This is the second half of an article I wrote several years ago.
He Is Gone From This World
When I got word that John had died suddenly of a heart attack, I was thoroughly shocked. He was in his late 50’s, fit and athletic, loving and open. And probably clearer and more untroubled than he’d ever been in his life. Why, John? He had said we were “unraveling,” but this was an unraveling I couldn’t have seen.
I like to know the conditions pertaining to someone’s death experience, partly because I want to understand the lessons we choose to emphasize for ourselves and others by the form of our death. Why the timing? Why the particular cause? Everything is symbolic and tells a story. Curious, that he was midstream in his project, close to coming out the other end of the long tunnel of disciplined effort he’d been maintaining. Why, when this man was becoming so clear, did his tunnel let him out on the “other side,” rather than here so he might help change the balance of power from dark to light in the physical realm?
An answer came to me as I meditated and contacted him spiritually. I saw that his goal in life had been to love as many people as possible. Not, like the goal of most of us, to BE loved; John instead reveled in opportunities to be with people in a real, loving way and to give and receive pure attention. He was an astonishingly good listener. At his memorial service, I heard that his girlfriend told many people how much they had meant to John, and they all said, “I know! He told me when we last spoke.” I saw that John had achieved this life purpose, and upon his release from his body, had had a full realization of just how successful he’d been in opening and sharing his heart. John had moved from being a man with a warm heart, to being a man who was ALL HEART; he literally became his exploded heart.
Often we don’t realize what our soul’s purpose really is, and confuse it with the mind’s goals. In John’s case, one might have guessed his purpose was the accomplishment of many socially conscious projects. How ironic, I thought, that perhaps we are here to become expert lovers, and that’s really it. That to love and realize the omnipresence of love is the most fun thing we can do. I saw that now that John is not limited by time, space, and a body, he can love more people, all at once, and be more saturated in the experience. People don’t have to be rationed out one at a time, and there are no distortions to reckon with, caused by people’s fearful, or need-based misinterpretations.
At last I heard the story of what came just prior to John’s death. He had participated in an all-night gathering of his men’s group two days before. They had performed a ceremony from which he emerged absolutely glowing. The following evening, his girlfriend attended a similar gathering of her women’s group. That next morning, she received a call from him. He was at home and needed help. “Please come right away,” he pleaded. “Something is happening to me.”
All the women got in their cars immediately and went to help him. By the time they got there, he had died, a shocked expression frozen on his face. After the officials and friends had finally cleared away, his girlfriend got out her aromatherapy oils and slowly, lovingly, anointed his body. She said his expression slowly changed, and a deeply peaceful look came across his face. For the next couple days, as he lay in state, people swore that he smiled on the hour.
Anything that doesn’t bring us fully alive is too small for us.
Now as I recall our last conversation, it seems like he was getting ready. Incrementally, he was talking himself into a state of oneness and open-heartedness, letting go of focusing on his flaws in exchange for an awareness of what is true and ever-present. What was it he said? “We must bust our collective stories. At this time there is no room for anything that gets in the way of soul alignment. Anything that doesn’t bring us fully alive is too small for us. We cannot allow a diminishment of ourselves now.” If we become fully alive, do we necessarily need to be alive in the body? Perhaps not!
The winds of change are blowing our debris away. What will be left of us? To surrender to the process can truly feel insane. If I become clear, will I suddenly die? Or will I remain here, ingrained in this world, a clear light in a body helping guide other people to become clear lights in bodies? For certain, our egos will die and be replaced with the warm wisdom of the heart. We will KNOW we are intimately connected in a unified field of energy and love. What difference then does it make whether we maintain our physicality or shift entirely into the higher frequencies of ourselves?
This time of soul-crafting is incredibly important, it seems to me. It is now that we set our real tone to vibrating throughout the entirety of ourselves, and by deciding who we will be, we get serious about bringing our soul into full consciousness. What’s interesting is that the consciousness of the soul does not come through our brain alone, in the familiar way we know when recognizing new information and insights. The realization, or physicalization, of the soul comes through the mind-in-the-heart. It comes whispering, in a new language we are not used to speaking,
The soul brings with it the experience of The Sacred Heart; the exploded heart, the heartfield. As soul takes over, the heart expands so rapidly that it becomes not a thing, but an environment to live within. And if we are not practiced in being porous enough, or soft enough, forgiving enough, or surrendered enough, our hearts may pound and try to escape our bodies. They may drift out when we are absent-minded, beyond the confines of our everyday auras, to commune with millions of other hearts. And we may find ourselves inexplicably overcome with emotion, or empathy, or experiences of human suffering and sacrifice. The heart eats pain and transforms this mistake of perception back into love again.
We must remember that our hearts are strong and flexible. They can zoom out and back in again. They are powered by divine sanity, and responsive to the needs of the collective. Hard hearts are not good; expressing hate, no matter how subtle or disguised, wounds the heart and stunts it, make it unable to make that quantum leap from object to environment, that is coming soon for all of us.
In this time of soul-crafting, I encourage you to commit to keeping your heart soft and open, no matter what seems to be coming at you from the world. I encourage you to think with your heart and discover what that actually feels like. I encourage you to exercise your heart, expanding it in various ways and letting it settle back to seek its own level again, like a pool of clear water.
If you, like I, have lost a loved one recently, I encourage you to continue to connect with them and let them guide you in stretching yourself to encompass more and more of your totality. Part of you is already in the frequency that they occupy, and you can take your mind there just as easily as keeping it contracted into the small ball we call daily reality.
Stretch out, relax, build your frequency, relax, run more energy, relax. Soften your heart, then focus. Let go of your identity ideas, then see what you are. Let the wind blow through you and be your friend.
Copyright by Penney Peirce