As I worked with Jordan to write the previous chapter, I found myself becoming more and more disengaged — not just from the project, but from my life in general. The doubts I struggled with regarding this book began to seep — in the form of a detached ennui — into nearly everything I did. Jordan saw what was happening and took action.
The first thing he did was contact me — as he has done many times — through my friend Catherine. At a little past noon on a Tuesday, the day Catherine and I often had lunch, we sat at a narrow table. The place was crowded, and we were hemmed in by voices.
“Hallelujah,” a song sung at Jordan’s funeral, came on the radio. I didn’t hear it, but Catherine did, and she began to feel the visceral changes in her body that herald Jordan’s presence: a warm rush; a tingling energy in her limbs; a drifting, dissociated feeling as she makes room for his spirit. Then she heard Jordan saying:
I’m here, I’m here.
Over and over. He was reminding me that he was present, watching over me. It was a direct response to my doubt.
But Jordan had more to say. A recent break in his murder case, with a possible identification of the shooter, had roiled me. I was afraid of finally seeing who took my boy, and I was afraid of being overtaken by anger, as had occurred so often when I was young. Through Catherine, Jordan told me to stay on the path of acceptance because that anger — as I’ve long known — would just imprison me.
Catherine wasn’t eating. Her eyes drifted unfocused. “It’s so strong,” she finally said. “He’s with you; that’s what he wants you to know.”
Catherine continued to be spacey as I drove us back to work, but I felt the beginning of something loosening, as if I might be relaxing after long preparing for a blow. When I’d lost Jordan, some part of me began waiting to lose hope as well, to be finally and unreachably alone. But today Jordan had repeated the same words I heard in Chicago:
I’m here, I’m here.
As it turned out, Jordan had more to say, but he needed a process through which he might convey some complex ideas. Two weeks after my lunch with Catherine, I met with Ralph Metzner, the psychologist who facilitated my past-life regressions.
I am uncomfortable in Ralph’s new office — which is a big box in a long, motel-like building. Burning incense gives the air a dense, saturated feeling.
“I feel uncommitted,” I tell Ralph, “to everything. I’m doing what I usually do, but nothing seems meaningful. It’s as if I’m going through the motions. I feel disengaged, even from the work that’s always meant the most to me.”
Ralph waits — perhaps for me to say more. Finally, he asks if I’m trying to find out why this is happening. I nod.
“Maybe we should ask Jordan,” he says, “and Catherine, too, since their souls seem to have connected.”
“How do we ask Catherine?” I’m surprised at his suggestion. “She’s incarnate.”
“We can ask the part of her soul — atman — that stays in the spirit world. And with Jordan, we can do the same. They can both help us.”
Ralph regresses me using images of white light to touch and activate key chakras, until I am in trance. In my earlier regression I met my soul group in a meadow, and now Ralph suggests that I will see Jordan and Catherine there. The scene takes shape. I move in and out of it as if entering and leaving a familiar room.
“You have been struggling with doubt,” Ralph says. “Let them tell you why.”
I see Catherine and Jordan in their embodied forms. They are leaning against a fallen log that slants into the high grass of the meadow. As soon as Ralph asks the question, I begin downloading information faster than words can form.
Catherine and Jordan both appear to be talking to me at once. The first thing I know is that my sense of meaninglessness and disconnection directly relates to this book. The problem is not just doubt — that what I learn from channeled writing could be made up — but fear. There is something about the book that scares me deeply.
Then they remind me of my past life in a yeshiva, a school for Jewish religious instruction, where as a young novice I was mentored by an old rabbi — Jordan. He befriended me, protected me, and tutored me, and I devoted myself to him. Then the old rabbi died. I was bereft and sought, through a form of meditation, to continue the relationship — much as I have with Jordan in this life. In my after-death communications with the rabbi, I was given a vastly expanded view of spirituality, the Torah, and life purpose. When I shared these insights with the learned men at the yeshiva, they were largely rejected. I continued conversations with my discarnate mentor, and I became convinced that there were terrible errors in how the Torah and other sacred texts had been interpreted. These errors led people away from truth and spirit.
