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.
September 21, 2026 /

The Fall

When we think about falling, we generally think in either physical terms, or in literal terms when referring to Christian doctrine in the Torah (the Old Testament of the Bible) and the ‘fall of man’ as told in the biblical story of Genesis, and the resulting expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden due to their lost state of innocence.  But what does this mean for us today?  What spiritual relevance does this notion of falling or ‘the Fall’ mean for us in the 21st Century, and why would we relate this to the nature of human life and our own existence?

Esoteric teaching tells us that much earlier peoples were able to maintain direct contact with higher life  and were conscious of why they had been born, which was to transform their essence into a conscious soul. This contrasts sharply with modern man, which is afflicted by the sleep state and whose interiors are now closed to direct divine influx.  This is the meaning of the fall of man; we have fallen away from a state of direct influx of divine instruction and reciprocal love for the Divine, for God.  Today, most people are unaware of their buried inner reality because it is obscured by their first education, their personality and all their ancestrally inherited negativity and reactivity.  We are all born with the same inner spiritual reality early man had, and we must reconnect with it, and with God.

Another way to look at falling is to ponder on the following biblical verse, “In my Father’s house are many mansions” (John 14:2), and the implications of the verse for our inner life, especially if we consider ‘mansions’ as a correspondence for states of mind and for the afterlife, which we know is split into the Celestial, the Spiritual and the Natural level.  Spiritually speaking, where are we in our mind, where are we living in our house, what room are we occupying, and what is the state of the room?

Are we on the top floor, in the basement, in the foundation of the building?  Are we moving between floors?  Or do we never move from the one room, unknowingly spending our lives with a shrunken perception of the spiritual pattern of reality, and shutting out that world without ever realising it?  Where do our psychospiritual states of mind place us within our house?  And what does it mean when we are living on the top floor, yet sometimes fall through the floors to a level below?

Swedenborg wrote about the celestials who temporarily fall away from elevated states, which represents a shift from love and wisdom toward self-love, and which is permitted by the Lord, “… so they remember they have no goodness of their own. All their love and wisdom flow entirely from the Lord.”  There is a lesson here for us, in that how we live, from where we live within ourselves, and what we have an affection for while living our earthly life not only determines what Swedenborg describes as our ‘ruling love’ after death, it determines where we live in our ‘house’ and ultimately where we will live once we enter the spiritual universe.

What do we love?  What do we have an affection for?  How, in accordance with those affections, do we co-create our spiritual destiny?  Perhaps it all starts in the room we find ourselves in and where our psychospiritual states of mind, and affections, place us.
June 20, 2026 /

Divorce

When we think of divorce it’s usually in terms of a legal and financial separation from a partner, with associated (generally speaking) angst, trauma, anger and grief at the disruption and loss of our assumptive world.  Our assumptive world is a collective term used to define how we see the world.  It is shaped by our core beliefs and our values, and by how we understand ourselves, others and society; it is an internal mental and psychological framework by which we make sense of ‘life’ and which largely determines our way of being in the world.

I’ve been divorced, twice legally and twice non-legally, so understand and know well what that wrenching apart from all that is familiar feels like.  The uncertainty of the future, the housing and financial insecurity, the starting over, the worry about the impact on my son, and the emotional, psychological, spiritual and physical toll on my health and wellbeing is not only well-seared into my memories, it has left a legacy of distrust of others.

However, during my recovery from a recent relapse of pericarditis, a condition I’ve been suffering from since July 2025, and upon reflection from the cross-roads where I found myself standing, I saw divorce from a different perspective.  I realised there’s another kind of divorce, a divorce from the world, from attachment to the illusion of its sole reality and from the people who inhabit it.  How does such a quantum leap occur?  Slowly I think, until suddenly the realisation dawns and you just become aware of the separation which is coupled with an associated lack of worry and concern about what one is separated from.

It’s not just an intellectual thought, it’s an inner knowing and a feeling of the rightness of that knowing.  And what does this mean?  It means that once again I find myself looking at myself, and at everything around me through a screen from the other side.  But it’s also simultaneously feeling the impermanence of the visible material world juxtapositioned against the reality of non-material eternity, against the spiritual pattern of reality, against what I term is the spiritual universe.

