Do Dead People Walk Their Dogs? (18 page)

Bad energy is
“defused,” or neutralized and dissipated when such people, in spirit form, enter God’s Light. (I’m only talking about a person who has been mean—not someone who has committed murder. Murderers don’t even get to enter.) But there is still a karmic debt to pay to those they’ve hurt. Sometimes they can start paying it back by trying to help those they’ve hurt if those people are still living on this side of the veil. Otherwise, like with any karma, this is a burden they’ll carry into their next lifetime.

This is entirely
up to the individual. With anything that happens to us, we either give it the power or we don’t. Once the abuser goes to the Other Side, their negativity is defused. The person left here is challenged as to how they will deal with the aftereffects. You can either use your early sad or negative experience to be empowered or disempowered. You can make the choice to do something better, help others. Nobody is saying that letting go of or transforming pain is easy. For some it can take many years of processing or therapy. Others will be able to more readily distance themselves from events that, as a child, they had no control over. The thing to be remembered is that if someone was in that position for karmic reasons (for example, my own mother experienced terrible abuse in the orphanage where she grew up), it is done. It does not belong to them anymore. What belongs to them is the rest of their life and how they use it.

If the person
(or people) who have been affected by this negative action are still here, they need to do their best to get rid of any anger, let go, and simply continue without dwelling on their loss. The person on the Other Side who has committed the crime, once they understand how hurtful they have been, both to whoever they stole from and also to themselves (since now they are loaded down with extra karma), will try to come through with blessings. Will you receive a check in the mail for the exact amount that was taken? Well, that’s really not impossible, based upon the way the Other Side works, but it’s far more likely that you’ll be “reimbursed” in other ways. If you over here are working on your part, getting rid of anger, moving forward, then the blessings will be able to come through. That other person knows what he or she did; they know they owe you. What you don’t want to do is set up a wall of negativity that will keep blessings from reaching you. All too often it is the case that once one bad thing happens we dwell on it. When we’re focused on the bad, the good can’t get through.

I’m really glad
you asked this question because I definitely know the answer. This comes up over and over in my readings: greed.

Over and over and over again, the thing that tears otherwise happy families apart, it’s so common and contagious, is greed. It’s so amazing to me. Everything will be cool—the family is close, loving, and sharing—until somebody crosses over. Then all hell breaks loose. What people will do over money and stuff! Conniving and justifying, and like I said, it’s contagious. Once one person starts acting up, then others think, “Well, if I don’t grab what’s mine, she’ll take it all,” and they start acting just as badly. Even when there is a will, some will find a way to twist things to their advantage. At least that’s what they think; they’re acting like here and now is all there is. But they don’t understand the karma they are adding on.

A dear friend of mine had a grandmother who died and left her two daughters (my friend’s mother and her aunt) money to buy a beach house. The aunt’s husband needed money for something, and she persuaded my friend’s mother to loan her share of the money to help her husband out. Once he got out of his predicament, instead of just giving the money back to my friend’s mother, they paid for the beach house—but now they say my friend’s mother only gets one third of a share, and her sister and husband
each
get a share! This is not at all what her grandmother intended; the sister’s husband wasn’t even mentioned—she left the money to her two girls. This is just stupid and greedy and mean—some nice payback for the help my friend’s mother gave them. But when they are possessed by greed, people can always think of a justification for their actions, whether it concerns money, a piece of jewelry, or a rocking chair that’s been in the family for generations. It breaks my heart to hear these stories. Because of something ridiculous, the relationship will never be the same. And the greedy person will come back next time with a big karmic debt. They risk coming back to have little or nothing.

Not every family behaves badly, of course. I’ll also hear in my readings how pleased a spirit is that their family did the right thing with their belongings, how good it made them feel to see that nobody got nutso about stuff or money left behind. Because, don’t forget, they are still with us and they do see how we behave over their things. What the Other Side wants us to remember is:
Greed never wins.
You create a loss on this side with your ruined relationships, and on the Other Side with a big karmic debt.

The object here is not to make you afraid of your own karma to the point where you give everything away. I’m only talking about not taking from others what is rightfully theirs, not demanding or manipulating to get more than your share. You just need to keep it in balance. We all know what a little generosity does—puts a smile on your face and another person’s.

I do think
that saying a truly heartfelt prayer for forgiveness is good for the soul. But even in the absence of that, all is forgiven on the Other Side. Once we cross we have complete and pure understanding—of the reasons why those in our lives behaved the way they did, said what they did, even believed what they did. There is nothing they don’t understand, and once they understand, there is nothing they don’t forgive. Very often the things we feel most guilty about are very small matters in the scheme of everything else. We worry about so much petty stuff over here. But even things that seem monumental, even things that are literally life and death, those things, too, are forgiven completely.

