“I am a pilgrim, and a stranger, traveling through this wearisome land…”
— Johnny Cash
Sweet Jesus, where do I begin? This could be the longest post in my blog… Five years of my life rushed by in the blink of an eye, like crowded subway cars packed with human drama. By the time I could think about another trip to the lakes, it was more an act of desperation than a vacation. There had been so many trials for me to endure, made infinitely harder by knowing the worst ones were of my own making. I was faced with a choice of completely giving up on my life, or working harder than ever to make it right. As always, I chose the more difficult path. Through the combined, amazing graces of mercy, forgiveness, and flat-out miracles, I had finally reached a point where I could get away from it all without giving it all up – if only for a few days.
I found great comfort in my distress by studying the Catholic gospel, Apocrypha, and mythology. Prayer and moral training gave me a solid basis for determining what was right and wrong, and for making correct decisions. I still felt like I was outside the church, looking in through the stained glass windows, and could only see a little of what was going on inside. Thankfully, however, that was enough. I hoped I could love myself enough someday to gain permission to enter.
After many years of office jobs, confinement, and little meaningful exercise, I was horribly out of shape. I worked in the medical research field, which was about as far from the natural world as a test tube from a uterus. It was there I met David, my uniquely connected friend who bravely but helplessly watched while my life went down in flames. We worked in the same humdrum office at first; then started doing special projects together. With the macabre camaraderie of wartime hospital patients, we discovered we had a lot in common, as he was having his own life disemboweled by a messy divorce. On the happier side, we connected on scholarly levels across the entire landscape of recorded human endeavor: from Yogananda and the Upanishads to Federal Regulations and the Internet. It had been many years since David last went backpacking, so during a particularly stressful time for him, I took him on a pilgrimage to the Bear Lakes that could possibly save both of our souls. For my part, I felt completely ostracized from human society, and needed to reconnect with the natural world, to balance the most unnatural one I had made for myself.
Aside from my self-inflicted problems, my mother passed away since I had last been to my personal holy site. She died from a severe case of lung cancer in the spring of 2001 when she was only 64. By the time it was discovered, it was so bad that she quickly opted for hospice – and her doctor agreed with her. She died fewer than six weeks after her initial diagnosis, and during her last 2 weeks she was practically in a coma from the morphine. So I only had about 3-4 weeks to process the news emotionally and say goodbye.
I knew I would have but a few opportunities to talk with her before she passed on, because I was in an unavoidably busy period of my life. My kids were in private school, for which I needed the income of 2 jobs, and we had just bought a new house. I showed it to my Mom by video because she was too sick to see it in person. I visited her as often as I could, in her little ashtray of a tract house about 30 minutes north of our new home. She had sold the Rusty Bucket Ranch in Lagunitas a few years before; back when none of us kids could afford it. It was a uniquely beautiful piece of property, but difficult to maintain. She’d had painful back surgery, and needed an easier house and property to keep up. She had felt her age for some time, but it was smoking for over 40 years that did her in. She never could quit, and stayed at home more and more; perhaps because she felt ashamed of poisoning herself. Judy and I wouldn’t let her smoke in our homes, or while driving with our kids. She seemed to think this was a rejection of her to some degree; choosing to ignore that her habit was hazardous to the health of her grandchildren. She became a bit of a recluse and mostly sat in her house, enveloped in a vapor of carcinogens. Her unhappiness became so incarnate that if the cancer didn’t eat up her insides, she probably would have done it herself.
Despite all that, my mom and I had always been profoundly close, like two handicapped spirits trapped in the same prison; wanting desperately to communicate but not knowing how. We rarely had long conversations, but our eyes often met anxiously – as if we needed to share something important, but could not. Despite her brave decision to avoid dying while horribly ill from all the toxic chemicals and radiation, I could see in her eyes she was afraid of death. I decided I would try and ease her passage to the next life by having a long talk with her; trying to explain all the certainties I had learned, and the feelings I had about dying. I had always thought dying was as natural as breathing in and breathing out. One rarely finds it an easeful experience, because one gets so attached to one’s body. I hoped that the end result would bring the peace we all search for in our lives but rarely find.
