All Together: The Living and the Dead
At the funeral, all eyes are on the coffin. As if the one inside was the victim of misfortune, struck down by some malicious fate.
Death isn’t bad luck, because there is no difference between the living and the dead. The one in the coffin is doing the same thing as the one grieving in the pew: loving and learning.
There is no difference between the living and the dead because the young have already been old, already taken a last breath, already watched planets die and galaxies collide. The one in the coffin is finished with this play. That’s all. And has taken everything learned back to “the whole,” back to the light.
The mourners go home. And while they grieve, the departed one is in the circle, greeting a brother from one life, or greeting a father, a daughter, a friend from others. Greeting a lover who left early, and a lover who in another play was left behind. Greeting the ones who were teachers, who were antagonists, who were protectors or protected. Greeting the one who ended a past life, who was a murderer.
The circle is always complete. We are always in it, and the funeral is an illusion. While souls actually experience no separation (just as Jordan is still with me), most human minds believe that the loss of the body is the loss of the person. And that if something cannot be seen, it isn’t there.
The human mind, having amnesia for all past lives, identifies each person (soul) with a single body. And if that body/person can no longer be seen, it is assumed to be gone. Lost.
But that isn’t the case. Jordan’s soul is right next to me, guiding me as I write this. Souls do not leave us, and the circle does not break just because that brilliant collection of molecules called a body is put in a box.
I know this, yet still I sometimes feel alone. I ask Jordan, and he explains:
The illusion of separation is perpetuated by religious images of the afterlife — an extraordinary realm so different from our planet that its inhabitants seem unreachable and lost to us. But again, it is the human mind creating fictions.
Images of the afterlife imbued with religious constructions of god and fantastic beings (for example, archangels and demons) are inventions of priests and holy men who attempted to make the journey while still embodied on Earth. Often aided by drugs or assaults on the body (including pain, sleeplessness, sensory overload, or deprivation), they saw in the “afterlife” what they wanted to see, what they feared seeing, or simply what their minds created in an altered state. The Tibetan and Egyptian books of the dead, the Upanishads, and the visions of countless mystics are examples of these journeys.
The Christian image of heavenly hosts singing god’s praises is also just a lovely hallucination. Such images — clouds and harps and angels at the gate — create hope. But paradoxically, they place embodied souls further away from those in spirit, making it seem that discarnates are in a place that’s sublime, distant, and inaccessible. These invented images hide the fact that departed souls are as much with us now as they were in life — perhaps more so, because now they are present as soon as we think of them. Telepathy covers any distance, instantly bringing souls together.
Souls in spirit love us as much as ever, think of us as much as ever, laugh with us at the absurdities of life, feel concerned about our pain, and celebrate our good choices. There is a simple reason for this. The relationship between living and departed souls is as deep, as vibrant, as committed, and as much in the present moment as ever it was on Earth.
This seems true to me. I am more in contact with Jordan now than I was at any time from when he left for college at eighteen until he was murdered at twenty-three. I consult with him often — about everything from family issues to personal choices. I send and receive messages of love and encouragement. And we are writing this book together.
I cannot hold or kiss my boy, which is a tremendous loss. But I can talk to him anytime, anywhere. There is no barrier — in this or in the spirit world — that can keep us apart.
The Struggle with Doubt
The only thing now standing between us is my own doubt. The doubt visits often, whispering that my conversations with Jordan are wishes rather than truth, and that all he has taught me is a fabrication, my own thoughts attributed to him. When in doubt, I withdraw. I seek him less. I feel frightened that I’ll discover something false in what he says, which will destroy my faith in us.
The doubt is unavoidable. I’ve learned that I must live with its whisperings even while I listen to Jordan. The doubt never leaves, because in this place absolute truth is hidden from us. Mother Teresa wrote that most of her life was spent with no sense of the presence of god. And whether or not the god she thought existed is really there, this dialectic remains: the quest for truth and the uncertainty are inescapably one experience.
Jordan says we are like shortwave radios, tuned to the frequency of some distant voice. Through the static, we pick up a phrase or two. We try to sew that into some coherence, but we have caught only a part of it. Through desire or projection, we may supply the missing words and get most of it wrong. But still we must listen.
I’ve learned one more thing about doubt. My need to send Jordan love and feel his love in return is bigger than doubt, bigger than the uncertainty and loneliness of living here without being able to hug my boy.
The Dual Life of Souls
I ask whether souls vacate the spirit world when they incarnate. Jordan responds:
Souls who incarnate live in two places — on their chosen planet and in the spirit world. Our soul energy is divided. Souls will never take all their energy into a physical body. Some is always left behind with their soul group. As a result, every member of a soul group is always there, in spirit, even while fully engaged in an embodied life.
Each soul has enough energy to allocate in this way, and the parts of the divided soul* communicate with each other during incarnations. This communication often takes the form of intuition, a surprising thought, a dream, a sudden impulse, or a wordless yearning.
Because soul energy is divided, and some part of us remains home in the life between lives, there is always a part of us that knows the truth. There is always a part of us that’s fully aware of our purpose here. And because we live simultaneously in two worlds, there’s always a part of us that accepts and understands the good and not good, the success and failure of everything we’ve done.
Do Souls Merge?
