A few days before he died, my friend Jackson related this dream to me:
“I’m swimming, but not in water—like in clouds. Narrow clouds, close together like a tunnel, so I’ve got to swim with my arms tight against me, and my butt sticking up in the air.”
He shot me a wry grin, and continued,
“So I finally come out of this tunnel, and all of Space opens up around me, all lit up with golden light, so gorgeous!
Then I hear this voice, and it says,
‘Here, let me show you how to swim,’ and very gently I feel my butt get pushed down into the clouds, and I dive! I dive right into the Ocean of God!”
Now I’ve known this man for years, and he was a confirmed ‘realist’ who did not believe in this kind of what he called ‘spiritualistics’—his private name for people like me! But one day when he had a coughing fit in front of my house, I helped his coughing simmer down, and he wondered how I did that, so we made a pact: I would come to his house twice a week to do hands-on healing for him, and in exchange, he would tell me his dreams and visions, and the strange shifts of consciousness he was experiencing. I also had to promise never to let his University colleagues know what we were doing together, because they would certainly brand him a New Age ‘kook.’ I expect I rolled my eyes, but we both promised, and in fact we each followed through on our shared promise until he died several months later.
Nobody, even his wife, ever learned what we did together those many weeks in his study (although it was a hot topic of speculation in the neighborhood!) But it helped him relax and feel positive about what was happening to him, so nobody complained.
As it happened, the dreams he reported to me during those months were typical of dreams reported by people on their deathbeds throughout the ages. They also appear in the lore of indigenous peoples on every continent, and from the wisdom traditions all over the world. What are we to make of this?
In fact, near-death exeriencers who have clinically ‘died’ but then been resuccitated, have reported similar visions, often giving accounts of their experiences that sound remarkably like traditional accounts of Heaven—and amazingly like Jackson’s dream: floating weightlessly through Space; passing through a dark tunnel; emerging into a vast, luminous space, and being greeted by people they have known well.
For those few who have found darkness, their reports are of unbearable loneliness.
For most near-death survivors, however, they later claim to have lost their fears of dying, and their only wish is to be of service to others during the remainder of their lives on Earth.
Evidence continually comes in from people after accidents, who have watched their rescues and resuscitations while hovering above their bodies, and they are able to descibe procedures a cold corpse could not possibly know. This causes us to wonder about the “impossible.” That human consciousness may well exist apart from the body, and that “the one who knows” and the body inhabited by “the one who knows” may not be the same thing. Could this mean that there are two of us in each of us, and that when we die, “something” leaves? And if that is so, what is the “something” that leaves?
What is death, anyway?
From the wisdom traditions of civilizations and tribal cultures all over the planet, come the image of two worlds: an Earth world, and a Spirit world. The mysterious Spirit worlds are where the ancestors reside; where shamans and witches journey to; where dreams and our Guardian Spirits come from; where the ultimate mysteries of Creation exist. This mysterious “place” exists beyond our view until we pass from this world, but it influences our every move during our lives on Earth.
Many modern researchers have been exploring this mysterious realm of what has been termed “Non-local reality,” referring to that ‘all-inclusive intelligence’ that pervades everything in existence, form and formless, alike. It is a kind of ‘knowing’ that exists everywhere and nowhere, and is invisible, immeasurable and ineffable. Without this we would not exist. As water is to the fish swimming in it, this ‘knowing’ is the very medium of our being.
Our culture has tended to perceive the things of this world as separate entities existing in a totally physical space. The old myths of Spirit worlds, unseen intelligences and magic are often considered superstitions of ignorant people.
And Death—well, Death is something to be denied, feared and fought. Especially feared…
Every seven years, the human body renews itself completely down to the last molecule. Each day, some 500 billion skin cells die, and are replaced by the same quantity of new ones. It is the natural fate of cells to die, and millions die every hour of every day of our lives. This is not a tragedy to be avoided. Programmed cell death is crucial for the growth and development of all multi-celled organisms. Death is a habit of the body and, in the context of biological processes, is completely safe.
