Amicus Mortis Posts
July 17, 2022 /

After-Death Contact: The point of origin

 

As readers of this blog know, its origins lay in a PhD research study exploring after-death contact (ADC).  The study had its origin in my own lived experience of bereavement which unexpectedly provided the psychosocial and psychospiritual context for the returning deceased; initially my husband and then following his death, both my parents.  Although a number of international studies have reported ADC phenomena  in their findings, few recent studies at the time privileged ADC.  I wanted something different.  I wanted to conduct a study which was not only positioned within a uniquely Australian context but one which did privilege this aspect of adult bereavement.  These accounts are widely reported; what do they  suggest?  What are they inviting us to know?  How do they impact on how we understand not ‘who’ we are, but ‘what’ we are?  And what do they tell us about the transpersonal nature of reality and how we define ourselves not only as human beings but as spiritually organic self-evolving organisms, capable of dynamic psychospiritual transformations?

I didn’t envision that my doctoral work would privilege the transpersonal. The fact that it does is something entirely out of my control and absolutely contrary to the direction I had planned for myself.  It was my intention to further develop my current interest and work in health education policy and reform for Indigenous Australians.  Many years ago a friend told me that God laughs when we make plans.  I resented the statement then especially as I had my life all mapped out however, after now completing my doctoral research I have to agree with those words. Are our lives pre-destined?  I’ve often wondered about that.  Are seeds sewn into our internals at birth which grow into proclivities and drives which naturally propel us in a certain direction and to a certain life purpose irrespective of what it is that we think we should be doing?  I’ve often wondered about that too and I still don’t have the answer to those questions.

What I do know though is what life has taught me to know; that there is a loving wisdom that gently touches all of us like a whisper almost, and so unobtrusive is it that it is almost imperceptible amongst the din of internal noise created by our self-oriented external self-centred lives.   I don’t even know if ‘wisdom’ is the right word.  I think that’s how it manifests, but what it is is beyond the capacity of my mind to conceptualise or understand; I can only feel it moving softly through me.  It’s always been there, like a shaft of sunlight cutting momentarily through a shadowed forest glade.  I would feel it every so often in moments of solitude or communion, as I would the bliss and sense of connectedness that accompanied those internal states, but it is only now after much vastation that I have truly learnt to surrender to it, to let go, to trust in something that I know only wishes to bring me to my greatest spiritual happiness.  And this is precisely how, I believe, I found myself completing a PhD on bereavement and the returning deceased rather than one examining Indigenous health policy and reform.
April 23, 2022 /

The Turning Wheel

 

Our experience of life, and living, is that it is punctuated with events which ultimately seem to teach us various 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 do not 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 through history, is evidenced across cultures and religions, eastern and western, and has been debated over and wondered at by people around the globe.  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 are passing through it as though 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, myself included, have had near-death experiences.  These events have taught them that physical death is the putting off of the physical body, which like a shell encloses us while we exist as embodied beings, while we live our life in the flesh.  When death occurs we do not cease to exist, we transform into something which doesn’t require a physical body any more.  But then what?  Ah, now that is the question.

 
January 26, 2022 /

What do we do in heaven?

 

When I was a young schoolgirl, my early education was gained by attending the local Catholic primary school where religious studies were mandatory, as was attending church on a regular basis. Having been baptised into the Roman Catholic faith, I remember attending church (for Sunday services and feast days), a foreign language spoken by the robed priest (which I learnt later was Latin), aromatic clouds of sweet-smelling incense (which instilled a life-long love for it), making my first Holy Communion and visiting the confessional (a requirement which I never quite understood).

I recall in particular an event which took place in class when our teacher, a nun, was explaining that when we die we go to heaven.  Because I thought a lot about death and the afterlife as a child, and because I wondered what we did when we got there, I asked her the following question, “What do we do in heaven?”  She looked at me with a startled expression on her face.  I could feel her bewilderment and fear as she stood there trying to answer my question.  And then I saw that she couldn’t answer the question because she didn’t know what the answer was.

As I sat in my chair waiting, she became more uncomfortable.  She couldn’t tell me, yet wasn’t she was supposed to know?  In my mind, as young as I was, I reasoned that she was a nun; she was meant to understand about God and heaven and all those things.  Heaven wasn’t just a place that people went to when they died, it was a place where other things happened too, and although I didn’t know what those things were, I felt the truth of it intuitively; I just knew.

