Esther Hicks and Abraham hit it right on the head. And yet, it can be a very difficult concept to process and embrace—particularly for people who think that they are their bodies.
As I see it, you’re an immortal spirit, living in a mortal body. In your experience of consciousness you’ve lived in millions of bodies (infinite, actually, but that’s too big to fathom). The body dies. You gather your consciousness up from the physical matter, and you step into another life. Shakti enlivens Brahma to create, Vishnu to preserve, and Shiva to destroy. The cycle of life is complete, and the dance goes on. You live, you learn, you grow, you break from the chrysalis, you fly—and you leave. It’s all good. There’s nothing to fear.
But, oddly enough, the fear of death is often the only thing keeping people alive long enough to work through the problems they’ve signed up to learn in their lives. Think about it. If you knew that there was nothing to fear in death, and if you could “get dead” instantly—just leave your body in a heartbeat, without the unpleasant “dying” part—you’d make tracks the first time someone broke your heart. Or the first time you experienced a whopping dose of social shame or embarrassment. If the ego didn’t identify so strongly with the experience of physical life, you’d book at the first hint of pain. My beloved betrayed me? Forget this game. Broken leg? I’m outta here. Broken car? Screw it, I’m not working for six months just to get a new transmission. See ya! We just wouldn’t have developed a desire to fight through the pain and learn from it.
My dad died four times. It was interesting, because each of the first three times he died—and was resuscitated—he had distinct memories of being “stuffed back into his body” by “them damned bastard angels” on the other side. Each time they brought him back, the doctors would tell me to keep him awake, for awhile, and as I sat with him by his ICU bed, holding onto his cold, clammy hand in order to warm it, he’d be grousing loudly that he hadn’t WANTED to get back in his old, sick body, and who the HELL did they think they were to shove him back into it? (I never knew whether he was talking about the angels—or the doctors!)
In vivid detail, he would describe all of the lifesaving measures that doctors had taken to restart his heart, viewing the proceedings indignantly from, “somewhere over their heads.” He’d complain about how effing much it had hurt, and how damned tired he was of the whole damned game. And then, eventually, a nurse would come in and take his vitals, and she’d give me the little nod that let me know that he was stable, and she’d tell my dad, “Try to get some sleep now.” And he’d doze off, his sleep fitful, and I’d sit there with my fingers resting on his pulse, wondering why he kept creating this and what he needed to learn, even as I was pondering my own lessons through my own involvement in this small, personal drama.
Each time he died and came back, when he woke up from that first sleep he’d seem embarrassed for having babbled on about being able to remember what had happened while he was dead. Almost like he’d gone on a bender and had been busted, too drunk to edit his words, blathering about the girl he had a crush on. But I’d lived in the same household he had, and I knew that it was because he had been caught in the pathology of mental illness for too long, living with my schizophrenic mother.
At the time, society hadn’t quite recognized mental illness as an illness, much less considered the possibility that folks who heard voices just might be split into two categories; those who could discern between physical reality and all the other stuff, and those who couldn’t. (Or as one of my clairvoyant teachers used to say, “The difference between a psychic and a psychotic is a functional grounding cord.”) My dad had seen how my mother had been treated by the medical community; the last thing he wanted was to be painted with the same brush. He clung to normalcy like a koala to a eucalyptus branch.
But he knew that what he’d experienced had been real, and being psychic, I knew it as well. I hadn’t had his front-row seat, mind you; I’d watched clairvoyantly from the ICU waiting room. But I knew. And he knew that I knew. And I knew that he knew that I knew, so, you know…
So there was this unspoken, sacred secret held between us, with me silently telling him, “You’re not crazy, Pop!” and him silently telling me, “I do NOT want to talk about it.”
The night he finally died (for real), I’d been together with my elder sister. We’d been preparing for a road trip to Janesville, Wisconsin, to see Miracle; the white Buffalo calf that had just been born. As it turned out, Miracle was the first of many non-albino, White Buffalo calves to be born in the years to come, but later, as I thought about it on the long drive home, I found the timing of the sacred calf’s birth and my dad’s surprise death…kind of interesting. In any case, I got a call from my aunt saying that my dad, who’d already been in the hospital with his semi-annual case of pneumonia, had had a coughing spasm, burst a thoracic aortic aneurysm, and was heading into surgery.
