We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.
—PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN
When patients ask me, “What’s my prognosis?” I always tell them, “We all have the same prognosis: fatal.” Despite our best efforts to avoid death, deny death, or defy death, one day our lives will inevitably come to an end, which begs the question: What’s next?
Newton believed there was no afterlife. Socrates, in contrast, believed in the immortality of the soul and expected to befriend a community of like-minded truth seekers after his time on Earth had ended. According to Sigmund Freud, clinging to hope of an afterlife is a form of infantile neurosis: human beings need to create fantasies of an afterlife because we are too afraid to face the possibility that this life is all we’ve got. Most Americans do not agree with Sigmund Freud, however. According to the 2014 Religious Landscape Study conducted by the Pew Research Center, 72 percent of Americans believe in Heaven, 21 percent do not, and another 7 percent don’t know.1
By the law of conservation of energy, energy cannot be created or destroyed; it simply changes form. The amount of energy in the universe is constant—energy can be changed, moved, controlled, stored, or dissipated. However, it cannot be created from nothing or reduced to nothing. In essence, atoms are immortal. They never die. Although the forms and structures that atoms create eventually come apart and “die,” the individual atoms themselves reconfigure, change form and live on. Thích Nhất Hạnh, a Vietnamese Buddhist monk and peace activist, discusses how modern-day concepts of death defy the law of conservation of energy:
The concept of death is that being turns into non-being. That is impossible. Can somebody become nobody? No. If we burn the piece of paper, we cannot reduce it to nothing. The paper will turn into heat, which will go into the cosmos, and turn into smoke, which will join the clouds in the sky. Tomorrow a drop of rain will fall on your forehead, and you will make contact with the piece of paper. The ashes produced by the burning will rejoin the earth, and one day they will manifest as daisies.2
Fritz-Albert Popp, a German biophysics researcher, suggests that death is a decoupling of our energy from matter (aka our cells and our bodies), so we can return to the field that connects us all.3 Does this mean that people are still around in some form even after they die? Could that explain why people sometimes seem to receive communications from the dead?
On several occasions, my patients appear to have had visits from “the other side.” Sharon’s first love, Paul, committed suicide. She described him in the most romantic terms. He was a beautiful artist, singer, and songwriter who carried himself with style, confidence, and grace. While he was alive, he had struggled with severe bipolar disorder from an early age. Together he and Sharon withstood the trials and tribulations of his condition, but when he ultimately killed himself, Sharon felt a devastating sense of failure. She was so deeply upset that she began to feel suicidal herself.
In our second session, as Sharon was expressing her heartbreak over the loss of Paul, my door buzzer suddenly fell off my wall and onto my floor. This was the only time in all my years in private practice that this occurred. Sharon and I exchanged a look of surprise.
Sharon interpreted this synchronicity as a sign that Paul was there, consoling her in her grief. This thought provided Sharon with some relief from her pain and precipitated a positive turning point in our therapy.
A similar event occurred with Bob, whose beloved younger brother died in a car accident seven years before we began treatment. At one of our appointments, the lights in my office began flickering on and off every time Bob mentioned his brother. This time, I wondered aloud whether Bob’s brother was with us that day. Bob looked at me quizzically at first, but ultimately welcomed my interpretation. It opened a powerful, cathartic discussion of Bob’s beliefs about the afterlife and his continued connection to his brother even after his passing.
Curiously enough, the light flickering continued when Bob got home that day. As he was vacuuming his living room, one of the lamps in his apartment went out. Bob examined the lamp to make sure the bulb was screwed in tightly and the plug was stably in place. Seeing no problems, Bob went to get a new lightbulb. As he approached the lamp with a new bulb in hand, the light suddenly turned back on. It continued to burn brightly and only needed to be replaced a full year later. As it had for Sharon, the idea that his loved one was sending him signals from the other side was a source of great comfort for Bob.
Other patients have reported experiences where they felt loved ones had protected them from harm. My patient Meghan told me she was driving home late one evening and fell asleep at the wheel. The car veered off the road and hit the curb, jolting her awake just in time to slam on the brakes. When she got out of the car, she realized she was five feet away from the home where her grandmother grew up! Had she hit her brakes one second earlier or later, she would have run head-on into a light post or fire hydrant. Meghan felt that her grandmother had helped her avoid a potentially fatal catastrophe.
Experiences like Sharon’s, Bob’s, and Meghan’s have led me to question the nature of life, death, and the soul. Could the buzzer falling off my wall and the flickering light in my office have been mere coincidences? Or do loved ones who have passed on have the potential to communicate with us, comfort us, and even protect us?
In an October 2014 article in Scientific American, Dr. Michael Shermer, editor-in-chief of Skeptic magazine, described an event that was so mysterious, it shook his own skepticism to the core. For a man who has essentially devoted his life to debunking the mystical and paranormal, this is a strong claim!
