No other experience so completely altered my understanding and my life’s course: my idea of what I had once called “death,” my relationship with my wife, my world view, the focus of my life’s purpose, and ultimately, my profession. But way before that, I brought into the world a deep impulse to help other persons of my species. So there was always that.
A formative and interesting series of life experiences eventually led me, at about age 50, to seek a past life regression. My guide, in a candle-lit, incense-scented astrologer’s basement, talked me back in time. It wasn’t hypnosis. She invited me to “remember” the experience, like recalling any other life experience such as remembering a vacation.
In my mind, traveling back through a magenta lit tunnel of swirling cumulus clouds, I returned to the body of an old astronomer wearing a coarse woolen robe and sandals, seated at a thick, heavy roughhewn circular wooden table in a domed room atop a stone tower. In the ceiling’s apex was a hexagonal opening with a reticule, a circle attached to each vertice. In the field of view was a cluster of stars, the beauty of which took my breath away.
“Where are you?” she asked. “Europe? North America?”
“I don't know” said I. “Let me look outside to see.” When I pulled on the heavy ring to open the massive wooden door, I saw the sun setting in a purple sky. Silhouetted on the horizon was a walled city. Behind its walls, were pyramids with horizontal metallic antennas glinting in the setting sun. “I don’t think this is around here!”
Then, in the next scene, I stood at the base of the city wall. There were inscriptions on the capstones that rimmed the wall, but I couldn’t read them. Next, inside the walls I found myself standing near a stone pier. At the end of the pier “floated” a medieval looking orange spaceship, shaped as two segmented cones joined at the bases. I walked up the “gang plank,” through a hatch and into the upper cone where two crew members (who looked just like us) sat at a console working on a navigation problem. I knew that I had flown with them many times before. Wondering “What makes this thing go?” I looked up into the frustum of the cone to see a huge suspended crystal.
In the next scene, we were flying through space at warp speed, stars streaking by. Then, suddenly I was no longer in the ship, no longer in a body. I was suspended in black space and around me were other souls…slowly whirling vortices of light, multiple colors, blues, greens, pinks, and colors I couldn’t name.
And there it was. The experience… The Incredible Lightness of Being in which we are all connected. The “Peace that Passeth all Understanding.” An unfathomable, all enveloping Peace that words could not capture. For weeks afterwards, I was buoyed by it. It was as if I were floating about 3 feet above the ground.
In the experience, I remembered: We are not our bodies. We are powerful, powerful spiritual beings experiencing the density of the earth plane in physical form. There is no “Death.” We are alive in our bodies, but way, way more alive out of them.
When I returned home that evening and related the experience to my then wife who was steeped in orthodoxy, she was terrified. It was the beginning of the unspooling of our spousal relationship.
I became a do-it-yourself hospice worker. For a time I worked as a hospice volunteer, then full time as a community liaison for a hospice organization. The legalistic restrictions of the organized hospice movement were not a good fit for me, so I continued and continue as a do-it-yourselfer.
Over the next 30 years, I supported myself and my family with day jobs, and my life’s purpose remained helping others in all possible ways, but especially in welcoming and celebrating the transition from a physical body back home into the Incredible Lightness of Being.
I was forever changed.
