A couple of days ago I listened to a podcast with my friend Cyrus Kirkpatrick. I call him my friend. I think we need a new term- cyberfriend. I “met” Cyrus after hearing another interview with him about his book “Understanding Life After Death”. I’ve never actually met him. I’ve interacted with him quite a bit on his Facebook group. Cyrus takes a no-nonsense, hands on approach to life after death. He wants to understand the mechanics of it. As such, he is an OBE traveler. He can leave his body and travel the astral planes, which he claims are where most of us go after we depart this plane. Cyrus insists the new age belief that we all become balls of loving light, non-feeling enlightened masters, at the moment of death, is nonsense. Cyrus, like many mediums, says that when we die, we essentially remain who we are. Then, last night I was reading a book by Steven Joseph, “The Tall Medium”, and he was saying emphatically that when we die, we leave all “negative Earth” emotions here. Anger, jealousy, regret, all of it, it’s just gone. We become loving, balls of light/energy or something. There is no physical existence in the afterlife or between life realms. I guess we just float around- disembodied. He also said that to break the grip of grief we have to let go of the physical attachment to our loved ones and accept that they are these energetic amorphous things now. To connect with them, we have to clear ourself of this physical addiction, give up all addictions (alcohol, tobacco, caffeine, processed foods, etc.) and then we can maybe reach some sort of connection. That wasn’t resonating with me at all.
It’s interesting to hear such dogmatic views of what lies ahead for all of us. The afterlife that Steven describes sounds like the boring heaven I imagined as a kid. It’s nothing like Earth. We were taught about “streets of gold” and milk and honey (I don’ like either). In this paradise, we have nothing to do really other than sing songs- “When we’ve been there 10,000 years, bright shining as the sun, we’ve no less days to sing God’s praise than when we first begun.” Arggh! Really? Shoot me now.
People who have astral projected, many mediums (most?) and even many who have had NDEs, say that we go to a “place” that is very similar to Earth. And why not? Earth is “good”. As far as I’m concerned, Earth is almost paradise. There are three major factors keeping it from being a place I’d like to spend a very long time, if not eternity. 1.) The need to “earn a living”. We spend so much time and energy just trying to keep these meatsuits alive. We have to pay for even the most basic things- food, shelter, even water. Those things cost money and money has to be “earned”. I couldn’t give a percentage estimate of how much of my time is spent in pursuit of providing a living for myself, Tywana and Kayla, but it’s way up there. If I’m not working, I’m thinking about what I should be doing. If I didn’t need to earn money, I’d still do “productive” things. I’d still help people. I’d still want a sense of purpose. I envision a world where people do what needs to be done for love and a sense of fulfillment rather than for money 2.) The constraints of time. There are so many times I think of how I haven’t seen a friend for a very long time. There are so many things I’d like to do. But, there’s never enough time. We all know we only have so many years. In addition to not having a large number of years, in prime health especially, we can only do one thing at a time, only be in one place at a time. I don’t know how time works on the other side or if it exist at all, but I’ve been told it’s very different. We are not constrained by time. We don’t have to fight it. We can take our time and do the things we enjoy. Unlike here, where time is our most precious thing, there time is not our enemy. 3.) Sickness, death and separation- I put these all together because they are so closely related. One of the reasons time is so precious is because we know that sickness, death, and separation is coming for us all. If it hasn’t hit you yet, it’s only a matter of time. These are things I believe we come here to experience because they don’t exist in the other realms. They bring life into sharp focus. They make us appreciate the good times. They still hurt like hell though.
If I could remove those three things from this world, it’d be pretty OK. The notion of a non-physical existence of being a loving, ball of energy with no capability to feel anything other than some blissed out existence doesn’t sound appealing to me. When people say they like what they have rather than something else I often question if they know what they like or if they like what they know. Maybe that existence is superior and I just can’t fathom it from where I sit now. Maybe. But, the astral planes sound pretty cool to me. I could hang out there for a few hundred years at least.
