The Awakening of a Revolutionary New Worldview

          Life Begs the Question:  What Happens to the Conscious "I" That Is Us When the Body Dies?  With respect to the issues of death and dying, most of us live in a fog of confusion, denial, pain, grief, and generally repressed terror.   We -- in Western cultures, at least -- appear to ignore the topic of death or pretend it's a non-issue until it "surprises" us through, for example, a piercing confrontation with a beloved's demise or our own imminent departure from this life.    When we gather to spend time with someone who is dying or to pay our respects because of the passing of an acquaintance or a loved one, even then, if we can possibly, possibly help it, we don't dare talk about death per se.    We may reminisce about hir, and of course, we think little anymore about participating in the most inane-to-intimate discussions about religion, politics, sex, "whatever," with anyone from our parents / children to perfect strangers -- anything, anything at all, except death.   Here truly is our last standing social taboo, our greatest source of pathological denial, buried in a carefully forgotten vault under the floorboards of our inmost secret closet.  

          Death is surely one of the most important moments of our lives, yet from first breath to last, many of us rely on nothing more than hardly-examined, hand-me-down beliefs about this Moment and its possible consequences and outside these assumptions, do little or nothing spiritually or mentally to prepare for it or to consider its Implications in our daily lives.   Where there is . . .                                             

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. . .    belief, there is also its shadow, doubt.   So, regardless of our belief and unbelief, each of us must occasionally wonder deep down, Do we really continue to live after death, or not? ...unless we have been blessed with an experience of direct knowing, such as an out-of-body experience, an afterdeath communication with a loved one, or a near-death experience, in which case, doubt and belief are no longer even relevant.   Under these conditions, we know ... in fact we know-that-we-know "death" is . . . a myth! 

          Throughout recorded human history, across all cultures, continents, religions and socio-economic divisions, a tantalizing tendril of possibility has persisted concerning countless direct extraordinary experiences and experience-focused research indicating the "I" that is we, one's conscious sense of self, survives physical death.  

          Remember Plato's allegory of the cave?   Socrates is talking with his friend Glaucon and asks him to imagine people chained so they are forced to face one direction, toward  a wall.   Behind them is a great fire, and the constant and restless silhouettes of those who eternally feed it cast an endless dance of shadows against the far walls of the cavern, which is all that the chained ones can see.

          They live out their simple lives immersed in the shadow world as the REAL.  Like the daily watching of a soap opera, the drama of this empty movement on the wall is all they think they have and so they perceive this as their normal world, that which owns all their waking hours.  No one imagines to question their consensus reality of shadows.  

          But every so often a few of our fellow prisoners in our Platonic "Cave" [here is a translation of Plato's Cave Allegory] determine to craft file and hacksaw to break free of the constraints of limiting beliefs and doubts.   They want to see and to know for themselves what Life is really all about, and they have become suspicious of the "solid reality," i.e., the dance of shadows [deliciously ironic!] ever preening and pirouetting on the wall of their limited perceptions.   Maybe some of their personal experiences just don't fit with the current interpretation of what life in this earthly cave is all about. 

Maybe one of these "rebels" is you. 

          Ultimately, we each must become our own heroic rebel in our very personal caves of consciousness (or unconsciousness?).   Even though the broad strokes of this journey are utterly universal -- birth, the developmental ups and downs of simply being creatured in these physical bodies, the gall and grief and grace and glory, and of course, death / "death," the living of our singular lives is also starkly, inescapably private, personal, apart.   At least they appear to be this way for most of us most of the time within the temporary constraints of physical incarnation.   The experiences of countless people of every 'when and where', however, put us on notice that even this sense of apartness is not so implacable and permanent as we might imagine.   Nevertheless, in our flesh-bound condition, this is a prominent, seemingly unavoidable feature, an initiation. ...  that we each face our personal death / "death" alone.   

