The Journey After Life by Cyndi Dale: Impressions

For as long as I can remember, I've been incredibly drawn to that realm beyond 'reality'. What begins after science ends? What are the things our senses cannot perceive? Where does one draw the line between matter and spirit? If you look at my book shelf, you'll see at least a dozen titles on energy 'sciences', religion, mythology, philosophy, and allied subjects. I read endlessly about what lies 'beyond', but do I believe what I read? I can't tell. I don't know. Years of formal Western style education, combined with a deep interest in Eastern esoteric-­ism, have turned me into this half­-baked creature. A skeptical believer, a believing skeptic. I want to believe but I find myself compelled to question. A fine example of my personal paradox is that I have now simultaneously become a student of both – evidence-­led history and archaeology, and intuition-led mysticism and mythology.

However, in my quest for answers, I lap up books like 'The Journey After Life' when they come my way. 'The Journey After Life' is written by Cyndi Dale, an American healer, speaker and author. She has written several books on Chakras and other energy paradigms, has intuitively healed hundreds of people and continues to do such work, thanks to her psychic abilities. In this book she deals with the subjects of death, the soul, and afterlife. She also talks extensively about spirit beings, angels, dark souls, faeries and so on, and their role in our lives. She elaborates upon the nature of the soul, drawing from religious sources as well as quantum physics! Dale's book not only shows the extent of her 'research', but also her intuitive understanding of human nature and compassion. It was the latter that quite affected me as I was reading this book.

Just a few pages into the book, and I felt connected with her. I felt her spiritual presence in the room, as I sat holding the book, like I would hold her hand. Ever so often, I would find myself crying as I read her kind words. I was reminded of my spiritual mentor, Shilpa Inamdar – also an energy practitioner and healer – in whose kind presence I always felt so purged and refreshed. In her wonderful manner of communicating, Dale introduces the concept of death as a part of life in the introductory chapters, which form the first part of the book. She says how all life is light, as everything emanates from the great White Light. I found this idea very similar to the Hindu idea of Brahman, from which all creation and life emanates and into which everything culminates.

However, Dale's idea of the great source of light is not all that simple, as she speaks about several Planes of Light through which a spirit travels before it reaches 'Ultimate Consciousness'. The second part of the book describes these planes in great details, with a chapter dedicated to each of the 13 planes of light. She associates every plane with a chakra, explains what it means, what a soul's purpose on that plane is, who the guiding beings on that plane are, how to 'visit' and benefit from that plane even when one is alive and what their corresponding metals, colours and mediation techniques are. It is greatly practical book from this perspective, but the key is belief.

Despite my initial 'connection' with the book, there were times when there was a complete lapse of faith and what I read appeared to me as gibberish, or fantasy at best. I might as well have been reading a book on nuclear physics, because I had no clue what was going on. Because with my limited knowledge and ordinary perceptions, there is no way of ever corroborating the contents of this book, and I was always teetering on the edge of (dis)belief. Spirits, guardian angels, tunnels of white light, NDEs, curses, ghosts and other such ideas are hard to stomach but there are great takeaways from this book in terms of love, humanity, kindness and compassion. Choose what you will.

Living

(Image source: Seismic_2000's Flickriver stream)

Someone has died.

Someone I know not from too long ago, died. He was a colleague from my ex-ex-workplace, and he died last evening. Young, boisterous, beer-guzzling, kebab-loving AK died of some terrible kind of stomach infection. I find out on Facebook this morning. I am shocked, sad, upset. I leave a customary RIP message on that post made by my ex-ex-boss. But because I am on Facebook, and I have 10 minutes before getting ready for office, I proceed to 'Like' some posts and pictures of other friends. Someone's even had a baby. "Congrats!" I say.

But someone has died.