As a matter of fact, death is a habit of the whole physical world! If we had clairvoyant vision, and could watch the world from above, we might see a constant pulsating of lights as cells, insects, plants, birds and all creatures—including us humans—came and went, were born and died, each cycling in its own way and each in its own span of time.
From above, it would look like a sparkle of sunlight on the moving surface of the ocean—bright, dazzling and alive!
Anthropologists recognize that all living beings eventually lose their vigor and wear out. In order to recover, each thing, at the ending of its season must get reabsorbed into the fundamental energy from which it came until its next season of vital living. The seed quickens in the soil; fertilized eggs grow, cell by cell, in the body of females of every species on the planet. But the eternal ground; the invisible ocean of life; the energetic web of potential—however we wish to describe Ultimate Reality inexpressible in human language—is never snuffed out.
Without the cycles of growth, flowering and decay; without decline and death to set limits, the profligate earth would be overrun by too much life, and within a season, Life would snuff itself out. The physical world balances between the terminating forces of death, and the unlimited creative forces of unborn energies. It is a necessary, purposeful and ultimately benign process. Wherever we look on the planet, life and death are occurring simultaneously.
Why would we ever think that this process applies to everything but us?
Almost every culture and religion in the world tells a version of the Myth of Eternal Return, and each story is a version of the same basic story:
Before we come into physical incarnation, we are the not-yet-born. After birth, we are the living-on-earth, where we reside for a ‘lifetime’ of trial, learning and initiation, which oftentimes involves pain, loss and suffering. At the end of this life-period, our bodies are released back into the ethers and, transformed by Death, we return Home, first resting in an in-between place (called Limbo in the Judeo-Christian traditions; Bardo, meaning ‘in-between place’ in the Tibetan.) In Aramaic, the word for ‘death’ translates as ‘not here—present elsewhere.
After absorbing the lessons of our previous lifetimes, we may return to the Earth plane, and incarnate in a new body for our soul’s next set of teachings. This cycle continues for as many lifetimes as it takes for the soul to accumulate spiritual wisdom, or consciousness of the Divine aspect of physical existence. The Mojaves call this an ‘unending circle.’ In West Africa, the word for ‘reincanation’is the same as that for a vine that spirals around a stalk, each turn twining higher up. Amongst Buddhists, we are on a turning wheel of incarnations, life after life after life…
The doctrine of reincarnation—the transmigration of souls—had been implicit in belief systems all over the globe, including Judaism, Christianity and Mohammedanism until 553 AD, when the Council of Constantinople in a 3–2 vote, declared it anethema, thus silencing formal discussion of the doctrine in Orthodox Christendom for 14 centuries!
While death may be commonplace in our human world—in our country a human being dies about every 18 seconds, adding up to over 2 million deaths a year—that does not make our personal losses any easier to accept. Next to the fear of our own deaths, losing a loved one is probably the single greatest cause of agony in our lives. Loss is the base of all our fears; it is the fear of being alone; of giving over our control and free-falling into the abyss of the unknown.
How could it be that I—me—myself should no longer BE?
Take a breath…
Well, what if this fear of total anihilation, of not being was simply not true, but a misapprehension perpetuated relatively recently in the history of humankind? What if we are more than the particular body we happen to inhabit now? What if some essential part of ourselves is not dependent upon a bodily form on a physical planet? What if our eternal conscious soul survives the death of our bodies—as seeds survive the disintegration of last summer’s flowers—and we re-cycle back in a new season to experience a changed version of ourselves in a new incarnation?
And what if we could recognize that fact now, rather than having to wait until those last moments before our body’s death, that we have not, in fact, left the universe at all?