So I prepared a few notes, and drove up to her house alone, and asked the hospice nurse to leave while we had a heart-to-heart talk. I wondered if my message would be rejected, or if she really wanted to hear about her own death and what might happen next. That afternoon I did most of the talking, and surprisingly, my dear mother sat propped up on her nicotine-stained couch and listened intently, as if we switched roles and she was the child. Oh, how I wished I could channel the zeal of an evangelist to testify all that was in my heart! I felt like I said too much, and it was too complicated, but I reproduce here some of what I tried to harvest, in optimism that others might benefit from the winnowing.
~
“This is the question all religions try to answer. You are not your body, because you can dream. You don’t need your body to dream, but you are most intensely YOU when dreaming.
“You are not your thoughts. How are you aware of these thoughts? Who is it that is aware of what you are thinking right now?
“You are that which sees yourself thinking.
“There is a divine consciousness in every physical manifestation of creation – from the tiniest subatomic particle to the largest star in the infinite cosmos. This innate sentience has been referred to as the ‘Christ Consciousness,’ but I like to call it the ‘life force.’ One way to think of this life force is that it came to earth as one man 2,000 years ago; in order to show all humans their divine connection to the origin of all life in the universe. I believe it has come this way many times.
“If you take this life force out of the body, what happens to the body? It disintegrates into the atoms of which it was composed. Those atoms reform into food for other living things, to nourish new bodies for the life force to animate. New life cannot reside in a body without the introduction of the life force. So, it must come from somewhere, and return to somewhere. The source of all life force is the objectified, individualized aspect of the Supreme Being, or ‘God.’
“YOU ARE THE ETERNAL LIFE FORCE THAT ANIMATES YOUR BODY. YOU ARE ETERNAL, CHANGELESS, AND CONSTANT.
“All religions worship this life force. Religion by its very nature is a fabrication of humans, but the underlying truths are absolute. All religions try to describe the ‘afterlife’ in some way, and all consistently identify the life force as a thing that is individualized, such as the soul. They say that this soul will go somewhere after the body dies. Where does the soul go? People whose souls have left their bodies for a period of time and returned often describe a white room, or tunnel with light at the end, through which they are drawn. At the other end are loved ones who have already passed away, waiting in forms that are recognizable – often younger than they were when they died. We can’t examine if these experiences are true, or apply to everyone, because they are nothing more than rare, anecdotal reports of people who have come back to life from death. There is no proof; only the independent consistency of their stories to indicate that it must be real.
“Great persons, male and female, have evolved spiritually to a level where they are cognizant of ‘the other side,’ and have described it for us. They have different names for this place – some call it the ‘astral planes,’ others call it heaven. A useful way to think about it is as different levels of vibration, like notes on a scale. Our souls are drawn to the appropriate oscillation by virtue of vibrational affinity. Some levels are lower, and the souls must stay longer to work their way free of the bonds they have made. Others go to higher levels where the attachment is less. At whatever level our soul finds itself, it will have a shrouded awareness of our last physical manifestation to reflect upon in quiet moments. I believe that we are given the opportunity to recognize the lessons we were supposed to learn during our lifetimes, and if the lessons have not been learned, the soul must go back to learn them absolutely.
“Certain souls, who are more highly evolved than others, are not obliged to return any more. All their lessons have been learned, and they are needed in the astral planes to help others. Some of these; however, are drawn by an altruistic nature to volunteer for a return to physical form, because they know they can help others more that way. These are known as ‘avatars’ – humankind has seen thousands throughout history – and they counterbalance the natural earthbound tendencies of the physical realms. This decision to return is very unselfish and brave, because it is dangerous. Once manifested in a physical body, the soul loses its identity within the maelstrom of the ego/intellect, which is a natural by-product of biological autonomy. This is nothing more than the survival instinct, generated by the primitive, reptilian part of our brain that is capable of sensory awareness of its physical environment. The danger is that the soul may get lost in this necessary alertness.
