Ever since I was a small child, I accepted death as a part of life. It is in the natural order of things. I held death in the palms of my hands, learning how it feels. The body grows very light, and then grows cold.

    I had a dream (April 9, 2013) that felt like a teaching dream. A dream that showed me something of death and the circle. In the dream, i was making paper pictures of each season in the cycle of life. 

    I came to labeling them and found myself in dialogue with a voice who sounded much like God, or, an old Sage-Like Osho?

    I knew the answers, and God, or the Divine Sage, whom i was hearing, seemed more or less to be confirming me. Although on the last stage-just prior to waking up-i wonder if the voice gave me the answer? Because i was so surprised. "Awakening"- wow! How curious. 

    In this extraordinary dream, I was gifted with a secret. The secret that Awakening is a stage in our lives between death and rebirth. I had never before seen or heard of a cycle of life depicted as this. (And where i wrote “life,” in the diagram- i feel like it may have been another word but can’t remember):

                Rebirth

   Awakening                 Life

                Death

    I think that we are all born enlightened, awakened before birth. Maybe some, like the spiritual masters, stay awakened or enlightened. Whilst most of us simply forget. As we live our daily lives, with whichever hardships, pain, sorrow, obstacles, traumas and disappointments come our way. We temporarily lose sight of or forget this. Things happen, life hurts, we all have something to contend with. Darkness can loom large, even overtake us.

    This, it seems to me, is the purpose of spirituality or religion. Each time we walk our respective spiritual paths, we recall and remember our true nature. Our soul nature of love and joy. We are filled with light. We reawaken. 

    My dad died (April 2, 2017).  He used to say that when he came back, he wanted to either come back as my pet dog or a rock. 

    Nothing prepared me for my father’s death. I sat with him and placed my hand on his heart. His eyes opened partway and a tear rolled down the corner of his eye. He blinked his eyes and twitched the corner of his mouth several times to communicate that he knew I was there, likely saying, "I love you," in morse code, the language he used often as a HAM radio operator (W9GXR).

    I felt my father and I had an unspoken agreement that I would be there when he died. I think that I reminded him of his mother, a nurse who sat with dying people, before there was such a thing called hospice. I never knew if it would turn out this way or not, but it did. I arrived Saturday afternoon and he died Sunday morning. 

    My brother told me the night before that dad was afraid of dying. And so that morning as I sat with him, I told him that there was nothing to fear. I told him of Ram Dass’s “Spiritual Disneyland,” that he would be in a place of pure and absolute love and joy.

     I let him know his parents would be meeting him, and that it was comforting to me to know he would be there for me when my time came. I told him that I would always hold him in my heart and in my consciousness. I let him know that he was free to go whenever he was ready. And then I heard that he needed to hear that he was a good person. And so I told him that he was a good person. 

    In turn, dad said he wanted everyone to know that he loved them. That was important. We were speaking in our original language, the language of telepathy. 

    Dad died about an hour later. 

    My father gave me many gifts in his dying. I saw how our body is just a shell. How we inhabit these bodies while here on Earth as terrestrial beings. Hours after my dad died, his body became like the exoskeleton of an insect. He had clearly left it. 

    Grandmother Flordemayo teaches that we are both terrestrial and celestial beings. I have now witnessed this. My dad continues to be with me from the other side. Our celestial nature is one which must be pure consciousness.