This Journal entry introduces the subject of Life After Life, and includes additional information about the heart, and so it’s a Journal about Life. This Journal entry is also a foundational Journal to this website portal. Some basic information will be introduced here which will be developed in future writings.
Life after Life is generally regarded by the intentionally unconscious (those who know that they don’t know and want to keep it that way), and the unconsciously unconscious (those who don’t know that they don’t know), as an inscrutable subject to be avoided, if not actively resisted. Such avoidance is purely fear based, and is unnecessary.
We all encounter the day and time when we undergo the transition from life in the body to no life in the body, followed by spiritual life in higher dimensional planes of Light. This event is a universal and important event in the life of human beings. The other universal and important event in our lives is birth. What goes on in our lives between these 2 events should be a developmental process of knowing what our life is all about.
One simple way to describe death is that it is the beginning of a new life. It is the end of an old way of living and is the beginning of a new way of living.
When we pass on to the afterlife, what dies in this life is our false self which never had any real basis of existence to begin with. The false self simply lives in our thoughts, emotions, and projections. It’s what we want ourselves to be and what we want others to think we are. Its egoistic facade is easily distracted with the pursuit of status symbols and reputation and the competition which usually accompanies such pursuits.
It seems that a lot of schools of thought and persuasions have arisen to help us figure out how to manage our lives between birth and death. Some of these schools (of propaganda) further the excuse for their existence by continuing to inform us about the shadowy unknown and imponderable aspects that are generally ascribed to death. We might wind up in Hell, for instance. This doesn’t sound so good, but at least it is a dim concession that there is some kind of a life after life.
Such teachings, now millennia old, drive a certain fear of death, and the schools continue through the centuries to harp on the theme of life and death with a purposeful vagueness that keeps the fearful flock in check. Most of the unconscious will somewhat desperately hang on to the school they are addicted to, continually tithing, with a dim hope that some enlightenment may arrive one day, and they can finally understand that it’s OK to die.
We rarely pause to consider that there is something very essential that we can only know by dying. In truth, we really don’t know what life is until we know what death is. Death, which seems like our ultimate enemy and is something that we must exhort every energy to avoid, is actually the doorway to a new life which is beyond the trials and tribulations of this world.
Before we give up the ghost, we might as well enjoy, benefit, and contribute our Light to the world while being alive in our human body. While we are pursuing those cherished status symbols and reputation perks, it really is best if we are able to contribute something lasting and helpful during our short time here. As is stated in Matthew 5:16, immediately following the 8 Beatitudes…”Let your Light so shine before men that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father which is in Heaven.”
Various institutions promote fear based thought constructs about death. These opinions, which are always outside of oneself, constitute what I refer to as listening to OPV, an acronym for Other Peoples’ Voices. The result of listening to OPV is a mishmash of noise that generally winds up running our left hemispheric thought processes and sounds like the ever familiar voice in our head that is who we think we really are. OPV is an imposter of the true Self, which is supremely quiet and non-judgmental.
This OPV noise in our head has the makings and sound of the Judge, the Critic, the Skeptic, the Pusher, and the Victim. Just listen in right about now, and see who is talking in your head space. Say hello to whoever is talking in your head, and see if you can get to know them a little bit. Then take it all the way home, and see if you can figure out where this voice came from. This OPV voice is not your authentic Self.
Observe it, gently let go of it, and forgive it, as best as you can from day to day. This is a type of mindfulness practice, if you will. It amounts to an ongoing negotiation process which should be conducted all throughout your life. You don’t have to beat up the OPV. Such wasteful efforts will only increase OPV. OPV is actually natural, in consideration of where you have journeyed, and who you have listened to.
Later you learn about how correct boundaries to OPV are formed, a most important milestone in one’s life, and it is a milestones which usually develops in degrees.
The authentic You resides in the quietness and mysteries of the chambers of your Heart. I am sure that in the stream of the Crestone and Beyond Journal writings I shall attempt to explore the mysteries of the Heart, at least as much as written words will allow.
We humans are culturally entrained to cling to life, without even considering what drives this style of learning about their life process. As long as we are so ardently clinging to life, we are promoting a shadow fear of our exit and evolution from this mortal plane.
The death and dying process perhaps should be more of a celebration of our graduation to higher realms of Light and learning. It should be like those cap and gown affairs that some of us attend upon graduating from some school. But somehow, along the way in our daily lives, our instinctive and healthy survival instinct is transmuted into a psychic demon…the fear of death, and therefore the fear of life as well. If we always carry along our fear of death, then we really do not live fully while we are here.
