My stepson Aaron was found behind a restaurant in Salinas a few weeks ago. He was taken to a hospital. He was resuscitated three times. The fourth time he slipped away, the hospital made a call to his family, and they said no more. Let him go.
Aaron’s mother and I were together from the time he was 2 years old until he was about 12, when she and I split up. I spent some time with him after that, but not much — he began using drugs at a young age, and stealing things to fund his habit.
That was almost 30 years ago. Aaron lived his life with paranoid schizophrenia. When he took his medication, he functioned okay — but he was still a drug addict. When he wasn’t on his medication, he was so paranoid that “they” were after him that he had to find a distraction to get relief. The only way he understood to find that was with drinking alcohol or doing heroin.
Aaron had overdosed numerous times throughout his life. He was in the hospital not long ago for heart disease. His body was shot. Despite the best efforts of the people around him, nothing was able to stop the disease of mental illness and drug addictions from finally killing him.
It’s a difficult thing, to care about someone and keep watching them self destruct, keep doing things in a way that, at any moment, could kill them. I’ve known many people like Aaron over the years. There’s a sense of helplessness in it. People with addictions are, by and large, self-medicating to get rid of their anxieties. Help them shut their brain off, find comfort.
With enough alcohol or opiates, the body can almost completely shut down and go to a quiet place of oblivion. I think when people overdose more than once, like my stepson, they’re riding that narrow edge between life and death. There’s nothing you can do except witness energy traveling into a black hole of the void.
Black holes suck in everything. That’s just part of the cosmos. But sometimes, inside black holes, there are universes.
Connecting With the Life Force
We are not our bodies. We are the consciousness that uses our bodies. The consciousness doesn’t die or age. It’s all a part of the cosmos. I ask people, ‘Is there a part of you that doesn’t feel any older, or like it hasn’t aged at all?’ If you feel that — it’s your sense of consciousness, and it’s connected to the infinite consciousness. The energy that includes all of existence.
So, in essence, we can’t die. There is no death.
Most people, when their bodies shut down and they’re pronounced dead but then come back, describe a space of pure peace. It’s a place they can relax and feel safe.
Just like when you first came into your mother, as a spiritual being and an essence came in, there would have been a moment of peace in your existence in the physical life. People entrenched in addictive behaviors find that place of peace through taking themselves close to the brink of death. They’re seeking peace within the life they’re in.
Regression
One of the ways we can get back to the peace that existed before we felt the separation of our life force from the expanded consciousness is through rebirth, or regression. An Australian psychiatrist I met in the ‘80s was using a technique called the primal scream. The premise was that if you regressed enough, you would go back into the womb.
When he watched people go through this therapy, he would see people’s bodies sometimes move exactly like eggs or sperm do as they’re seeking to connect. So, is there a cellular consciousness there? The life force kicks in at the moment they connect — and then separates from the creator of that life force and identifies with the individual cells embodying it. He says that’s our first abandonment experience.
Everything is energy. We pick up on energy from everything around us, the frequencies and the wavelengths going on around us. As people go through rebirth, they take that feeling they had when they were fully connected to the life force and bring it out of their body. It was always a part of them. It’s always a part of you; it just got lost in the experience of genetics, the influences of the responses in the life sustaining it.
Ultimately, in the rebirthing process I have them move forward. They go through the whole process of being reborn, and come out imagining being in an environment where everyone is celebrating them. This brings them out into the world with a sense of inherent connection to the source.
All the years I’ve worked with people who’ve done any kind of deep psychological work, they almost always say things like, “I want to matter.” “I want to be appreciated.” “I don’t feel loved.” The only thing that can get us there is to experience an internal reconnection to the truth of our existence — and that is that you are already valuable. You’re already loved.
Meditation
Regression and rebirth isn’t the only way to connect to this life force — there are many ways, but this and meditation are the ones that I’ve personally validated myself. You can expand into nothingness and everything, or go back into the womb. Either way, you’ll find the life force that came into that cell in the beginning actually came from the source that you just left.