A mother's son. I am given to tears. No parent should have to live through the death of their offspring. I am trying to remember if he had a girlfriend. I am wondering about crushed dreams. I am also looking at the clock and cursing myself. I could be late. I hate getting late. I run into the shower, and I am thinking to myself how uncertain life is, and how hot the water is. I turn off the geyser. The cold water feels nice on my sweat-dried, worked-out skin. I am reminded of the ritual of bathing dead bodies before clothing them in finery for their last journey. I am also taking mental notes about buying soap on my way back home from work. I like Mysore Sandal Soap.

But someone has died.

AK won't need soap again, or the money to buy soap. He won't need to worry about getting to work on time, or working at all. He won't need to stand in front of the cupboard and decide what to wear. But he must have done it all a week ago, perhaps a month (I don't know how long he was ill). How inconsequential all of it seems now. But the pink skirt is what I choose. It's not ironed, but it's okay; people will be looking at my freshly-waxed legs anyway. Irreverently, 'Yai re, yai re, zor lagake nache re' pops into my head. It is perhaps the skirt that invoked the image of Urmila swaying to music. I brush it off, chastising myself. I wonder at the measure the human mind takes to cope with bad news/grief/disorder. Anything to maintain the semblance of the normal. I wear my Titan Raga watch. It has been nicely fixed now. The glass face was broken. I also wear some dangly earrings - with a heart and a star on it. Must scoot. I wonder about the wisdom of wearing heels today.

But someone has died.

Someone who, just like me, cared about how he looked. He and I won the "Best Dressed Employees" that year on Diwali. He made the effort to adorn his body. But he doesn't have a body anymore. Taken away just like that. With something as 'lame' as a stomach infection. Why, I get those all the time. This doesn't seem real... ("R.K. Studio", I tell the rickshaw wala. These darned shoes are still giving me shoe bites)... Until last week, a young person dying of a heart attack seemed unreal. A junior from college. And until three weeks before that a young person, a college mate, committing suicide seemed so. News-y things happening to people I once shared spaces with. My world has three less familiar faces. These faces didn't mean much while they were living, but now that they are gone, the gap is noticeable. Not for long, though. Perhaps this is what it feels like when a tooth is extracted. You stop noticing it after some days. These guys here, drinking chai and smoking cigarettes, sending admiring glances my way as I walk up the steps of the office building, won't miss me if I stopped coming to office; if I stopped existing. For now, they make my effort to match my lipstick with my outfit seem worth it. I am drifting. I am going about my life, my work, as I would everyday. I am on Twitter, on excel spreads and word documents, on fashion websites and messengers, and good old Facebook, where a picture of AK, along with a condolence post by other ex-ex-colleagues remind me that     

someone has died.   

I am thinking people become pictures so easily. Like a little hiccup in our routines. Tomorrow, the lame jokes will start. But that's the thing about being alive. About worrying about groceries, and EMIs, an old crush, a new love, illnesses, weight loss, familiar sex, good music, favourite movies, pride, regret, old friends, new friends, and so much more. It is also about getting bugged with interns' questions, as I am now, about getting irritated with the excessive sugar in the watery coffee that this peon makes, about feeling elated at having helped change people's course of life, about sleeplessness that comes when your young children are young, or old. I think I am beginning to shed the romantic notions of dying young. For the first time, I feel greedy about living. There are so many people to live for, and so much in life to celebrate, although

someone has died.   

  

Many Lives, Many Masters by Brian Weiss: Impressions

As a Hindu and someone, who takes a deep interest in spiritual/religious/occult studies, Dr. Brian Weiss' super bestseller Many Lives, Many Masters offered me nothing I did not already know. Perhaps 13 years ago, when the book was published, it was an eye-opener to the largely wary Western world, but Indians have always known and believed in the theory of rebirth and karma.

What surprised me, though, was the startling similarity of the ideas in this book and the basic tenets of most ancient Indian scriptures. I've recently read books on similar topics by Swami Vivekananda, his contemporary, Swami Abhedananda, and more recently, Dr. Devdutt Pattanaik's book on Hindu mythology, Myth=Mithya and the ideas are fresh in my mind. The ideas of karmic debt or rnanubandhana, choice of body for rebirth, a nether world or an 'intermediate space where souls stay', the progeression of souls through multiple human births, and the ultimate goal of a soul being merging with the Supreme One are some themes that occur repeatedly in Catherine's (Dr. Weiss' patient whose past last regressions is what this book is about) recall material, and are really similar to what Hindu scriptures talk about.