This in-between place, this place between two worlds, is a remarkable place to be, to experience, to arrive at after a life of work on oneself.  It is a place where I ask myself the question, ‘What is God’?  Only to be answered immediately by inwardly knowing that the reality of God can only be felt, and therein lies the rub.  We cannot ‘think’ God, we can only ‘feel’ God, this is a truth.
March 31, 2026 /

Glimpses of the afterlife

During our life, I believe we catch glimpses of the afterlife, of what I term the spiritual universe.  Sometimes it might be from a significant dream experience involving a deceased loved one, or from a near-death experience, or from some type of death-bed phenomena.  Popular cross-cultural literature is replete with documented stories of the returning deceased, of true-life and lived experiences of encounters with spirits, ghosts, the disembodied, those from the other side, however we want to define them.

Carl Jung, the renowned Swiss psychiatrist has written at length about the afterlife, noting in his autobiography Memories, Dreams, Reflections (Fontana Press,1961) that in his childhood such things were considered quite usual.  In 1944 Jung broke his foot, experienced a heart attack and then had a near-death experience.  This, combined with his childhood experiences of the paranormal led to “… a fruitful period of work” where a “good many of my principal works were written only then”.  Anyone reading his autobiography can see that even from an early age, the existence of the afterlife, and other-worldly phenomena, had a decisive influence on his psychotherapeutic understanding and work and treatment of patients.

Sometimes ‘life’ forces our hand, as when for example paranormal sightings were frequently reported by survivors of the March 2011 earthquake and subsequent tsunami off Japan’s northeastern coast.  Journalist and researchers have documented a host of eerily chilling, emotional stories of taxi drivers picking up phantom passengers and residents seeing apparitions in destroyed areas, linking these experiences to profound grief, trauma, and the search for closure.

What is this telling us?  Why do such things occur?  Why do some people experience a host of other-worldly phenomena while others never do and similarly never entertain the possibility of life after death or the existence of the afterlife?

We need to wake up, and we need fresh insights and a change in our attitudes, toward ourselves and toward death and the afterlife. Jung never dismissed the paranormal as unscientific and in his The Red Book (W. W. Norton & Company, 2010), which is not a simple narrative but Jung’s voyage of discovery into his deepest self.  He wrote that the ‘voyage’ began when he was eleven years of age.  “On my way to school,” Jung recalled in 1959, “I stepped out of a mist and I knew I am. I am what I am. And then I thought, ‘But what have I been before?’ And then I found that I had been in a mist, not knowing to differentiate myself from things; I was just one thing among many things.”

This is exactly what we need to do, realise just as Jung did, that we are just one thing among many things.
February 22, 2026 /

The light

When I was young, a child, life always seemed so far away.  Family events, holidays, school excursions and so on, stretched far ahead of me and time passed excruciatingly slowly until the grand event finally came to pass.  As an adult it’s different.  Now, life’ is in my face every second of every hour of every day of every month of every year.  There is no sense of distance between events, no real anticipation, there is just a sense of, now, a sense of continually being in the present moment.

Which is better?  Living with the agony of constant anticipation or navigating, what can at times be life’s cloying presence?  Do we grow from one state to the other as the child matures to the adult, or is something else taking place, something psychospiritual which is as necessary for our growth as is the air we breathe?

Life presses itself upon us constantly, suffocatingly at times, a fact brought home to me recently by the words a friend wrote to me in an email.

“… with so much conflict in Sydney in recent days, I had to mentally switch off while attuning my soul to God.  I just want to see God’s love spread in the world so that there can be one human family instead of the incessant conflicts.”

And there it was.  So clear.  So simple.  I was reading my own feelings in the words written by my dear friend.  It seems to me that sensitive empathic souls feel the ills brought about by others deeply, powerfully, perhaps because they also feel the beauty of the presence of God, of the continually present Light.

It is a somewhat cruel juxtaposition, is it not, seeing both the dark and the light, and having to choose, always, constantly, which to travel toward?  The conflict so present in the world is a reflection of our own internal spiritual conflict.  It mirrors our inner struggle to awaken, our struggle to work on ourselves against an ageless inherited ancestral negativity, and our yearning for the Light, always the Light, to dispel the ever-present, encroaching darkness.
January 31, 2026 /

1800 God

A friend asked me recently if I thought there was one pre-eminent religion existing over and above all others, which seemed an apt question considering the current era of disharmony and religious divisiveness in the world.  How is a question like that answered without causing offence?