On his wedding day, his bride, Jennifer Graf, told him she was sad that her grandfather was not there to walk her down the aisle. Jennifer’s grandfather died when she was sixteen, after having been the main father figure in her life.
Just as they were preparing for the ceremony, Michael and Jennifer heard music. They searched the house, only to discover that it was coming from a dresser drawer in the bedroom. In the drawer was her grandfather’s 1978 Philips 010 transistor radio, which she had shipped to the United States from Germany a few months earlier.
Jennifer shares Michael’s skepticism about the paranormal, but the music was hard to ignore. This synchronicity symbolized for Jennifer that her grandfather was there. The music was his gift of approval. It was a deeply meaningful experience to Jennifer and shook even a professional skeptic like Michael Shermer to the core.
Although this coincidence is certainly meaningful, Michael Shermer emphasizes that such inexplicable events as these “do not constitute scientific evidence that the dead survive or that they can communicate with us via electronic equipment. The emotional significance we attribute to such anomalous events grants them importance in our lives regardless of what caused them. If we live in accordance with the scientific credo to always remain open-minded in the face of inconclusive evidence and yet-unanswered questions, we should not discount all possible explanations for the mysterious.” Could this uncanny experience have unexpectedly transformed a widely reputed atheist into an agnostic?
This story underscores one of the most important qualities in any search for truth and fulfillment: humility. Humility implies open-mindedness, wisdom, and maturity. While arrogance is far more popular, all it reflects is denial, close-mindedness, pride, and immaturity. As stated in a Hasidic proverb, “There is no room for God [or spirituality] in him that is full of himself.” The wisdom of humility is what enabled a skeptic like Michael Shermer to be moved by the synchronicity he experienced on his wedding day, while tolerating the uncertainty it created.4
Prior to his near-death experience (NDE), Harvard neurosurgeon Eben Alexander agreed with the many scientists and skeptics who argued that NDEs are simply delusions or fantasies produced by our brains while under duress. His own experience was so real and remarkable, however, that it opened him up to a whole new realm of being, suggesting that consciousness can continue even when the brain has been shut down.5 Now a dedicated author and educator on the intersection of neuroscience, heaven, and the soul, Dr. Alexander believes, as I do, that true healing can be achieved when we realize that a Higher Power and the soul are real and that death is not the end of personal existence but only a transition.6 But the idea of connecting with others outside of the usual channels of communication is not limited to telepathic experiences, dreams, and NDEs. Another realm where this idea has been explored and experienced by many is in what some call empathic or “shared death experiences.”
At the exact time Betty began suffocating in her hospital bed in Oregon, her daughter Annie Cap began choking at work in England. Despite being thousands of miles apart, Annie believes she was having an empathic death experience—physically feeling her mother’s fatal symptoms—because her mother, Betty, was reaching across the heavens to say “goodbye.” Shortly after this experience, Annie’s intuitive and psychic abilities dramatically increased, leading to a renewal of faith in this former nonbeliever. Through this experience, Annie was transformed and felt called to share her experience with others.7
Penny Sartori, PhD, who worked as an ICU nurse for seventeen years, began researching near-death experiences because of her proximity to death in her work. In her PhD dissertation, she documented cases where people who were present at the bedside of their dying loved one suddenly found themselves participating in a transcendent experience of a partial journey into death. She also documented cases where miles away from their dying loved one, people have suddenly and inexplicably been overwhelmed with intense emotion, only to realize that this coincided with the loved one’s death.8
My friend Jonathan was playing cards with his friends one Saturday night when suddenly, without knowing why, he looked up from his cards. His acquaintance, who became a close friend after that fateful evening, looked over at Jonathan, noticeably concerned. “You just turned pale—are you okay?” Jonathan felt overwhelmed by emotions he could not comprehend. Out of his mouth came the words, “My father just died!”
There was no reason for him to anticipate his father’s death. As far as anyone knew, he was perfectly healthy. Jonathan and his father had just spent the entire day on Friday talking and coming to a place of understanding and peace that they had never had before. Yet on Saturday night, Jonathan’s father had a fatal heart attack, and all the way on the other side of town, Jonathan knew. Could the conversation Jonathan had with his father the night before have created the peace and closure his father needed to leave this world?
These kinds of experiences are relatively common, so it’s quite possible that you or someone you know has had one, too. While our culture may view them as unusual, they are actually a natural part of the continual exchange of information we all receive through our connection with one another. Individuals who choose to cultivate their intuition are likely to become more aware of this ongoing source of knowledge—not only about death, but all kinds of things.
Whenever this normal connection to the world around us is perceived as strange or anomalous, it is deprived of its organic relationship to the ordinary flow of life. Under those conditions people who are aware of this knowledge can be marginalized, demonized, or even burned at the stake. When animals and other creatures seem to be aware of it, they are seen as uncanny, supernatural, or possessed. These strange superstitions get in the way of a scientific understanding of how the world works.
