Introduction:
Charles Whitfield asks several important questions in his foreword to my second book Spiritual Awakenings. These include: Who am I? What am I doing here? Where am I going? How can I get any peace?
While the answers to these questions remain a Divine Mystery—Charlie begins to answer these questions by constructing a map of the mind or psyche.
Other names for the True Self, who I really am, include the Real or Existential Self, the Human Heart, the Soul and the Child Within. They are all the same because they are our true identity. Just as an acorn contains the potential for a giant oak tree, we too, as we are born contain the potential for our True Self to develop to its fullest. If a new born baby is given everything it needs as it grows and develops - a loving bond with caregivers, mirroring of feelings, stimulation to learn, praise, healthy role models, etc. then this baby will likely grow up to fulfill all of its potential-- realizing and experiencing its natural connection to its Divine Nature. This Divine Nature that we call Higher Self in the map of the psyche can also be called Guardian Angel, Atman, Buddha Nature, Christ Consciousness or simply Self. And both of these, our True Self and our Higher Self, are intimately connected to our Higher Power which we may call God/Goddess/All-That-Is, a part of which is also within each one of us.
This relationship -True Self, Higher Self and God - is such an important relationship that we can view it as being one person, which we can call the Sacred Person. When we are in alignment, when we are our authentic True Self connected to our Higher Self and God we are no longer a human being hoping for a spiritual experience. We are a Spiritual Being living through a human body. We may even feel the presence of God's Divine Energy that some call Holy Spirit, Chi, Ki, or Ruach Ha Kodesh. Each religion has a name for this Divine Energy. With or without our being religious, It is with us, patiently waiting for us to realize It's presence. During births and during deaths, Its presence is easier to recognize if we are being our Sacred Person -- our True Self connected to Higher Self which is then connected to God.
As part of the Divine Mystery, my True Self makes or constructs an assistant to help me as I live out this human experience. We can call this sidekick, the ego. Ego can be positive or negative. When the ego is helpful to us, such as in screening, sorting and handling many aspects of our internal and external reality we can call it positive ego. My positive ego is writing this. Your positive ego is reading it. Positive ego balances our checkbook, keeps us on time for appointments, etc. When it tries to take over and run our life it becomes negative ego, also known as false self or co-dependent self.
Being with someone who is dying
As I tell the stories in my third book Final Passage: Sharing the journey as this life ends, I will occasionally pause and explain this difference to help the reader become more familiar as people switch back and forth between their Real Self and false self.
Being with someone who is dying is an opportunity like no other to help us learn how to practice being real and feeling connected. Whether we are the person dying or the person helping, this process is a chance to step out of our egos and practice being our real self.
A Course in Miracles says in its introduction: What is real cannot be threatened
What is unreal does not exist.
Herein lies the peace of God.
What is real is God and God's world -- that of the Sacred Person. The ego and its world is not real, and therefore, in the grand scheme of the Mystery, does not exist. Herein, when we make this differentiation, lies our peace and serenity. The way to peace and serenity is by learning to differentiate between identifying with my True Self and my false self.
Some of these ideas may be hard to grasp. Identifying with our Soul, our Real Self and not our body is a strange concept in a world where we are constantly being bombarded with messages about the way we look. Magazines, television, and movies constantly tell us that we're not young enough, thin enough or firm enough. Our society bombards us with materialistic messages that keep us locked in our body as our only identity.
Much of the time people who are dying wake up to their true identity before they die and realize they are not just their body. They let go of the image of themselves as just their body and at the same time they realize they are not their ego. They wake up to their spiritual nature, which is their True Self. Sometimes, as I meet a patient for the first time, we will gaze into each others eyes and instantly recognize this special place that knows that we will continue to exist after our 'death.' Their is a sense of joy at the knowledge that this worn out or diseased body is going to drop away and release the Real Self back into wholeness.
Leaving our bodies
How do I know of this? I have experienced it with my dying patients, and I remember it from when I was dying in l975 as clearly as if it were yesterday. The hundreds of near-death experiencers I have interviewed say the same thing. We were not upset to loose our body and this incarnation when we realized that we were still who we are and that "thing" we left behind was painful, cumbersome and inhibiting. There was often a sense of "Oh! So that one's over! Now I can get some rest and start again - anew."
If our death wasn't sudden, if there was enough time to realize we were dying, it was then painful detaching from the people we love. But once we left our bodies, we were not so upset about leaving. Many of us reported being joyful. We felt peace. Some of us even became ecstatic as we moved toward the Light.
