder and curiosity that has paradigm-shattering consequences for all of us. Think about it; if this experience is universal across almost all of the cultures of the world, it breaks down religious ideas like “my heaven or God is the only one,” revealing a more unified understanding of what is quite possibly the afterlife, shared by all.

But it’s more than just a culture shock. Recall Barbara Harris’s story earlier, at one point, she was transported to the physical world but outside of her body, and heard information that was otherwise secret to her, bewildering the nurses with her knowledge when she awoke. This is so far out there, and Barbara’s story is not an isolated event.

Back in 2008, something known as the Awareness during Resuscitation Program, AWARE for short, followed 2,000 heart attack patients across the globe and studied the amount of NDE’s that occurred among survivors. Some of these survivors reported an out of body awareness, and for one of them, the perception was confirmed to be accurate by hospital staff. A similar study in 2001 looked at the same patient’s experience. The researchers stated that  "it didn’t appear consistent with hallucinatory or illusory experiences, as the recollections were compatible with real and verifiable rather than imagined events." In a nutshell...somehow, these people are aware of the world around them, even sometimes past the range of their physical body, despite showing all the signs of being clinically dead. Now, we’re way past our time limit here, but this stuff is just so impressive. Before we wrap things up, there’s one more important thing I must share with you! Despite the recent studies seemingly acknowledging some kind of experience, helping to affirm their existence, ancient Buddhist Texts refer to the ability to enter a near-death experience without physical threat to the body through…..you guessed it….. meditation!

Of course, in learning this, people at the Journal of Mindfulness went on a 3-year study with monks from different Buddhist Schools and monitored them during meditations. Amazingly, the monks were seemingly able to plan ahead of time and even how the NDE would manifest. Researchers confirmed that meditation-induced NDEs produced the same long term mystical enhancement in a person’s life. If you want to read the studies, you’ll find a link to them on our website!

So… what do you think is going on? Even today, mainstream science believes that an NDE is simply a psychological phenomenon where the brain is reliving its memories. It’s a convenient explanation, but it does not explain the commonness of descriptive experiences or the knowledge of events that are so far removed from someone going through the experience. It also conveniently ignores the correct skills of the Monks.

Honestly, I feel the day that we, as a society, accept NDE’s, is the day that we make leaps forward in our understanding of life, death, and the nature of consciousness. But in the meantime, if you are someone who wants to make leaps ahead in your journey, consider checking out our Seven-Day Transformation - nearly guaranteed to help you radically transform your life in only one week! You’ll find links below, and I hope to see you there!