Amicus Mortis Posts

I first met Sol well over ten years ago.  I had been invited to sit on a not-for-profit committee of management board and was attending the yearly AGM.  I was being introduced to the other committee members and I turned around to see an aged man looking at me and smiling.  I was instantly captivated by him, not because of his smile, but because of what I saw within him; a great white light, glowing brilliantly.  I knew in that instant we would become friends, and we did.  Over the years, and as I came to know him, I saw the reason for the light.  He was a man generous of spirit, warm hearted, loving, non-judgmental, deeply understanding of human nature, sensitive and empathic.  He was the father I wished I had had in life and though he wasn’t, he loved me always as his daughter.  In addition to being friends we were colleagues, collaborating on a number of projects for the community centre and in this capacity, I came to appreciate his incredible business acumen as well.

He was a widower and in time met a lady (20 years his junior) who naturally began to take up much of his time.  Although our friendship remained close the dynamic changed, the result, I think, of certain insecurities of his companion.  Eventually I barely saw him.  Every so often there would be a phone call, and we would catch up but the space between us grew bigger.  Then out of the blue I saw him.  When I ‘see’ people in this way, I see with eyes inside my eyes.  Some people may call it a vision but the only way I can describe it is as I experience it.  It’s like seeing material and non-material reality simultaneously.  It is always sudden and unexpected and often catches me unawares.

He was surrounded by darkness, reaching toward me with his right arm outstretched, and calling for me; he was afraid.  I knew he had had a number of minor brushes with cancer in the past and wondered if his situation had taken a turn for the worse.  Around this time I made contact with a mutual friend who informed me that he had stage-4 cancer and was very unwell.  I wondered why his companion had not contacted me.  This sparked a flurry of phone calls and text messages to Sol, none of which were responded to. My partner at the time also made repeated attempts to contact him, again, nothing.  Eventually he did respond and we all agreed to meet; it was one week before Christmas.

Seeing him after so long was a shock.  He was obviously gravely ill, thin, and walking with a cane while having to be supported.  As I embraced him I felt the sickness within him, eating him from the inside out, and as he looked into my eyes no words needed to be spoken.  The four of us sat and chatted as though everything was okay, but it wasn’t.  Eventually the word ‘cancer’ was spoken and then I was able to ask direct questions.  “What treatment have you been having?” “How has that been for you?”  “What treatment protocols are in place?”

As he spoke I began to understand that he wanted to maintain a semblance of privacy about what was taking place in his life and that by doing this he was maintaining a feeling of control when everything else was spinning out of control.  He wanted to die on his terms one of which was that he wanted people to remember him as he was and not as he is at the moment.  As we said our goodbyes, and I held him in my arms, I knew I wouldn’t see him again, and I grieved that knowing. We had talked at length about death many times in the past, before he had met his companion, and I grieved the knowing that I could not companion him at this time of his life.

Christmas came and went and all the while I kept texting and phoning.  He did manage to call in the following January but I missed it, having instead to be content with a voice-mail message on my phone.  He sounded so tired, and I could hear the effort it cost him even to speak.  My partner and I often talked about him and wondered at the role of his companion.  Why hadn’t she called?  Why did I feel that she had somehow nurtured the space that had come between us?

And then I saw Sol unexpectedly in a vision.  He was standing bathed in luminescent yellow light.  He was smiling at me because he knew I could see him and I felt that a great burden had lifted off him.  Had he become reconciled to his imminent death?  Was his fear gone?  I knew something had happened because I could see it and I knew that whatever had happened, it was joyous for him.  I told my partner and he wondered if Sol had died.  I said no, that surely, we would have been contacted, but in my mind I wondered.

The last two weeks of my husband’s life when he was in the palliative care ward, I experienced events like this.  I would see him standing outside his body bathed in light and knew that he was getting ready to leave.  I understood this to be a kind of spiritual ‘loosening up’, so that when his physical body ceased functioning, and he found himself in the spiritual universe it wouldn’t be too much of a shock for him.  Was Sol being readied?  Was he too experiencing that same ‘loosening up’?  As it turned out, he had died and he had come to tell me.