Shadow Fear
The survival instinct is actually a healthy sign of an intact and healthy first chakra function. It is a primal instinct of any creature born into this world we call Earth. It is designed to alert us that we may be in some sort of danger, or that a threat is present. This is healthy utilitarian fear. On the other hand, the demon of the balanced first chakra zone of conscious and subconscious interface is a shadowy, paralyzing, dissociative, anxiety based type of fear.
Shadow fear has many synonymous feeling states that we are able to register in our conscious mind as being present in our body and brain mind thinking. For the sake of clarity, the next paragraph is a useful alphabetical listing of some of the feeling states of shadow fear.
As you read the listing, just check in with your inner world, and see if and why you remember feeling any of these states at any time in your life: anxious, apprehensive, cautious, clammy, cowardice, defensive, distrust, doubt, dread, embarrassed, evasive, foreboding, frantic, hesitant, horrified, hysterical, inhibited, insecure, irrational, nausea, nervous, panic, paralyzed, paranoid, scared, secretive, shaky, shy, skeptical, stage fright, superstitious, suspicious, tense, terrified, threatened, timid, trapped, uncertain, uneasy, vulnerable, want to escape, wary, and worry.
If you are feeling most of these states much of the time in your daily world, then you have several issues to consider:
- Balancing your neurotransmitters…in this case, you probably need more GABA (gamma amino butyric acid, the calming neurotransmitter), and just a little less of the fight-flight catecholamines (dopamine, norepinephrine, and epinephrine).
- You are being informed in your conscious mind by reflexive trauma triggers from the past which are guilt/shame related. These traumas need some healing help, usually by employing the help of some type of trauma healer, as well as a sincere dose of forgiveness. Such a healer actually lives inside of you in the form of your Divine Healing Intelligence, which I call the DHI. Outside healers should be able to facilitate your awakening of your inside healer, the DHI.
- You want to begin practicing how to get a grip, and figure out what the shadow fear is trying to inform you about. With this type of fear, we can practice shifting it into the positive utilitarian healthy fear by asking a question, “What action is needed right now?”
The action needed when gripped by the clutches of shadow fear falls into one of 2 categories, and often emotionally intelligent people can access both types of actions:
- A boundary formation is necessary, as in the animal world of fight or flight. For humans, this means we have to access utilitarian anger (fight) or utilitarian apathy (flight, just walk away, or ignore the situation). Either of these actions will help you formulate a boundary as you delve deeper into a solution for the issue which presented itself.
- You need to access a higher emotional tool called desire (you have to know your passions, what you want, and how to protect this), and if your desire level is greater than your fear level, you will then access a still higher emotional frequency called courage, and you will then step right into the adventure which is being presented to you by whatever is evoking your conditioned fear.
As stated in a previous Journal, when dealing with the understanding of shadow and utilitarian emotional states, courage is not the absence of fear. Courage is moving on into the experience with dignity, despite having the fear. Until we start to practice accessing desire and courage, our shadow fear will usually self magnify, and evolve as a growing fear that grinds its way into our neural pathways and our psychic byways and paralyzes our appropriate life response.
Fear is actually a gift that was designed by nature to alert us to the situation at hand, and energize us to be able to deal with the stressful situation. On the other hand, as the list above indicates, we can also become paralyzed by the fear. Being so subverted, we return to the comfort zone, and we miss out on the great potential of the great adventure. We miss the opportunity to experience, practice, learn, and grow.
On the other hand, walking through the fear (by accessing desire and courage), means that you will meet tests, challenges, and helpers. If the adventure is in alignment with your Heart based primary motivators, or passions, then the chance for success approaches 100%. The Universe, which wanted to know Itself through your Heart, will synchronistically shift to strengthen you and assist you through the journey. It is the Universe’s job to figure out out how to help you manifest your desire. We don’t really need to know how the Universe, or, Mind of God, accomplishes its silent miracles in our lives.
At this juncture of accomplishment, one is learning what the higher emotions of neutrality and willingness are all about. These 2 emotional states are higher on the emotional frequency scale than courage. They equate to trust and release (neutrality), and optimism and intention (willingness). I suggest some practice of accessing your boundaries, your desire, and your courage by taking baby steps in this practice of navigating in your emotional toolbox. Walk into and through your fears, and allow Grace to assist. Carry the staffs of desire and courage with you. You will be aided and guided. Have faith.
As with shadow fear, we can go through the various synonymous feeling states of the 6 lower case emotions of apathy, grief, fear, desire, anger, and pride. These 6 states are informed by trauma (memoried guilt/shame) to manifest in our day to day lives in the shadow. We can check in with how many states we feel, and upon discerning our level of feeling, we can then ask the appropriate question for each of these shadow states, and thereby practice shifting into the positive utilitarian use of the emotion to help protect and heal our lives. From there we can practice accessing higher emotional tools of courage, neutrality, willingness, and acceptance (forgiveness).