When I was 11 years old and growing up in Brooklyn, I took a fall roller skating on our street that I believe determined the rest of my life. We kids were playing tag, and reaching for Bobby I tripped and fell on my back; stunned, I suddenly saw the world in a new way. It was as if I was looking down on us from above, and that the whole world was spinning. I was there, but so was my mother and her mother and her mother before her… down to the first bit of living matter in the Universe. And our street extended way out beyond our neighborhood, to the edges of Brooklyn and the Atlantic Ocean and Europe and our planet and the whole Sun and Moon and Stars…
And I felt like I went way back to the first moments in Time before there were people or animals or even an Earth, and then I whooshed past myself still lying in the street with my ball-bearings spinning into unknown futures that contained my own children, and their children… and their children… It was at that very moment that I understood, somehow, that all of Space and Time existed exactly together; that nothing and nobody—even tiny ants—were separate from me and from my friends roller skating on a Brooklyn street, and that everything was connected to everything there was, now and forever! And that I was like spun sugar on a melt-in-the-mouth sugar cone, right now, right here, right everywhere Right NOW that never stopped being NOW…
A moment later I was back in the fray, laughing and skating away from Joey as fast as I could go. But from that day forward, I understood that the world was much vaster than I had imagined; that I and everyone who had ever existed never stopped existing, even after we died.
I got it that Not existing was impossible.
Dag Hammerskjöld, former Secretar General of the United Nations once said,
“In the last analysis, it is our conception of death which decides our answers to all the questions that life puts to us. Hence, the necessity of preparing for it.”
Perhaps the purpose of being born in a physical body on the earth, is to go from experience to experience until we recognize the sacred nature of ourselves and the world we inhabit. If, at Death, we return to our roots in “the Divine”—or whtaever name we call the primordial fundamental unity which is our ultimate home—then life on earth in a human body is a stunning gift, an opportunity not to be missed, a grand adventure.
To the extent that we do not accept the challenge of using life fully, we can be said to be in a state of Hell. Psychically, Hell is the fear of living. It is hatred and anger and envy; it is being dead in life. The fires of Hell exist within ourselves, not in a fiery realm beneath us. We create our own Hells by refusing to accept the offerings of physical existence, as we are all creative artists with life as our canvas. If we do not fully live our lives creatively and mindfully, at death we realize our mistake, and our remorse is our agony.
When a life cycle on Earth is completed, the Soul essentially loses interest in its vessel and begins to let go of its temporary home. As if hearing a summons from its source, the Soul slips out like a snake shedding its old, worn skin, and prepares to leave it behind. This is normal. What the body calls “dying,” the Soul calls “being born,” a transference of energy at the other end of life to the Soul’s true ground of Being. During the dying process, the personal consciousness shifts to the universal consciousness, wherein Time and Space disappear, such that “here” and “now” become eternally the same. Internal and external become One, and the illusion of all separateness is eradicated.
This transformation, which does not entirely require dying to be realized by us, may be thought of in harmonic terms: if life on the Earth plane were at middle C, for example, then the plane we would shift to at death would be up a fifth to G, several octaves higher, as we would vibrate at a higher frequency. Our song sings at a higher pitch, too fast for a vessel as dense as flesh, too fine to be visible to human eyes.
Many indigenous peoples of the world become familiar with the shift to this frequency while on the earthly plane—and call it “ecstatic experience.” Drumming, chanting, dancing, meditation, sensory deprivation, mind-altering plants eaten or smoked—all these techiques help produce relaxed musculature and open-heartedness. The mind is transcended as body, mind and spirit vibrate to a higher frequency, and people bond with the earth and one another ecstatically, experiencing a joy that may well be a foretaste of what comes after Death, in which there is neither fear nor separation nor isolation. Once loosed from the bonds of flesh and ego, we are held in the ineffable love that surrounds us, includes us and IS us.
Our experience, according to indigenous cultures, is ecstatic joy.
I gaze out my window as I write. It is winter here in Vermont, and the trees are bare. Seeds are still sleeping in the mulchy earth, and the geese have flown South to their winter feeding grounds. Soon, the season will shift and buds will form on the forsythia right outside my window. The cardinals , who spent the winter here, appear on the bare branches like jewels, as they do every morning, brilliant red against the overcast gray of the winter day. They will be flitting like bright red jewels, and flirting with the females who will have many bright beauties to choose from—as they did last year, and also the year before that… How wonderful is that?
I look forward to it all.
