The nun walks slowly in the aisles.
Children stare at their palms, a finger
tracing the lines. She bends from side to side.
“It stands for mortal,” she says. “It is a sign
from God that you will die.”
From the windows, white row houses step
down to the sea. The streets are shadowless, supine.
The ones who have not yet found it raise
their hands. She shows them the murmurs
from the bed, the last sound.
No one is afraid. Thin strips of lawn
inscribe the paths and driveways up
and down the block. A scarfed woman sweeps.
My boy tells me about death.
“They can never talk to us again,” he says.
I stare at it, inviting the feeling of loss.
As if death were generous, as if
death were the giver of love.
I wrote this when Jordan was six. As it turned out, Jordan and I would both discover that we could talk past death. But my sense that death can stir the deepest forms of love has turned out to be true.
I’ve always been aware of the closeness of death — in the presence of beauty, in joyous moments, in the fragile ways we join and lose each other. As a child I was deeply moved by tales — mostly in things I read — in which the dead influenced, or communicated with, the living. And I seemed to collect these stories, finding in them some ineffable comfort. This was long before I had any personal experience with death, and years before, as a young man, I began to fear death as the absolute end of consciousness.
As a young adult, I found that the many stories I’d heard of post-death communication occupied a place in me that lived right next to a chronic, well-nourished despair. And when, late at night, I imagined the moment of my last thought, my last awareness, I also found myself composing after-death messages I would somehow convey to everyone I loved. For all my fear of death, I somehow felt I would go on loving, holding, being with everyone who mattered.
This dialectic — a morbid terror with the competing sense that the living and dead remained together — held me captive for years. Then, around the year 2000, I read about Michael Newton’s research on the life between lives.* Newton is a psychologist. While regressing a patient to see if past-life occurrences might have a bearing on her present symptoms, he heard a startling tale. As is common, the patient described her death in a past life. But the narrative went on: she told of being met by guides, of rejoining her soul group (a family of souls who reincarnate together over many lives), doing a life review, meeting with a council of elders, and engaging in myriad learning activities with her group and her guides. Newton immediately realized this was nothing like any past-life regression he’d seen or heard of. His patient was reporting events that hadn’t occurred on this planet; they belonged to a life between lives.
Over a number of years, Newton hypnotized hundreds of people, guiding them past the moment of a previous death and encouraging them to describe what happened next. Never suggesting what they’d see, Newton prompted his subjects by asking, “What is happening now?” and “Where do you go next?” Remarkably, across hundreds of naive subjects, there was near-universal agreement about the main events, processes, and locations in the life between lives.
As I read Newton’s book Journey of Souls, I was frequently overtaken by tears. His words seemed to be describing something I had always felt, always known — even as a child. And I experienced a sense of rightness, of things falling together that had been long separated by ignorance and doubt.
Newton’s subjects reported living hundreds of lives, each carefully chosen to teach lessons relevant to that soul. The purpose of living, according to these reports, is not to undergo a pass-fail test that earns a trip to heaven or hell. The point is to grow, to learn, to accumulate wisdom, for both ourselves and the evolution of all consciousness. Newton’s research suggests that our life purpose — individually and for all souls — is to become. Embedded in this idea are important implications:
• We are in this together, and we never lose each other. The souls who reincarnate together, life after life, are like a repertory theater company. We have many parts in hundreds of plays, but the circle of love and relationship is never broken. We rejoin in the life between lives to review our work and learn from what we’ve done.
• The purpose of every life is both particular and universal. In particular, we choose life circumstances that will resolve karmic debts, unlearned lessons from previous lives. Often we sign up for plays that will likely bring specific kinds of challenges or pain — not for the pain itself, but for what it teaches. Beyond the particular lessons exists the universal work of all incarnating souls: learning how to love in the face of pain and loss. We need to forget everything we know about our eternal home to learn this one, which is why we begin each new life in a state of deep amnesia.
• Everything we do — even things that cause pain to ourselves and others — is part of our, and their, learning and growth. This means that there is no sin in the way religions teach it. There are only lessons that we fail to learn or that we’re slow to learn. There are only the classic mistakes (such as making our lives about seeking pleasure and avoiding pain), which we will correct sooner or later, in this life or in lives to come.