I felt that I lived in a world that had come from a special place and if that place wasn’t heaven, I didn’t know what was. The shinning people came from that place, it was their home, and on some level I knew that that ‘place’ was my home too.  Was that heaven?  Is that what it was called?  These were the thoughts in my mind when I asked the question, because I knew, again intuitively, that when we died we did something, but I didn’t know what; we didn’t just disappear.  I needed to make sense of my other-worldly experiences and having my question answered would have helped me do that.  But the nun didn’t know, and I reasoned that if a nun couldn’t help me, who could?

Fifteen years later, my question was answered and I understood then why the nun didn’t know; she hadn’t been taught.
December 19, 2021 /

Soul growth #1

What is the soul in itself?  From an esoteric Christian perspective, soul growth and evolution is one of the driving aims of The Work and of work on oneself.  The soul is the function that enables an individual to move toward the Divine; as such, it is an activity, a principle within us.  The form of every individual is the pattern of the soul rendered material.  It is important to understand that the soul has two sets of force acting upon it, God or the Divine, and matter.

GOD   [Affirming]

       Soul (reconciles the two)

Matter   [Denying]

Matter is inert and non-living.  It resists all flexibility and all life and it expresses the energy of denial.  The soul is poised between this polarity (which is denying) and the Divine (which is affirming).  At every instance the soul is affected by the sheer inertia of matter.  To learn, the soul reconciles this two-fold thrust from creation.  The soul is an important creation between the Divine and the world, and unless it can move to depths and heights it will not grow or learn.  When it reconciles the polarity between the affirming and denying force, it helps make the world function as one whole process.

According to esoteric teachings the soul is formed of the things of love and wisdom given by God.  Life, love and wisdom flow in to sustain the pattern of the soul.  The soul also needs an instrument of knowing and is given the power to generate this instrument.  This instrument of knowing is a spiritual formation, the mind.  The mind is capable of knowing the action of life and the impact of wisdom.  It can feel the urge of the soul passing through it, something that becomes the individual’s natural drift.

The mind is an individual’s most important function because this is the part that looks up or down.  It is the mind that is the instrument of growth and transformation.  The destiny of the soul is wrapped up in the mind.  People often say that they ‘have a soul’.  This is an incorrect statement.  People should say, “I am a soul.”
November 29, 2021 /

Just another day

It was as a child that I first realised I lived in the meeting place of two co-existing or overlapping realities.  One of these realities was solid and tangibly material; it was the world I lived in as a sentient, embodied human being and where I lived my life in the flesh in the material universe.  The other reality was characterised by non-ordinary, other-worldly or what could be termed spiritual phenomena.  Though these phenomena constantly intruded into my daily life, the place from which they came, that is their source, was always seemingly just out of reach.  Since first becoming aware of the duality of these realities, and despite always wanting to have a sense of permanence in at least one of them, I was only ever beset by shadows from both.

When I was twenty years of age that changed because I encountered a body of knowledge, some would say a doctrine, which led me to become a student of an esoteric Christian School, and how I lived in the world and how I understood reality was never the same again.  It was never the same again because I realised that while I believed I was alive, I was merely the recipient of life, and while I knew of the existence of another kind of reality, a non-ordinary or other-worldly reality, I did not understand its’ significance.

As a result of being a student in this School, it now feels that the past, the present and the future continually merge and blend into a unique and dynamic state of being which I experience as ‘now’.  In this state of being it appears that all events coalesce or merge into an ongoing experience of life.  There is no ‘past’ or ‘future’, there are only moments or events which appear to be measurable fragments of time yet framing those moments or perhaps giving them shape and structure, is something profoundly spiritually abiding.  From this abiding there comes an unveiling; tentative at first until gradually a perpetual revealing of the world as it turns on the axis of the universe becomes visible.  And at times, barely discernible, there’s a pulse, a rhythm almost, that seems to beat or throb in time with something that resides beyond the senses.
October 29, 2021 /

How open are you?

Life has taught me that there is no death; there is only deathless existence as there are worlds within worlds, metaphorically speaking.  Life has also taught me, as it has others, that the event of death enables a human being to change their form from something that was once material to something non-material.  But there is more to it than that, and to state it so simply is to deny one of deaths’ roles as the doorway to our afterlife.

When we die, we enter the vastness of the spiritual universe, a world largely unexplored by most people.  Before that occurs, our lives can intersect with our death, as in for example when we experience shared-death events or near-death events.  These events teach us that we are more than our material selves and that existence continues after death, albeit in different form.  Such experiences can be deeply profound for the individual, creating psychological shifts and a reorganisation of their inner lives, their world views and belief systems, and ultimately, how they live in the world.

