Author: Michele T Knight

Dr Michele Knight is a Social Worker, Social Scientist, researcher and independent scholar.

Her interest and research in the end-of-life has its origin in the lived experiences of her own bereavements, her near-death and shared-death events, the returning deceased and attitudinal responses to those experiences.

Since 2006, she has been extensively involved in community development, support and advocacy in both a professional and community services/voluntary capacity in the areas of bereavement and grief, hospital pastoral care, and academic lecturing/tutoring.

Her PhD, Ways of Being: The alchemy of bereavement and communique, explores the lived experience of bereavement, grief, spirituality and unsought encounters with the returning deceased.
August 20, 2023 /

What is it about ghosts?

The light of dawn, Michele T. Knight, ©

What is it about ghosts?  I know I’ve written about this topic previously in my blog, however this question came to my mind again when meandering in a city bookstore I came across some children’s books dedicated to the topic. I hadn’t really noticed this genre in children’s literature before, which doesn’t mean it hasn’t always been there of course.  It’s probably more the case that for so long my focus and interest in the afterlife has generally been directed toward an adult audience.   In pondering this, I remembered then how I used to buy R. L. Stine’s Goosebumps books for my son when he was little and then how he too became fascinated by the afterlife.

What is it about ghosts, and by default the afterlife, that fascinates us?  Why are we drawn to accounts of the returning deceased and to the locales they inhabit?  Why do we watch movies and documentaries about hauntings, and mediums, why do we go on ‘ghost hunts’, why do we love telling stories about ghosts and listening to ghostly tales?  What is it that is driving this interest, what is it that is compelling us, that is pulling us toward it?

Is it a sense of connectedness, or reassurance perhaps, that when we die we don’t cease to exist?  Or that those we love don’t cease to exist?  That we, and they, don’t disappear?  And in thinking about death, what then is life, what is our life, for?  What are we ‘to do’?  What are we ‘to be’?  And what are ghosts, the returning deceased, inviting us to consider?  Maybe it’s all those things, maybe it’s none of them, maybe I will never know all the answers, but I do know that this is ‘some-thing’, and surely it’s occurrence testifies to that.

What is it about ghosts?  Well, truth be told, I probably won’t know until I am one.

 
July 31, 2023 /

Consciousness and the search for reality

 

Coming soon:  Consciousness and the search for reality: Beyond the veil, a Salon de Morte publication.

A powerful journey about living a spiritual life in Western modernity - how a 
destined encounter with a teacher of the Work led to an awakening of consciousness and an understanding of the spiritual foundation of reality.

I’ve always felt that there was more to life and that there was an intention or purpose to my being born.  I’ve always felt too, that the visible world and universe in which I lived as an embodied human being separated me somehow from something immeasurably vast that I couldn’t see yet felt and knew existed.

As a child I was constantly aware of this vastness incessantly pressing itself against me.  Its gentle urging to be known resulted in the creation of a persistent and unusual inner tension.  Why did I feel like this?  Why did I think like this?  What was life about?

This discontent was the impetus for a life-long spiritual journey of discovery, self-examination and growth which not only stripped away my illusion of reality, it took me to the depths of my being and beyond, the story of which is recorded in this book.

All of us have something in us which can grow.  And in this semi-autobiographical book I share intimate accounts of how deeply profound spiritual experiences intersect with esoteric knowledge to provide a rich and meaningful spiritual education, all the while amidst living a busy Western life.

 

 
June 26, 2023 /

Blurring the veil

An education which leaves untouched the entire region of transcendental thought is an education which has nothing important to say about the meaning of human life.

Abraham Maslow, The Long Way Home, MANAS, XVI:29, July 17, 1963

Death is generally regarded as the final act in the drama of our embodied lives and existence, however in a spiritual sense, death simply means resurrection into eternal life. In my upcoming book, Consciousness and the Search for Reality: Beyond the Veil, frequent references are made to the fact that our spiritual destiny, our afterlife, is shaped and determined by the efforts we make while living our planetary or embodied life.  Higher Life waits for us, but that doesn’t mean when we die we march on into a sublime celestial existence.  It’s up to us to create the spiritual future we want for ourselves here and now, and we do that by working on ourselves.  Do we understand what we are?  Do we understand why we are born?  And most importantly, do we understand how precarious our cosmic situation really is?  This principle was known in ancient times and can be summed up in the following parable:

And if the tree falls to the south or if to the north, where falls the tree there in the place shall it be.

