We are all loved

Roger Knights directed me to this story in the Washington Post. It's heartwarming and reassuring, and may provide some comfort in these increasingly crazy (and crazy-making) times.

The story is written by a hospice social worker, Scott Janssen, who, like many people in that field, has encountered patients with compelling stories of deathbed visits and similar phenomena. In this case, an elderly patient remembered a deeply meaningful event from his time in World War II. After a particularly traumatic day of dealing with casualties from a combat operation, the patient was unable to shake the memory of one patient in particular. He said:

“Later that night I was on my cot crying. Couldn’t stop crying about that poor guy, and all the others I’d seen die. My cot was creaking, I was shaking so hard. I even started getting scared that I was going insane with the pain.”

I nod, waiting for him to continue.

Then I looked up,” he says. “Saw a guy sitting on the end of my cot. He was wearing a World War I uniform, with one of those funny helmets. He was covered in light, like he was glowing in the dark.”

“What was he doing?” I ask.

Evan starts crying and laughing at the same time. “He was looking at me with love. I could feel it. I’d never felt that kind of love before.”

“What was it like to feel that kind of love?”

“I can’t put it in words.” He pauses. “I guess I just felt like I was worth something, like all the pain and cruelty wasn’t what was real.”

“What was real?”

“Knowing that no matter how screwed-up and cruel the world looks, on some level, somehow, we are all loved. We are all connected.”

This turned out to be the first of several paranormal visits. Each time the specter arrived, he’d wordlessly express love and leave Evan with a sense of peace and calm.

“After the war, the visits stopped,” he says. “Years later, I was cleaning out Mom’s stuff after she died, and I found an old photograph. It was the same guy. I looked on the back, and Mom had written the words ‘Uncle Calvin, killed during World War I, 1918.’

Janssen asked him why he'd brought up this subject, and Evan replied:

“He’s back,” he whispers, staring out the window. “Saw him last night on the foot of my bed. He spoke this time.”

“What’d he say?”

“He told me he was here with me. He’s going to help me over the hill when it’s time to go.”

Janssen goes on to describe some paranormal experiences of his own, which opened his mind to the conviction that his patients were not merely hallucinating. He writes that while he tried to dismiss one such experience as coincidence ...

Inside, though, a part of me knew it was real.

After nearly 30 years as a hospice social worker, I’m certain of it. And I have patients like Evan to thank: dying patients who have convinced me that the world we inhabit is lovingly mysterious and eager to support us, especially during times of disorientation and crisis. It even sends messages of love and reassurance now and then when we’re in pain.

I would add to this only two things.

First, I think there are times when we all feel we are "going insane with pain." This particular moment in American history may be one of them – and this is true for people on both sides of the increasingly wide political divide. It is comforting to think that others who've endured their own share of earthly misery, perhaps in much larger measure, are watching over us and are ready to take our hand and lead us to a better place when it's our time to go.

As an aside, I sometimes think that only my exposure to spiritualist concepts and the evidence for them has kept me from losing my mind entirely. Admittedly, sometimes I come pretty close to losing it, anyway ... But as G.K. Chesterton reportedly said when told he was a pretty rotten person for all his Christian faith, "Imagine how much worse I would be without Christianity." (Quoted from memory, because I can't track down the actual quote.) In my case, just imagine how much worse I would be without my knowledge of the afterlife and the higher self! I shudder to think of it.

Second, I would note that my own rather limited experience with hospice workers, during the brief time when my father was on in-home hospice care, made me realize that these people – people who deal with death on a daily basis – are often profoundly spiritual in their outlook. In fact, I would even describe them as "Spiritualist." Some of them use the language and concepts familiar to me from my own readings of Spiritualist literature of a hundred years ago.

It is, of course, entirely possible that some people influenced by Spiritualism went into the hospice field precisely so they could attend the dying. But I think it is also the case that hospice workers have witnessed so many examples of anomalous phenomena – deathbed visions, near-death experiences, out-of-body experiences, apparitions, and so forth – that they have no choice but to adopt the language and mindset of spiritualism in order to make sense of it.

I might add that years ago, I was in a used bookstore when two hospice nurses asked the clerk if she had any of John Edward's books. This was a time when John Edward was the most famous medium in America. I somewhat regret not talking to those nurses, as I imagine they had some interesting stories to tell.

