Conversations with a Soul (36 page)

I had sailed from Africa profoundly distressed by the condition of my native country. I was obsessed with forebodings of Apocalyptic disaster. I did not recognize what my own people had become and they did not recognize me….one afternoon alone in my cabin, worn out and hovering between waking and sleeping out of exhaustion. I suddenly had a vision of myself in a deep, dark valley in avalanche country, among steep, snow-covered mountains. I was filled with a foreknowledge of imminent disaster. I knew that even raising my voice in the world of this vision could bring down the bulging avalanches upon me. Suddenly, at the far end of the valley on one Matterhorn peak of my vision, still caught in the light of the sun, Jung appeared. He stood there briefly, as I had seen him some weeks before at the gate, at the end of the garden of his house, then waved his hand at me and called out, ‘I’ll be seeing you.’ Then he vanished down the far side of the mountain.

I instantly fell asleep (and) woke next morning just as the sun was rising, and pushed aside the curtains of the porthole of my cabin. I saw a great, white lone albatross gliding by it; the sun on fire in its wings. As it glided by it turned its head and looked straight at me…hardly had I got back into bed when my steward appeared with a try of tea and fruit and, as he always did, the ship’s radio news. I opened it casually. The first item I saw was the announcement that Jung had died the previous afternoon … it was clear that my dream or vision had come to me at the moment of his death.
⁹⁹

In many parts of the world reports of visitations by the dead would not be regarded as abnormal or even unusual. The Australian Aborigines can hardly conceive of anyone dying without the gentle help and caring of those who loved them, whether such helpers are themselves dead or alive.

We Westerners however have been taught to greet such reports with scepticism. Alongside of sterile wards, we have been conditioned to expect that death is primarily a clinical event wrapped in mysterious breathing tubes, beeping monitors and an occasional visit by a stethoscope wielding nurse, who will inform us when the person has died. Any reported occurrences that depart from the medically choreographed process of dying are 'explained away' as pure coincidence, wishful thinking or even delusional emotionalism (as though the assignment of a label settled the matter).

By their very nature contacts between the living and the dying are intensely personal. This makes them poorly suited as subjects for scientific research, which has developed its own procedure in the pursuit of verification, a procedure that demands detailed, objective observations. Objectivity rather than subjectivity forms the basis for scientific investigation. Yet by their very character, contacts between the living and the dying are not objective. Furthermore, scientific methodology demands that the processes under scrutiny should be repeatable, a condition which is obviously impossible to fulfil.

Often this accounts for the reticence expressed by many to speak about their personal
near death
and
end of life
experiences. Such experiences are deeply personal and sharing them demands courage. However when the experiences are dissected in a dispassionate way, or even worse, dismissed as a figment of the imagination, the result is a wounding of the Soul.

However, even though our
Scientific Fundamentalism
discourages research into these personal experiences, there is a vast store of them, each testifying to something that happened by and to the dead or dying.

Furthermore, many of those who have written or spoken of these experiences are not persons given to flights of fantasy.

My mother had been suffering for two years from a medullary blastoma (brain tumour) only discovered post mortem. She obviously had been deteriorating slowly but her death was not expected imminently. She was in and out of St. Thomas’s Hospital and was experiencing another stay there when she died. My father (a Cambridge/St. Thomas’s doctor) is not a man given to flights of fancy, nor is he particularly religious. He was lying in bed one night, reading, when he heard or felt my mother’s voice or presence. He ‘understood’ from her that she was ‘going’ and he put his book down and just said, ‘It’s all right darling.’ Ten minutes later, St. Thomas’s phoned to say that she had died.
¹⁰⁰

After a life time of collecting and examining similar reports Peter Fenwick came to suspect that the phenomenon was somehow rooted in the mysterious nature of personal consciousness. More specifically, it would appear to be
an awareness of the other
whose presence was established through a deeply shared relationship, even if many years passed since the association was first made.

We are all interconnected and our lives participate in a matrix of human contact. We sometimes connect with others independent of physical proximity or even brain function, leading Fenwick to comment that,
'it may be as spiritual masters have suggested that love is the structure that connects people together'.

Could it be then that love provides the matrix within which the living and the dying reach out to communicate with each other?

Because of what he sees as the limitations imposed by mainline scientific thinkers, on experienced based claims, Fenwick (and others) have increasingly turned to other models that might help us to understand and explore these mysterious visits. Eastern philosophical principles provide one such avenue and help us respond to the mysteries of death.

Whatever else Eastern mystics have to teach us, of critical importance is the principle value of
the present moment
, on which we have already touched.