Newton’s stories of the life between lives — which I read years before Jordan died — changed my cosmology. The problem was that these stories remained just words in a book — until about two years before Jordan’s death, when a friend suggested I could do these regressions myself. And, further, this friend, Kim, insisted on being my first subject.
I’m a trained hypnotherapist, and over the years I have done hundreds of inductions with my patients, mostly to work with issues related to anxiety, trauma, or health. But the life-between-lives induction, as Newton does it, is a multistep process that can take four or more hours and be emotionally and energetically draining. Nonetheless, Kim and I decided to proceed.
We meet on a late May afternoon in my office. Kim arranges herself across carefully placed pillows on my couch. After a long muscle-relaxation process and countdown, Kim is ready to go deeper. I suggest that she is in a meadow full of golden light. I encourage her to levitate, to drift up to examine the highest trees and then skim over a stream, feeling the water brush the soles of her feet. At the end of the meadow is a stairway going backward in time. As Kim descends the steps, she stops to examine eras in her life: her room at age fifteen; a moment with her parents at age ten; the school yard at age six; being held as a toddler.
And then she is in her mother’s womb. In this place she can feel her mother’s emotions and her own anxious waiting for life in the world to begin. Next I suggest that Kim can see a tunnel, and when she enters the tunnel, she will pass from this life to her last one. At the end of the tunnel, Kim arrives in a field where she is hanging up wet clothes — she is a washerwoman on a plantation in the American South. This is a difficult, lonely life, where she will die young.
When I progress Kim to her death as the washerwoman she is struggling to breathe. She has consumption. At the moment of transition, as Kim drifts above her body, she feels an enormous release — not just of physical pain, but also of the desolation of that life. She sees the plantation cook, a soul who has been with her in many incarnations, bending over the body. But by now Kim already feels a soft tugging that starts to pull her upward and away. In a few moments she arrives at the first stop on her journey home.
Kim went on to describe a life-between-lives experience that was like, in every important detail, those of Newton’s subjects:
• She was met by a guide.
• She found her soul group (companions who had learned with her across many lives).
• She did a comprehensive review of her existence as a washerwoman, examining how she responded to pain by disconnecting from all potential sources of hurt.
• She met with her council of elders to examine key themes of this and previous lives.
• She eventually entered a process of choosing her next (this) incarnation.
Because Kim had already read Newton’s book, nothing about her experience during regression provides support for his discoveries. What’s meaningful about her regression to the life between lives is that it allowed her to identify her core life purpose for this time around. Kim now sees that her work is to learn how to stay open and emotionally engaged with loved ones when she is hurt, including when she is facing loss. She must also resist caving in to anger and hopelessness — a hallmark of past lives. This karmic knowledge would not have been available without the glimpse of her last incarnation and the lessons — at home with her guides, her soul group, her council of elders — that she learned during regression.
My experience with Kim deepened my conviction that the life between lives — if we can access it — is a source of vital wisdom. An opportunity to learn more came when my friend Catherine asked me to regress her.
It takes a forty-five-minute induction for Catherine to get deep enough to enter a past life. She arrives as a child, staring at a modest Tudor-style house. In this incarnation Catherine is male; her name is Timothy. Two sisters [also siblings in her current life] are in the courtyard. The scene appears to be nineteenth-century England.
As I progress Catherine in the life of Timothy, she describes working at a newspaper as a young man — he is an activist trying to publish the truth about events of the time. Later, he becomes a minister. In this role, he attempts to convey spiritual truths from the pulpit.
At the time of Timothy’s death, he is living alone. Catherine tells me that solitude has been an essential part of this life. Aloneness provides a field for the cultivation of spiritual and emotional learning. Catherine recognizes her soul essence in this old man dying in his bed. She says, “His quest to find and convey the truth, his desire to seek clarity through contemplation, his core peacefulness are parts of me — my soul.”
Now Catherine is drawn away from the room where Timothy died. She moves through what seem to be clouds until she emerges into a bright landscape. In the life between lives, Catherine encounters guides, her soul group, and the council of elders. She reviews the lessons of her life as Timothy, and begins to prepare for her next incarnation.