Though as a child I was baptized into the Roman Catholic faith, I grew up experiencing the mystical presence of God and higher life outside of the church and formalized worship, which though grounded in lived experienced, created a definite ideological bias.  And while I know that external forms of religious worship can inspire a sense of communion and companionship with others, life has taught me that love for God, agape, transcends any external religious-related societal act or expectation placed upon us by others.

The 17th century Church of England priest and English mystic William Law (1686-1761) had this to say about the matter:

Now there is but one possible way for a man to attain to salvation.  There is not one for the Jew, another for the Christian and a third for the heathen.  No!  God is one, human nature is one, salvation is one and the way to it is one; and that is the desire of the soul turned towards God.  When the desire is alive and breaks forth in any creature under heaven, then the lost sheep is found and the shepherd has it on his shoulder.

Esoteric Christianity teaches that within our collective history there is one fundamental unbroken stream of phyletic religion, from which at different times in mankind’s history and evolution, an expression has come forth, has emerged in response to the spiritual needs of humanity at that time.  These offshoots from the source are many and diverse, and in the 21st Century well represented by people, societies and cultures around the world.  Despite this diversity and the all too often petty and senseless squabbling of their exponents in the current age, there is something fundamental which links them at a common root, something universal, something which exists beyond our external understandings, literal interpretations and at times scholarly dogma.

The journey of the soul back to the source begins with a yearning heart and is born in the desire of the individual, any individual, whose mind is turned toward God.  Religions are indeed many, but God is One.  There are many paths back to the source; what does the name of each matter so long as the path brings us back to God?
December 30, 2025 /

Our continuity of existence

Cultural traditions and stories relating to Christmas speak of different things, yet to me there seems to be some common underlying themes.  Advent, the period of preparation for the celebration of the birth of Jesus at Christmas, lasts for 40 days and commences on the Sunday closest to November 30.  Each Sunday before Christmas a candle is lit to symbolize one of four weekly themes: Hope, Peace, Joy, and Love. In some churches and homes, a fifth candle bigger than the others, is lit to represent Christ as the light of the world.

Hanukkah, the Jewish Festival of Lights which commemorates the recovery of Jerusalem and the rededication of the Second Temple at the Maccabean Revolt against the Seleucid Empire in the 2nd Century BCE, also incorporates the use of candles.  Again, I can’t but help draw a parallel between these two profound expressions of hope after adversity, and of light as an illuminator and correspondence for truth.  The eight-day festival is characterised by, amongst other devotional acts, the nightly lighting of the menorah.  The menorah candlestick holds nine flames one of which, the Shamash is used to light all the others.

The Hanukkah story is one of light over darkness. It commemorates the victory of the Maccabees, ****Jewish freedom fighters, who defeated the Seleucid Greek rulers of Judea and restored the Temple service in Jerusalem more than 2000 ****years ago. The culmination of the miracle came when a small jar of pure oil, enough to fuel the Temple menorah for a single day, burned for eight days.

Hanukkah marks the Jewish struggle in the Land of Israel to preserve Jewish identity and self-determination. Together with the miracle of the oil, the candles recall the unbroken attachment of the Jewish people to their ancestral homeland.

Lighting the menorah is an act of memory and continuity. Each flame affirms that Jewish identity, history, and connection to the Land of Israel cannot be erased.

Hanukkah has been observed for over two millennia: through expulsions and pogroms, through crusader massacres, through ghettos and death camps, and today, through antizionist Jew-hatred.

Hanukkah is a festival of light – ****and of Jewish self-determination in the Land of Israel.

Anon.  (Written 14th December before the terrorist attack on Bondi Beach.)

This December, Hanukkah and Christmas were marred by an appalling act of terrorism and murder directed toward the Jewish community.  Instead of light, blood cast it’s terrible shadow as two gunmen shot indiscriminately at men, women and children who had gathered to celebrate Hanukkah, wreaking a devastating and heartbreaking toll.

History contains endless stories of the dank darkness of mankind’s evil deeds which have cast their ill-intent toward others, but so too have there been stories of light and those who have embodied it who rose to meet and overcome that darkness.  Darkness, like the dark of the starless night lasts only a little while, and in the end, as with the coming of the dawn and the rising sun, it always fades away … and we continue.

