You are pounding at the door
of Lori Wong’s flat, bleeding
from the bullet in your back.
In a moment you kneel,
bend to the terrazzo step
and have the last thought
of this life.
The ones who killed you
go on, their lives closing
around a wound
that was never bound;
closing as if rage,
as if taking
could replace the blood
they lost.
The ones who hurt Jordan go on, while his days with us slip farther and farther into the past. What was the plan, the purpose, in his leaving so early, in the middle of a passionate life?
In the beginning I tried to explain that rendezvous — between Jordan and his murderers — as chance, as a random convulsion of fate where men who are prone to violence happened to cross his path. And I have imagined them as victims too, poured from families and neighborhoods that breed trauma. I have imagined them, impoverished of other opportunities, using violence as an instrument to prove themselves or meet basic needs.
I have tried to explain violence — and the moment Jordan died — as the poet W. H. Auden did: “Those to whom evil is done / Do evil in return.”* But while that statement is absolutely true — as I know from my own work with trauma victims — I less and less believe it as the reason for losing my son. That’s because the matrix of cause and effect is only the most obvious explanation for events.
If I let go of my pen, the force of gravity will make it fall. Cause and effect. If a child is raised in a brutal, treacherous environment, attachment theory predicts he or she will struggle with emotion dysregulation, as well as with aggressive or impulsive behavior. Again, this would appear to be cause and effect. However, falling pens don’t make choices. Our human ability to choose — through some degree of free will — tangles the web of cause and effect. Causes become harder to trace.
To understand why Jordan was killed I’ve had to go back to the question of why we are here. In fact, I’ve had to go even further, to the purpose of the material universe.
Jordan tells me this:
The purpose of matter — whether in the form of circling planets or the human body — is to help consciousness grow. All of physical existence serves this purpose. Consciousness creates matter and the laws of the universe. Then it manipulates and lives in physical worlds in order to learn and evolve. So every event is an opportunity for souls to grow. There is no tragedy; there is no loss. There are just events we learn from.
We select lives based on what will probably happen in that life, and what those experiences will teach. So our lesson plan determines the body, family, and environment we enter — including major relationships, challenges, and crises. But things don’t always go according to plan, because of choices — our own and those of the souls around us. The possibilities at the moment when we select a life are often changed by the counterforce of free will.
The matrix of cause and effect, stretched over time, collides with hundreds of choices by dozens of nearby souls. As a result, what we signed up for may look very different thirty, forty, or fifty years into a particular life. To add to the uncertainty, lessons that go unlearned must be presented again in new circumstances. And karmic challenges that have finally been faced and surmounted will be dropped from the lesson plan, with new learning opportunities to replace them.
How much, I ask Jordan, of the lesson plan for a life actually happens?
The big challenges and major events usually occur. This is because the waves of probability are so strong and because they intersect from multiple sources. But events with a lower probability are often erased by decisions we make. For example, souls born in the 1920s and 1930s had an almost 100 percent probability of facing World War II. Where they lived and how the war might touch them wasn’t likely to change. But choices they made responding to countless life events could change their circumstances — even to the point of altering the likely span of their lives.
In short, the big stuff is set. But as the force of probability diminishes, our individual wills have more effect on what happens. This much is always true: whether events occur as planned or are affected by choice, the purpose of everything is to learn.
Why We May Choose Short Lives
Jordan and I also discuss why some souls choose short lives. His response:
There are lots of reasons souls don’t stay long. For instance, they may choose to:
• briefly accompany and support another soul who’ll have a longer life.
• teach a specific lesson to one or more souls.
• learn one specific lesson to complete a karmic process from another life.
• focus on developing a particular spiritual skill, such as discipline or compassion or independence, in preparation for another life when it will be needed.
• learn a particular lesson, such as helplessness, that only childhood circumstances could teach.
• experience a short reentry into the physical plane, though they now spend most of their time in spirit.
• give the briefest moment of pure love that will change surrounding lives.
• stay only a short time as a way to cope with the reluctance to reincarnate.
• have a brief excursion to Earth though they usually incarnate on other planets or planes.
As this indicates, short lives have many purposes. And in the course of world history, short lives were the norm rather than the exception. Only in recent times have we come to expect — to demand — a long life.
I learn that Jordan chose a short life to prepare for a longer one that will involve greater responsibilities. He tells me this:
I needed to recover from violence in past lives. That recovery was possible only with people who would hold me and protect me, whose love would make me safe again. And I needed to learn two key skills: (1) discipline and determination, and (2) the ability to face fear. My life as Jordan accomplished both those things.
When those lessons were learned, I could leave to do more prep work in the life between lives. My leaving also triggered many growth opportunities for the people who knew and loved Jordan. Much of that was planned.
He reminds me that I agreed to this:
Mom was working on developing wiser responses to loss — so this was an opportunity for her. And it was a chance to supercharge your spiritual growth by learning to stay connected beyond my death. You needed to grow past the “science mind” you were prone to and reach across the curtain.
I ask if there were any lessons for Jordan in the moment or circumstances of his death. He says:
I knew my murderer from a past-life connection. My death as Jordan was an opportunity to learn about victimization: how it feels for the one being hurt, as opposed to the perpetrator. That was work I had to do, and an opportunity arose to both exit my Jordan life and learn more about the helplessness of the victim.
Now the one who took my life is learning about how violence corrupts the soul, how it makes our energy dense and frenetic, how it weakens awareness of our purpose here. Perhaps the worst thing is that violence deepens our sense of being alone; it leaves us less and less held by love. So my death was the triggering event, and the lessons go on for the soul who murdered me.
Why Things Happen
Jordan says:
In the middle of our lives, it isn’t important to know why things happen. If we knew why, we would see through the lesson and it might cease to be instructive. All that matters is that things happen for a reason. And beneath the ripples of cause and effect, beneath the material impact of every choice, is the driving purpose of all consciousness (and everything consciousness creates): to become.
Literally everything that happens is teaching us — from the ecstatic moments of connection to the moments of fearful pain — and we cannot stop learning from them. There is a force, much like gravity, that pulls us toward the circumstances of our next lesson. It isn’t a conjuring trick, where the universe creates these events. Instead, it is an attraction, almost a yearning to be entangled in a particular kind of struggle. We unconsciously seek people, situations, and environments that offer a new version of old challenges that we haven’t learned how to face, or new lessons that are integral to the plan for this life. So each event of our lives is pulled to us, and we to it, so that we may know what isn’t yet known, complete what is partial, see a hidden truth that all of consciousness has waited for us to see.
* From W. H. Auden, “September 1, 1939”; see www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/september-1-1939.