Readers of this blog know that I’ve thought about death for as long as I can remember. In fact, a  large part of my childhood was dedicated to wondering why things, people, insects our family dog, her puppies, died.  Why did it happen and where did they go when they died?   Life eventually taught me there is no death, not in the spiritual sense, and that death as an event in our life is simply the putting off of the physical body.

Eventually then, death comes to stand at every door.

When that occurs do we run shrieking in terror away from the door, do we stand transfixed and unable to move, or do we open it, an act which heralds our rebirth into the spiritual universe where we can take our place as functional members in the greater eternal body of spiritual society?

A friend of mine is actively dying.  Cancer is robbing him of his strength and vitality and every day it seems death comes to stand at his door, waiting patiently.  As I share his journey and watch his physical life slowly ebb away, I’m reminded again of the fleetingness of our lives and of the importance of living well, and of dying well.

What does this mean?  For me it means to have lived a life with purpose, to have served others, to have grown my  spiritual life and to have cleaved to the Divine, to God.  And when death comes to stand at my door, it means to open it willingly, to step gladly into eternity, and to be with my spiritual community who made their presence known to me all those years ago when they came to me as a small child.

My friend is not having a good death.  He is suffering physically, spiritually and psychologically.  He wants to be alone.  He wants to die at home in his mother’s bed.  His house is not in order.  He is unable to see the enormity of life, the vastness of it, the profundity of it nor can he see those things which have always taken my own breath away.  His is a death of barrenness.  He does not see that above the muck and mire of infallible human existence and all its suffering there is a stillness, an order, a deep serenity which gently announces its presence to all and which touches the soul and warms the heart.

I hope to be by the bedside of my friend, to hold his hand and to say goodbye knowing that despite his fears and apprehension, he has loved ones waiting for him who will greet him warmly, and who will thank God for his safe return home.

I have a book in my library, Measuring the Immeasurable: The scientific case for spirituality (Sounds True, 2008) which contains chapters from contributing authors discussing a diverse range of topics relating to research and spiritual methodologies and ways of being.  However, one chapter from the anthology by contributing author Charles Tart entitled “Consciousness”, caught my eye.  It’s a beautifully written chapter which not only inspires pure enjoyment, but one which explores the intersection of psychology, transpersonal psychology and parapsychology in a context of understanding consciousness, a particular passion of mine.

My own book, Consciousness and the search for reality, will shortly be available and in it I also discuss the relationship and intersection between spiritual psychology, the individual, higher life, and consciousness.  The word roots for consciousness provide a clue for my approach in that consciousness means ‘knowing together’, which in the context of spiritual psychology is seeing and knowing everything in ourselves.  But what does this mean?  How do we do this?  And if we do, what then?

Most people think they are conscious however the truth is that we often go through our day in at times what seems to amount to a dreamy state of abstract awareness.  Writing about consciousness in a Western post-modern epoch is challenging, especially because there are so many opinions from so many people.  Which of these can we trust?  Which of these resonate with us such that we know we have found a truth?  It is difficult because people in good faith are searching for something with which to connect, for something which will answer what may be a burning question they have.  Fuelled by a force they may not quite understand, they are driven to search relentlessly, to know, to experience something above and beyond themselves.

It is hard to be a human being.  Life is difficult for all of us in different ways and death, disaster and trauma never seem to be far away.  But there is something good in the Universe, there is something which is striving to bring us to our greatest happiness, we just need to connect with what that is.  Tart in his chapter recounts Maurice Bucke’s spiritual-mystical experience.  Described in full, it is an astonishing event which Bucke himself describes as ‘an aftertaste of heaven’.  We can all have these experiences, we don’t have to be ‘special’, we just have to be open to them.

For the  past four weeks I’ve been living in a hotel in Seoul in South Korea.  I say living because although technically I’ve been on holiday, my time in the country hasn’t felt like a holiday, it’s felt like life, like how I live my life on a day to day basis wherever I am.  What is different of course, is that I’m alone in the country and embedded in a non-English speaking culture and society experiencing a bombardment of new and diverse impressions.   And as I wrote somewhere a while ago, for me it’s not so much about time or locale, its more about state.  State of being that is.