In 2007, the New England Journal of Medicine profiled Oscar, the resident cat at Steere House Nursing and Rehabilitation Center in Providence, Rhode Island. When a patient is about to die, Oscar shows up at their door to spend time with the resident and pay his respects. Apparently, Oscar has a reputation for predicting a patient’s death better than any physician or medical test. Nobody knows how Oscar does it, though Dr. David Dosa speculated in his article that Oscar may be attracted to an unknown pheromone or scent. While Oscar offers much-needed comfort to the terminally ill residents who would have otherwise died alone, his presence at a bedside is such a reliable sign of impending death that, when he appears, family members are always notified to come. In this way, Oscar is believed to have predicted more than one hundred deaths of nursing home patients.9
The world according to Newtonian physics sees human beings as essentially isolated from the world and our minds as isolated from one another. In contrast, quantum physics has shown that people are inherently interconnected to and indivisible from their environment and one another. Telepathy is one of the many ways in which this interconnectedness manifests. It may be that certain people, like psychics and mediums, have an exceptional capacity for interconnectedness with others, dead and alive, and therefore are able to obtain information about others that most people would have no way of accessing.
Henry, one of my patients who was quite skeptical of the paranormal, surprised me when he decided to go to a medium, somebody who can “channel” information from people who have died, after both his mother and father died unexpectedly in short succession. Fortunately, while with the medium during the reading, he recorded the session. When he shared it with me, it blew both of us away.
Knowing absolutely nothing about my patient and with no cues from Henry, the medium immediately started “communicating with departed souls.” He said a man who had recently passed away was calling my patient “Fonzie,” the nickname Henry’s father always used for him. (“Fonzie” is short for Arthur Fonzarelli, the cool, super-masculine, lady-charmer lead character played by Henry Winkler in the 1974–1984 American sitcom Happy Days.)
This intense experience melted my patient’s skepticism and enabled him to receive some powerful, healing messages from his father who had passed on. The most powerful of these messages for my patient was that the place where his father had gone was peaceful and beautiful. There was nothing to fear. Interestingly, at the end of his first medium session, Henry’s father told him to drink a glass of water with lemon every morning. Henry had no idea why but decided to comply. For the next week, he drank a glass of water with lemon every morning. A few months later, Henry went to the doctor with complaints of low back pain radiating to his groin. The diagnosis was kidney stones, a natural treatment for which is drinking water with lemon!
A few years ago, a psychiatrist colleague of mine e-mailed me asking if I could recommend a medium for Altan, a Mongolian male patient with whom he had been working for the past year. Apparently, Altan had been told on two separate occasions that his late father, Gan, was trying to contact him. Since Altan and Gan had a very turbulent relationship, Altan was not particularly jumping for joy at this news. Besides, Altan was not convinced that it was possible to contact the other side.
The first time Altan had been told about Gan’s attempts to contact him was five years before, when one of his friends consulted a medium. While his friend talked to her own father through the medium, Altan’s father jumped in with a message—he really needed to speak with his son, Altan! When Altan heard this, he rolled his eyes, paid it no heed, and moved on with his life.
Imagine his surprise when it happened again five years later. Another one of Altan’s friends had consulted a different medium and had the same experience. Gan was obviously quite persistent. Only then did Altan confide in my colleague and the two of them together decided that Altan would consult a medium to see if this experience could help heal the pain and anger Altan still held in his heart toward her. I provided Altan’s psychiatrist with the name of the medium my patient Henry had used, which ultimately led to an unexpectedly warm reunion between Gan and Altan and the long-awaited apology that Gan had never been able to give Altan while he was alive.
In my life and work, I have struggled to make sense of stories like this alongside my patients. What do such experiences tell us about what happens after we die? Perhaps more importantly, what can we learn from them about how to consummate our life and fulfill our potential while we are alive? These pressing questions can lead to a common complaint I hear among my patients—death anxiety. While we began to explore this concept in chapter 7, Transforming Your Fear, my patient Gaston’s case presents a slightly different perspective of how death anxiety may show up in one’s life.
Gaston, a sixty-eight-year-old retired oil tycoon, came to see me at the urging of his family because for the last three years, every time he had an appointment with his estate attorney to create his will, he would get sick, find a reason to cancel or, as had happened last week, have a panic attack and end up in the emergency room. Planning what will happen to your estate after you die necessitates accepting that one day you will die. Gaston did not like this idea and did everything he could, consciously and unconsciously, to avoid it. To appease his wife and children after his latest panic attack, Gaston found my information online and made an appointment to see me.