That last part surprised me, in part because I knew that the fatality rate for a burst aortic aneurysm is about 80%. If he hadn’t already been in a hospital, he would have died within minutes. And I also knew that he had a signed, Do Not Resuscitate order on record. But apparently his nurse, who was also his friend, had acted instinctively to save his life, and had shoved a permission slip for surgery in front of him. She just said, “Sign this,” as he’d begun to hemorrhage, and when he’d obeyed, he’d voided the DNR.
I wondered why it had fallen out like that. Was he intending to hang around? At this point, I’d been studying to focus my ability to read clairvoyantly from a neutral perspective for some time, and having had some experience with his repeated sojourns into death, I sat down and “looked” at him psychically before I judged the situation to be as dire as it sounded. But unlike his previous attempts to leave his body, this time, I saw that he had several Akashic Record keepers surrounding him, helping him to retrieve and catalog his life information. They’re spiritual “specialists.” You only see these guys show up when someone is truly planning to leave the game—to die for real. So I called my siblings and said, “He means it this time, guys. If you want to see dad before he dies, you’d better get moving.”
I lived in closest proximity to my father, and I visited him the most often. I knew that the time it would take to drive from my home to where my dad was, in Arkansas, would be about the same as the ordeal of maneuvering through airports and car rentals. So my sister and I jumped in my car, which (interesting coincidence, eh?) had been already prepped for a road trip, and took off.
I’ll admit that I found myself dallying, as I drove, feeling a myriad of strong, deep feelings, and delaying a bit as I tried to sort through them. I was working to remain focused on the truth as I knew it; that there is no death; only a change of state, from incarnate, or “embodied” to disincarnate, or “pure spirit.” I was also keeping a clairvoyant “eye” on my dad as we drove, which didn’t actually make it any easier. To me as spirit, this was one type of event. A transition. A graduation, even; and although there was sadness that he would be leaving his body, to me as spirit, it was no more a separation than when he’d moved from Northern Illinois back down to Arkansas, after my mother had died. (C’mon–I’m clairvoyant. He wouldn’t be out of touch. I talk to dead people all of the time.)
But to my body, this was a fairly dramatic—fairly traumatic—event, not just because bodies feel the loss of physical contact with a loved one, but because in the natural order of things, the death of a parent, in particular, presages one’s own impending demise. So in addition to the fear of loss, I’ll admit that my body was again feeling the same cold, survival anxiety that had been stimulated during his prior three deaths—to the tenth power.
And I knew that if I wanted to grow, to learn from my father’s final lesson, that I couldn’t just push down the feelings. Yet, why would anyone want to? The entire purpose of life is to feel; to experience the illusion of a reality that is able to perceive things like fear, and loss, and sorrow—and love, joy, and exhilaration, too. Disincarnate Spirit, by its very nature, doesn’t experience the highs and lows that infuse physical life. How can it? After all, Spirit is a vast expanse of Oneness, and most intense human emotions arise either from a response to an event of poignant transience or to one playing out some kind of limitation.
And I’m not just speaking of unpleasant events; a sunrise or sunset evokes a rich feeling akin to passion because it is so transient—and so ephemeral. It will occur once, and only once; and not only is it fleeting, you will never see the indescribable beauty of the same sunset ever again. Since Spirit feels neither transience nor limitation, we incarnate—we literally become encased in human flesh—explicitly to gain access to those states, in order to feel that rush of deep, emotional sensation, and to learn to master the expression of it.
It’s the same reason people go on roller-coaster rides; to feel the exhilarating rush stimulated by the illusion of danger. The ride itself is perfectly safe—you wouldn’t get many repeat customers if it wasn’t—but the unexpected shock of drops and shifts at high speed makes it feel dangerous, and so you get to feel the physical response to a burst of adrenalin and terror, while simultaneously having the ability to laugh off the fear and feel a flood of expansive relief when the ride brings you safely back to the gate.