When I was grieving the death of my then husband, who had died in 2004, ‘life’ taught me that I had to find my rhythm with my grief.  I did find it and I found it in a way that was right for me.  Many people have said to me throughout my life that death is a mystery.  Dying isn’t, that’s all too real, but the meaning of death, its purpose in our lives, that doesn’t have to be a mystery and it won’t be if we can find our rhythm with it.  How we do this is intensely personal, unique, and dependent on numerous factors which may interconnect with other facets of our lives, which themselves can be subject to influence and change at any time.

From the perspective of an afterlife and a useful universe, what is death’s use and why would we contemplate it?  It seems to me that when we contemplate death, by default we also contemplate life, and when we contemplate life, we eventually ask ourselves, “What am I living for?”  Some people may never ask themselves that question, yet others, discontent with life are inwardly driven because they know life can be more meaningful and so they search for answers, or a way, or a signpost that will point them in a direction that is right for them.

My journey toward finding my rhythm with death and the afterlife began in my childhood, a formative period during which one of the things I learnt was that I had the power to think for myself.  I also learnt something else; that even though human beings can inflict untold misery, cruelty and suffering on one another, something fundamentally good exists over and above such people as it does the suffering they cause.  It was a harsh lesson for a child to learn, but as young as I was, I knew that my way of being in the world and how I wanted to live in the world was the result of my own inner decisions; it was later in life that I learnt that those inner decisions had to be contrary to life’s influences.  And it’s been that way ever since.
September 12, 2021 /

“… these experiences humanise us.”

Just recently I was chatting with one of the presenters from the IANDS conference, at which I was also a featured speaker, who had spoken about the topic of shared near-death experiences.  Even though I’ve had several of these myself with both my father and my husband, I had not come across the publicising of the concept before, so was fascinated both by his work and by his own lived experience of the phenomena.

As researchers do, we talked about our research, our lived experience, and the impact of the phenomena we studied on ourselves and on our lives.  I told him that my research evidenced the fact that after-death contact humanises the experient; he liked that, not having heard such an interpretation before.    And the reason for that lay in the meaning that people drew from the subjective experience of their after-death contact, which also evidenced shared commonalities.

The impact of after-death contact challenges how we define and understand ourselves as human beings, how we define and understand ourselves as spiritual beings, and how, ultimately, we live in our social and cultural worlds.  It can shape or redefine previously held spiritual beliefs as it can awaken us to the reality of an afterlife, and to the understanding that death as an event in our lives represents a profound transformation enabling individuals to live as a spiritual being in the spiritual universe.

In reflecting on after-death contact, and shared-death experiences, it seems to me that the teaching being conveyed in such events is that physical death does not end or define an individual’s existence, and that death is actually a permeable barrier between material and non-material reality.

(CDMA, https://unsplash.com/photos/Sqo3LG0pMJM)
August 28, 2021 /

Death’s not the end of it …

“… you’ve got a chance of joining them … death’s not the end of it”.
John, Ways of Being research study participant, 2011

I’m shortly to present the findings from my doctoral research at the upcoming International Association for Near-Death Studies (IANDS) conference, which is running from 1-5 September.  This is an opportunity to join with fellow researchers, experiencer’s, and other experts who work collectively to raise awareness, to normalise, and to offer support and information about near-death and other extraordinary or other-worldly experiences.

The quote from “John” captures the essence of my research, which is that death is not the end of our existence, and that we do have the chance of joining those close to us who have already died. Anyone, myself included, who has had a near-death experience knows the truth of that.

Over 20 people who had experienced the death of someone close to them chose to share their stories with me while I was undertaking my research.  Being able to present at the conference honours their trust in me as it does their contribution; without them the study would not have been able to be conducted.

The following words encapsulate or embody the nature and meanings of the experiences of the returning deceased which were shared with me during the conversations I had with study participants. In research-speak, it is referred to as ‘the Composite Depiction’, which doesn’t just reflect individual experiences, but qualities of the experience which permeated the whole group.  My research explored after-death contact, specifically, unsought encounters which were experienced randomly and unexpectedly.  In sharing them with you, the reader of this blog, it is my hope that you will perhaps find a sense of connection, maybe wonder, and a sense of rhythm with your own thoughts and feelings about death and the afterlife, or with someone close to you who has died.

