Life May Be Far More Mysterious Than We Know

I spent most of my adult life working to heal my personal "demons" through a variety of modalities including Freudian-style therapists, Reiki, sweat lodge, soul retrievals, AlAnon, Family Reconstruction, and a billion prayers. This self-improvement effort was certainly worth it as I have been happy with who I am, and quite peaceful and satisfied with my life for the last twenty years or so. I have dealt with everything in this lifetime that had given me trouble, and I am still plumbing the more subtle depths with a decade of serious mediation practice.

My daughter is currently studying several trans-personal methodologies with the goal of eventually helping people heal themselves. For her to earn a certification she needed volunteers. I agreed to a session designed to access and deal with emotional trauma. I had absolutely no expectations or preconceived notions of what might happen when I agreed to participate. I had no idea what, if anything, might come up for me.

The methodology is not hypnosis nor anything manipulative. It is simply an opportunity to stop and listen to the deepest, most silent information in our own psyche. I believe the calm and focused attention I have been cultivating in meditation made the session quite easy for me. The session begins with the willingness to feel in the physical body any sensation that may need to be recognized or acknowledged. After some minutes I began to feel an ice cold sliver of pain in my lower left abdomen. I did not recognize that sensation. The longer I focused on it, the more defined it became until it felt as if a long thin icicle was inside my body. My daughter's guidance was to stay with it until I could recall or otherwise understand the source of this strange pain.

I guessed it was physical trauma from the emergency Cesarean delivery of my second child, but each time I tried to match that feeling with what I experienced in childbirth, it did not agree. I relaxed even further and patiently waited to see what might eventually be revealed. Before long my entire abdomen was ice cold, freezing. I began to shiver. Following my daughter's guidance to wait, it soon became clear that I was feeling an ice cold wind in my lower abdomen due to evisceration. Then my right leg was suddenly missing from the hip. My mind searched for some context for these physical sensations that were so real and immediate though I was lying in the comfort and safety of my own living room. Slowly, very slowly, I realized that I was hanging suspended in the sky from an enormous parachute. A bullet or shrapnel had pierced the flesh of my abdomen and my intestines had spilled out. The icy wind I could feel inside my warm body was literally the wind blowing into the empty cavity of a dying body. Another impact ripped through my right leg at the hip and it was gone. I was not in any physical pain except for the icy cold. I knew I was dying. As I stayed with these strange sensations, I "recalled" that I was 17 years old and had jumped from a huge plane over Normandy. The entire sky around me was full of men hanging beneath parachutes being systematically shot by a huge army of guns on the ground.

I was no longer afraid of anything because I knew I was already dead and it would not hurt when I hit the ground. An enormous sadness filled my entire being and my 17 year old heart shattered at the thought of my mother. How dearly I wished to see her and be safe in her arms again. It seemed there was even a few short memories of how I felt as I left this earth behind. I was peaceful but the sadness weighed me down. That 17 year old spirit was pretty cocky otherwise as he answered a few of my daughter's questions. He seemed irrepressible.

So.... I did not cry in the here and now though perhaps I should have. After some appropriate leave taking of the 17 year old soldier, Phase Two kicked in. This time as I remained still, it was a pain in the right side of my skull that heralded another traumatic "memory". Soon, the pain became a crushing ache and I knew that my skull has been fatally smashed. I could not tell if it was from warfare, murder, or if it was a hunting injury. As I patiently waited for this trauma to communicate itself to me, I realized I was a middle aged Native American man and it was not important how the injury happened. I was lying on the frozen ground in the deepest cold of a Plains winter. I either could not move, or the blood had frozen my clothes to the ground and I could not get up. I knew that I had been mistakenly left for dead by my companions. Or perhaps they deliberately left me behind. What was remarkable to the me in the here and now was that there was absolutely no rancor toward my companions who so heartlessly left me behind. I was not afraid of dying. It was natural and peaceful though I wished I could continue to live. I knew my life was over. The trauma seemed to be from the painful, conscious awareness as I lie slowly freezing to death on the ground. It was a hard way to go. But once I was dead, I left this realm with a good and peaceful heart. In the here and now, I thanked the Native American man and said my farewell to him.  

I continued to physically shiver despite the warm blanket I was wrapped in. Slowly I readjusted to being this version of me, in my house, in the present. Wow. As I slowly warmed up, I reflected on a very surprising chain of experiences. Both episodes began with real physical sensations in my body and I simply had to wait for information to "arrive". I do not know if they are past life memories, or some deep psyche "metaphor" of this lifetime.  Another rather extraordinary thing was how information coalesced in my conscious mind. I think my imagination filled in some of the blank details, but the manner of death came from outside of my normal thinking processes. Some of what I came to understand cannot even be easily expressed in verbal language. It was strange and mysterious and there is absolutely no way to objectively determine the source.


The take away is that it is painless to actually die. There might be a lot of physical suffering and mental anguish prior, but once a person actually dies, it is painless. We have feelings and opinions about what happened to us in the life we just lost, too. Apparently, something of who we were in that lifetime continues to exist intact in some form or manner because I held a short conversation with each man after I "remembered" how he died. Perhaps they were ghosts needing some help to move on - except they seemed to have already moved on after they died as far as I could tell. I assume there was trauma and great sadness that had to be healed in both of these experiences and I feel as if that happened. I do not see any change in my day to day thinking but I do feel a lot more confident about dying - someday. Perhaps I will die a very peaceful death this time around.