As with Kim’s, all of Catherine’s post-death experiences correspond precisely to descriptions by Newton’s subjects. But that isn’t important. What is significant to me is Catherine’s use of the experience to clarify her life purpose now.
Catherine discovered from the guides that she is part of a group of souls she calls conveyors, whose core purpose is to share knowledge. Their work is to gather what has been learned, create a community, and provide that community with new knowledge.
Catherine explained, “I now know that my purpose (acquiring and conveying knowledge) grows directly from the core of who I am. My work is a dance: connecting to others while struggling to learn, followed by withdrawing inside to make sense of that knowledge, then connecting again and trying to convey what I’ve learned.”
A last note about Catherine’s regression concerns her struggle with doubt. Throughout much of her regression journey, Catherine questioned the authenticity of what she saw. Was she viewing an actual past life, or was she making it up? Was her soul-group encounter fabricated from things she had read, or was this a real experience in the life between lives?
There is no clear answer. The images Catherine saw exist right next to her uncertainty. Truth and doubt are inseparable. And uncertainty is the atmosphere, the medium where we live. What’s undeniable is that the regression clarified Catherine’s sense of self and her purpose on the planet. Whether true or conjured, what Catherine saw truly changed her.
My Own Journeys
While I went on to facilitate a number of past-life and between-lives regressions, I remained just an observer of what seemed — from the outside — a profound experience. I heard the words, the descriptions, but I couldn’t journey with those in trance to witness for myself what they saw or in any way judge its veracity. After Jordan’s death, it became imperative for me to make this journey myself. So, again, I turned to psychologist Ralph Metzner, who has developed a divination process that uses images of light and heat to touch spiritual centers in the body and facilitate past-life and between-lives journeys. For me, these divinations seemed little different from hypnosis. I felt as if I were in a trance.
During my first session, I experienced a glimpse of what lies past the boundaries of this life. The journey taught me so much.
After a preparatory meditation, Ralph suggests that I enter into a semi-dark, cave-like tunnel. A moment later, he suggests that as I emerge I should look down at my feet. I see white, hairless ankles below a nightshirt. On my feet are fallen-down woolen stockings. “Look at yourself,” Ralph says. I see then that I am an old man, with white, wispy hair and crepe-paper skin.
On my right is a single bed; to the left is a large table with stacks of leather-bound volumes. Behind me is a table with a bucket, next to a fireplace and hanging pot. Straight ahead is a pair of casement windows, though little light reaches this far into the room. Ralph encourages me to move toward the light. The street outside is narrow, with a few standing carts. Buildings are made of stone; there are no telephone wires. I notice it is sunny, and my heart leaps up as if gray skies are more typical here.
Then Ralph asks me to turn back to the room. I move toward the piles of books. Some have Latin titles; some appear to be scientific volumes. In this instant, I know I have been a bookbinder in this life, and the knowledge arrives with a certainty akin to recalling the street you lived on as a child.
More knowledge arrives — unbidden, unsought. The content of these volumes is a mystery to me. I made them with great pride, even reverence, but I have no idea what they are about. Now a sadness begins welling in my chest. I feel the emptiness of this room, this life. I begin to cry.
Ralph suggests that I move back to an earlier time in the bookbinder’s life. I immediately see a small town — just a few streets adjacent to a wharf area. And I recognize the cottage where I live with my wife, Elzbeth, and our two children. It has a thatched roof, and Elzbeth is standing in the doorway, calling to a boy and girl who are playing near the docks. I recognize the girl to be my daughter in this life, Bekah. Again the knowledge arrives in the same way a memory shows up: a clear and simple sense that something is so. I recognize that this is my family, and somehow I belong here.
Ralph progresses me forward, and I move to a time when Elzbeth has died; I am raising my children alone. I see further into that life: the children scattering, my daughter moving with a young man to a distant town, my son going to sea. They will be gone; I will not see them again.
After they leave I will ply my trade, taking comfort in the binder’s art. And I will withdraw into a room where I will let go of love, where I will not be hurt again by loss, but where loss lives in every shadow.