“So, this biological brain takes over when we are born, and it is a terrible and beautiful thing. Beautiful, because God has given us the grace to realize her metaphysical nature while in the physical plane, which provides objectivity for a love so vast and absolute that it has no frame of reference. This is a vital existence, because it gives us the opportunity to learn our lessons and work out our ‘karma,’ which can only happen while in a physical body. The brain is terrible, however, because this objectivity also provides the biological body with awareness of its own existence, and to reconcile this point of view it identifies more closely with that which its physical senses perceive as ‘real.’
“The soul is always, always waiting, just behind the veil of the physical senses, and at times our wits give us a blurry glimpse of its luminance. Our soul is most often encountered in our dreams, when we are free from our physical bodies. There, the body’s senses are all suppressed, while the soul’s energy plays with the information stored in the brain. Some of our memories, experiences, and personalities naturally get caught up in this psychic fraternity party, which explains why we remember bits and pieces of our dreams when we wake up. What we remember most when the body wakes up are naturally the things that are meaningful to our egos.
“When we wake up from this dream we call ‘life,’ what will we remember? I believe we will remember only the things that are important to the soul: chiefly LOVE. We will, for a time, reflect on all the events of our lives, and with the soul’s eye of love, we will see what we needed to learn from all these experiences. But all that will remain is the love.
“The act of ‘waking up from life’ is nothing more dramatic than walking out a door into the sunlight. There will be no pain, because there will no longer be a physical body to feel pain. There will be no mourning, because the realization that the soul is EVERYTHING allows no perception of loss. There is no regret, because the lessons were learned (or not learned) exactly as they should have been; no more or less. There will be no more longing or loneliness, because the soul will return to the cohesive collusion of all that is. There can be no missing anyone, because there has to be a perception of lack, and time passing, to miss something – and those are relational comparisons that are relevant only from the physical perspective.
“So, all that remains is LOVE.
“You will remember the love given, and the love received. Your soul, being in essence a creation of pure benevolence, will drink deeply of the love that has flowed through your life like a river. The joyful remembrance of this love will be as immense as the ocean to which all rivers flow, where individualized waves arise from, and return to, the source of all affection.
“You will know that I was with you before this life, Mom, and that I chose to be brought into existence through your physical body. This means also that our souls are bound together for eternity, as the stars are attracted to each other by gravity. We are all part of the same stuff: the same energy that absolutely must be eternal, because the universe is eternal. So, the universe itself will prove how much I love you.”
~
When I was done reading we hugged and cried, and shared an experience that was as memorable and exhausting for both of us as the day I was born. It was a birth that brought us together, enabling us to learn many lessons during our imperfect lives, and we knew this would not be ‘goodbye.’ The life forces that participate in the same birth are forever linked. For a mother and child there can be no death – their love will be reborn in the stars, and echoed in the division of every cell.
To anyone reading this, I strongly recommend making a sincere effort to communicate deeply with the ones you love before they die. The result of not doing so will be a lifetime of painful regret for the things that you didn’t even know you wanted to say. I’m so glad that I had the opportunity to talk to my mom in this way before she passed to another existence. There is so much we cannot say to our closest traveling companions when we are alive. It takes a departure to finally arrive.
~
“If the baby in the darkness of its mother’s womb were told: outside there’s a world of light, with high mountains, great seas, undulating plains, beautiful gardens in blossom, brooks, a sky full of stars, and a blazing sun… and you, facing all these marvels, stay enclosed in the darkness… The unborn child, knowing nothing of these marvels, wouldn’t believe any of it. Like us, when we’re facing death. That’s why we’re afraid. How can death be the end of something that doesn’t have a beginning?”
— Bab’Aziz