Gaston was quite a character. When I asked him what he did for a living, he answered, “As little as possible!” When I asked about his family, he shrugged it off. “I have a European system with my marriage. I am one hundred percent loyal, just not always faithful.” For most of the year, he lived at his villa in the Swiss Alps with his wife, Francesca, to whom he had been married for thirty-eight years. Until just the week before, he had also been dating a thirty-five-year-old nurse named Sabine, but he had just ended the relationship.
Sabine had been Gaston’s nurse when he suffered a mild heart attack six months earlier. She enjoyed working with him and loved his quirky sense of humor. As soon as Gaston had been strong enough to leave the hospital, they’d started a romantic relationship. Then, as always happened to Gaston, his mistress wanted more than he was able to give her, so he broke it off. It was a familiar situation for Gaston. But this time was different. He could not stop thinking about Sabine. While he originally came to see me about his panic attack and death anxiety, a more pressing reason for his visit was to mend his broken heart.
“She wanted me to meet her child!” he said, shaking his head sadly. “I knew I could not give her what she really wants because I do not want to end my marriage. So I had to end things and I am heartbroken. We had a real connection. I’ve only had one other connection like this in my life. We had a real chemistry.”
When Gaston described Sabine, he lit up. She was outgoing, fearless, and fun. He liked everything about her.
When I asked Gaston about his wife, he said he also loved her very much, but their chemistry had ended twenty-five years ago. In that time, it felt to him as if she had gotten older while he had gotten younger. Although they were actually both the same age, Gaston felt like she was eighty-five (always preoccupied with health issues and filling her days with nonstop doctors’ appointments) and he was thirty-five (trying his best to live life to the fullest, as evidenced by his young mistresses).
Once I got to know Gaston a little better, I asked him why he’d chosen me as his therapist. The answer to this question is always very interesting, but in the case of Gaston, I had a hunch. I was close to Sabine’s age and wondered if perhaps Gaston had, consciously or unconsciously, chosen somebody like Sabine (close in age, at least) to temporarily replace her as his therapist as he healed his heart and worked through his emotions. In essence, I would be his transitional relationship. He was amused by my interpretation and, with a flirtatious smile, answered, “Perhaps…”
As Gaston and I began our work, he slowly transferred his former dependence on Sabine to a dependence on his therapy and me. He came twice per week and told me all about his family, children, life, travels, and everything in between. Whenever the topic of dating younger women came up, Gaston gave me his signature response: “Why not? They make me feel young again.”
I explored with Gaston some of his feelings about getting older and his efforts to ward off death anxiety by dating younger women, starting triathlon training, and other such activities. Six months into our treatment, Gaston announced that he was feeling better and was ready to leave therapy. He felt his broken heart had healed and he had met another woman he really liked: Fabiola, a twenty-five-year-old waitress.
Gaston is not alone in his use of therapy as a transitional space between relationships, though he had no intention of using his therapy to face his fear of death. As long as he could interest younger women, he was perfectly happy with the illusion that their proximity made him young, too.
The most powerful way to deal with death anxiety is to engage in the old adage of living each day as if it were your last, without fear or regret. Although death itself will lead to the end of our physical life as we know it, the recognition that life is finite may be the very thing that opens us up to our aliveness. Ways of dealing with death anxiety include embracing our authenticity, living with purpose, fostering meaningful connections, and embracing our freedom by taking full responsibility for our life. None of these things will make you immortal, but they will enable you to live the life you have on earth most fully. As Irvin Yalom writes, “Though the physicality of death destroys us; the idea of death saves us.”10
As in the prior chapter, set your stopwatch for five minutes and write in stream-of-consciousness fashion on the topic What Are You Waiting For? The Questions for Reflection are included as mere guideposts. As with life, let your writing take you where it may.
1. If you found out you were going to die tomorrow, how would you live your last day of life?
2. If you found out you were going to die in a week, how would you live your last week of life?
3. If you found out you would die in a year, how would you live your last year of life?
4. Of all the things you would do in your last day, week, or year of life, which ones have you not yet done? What has held you back? What are you waiting for?
In the coming month, choose one of the things on your list above and do it.
Curiously enough, the field of medicine, which has been so devoted to the exploration of the deepest layers of the psyche, has recoiled from taking a closer look at our universal fear of death. Among therapists and thinkers in the field, death anxiety is rarely a part of the conversation. Either they deny that it exists or they deny its relevance. They sometimes claim that fear of death is actually the fear of something else, which we explored in chapter 7. Although this may indeed be true in some cases, in other cases it may be a suspicious attempt at deflection. Perhaps these medical professionals are themselves afraid of unearthing their own fears of death, facing their own perplexity and despair, or admitting their own reliance on ideology—religious or otherwise—for explanations, comfort, meaning, and a sense of peace.