Ecclesiastes 11:3

The language of correspondences assists us in understanding the parable’s esoteric meaning in the following way.  The term ‘tree’ corresponds to our being, specifically what we have made of our being, what we have spiritually become or not become.  This is the totality of the lifetime of intentional effort we made when working on ourselves.  The term ‘falls’ corresponds to physical death.  The words ‘there in the place shall it be’ refer to the fact that what we have made of ourselves up until physical death remains so for eternity. The term ‘there in the place’ corresponds to our spiritual development and growth, which is representative of a particular level and spiritual society in the spiritual universe to which we will belong. ‘Shall it be’ is a warning that what we have or have not become, will remain as such.

The words from Ecclesiastes are a decisive and powerful communication which illustrate the importance of work-on-oneself from a cosmic perspective; we are what we make ourselves to be, and we determine where and how we live in the afterlife; it really is that simple.  The Gnostic texts also highlight the importance of working on ourselves now, as they do the sense of immediacy which accompany that task.  In The Gospel of Thomas from the Nag Hammadi Library we read the following words purportedly spoken by Jesus to his disciples, “(59) Jesus said, take heed of the living one while you are alive, lest you die and seek to see him and be unable to do so” (Koester & Lambdin, 1978, p. 132).  Again, the exhortation is clear; know now, learn now, prepare now.

When we die, we enter the vastness of the spiritual universe, a world largely unexplored by most people.  Sometimes our lives intersect with death, as in for example shared-death experiences or near-death experiences.  These events teach us that we are more than our material selves and that our existence continues after death, albeit in different form. The Work makes it very clear that a large part of our life should be devoted to active work-on-oneself in preparation for the afterlife.  In fact, our early years should be spent in gathering esoteric knowledge which in our later years is digested and absorbed to bring about the required transformations necessary for the evolution of our soul.

Planetary existence provides us with the opportunity to work on ourselves.  The intentional efforts made while in our embodied state are crucial to determining what sort of eternal spiritual future we create for ourselves.  The rule is this: What we make of ourselves here remains so there, and once we get there, how we live there is reflective of how we lived here.  It really is that simple.

 

 
May 26, 2023 /

Back to basics: After-death contact

Beyond the mist.  Michele T. Knight©

Many years ago I was approached by an editor who wanted me to contribute an article about my research to their magazine.  The focus for the storyline was unexpected outcomes of completing a doctoral study exploring after-death contact (ADC).  My research explored the returning deceased who made their presence known in some way, shape or form to their bereaved loved one.  This is the opposite to the bereaved who may reach out to them with the help of a medium or some other support or technique; it is the deceased who make contact first.

My previous article had highlighted some of the tensions brought to light when two paradigms come face-to-face with one another.  Those paradigms, analogous for a way of seeing, thinking about and relating to the world and its phenomena, can be broadly classified as the scientific paradigm and the spiritual paradigm.  Both are delineated by a distinct cluster of ideological constructs, and both have adherents who staunchly defend their relative positions.

The research I conducted explored the natures and meanings of after-death contact, a phenomena which I defined as post-mortem engagement between bereaved adults and the person close to them who died, the deceased.  According to lived experience accounts, this occurs when the now non-material  or disembodied person, after their physical death, spontaneously and without assistance or provocation from anyone living, engage and interact with the bereaved individual in a manner deemed by them to be significant or meaningful.

Although everyone who participated in the study brought to it the subjective uniqueness of their own lived experience, there was an underlying sense of communion and providence which interconnected, sequenced and linked those experiences in a deeply profound sense of wholeness and integration.  Reflecting on that time, it seemed to me that we were all reeds in a reed-bed, whose roots were anchored in the same earth.

The editor’s invitation was an interesting one.  How do you interpret ‘unexpected outcomes’?  Are they what one wants to know or suspected, or what one doesn’t want to know?  Are they unexpected outcomes for the researcher conducting the research or, for those individuals choosing to participate?  In pondering these considerations it became apparent to me that there was indeed an unexpected outcome: the implication of the findings and their relationship to how we understand ourselves as elements of the living body of humanity, and, our innate umbilical connection to and with the parent-sacred.

What does this mean?  Well, the methodology my research used privileged pluralistic lived experiences of  non-material anomalous phenomena (which can include for example mystical, spiritual or metaphysical experiences, and alternate ways of knowing).   In addition to potentially transforming the mind of the individual and introducing new trains of thought, such research activities in themselves can become acts of self-realisation for the researcher.