Photo by Eliezer Muller on Unsplash
November 30, 2025 /

I’m ready to go now

I’m ready to go now.

Those were the words I spoke out loud as I lay in bed, wondering if it was time to catch the express to the great beyond.  My affairs were in order, I had detached from my material possessions, I knew where I was going and who would meet me.  I had gone through a powerful process of separation from worldly affairs, things, people.  Nothing really mattered anymore, and the things that once did now seemed laughingly absurd.

Illness can be a strange thing.  At its worst it can be terrifying, at its best liberating.  I had experienced both, coupling a potentially fatal heart condition with a stripping away of aspects of my personality, a process which had taken place over several months.  This resulted, as the illnesses I experience always seem to, in a realignment of my psychospiritual values and a purging of my mind.  I had made my peace with the world and with myself, and I was ready to go.

But I didn’t go.  And this isn’t the first time I didn’t go when I thought I was going to.  But then, truth be told, who really knows when it is time to go?

I had a lot of time for reflection during my illness.  There wasn’t much else I could do, because for a large part of it I was consigned to bed with extremely limited mobility.  Endless rounds of visiting doctors and specialists and having to undergo a multitude of tests and discussions of results became my new norm.  My world, which had been a socially active one, gradually shrank until I was its only inhabitant.

But now things are different.  My heart is healing, my revisioned world gently expanding, my mind renewed, and my way of being in the world, different once again.
October 31, 2025 /

Chaos, Cosmology and Meaning

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.

Geiger, The Long Way Home, p. 3, 1963.

 

Many people fear death.  Why?  Is it due to our lack of understanding of its purpose in our lives, of its inevitability?  Or is it because we think when we die, we cease to exist and simply can’t abide the thought?  And is this, I wonder, where our fascination and curiosity about ghosts, stories of hauntings and things that go bump in the night might come from?   Is there a homing beacon within us drawing us to such accounts, not just because ghost stories reflect cultural and social norms and values, but because something deep within us intrinsically knows our existence continues beyond physical death, and that somehow, we seek validation through such accounts?

The question is, are human beings more than their body?

I believe the phenomena of after-death contact suggests they are.  Is there another reality beyond what is known and experienced through the physical senses?  I believe after-death contact suggests there is.  Does existence continue in this reality, albeit in different form?  I believe after-death contact suggests it does.  And are those from this reality able to positively influence the lives of the living?  I believe after-death contact suggests they can.  Is physical death the passageway through which human beings pass to reach “the other side”?  I believe after-death contact suggests it is.  Is death merely a biomedical phenomenon for the individual, or, because it is a passageway to another existence, something more meaningful?  I believe after-death contact suggests it is.

After-death contact, like other other-worldly phenomena, is difficult to explain.  Acknowledging and accepting its existence is one matter, but truly understanding the conditions which bring about its occurrence is another.  And while biographical self-accounts not only challenge and invite us to consider notions of our own mortality, the afterlife and our ongoing existence after death, it is my hope that people will draw their own conclusions and come to their own decisions.

After-death contact isn’t just “other-worldly phenomena” however.  It is unique because it brings hope.  I like to see this as the hope that despite the pain and suffering we experience in life when someone we love, or who is close to us dies, that something fundamentally good is at work in people’s lives of an uplifting nature.  And though stories of such encounters between the living and the dead can be challenging, the lived experience of such events educate us with the realisation that we don’t “die” when we die.

And because after-death contact, as an idea, extends an invitation to consider life from an alternate transpersonal or spiritual perspective, it brings with it the hope that human beings can grow beyond what they think they are at a given moment in time.  Remember too, when after-death contact occurs it is the deceased who are reaching out to the living, not the other way around.  Importantly, what is also suggested by these encounters is that death is not an impermeable barrier between the living and the dead.

The appearance and reappearance of the dead in our lives, of our loved ones, evidences the fact that the deceased can exist in two worlds simultaneously, their world and ours.  Even if their appearance in our world is only brief, it is enough because it’s ramifications are so powerful.
September 28, 2025 /

The growing light

I’ve been unwell with a health issue affecting my heart.  A battery of tests, the outcome and proposed treatment protocol currently unknown, has left me not only excessively tired and needing to rest, but more reflective than usual about the events of the past few months, which have also included other health issues.  And for some obscure reason, I kept finding myself thinking back to the time my husband died.