By now I was a firebrand, demanding to be heard. But the yeshiva elders, already deaf from fixed ideas, turned against me. I was shunned. And though I continued to live within the yeshiva walls, I was ridiculed as a fool who talks to the dead.
Now Jordan and Catherine allow me, for a moment, to experience the full trauma of that rejection. I feel the loss of my community, my home; and perhaps worse, I feel demeaned by the men I respected.
I see, at this moment, where Jordan and Catherine have been leading me. I am afraid the same thing will happen now. Should anyone from my science-focused community read this book, what would they think? Might they react as the yeshiva elders did? Might they have contempt for me? My fear of repeating a past-life trauma has led me to withdraw my commitment and belief from this work I do with Jordan.
And now the shutdown and disconnection are spreading to my life as a therapist, researcher, and teacher. The reason is simple: We can’t pull the plug on something we deeply value without losing power to everything else. Every other thing I care about has lost some of its meaning because I am afraid of what publishing this book will do.
Now, in the meadow, I hear something else: this fear will not be going away. While it might help to know where it comes from, I will have to carry it with me as Jordan and I finish this book.
While I’m still in trance, Ralph asks what I’ve learned.
“It’s just fear,” I say. “I see it now, and it won’t stop me.”
Over the next several weeks, my commitment returned to my work with Jordan and the other things that matter in my life. Yet though I was again fully involved, the doubts persisted: Is this real? Have I invented my afterlife relationship to Jordan? Are all the lessons of channeled writing products of my own mind?
Jordan wasn’t finished with this issue yet. He would have one more message for me on the subject of my doubt. It would come through Catherine and a medium named Austyn Wells.
Catherine consulted Austyn with several goals in mind, one of which was to clarify her relationship to Jordan. She was hearing from him all the time, often with messages for me but increasingly with suggestions about her own spiritual path and purpose.
In this life, Jordan had known and liked Catherine. On one occasion, he had turned to her for advice. But they weren’t especially close, and there wasn’t much to suggest a deep soul connection. However, in channeled communications to me there was another story: Jordan said that he and Catherine had worked toward shared goals in several past lives, and they had a relationship independent from me.
Austyn did a reading for Catherine. Without knowing anything about Jordan or why Catherine was consulting her, she indicated that a young man was present who had died violently. She went on to describe Jordan, noting that he was functioning as one of Catherine’s guides in this life.
The following day Catherine received an email from Austyn. “Jordan kept chatting with me all the way home,” she wrote. “He has a lot to say. He told me that he is working on a book with his dad, helping him heal.”
At that point, only eight people in the world knew about this book. Catherine, of course, was one of them. But she had said nothing about it to Austyn Wells, and she hadn’t even been thinking about it during the reading. The odds that Austyn could guess that I was writing a book with my dead son are astronomically long. This left me with a clear message from Jordan. If he can talk to Austyn and tell her something she couldn’t possibly know, then he certainly can talk to me and provide the spiritual contents of this book.
I’m here, I’m here.
Yes, you are, my son.
What I know now, which I had no sense of at the beginning of my search, is how the living and the dead support each other across the curtain. This is a fully reciprocal relationship. If we open the channel, the ones who love us on the other side will provide the support and guidance we need.
In the same way that Jordan is watching over me, your loved ones are watching over you. They see what you feel and fear and hope for. They see the path you are taking, and they often know the direction you need to go. In the same way that Jordan helps me when I’m afraid or full of doubt, the ones you love will reach out to you — in dreams or feelings or direct replies — if you ask.
The ones you love will stay with you — whispering comfort and touching your heart — to the end of your days. And then they will greet and embrace you at the portal. You will lean into them, letting them carry you across to your spirit life. And then you will begin with them again, in another play. Another chance to learn in this most difficult and beautiful place.