Category: Uncategorized

“Today there is a wide measure of agreement, which on the physical side of science approaches almost to unanimity, that the stream of knowledge is heading towards a non-mechanical reality; the universe begins to look more like a great thought than like a great machine. Mind no longer appears as an accidental intruder into the realm of matter; we are beginning to suspect that we ought rather to hail it as a creator and governor of the realm of matter… “

Sir James Jeans, The Mysterious Universe, p. 137,  1937

I’ve pondered on the meaning of life and death since I was a child.  What is the purpose of our birth?  Why are we born?  Why have I always felt that there is more to life than just our one-dimensional experience of it?  Why do I feel that the universe is a living being, that it pulses and throbs?  Why do other-worldly experiences occur?  What generates them?

I can’t imagine a time when I haven’t felt or thought about these philosophical questions, particularly death, however it wasn’t until my husband died that not only did death become personal, but also that rather unexpectedly my perception and understanding of time underwent a paradigm shift.

The event which prefaced this shift began when I woke from sleep with an unexpected feeling of foreboding.  As the day wore on the foreboding not only increased in intensity, it seemed to seep into my being until it reached a crescendo.  When that occurred, I stopped in the middle of what I was doing and saw what appeared to be a great dark mass on the horizon moving toward me; this was not physical phenomena but a vision.

The foreboding, which obviously acted as an alarm, occurred in response to the threat of danger which was looming over me, and I knew that something terrible was going to happen to someone close to me that I loved.  I also knew instinctively that I had absolutely no control over what was going to occur, that I could not change the impact, that I could not prevent it.  It was of a power or force beyond this world, and nothing here was equal to or greater than it.

Not even thinking at the time that it might be regarding my husband, I contacted my son, warning him to be careful as I feared an imminent accident.  Although shaken, the next couple of days passed uneventfully and I began to wonder whom the vision referred to because all seemed well.

I was at work when I received a phone call from the hospital.  My husband had been admitted with a broken arm.  Diagnostics revealed metastasized cancer which had spread to his bones and brain.  Up until the time when he fell and broke his arm, there had been no indication of anything being medically wrong.  The diagnosis was terminal, he had twelve months at best.  I realised then that the vision wasn’t warning me about my son, it was warning me about my husband.

My husband died in my arms 11 months after being diagnosed and since then I have frequently reflected not only on the nature and circumstances of his death, but on the vision which pre-heralded it.  It was not just knowing that I had to relinquish any possibility of trying to control the situation so as to change the outcome, it was something else as well.

I learnt that when you experience a present moment such as this that there is no future as such, because when you see events that are to come to pass you are actually standing in the present looking back at the past; you ‘see’ them because they’ve already occurred.  It’s a complete contradiction and one which stretches the mind.

The event has already happened because it’s able to be seen and nothing can change what it is or what its outcome is.  Because it has already happened, everyone involved simply goes through the motions until they catch up with time.  It’s like watching the pre-screening of a movie prior to it being released to the general public; you know the characters, you know the story-line, and you know how it ends.  What’s more, you know it before everyone else does and the fact that you’ve seen it before them doesn’t change any aspect of the movie, how can it?  The movie is an event, much like a spiritual vision or a precognitive experience is.  Seeing it before others, knowing the characters, the story-line and how it ends cannot change what occurs in the movie.  All it means is that you’ve seen it before others have and in truth, it’s a done deal; there’s no escaping, there’s no wishing it won’t happen.

I have pondered on this one event, this spiritual vision, deeply and continuously since it occurred.  It challenged my understanding and sense of time, it challenged the notion of what ‘the future’ meant as I had been taught, and it challenged the notion of being able to ‘change the future so as to change the present’.  I am not a quantum physicist or a scientist, and I cannot explain in such terms what happened, I only have the lived experience of it.  But what I do know is that there are immense forces at work, forces which we don’t understand, forces which are perhaps beyond our comprehension.

Such events invite us to consider ourselves and our existence from an alternate perspective and to perhaps reflect on the words of the English physicist and mathematician Sir James Jeans who wrote that the universe is more like a highly organised mind, than a machine.