That’s what human life is like. You signed up for this ride. You wanted to feel all of these extreme emotions. Having lived countless lives before this one, you thought that it sounded exciting. You thought that maybe you could learn something new from it. And just like the metaphor of the roller-coaster ride, you’re actually in no danger. You will come back to the gate, at some point, and step out of the car—probably with a big smile on your face as you turn to chat with your fellow riders to compare experiences, and to greet the friends who are waiting for you on the platform.
And you even handed yourself a twist. When you got in line for this ride, the immortal part of you that’s spirit knew that it can’t actually be killed. You, as spirit, can’t even be injured. But to make the ride more exciting, the minute you stepped into the car and sat down, you allowed yourself to forget that very important detail. In fact, to make it even more exciting, you began to forget that you’re really Spirit. You let yourself begin to identify with the “car” that you created to be your vehicle on this wild ride.
In other words, you began to think that you are your body.
And it’s understandable. After all, you created it from scratch. You brokered a contract with a couple of folks who were already incarnate (your parents) to invite you in to the park, worked with your mother to pop out the first iteration of your body and to have her teach you the rules of the society into which you were born. Then, using the materials you acquired from life on the planet (what we generally call “food”), you focused your energy on creating your body completely on your own. By the time you were seven years old, you were wearing Body: Version 2.
Designing the perfect “car” for the “ride” takes some doing too. You had to imbue a bit of your Spiritual consciousness into the body so that it would have the wisdom to care for itself. Things like remembering to breathe, knowing how to digest food and what to do with the raw materials it acquired; you know—how to make a blood cell and how to know where to put it.
You also installed this thing called, “an ego,” so that your body would see itself as unique and separate from all of the other bodies; in part, so that you could interact with “other people” to learn new things and enjoy life, but also so that it would have a healthy self-preservation instinct. Without that; without a healthy fear of death; you might jump ship before the ride was over. Particularly if you selected an intense experience this time around. So you’re traveling through this theme park in an exquisite, self-repairing, fully conscious vehicle—your unique body, which has been programmed to be wary of death.
(That’s not written in stone, by the way; some folks we laughingly call “Overachievers.” They’re Spirits who wanted to really ramp up the experience, and they might handicap themselves in the game by coming in with a body that has significant health issues. My mother’s broken psychic “off” switch played into my father’s desire for growth, and visa-versa, with amazing compatibility—for all that their relationship looked like a flaming pu-pu platter, on wheels, from the outside.)
So here I was, driving down for my dad’s graduation party. Yet even as my body was freaking out, as spirit, I was pretty intrigued. I kept asking myself, “What’s changed?” My dad had tried to leave three times already, and had gotten “stuffed back into his body” three times. Three times! That’s…a pretty dramatic spiritual event. When I read the energy of his apparent inability to croak, and when I’d asked my clairvoyant teachers to read it, too, the three perspectives had jibed; apparently my father had incarnated with the bad “habit” of checking out of his current life before he’d learned the lessons he’d come in to learn. This life, he’d asked for spiritual help. He’d contracted with God, and a number of specialized beings I was told to call “Cosmic Cops,” to make sure that he didn’t leave his body before he’d learned the lessons for which he’d signed up, this time around.
So when he’d tried to sneak out, they’d obligingly stuffed him back into his body, as per their agreement. Three times.
I’d already seen that much; it was finally being able to see the “why” that was surprising.
He’d had a pretty hard life, my dad. His people were poor, and he was six when the Depression hit America. He quit school at eight to start working in the fields for a nickel or less a day. The area had already been suffering a catastrophic series of droughts that lasted through the entire decade of the 30’s (Remember the Dustbowl?) There was little food to be found. The entire country felt the loss of the crops that failed, but in the afflicted areas, folks were dying of pellagra—B3, tryptophan, and niacin deficiency. He and his own father hunted for their family’s food. He’d been hunting since he was six, and he once told me that they’d made it through one winter with just two bullets between them, because they couldn’t afford to buy more.