          Given this condition, it is not surprising that every one of us, as if we are the very first to tread this ever-virgin territory, during rare, still-point moments of our lives must stumble to our mental knees before the enigmatic face of the sphinx-like marvel and mystery of our existence -- of who and what we are and why we are here, of our coming into these lives and our leave-taking.   The Mystery encompasses the inner and outer Infinite and yet reflects perfectly in every most intimate hologramic detail of the world we share -- that eternal Mystery glimpsed deep on deep in the unfocused, light-filled eyes of a newborn held close to our hearts and in the tracery of an enigmatic smile that lingers on the face of a beloved who dies in our arms. 

A Mother's Transformative Experience 

          In 1985 my mother faced such a moment.   In the sweltering heat of a July morning, she stepped out onto the screened-in porch that dominates the back of her home.   Breakfast, the little she had eaten, felt like a rock in her stomach, and she often gravitated to the healing greens of the backyard when she wasn't feeling well.   As she settled into one of the old cushy chairs she noticed a new rip in the wire mesh down near the floor.   She leaned back and raised her eyes, staring unseeing into the usually-enjoyed twitter-and-flitter shenanigans of birds around the feeder.   But after only a few minutes, an all-too-familiar inner restlessness pried and prodded and pushed until she was sitting on the edge of the seat, and for lack of something to do, she decided to fix the screen.   With another of many sighs that morning, she pulled herself out of the chair and went inside to gather what she needed to patch it until the whole thing could be replaced.   Pulling a small rug over next to the torn wire mesh, she settled onto it with a grunt and soon found the right needle for the tough fishing line she would use. 

          The tussling and teasing and wild impulses of sundry dogs and cats and kids over the years had created occasionally stunning holes in the screen, the kind that became enshrined in favorite family stories.   This one was merely a "fly door" and would only take a few minutes to repair.   Cutting a small scrap of mesh material to fit, she overlapped it across the tear, but unsteady hands and a sudden spillage of blinding tears that never seemed to stop for long lately made the task difficult.   Two weeks and two days before, her youngest son and also his best buddy, both 21 years old, had died almost instantly in a car accident, two more July-4th-weekend statistics.   At the moment, Dad was out of the house "on some errands," coping best as men do who cannot openly express their grief, which meant she was alone in the house. 

          She took a breath, reached again for the now threaded needle, and set about the task at hand.   The low placement of the hole made the process awkward, and weaving the needle back and forth challenged her usually saintly patience.   Also, for some reason, the fishing line did not want to cooperate and kept knotting up.   Here was a woman who had sewn enough stitches for family and friends over the decades to loop a path around the moon and back, and yet amazingly, the thread kept tangling, something that almost never happened to her.   She swiped at the beading moisture on her face.   Another snarl bubbled up like a sudden storm cloud, and the more she tried to pull it free, the worse it got.   Once more,  sigh escaped as she reached for the scissors, thinking to cut her losses and start over. 

          Suddenly the phone rang.   She jammed the needle securely in the screen by the rip, dropped everything else, and hurried just inside the door a few feet away to get it.   Picking up the receiver, she glanced back with consternation at the tangled mess, still as stone for want of a life-renewing October breeze.   Dad was calling to ask what she wanted to do with some of Jimmy's belongings. 

          Hardly a minute later, she returned to the porch.   There before her was the once hopelessly knotted thread and needle -- laid out tangle-free in a straight line across the floor where she had been sewing.   Thinking a neighbor must have come in, she  quickly looked around the porch, the yard, the neighbors' yards, but no one was there.   No one was there! -- unless you count the little, live-wire beagle that owned my parents.   The inalterable rule is, if a visitor approaches the house, the dog barks.   And barks.   Howls, even, being a beagle.   So no one had physically approached the porch.

          But who could have possibly fixed it?   Even if a neighbor had been able to slip in past the dog and survey the problem, s/he would hardly have had time to cut the thread and fix a new one, much less disentangle the knot, and surely even my mother would have found it impossible to miss someone's approach, assuming  the dog had been sleeping, since the possible good Samaritan would have been in her direct line of vision while she was on the phone just inside the glass sliding door. 

          At first in her benumbed state of the last weeks, she simply lapsed into wordless wonder.   Then, as if she suddenly felt him standing right beside her and heard his special, fun-filled laughter that goes so well with his favorite baseball cap on backwards and those warm, teasing, sun-glinted eyes, the thrill of a realization hit her, and she knew:   Jimmy did it!!   In spite of his frequent mischief-making, he always did a far better job than any of the rest of us to make sure Mom was taken care of.   Like she later said, "That's just like something Jimmy would do." 

