CHAPTER TENWho Are We and Why Do We Get Sick?
Jeannie was a 32-year-old mother of twin 3-year-old daughters when she was diagnosed with inflammatory breast cancer. One of the most optimistic, hopeful people I've ever met, she taught me a lot about seeking out the best care for the body while honoring the needs of the soul.
Despite aggressive chemotherapy, a stringent macrobiotic diet, acupuncture treatment, regular yoga and meditation practice, tremendous support, and a great deal of prayer, Jeannie's cancer spread like wildfire. She is one of the many bright, loving people we know who are important reminders that when our time comes to die—no matter how loving, supported, and emotionally healed we are—our physical vehicles will return to dust so that our souls can be born once again. Jeannie's deep conviction that her physical body was only the house for her soul allowed her to approach death with a peaceful wisdom beyond her years.
Jeannie wrote each of her children a letter to be opened every year on their birthday, an idea that had originated with one of the first cancer patients I ever had the chance to work with. As I read some of the letters, I had the uncanny feeling that she actually knew her daughters at each age, and truly understood their hopes and fears. The letters carried with them the certainty that Jeannie would continue to be there for her children long after her body had passed away. She also taped stories for them about her own childhood and the challenges of growing up. She spoke of her parents and what she'd learned from them, about marrying their father, and how excited everyone had been at their births. She spoke, too, about her struggle with cancer and the tremendous grief she felt when she knew she'd have to leave them. She would miss their ball games and dances, their sore throats and report cards, their first periods, their weddings and the birth of their children. But, if her children remembered her, she promised she would be there in spirit for them.
An old Hasidic tale tells how the angels weep when a soul enters a physical body at birth and how they rejoice when it returns to the heavenly realms at death. This is a very different way of looking at life, isn't it? We usually think of our lives as straight lines beginning with birth and ending at death—the longer the line the better. In Native American tradition, in contrast, life is thought of as a circle. Whether the circle is small or large, death marks its completion rather than its destruction. Patients such as Jeannie helped me see death as part of the wholeness of life. Her death might have seemed premature to others, but she was able to see her life as complete.
Because Western culture worships youth and fitness, stories like Jeannie's may seem troublesome. She was so positive, so healed. Why did she become ill, and why did she die? There is an ancient story that I always think of when I ask myself those questions:
Before Siddharta Gautama became the Buddha, he was a young prince supplied with every conceivable luxury. His father had gone to great lengths to keep him inside the palace, protected from exposure to suffering. One day the curious prince demanded that his charioteer take him into the city. Spying a sick person, he inquired, “What is that?” His charioteer explained that all human flesh was heir to illness. Next he asked about a very old man, hobbling with a cane. Once again, the charioteer explained that all flesh had to age. Finally, Siddharta saw a corpse burning on a funeral pyre. Stunned, he asked whether that would happen to him and his family as well. Once again, the charioteer pointed out the impermanence of the human body.
The future Buddha was so distressed that he left the palace and took up the life of a renunciate holy man, vowing to find an end to suffering. The method that the Buddha eventually taught, following his enlightenment, did not obliterate sickness, old age, or death. Neither was it about using the power of your mind to manifest wealth or to win friends and influence people. Liberation was not about the body or about filling our endless desires. It was about attaining a state of peace, joy, wisdom, and compassion that was not dependent on any outside condition.
The Buddha's message is as powerful today as it was 2,500 years ago. But we have to have the ears to hear it. Perhaps the saddest misunderstanding of the power of the mind to heal is the twisting of the Buddha's message. Rather than transcending suffering, which means that we must learn and grow from it, the “New Age” message is that we can eliminate it. Just think right and you can cure illness, prevent aging, and possibly even live in your current body for hundreds of years, some New Agers offer. Perhaps at death you can even ascend, leaving a little pile of hair and fingernails. A few mystics have done just that, but by far, the greater majority have died of cancer and other diseases, often at young ages. Can we reasonably assume that these great masters were psychological basket cases or spiritual failures? The Buddha himself died of food poisoning, but not before explaining to the cook that his time here was done and he needed a doorway out of his body!
I once spoke at a health-care conference with several notable experts on body/mind and spirit. One of them tried to convince the audience that spiritual awakening is a sure-fire cure for illness. I could feel my blood start to boil as he went on and on about spirituality and perfect health.
Although a somewhat shy person, I stood up and challenged the speaker who, to me, represented a subtle, dangerous type of New Age Gestapo member. I explained that he was unleashing terror on people, giving them the impression that illness is—if not the result of the wages of sin—at least the badge of the unenlightened. I pointed out that all the mystics and spiritual teachers were dead, many of cancer. Upon hearing this protestation, the entire audience sprang to their feet and gave me a standing ovation! When the conference was over, the speaker I had challenged sought out Miron and me. His last attempt to uphold his dangerous thesis was that perhaps the saints I had cited really weren't enlightened after all!