Atul Gawande, MD, author of Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End, said that he learned a lot of things in medical school but mortality wasn’t one of them. He was surprised to find that medical textbooks said almost nothing about the process of dying or aging. As a physician, he was curious about how people experienced the end of their lives and how it might affect their loved ones and others around them. Yet the medical school curriculum seemed to consider these matters to be beside the point. Clearly medical school was meant to teach aspiring doctors how to save lives—not how to tend to the dying. “People live longer and better than at any other time in history,” Dr. Gawande said. “But scientific advances have turned the processes of aging and dying into medical experiences… and we in the medical world have proved alarmingly unprepared for it.”11
My friend, colleague, and classmate at Stanford University and Yale Medical School Dr. Paul Kalanithi was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer while completing his neurosurgery residency in 2013. In March 2015, he passed away at the age of thirty-seven, leaving behind an artfully introspective legacy titled When Breath Becomes Air. In this rich masterpiece, Dr. Kalanithi echoes Dr. Gawande’s earlier sentiments on the limitations of science in reconciling death, dying, and the soul:
Although I had been raised in a devout Christian family, where prayer and Scripture readings were a nightly ritual, I, like most scientific types, came to believe in the possibility of a material conception of reality, an ultimately scientific worldview that would grant a complete metaphysics, minus outmoded concepts like souls, God, and bearded white men in robes. I spent a good chunk of my twenties trying to build a frame for such an endeavor. The problem, however, eventually became evident: to make science the arbiter of metaphysics is to banish not only God from the world but also love, hate, meaning—to consider a world that is self-evidently not the world we live in… Science may provide the most useful way to organize empirical, reproducible data, but its power to do so is predicated on its inability to grasp the most central aspects of human life: hope, fear, love, hate, beauty, envy, honor, weakness, striving, suffering, virtue.
As a result, many doctors have looked elsewhere for answers, turning to the religion of their childhood or adopting new ones—anything that might promise certainty in the face of a fatal prognosis. Others have come across surprising alternatives without looking for them at all.
Dr. Brian Weiss, who graduated from Yale Medical School, started his career as a conventional psychiatrist but over the course of his work had a series of inexplicable experiences that shocked him and seemed to provide evidence of the transcendence of the soul and proof of immortality. Before medical school, Dr. Weiss graduated Phi Beta Kappa, magna cum laude, from Columbia University in New York City. By the time he completed his psychiatry residency at Yale, his mind was disciplined to think like a physician and scientist. He was suspicious of anything that could not be proven using scientific methods. While he was aware of studies in parapsychology, they didn’t hold his attention. They seemed “too far-fetched.”
Then he met a patient named Catherine who would radically alter his way of thinking. After working with Catherine for eighteen months in an effort to allay her numerous unremitting, paralyzing fears (of water, choking, dying, heights, the dark, you name it) to no avail, he turned to hypnosis. To his surprise, Catherine remembered her “past lives” while in a hypnotic trance. Following the process, Dr. Weiss went with the “memories” and found that working through them effectively eliminated her symptoms, something no conventional methods had been able to accomplish. For the first time in her life, Catherine was happy and at peace.12
Dr. Weiss’s work with Catherine provided him with an unexpected glimpse into the spiritual side of our existence using past-life regression under hypnosis, giving some credence to the idea of past lives. While our physical bodies have a finite life span, our souls are eternal and keep returning to earth to undertake new journeys, learn new lessons, experience new things, play different roles, and accumulate new memories. Each journey is an “incarnation,” and the cycle of returning and embodying again is a “reincarnation.” Through his best-selling books, Dr. Weiss brought ideas of reincarnation into mainstream consciousness.
No science that Dr. Weiss knew of could explain the radical transformation he observed in his patient. There were no plausible scientific explanations for the power of these past-life memories and their apparent impact on Catherine. Dr. Weiss speculated that under hypnosis her mind may have been able to access actual past-life memories. Perhaps she tapped into the collective unconscious referred to by Carl Jung?
Jung’s concept of the collective unconscious came from his recognition that our unconscious mind contains more than just our personal unconscious. Jung saw that even without direct cultural transmission, there are archetypes or themes that are expressed universally in dreams, the arts, and daily life. He believed that these archetypes were a part our greater human heritage that we inherit not via DNA transmission but by tapping into the collective unconscious, which contains knowledge, wisdom, information, and memories of the entire human race. While the collective unconscious influences all aspects of our lives, we cannot be fully conscious of it and so only know it indirectly, by looking at its influences.13
Science is meant to investigate things that can be measured. According to the Dalai Lama, the trouble is that the mind and the self cannot be measured. From a Buddhist point of view, the mind and consciousness are currently outside the realm of science. Since there have been so many sophisticated scientific experiments about the experiences of dying people, the Dalai Lama is hopeful that the study will expand and one day lead to new discoveries. For now, the only way for science to explain the yet inexplicable—in this case, past lives—is to say that it does not exist. In doing so, however, the following problem emerges:
[I]f it is scientifically proved that certain things do not exist, then theoretically speaking, it has to be accepted. For example, if reincarnation is thoroughly investigated in a scientific way and it is proved 100 percent that it doesn’t exist, theoretically speaking, Buddhists would have to accept that. But you must see the difference between merely not finding proof and having tangible proof that something doesn’t exist.14
The Dalai Lama is highlighting the important scientific principle that absence of evidence does not constitute evidence of absence.
