The following is a excerpt from “Into the Light” by John Lerma MD (http://www.amazon.com/Into-Light-Afterlife-Pre-Death-Experiences/dp/1564149722). This is from a chapter titled “Father Mike,” who was a 78-year-old, retired, Catholic priest who was well respected and had been president of a Catholic university. He was in the hospice unit to live his last days, diagnosed with terminal cancer. At this time, Dr Lerma was working at that hospice unit, caring for the terminally ill and making their last days as comfortable as possible. This section deals with the final minutes of Father Mike’s life:
“As I arrived at the hospice unit, the lights on the hospice floor were flickering on and off. There was an incredible sense of peace in the midst of the chaos that was occurring. Several nurses and my secretary were present. They had rushed me there to experience an inconceivable event. Every time the lights turned on and off, little feathers fell from the ceiling, drifting down as if they were snowflakes. One fell in the hand of a nurse and disappeared. As soon as they fell, they disappeared. Father Mike’s call light was going off and on. His door, which had been closed when he died, was now open. The secretary and one nurse saw a bright light shining from his room. They thought the lights were coming back on, but the bright light was radiating from his body or bed., Out of that light came this bright sphere that floated out of his body and circled the bed about three times before it soared out of the closed window. Less than a minute later, the lights came back on, it stopped raining and all the feathers disappeared. We all had goose bumps.”
I’ve tried to write this piece several times now. Each time I ended up ranting about the people who refuse to accept the evidence of the paranormal, in all it’s different forms, and I didn’t like that. I kept rewriting it, but it still didn’t feel right. Then I finally got it: The real question is, do I believe it? And the answer is, <ding> I’m not 100% sure that I do. Sure I have my intensions, but can I really accept that feathers can just appear out of nowhere and then vanish?
This now brings something into focus. There is an idea in the psychological world that everyone and every thing you dislike or hate, is part of yourself that you can’t accept. You then project it out onto people or things in the world, both separating yourself from it and unconsciously hoping that destroying it will purge it from your psyche. If that is true, then my issues with hypocrisy and abuse of power stem from my own fears and tendencies in those areas. Guess what? It turns out that I don’t have to look too long to see the truth of that, which some recent incidents have made all too clear. This leads me to the next question: What do I do about it?
I’ve been watching some Abraham-Hicks videos on YouTube. These are about a woman named Esther Hicks channels an energy that calls itself Abraham. (It took me a while before I figured that out.) Usually I don’t watch, I just listen. He/She can be very entertaining, though, at points, I sometimes I wonder why everyone is laughing so hard. (Maybe being in a seminar for 8 hours makes you a little punch-drunk?) Anyway, most of her talks center about manifesting, abundance, getting what you want, the life you want, you get the idea. I listen because these talks resonate on a very different level than someone like Tony Robbins, and give me the idea that there’s something there, if I can just wrap my head around it. In pondering/meditating while listening, the question came up about knowing who you are and what you want. At that point, I realized that I don’t know who I am.
Isn’t that a strange thought? How can you not know who you are? When I looked, I mean really looked, I could see that there is a significant part of me that I don’t have access to. It’s just an indescribable something, that is just there, and it’s completely impervious to my usual techniques to getting a handle on it. I am getting that I need to meditate in a new way to deal with it and move to the next level. I need to get out of my head, with it’s logic, language and symbols, and into something more abstract. Forget what I have been taught and practice just be with certain “concepts.”
I have spent a good portion of my life stripping away layers of conditioning and expectation, a process that has steadily accelerating over the years. At first, it was no big deal. It just made me feel better about stuff and my life better as a whole. But, as I continued, my personality and outlook began to shift. The changes were subtle at first, but over time my tastes began to change, and, eventually, I became profoundly dissatisfied and my choices led to a wholesale life restructuring. That’s a fancy way of saying that I left my career and my marriage, got a new place to live, new job and new friends. Not really on purpose, but things just happened when I realized that I could do that any more.
At this point, it seems like the process has removed most of my cultural conditioning and expectations, those “shoulds” and “should nots,” along with the fears of what will happen if deviate from the norm. I have lost a lot of comforting beliefs and rituals about the world and my place in it. But, at the same time, I have become a lot more open to new ideas. Most people cloak their skepticism in science or faith, but we all know that the simple truth is that they’re mostly worried about “what will people think?” While I wish I was completely free of that, I’m not, but I am about 90% less worried about it than I used to be. I get now that I can never be who a really am, until I can stop pretending to live up to someone else expectations. Make no mistake, we are all pretending, one way or another.
Do I believe that those paranormal things actually happened, really? Yes I am, and I’m willing to take all the flack that that engenders. What about everything else in “Into the Light?” (It has a very Christian focus) I still have very negative feelings around terms like “God,” “Jesus” and “faith.” Probably because I constantly hear those words used to justify the most hateful, hurtful and destructive actions and I can’t understand how anyone would want to be associated with the awful things that are said an done in the name of “God’s Love.” That aside, I can deal with the idea that these concepts have just as much claim to legitimacy as ghosts and guides, so I shouldn’t toss them out due to personal prejudice.
In reality, (funny to say that in connection with the paranormal, but, oh well) all “supernatural” forces are conceptually the same, whether you’re talking about God on high or the things that go bump in the night, and all evidence needs to be evaluated and considered. The waters around these phenomena are muddy enough already, there’s no point in making it worse by buying into artificial distinctions. It’s a good idea to keep my mind open all aspects of the paranormal, for that is the only way to ever begin to draw any kind of comprehensive understand of what’s going on, and what are the implications for everyday life. Then, perhaps, I can stop being upset by the compulsive skeptics.
“Who are you going to believe? Me, or your own eyes?” —Groucho Marx
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