Seeking Jordan: How I Learned the Truth about Death and the Invisible Universe by Matthew Mckay Phd

Author:Matthew Mckay, Phd
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: New World Library

*“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” from John Keats, “Ode on a Grecian Urn”; see www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/173742.

CHAPTER 7

All Together: The Living and the Dead

At the funeral, all eyes are on the coffin. As if the one inside was the victim of misfortune, struck down by some malicious fate.

Death isn’t bad luck, because there is no difference between the living and the dead. The one in the coffin is doing the same thing as the one grieving in the pew: loving and learning.

There is no difference between the living and the dead because the young have already been old, already taken a last breath, already watched planets die and galaxies collide. The one in the coffin is finished with this play. That’s all. And has taken everything learned back to “the whole,” back to the light.

The mourners go home. And while they grieve, the departed one is in the circle, greeting a brother from one life, or greeting a father, a daughter, a friend from others. Greeting a lover who left early, and a lover who in another play was left behind. Greeting the ones who were teachers, who were antagonists, who were protectors or protected. Greeting the one who ended a past life, who was a murderer.

The circle is always complete. We are always in it, and the funeral is an illusion. While souls actually experience no separation (just as Jordan is still with me), most human minds believe that the loss of the body is the loss of the person. And that if something cannot be seen, it isn’t there.

The human mind, having amnesia for all past lives, identifies each person (soul) with a single body. And if that body/person can no longer be seen, it is assumed to be gone. Lost.

But that isn’t the case. Jordan’s soul is right next to me, guiding me as I write this. Souls do not leave us, and the circle does not break just because that brilliant collection of molecules called a body is put in a box.

I know this, yet still I sometimes feel alone. I ask Jordan, and he explains:

The illusion of separation is perpetuated by religious images of the afterlife — an extraordinary realm so different from our planet that its inhabitants seem unreachable and lost to us. But again, it is the human mind creating fictions.

Images of the afterlife imbued with religious constructions of god and fantastic beings (for example, archangels and demons) are inventions of priests and holy men who attempted to make the journey while still embodied on Earth. Often aided by drugs or assaults on the body (including pain, sleeplessness, sensory overload, or deprivation), they saw in the “afterlife” what they wanted to see, what they feared seeing, or simply what their minds created in an altered state. The Tibetan and Egyptian books of the dead, the Upanishads, and the visions of countless mystics are examples of these journeys.

The Christian image of heavenly hosts singing god’s praises is also just a lovely hallucination. Such images — clouds and harps and angels at the gate — create hope.

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