If we leave the body and go into deep meditative states, we start to expand our consciousness. We see that we’re not the body. We’re not the thoughts.
In the now, there is a sense of fullness and richness so expansive, nothing ties you to the past or to the future, to desires or to expectations. There is just this one. And this one. And this one. When you’re in the present, you can be 100% satisfied. If you’re distracted and thinking about other things, you’ll only ever achieve partial satisfaction. I think most people live their lives with only partial experiences, because they want to be numb and disconnect.
No one ever told us how to live fully without being afraid that you have to hide all the time or be ready for something else.
Some people achieve a meditative-like experience from something like gardening. When they get absorbed in it, they’re not really attached to the mind. We call these mindless activities, but really they’re just detached enough to halt the internal conflict and give some relief. That happens when the self detaches from the importance of the thoughts and the internal conflict.
With meditation, as we progress we get more and more detached from the conflicts inside ourselves, and all the different pulls for our attention. But it’s not really fully about meditation. It’s about developing the discipline required to establish a habit that you’ve decided will be of value to you.
When you do that, you start to feel a sense of empowerment. A sense that you have a choice of what habits to put your energy into. And then you start to recognize you have more freedom in the world than just reacting to whatever comes into your brain or through your emotions or memories.
Letting Go of Fear
The day after Aaron passed away, I got a call that my father was in the hospital with pneumonia. He wasn’t doing well and for a while we all thought it was the end. While he did recover and is doing better now, it was a tough week. It got me thinking about death and all the feelings of fear and trepidation that go along with it.
We have to let go of the fear of death. That’s not to say that we can’t feel the grieving and the loss and sadness of losing someone you’ve been attached to. But that suffering has to have its own place. Go into it, let it breathe, breathe into it. Whatever it is, breathe into it. It’s the next moment. Then the next moment. As I allow the flow of that experience to continue and stay alive within me, I have to understand that whatever comes, I’ll go through it, whatever it is — and then it will be something else.
But if you’re afraid of death, you’re always running away from the idea of it. Everything comes down to this fear — and it pushes us to seek peace in all kinds of things that are external to us. It’s rooted in not having a structure for knowing, from the beginning, that we are peace. We are love. We are divine.
When we connect to the infinite resource, everything we need is there. Everyone is already waiting for us. We just have to allow ourselves to become quiet enough. To surrender enough. To let go enough and just be in this moment, so that everything can be provided. No more attachments, no more hanging on to this or that, no more thinking, ‘What if I need it later?’
From this perspective, death isn’t even an option. It only exists in the realm in which our bodies exist. In the realm of our egos, of thinking that we’re not important, or that we are important, or that we’re awful or good. Whether positive or negative, those are all stories that the ego tells us.
Choosing Consciousness
My 45-year-old stepson’s body was brought back three times but would not sustain him. My 99-year-old father, on the other hand, came back from the brink of death. It wouldn’t have taken much for everything in him to just quietly shut down. So how do we reconcile these two events?
Every time I go visit my father, his wife talks about how enlivened he gets with the excitement and anticipation of something that matters to him.
To truly be alive, we have to live with a belief that there’s another adventure waiting for us. That we want to be awake, get out, try something new. If we’re stuck running on our unconscious thoughts, we can only run on programs that were given to us by our experiences or our genetics. Those old feelings become so familiar they bring us a kind of relief, in that it reduces anxiety because it’s predictable.
Consciousness, on the other hand, brings abundant possibility. But we have to start down a path that opens doors and gives us a peek into that awareness, so we start to understand that, ‘Wow, I could actually have a life with joy. I could actually feel good about myself.’
When we go beyond thoughts, beyond the body, we find the quiet sense of peace. We access the life force that jolted us into a body of cells in our mother’s womb. Once we find that, we don’t need to run anymore. We don’t crave death as a release from pain. Nor do we fear death.
Because we have a place to go, deep inside, that’s connected to the infinite. Death is just the body — we are the universe.