Our problems began when we had to return to the physical plane. We liked leaving our egos behind and coming home to our Self. We could be real again and feel the connection to our Higher Self and God. We liked more fully experiencing who we really are - our Sacred Person. Once we were back here on Earth in our body, we had to struggle because our loved ones and our society wanted us to get back into our old roles, which meant putting our egos back on or being our false self.
Don't just do something – stand there.
Many years ago, Charlie studied with a nun, Sister Chaminode. She was teaching the way she had learned to work with dying people. She was able to sum her experiences up in one easy sentence taken from the old adage "Don't just stand there – do something!" She reversed it to demonstrate that when we are assisting in the dying process, the best we can do is – do nothing! Just stand there. Just be with the person – just witness and validate their feelings, intuitions, truths. Stand there with love in our hearts and help them to embrace their true identity.
Sometimes, when people are dying, this mechanism of dropping the ego and being real starts long before the dying process is complete. Those of us assisting them have an easy time because all we need to do is be real. Being real invites our attention to focus on the Divine Energy that is really orchestrating everything and we can release into the dance of life and death. We become aware of the cycle that the Eastern religions have always referred to: birth, life, death, birth, life, death. Souls come in and souls go out. The ego and the body dies, but we, our Essence that we here call True Self continues its journey.
Birth is an experience of celebration. Death can be, too. I am not trying to get your hopes up about what it is to die. Realistically written, my book Final Passage contains some stories of suffering that never transformed to anything higher. But this book also contains stories of what is possible when suffering is transformed by Spirit. When we are being real we share our Truth. Being real and sharing our Truth flips our consciousness into a deeper dimension that is spiritual, and the suffering is what is happening to the body, but not to us. Suffering is about fearing our pain. When we make room for spirit – we stop fearing and the suffering dissolves.
The cycle of birth - life - death is beautifully designed to switch at the exact right time with the assistance of God's Divine Energy. Each one of us creates or designs our timing - not one minute before or one minute after the appropriate moment. Our ego can do none of this - our True Self in concert with God is creating our time table. Our ego is the victim of our dying. Our True Self can be the orchestrater of our death.
Our Soul – our True Self's nature is to create. There is a formless part of ourselves (like the part of the acorn that holds the oak tree) that creates our personality, ego and image. Its nature is to create. If we identify with the creation - our bodies, ego, image - we will suffer in life and in death. If we identify with the creator - our True Self, our Higher Self and God - we will end our suffering. At this level we go behind the ego chatter and we are free.
No matter how spiritual or free we become – as we move toward death there may still be some moments or elements of pain if we decide not to take any medication. We may experience the pain – but not the suffering that was created by resisting the pain. And, if we examine our pain closely, what emerges is the knowledge that, in part, pain sculpts who we are becoming. We are "becoming" through our entire life and that includes every moment of the dying process. (See Whitfield C, A Gift To Myself . Read the section on Stage Two "Learning to tolerate emotional pain.")
Examining Pain
Looking back at our lives - would we trade our pain? I wouldn't. I spent seven months in a full body cast. I wore one cast for a month before surgery and then after surgery I had an identical one for six months. It began at my armpits and ended at my knees. I weighed about 85 pounds. (I normally weigh about 118.) The cast weighed 30 pounds. The one I wore before surgery taught me how to be in the post-surgery cast while I was still strong enough to learn the tricks of survival. The awful part of the one--month pre-surgery cast was it showed me what was to come and I felt full of dread while suspended in a Stryker frame Circle Bed. I was in the Circle Bed for almost a month, dreading the next cast. Then for six months I again was encased in plaster that intruded on my every move. It also deepened my knowledge of myself a thousand fold.
Even if I never had a near-death experience, the body cast would have still changed me profoundly. This rock—like enclosure kept me in the moment, and kept me real. There was no place to hide. Being real every second of every day again brought me closer to God. I watched my defenses drop away. Every new pain brought on by the cast brought me closer to realizing my True Self. If we can recognize this - if we can recognize our pain as an anchor to be in the moment - we can release our clinging to our false self. The minute we look to see where we are clinging - if we can let go - we are released again to be our True Self. Pain can be the vehicle to release attachments, defenses and ego.
As we die-- there may be denial, pain and fear. How much can we transmute by seeing it as suffering, clinging and resisting? How much can we transform? If two people can look into each other's eyes with love and truth in their hearts, anything is possible. There is a moment of possibility where consciousness can "flip" from suffering to celebration. |