I held my first Death Café in September 2014, and since then have held them on a regular basis each month in various locations around Sydney.  At a Death Café, people from all walks of life, often strangers, gather together to talk about end-of-life issues.  While I facilitate the group, discussion is always group directed, agenda-free and takes place in an open, warm, respectful and inviting forum where everyone attending can express their views safely and without fear of judgment or ridicule.

In my experience, neither age nor gender is a barrier when it comes to talking about death, and in the time I’ve been running Death Café attendees have ranged in age from as young as 13 to folk in their mid-80’s.  While men do attend Death Café, they are generally in the minority and are usually outnumbered by women, and while there are ‘regulars’ who come and go, at every Death Café I’ve held, there are always first-timers who attend.

There are many reasons for people wanting to come to Death Cafe, but one of the most common is that people just want to talk about death without fear of being perceived as ‘morbid’, ‘ghoulish’, or ‘depressing’.  Sometimes people have had a near-death experience which they want to explore, sometimes someone close to them has died and they’ve experienced after-death contact with the deceased, some people are curious or have just always been interested in death and the possibility of an afterlife, and some are looking for ways in which they can have death-related conversations with either friends, family, or in the case of medical professionals such as nurses or medical students, death-related conversations with patients and their families.

Contrary to what you might think, Death Café is not sad, morbid or depressing, in fact it’s the opposite; affirming, validating, and comforting.  Conversation is profoundly meaningful because people explore their mortality and their attitudes toward death in an environment and forum where nothing is off the table, which can be quite liberating.

For example, at one Death Café, some attendees talked not so much of death and dying, but of their fears for those left behind while others shared their experiences of being present at various deaths.    One attendee articulated that people have to be made aware of death so as not to be afraid of it and shared a story of taking her two young children to view a full-term still-born baby, kept beside it’s mother in hospital, while another attendee, speaking softly, shared her out of body experience when after an accident she watched the doctors operating on her in hospital.  After recounting a particularly poignant account of the death of someone close, and becoming quite tearful and apologising, another attendee said matter of factly, “It happens” which resulted in a round of laughter from everyone present.  Yes, death does happen!

Another attendee shared some of her experiences of being present with the dying, commenting on the things that people do to let you know when death is about to occur, which brought back memories of the death of my own mother and what she did.  Another attendee highlighted the importance of understanding the language used by the dying as death approached, and of knowing how to be present in that context with them. We also talked about how we would like to be “sent off”.  Some preferred cremation, one longingly talked about going out in the style of the Vikings!  We also compared the death rituals of other cultures with our own Anglo Western culture, which so often sanitises and medicalises death.

In reflecting on my experiences of Death Café, people do want to have these conversations, young, old and in-between.  I can’t say that I’ve noticed an increase in young people, say for example those in their teens twenties attending, but that could be a result of how I advertise and promote the Death Café, which is usually via social media or a mail-out in which previous attendees receive an email advising them of the upcoming event. Globally, humanity is at a tipping point and death, which is never far from our door, is much closer to us because of our technology; distance is no barrier to news of acts of terror, natural disasters and civil unrest.

I think that death makes us think about life.  It makes us think about how we are living our lives, about what we are living for, and about what our purpose is.  Asking oneself, “Why was I born?” is a fundamental question which we should challenge ourselves with.  Death is a certainty, but we are not born simply to die, there is a purpose to our birth, and we need to discover for ourselves what that is.

When taking one of my usual early morning walks, I came across a young dove dead by the side of the road.  I wouldn’t have seen it except for a pair of minor birds, who were approaching it, squawking.  The birds flew away and as I picked up the dove I could feel that it’s body was still warm; it must have only died shortly before.  It appeared to have suffered a head injury, perhaps it had been hit by a car.

My first thought was to take the dove home to bury it in the garden and I thought about what flowers I would cushion its body with.  This made me ponder on both our reverence for the dead and our behaviour toward the dead.  Our Neanderthal ancestors buried their dead, a fact verified by scientific finds and analyses which have also revealed that they buried their dead with flowers as well.  These ‘flower burials’ suggest an intentionality, an affection, a tenderness, and dare I say, a reverence.

What does this reverence acknowledge?  I asked myself that question as I walked home.  In picking up a dead bird, which I have done many times, what is it that is meaningful about such an act?  Why do it?  What is it in response to?  My behaviour is an acknowledgement of something which I believe is deeply profound; an acknowledge of the source of life manifest as a material end-effect.  It is care and respect for that particular creation, not just because we may feel pity or love for it now that it is dead, but because we acknowledge the Divine source as the spiritual point of origin from which all life forms proceed.  And in doing so, we acknowledge the Divine’s presence amongst us.  In truth, the whole world is shot through with God, yet we see it not.