Three out of the 34 television channels available on the TV in my hotel room feature English-speaking programs, and two of those are CNN and the BBC.  When coverage of the Hamas war and the American presidential race starts to wear thin, I find myself channel-surfing through a kaleidoscope of colour and entertainment, which at times is mesmerising, especially for someone who doesn’t haven’t a television in their home.

I’ve watched several movies, all in Korean and without English subtitles, about death and the afterlife, and ghosts.  And what always strikes me is how comfortable people here are with this genre and in particular with the afterlife and the understanding and belief that after physical death our lives and existence continues in a different way.  This leads me to the topic of Shamanism, which though sometimes frowned upon and considered something of a relic of the past, is nonetheless highly respected, with most Shamans being women (the term is ‘mudang’).  Among other duties, Shamans interact with spirits in the spirit world usually providing assistance to help with their transition into the afterlife.

I’m writing about this because at the time I was conducting research for my thesis, and was completing preparatory field work, I spoke about some of the interactions I experienced with my deceased husband with an Anglican nun, who told me in no uncertain terms that such things were considered evil by Sydney churches, and that a person who talked about such things would be considered possessed.  When I spoke about these things with the guide from the Museum of Shamanism I visited, the reaction was completely different; he smiled knowingly, and nodded.  Why do you have to travel a thousand miles to be understood?

At core of course is a shared belief in the afterlife, and in our ongoing existence of life beyond this earthly life. In reflecting on my association with South Korea, this being my second trip, I finally came to understand why the country resonates with me, why it calls to me so persistently; it’s the visibility of the dead in everyday society.  This isn’t just evidenced by the presence of Shamans and Shamanism in Korean society, the dead are everywhere, in myths and songs, in popular K-dramas and in historical plays and dramas enacted before audiences on stages in theatre house.

Their sociological and psychospiritual visibility is precisely because of the attitudes of the living and no wonder I feel so at home in this foreign culture.  It is precisely because of this visibility, this shared understanding and acceptance of our mortality and immortality, and the hope that it brings.  What about this is so difficult to understand, and why are the dead by their presence in our lives so often feared, misunderstood or reviled?  When we face the dead, ghosts, or spirits, we are really only looking at reflections of ourselves.

Photo by Austrian National Library on Unsplash

In an attempt to make sense of the ongoing and horrific conflict in the Middle East, I turned to Swedenborg and to the small booklet, Peace and War (The Swedenborg Society, 1977), which is a selected series of quotations drawn from some of his works.  While I understand that war and the devastation and loss of life it creates is motivated and driven by human beings for many reasons, I wanted to understand what was occurring from a spiritual perspective.   Perhaps I was trying to find a sense of meaning behind the horror and brutality of it, a pathway of sorts through the terror and confusion in my own mind as well as a means of coming to terms with the gross and constant misappropriation and distortion of the truth playing out in the global media and social domain.

Swedenborg tells us that wars occur because a man’s life’s love has “become such as to desire to rule over others, and at length over all, and to possess the wealth of the world, and at length all wealth”.  He then tells us something else, that unless these evils broke out, “man would not see them and therefore would not acknowledge them, and thus could not be induced to resist them.”  The fortunes of war, when victories occur, are brought about by the working of divine providence flowing into the minds of men and women from heaven who seek to oppose and overcome the threat.  And the ugly sickening brutality, the cruelty and inhumanity of war and the actions thereof, flow from hell into the minds of the men and women who perpetrate such deeds.

We are a violent and despite our technical prowess, uncivilised race.  We have always sought to dominate one another, to take from one another, to kill one another, to harm one another.  And women and children have borne the brunt of much brutality and marginalisation because of it.  But, and there is a big ‘but’, there have always been those who have fought against injustice with shared values, and there will always be those who will rise up after those who stood before them have died.  There is something in us, I’ve always felt it, that can transcend the darkness, that is capable of change, and which is worthy of life in all its sacredness.

I think back to my Judeo-Christian roots and to the presence of Christ in the world.  Why here?  Why us?  What did the Divine-made-manifest see in us that was worthy of such sacrifice, that was worthy of living among us?  And that is what gives me hope, that is what helps me find a sense of meaning in the horror of our humanity.