Death, Where Is Thy Sting?

Once I dreamt my exit strategy.  In my dream, I’m told that this dream landscape would make a good place to enter as I’m physically dying. In my dream, there’s a lovely woman, a guide of light assuring my safety.  And the drums are calling me to dance.

Needless to say, this is a dream I value highly; it’s a gift to me because it’s one way I can choose to play out my death experience. My spirit crossing, “shuffling off this mortal coil” can happen like this if I want it to. In this dream, I’m given the map to that country that so intrigues us as humans and I’m given an exit strategy through a dream portal I can re-enter in order to familiarize myself with the plan, the landscape and my options, NOW.  I don’t have to wait, in fact, just like buying the guidebooks to Hawaii before I went there, anticipation and some scouting ahead is part of the fun of the trip. 

Though many people still don’t want to think or talk about death, we on this planet, at this time are starting to evaluate old paradigms and open to new ones in record numbers. We’re blessed with some extraordinary teachers of these paradigm shifts and the books they’ve given us. There is a growing community of people deep in spiritual exploration; perhaps we will dream a new dream for humanity in time to restore this beautiful earth to it’s natural state of living vibrancy.  Perhaps that’s why we’ve chosen to incarnate at this time.

I’m not negating that death, like birth, can be messy and painful.  I wish us all a smooth exit at the right time.  I don’t claim to have conquered every fear of death, but I also came into this life kicking and screaming.  Both ends seem to have some pain factor involved.

In this magic moment in time, a  new spiritual consciousness is emerging, and the extensive dream and spiritual exploration blossoming this past half century are key contributors.  Dreaming practices open avenues of exploration to any human being willing to pay attention to her/his own dreaming. As Robert Moss puts it, “Dreaming is the science of soul for the 21^st century.”

Many people, across the globe, are arriving at a new human paradigm that sees each of us responsible for his or her own soul journey through dense matter, through this physical plane.  We are finding that turning inward, experiencing dreaming and the dream worlds have made us our own ultimate authority on the meaning of life and has eased, if not erased. all mortal fears.  

Dreaming isn’t the only science positing a new heaven and a new earth; contemporary theoretical physics also points to  a multiverse hidden within the one we observe as reality.  William Buhlman gives a wonderful and succinct overview of the most revolutionary physicist’s views in, Adventures Beyond the Body and draws exciting parallels to OBE experiences he’s had or researched in his sweeping surveys of OBEs around the world. 

We live as entities of energy in the multiverse.  The best way to see this is true is to pay attention and participate in your dream life equally with your waking life.  This simple avenue of proof is what we’re born with, a gateway home through the multiverse, a place before birth and after death.  A continumm of my existence, not a stagnant malignant restricting place, a place of possibility, free of the density of matter.

In dreaming, we experience, to varying degrees, depending on our own focus, the multiverse of non-physical realities that physics say exist and that dreaming says are the landscapes of our infinite non-physical existence. In these realms, energy generated by intention, thought, emotion, unconscious factors and consensus matters a great deal; it’s important to be clear about what you want and open hearted.  Those energies get you into the best places.

What about Heaven and Hell? Religious paradigms, literally man made, mental constructs, what the famed mystic poet William Blake labeled, “mind-forged manacles.”  Religions demand adherence to non-experientially based belief, often called “faith.”  Has anyone else noticed that religions, especially hard boiled, my way or the highway patriarchal religions in the world today are kind of ruining it for everybody? Having violent, jealous gods is getting old; having women reduced to chattel again is not an option in my hymnal.  Religions are causing a lot of trouble.  I myself am looking forward to being popeless, if just for a few weeks. Authoritarian belief based systems are the dinosaurs that smash spirituality, but we are living in a consensus paradigm that has the potential to become post-religion and truly spiritual. 

Organic spirituality, dreaming, isn’t based on a belief system, it’s based on experience in the dreaming and in the waking.  Each person is his or her own authority.  What I know to be true is what I’ve experienced myself in the dream worlds and in waking life, the physical and the non-physical.  And I’m not alone in this consensus; all over the world, people are waking up to the power of dreaming and the spiritual reality of our planetary existence on earth, the physical realm. 

At this moment on earth, we’re blessed with many wonderful teachers and their written works. It’s a spiritual explorer's dream come true to learn from dreaming pioneers like Robert Moss, William Buhlman, Patricia Garfield, Gayle Delaney – so very many more, as well as  from dreamers on the internet. My primary resource is my own dream experience…when I lay me down to sleep, I open a window and fly through it…I’m free.  Yes, not all dreams are pretty and sometimes they're hard to retrieve, like shadowy ghost images fading as I call them back.  But dreams are the royal road to inner-spaces.  Once you build a relationship with your own dreams, you see the bridge before you, there and back again.

“To be or not to be…”, if that’s the question it helps to know, based on the empirical evidence of my own experiences and those of countless others, that the physical event of death is a transition very much like the physical event of birth, that I’m turning the page, transforming my reality.  Maybe it’s not death where is your sting, because it definitely can hurt, but it appears death’s sting is fleeting compared to the rest of what I’ll experience. Death be kind, give me a good transition, but I don’t fear what Hamlet did “….for in that sleep of death, what dreams may come?” Bring those dreams on! I'll have new opportunities; the I that is spirit, energy, consciousness will endure in the most interesting ways, depending on where I am in my quest when I cross.  This holy grail of attaining spiritual awareness, becoming Conscious as Eckhart Tolle puts it,  just might be more important than making it in business.  It doesn't preclude financial success, but if all that survives death is who we are and not what we have, some balance would seem wise in preparation for the inevitable.