The encounter with the transcendent dimension of the topic of inquiry can not only inform and educate, it can also change the researcher, sometimes radically.  Transpersonal researchers learn about the topic they are researching and themselves and moments of awareness and self-realization can be challenging and confronting, or they can be liberating and enlightening.  But, research conducted as an act of social science endeavour has the ability to initiate and realise authentic change in our world.

Humanistic psychologist Abraham Maslow writes of the notion of “one’s fullest humanness” (1993:28-40), which he defines as the human being in their psychological, psychosocial, philosophical and spiritual entirety.  This fullest humanness is characterised by Maslow as constituting several intrinsic elements which allude to the notion that human beings are spiritual beings living within a material body:

The spiritual life is then part of the human essence.  It is a defining characteristic of human nature, without which human nature is not full human nature. It is part of the Real Self, of one’s identity, of one’s inner core, of one’s specieshood, of full humanness.
(The Farther Reaches of Human Nature, 1993:325)

These elements coalesce in the experience of after-death contact, which indicates that something profound is not only occurring but being communicated as well.  After-death contact is an experiential allegory of potential psychological and spiritual growth and development, which can be utilised by the experient to re-evaluate the meaning of their existence as a human being, the meaning of life, and the meaning of their relationship with the sacred or the spiritually infinite. It invites the individual to consider life and one’s participation in life from a spiritual paradigm rather than from the scientific paradigm.

After-death contact occurring within the context of bereavement, which is what my research explored,  suggests that something other than material reality is both at work and being revealed because there is an intersection occurring between two realities; material and non-material reality.  In essence, it is not so much that this phenomena exists, it is that it occurs.  Acknowledging and accepting its existence is one matter, but truly understanding the conditions which bring about that occurrence, and why, is another.

Engagement and ritual with the sacred or spiritually infinite and relationships between the living and the deceased, and with material and non-material reality, is recognised by experients in both Western and non-Western, industrial and non-industrial cultures and societies.  This relationship is well documented in historical and contemporary anthropological, sociological, philosophical, religious and spiritual literature (Durkheim, 1995 orig. pub. 1912; Eliade, 1958; Eliade & Couliano, 2000; Frazer, 1913; Goss & Klass, 2005; Hume, 2007; James, 1902; Maslow, 1964).  After-death contact occurring within a context of bereavement, is a constituent of this organically evolving history.  It constitutes a spiritual paradigm of soul growth and is as much a component of the subjective experience of death as it is a social construction of the psychospiritual growth of the human beings who experience it.
April 27, 2023 /

Thou art the One, there is no other

The risen Aten.  Michele T. Knight©

When I was a child, I began to randomly experience unusual other-worldly phenomena.  I can’t remember when they first commenced because it seems as though they have always been a part of my life, and I simply can’t remember a time when they weren’t.  Whether or not I knew it then, these experiences were teaching and showing me that another reality co-existed with the one I lived in as an embodied being.

Throughout my life and across the years, they have continued to occur unexpectedly with little or no warning, challenging my understanding of linear time and slicing through the permeable barrier which separates the visible material world from the non-material spiritual universe.   They have taught me about a reality which I would never have known existed otherwise.

They have always been completely unexpected and still are, and writing about them now some fifty-five years or so since I first began to experience them, can say that there is always something consistent which accompanies them, something which throbs in the background like an unmistakable energy or vibration.  When I was little that was unnamed, but now as an adult I know it to be the presence of the Divine.

I know people can experience other-worldly phenomena and states of being using for example mind-altering/enhancing drugs or through other activities, however I’ve never done so.  And when I reflect on these approaches there seems something harsh about them, something intrusive or artificial perhaps, as though one is trying to force one’s way in (I could very well be wrong of course).  I have always been aware of a profound gentleness accompanying these experiences, and though they can be sudden and occur unexpectedly in the midst of daily activity, I have never tried to stimulate or bring them on and in truth have always had a life of their own.

And though this phenomena and its manifesting experiences last only seconds in measured time, they are enough, they are enough.
March 31, 2023 /

Eerie tales from old Korea

I’ve recently returned from a holiday in South Korea, a country and society steeped in ancient history and customs which are juxtapositioned against postmodern 21st Century tech.  Roaming ‘off the grid’, and amongst other experiences, I unexpectedly encountered the presence of the deceased.  The first experience occurred in the surrounds of Deoksugung Palace (previously known as Gyeongbokgung Palace), where a lady of noble linage approached me with immeasurable grace, gentleness, noble bearing and a serene smile. She was dressed in embroidered robes of silken cloth and looked like she had stepped out of the pages of a history book; I knew she was from another time long before my own.

