Tuesday, July 31, 2012

Reframing Death


Through the magic of Facebook, I have learned that 2 acquaintances, both women in their 50s, have died recently.  My heart goes out to family and friends of each.

One was a woman who went to my high school. She was a couple of years behind me, so although I knew who she was (she was really out there, and hard to miss), I didn't really know her.

The other was a woman I met at a professional conference 2 years ago, and had gotten to know a bit on Facebook. She was always kind, and often funny. She often commented on my daily 'morning walk'  photos. I didn't really notice that she stopped commenting a month or two ago, and then I was shocked to see a post about her memorial service.

Then another friend said that two of her friends had gone recently. These were really friends, and she was sad about their crossing over, missing them. I reminded her that there is ample evidence that the soul survives the death of the body (see Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation, by Ian Stevenson, M.D. Stevenson found over 2500 cases, but only 20 are chronicled.) After you look at all that info, it's pretty hard to deny the reality of an eternal soul.

If you have a soul, and your friend has a soul, then it comes down to a communication problem. Most embodied humans have a hard time speaking with non-embodied souls. This makes missing someone more a communication problem than anything else.

Think of it this way: a little more than a century ago, if someone moved from the 'old country' to the US, or even from the Eastern seabord to the frontier, that person might never see his family again. If that person or his family were quite poor, perhaps illiterate, he might never even hear from his family again. So today, communicating with 'the other side' is not so different from communicating with someone on the other side of the world back then. In fact, we can use technology to communicate with those on the 'other side'.  

So I've been thinking about what we call 'death' lately. 

Then I was lying flat on my back in 'corpse pose' in yoga class yesterday, with the yoga teacher talking about breath, when it hit me that death is just another word for release.

Looked at from the soul's point of view, death is simply the soul releasing the body that housed it. The soul that held the molecules that made up the body in place, allows those molecules to release all the elements in them to be reused. (It's called decay, but really, it's recycling.)

This is true for non-physical deaths, too.

While you can say a romantic relationship dies, from the point of view of each of the partners, it's simply releasing the attachment to the other person. This leaves each person free to use the energy that held the relationship in place for other things -- career, home, other relationships.

While you can say that a company that files Chapter 7 bankruptcy dies, what actually happens is that the parts are released to other entities. For example, hard assets can be sold off -- released -- to other people or companies.

Even software has deaths -- updated versions are called releases!

So if someone 'dies', while it is quite natural to miss the easy communication you had with someone, you might consider learning to communicate telepathically. If someone or something dies, you might consider how to use the energy and/or material that has been released in a new way.

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