In addition to the idea of past lives, another notable exception to the belief system of Western medicine is the presence of spirit guides. The reality of guiding spirits has not yet been validated by Western medicine, but it is a noteworthy subject, since it would provide evidence that we are indeed “guided” by something greater than ourselves.
Psychologist Michael Newton, PhD, author of Journey of Souls, has used past-life regression extensively and believes in spirit guides. Human beings, he says, have always created anthropomorphic figures to portray the spiritual forces they sense all around them. In this way, the act of praying is an attempt to reach out to a caring, familiar entity for love and inspiration. Newton finds the idea of one supreme God to be too distant and impersonal, so spirit guides fill the gap, serving as intermediaries.15 In some religious traditions, angels serve the role of spirit guides.
Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, whose landmark 1969 book, On Death and Dying, changed the way a generation of physicians and caregivers worked with the terminally ill, would agree. She devoted her working life to the end-of-life counseling that others before her had been reluctant, perhaps afraid, to take up. In the final years of her own life, she turned to a channeler of the spirit world, who led her into meetings with her spirit guides. As she describes in her 1997 book, The Wheel of Life, her first experience with a spirit guide was dramatic:
One day a woman in Virginia asked me into her house and wanted to know if I believed in fairies. I told her that I wasn’t turned on to fairies but would like to know about my guides. I believed that there were such things as guides, but up to that time I had never seen any.
She handed me a Polaroid camera and asked me to take a picture of any part of her garden. I thought this was a strange request, but I took the shot nevertheless. As the picture developed, imagine my surprise when I saw a fairy right in the middle of it!
There it was, pretty as ever, looking at me. So that afternoon I thought to myself, if a camera can take pictures of fairies, then it certainly could take pictures of guides! So I took my husband’s expensive camera, went up a small hill, looked into the woods, and said aloud, “If I have a guide, I’d like to see him or her materialize in a photograph.”
I pointed the camera at the trees, took two pictures, went home and forgot about the whole thing. Weeks later when the pictures were developed, there, on one of them, was the figure of a tall American Indian with a hand stretched out toward me. Needless to say I was thrilled! That was my first encounter with one of my guides.16
Many believe we all have spirit guides to help us complete our soul corrections and actualize our soul contribution potentials. These are entities that exist at a much higher spiritual level than us, who guide us and communicate with us in various ways, such as through synchronicities, gut feelings, intuitive insight, inspired thoughts, dreams, even sending certain people into our lives and arranging chance meetings when we most need them.
Since spirit guides work through various means—such as creating “signs” or synchronicities and facilitating intuitive inner knowing—there are many ways in which we can connect to our guides. Whether you are a skeptic doubtful of this process, an agnostic willing to be assured, or a believer refining your skills of connection, this exercise is designed to help connect you with your spirit guides.
One way in which you can connect to your spirit guides is through the process of automatic writing—asking your spirit guides a question in written form and being open to whatever they respond back to you in written form. This is the means through which best-selling author Neale Donald Walsch wrote his best-selling series Conversations with God. We will explore this exercise together here.
1. Open your journal to a new page.
2. Write down some questions you would like to ask your guides. These could be questions about any part of your life in which you would like some guidance. Your spirit guides are loving and compassionate. They do not judge, so feel free to ask anything, no matter how troubling. Some sample questions include:
• What do I need to release?
• What is the source of this struggle?
• How can I achieve my dreams?
• What is the purpose of my life?
• Is this a healthy relationship for me?
• What positive changes can I make right now?
• Do you have any advice for me right now?
3. Now take several slow deep breaths as follows:
• Inhale through your nose for the count of two.
• Hold your breath for the count of four.
• Exhale through your nose for the count of eight.
• Repeat for five breaths.
4. Now go back to the questions you just wrote. Reach into the inner depths of your being and begin to write down your answers to these questions, as if the answers were coming from your spirit guides. Keep going as if you’re having a conversation with them. In your writing, you may greet your guides and ask them their names. Although it may seem as if you’re just writing answers from your imagination, your spirit guides can communicate with you through your imagination and your thoughts. At first it will feel weird, as if you’re communicating with yourself or with an imaginary friend. But if you can suspend your judgment and freely allow yourself to converse with your guides, you may be startled by the information you receive. Be sure to be open to whatever answers come. You may or may not anticipate the answers, and you may or may not like and/or agree with them. If in doubt, just keep going. When you feel like you have your answers, thank your guides for their support.
5. Take a look at your answers and then put your journal away for safekeeping so that you can review what you wrote at a later time.