I knew instantly that in life she had been a woman of great inner beauty who loved those around her with a genuine, sincere and warm affection and that she was a person who held true to her values, even fighting for them.  There was also something transparent about her, something which was without guile or deceit, and I could see she was unique amongst the contemporaries of her time.

I don’t know who this woman was, nor why she chose to reveal herself to me, but I knew I was in the presence of someone gentle and kind who had a clear seeing mind and a razor-sharp tenacity.  Who was she, and how was she linked to the palace?

The second occasion on which I experienced the presence of the deceased was at the Seolleung and Jeongneung Royal Tombs complex of King Seongiong and Queen Jeonghyeon of the Joeson Dynasty. Queen Jeonghyeon, was the wife and Queen Consort of King Seongjong of Joseon, the 9th monarch of the Joseon Dynasty.

 As I approached the tomb of Queen Jeonghyeon I was instantly aware of an intense feminine energy wrapping itself around me and then as I stood looking into the queen’s burial complex a woman, again of noble lineage approached me.  I was held fast, utterly transfixed by the encounter as I was by the exquisitely feminine, grace and profound beauty of the soul who stood before me.  Who was she?  Why had this happened and why in this location?  What did she want?

These questions were similar to the ones which had gone through my mind in my previous encounter in Deoksugung Palace.  Again, I didn’t want to leave, I never wanted to leave, I wanted to remain in her presence.  I could feel her essence pass into and through me, and I was mesmerised by her great inner beauty.  She was gentle and quiet, serene and strong, loving and both warm and nurturing.  She smiled at me, and I was reminded of the other woman who had come to me, she too had smiled gently, and in recognition.

Writing this blog I’m reminded of something I heard spoken in a Netflix docuseries about people’s accounts of spirits which occurred after a devastating tsunami swept through coastal areas of Japan.

“Japanese people don’t separate the dead from the living.  To Japanese people, death is like shoji, the paper sliding door.  Once you open the sliding door you go through to the other side, and the living  can still see you through it.”

After experiencing what I did, I couldn’t agree more.

 

 
February 14, 2023 /

Salon De Morte: A literary collective

(Mi Serenata, Robert Bryce, 2020)

Salons have played a vital social role throughout history in the communicating, fostering and sharing of information and new ideas.  Initially established by women, the salon served not only as a means of self-education and access to information, but as a form of resistance by women against social constraints which restricted their full participation in society.  These included access to formal education, to enlightened conversation and to intellectual discourse.

Facilitating and hosting the salon was a central binding figure, a noblewoman who was termed the salonniere.  It was the salonniere who hosted the salon in her home, determined topics of conversation such as philosophy, politics, religion, and/or the arts and sciences, and who ensured that all present could gather freely to openly discuss and debate liberal ideas and current affairs.

Salons not only provided a unique forum in which women’s voices could be heard and ideas shared, but they fostered cross-class and cross-cultural communication between both male and female social groups.  There are records of salons dating back to the early 1600s, one of which was a literary circle hosted by the Marquess de Rambouillet, who at the time brought together Paris’ intelligentsia and literary set.

In similar fashion to the historical salon and literary circle, a contemporary salon has come into being, and while it’s presence will be digital, it will serve a similar purpose as its forebears’ have done.  In this instance, the salon is metaphorically represented by the new business entity, “Salon De Morte: A literary collective”.  The salon will have a uniquely Australian presence and will bring together like-minded writers to disseminate and share ideas relating to the Work, and to spiritual growth and development in contemporary Western society.  The business was conceived by me in 2022 and its corresponding web presence will be launched, also by myself, in 2023.

This is an exciting moment, and I look forward to sharing Salon De Morte: A literary collective, and all that it offers, with you in the near future.
January 29, 2023 /

The virtuous man

Photo by Marco Zuppone on Unsplash

 

The virtuous man who has breadth of character carries the outer world.  When you come, you never want to leave.
China, Wuzhen, water town in Southern China

The quote above came from Wuzhen, a water town in Southern China.  I have a photograph of the man penning it, who sits in a small room surrounded by assorted paraphernalia in what looks like a curio store from a Harry Potter scene.  I’ve often looked at the elegant characters gracing the page, never knowing without the English translation, what wisdom they contain.

What does this mean, and how does it apply to our life?  What can it teach us, what is it inviting us to know?