If the contents of this book are any 'evidence', since it has been written by a 'scientific' practitioner, it proves right most of our Vedic and Vedantic literature. The messages of love, compassion, trust and humanity revealed by the 'Masters' of afterlife via Catherine are exactly what our seers and sages have been preaching since time immemorial. And why only Hinduism? Every religion of the world teaches the humankind these lessons. Today, if a money-driven society, steeped in dissatisfaction, turns to books like these and to ancient spiritual literature to find peace and fulfill the original purpose of the soul, it is only natural.

The book is good for beginners & sceptics, and Psychology & Psychiatry professionals, but for those who already know that death is not really the end of life, it will only be an affirmation of their knowledge.

Spring cleaning

(Image from allposters.com)

   Good things must often begin with the not-so-good. Spring cleaning wasn't the best way to begin the season of light and warmth and colour, but the old must be done away with, to make place for the new, mustn't it? She sat amidst a mountain of mess, pulling out things and memories from her closet.
    And, then, like a ruthless Tsunami, memories gushed forth. Unabashed. Unrepentant. An old photo-frame here, a worn out sweater there. Some mugs tossed in there casually, the new abode of some spiders. Then she saw it. That relic of her kaleidoscopic past. Its impact searing her retina. It was just a small black diary. She could feel her heart thud like a drum and that faint feeling of sinking begin to gnaw away.     

   Some dried petals fell out, as she held aloft the diary, and put an end to the debate of whether she should open it or not. The now bare stem of that long-lost symbol of love guided her to that day of January, 1996. She smiled, as she read the opening words of a heartbroken teenager. "Dear Diary, I want to kill myself, and him..."     

   "...I really mean it. This bottle of rat poison that I've smuggled into my purse is going to do the trick. A few drops into our coffee tomorrow, and I will end this misery! What does he mean we are just not on the same wavelength anymore? Didn't feel like that when we made love in his pad last week! It's that bitch, playing games. Ha! How would he know I've just ran my car over her? Aren't accidents common in this part of town? *Giggle*."
    She looked up from the diary and laughed out loud at the memory. She had been quite the firebrand in those days. Fortunately, only the Bitch's leg was broken in that accident. And the rat poison had never happened. Good sense had prevailed. 'It should have...' she thought. Two fat tear drops blotted some words on the page, and she started shedding silent tears. Aravind was a beautiful dream that had ended too young.
    She flipped over a couple of pages. November 96. "Dear Diary, Just back from Aravind's wedding. It was grand. He looked cute. I actually smiled at his wife. I loved his expression, when I went on stage to meet them. For all he's done to me, I actually wish him well. Couldn't stay there very long. It hurt. Him too? Wonder... They're relocating to NZ. He's always loved that place. We'd planned a holiday there. Sighhhh.. I miss him bad. Feeling bleary, baby. Think it's this rum. Glass number 4. Ha! I'm happy.... " :-/
    There stuck a picture of a dashing 28-year-old Aravind, his pretty, wide-smiling bride, Mischa, and her, still the awkward teenager, edging towards womanhood. She ran her fingers over the picture, especially over Aravind's face, and smiled. Then she remembered what cancer had done to his handsome countenance, and tears streamed down her face again.
    It was 14 years since she last saw him on that bed. She saw him until she could bear to see no more. The mess of saline lines hanging over him, his skeletal body -  a sad reminder of his muscular frame. She'd walked away sobbing, vowing never to be back. She had slept that night, crying. Numb with  pain. Unable to feel anything else. When she woke up the next morning, she really couldn't feel a thing. She was unable to move, unable to feel her legs. It took months for the fact to sink in that she was paralyzed, and could walk no more. Aravind had died sometime in those dreadful months too. She never found the strength to verify the news. It wasn't his death that had crushed her; it was the death of the idea of her first love that she had grieved - soul and body. 