I also ask Jordan about whether our individual souls eventually merge into one oversoul or permanently join collective consciousness. He replies:
I’m still here, aren’t I? I’m still talking to you. So the idea that on the point of death we all dump into some merged state can’t be right.
And then I see the obvious: His identity, the soul I recognize as Jordan, hasn’t disappeared. He holds the memories of our life together. He can describe lessons he learned as Jordan. And he shares with me experiences in his most recent incarnation.
Jordan isn’t gone. He hasn’t melted into a great sea of souls who have lost self and all connection to their former lives.
Jordan says this:
We remain as individual souls. Even though some beliefs, such as the Pali Buddhist tradition, hold that we dissolve and lose our identity in the afterlife, this is not the case. Instead, each individual soul does the learning by collecting karmic lessons across many lives, and it brings what it has learned to the whole.
Every choice we make as souls, whether it goes well or not, contributes to what we all, collectively, know. Everything we see clearly that was once clouded or obscure becomes a vision that all souls share. There is no end to knowledge; there is no limit to what we (at first with individual experience and then collectively) can see and understand.
We exist simultaneously in both collective and individual awareness. We know, as souls, what happened as a result of the choices we made yesterday. But we know, as members of the whole, how each choice merges with all that’s known to illuminate the dark. This knowledge of outcomes can be the ordinary learning that happens during life. But knowledge from the whole is primarily gained in the life between lives.
Collective consciousness (the whole) wouldn’t be able to learn without individual souls interacting and collecting data in both the physical and spirit worlds. Collective consciousness is a reservoir of knowledge and wisdom. It knows all that has happened, it has created all that exists, and it is gathering wisdom to make the next, more beautiful universe.
There are two eternal forces in consciousness. The first is the will to merge, to join. Yet that force is always balanced by a second force that individuates and separates. That’s how we can be a part of collective consciousness and still remain souls with separate identities.
The drive toward merging has a purpose — to increase the “horsepower” of consciousness. Just as a boat gains more speed and power when more people are rowing, consciousness can take leaps when souls pull together during periods of collective effort.
On Earth, we experience the power of merging in limited ways (for example, in task groups, on construction projects, in dance troupes, and, often, in sexual relationships). Intense experiences of love, beauty, harmony, and creativity come from such moments of joining. When souls merge in the spirit world, the power of their collective wisdom can light dark corners of the universe.
On Earth and in the spirit world, we grow both from experiencing the power of joining and from making our individual choices. Consciousness has a rhythm that oscillates from an individual to a joined state, never staying exclusively in one or the other.
Death exemplifies these two forces. On one level, it seems that the person who has died has separated from the ones still living. Yet this level of separation is necessary for certain lessons to take place. As embodied people on Earth, we yearn for our departed loved ones (and vice versa), so our souls seek connection through telepathy and wordless expressions of love. This form of love — holding each other in absence — then strengthens our ability to know what is dark and invisible. In fact, when we hold each other across the divide of death, we are learning to hold the as-yet-unseen and -uncreated; the idea that has not yet taken form; the dark, untouchable corners of the universe that have yet to be imagined. In this way, death — loving what cannot be seen — prepares us for these larger tasks.
What allows us to hold each other past death — what allows you and I, Dad, to continue our conversation years after we last hugged in front of Saul’s — is the same power that connects planets and molecules and families. Sometimes it’s called gravity, or entanglement, or love. But at every level of consciousness, connection happens because of the alignment of vibrational patterns between objects or particles. Or souls. With soul consciousness, vibrational alignment is created by knowing the other. Knowing aligns energy to form connection and love.
Love is knowing — completely and without judgment. What you truly know you entrain with, stay with, yearn for. We stay connected to souls who are in spirit by remembering who they are.
Jordan reminds me:
My place is with you. We are physically separated, but always I am with you.
Pathways to Connection
When I step back and ask myself how I heard those words of Jordan’s, what grace gave them to me, I realize how the channel was opened.
• It started with the physical. Objects link us to the past. They are alive with the souls we love; they let us travel back and forth between here and earlier times. The objects we have in common with the dead often provide the first path to reconnection. Objects that best connect me to Jordan are his racing medals, his favorite stuffie (a rabbit named Wilzoff ), and things he wrote.
• Chosen memories and places are another pathway. Specifically, this involves joining the memory of a loved one to a moment, a room, a special location. When I go back in time, I often meet Jordan on the trail to Bridal Veil Falls in Yosemite or in our kitchen. Or sometimes I find him on a deserted golf course we used to walk at night. In each place I can hug him, feeling his strong, compact body beneath my arms. And then, fully anchored in that moment, I can begin to talk to my boy.
• At the deepest level, connection rises from a meditation on a soul’s essence, the signature feeling we carry of that beautiful spirit. Here we can leave behind particular moments, memories, or good or bad qualities associated with a departed loved one. We just hold them, entirely, in the heart. Love, entrainment, is knowing everything — at once and without evaluation — and holding it until the channel opens.
Right now I feel the tears and the truth of us, Jordan and I. When I ask him how best can we reach through the curtain — how we can keep death from separating us — he reminds me:
We must learn to love with a love that holds everything.
* In Hindu mythology, the incarnate part is known as jiva, and the discarnate as atman.