I once had a client, a woman, who came to me beside herself with worry and guilt. She said, “I’ve been carrying this guilt for eight years. My mother was in such pain before she died. In the final stages of her illness, it took her three long weeks before she crossed. Every time I went to the hospital to visit her, she begged me to get pills for her so she could end her life. I was so torn. On one hand, seeing her suffer so much was killing me, but when it came down to it, I just couldn’t do what she was asking. I just couldn’t. I feel like because of my weakness she suffered unnecessarily and I’m afraid she’s angry that I couldn’t bring myself to give her the help she was begging for.” This is such a heavy burden that this woman was carrying! This is not a small thing. But on the Other Side, her mother does understand. Completely. Not for a moment does she think her daughter didn’t care enough about her to help her. She knows that her daughter was acting out of love. As far as she is concerned, not only is her daughter forgiven, there is nothing to forgive.

It’s just amazing!
You feel light and tingly—you’re lighter than a bird, faster than a bird. You can travel through walls or closed doors. It’s different from anything we experience in physical form. You’re not standing up or lying down or even sitting. I couldn’t even describe what “position” it’s done in because with no body, there is no position. You’re just pure energy. You can see all around you in every direction at once.

My mother was raised in an orphanage, a horrific institution. She was beaten savagely, never given proper food or medical treatment. She was hired out to watch kids, clean houses, and so forth. When she and my father got married, he insisted on buying her a car even though she didn’t know how to drive. He told her she had to learn. He said, “For the first time in your life you’re going to feel free.” My mother told me that he was right, and from the first time she started driving, she never stopped. She said, “I could go where I wanted when I wanted. Those bastards didn’t own me anymore.” Driving is really like being in energy form—even though you are using the wheel, it’s not taxing. In a way, cars have taken human beings to the next level, a way to experience while we’re still here a little bit of how it’ll be to be out of our bodies. I really believe that the reason so many people like driving is because it’s the nearest physical approximation to an experience of being in spirit form.

One time that
comes to mind is when I was in the bedroom one night. I don’t sleep well without the burglar alarm set because I’m constantly being woken up by dead people, and sometimes I’m just not sure whether it
is
a dead person walking through my room or whether someone has broken in and wants to tie me up and steal all my favorite
bijoux
(that’s French for “bling”). In any case, I came “awake” to realize that I was in energy form. When I’m in energy form, all I need to do is to think that I want to be in a particular place and I’m there. A lot of times I’ll decide to go see someone I know so then later I can confirm that I really was out of my body by saying, “Last night, were you wearing your long white nightie with the green stripes, and did you have it bunched up around your waist while you clipped your toenails, with a bag of chips and a glass of wine sitting right next to you?” (Just kidding. But I do like to visit friends this way.) This time, I just thought, “I want to go out in the hallway.” This was a little unusual because most of the time, I’ll go out the window, since in the hallway I’m likely to meet spirits who have gathered to visit with a loved one who might have an appointment with me the following day, or might still be hanging around from earlier. I really don’t like to run into those guys when I’m in that state. But this time, I just floated out into the hall. As I did, I was vaguely aware that I was nervous about triggering the alarm by being out there, but of course it didn’t go off. I thought that was pretty cool; I was just like the ghosts who could come and go without setting off the alarm.

Time of day
is not so important. What’s important is that you’re in a very relaxed state. One day I was home, around noon or early afternoon. I’d been watching a great movie on DVD and was apparently pretty tired because I fell asleep in broad daylight. At some point, I came partially out of my sleep state and became conscious of the tingly feeling and decided to, in essence, go for a ride. I turned so that I was lying flat on my back because, for me, that’s the easiest position to leave my body from. Everything that I did was directed by my thoughts. First I thought, “I want to look at my face, see what I look like when I’m doing this,” and so I just looked down from where I was and did that. Then I thought, “I want to go out through the hallway” (this is the downstairs hallway—a different hallway from the one where the dead guys usually hang out), then, “I want to go out over the trees,” and each time I thought something I was able to do it. Then I thought, “I want to go to John’s job site.” But for some reason I couldn’t manage to make myself go there. I couldn’t figure it out since up to that point, I’d been able to direct whatever I wanted to do. So, in any case, I just floated a while over the trees and then I thought of my brother and I said, “Harold, are you here?” And I heard him answer, “Yes, I am.” Then I saw his face, a long ways distant from where I was. It was slowly coming toward me, but then all of a sudden he speeded up—it seemed like at the speed of light!—and his face was instantly just an inch from my face! I was so startled that it snapped me back into my physical body, instantaneously. I felt bad to have reacted that way—see, like anybody, even though I’m used to getting out of my body and having these kinds of experiences, I still have human reactions. Afterward I realized that he was trying to teach me that in spirit form, our actions are as fast as we think them.