That’s when he’d learned to trap. It wasn’t easy; nature, too, was feeling the pinch of the drought. But he’d trap possums, squirrels, raccoon, rabbit, turtles, frogs, river clams, rattlesnakes…ducks and geese, when you could net them. Doves, sometimes. He’d mentioned one lucky day when he’d happened upon a rail-thin deer with a broken leg. Not a lot of meat, but it still had bones. River water and bones meant soup. Brains and eyeballs and intestines were protein. Basically, if he could trap it and drag it home, they’d eat it.
My dad was ten years old when his own father died of a massive stroke. He hadn’t died right away, and there was no money for a doctor, even if one could have been found. They just set him up in bed, and did what they could to make him comfortable, watching over him until he died. And my father became the provider in the household. At ten.
The drought finally broke in 1939. For rural folk, of course, recovery wasn’t instantaneous. It took a few seasons for farmers to get back on their feet after the rains came, but then, for a a little while, life seemed to ease up a bit. Until December 7th of 1941, of course, when Pearl Harbor ushered the United States into WWII. Joining up gave my dad something unexpectedly wonderful, for a few weeks—a warm, clean bed in a barracks, and three meals a day. Nothing fancy, but it was food! He became a corporal in an engineering battalion; they’d build bridges overnight, and the Allies would rush to get their forces across at first light, before the Germans could fly over and bomb the bridges to smithereens.
He didn’t talk much about any of this; just a few sentences here and there. Like hunkering down with one of his pals from home in a break from the shooting, and turning to pass his buddy a cigarette. His friend had looked up with a smile, reaching out for the smoke—just as something whizzed by my dad’s shoulder. A small, red spot blossomed between the kid’s eyes. “And just like that,” my dad said, tapping my forehead with his fingertip. “He was dead.”
His friend had been shot in the head, a foot from my father’s outstretched hand. During a lull in the fighting.
(How’s your body doing right now? Is it feeling its mortality? You might want to start breathing and grounding. You might want to get your crown chakra up to gold. You might also want to remember that you are not your body. You’re a spirit inhabiting a body, and moreover, this is not your story. This didn’t happen to you. Interesting, isn’t it? How easily bodies fall into sympathetic terror?)
Then, believe it or not, things managed to get even worse. Ol’ dad was moved to the front lines during the Battle of the Ardennes; known to most folks as the Battle of the Bulge. It was the last major German offensive on the Western Front; a (luckily) unsuccessful attempt to push the Allies back from German territory. My father got trapped in the “bulge” behind enemy lines, and was captured by the Germans while trying to steal a halftrack to get back to the Allied forces. It was right around Christmas Eve.
And the Germans? Well, they didn’t like the fact that my father had a German last name; they claimed that he was fighting on the wrong side. That was dangerous ground. “Was he really an American?” they wanted to know. “Or a German deserter?” Or even a spy? POWs couldn’t be killed, you see, but deserters were summarily shot. Spies…well, let’s just say that you didn’t want to be a spy.
They sweated him for awhile, but all he would tell them was his name, rank, and serial number. My father told me that they talked amongst themselves a lot, right in front of him—in German—glancing back at him from time to time. Luckily, my dad didn’t speak German, and our guess was that he didn’t react at all to something heinous that was being said. Eventually, they shrugged and threw him in with the other men. To starve.
Like I said; my dad didn’t want to talk much about that time, but I do know that when the Allied forces freed him from the POW camp, he’d weighed less than eighty pounds. He was six feet tall and 180 pounds when they captured him. Clearly, he kept creating a repeating theme in his life: there was no food. The men would dig worms from the frozen ground, and make soup from them in rations tins. “At least it was hot,” he told me.
The man I knew as my father was never in robust health. Not surprising, considering his history before I came on the scene, but after he met my extremely Catholic mother and popped out four kids, I’m sure that he could have added, “Working too much and being perennially sleep deprived,” to the list of factors that influenced his poor health. He only had a second-grade education; high-paying jobs were hard to come by. So he worked several jobs at a time; sometimes three or four simultaneously.