The Four Forms of Fear
In consideration of shadow fear, that being the kind of fear that drives our avoidance of the death topic (which is exactly the kind of fear promoted by many life schools), we might start with a consideration of how such fear enters our lives early on, and what this primordial fear eventually leads to.
This type of fear is part and parcel of living a life on Earth plane, and it starts as a result of our first great illusion; an illusion that we begin to develop after the time of birth when we are pre-verbally learning what it feels like to be ourselves. We are a Consciousness living inside of a helpless blob of baby flesh which is dependent on outside resources to keep it warm, dry, and fed. The illusion that I am referring to is the illusion of separation.
The illusion of separation leads to 4 types of OPV fear based thinking and response:
- The fear of scarcity, or lack
- The fear of not being good enough
- The fear of rejection
- The fear of loss of control
If these 4 OPV fears are running all of the time in the background and in the foreground, all as a result of our operating from the illusion of separation, then the inevitable result is the evolution of the feeling that I refer to as the “fear of death.”
Our Soul/Spirit knows coming into these Earth bodies that it is going to have to contend with this sense of feeling separate from everything for all of its days here. This is a pre-birth knowing, and this understanding is acceptable to our Consciousness. There will be a development in the body of the resultant companion of fear based consciousness. This is unavoidable in so much as we have to contend with the grand Illusion of Separation.
This amounts to something akin to a pre-birth contract of sorts. having agreed to such an arrangement, we are then born into life in a human body. Our charge then becomes how to assist our own journey as an evolving spiritual being having a physical experience.
Shadow fear furthers the illusion that we are separate from others, and all of Creation. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth. All of Creation lives inside of us, in our inner realms of Being, and is known in and through the Heart. The words of sages ring true…We are That.
Most people run their lives without any consideration given to the nature of their fears, and are generally engaging with life events on a reactive basis, letting life lead them around by the nose, so to speak. We could, instead, gain a little traction by understanding our fears, and perhaps take a more proactive approach to the life we want to create. It also helps to become familiar with OPV, and renounce it while negotiating with it and forgiving it.
Unfortunately, in the vast majority of lives, the parenting is of such a quality that our fear based instincts become deeply imprinted into our neural circuitry up through the time of completion of the development of our subconscious mind, which is age 7 years. This is also the time period when the heart chakra has fully developed, from age 4-7 years.
The Heart
A balanced healthy Heart has the capacity to give and receive love unconditionally. All of my earlier significant teachers were able to help me understand in one way or another that unconditional love is life’s most powerful healer. The ability to give and receive unconditional love is predicated on our level of self love, which is founded on our ability to forgive and be non judgmental first towards self and then towards other. If we have not healed ourselves through forgiveness of self and all that has passed before in our lives, then we will just keep projecting our shadow onto others.
Before we leave these bodies that carry us through our Earth side life journey, the daily theme worth considering is what sort of sanctuary we are building in our Hearts, both the neuromuscular pumping heart, and the Heart that is the seat of the Mind.
This heart is 60-65% neural. These types of heart cells are neural cardiocytes. They are thinking, longing, knowing, and feeling. Neural cardiocytes do not think with words. They think in a fractal of nested knowing and connection to their Divine source. The heart transmits on an energetic spectrum to all the cells of the body, ranging from low frequency fight/flight energetic to resonant frequency to higher frequency overwhelm/withdrawal energetic.
When we experience the resonant frequency of the heart, (easily displayed with biofeedback devices which record a spectral analysis of heart rate variability), we feel calm, can access higher emotional frequencies, have higher cognitive ability, higher intuitive ability, and we can entrain other hearts within our local vicinity, as well as beyond, into our calm resonant frequency.
Heart resonant frequency lies in the range of 0.08 cycles per second (Hertz) to 0.15 cps. Usually people come in around 0.10 cps, and this value is regarded as heart resonant frequency. This is easily measurable with biofeedback devices (see www.heartmath.org). I commonly use this biofeedback device in my practice so that people can have a visual, cognitive, and felt understanding of their level of heart electromagnetic chaos which feels like “foot on the gas,” or “foot on the brake,” or both foot on the gas and foot on the brake simultaneously, which is quite chaotic, and quite common. The instrumentation can also be used to help clients learn how to access heart resonant frequency.
“Foot on the gas” refers to dominance of heart frequency by the Sympathetic Nervous System (SNS) division of the Autonomic nervous system. This division is sometimes called the “fight/flight” energetic. It provides a type of native intelligence to our life. The SNS serves to speed and contract organs when under the threat.