You see, when we make perfect bodies the focus of our lives, we will inevitably be very disappointed. While we need to do what we can both to stay well and to cure our illnesses when possible, a total healing is not always our destiny. Miron and I have heard dozens of accounts of people's near-death experiences (NDE's) that speak to the question, “Why does illness occur?” One woman told us that during her NDE following a serious car crash, the Great Being of Light had offered her three choices: continue into the Light, return to earth with minor injuries, or return in a vegetative state. I was shocked by the last choice, but the woman explained that it wouldn't have been a hard choice to make had it been the right choice. After all, while on the Other Side, our earthly lives seem as short as a dream. The Being of Light showed this woman a life review of all the people she loved, with and without her being in a vegetative state. When it was clear that the vegetative state would not have occasioned any particular growth for anyone, she chose to return with minor injuries.
Betty Eadie, in her best-selling book, Embraced by the Light, recounts a fascinating insight that the Being of Light gave her. At one point, the heavens seemed to scroll back, and she was able to look down at the earth. She saw a homeless man and instantly “knew” that he had chosen this particular role in order to teach compassion to the wealthy psychiatrist whose office was down the block. Too often we've been taught to think that poverty or illness is a divine punishment, or at least our “bad karma” returning to us! Perhaps, as Betty Eadie and countless others have experienced, some life events are actually soul contracts that we agreed to for our own or someone else's benefit. That puts an entirely different twist on the question of why a beautiful, caring young mother such as Jeannie would get sick, doesn't it?
Think about Jeannie's story for a moment. Now, think about someone you know who died young or who had or has a serious illness. Can you imagine that their illness may in fact be a gift, an act of service, that helps other people toward a more compassionate awareness?
Physician Raymond Moody was one of the first people to write about the NDE. When his classic book, Life after Life, was published in 1978, very few people had even heard of NDE's, although reports of such events exist in the literature of every culture. In the years that have passed since Moody brought the phenomenon to public attention, the term near-death experience has become a household phrase.
With the publication of Heading Toward Omega: The Meaning of the Near-Death Experience, psychologist Kenneth Ring ushered in a scientific era in the study of mystical states. Ring's detailed questionnaires allowed him to map several phases of the NDE. Not every person experiences each phase, but a small percentage report having an entire, or core, near-death experience. The first phase is marked by a transcendent feeling of peace. The only words I can summon to describe my own experience of this phenomenon comprise the biblical phrase, “The peace that passeth understanding.” The person then has the feeling of lifting up out of their body. Some people experience leaving through a hole in the top of their head, a location that corresponds to the crown, or seventh chakra, of the energy body.
People often comment that looking down at their bodies from a perspective that we are totally unused to is most unnerving. In fact, it is sometimes hard to recognize the body beneath them as their own. Rather than feeling bad about their dying body, most people report a curious detachment from it. We have heard it described as the husk of a seed that has sprouted or the clothes taken off at the end of the day. People at this stage often describe scenes of physicians attempting to resuscitate them. They may also have a thought of family, for example, and find themselves instantly in another locale, observing the person they were thinking about. Remarkably, it's not that unusual for a family member to see the apparition of a dying loved one as it makes its final rounds.
The next phase of the NDE is marked by very rapid movement. The most common description is that of hurtling through a dark tunnel. Sometime during this process, other beings who may be described as dead relatives, angels, helpers, or guides arrive to assist the soul in its journey.
At the end of the tunnel comes a meeting with a Divine Light that emanates perfect love and deep acceptance. This Light is alternately described as God, Jesus, an angel, or a Supreme Being of Light. The experience of Divine Light, which I have been graced with on four separate occasions, is inexplicable. We simply have no words for it. To say the experience is pure love, absolute forgiveness, and incomprehensible wisdom is a very pale facsimile. Most people who have this experience simply don't want it to end. It is the most beautiful, blissful state imaginable. People leave it very grudgingly, either because they are informed at this point that it isn't yet time for them to die, or because they are given a choice about whether to continue further into the experience or return to their bodies.
Almost everyone we've ever talked to about their NDE said that they did not want to return to life on earth. It's too hard here, too far from the love that our soul recognizes as home. Nonetheless, people who make the choice to return usually do so for one of two reasons. The most common is a commitment to raising their children. The second is a strong knowing that their life has a specific purpose that has not yet been fulfilled.
