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.
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.
May 31, 2025 /

Rest well

Not everyone believes in a life after death and for those that do, many don’t know what takes place on the other side of it.  Once we die and shuffle off the proverbial mortal coil, then what?  Do we rest in eternal slumber, do we return and live our lives over?  What happens when we get there?  What do we actually do?

While there are prolific accounts of life after death experiences which speak of a homecoming with previously deceased loved ones, beautiful landscapes and different societies (both heavenly and hellish), it is difficult to sift through notions of the afterlife put forth by psychics or channelers.  How do we judge the claims of those who say they have been there?

I’ve read many books about this throughout my life, including those written by near-death experiencers and mediums, and have even had my own near-death experience where I found myself unexpectedly thrust into the spiritual universe, and the most credible author I’ve found from all those I’ve read throughout the years, has been Swedish scientist and philosopher Emanuel Swedenborg.

Today’s churchman knows almost nothing about heaven, hell or his own life after death.  Many people born in the church deny these things and ask in their hearts, “Has anyone come back and told us so?”  To prevent so negative an attitude from infecting and corrupting people of simple heart and simple faith, it has been made possible for me to be right with angels and to talk with them person to person.  I have also been allowed to see what heaven is like and what hell is like: this has been going on for thirteen years.

The quote is taken from Swedenborg’s work entitled Heaven and Hell, in which he describes the world of spirits and both the heavenly and hellish realms of existence.  My attention has always been drawn to his accounts of heaven as a place where angelic beings live in houses, belong to communities, perform tasks and have governments.  This suggests to me that eternal existence is one of dynamic activity, order and harmony in which we all play a role.  Am I afraid of dying, of death? No, I never have been.
April 13, 2025 /

The meaning of death

Death has always fascinated me, because of what comes after it, and because I’ve always known we don’t die when we die.  Similarly, I’ve always been fascinated by the meaning of death, which is possibly the same thing.

Pondering on this drew me to my bookshelves (which are replete with death and dying literature) and to Herman Feifel’s edited volume, The Meaning of Death (1959, McGraw-Hill Book Company).  In the preface Feifel writes, “There is no book on the American scene which offers a multi-faceted approach to its problems.”  65 years ago I would have agreed, but these days, and with the burgeoning growth of death literacy, I think the situation is otherwise.

Carl Jung wrote, “The birth of a human being is pregnant with meaning, why not death?”  Why not indeed.  Why don’t we think about death in this way, especially in the West?  And, what is attained with death?  Why are we born if only to die?  And so I am back at the beginning.  This preoccupation of mine is defined by what Viktor Frankl terms as the will-to-meaning, “the most human phenomenon of all”.  Something which I believe is entwined with the concept of what life is expecting from us.

Does death remind us of the importance of our lives, of how we want to live and for what purpose?  If death is a constant reminder of our mortality, does it by its very nature compel us to consider the meaning of how we live our lives?  Does the shock of its impact thrust us into an awareness of meaning, is this its purpose, and its necessity?

We need to know we die, as upsetting as that can be at times.  And we need to search for and find the meaning of our lives before time runs out.  We all have different ways of seeing the world as we do of experiencing our relationships with spirit, with the universe, with God.  Some believe we return to earthly existence, traversing an endless loop of dying and being reborn in pursuit of perfection of the self.  Some  believe at death we cease to exist.  While others like me believe we pass this way only once, so rendering time infinitely precious.
March 22, 2025 /

Ghosts

What is it about houses and ghosts and things that go bump in the night that is so fascinating?  Why does belief in the afterlife and the presence of disembodied spirits, or ghosts as they are so commonly known, have such deep historical and cultural roots?  And why am I not the only one drawn to such tales?   Why does this otherworldly phenomena touch an inner nerve within so many of us?

Pliny the Younger for example, Roman writer and politician from the first and second century in a letter to Licinius Sura, documented three tales of ghostly goings on which occurred in a house in Athens.  While in Mexico, the Day of the Dead rather than being a sad occasion, is a widely practiced social and cultural event where the dead are treated as guests of honour who are warmly welcomed to family festivities.  In Japan, the notion of Obakeyashiki (お化け屋敷) or ghost houses, is deeply rooted in Japanese folklore and the belief in supernatural beings called ‘yokai’, which include various types of ghosts and spirits who either come to visit or who live with them.

Why has this subject area had such a prolific outpouring in literature, screen and campfire tales, so much so that the ghostly haunted house has evolved into its own genre?   Nowadays, the haunted house and its ghostly inhabitants is a much-loved horror genre blending paranormal activity with psychological terror, with the house usually the locale where, generally, nefarious events take place. Although it must be said that not all ghosts are hell-bent on revenge from the grave and for me as for others, ghost stories and ghosts have always been a topic of fascination and lately I’ve been wondering why.

Is it because some of us intuitively know or perhaps sense the presence of non-material reality and those who inhabit it?  Are we ‘hard-wired’ to feel and ponder, to consider ‘reality’ from outside a strictly scientific paradigm and mindset?  And do ghost stories, which reinforce cultural and social values also function as a reminding factor?  What is this phenomena telling us, what is it inviting us to know?

The sleep state is pernicious with many of us unaware of its devastating impact on our lives.  Experiencing ghostly phenomena can shock us into an awareness of other forms of reality and can prompt us to consider ourselves as something other than purely flesh and bone.  Is the message being conveyed through ghost stories and their inhabitants, one such that corporeal existence is temporary and that we need to think about, consider or possibly even prepare for our afterlife?  And if we’re not born to simply die and fade away, what then is the purpose for our being born?  What is the purpose for our existence?
January 25, 2025 /

When the Universe steps in

The New Year has begun and in reflecting on the events of the previous 12 months, I wonder once again at how quickly time passes and at how much life experience can be packed into such a short space of time.   I was told many years ago that my entire life would be like this because it was necessary for a huge amount of experience to be condensed into a short timeframe.

For example, during 2024, and in addition to working full-time, writing and working on my book, running a monthly Death Café (and of course working on myself), I was also the guardian and carer for a friend who subsequently died in September.  In addition to this, I became involved in voluntary work for a not-for-profit startup, actively fought antisemitism, commenced job hunting for a new role and received a diagnosis from a Psychologist that I was neurodivergent (which actually explained a lot). Naturally, by December I was mentally and physically exhausted.  I had planned to travel to South Korea for a month’s holiday, however several days prior to the date on which I would have been flying out of Sydney I had a freak accident which severely injured one of my ankles rendering me unable to walk.

Although I knew during the year I was doing far too much and needed to let go of some things, I didn’t.  However, higher life with its innate intelligence finally stepped in to save me from myself and pulled the rug out from under my feet quite literally stopping me dead in my tracks.  The instant the accident happened, I knew that it was an intended event and not simply a coincidence.  And so I chose to surrender, and while I rested my ankle at home and underwent rehabilitation and physiotherapy, I gradually began to let go of people and other things I had attached myself too.

As the awful bruising and swelling gradually disappeared, and I rediscovered the joys of sitting by the seaside, I thought about the New Year and what my goals might be in a greatly modified lifestyle.  Of course, the first thing which came up was ‘write’, so one of my new projects is to complete another book I have already started about the impact of after-death-contact on the lives of those experiencing it.

There will be other projects but hopefully not other ‘freak’ accidents, and no doubt the year will unfold as it needs to and while we have no control over the events that occur in our lives, I know we can choose how to respond to them.

The New Year awaits.