Ralph leans closer. He asks, “Your wife in that life — who is she in this one?” Instantly I know the answer, but I don’t want to say. The tears start again. The answer seems improper, as if speaking it would violate the mores that anchor me.
“Do you know?” Ralph pushes.
“Yes. But I’m afraid.”
Ralph is quiet, then he says, “The truth can’t hurt you.”
“She is Jordan.” And though it seems wrong that Jordan could be my wife, that I would know him in that way, it feels absolutely true.
Next I am progressed to the day of my death. In this narrow bed, the bookbinder struggles to breathe. Someone attends to him — a woman from the neighborhood who has brought soup. I feel the moment of detachment, the sudden lightness. And the pain that a moment ago came with every breath is gone.
I watch my body from above, moving backward toward the window. A sense of loneliness and failure wells up in me, as if this dark room is the natural outcome of my choices in this life.
I back through the window, with no sense of movement or touch. And now I am above the street, being drawn slowly up. The town grows smaller, and it eventually disappears in clouds and darkness. When I see light again, it is a garden with brilliant, surreal colors. I am met by a portly, gray-haired man whom I recognize as my brother in the life of the bookbinder, and my father in this one. I am overjoyed to see him. And there is Elzbeth, my wife.
A guide, standing a bit apart, seems taller than our little group and radiates dignity and grace. I recognize him from other times in the life between lives. In a while, I feel him encouraging us, telepathically, to begin moving. I notice that we glide; while I have legs, I don’t appear to need them for walking. I am told, again telepathically, that the garden scene isn’t real. It has been conjured to comfort me as I transition from a physical world.
In time I arrive at a place reserved for contemplation. Souls are quiet here, attended to by guides as they review a just-completed life. I have an odd experience of watching myself as I settle in, as if my consciousness is somehow divided.
What I experience in the life review is unbelievably difficult. I must now relive every moment of my last incarnation as a bookbinder — every thought, every feeling, every emotion. What’s more, I now experience the full effect everything I did had on those around me — what they felt, how they were changed. And then, through chains of cause and effect, I see how they and others were impacted far into the future. It goes on and on, so that everything I have done is seen in this full circle. The smallest consequence of the smallest choice must be examined.
What I see now, and later in the blue-domed chamber of the council of elders, is that to avoid the pain of loss, I had let go of everyone I loved. Elzbeth was the first; I had banished her from my mind after her death. I had refused to hold the cord that connects us to everyone we love, even after they were not embodied. I had rejected my daughter because she impulsively latched onto a boy who took her far away. And when my son had gone to sea, I stopped thinking of him as well.
I see myself in that life turning inward, collapsing into small routines and pleasures, but never again reaching toward someone. Never loving. As I watch myself in the place of contemplation, I see the enormous, necessary pain required to face the truth about a life. And I am gratified that I may yet have time to change this one — because I still tend to respond to loss and disappointment in the same way: withdrawing and disconnecting.
At some point — I’ve no idea how long I’ve been in life review — I am ready to see my soul group. They are in a meadow, surrounded by tall, ancient trees. A fallen trunk, barkless and white, cuts across the grass. My brother/father and Elzbeth/Jordan are there. I see souls from my present life: two former girlfriends; my wife, Jude; Bekah, my daughter; several dear, close friends. I am crying with relief to be with all of them again. And while I know the image of the meadow is only a comforting creation, the souls who greet me there fill me with love.
When Ralph returns me to the present moment, I feel moved, yet caught in doubt. I open my eyes. My face is streaked with tears, and I wonder about the source of this emotion.
“What did you see?” Ralph asks.
I am still crying, and I don’t have words. If I could say it out loud, I might tell him I can see past the curtain. I see the fundamental truth that we are not alone, that time is an illusion, that we connect beyond death, that love is the basis of all reality.
On some deep level, we all want this to be true. And what we want to be true isn’t fantasy. It isn’t wish fulfillment. What we want to be true is a reflection of the deepest truth in the universe. We will always feel uncertainty, because doubt is woven into living here. However, our hope that there is a life beyond this one — and that love is never lost — is not in vain. I have gone past the curtain. There is something there.
* Michael Newton, Journey of Souls (Woodbury, MN: Llewellyn Publications, 1994).