It seems to me that life teaches us many things, to the end that we come to understand that our life has a purpose, that it is necessary for something important, for something that our life quite literally depends upon.  Not our embodied, corporeal life, but our spiritual life.  Accompanying that, and with  time, comes the gradual separation of ourselves from material things, and a growing love for those things spiritual.

Although it happens gently, in truth it’s a psychospiritual shift which occurs in the mind in conjunction with a reorientation of our spiritual belief-system and world-view.  We find that our way of being in the world is different because our values have changed.  We may seek solitude or nature, our circle of friends may become smaller, our tastes in music, art or literature may change.  Or, we may start to see the material world through the lens of correspondences where we understand the spiritual pattern of the material object.

I understand ‘the virtuous man’ to be an individual who does indeed have breadth of character because of a deep internal spiritual core, which can be palpably felt when in their presence.  This for me is the virtuous man, and if ever you meet such a one, you do indeed never want to leave.
December 31, 2022 /

Noah’s Ark

Photo by Lucas Dial on Unsplash

The biblical story of Noah’s Ark and the great global Flood recounted in Genesis 6-8, seems to find a reflection in the current clime of the flood of pestilence which has swept over us all.  COVID and its mutated variants have swirled around the globe for a second year with deadly impact, causing great suffering and taking countless lives in wave after engulfing wave.   Never have I been so personally confronted with my own mortality, nor so continually challenged to navigate unscathed through troubled and uncertain times.

If there is anything that the Year of 2022 has taught me, it is that life, or our existence, is fundamentally impermanent and that we need to create for ourselves our own metaphorical ‘ark’.  By this I suggest a body of spiritual truths and/or a spiritual doctrine to help us ride the waves of misrepresentation, false information, negativity and fantastical theories.  Reality has a spiritual foundation and COVID, in holding a mirror to our mortality, has highlighted how important it is to build something spiritually permanent for ourselves which will transcend this flood.

What is real?  What is true?  What body of doctrine can help us understand why we were born and what happens to us on the other side of death?

Discovering the answers to those questions is the journey the seeker after truth takes.  It requires courage, perseverance, unwavering effort, and a sense of discontentment.  Sometimes one finds others along the way, but my experience has been that the journey is for the most part a solitary one.  I’ve always found that it is in solitude that I can hear what I’m meant to hear, that I can see what I’m meant to see, and that gently, ever so gently, I find my way.
November 24, 2022 /

To be a spectator of Reality is not enough …

“To be a spectator of Reality is not enough. The awakened
subject is not merely to perceive transcendent life, but
to participate therein;  and for this, a drastic and
costly life-changing is required.”
Evelyn Underhill, Mysticism, 1995, p. 195

Evelyn Underhill (1875-1941) was an English mystical poet, author and Christian theologian.  In the 1995 edition of her book, Mysticism she wrote that when the self begins to stir or to question its’ existence, “… a change occurs in the individual, a change whereby that self turns from the unreal world of sense in which it is normally immersed, first to apprehend, then to unite itself with Absolute Reality” (p. 174).

Because of the spiritual or other-worldly experiences which have populated my life since childhood (as they have the lives of others), I find a strong sense of resonance with Underhill’s words. In reflecting on those experiences which are as deeply etched in my mind as an adult as when I experienced them then, it seems to me that the self is the instrument through which the individual acquires a new understanding not only of the reality of its’ existence, but of the reality of life.

And if Underhill is correct, when the self stirs, when we know within ourselves (and in a way which cannot be denied or argued against) that our way of seeing and experiencing life is illusory, then it is one’s very existence which is challenged.  Suddenly everything is different, and those things which were once meaningful and fulfilling are now no longer so.  And this happens because they have been replaced with new meaning and a new way of being in the world.

Underhill  put it quite simply, stating “We see a sham world because we live a sham life.  We do not know ourselves …  hence attribute wrong values to [their] suggestions and declarations concerning our relation to the external world” (1995, p. 199).  Importantly, Underhill also highlights something else, which is that the mystical adventure, regardless of form, must begin with change of attitude.  This mental shift is crucial, especially because true self-change can only be initiated by the individual themselves.

How does this change in attitude come about?  What is it that compels one person to question and contemplate the nature of their existence while for another, the thought or impulse never arises?  Why is one person born with the flames of future burning questions already pressing upon them, while for others  such things manifest not?  Perhaps change in attitude has its birth in a sense of inner dissatisfaction, or perhaps it springs from the feeling that there is simply more to life, that ‘life’ has hidden depths which gently beckon to be known.  Then again, maybe the answer to the question of ‘why?’ isn’t important, maybe just the fact that we awake to the realisation is enough.