To repeat what hospice patient Evan said, his comfort came from "knowing that no matter how screwed-up and cruel the world looks, on some level, somehow, we are all loved. We are all connected.” This is so easy to forget and so hard to remember. Yet it is true – profoundly true.

Why do we forget? My forthcoming book The Far Horizon has some thoughts on this, essentially suggesting that we are temporarily players in a fully immersive virtual-reality environment. "Fully immersive" means we cannot easily emerge from the illusion of earthly life. We must endure all the Sturm und Drang of our environment even if it is only an illusion. Apparently, this is how we learn and grow. And those who refuse to engage with the world and endure its highs and lows, those who prefer to sequester themselves in ignorance and apathy, are missing out and will probably have to return again and again until they learn their lesson.

The late Bruce Siegel, who often commented on this blog, liked to emphasize the primary role of love in any understanding of life and spirituality. I was frequently inclined to downplay his input, preferring to focus on more "scientific" concepts like information theory. But I'm starting to suspect he was right all along. Without love, what is there? What's the point?

Ultimately, one way or the other, all the pain and drama of this world will fade like a bad dream. That's worth remembering at times when the bad dream becomes especially nightmarish.

Duncan is in his grave;
After life's fitful fever he sleeps well;
Treason has done his worst: nor steel, nor poison,
Malice domestic, foreign levy, nothing,
Can touch him further.

MacBeth Act 3, Scene 2

Comments

[Art]

\\"We must endure all the Sturm und Drang of our environment even if it is only an illusion. Apparently, this is how we learn and grow" - MP//
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How can I not comment on this? Can you learn how to drive a car just by reading a book about it or even watching a video of someone else driving? No, the only way to learn how to drive a car is by getting behind the wheel of a car and driving it. The same holds true of learning how to ride a bike. It is not enough to just watch someone else ride and bike and then say "I know what it is like to ride a bike because I watched someone else do it." Or what about making love to another person? If you watch two people making love can you say "I know what it is like to make love to another person because I watched a movie of two people making love. I remember in high school how badly I wanted to know what it was like to have sex... but I had to wait until I was 19 years old before I got that opportunity for myself.

The same thing is true of being in a body and learning how to control that body. If you are "soul stuff" or pure consciousness and you had never been in a body and learned how to control it ,or what it felt like to be in a body, or what taste, smell, sound, touch, or sight looked and felt like the only way to learn those things is by coming here and getting in a body and learning how to control it. A newborn child wants to "taste the universe" so they stuff everything they can get their hands on into their mouths. They wave their arms and legs around trying to learn how to control that little body.

And it has everything to do with "why we are here" ... to learn all the things that can't be learned in heaven. This world is set up so that we experience everything about what it is like to live in a 3 dimensional + 1 time universe, what it means and how it feels to be separate, unique, individual, how to control this body we've been put into, and make memories of what it was like to live in a 3 dimensional + 1 time universe.

Why? Because after we die we are able to use those memories to make our own realities, Gods in training, learning the things here that would be difficult or impossible to learn in heaven. And if we watch someone else living their lives we can empathize and know what those feelings mean.

Excerpt from Mark Horton's NDE: "From this vantage point, I had to merely think of a place and time and I was there, experiencing everything about the place and time and people present. I have always, I don’t know why, had a very strong “pull” toward Scotland. I have some Scottish ancestry, but no more so than English, Swedish, and Prussian, but I don’t know why I have such a strong affinity for the land, its history, its culture, and the music. (No sound in this world can stir the feelings that the sound of bagpipes arise in me!) Well, one of my first “trips” was to Scotland, on a high cliff overlooking a grey, crashing sea during a violent thunderstorm. I was there! I could feel the wind lashing at me and the driving force of the rain while I could see and hear the crashing of the thunder and the sea. All I had done was have the merest fleeting thought of the land and I was there! As I’ve said, I have no idea why I have such a strong tie to that particular piece of space/time." https://angelicview.wordpress.com/2013/11/27/a-journey-out-of-our-universe-spheres-within-spheres/

And the more emotion these "lessons" and experiences here evoke, the more we remember them, the more they imprint on our memory so that after we cross over we'll have a library of what it was like to be in a body and live in this 3 dimensional + 1 time Universe.