Connecting to your spirit guides is like tapping into the depth of your unconscious mind. Your guides are there to help you in any way they can and, more importantly, in any way you allow. The more open and allowing you can be, the more help you will receive. Over time you’ll see that you are being guided in the right direction and you’ll trust your guides—who communicate with you through your inner wisdom—even more.
For Dr. Kübler-Ross, there was no question of life after death and no need to fear death whatsoever. She likened death to the shedding of our bodies like a butterfly sheds its cocoon. The profound difference is that death is, according to her book Life Lessons, “a transition to a higher state of consciousness where you continue to perceive, to understand, to laugh, and to be able to grow.” If we were able to put aside our fears, we might be surprised to discover that death is very possibly one of the most wonderful experiences of our lives.17 This involves making the perceptual shift similar to what was suggested by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin in the opening quote of this chapter. We need to go from seeing ourselves as human beings having an occasional spiritual experience to inherently spiritual beings having a temporary physical experience.
So many people wonder about such questions that Raymond Moody’s book Life After Life: The Investigation of a Phenomenon—Survival of Bodily Death was a smash bestseller that has now sold more than thirteen million copies around the world. Moody published it after conducting a small study of one hundred people who had been medically revived after being clinically dead.
What he found was that, in general, when someone is dying, he hears a loud ringing or buzzing, then feels as if he is moving through a long, dark tunnel. Suddenly, he finds himself in the same room, but outside his own body. He sees himself from a distance. Maybe people are trying to resuscitate him or crying. He watches the scene as if he’s a spectator.
Soon the spirits of dead relatives and friends appear. A warm being of light asks him, nonverbally, to evaluate his experience. He is shown an instant replay of his life. He is drawn to a mysterious border between this life and the next but finds that he cannot cross it. Sometimes it is not yet his time. Sometimes he has to go back to Earth. Usually he doesn’t want to return, but if he does, he is “overwhelmed by intense feelings of joy, love, and peace.”18
Beliefs about what happens after death appear in virtually every civilization throughout recorded history. There is some evidence that even in prehistoric times people may have been buried with a sense of the afterlife to come. Dr. Peter Fenwick, an internationally renowned neuropsychiatrist, developed a profound interest in end-of-life experiences when he received a letter from Pauline Drew describing the day before her mother died. Pauline’s mother suddenly stared intently out the window and told her daughter, “Please don’t ever be afraid of dying.” She said she had seen a beautiful light and felt herself irresistibly drawn toward it. The appeal was so great and the effect so peaceful that she had to fight the urge to sink into it and never come back. The next morning, Pauline’s mother died, but Pauline was forever changed by her words.19
Whether we can face death with equanimity and joy depends a great deal on how authentically we have lived. All throughout our lives, we get nudges and reminders about the direction that best suits our soul, the ways we can contribute to the world, the better course of action. A life well lived is one in which we have worked to complete our soul correction and actualize our soul contribution. If we fail to pay attention or ignore the guidance life gives us, we can easily end up in the wrong place, living according to someone else’s values and feeling alienated from ourselves. Staying focused and living authentically will allow us to not only live a more fulfilled life, but also guarantee a good death.
As Kübler-Ross wrote, “It is not the end of the physical body that should worry us. Rather, our concern must be to live while we’re alive—to release our inner selves from the spiritual death that comes with living behind a facade designed to conform to external definitions of who and what we are.”20
Death is predicated on the concept of linear time. We are alive as physical, living and breathing bodies for a certain number of years, after which our bodies cease to function and we, as we know ourselves, cease to be. Everything in our life is measured in designated intervals of linear time, beginning with the nine months we are in utero from conception to birth. We scrupulously keep track of time, bemoan its passing, measure our accomplishments against it, and await the next milestone. We may ask ourselves, particularly in our waning years, if time is infinite, why do we have so little of it?
But what if time is not truly linear? What if it is actually possible to go forward or back in time? What then do we make of the concept of death?
Science writer and MIT professor Alan Lightman explores this question in his 1993 bestseller, Einstein’s Dreams. In a series of vignettes assembled into a novel, Lightman illustrates thirty conceptions of nonlinear time, such as the following:
Suppose time is a circle, bending back on itself. The world repeats itself, precisely, endlessly. For the most part, people do not know that they will live their lives over. Traders do not know that they will make the same bargain again and again.… In the world in which time is a circle, every handshake, every kiss, every birth, every word, will be repeated precisely.21
Lending some credence to the idea that time does not function as we might think it does, Cornell social psychologist Dr. Daryl Bem conducted many experiments on this subject. When he gave two randomly selected groups of students a simple test, he asked one group not to study for the test at all and the other group to study only after taking the test. Surprisingly enough, the students who studied afterward did better than the group that had not studied at all! Studying for a test will surely increase your test score, but how can this be possible if you study after the test?