It is an event which occurs unexpectedly, randomly, with little warning and which often takes one by surprise.  It appears to occur spontaneously and sometimes as if by coincidence in response to the emotional and psychological needs of the experient at the time. It can happen when sleeping or awake. For those who have never experienced non-material phenomena the event is transformative, while for those who have, the event is confirmative. It can take a variety of forms, but whichever form it takes, it is uniquely personal to the individual because it involves the person close to them who has died. It is something that is done to them, and not by them. 

When it is experienced, it is an event which amongst other purposes serves not only to educate and inform the experient regarding two forms of existence, one material and one non-material, it offers an invitation to understand life and one’s place in the universe from alternate perspectives. A cacophony of Feelings arise in response to this reaching out from the dead to the living and the mind turns inward in a concurrent effort to understand what it is that has taken place. Sometimes it is initially confusing because the mind struggles to conceptualise what that is in terms of what is already known. At other times it is a confirmation of what is already known. The experience causes an internal shift which has a rippling effect in the life of the experient as it does in the visible social and cultural world. The individual acts differently because they think differently. It can lead to psychopsiritual change resulting from the removal of illusory veils of understanding which hitherto blocked or distorted the individual’s perception regarding the nature of some aspects of reality.

Every time it happens, it seems that life is offering an invitation to the individual to consider what they are, as opposed to who they are. Some individuals experience a sense of communion or conjunction with the sacred, as understood by them, while others feel a sense of awe and wonder, and feel blessed by the experience. While for others, there are no words just feelings that cannot be put into words …
July 11, 2021 /

Convergence: Hers

The sound of rumbling, a gurney swathed in white, caused her to start suddenly.  She’d fallen asleep in the chair while holding his hand.  Eyes flickered, moving swiftly from side to side under lids in a face pale and gaunt.  Twitching, all too familiar now, rippled erratically throughout his body causing it to jerk and spasm.  What time was it?  It was morning when they had come into the hospital.  A grating electronic beeping sound from an overhead monitor broke her train of thought.  Her neck was stiff.  10:30am.  It was 10:30am.

”We’ll insert that cannula now,” a faceless voice echoed.  She rubbed her eyes.  His hand reached out to her.  He hated needles.  The doctor was gentle, steadily plumping the vein, and then just as steadily, slowly, slowly, inserting the needle.  His grip tightened, fingers digging into and compressing her skin.

He lay back when it was over, exhausted.  Voices echoed along the corridor.  Conversational snippets intruded into the room that had become their world yet again.  “I’ll be here for four days,” he said.  She wondered how long that would be.  It was hot; there was no window.  Laughter burst in upon them.  “Lunches are here!”  A whole world existed in this place, this bed with curtains drawn, and both of them were a part of it.  “We have a bed for him.”  “Kenneth?”  “Number 5.”  Number 5.  Number 5.  Number 5.  Number 5; it reverberated in her mind.  “How do you cope?” a kind voice asked her as they had walked down the corridor.  “Sometimes I don’t,” she had responded.

A-Bay Ward.  Sickening stifling heat.  Where were the windows?  God they were all old, horrible old men.  Sick and wrinkled and crabbed.  Suffocating, she felt like she was suffocating.  Dead, she felt like he was already dead and she was standing in a cemetery.  She pulled the curtain around the bed trying to block it all out, to shield him.  Or was it to shield herself?  Both.  More faces peering into theirs.  More intrusive, nameless voices.  When would she wake up, when would they both wake up from this nightmare that never seemed to end?

She wondered what went through his mind as he lay there, shrunken and small.  He never really spoke about it very much.  What did he think about during the long hours?  His eyes flickered, his breathing paced, fingers touching one another as if to seek assurance.  “Would the owner of car number NSB 448 contact the switchboard please?”  Beads of perspiration were forming slowly on his forehead.  An intake of breath, cool air flowing around her ankles.  “How do you spell origami?” a woman’s voice boomed into their space.  “Crippled, if you’re crippled you are…?”  “Does it mean you’re lame?”  The voices droned on around them, the woman’s loud, raucous; the man’s muted, barely audible.

Through a slit in the curtain she could see that the man sitting opposite was asleep holding his cup.  Would it fall she wondered?  She needed to touch up her lipstick, perfume too.  The ritualistic behaviour was calming, normal, something that made sense in a world that illness had manufactured for them.  It was a world where there was no sense anymore because everything had fallen in upon itself until reality had blurred.  He moved.  She wiped the sweat off his brow.

He was sleeping now.