“Foot on the brake” refers to dominance of the heart frequency by the Parasympathetic Nervous System (PNS) division of the Autonomic nervous system. This division is sometimes referred to as the “freeze” energetic. It provides a type of native intelligence to our life. The PNS serves to slow and relax organs, as in the “rest and digest” response.
There can be dominance in the heart and body by either SNS or PNS, or both simultaneously, hence the terminology of “foot on the gas and foot on the brake” occurring at the same time.
If a person lives in the SNS or “manic” state for a period of time, then an inevitable collapse into the PNS or “depressive” state will ensue as neurotransmitters are burned up. If this type of swing is continuously occurring, then we are dealing with a form of bipolarism.
We can discern types of bipolarism of any of the 7 major chakra zones, a particular subject which is somewhat beyond the scope of this particular Journal entry.
In the state of balanced Heart energetic the SNS and the PNS have come together in the middle, so to speak, into a balanced repose of heart resonant frequency, 0.1 cycles per second, and this feels calm.
This resonant frequency is quite unlike the 2 ends of the heart frequency spectrum of sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system dominance. The 2 divisions of the autonomic nervous system, the sympathetic and the parasympathetic, are largely driven by fear based entrainment in those who have a significant amount of unresolved trauma memory reflex. These 2 divisions of our nervous system are running (informing) all of our cellular and organ functions. Their origin is in the subconscious mind. The conscious mind cannot process fast enough to run the myriad of processes that occur on a second to second basis in a human body.
When the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems are operating in a balanced harmonic, then the heart, as stated above, is in its resonant frequency range of 0.08 to 0.15 cycles per second (Hertz). The resonant frequency of the heart is generally thought of as 0.1 cps, and this will vary somewhat from person to person.
When an individual is stimulated into a fear based memory reflex, the heart instantly shifts its frequency and informs the brain to signal all the cells of the body via the divisions of the autonomic nervous system into a more chaotic energetic. This signaling arrives at the cell membrane (the real brain of the cell, since it is the sensing feeling unit of cellular function), and from there into the DNA, which encodes for cellular protein and subsequent function.
A natural inquiry may be, “What is the quality of energetic that my heart is radiating into my body, and outside of my body? What is the quality of energetic that other hearts around me are radiating?” Such inquiry can lead to deeper understanding of the effects promoted by OPV into our immediate field of influence, and into the magneto-sphere of the Earth.
Other Peoples’ Voices, masquerading as what we identify as our self, overrides the heart, and its messaging about our authentic Self. To perceive, and understand, this messaging requires a calming of the thought waves in the brain.
The Sanskrit words, from the second sutra of The Yoga Sutras of Patangali, are the words “yoga chitti vritti nirodha” – the purpose of yoga is to still the thought waves of the mind. The mysteries and the deep knowing of the heart can be manifested and lived with less and less fear as we practice our yoga of living in the world via resonant frequency and mindfulness (quiet mind).
Most people harbor a fear of the life event that is commonly called death. This word carries the connotation of finality, or, there is no more. The word “death” is a misnomer, because we don’t die. The body ceases, the Soul/Spirit live on. the energetic repository of the Heart lives on.
The word “death” has become such a handy word in our lexicon, that I suppose we will keep on using the word with some unknowing degree of irreverence. However, the oft felt negative connotations which accompany the use of this word are not necessary.
It is the belief of most people on the planet that after the body functions cease, and there is no more life in the body, that an essence of life, known as Spirit, transitions and lives on in other realms. These life after life realms are generally regarded as an unknown by most people and such people get into their heads and advance an argument that one cannot know or prove anything about life after life. Such are the belief systems that people are running as a result of collective OPV.
As it turns out, there is an impressive assortment of literature addressing the subject of what goes on in life after life. In the next 3 Journal entries I will offer an arrangement of types of literature on this worthy subject.
It is my feeling that all of these diverse forms of human insight on life after life studies are basically advancing a similar viewpoint.
Thank you for reading.
Signing off from Crestone and Beyond.
“Death is not putting out the light. It is putting out the lamp because dawn has come.“….Rabindranath Tagore
Associated Reading
- Consider the Seed…a Zen Buddhist practitioner offers fresh perspective on all of the above in beautiful words, allegory, and story.
- On Beginning at the Beginning…a brief and enlightening commentary about overcoming inhibitory states of mind when attending dying people in their transition.
- A Crestone End of Life Ceremony…a writing on this website about an outdoor cremation I attended in Crestone in February, 2010, for a deceased patient.
- Breaking Into Light…Tarron Estes of the Conscious Dying Institute shares a nice writing about conscious dying. Near death phenomena and end of life experience are discussed here.