Scientists all over the world were encouraged to replicate his seemingly anomalous results. Bem’s experiment has been carried out ninety times in thirty-three different laboratories in fourteen different countries. A meta-analysis of the data suggests that, indeed, his findings are for real.22 Studying after a test improves your test score. Had I known this trick, I could have saved myself a lot of time in college and medical school!
So what is going on here?
Bem hypothesizes that these results represent the effects of time slippage, the ability to tap into your so-called future self to make use of what that future self might know.23 This is a general form of precognition, when we know something before it actually happens. Bem’s results turn the modern-day concept of cause and effect on its head and provide support for the phenomenon of retrocausation, where the effect (doing well on a test) occurs before the cause (studying for the test). Maybe time can move backward after all?
Appalled and fascinated by these results, the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) sponsored several conferences for physicists and researchers to figure out what is really going on here.24 In the conference proceedings, published by the American Institute of Physics, it was written: “It seems untenable to assert that time-reverse causation (retrocausation) cannot occur, even though it temporarily runs counter to the macroscopic arrow of time.”25 Has the AAAS officially suggested that time can move backward? Why didn’t anybody tell me earlier? There are a few things in my past I was hoping to alter just a bit…
Time slippage, retrocausation, precognition, and time moving backward are inherently incompatible with our everyday Newtonian conception of physical reality. Numerous researchers have suggested compelling metaphors with quantum theory to explain what is going on26 as well as other theories that are more testable than simple metaphor.27
If nonlinear conceptions of time exist, what does this say about our ideas of death? Whatever the answer, death of the body is our destiny. We all want to survive, so we instinctively resist death. The most powerful way to overcome death anxiety is to live a life of fulfillment: living authentically, living with purpose, and perhaps most importantly, living in the present. After all, the past is gone and the future is not yet here. The present moment is all we have. It is all we have ever had. Yet often our minds get in the way of our embracing the present. We relive the past and plan for the future. These behaviors are healthy and normal. They are essential to living a fulfilled life. Yet the capacity to quiet the mind, embrace the silence and be present with our experience is one of the most important tenets of cultivating true fulfillment.
Journalist Lynne McTaggart, who was skeptical of all things quantum before she researched and wrote her award-winning book The Field, points out that there is no such thing as time in the quantum world of the infinite field of consciousness of which we are all a part. It is a realm of pure potential, existing in “one enormous present.” Time and space are tools used by our consciousness and filtered through our brains to enable us—inherently infinite beings—to exist in the finite here and now. According to McTaggart’s extensive research, both time and space are imaginary! This implies that every place and event exists in a vast “here and now.”28
The very act of being present and embracing the here and now can be our reservoir of calm in any flurry of chaos and commotion. If you are completely present, your worries recede and you are able to honestly and spontaneously experience “what is” in its totality. Jewish theologian Martin Buber makes this point in saying, “In spite of all similarities, every living situation has, like a newborn child, a new face, that has never been before and will never come again. It demands of you a reaction that cannot be prepared beforehand. It demands nothing of what is past. It demands presence, responsibility; it demands you.”
While the method for being present is fairly simple, it’s the practice that matters most. Most people don’t learn to be present because they don’t practice, not because it’s too hard to do. The way to be present with whatever you’re doing is to learn to focus completely on doing that one thing. Choose one thing today with which you would like to be wholly and completely present—it could be absolutely anything in your day. Now begin the following steps:
1. As you begin to do this activity, pay attention to every aspect of it.
2. Take a moment to consciously collect all the information about your experience through your five senses: touch, sight, hearing, smell, even taste.
• How does this experience feel?
• What does it look like?
• How does it smell? Sound? Taste?
• What emotions come up as you do it?
• What is going on in your body as you undertake this experience?
3. Now become aware of what thoughts enter your mind. As you become aware of your thoughts, you’ll notice them jump to other things.
4. Use your awareness to gently bring yourself back to your present task. Keep gently returning your awareness back to the present moment, time and again. It can become tiring at first if you’re not used to it, in which case certainly take as many breaks as you need and return once you feel ready.
I invite you to practice this exercise at least three times per day in the coming week. Over time you’ll notice the worries and distractions in your life melt away as you begin to enjoy the present moment much more. Be joyful in whatever you’re doing, grateful that you’re able to do that specific task, and fully appreciative of every little movement and tactile sensation of the task. In this way, you become much more mindful in your daily life.
For this exercise, little presence reminders are useful to help you come back to the present. You can find presence reminders everywhere: your child’s voice, your colleague appearing before you, a regular event on your computer, the noise of traffic. Practice, repeatedly, in small, easy, beautiful steps. Each step is a wonder in itself, and each practice helps you to find that calm in the middle of the traffic of your life.
By living in a constant state of presence, we begin to appreciate the miraculous in the mundane. As Albert Einstein once said, “There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.”