Raw Insight Births Another Rebel

          The impact of this event on me was as if it had actually been my experience.    This was after all my own sweet mother, whom I knew I could trust as if she were myself.    Beyond all doubt I knew-that-I-knew (though of course, I honestly have to say I believe implicitly) Jimmy had visited her and made her see in a very direct way that he was fine [his sense of humor and love and concern for his mother were certainly still intact!] and that losing one's physical body did not mean death for one's conscious being at all.    This was in fact the defining event responsible for my avid pursuit of the subject of death and what I then (1985) thought of as 'the afterlife', eventually carrying me, a new convert to rebeldom, into the vocational direction leading to the creation of wHeretwoworldsTouch.com.   

          As a 'rebel' who hungered for answers to the B-I-G questions about life and death, I had had a number of supersensory experiences, not unlike the one my mother had with the needle and thread and Jimmy, demonstrating there is far, far more to LIFE than our five senses can bring to our awareness.   How could I be satisfied with belief systems, be they religious or scientific or other, that fell far short and did not even mesh with what I had learned through direct experience and the similar, corroborative experiences of others?    

          You remember the story of the emperor with no clothes, who went parading before his minions in all his 'nekkid glory', and there was finally one kid who said out loud, "Look!  He has no clothes on!"   To our great good fortune, in recent years, many such unabashed observers in this world long driven by certain institutions and ideologies that for all their strengths and achievements have something in common with that pathetic king, have been coming forward with their own honest, experiential insights, of course including scientists and religious clerics.   These people come from every possible corner of the globe and every cultural and socio-economic background.   Even their types of experiences have been highly variable -- near-death experiences, after-death communications, conscious dreaming, out-of-body experiences, mystical and visionary experiences, interactive shamanic experiences with the living and the so-called dead, ufo abduction experiences [for fuller listing, see death-transcendent "exceptional human experience" / EHE List].   

The Crucial Factor:  The Aftereffects of DT EHEs:

          But regardless of the dramatic differences, DT EHErs have certain crucially important things absolutely in common [for a fuller explanation, see EHE Characteristics].  Examples are [this interpretation, per Kenneth Ring], they --

• Appreciate life more fully

• Experience increased feelings of self-worth

• Have a more compassionate regard for others and, indeed, for all life

• Feel a heightened ecological sensitivity

• Experience a decreased interest in purely materialistic and self-seeking values

• Tend to become more universalistic in religious orientation

• Become more inclusive and spiritual in feeling and expression

• Become aware their fear of death is most often completely extinguished

• Have a deep-rooted conviction, based on their direct experience, that some form of life after death awaits us, which becomes unshakable and a source of enormous comfort

• Spontaneously experience or are aware of increased powers of higher sense perception, increased psychic ability and intuitive awareness, and/or the gift of healing

• No longer believe (or not) in the existence of an infinite spiritual intelligence; they know directly, experientially Spirit / God exists

          If you study the remarkably dynamic and service-directed individual lives of those who have been transformed through DT EHEs, the pattern is unmistakable, and no matter their previous behavior and values -- literally good, bad or indifferent; one transformation outcome fits all.   

          Also, as any EHE-type researcher is quick to tell you, many people are similarly transformed by simply being exposed to people's sharing of their DT EHEs, as happened with me when my mother told me what she had experienced with the needle and thread.   And just as lastingly, by all accounts.   Kenneth Ring calls this phenomenon a 'benign virus'.   Once you catch it, you're never the same again, and it's highly contageous!   

FUELING A REVOLUTION: The Subversive Act of KNOWING Who You Are

          Of course it's the outcome observed in and by so many DT EHErs that is the ultimate attraction.   If such experiences have this kind of impact on ONE dyed-in-the-wool Experiencer -- or 'EHE Empath' -- what will it take to bring the entire human population to this deeply personal awareness and consequent shift in worldview, values and priorities??