How many lifetimes do we get? How many different bodies?  We experience much suffering when we think we only get one life and one body. Sure, this body you’re in right now, that skin and those bones will die. You’ll go to sleep in that tired worn shell and awaken to find yourself emerging fresh into a new body, once again at the beginning of a life. What the caterpillar calls death, we call a butterfly. You go to sleep there and awaken here. We survive in consciousness after the change called death, just as we survive in consciousness after the change called sleep.    Growing up as a child, I was always comforted when my mom would say we would see our loved ones again, they were just on the other side of a wall, kind of like when Abraham says it’s as though they are in another room and soon we will be in that room as well.

The butterfly will emerge from the cocoon (we, emerging into the next “life”) ad infinitum. When we understand that, we don’t feel loss when a loved one cocoons, we feel a connection with them no matter what stage they are in, physical or non-physical.

In the work I do, my experience is we exist in our consciousness — in our mind — which is why “we” don’t die when the body and brain dies. “We” don’t have to have a body in order to exist. Would God intervene to prevent the caterpillar from becoming a butterfly, a tadpole from becoming a frog? Would He stop an acorn from tearing apart in order to grow into an oak? The surface shell dies away, our essential self remains alert and conscious inside, ready to awaken into the next dream. What would happen if God kept the little seeds intact so the Mother oak didn’t watch all her seeds split apart and crumble into mulch? We’d never see the glory of another oak.

The Death Experience like a day on Facebook. You know how you come online to do one thing, then look up and realize you’ve just played on Facebook for 4 hours? Or you dash into the mall for a red jacket and come out after nightfall having bought everything but?  That’s because no matter what you thought you set out to do, as you became IN THE MOMENT with where you were, your attention was directed to one thing, and then another until it became a free flow of moving from one place and situation to the next and you lost time with the flow of it all.

That’s what the DEATH experience is like also. You close your eyes here and open them elsewhere. Wherever you find yourself, there will be something catching your attention, then something else, then something else. There is no dark hole of nothingness where you’re wondering WTF? You will be met by loved ones who have passed before. You will be comforted by familiar surroundings.

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