A friend of ours who had tried to commit suicide as a teenager was not given a choice, but a reprimand. She was told that life was sacred, a great opportunity, and to take this life was to deny our part in God's plan. When she complained bitterly that no one loved her, listing the shortcomings of her parents, the Being of Light told her with great tenderness that she would have to learn to love herself, that she could never feel the love of another person until she truly loved herself.
Shortly after we heard about this incident, we met another woman who had been so abused that she had tried to kill herself at the age of seven by sledding downhill headfirst into a cement bench. Her experience was similar—she was told quite sternly, and yet with total love, to return to her body and to learn to love herself.
People who have NDE's that result from suicides rarely try to take their lives again. Often, they become explicitly aware of the value of all the trials, obstacles, and even horrors of their lives-how every trauma and disappointment had the potential of contributing to their (or other people's) wisdom and capacity to love. They've gotten the message that life is a privilege.
The Buddhists say that if there was an ocean the size of the Universe, with a wooden hoop floating on its surface, getting a human birth would be about as likely as a lone turtle swimming in that endless sea, sticking his head up through the wooden ring. It may seem trite, but life really is a gift and a privilege.
Interestingly enough, about a third of all people who have an NDE also experience a life review. However, this life review does not consist of the familiar sense of one's life rushing in front of one's eyes that some people describe when they have a brush with death (but don't actually leave their bodies). Instead, the Supreme Being of Light conducts the review, during which all of life seems to appear at once, like a hologram. Rather than reviewing the events of life through one's own eyes, the review consists of evaluating one's relationships through the eyes of the people you actually related to. If you caused pain for another person, you feel that pain. If you brought joy or encouragement to someone, you feel that, too.
Many people have told us that the life review was the most difficult experience they have ever had, and also the most important. We are ultimately responsible for all our actions. The problem is not one of God forgiving us. As one woman said, that's a given. The real question is, can you forgive yourself when you understand the depths of your own lovelessness. Time and time again, we've been told that the lesson of the NDE is one of love. We take human birth in order to learn about giving and receiving love, and in the process, we become wiser and more creative. We are like growing edges of the Divine Mind, developing the love and wisdom to become part of the co-creative process through which the Universe expands.
Some Christian fundamentalists once presented us with a magazine that described how Satan was responsible for the NDE. After all, the article reasoned, Lucifer is a fallen angel whose name means light. The article stated that the devil is trying to trick us into believing that we are loved in spite of our mistakes. If we believe him, we may slack off in our efforts to improve ourselves, and fare poorly on Judgment Day.
I tried to explain to these fundamentalists that Jesus had specified how we could evaluate the truth of various teachers and experiences. He told us to look at their results—“by their fruits ye shall know them.” Psychologist Kenneth Ring has researched the effects that NDE's have on people, and their fruits are very good indeed. People who have NDE's do believe that God has forgiven them for their ignorant actions, but that doesn't mean that they become apathetic when it comes to displaying human kindness. In fact, compassion and responsibility are much enhanced.
There have been several reports concerning hardened criminals who had NDE's and were instantly reformed, more interested in helping others than in serving their own needs. Whether you believe in Satan or not, how can such a positive change be the result of anything evil? How can we go wrong with respect, benevolence, and the urge to listen for the voice of God—doing the Divine will rather than our own?
People whose NDE's continue beyond the life review are sometimes given a mini-tour of the Other Side. What they see is varied. Many have reported “lost souls” drifting through a gray mist. These souls apparently do not know that they are dead. A woman we met who had an NDE as a child asked the Being of Light about these souls. He pointed out that there were angels all around them, and if they asked for help, the angels would take them to the Light. Help could not be given unless asked for, however, since human beings have free will.
Another woman reported seeing people in various “hell states.” These hells, she realized, were projections of their own fears. As soon as they either recognized that, or asked for aid, they could move on. This latter experience is very reminiscent of Tibetan Buddhist teachings on the bardo states.
According to this philosophy, after we have gone through the light experience, the soul then proceeds through a variety of intermediate (bardo) states between death and rebirth, either on earth or in some other realm. As we move through these bardos, we are met with the projections of our own minds. In one bardo that seems like an apt description of a fundamentalist hell, our fears seem like wrathful deities (devils) attacking us. Our doubts assault us. Our ignorance returns to us. At any stage we can “wake up” and find ourselves back in the Light. Should we do that, we realize the true power of our minds to heal.
Once awakened to the true power of the mind, we are “enlightened,” awakened to who we really are. We can then apparently choose to come back to earth to help others or continue on into other realms. In the Tibetan tradition, the homeless man of whom Betty Eadie spoke would be recognized as a Bodhisattva, a person who returns not because of his own needs, but to help others. The angels cry as much at the birth of a Bodhisattva as they do for the rest of us. Every soul, no matter how enlightened, forgets the Love from which it springs in order to play its role here on earth.