Eckhart Tolle put it this way:

Being is the eternal, ever-present One life beyond the myriad forms of life that are subject to birth and death. However being is not only beyond but also deep within every form as its innermost invisible and indestructible essence. This means that it is accessible . . . as your own deepest self, your true nature. But don’t seek to grasp it with your mind. Don’t try to understand it. You can know it only when your mind is still. When you are present, when your attention is fully and intensely in the Now, Being can be felt, but it can never be understood mentally. To regain awareness of Being and to abide in that state of “feeling-realization” is enlightment.
¹⁰¹

On the windowsill of our bedroom my wife placed a small magnifying mirror for use in the delicate task of applying makeup! In the same room, suspended from the ceiling, is an elegant faux-French light fixture complete with dangling glass 'crystals'. One morning, for no particular reason, I centred the reflection of the light fixture in the mirror and, since in the morning my brain takes a while to start functioning, I just stared at the image, while congratulating myself on accomplishing my first task of the day!

Suddenly something remarkable happened.

As I looked, the image freed itself from the two dimensional reflection in the mirror and floated out into the room as a tiny three-dimensional model of the light fixture!

I’ve repeated my magic trick several times. I can make it  'happen' whenever I wish by simply aligning the mirror with the light fixture and then just staring at the light. I’ve tried the experiment with regular mirrors and it doesn’t work, so it has to be a magnifying mirror. I cannot get close to the image because the moment I step in front of the mirror the image disappears. So I stay my distance, content merely to conjure-up my floating light!

I love the effect even though somewhere in my brain I know it probably has to do with the refraction of light, about which I know nothing. Nevertheless, I am captivated by the sheer magic of the miniature floating light.

I don’t know if the tiny light fixture is really there or whether my brain has been hoodwinked into seeing something that doesn’t exist. I can see it but I cannot touch it. My philosophical dilemma! I delight in the fact that I don’t have to think about the image, if I look in the mirror there it is. Continue looking and it floats out into the room.

I don’t want to make too much out of my floating light fixture although it begins to steer me in the direction of
'transcendence',
which, like my floating light happens when I simply give myself permission to be present to whatever phenomenon is going on around me
.

As one might expect, the word comes from the Latin 'trānscendere' and describes the act of
surmounting, climbing over or going beyond. 
Immanuel Kant loved to play with the idea of transcendence as he constructed a 'theory of knowledge', but I think that poets really understand the principle of transcendence better than most.

Stand at the grave’s head

Of any common

Man or woman,

Thomas Hardy said,

And in the silence

What they were,

Their life, becomes a poem.

And so with my dead,

As I know them

Now, in His

And Her

Long silences;

And wait for, yet a while hence,

My own silence.
¹⁰²

Transcendence will light a path that leads to a secret place wherein are stored the poems I’ve never put to writing; insights I have never shared with anyone, moments of wonder that I have accumulated all through my life.

But to walk that path I must go without a map and reject any suggestions of taking a short cut. Instead I need to sit on a comfortable rock and hold gently in awareness the moment that is
now
. I need to give permission to whatever and whoever comes to claim my awareness. It’s important that I don’t work at it or think about it but just be present.

Transcendence can happen anywhere and at any time and is primarily about discerning the reality that lies beyond and within the concrete, visible objects that come my way.

Everything and everywhere in our world, wherever we look there is the possibility of transcendence but you have to be careful not to get in the way or it disappears!

In the earliest Buddhist iconography there are no images of the Buddha with his little fat tummy. This came later under the influence of the Greeks. Instead of the Buddha figure, devotees were presented with an image of an empty seat or a pair of footprints. This was done so that no image of a being might get in the way of transcendence. It was all about the teaching and not about the teacher!

The same thinking may have been behind the second commandment’s prohibition on making any image of the Divine. Once we create an icon, an image, we have created another layer of  'stuff' that gets in the way of
experiencing the transcendent
. From there it’s a short step to localizing and domesticating, what should never be localized.

The World English Dictionary defines transcendence as 'beyond consciousness or direct apprehension' therefore in order to be apprehended by the transcendent we have to learn how to empty the mind (so that nothing can get in the way) usually described in language that is strange to Westerners.

To see all the way
through
something is to become enlightened and to have an experience of the transcendent. We are sometimes discouraged by the difficulty of grasping Eastern terminology and the hard work it takes to integrate those ideas into our lives. Then we are tempted to discard the riches embedded in the language of transcendence and fail to recognize that it is also
our
language. This way of dealing with reality inevitably leaves those of us who have had no training in Eastern spirituality having to do a lot of work, although the Christian religion offers us many parallels such as Jesus’ repeated emphasis on the importance of the present, such as: 'take no thought for the morrow.'

Thomas Carlyle defined Worship as
transcendent wonder,
which suggests an experience wherein we lose ourselves and our petty ego in something far greater than ourselves
.
The same theme is captured in Charles Wesley’s hymn, ‘Love Divine, all loves excelling’ in which he described being 
'
Lost in wonder, love, and praise!' 
When we lose ourselves in wonder, love and praise we’ve moved far beyond thinking and we’ve been grasped by a transcendent vision.