[Saj Patel]

Beautiful anecdote!

I agree with the functional aspect of the VR-experience, in that a lot of stuff falls into place nicely when one thinks in terms of Virtual Reality or Gaming Environments.

However I don't think this experience is illusory, as I like to emphasize that idea comes from a group of people - the Brahmin caste - that wanted to deny free will and emphasize individuality as an illusion while sitting atop a brutal caste slave system.

Compare this to the "other Indians", the Native American accounts of reincarnation, where rather than karmic debt their souls choose where they'll end up. (I mean no offense, when I was in NC I continuously used the term "Native American" while the actual modernized tribal peoples I spoke to just said "Indian" while looking at me like I was some odd-ball.)

But also on a personal and perhaps aesthetic note it feels unseemly if this life was just a game, as best put by William James ->

"If this life is not a real fight, in which something is eternally gained for the universe by success, it is no better than a game of private theatricals from which one may withdraw at will.

But it feels like a real fight, —as if there were something really wild in the universe which we, with all our idealities and faithfulnesses, are needed to redeem; and first of all to redeem our own hearts from atheisms and fears. For such a half-wild half-saved universe our nature is adapted. The deepest thing in our nature is this dumb region of the heart in which we dwell alone with our willingnesses and our unwillingnesses, our faiths and our fears. As through the cracks and crannies of caverns those waters exude from the earth’s bosom which then form the fountain-heads of springs, so in these crepuscular depths of personality the sources of all our outer deeds and decisions take their rise."

[Faisal]

Great post,

Thank you for it

[Ian]

In the madness of this world, it's always reassuring to read about how the powers that be are consistently loving, understanding, and forgiving towards us. That's an immense comfort, and a logical one: the more you understand why someone acts the way they do, the harder it is to stay mad at them; if God and these beings have a much greater awareness and understanding of us than we do, then we can hope that they view our struggles, our anger, our frustration, and tears with infinite compassion because they understand how we struggle so hard just to get through the day, much less a life.

[Iris G.]

Hi Michael,
I have been following your blog since 2006 and I have learnt a lot from it. Thank you for your work and I am looking forward to your upcoming book! Consider to promote it a little more. It will be uplifting to people in those uncertain times.
Iris

[Art]

\\"I agree with the functional aspect of the VR-experience, in that a lot of stuff falls into place nicely when one thinks in terms of Virtual Reality or Gaming Environments." - Saj//
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Something doesn't have to be real for us to learn from it. As long as we believe it and experience emotion then it will imprint on our consciousness or soul and we will learn from it. It is in the "not knowing" that the learning happens.

When you are in school and your teacher makes out a lesson plan she puts a clearly stated objective at the top of the lesson plan. As you work through the lesson plan you are learning - and the interesting thing is that the more in control the teacher is the more you learn! So you don't even have to have "free will" to learn!

Simply by being here and experiencing what happens around you are learning. It is called "learning holistically" and you are learning whether it feels positive or negative. It doesn't have to cause happiness or be fun as long as it evokes emotion and you are paying attention and you remember it. You are learning from the moment you are born till the second you die and everything is a lesson, even the little stuff. Stuff that you don't know is a lesson is a learning experience. And in fact you don't even have to believe it to have that information imprinted into your brain.

Emotions make the memories last:
https://www.webmd.com/balance/news/20050131/emotions-make-memory-last

[Paul S.]

Dear Michael,
An excellent post! The phrase you attribute to Chesterton is actually apocryphally attributed to another British Catholic, Evelyn Waugh. From [https://evelynwaughsociety.org/2016/waughs-religion/]: “There is a well-known story about the novelist Evelyn Waugh. He was once very rude and his hostess remonstrated: ‘How can you behave so badly – and you a Catholic!’ Waugh replied: ‘You have no idea how much nastier I would be if I was not a Catholic. Without supernatural aid I would hardly be a human being.’”

[Michael Prescott]

Thanks, Paul. I guess that explains why I couldn’t find the quote when I Googled Chesterton.

By the way, did you know that Chesterton was the model for John Dickson Carr's scholarly detective Dr. Gideon Fell?