She remembered that she had to pay the rent.  She had seen a jumper that she liked, perhaps she would buy it.  Voices.  “Are you going to the cafeteria?”  “No, I’m going downstairs.”  It might make her feel better if she bought something.  She felt her emotions rising to the surface.  She hated that happening.  She turned to check on him.  He seemed peaceful, silent.  It was so quiet at home without him.  She slept alone with a pillow in her arms.

She looked at him again.  She never really knew what he was thinking.  Was he dreaming as he lay there she wondered?  She must ring friend number one, and then friend number two.  Had she eaten today, yes at breakfast, some fruit, coffee.  Maybe she would buy that jumper, maybe.  “What we’ll do is get Beverly to bring your own frame in, if you can manage with this …”  Their voices drifted down the corridor as they walked past the room.  “Would the owner of a black Golf, registration number NSB 448 contact reception please.”

The cleaner emptied the bin next to his bed.  The man sitting in the chair opposite dozed.  Life went along in this world within a world as surely as it did out of it.  He coughed, twice, and was still again, his breathing regular.  She didn’t ask why any more, she just accepted that at this time it was this way.  Somebody had asked her once if she thought it was Karma that he had sickened in such a way.  Voices intruded.  “So which one is better, we have to decide which one you’ll be taking home.”  No it wasn’t Karma, it was just life.  Voices intruded.  “What about the pain, does it make a difference?”  No it wasn’t Karma, it was just life.  Voices intruded.  “That’s it, that’s the one!”  No, it wasn’t Karma.  It was just life.  Just life.  Just life.  Just life.  She blinked her eyes, her nose was running.

When would they wake up?  When would they both wake up from this agonising moment that seemed to make a mockery of eternity?  He coughed, gently this time.  It was early afternoon.  The light had softened.  She had to go.  She tried not to feel sorry for herself.  She thought of what he was going through.  What colour was that jumper again?  How awful he must feel.  But he kept so much from her.  She never really knew, she had never really known.  Another intrusion. “Hello, I’m Peggy; I’ll be looking after Ken.”  So terribly pleasant in a world that was anything but.

The sun was low when she walked outside.  Something caught her eye.  A shaft of sunlight fell on a single cluster of daffodils surrounded by the large leaves of the mother plant.  In the midst of this sprawled a large, fat, ugly, prickly nettle.  The juxtaposition of the daffodil and the nettle seemed significant to her in some way.  She stood there pondering, and then she suddenly understood that what she was looking at was the reflection of a manufactured life which was as achingly beautiful as it was painfully ugly.
June 28, 2021 /

My ghost had to travel

I had a conversation recently with someone about the afterlife.  Well it wasn’t so much a conversation as rather a brief exchange of words.  I happened to mention that the best is yet to be, which as any reader of this blog knows aligns with my particular spiritual belief system and world view.  There was a stiffening of body posture, and then a look of pity came my way coupled with a firm and authoritative statement alluding to the fact that there is no continuance of life after death, that this life is the only life, and that to think otherwise is quite frankly just sad, a bit pathetic and false hope.

As I watched the person walk away confident in their knowledge that material existence was the only form of life, and that once dead we cease to exist, I reflected on the experiences which had peppered my life from the time I was a child.  Each of these, without exception, have taught me as they have others, that what we are and how we exist does not end with our death, it only changes.  Death is the putting off of the physical body and as an event in our lives, allows us to live as spiritual beings in the spiritual universe.

Every event I have ever had in my life, every heartbreak, every triumph, every betrayal, every physical illness, every joy, every revelation and every mystical experience has not only revealed to me the illusory nature of the material universe in which I live, but that something vast, something profoundly intelligent and loving co-exists with it, out of sight yet present nonetheless, out of sight yet subtly and gently interweaving itself with everything around me.  Everything that has ever happened to me in my life has brought me closer to that loving vastness, and every day I grow more aware of its presence in my life.

I have just finished a Social Work qualifying master’s degree, and in my final assessment task, an essay, for the final unit of study, made reference to the fact that my identity as a human being was inextricably tied to and interwoven with my identity as a social worker.  We are married in the true sense because not only do we share the same values, but that completing the degree has fed my humanity and grown my spirit.  As an event in the journey of my life course it has equipped me with skills, knowledge and understanding to confront inequality and injustice, but more than that, it has helped me evolve as a human being because it has contributed to the shaping of my soul.  This in turn will influence how I engage with all other people as much as it will the footsteps I leave behind me.

Photograph by Igo Vitomirov, Misty Forest Road