Based on his OBE experience and research, William Buhlman asserts unequivocally that we’re eternal spirits having a physical experience, each for individual reasons, determined to enter this physical external plane with something to accomplish.  What he describes resonates with many of my own experiences in dreaming.  This empirical spirituality offers me a great alternative to fear based, reward for towing the line, religions.  Dreaming offers a portal into my authentic being and teaches me what I'm really here on this amazing gorgeous planet to do.  Religions that insist on incinerating everybody on principle should be carefully assessed, as should those that have not protected children nor served LOVE.  I think the big 3 need to stand trial in this modern world. Ancient and indigenous spiritualities honored dreaming as a vehicle between worlds, always; they still have much to teach us.  Father obsessed religions of the last 6 thousand years or so don’t serve us as human beings, nor do they serve the planet and the future of our children.

Dreaming is the royal road to the unconscious and through the gates of death into the new, extended adventures available to each and every one of us.  This knowledge shines a very different light on “old age” death and the after life.  Instead of a decline of all that’s important to me, a loss and a disconnect, I can experience my old age as a new chapter and an opportunity to look ahead and take control of my journey. 

Shakespeare’s brooding prince Hamlet peered into death’s abyss hoping for solace from his earthly woes, but stopped short of doing himself in with his bare bodkin when an existential question occurred to him: “What dreams may come when we have shuffled off this mortal coil?"  Fearing dreams, he was unprepared for death.  He was also cut off from his spiritual options; it would take several more centuries for the doors of dreaming to open the doors of death again.  But it’s happening.  What dreams may come?  What dreams do you want to realize?

The other day I had one of those conversations, okay, yes with a man, that’s heavily mental; they call it “reason, logic” and back it up with quotes from whatever dead author they believe nailed the truth in some pithy tome.  My sense is that whatever teachers I read and admire are my predilections; I don’t expect anyone to genuflect when I name them. I am not the authority over someone else’s waking dream or night dream.  After letting him spin out for a while, I held his paradigm of a dystopic, depleted future ruled by man’s technology gone awry before him, summarizing it briefly and asked him, is this the future you want to see happen, the one you want to bequeath your sons?  No, it's not.

Though being cynical may make us feel intellectually superior, in the long run, I think it’s dangerous.  There is a great deal of energy in a passionately held thought or belief and this carries energy that manifests into reality. When large numbers of people hold these negative beliefs, well...  We don't have to deny the obvious problems to adopt a passion for solutions instead of resigning ourselves to fear.  If thought is a form of creative energy, what we think matters.  Personally, If I’m conscious that my death will not end anything, that I’ll pick up in some way from where I left off, then I want to make sure that I like where I’m picking up from and where I left off.  That’s something I can do right now, prepare for death by living in the light I want to behold when I die and by dreaming the future I want to see happen, not the one I fear. 

Preparing for death means living a life that flows from waking into dreaming realities in a natural, openhearted and curious way.  Of all the wonderful acquisitions I can manifest on this physical plane, the ones I can take with me are the product of my own searching, my own experiencing in the physical waking world and the non-physical dreaming dimensions. Unlike Hamlet, I choose to stick around not because I fear death, but because I came here for a reason.  I have a job to do, something I signed on to do.  When I’m done, then I’ll cross over; and when I cross over, I’ll continue it on another level.

For me, I’d be happy enough to have helped foment a spiritual jail break, “setting all the captives free” seeing all those paradigm prisons dissolve and humanity turn a new leaf. A dream fueled spirituality will allow more of us to have fun in this dimension, resting in the secure knowledge, born of experience, that we are not alone and that we are each eternal spirits.

 Although religions parrot this, they put all sorts of imperatives and conditions on salvation and usurp individual spiritual authority.  The ancient poet Ecclesiastes wrote, “Naked came I into this world and naked I shall return.” We each come and go, the experience is individual, natural and safe, but we make that crossing on our own. The most universal dream report I hear is about a beloved departed person visiting the loved one in the dreaming and assuring them they’re ok.   Wish fulfillment?…nah-ah. I’ve seen too many eyes sparkle and hearts open telling me about when dad, mom, child, beloved partner or even a cherished pet comes back in the dreaming to give their reassurances or make their requests.  It is organic spirituality’s portal through death, the dreaming, a glimpse of non-physical realities.  

When you know through your own experience, your own dreaming, that death is a door that opens into a non-physical multi-verse, so what you attract to you by your attitude and desires will be your new environment when you walk through that door, it seems to me that you evaluate and adjust your passions and desires in order to attract the environment you want to live in forever.  I guess this is where good guys actually finish first. The Egyptians believed at death each person’s heart is weighed against a feather on golden scales, only a light heart will pass the test of eternity.

In my up-coming dream group, we’ll journey, as I’ve done in groups with Robert Moss, to the realm of Luna, the transition station where souls either incarnate or arrive after incarnation.  I look forward to hearing the stories each dreamer will tell of their adventures.  I look forward to exploring this realm again with a new group of travelers.  

The strongest thing we can do is to dream our best dreams for the highest good of all.  May it be so.