   Years of visits to specialists had only offered one diagnosis: her paralysis was psychosomatic. Nothing was physically wrong with her. Physiotherapists, psychiatrists, and even faith healers had tried to convince her she could walk. But she wouldn't. She couldn't. She wondered which part of her didn't want to.
   Her husband, Dev, had been kind. Beyond kind. He was a physiotherapist, and they'd met during one of her first frantic visits to the hospitals. She hadn't got used to this cumbersome wheelchair then. She hadn't gotten used to her legs (or her mind) not obeying her then. She hadn't gotten used to the past tense that Aravind had become then. She was hysterical, when she first met Dev. Somehow, his understanding presence had broken her down. She howled in pain, or the lack of it in her legs, letting loose all the anguish that her tender 20-year-old heart had held.
   Dev had held her then, as he held her now. Forever loving, forever patient. He was patiently stirring the soup in the kitchen now, even as she messed about with the skeletons in her closet. She smiled fondly at the gentle noises of the wooden ladle. Ever so consistent. It had taken years of Dev's mature love for her to start forgetting Aravind, and now she had stupidly done this. She shut the diary and wheeled her chair to the window of their fifth floor apartment, which overlooked the river. She closed her eyes, and flung the diary out, feeling the weight of her past let go of her shoulders, her head, her heart. It was high time Aravind made place for Dev...
   She sat back, and took a deep breath. She felt light. Her heart felt joy. Her stomach felt fluttery... Fluttery? Wait-a-minute! Was it? Could it be? Yes it was! It was her and Dev's child's seal of approval. It was their baby's first kick! She held her stomach, and began to weep loudly. Dev rushed in from the kitchen, and stood at the door of their study.
  "Babe, are you alright?" he asked.
  She looked up, and smiled a smile of ecstasy. Rising unselfconsciously, she ran up to him, and holding him like she would never let go, said, "Never better."  

(Co-authored with Nikhil Deshmukh  @red_devill22)

Taller than all

There are the many glories of nature and men that inspire awe; that force one to acknowledge that ‘greatness’ really is not easy to court and definitely not easy to conquer. All celebrations of the heroic in man can well be counteracted upon by still greater heroics; but it is death that takes the cake. Almost always successful in humbling men, death fails not even with the most realised of men, to humble. Whether it is wailing women with beating chests, brave tears, sympathy and solace or turning to the divine or philosophy for comfort, death surely makes itself manifest. Of all beings – good and bad, poor or rich, vain or humble, winners or losers, the big or small – death stands tall - taller than the reaches of most human vanities. For a while, it shattered mine too…today.

One of my students from MIT-SOG died today. He’d been in the hospital in coma for a while due to brain haemorrhage and passed away this morning after unsuccessfully battling for life for ten days. Death is mightier than all weaponry of all the life support systems of the world put together. Even the strong arm of Robert Svoboda (author of the book Aghora III – The Law of Karma that I’m reading now) hasn’t been of much help for my psychological leaning. I’m not as ‘objective’ as I thought I was on the way to becoming.

A young guy he was – called J K. The kind of stuff that rural backgrounds, big dreams, low self confidences and much lower than average looks are made of. Twenty five odd years and the pride of being the only barrister in his family - all gone to the dust in a matter of days.

Of my limited memories of him, one scene keeps flashing again and again before my eyes. It was one of my counselling sessions with him. Like most Marathi-medium students, he was terrified of English and I was trying to boost his confidence with English speaking. I remember I was telling him, “There are a million possible personas in an individual. Each time you find that the fumbling and nervous J is taking over, rouse the powerful J in you and kick ass.” He smiled the smile of confidence and I returned it with a smile of contentment.

I believe this one incident keeps coming back to me because it was the only real exchange of honour – much greater than words. In the following classes, I saw him internally kick his fears as he rose to face the class and speak in wrong yet brave English. There could be no greater tribute paid to a teacher. It’s time I return those tributes. These words I write for you J, as those words that you spoke for me.