He’d started smoking when he was eight—corn silk, mostly; but he’d smoke the scrap from the locally grown tobacco—and the habit became a crutch, then an addiction. He’d smoke while he was driving home at 3 in the morning, in order to stay awake. He’d light another one when he had to get up to go to his day job, at 5:30am. At the time, I didn’t realize how unusual this was, but I knew how seldom he was home, and I clearly recall the dismay I felt when he had his first major heart attack—of eight!–when he was thirty. (The inevitable quadruple bypass didn’t come until he was in his 60’s.) The emphysema he developed on the job from compounding pharmaceutical chemicals in pre-OSHA days (no masks; no real ventilation; and cleaning out the compounding tanks with bleach sprayers while standing inside the tank) didn’t make his breathing any easier.
I know. He seems like the Universe’s whipping boy, right? Take a few deep breaths. Re-ground your body. Believe it or not, this is all leading to something. Hang in there.
As a child in Arkansas, nothing was ever wasted in his household. If you managed to get some work weeding the garden of the wealthy lady down the road, and got paid with a handful of spindly carrots, you considered it a good day’s work, and the roots went into the stew pot, greens, grit, and all. Even after he’d come North and had gotten a few bucks in his pocket, he’d fabricate makeshift items around the house, rather than buy them. Discarded plastic buckets he turned into lampshades. Trashed strapping that was used to secure boxes to the shipping pallets where he worked, he respun into rope. He’d wear a pair of shoes until he couldn’t repair the soles any more.
A true child of the Depression, raised with a mindset of lack, his motto was, “Use it up, wear it out, make do, or do without.” As I was growing up, he seldom bought a thing for himself, and he had a hard time receiving—or using—gifts. Cleaning out his closet after his death, I found the half-dozen pair of plush lambskin slippers I’d gotten him as Christmas gifts over the years, still in the boxes, unworn. He’d been saving them, and wearing threadbare scuffs.
It’s amazing how many times in life we only move towards growth from a place of pain, isn’t it? And yet it’s true.
He was on life support, in a coma, by the time we reached the hospital. And yeah; his Akashic Record Keepers were still there, busily withdrawing his energy from his body, and they joined me in my vigil as I tried to clear off the external energy that seemed to be keeping him from taking his next step. And standing at his bedside, trying to field the chaotic energy of my siblings, and the distressed emotions of the hospital staff, who were upset because they loved my dad, and my own welter of emotions, I finally saw what had shifted. What final, enormous lesson he’d learned, that let him feel that he was now free to leave.
He’d given himself a gift.
Six months earlier, he’d purchased a mini-pickup truck, a sparkling mocha brown. It had a radio, and a tape player, air conditioning, and everything—he’d even splurged for a pale tan, locking, cap. He sent me pictures of his new toy from a dozen angles. He drove that thing everywhere, chatting with the ladies at the VFW, tooling over to the grocery store, the hardware store, and from there, over to his half-brother’s place. Even hauling an oxygen tank around, he’d scrounge excuses to drive around the county in his Brand New Truck.
I think it was the first thing in his life that he bought for himself that he didn’t need. He’d just wanted it. And he’d saved up enough money from Social Security and disability that, with his trade-in, he’d bought it outright, cash on the barrel head. He couldn’t have been prouder if he’d built the thing himself. He’d seemed more alive than I’d ever seen him. Joyful, even. He’d driven that thing around, everywhere he could think of, for six solid months.
And then he had, once again, stepped back to the edge of death. Only this time, “them damned bastard angels,” who’d held him fast for so long, had stepped aside, and were preparing to let him go.
I was profoundly moved.
My sisters and I had been keeping vigil, standing to either side of his bed. Each of them had a hand on one of his. But I’d spent years honing my clairvoyant and healing abilities, and learning to how maintain healthy boundaries. I could easily identify when someone was accessing my energy system or violating my space, and because of that, I could tell right away that neither of them intended to let him go. In spite of the fact that his organs were failing and his body was shutting down, they had linked their energies together, and had roped my body’s energy into the mix as well, and they were keeping him alive with our three linked body energies. It was instinctive, I think; the bodies of family members come from the same genetic source; they’re similar in vibration. In essence, our bodies were freaking out, and keeping his body alive.