The memories of that experience have never left, especially those moments when I railed at life, hating it to the depths of my being because it continued onward, seemingly ignoring he indescribably painful void which had filled my life.  I wanted time to stop, believing if it did then I wouldn’t be ignored.  I wanted life to mourn with me, to pay homage to the dead as I did, to hold me in its arms so I could lose myself in its embrace.  How could it continue when my world had been ripped apart?  How could it carry on when I couldn’t?

But nothing stopped.  People around me didn’t stop, the rising and setting of the sun didn’t stop.  Time didn’t stop, and life didn’t stop.  I remember wondering how life could be so oblivious to someone whose own life had been so profoundly changed, whose own life had been so othered by death?

Over the following months I finally came to understand an important principle.  Irrespective of what had happened to me, irrespective of the deep grief and sorrow I could never give words to, irrespective of my suffering, I had to make a choice.  I could remain outside of life enclosed in a world of grief and intolerable pain, watching it from a distance like a great train rushing past me, or I could step back into it.  So I stepped back into it, but it took a long time.

That was 21 years ago.  But here I was thinking about that time once again, thoughts brought on no doubt by my current health predicament, a somewhat prophetic dream and the impact of a spiritual exercise involving the heart, a golden ladder, and crossing the gap in the octave.  I found myself pondering on this and thinking about life continuing in our absence, potentially mine, and I suddenly understood with great clarity that life has to continue, that it cannot stop to mourn with us because it doesn’t have that luxury, nor is that its purpose.  And I smiled.

I smiled because I saw how much the wild child who existed all those years ago had grown in depth and breadth, how she had expanded beyond herself, and how she had found her rhythm with life.  When we die, and when those around us die, we are still part of the stream of life, and though we may be gone from the sight of others, we don’t cease to exist.   And though the world may not miss us, Heaven will welcome us with open arms.
August 3, 2025 /

We’re born, and then?

My experience of life, and living, is that life is punctuated with events which ultimately serve to teach us life-lessons.  Some of these are gained from experiences of profound loss and grief, others from moments of joy, bliss and ecstasy.  Death, the final transition, and it’s meaning in our lives can be difficult to understand and to come to terms with.  Why are we born seemingly only to die?   Why do accidents, which frequently claim lives, happen?  Why are we afraid of dying, or, why do we not really think about it all that much?  What is our final destiny?  Do we go on, or do we cease to exist after physical death?

While there are many people who already have a relationship with the afterlife, there are many who don’t and one of the reasons I write this blog is because I want to encourage people to not only reimagine or reframe their relationship with death, but to do that with the afterlife as well.   Belief and knowledge of the afterlife has been documented throughout history, is evidenced across cultures and religions, eastern and western, and has been debated over and wondered at by people for millennia.  Books have been written about it, artists, poets and musicians have been inspired by it, and movies, telemovies and documentaries have been produced about it.

There is a scene in the series, The Tudors, where King Henry at the end of his life wonders about death.  The scene was inspired by the work, An Ecclesiastical History of the English People, in which the author Saint Bede recounts a story relating to King Edwin of Northumbria (AD 627).  The King was in discussion with his counsellors about whether to accept Christianity, which incorporates an afterlife, when one of his advisors makes mention of their ignorance of their final destination.

The advisor makes an allegorical statement, likening ‘life’ to a sparrow flying into a lighted hall at one end before flying out the end at the other.  While inside the sparrow is safe from winter’s tempest which rages outside, but after a short time the sparrow disappears, flying through the hall before “… passing from winter into winter again.  So, this life of man appears for a little while”, he declared, “but of what is to follow or what went before we know nothing at all”.

Yes, our life appears for a little while and it does feel at times that we’re simply passing through it on our way to another destination, but of what is to follow we do know.  And the reason we know is because so many people, me included, have had near-death experiences.  These events teach us that physical death is the putting off of the physical body, which like a shell encloses us while we exist as embodied beings living our lives in the flesh.  When death occurs, we do not cease to exist, we simply transform into something which doesn’t require a physical body anymore.  But what then?  Ah, now that is the question.