Are we ‘alive’, or are we simply the recipients of life and if so, what does it mean to acknowledge that to ourselves?  Perhaps in my preoccupation with ‘all things dead’ I am merely remembering the source of life which has sustained them.

“I, all of me, wants to grow.  I, all of me, wants higher help.”

Source unknown.

What does it mean to grow?  What does it mean to want higher help?  Why does such an affirmation exist?  What is its purpose in the life of the individual?  How did such an affirmation come into being?

Such questions not only turn one inward, they generate curiosity in the mind.  Why grow, and grow into what, or is that an assumption on my part to think that everyone needs to or indeed wants to grow into something?  What is higher help and where does it come from?

While observing that ‘growth’ has pluralistic meanings in that it means different things for different people, especially in the post-modern world of the 21^st Century, in this particular context what does ‘growth’ mean?

This consideration lends itself to the concept of work on oneself and a relationship with something greater than oneself.   It suggests that this work can’t be done alone, that in addition to our own impetus, perhaps in acknowledgement to the knowing that there is more to life,  something else is needed.

What is this ‘something’ and what is it that we grow into?  Now there’s a consideration.

For the past few months I’ve been living in a somewhat crowded house.  It wasn’t crowded in the sense that too many people lived in it, it was crowded in the sense that its previous and long deceased inhabitants also lived there (and quite noisily at times).

The house is built in a location which since the 1800s, and like so many historical sites in Sydney, has seen a fair share of tragedy and death; an Aboriginal massacre, a terrible farmhouse fire in which a mother and her two children perished (and after which her husband, deeply grieving, committed suicide), the death of an Inghams factory worker and the death of the previous home owner.

While I’m no stranger to ‘things that go bump in the night’, I was somewhat taken aback by the persistent nature of the phenomena; doors opening and closing by themselves, lights switching on and off, the continual sound of objects, or of someone, moving around in the kitchen, the sound of children’s footsteps running down the hallway, and knocking and tapping sounds.  There was also a strong sense of presence of children, and toward the end of my stay, their mother.

During this time I developed a rapport with someone I affectionately named ‘Mr Smith’.  I don’t know who Mr Smith was in his previous embodied life, or whether or not it bothered him that I didn’t know his real name. I do know that he was sad to see me go and that he was upset at the circumstances which led up to that, having been a silent witness to all that had occurred while I was there.

I felt ‘safe’ with Mr Smith, who appeared to have a fatherly affection for me, and who had in his own way watched over me during many times of distress.  My great grandmother who was a trance medium in her day, used to say that when we experience such things the dead are simply ‘passing through’ and that there is nothing to fear.  I must admit though that I did jump once or twice, especially on one occasion when I suddenly woke from a deep and dreamless sleep acutely aware of a presence standing outside my bedroom door, which then suddenly opened toward me.  Apart from that, and for most of the time, the non-material inhabitants of the household, and their goings-on, were largely benign.

These tales always make for fascinating reading and experiences such as these, which occur when material and non-material realities intersect, prompt us not only to ponder on our own mortality, but the afterlife in general.  I had the sense that these disembodied beings were somehow ‘anchored’ to the location, perhaps because they had a sense of belonging, for whatever reason, to it.  But they were ‘dead’, why were they there?

I thought a lot about this during my time in the house and often asked myself whether I wanted to be a Mr Smith, or a child running up and down a hallway who occasionally touches the living (I was poked and prodded a few times as well with a wee little finger), or a brooding presence loitering in a kitchen corner?  Do I want to exist in the narrow intersection of two realities, where these events are situated, or do I want to move beyond that, both while I’m living and after my death?

Life taught me long ago that there is a vastness beyond this place where the dead and the living intersect with one another.  When my death comes, which is the putting off of the physical body, do I want to be ‘anchored’ to a material location, interacting with the living, or perhaps being bothered by them, or do I want to explore the limitless expanse of the world in which I would now exist?   Well, anyone who reads these posts would know the answer to that question, as I did, within a millisecond.