But I knew that he didn’t want to be kept alive. Every time that he’d died, he’d made me promise to “just let him go” at the first available opportunity. He was sick, yes; but mostly he was tired. He’d loaded his plate with every flavor of loss, lack, fear, and pain he could find—every energetic handicap he could imagine—in order to make his final decision to choose to give to himself, for once, just because he wanted to—all the sweeter. And, shockingly, I could see that he’d cleared the last hurdle. This time he had a green light to make the journey home—and he wanted to go out on a high note.
I also knew that my sisters had no idea what they were doing, or how hard they were making it for him to leave. I murmured, “I’ll be back,” to them, and left the room.
I sought out the hospital’s bare, little chapel, which was empty, and dropped into a light meditation, quickly cleaning my siblings out of my space. I cleaned them off of my body, disconnected their cords, and spent a few minutes running my energy and reassuring my own body that just because dad was going home, it didn’t mean that we had to. It took awhile—it was one of the most emotionally volatile situations I’d ever been in!–but she finally calmed down enough that we were able to go more deeply into trance, and look at the game, and the players, from neutral.
My sisters were clearly in fear and pain, and I asked for help to give them energy healings. Then I called on one of my favorite teachers, Jesus, and asked him if he could help my father take his next step. I was very careful not to interject my desires into the space, but just asked JC if he could help my dad do what he wanted to do.
And in my mind’s eye, I saw a burst of bright white light open up at the head of my father’s bed. Several very large, very powerful beings stepped through the curtain of light. Four moved to stand at the corners of the room; four more stood a couple of feet from the corners of his bed, holding open a space of blazingly pure light. I couldn’t see my sisters anymore; they were obscured completely by the light. But I could tell that they were no longer influencing my father’s body, or his decisions.
Then JC stepped out into the open space, and met my eyes with a smile. He reached out and took my father’s hand, and my father sat up out of his body. He set his body aside with a strangely casual gesture. It almost looked like he was pushing back the bedclothes.
I’ll never forget the look on his face. He looked from JC’s face, to the guardians holding the space, and then to mine, looking absolutely baffled. I started to laugh, and realized that there were tears rolling down my cheeks, even as I found his expression so funny.
“It’s real,” he said to me, astonished. “All of the psychic bullshit you’ve been talking about all of these years. It’s real!”
That made me laugh even harder, but even as the tears continued to flow, it was the sweetest moment of my life. “Yeah, papa, it is,” I told him, speaking soul to soul. “And you can go now. You did good, dad! You really did! I love you!”
He looked at me for another long moment, and I felt a wave of deep love coming from him, and maybe even a little gratitude. My heart felt light, and I felt so happy for him. He’d worked so very hard in this life; it was high time he got to lay his burdens down.
He turned slowly back to JC, who helped him to stand, and then, still holding JC’s hand, the two passed back through the shimmering veil of light. His Akashic Records keepers followed, and two-by-two, the guardians also passed through, withdrawing the radiance behind themselves.
Bemused, I stood up and brushed the tears from my face. I sniffled, took a deep breath, and headed back towards the room where I’d left my sisters, only to be met by my younger sister, racing towards me down the hall.
“He flatlined!” she cried, clearly distraught; but I could only smile with relief and say, “I know.”
His was a powerful, intense life—and yet completely unremarkable, from the outside. But the lessons he took from his life, and the lessons I learned from him about persistence, integrity, and honor, and a hundred other things, from making whistles out of willow-twigs, to framing kites from green branches and grocery bags—were rich and deeply valuable. As Spirit, he’d taken on a tremendous class load, and he hadn’t allowed himself to leave until he’d learned the last one—self love. And perhaps too, a long-awaited glimpse into the spiritual reality he’d so long eschewed.
And it sounds weird, I know, but in the moments surrounding his passing, I’d never felt closer to the man, more seen by him, more appreciated, or more understood, in my life. That, too, was a loving gift he gave me.
“Because we know the whole picture, we grieve not a moment for any of you.”
I get it, Abraham. Thanks, Esther! Thanks, Jerry! And thanks, Dad. I love you.