Life after death

• 25 December, 2022
• karma
• trauma
• reincarnation

First I need to do a bit of housekeeping.. I'm writing from my own perspective of someone who understands the relationship between reincarnation, karma and trauma and also understanding that life is what happens between the duality and polarity of love and death. This means that life, love and death are three intertwined and interconnected aspects of the human experience of existence.

Do soulmates exist?

Yes they do. But not in the popular romanticized loving partners as is often believed. It disappoints me that something so beautiful as love and death can be cheapened and degraded in such a way. Telling recently bereaved people that their loved one is in another room or meeting Jesus in heaven diminishes one of the most important life experiences they're going through and is actually quite callous. If you don't know what to say - say nothing. Death is serious. Love is serious. Trauma is incredibly serious.

Death is the ultimate traumatic experience. Nothing survives. The body is biomass. Whatever consciousness there was remains where it is, out in the environment and the universe. We often believe that death is the end of our life, because that is the only way we can perceive it. But it's also the start of a new incarnation and new life. It's important to understand that we are all of the same consciousness, the same pattern or cycles of incarnation, experience roughly the same broad spectrum of life experiences, only we experience life in many, many different ways in many many different incarnations. Only the incarnation and physical being is unique and individual. But see love, which is consciousness, is never affected by death, simply because death is physical trauma, and all trauma is motion into the unknown.

We have all lived many different lives. It's probably true that we have been all related to one another in families at some point. We have also loved each other at some point. But as we lose out physical incarnation with each death, we cannot remember and have no way of knowing anything about our previous lives or who we will be after we die. To simplify this without going into all the cosmology it's safe to assume that in your previous life you were someone else and after you die you will be someone else as well. Who you once were and who you will be in the future is not known and cannot be known. This is no different to who you once were last year is not who you are now and next year you will be different to who you are now. You thinking that you're the same person throughout your life is only your assumption.

Soulmates are just people you recognize or who recognize you across different incarnations or life cycles because you share a karmic bond. You could be friends, lovers, relatives, adversaries, whatever, but there's some shared awareness or consciousness through which a closer connection or chemistry is felt. It might be love, but then again it might be guidance, insight, additional support, a challenge, or a karmic debt. Neither the universe nor nature cares about your individual relationship. Only the evolution of the species and evolution of life matters.

Relationship entities

Whenever there is a relationship between two or more people which is based on a karmic bond or loving awareness what happens is that the deeper, more refined planes of consciousness from each person blend into one another to create a kind of shared conscious awareness or entity which forms the basis of the connection or bond.

Many people aren't aware of this so I will go into it a little because it will help us understand the grief process later on further in this post. We exist on different levels or planes of consciousness, and as such experience different levels of reality. These levels are not definite or specific, because the universe is both consciousness and energy so it's all atoms, molecules and stuff without any labels. So off the top of my head I generally come up with several levels or planes:

The physical appearance plane

What you see when you look at another human being is another physical body - man, woman, old, young, tall, short, slim, fat, and so on. You see yourself in much the same terms. This is the most basic dimension. What you have here is a young woman with blonde hair who is probably slim and rather physically attractive. This is the most basic, fundamental level - purely physical - the level at which people eye each other up and teenagers give each other a score out of 10.

The psychological plane

Then what you have when you meet someone, or what interests you is their psychology, how do they think, their demeanour, and how they come across to you. Are they happy? Depressed? Confrontational? Friendly? Open-minded? Intelligent? Ignorant? Some people in therapy are prominent on this level, and are preoccupied with their own issues, depressions, highs, lows, fears, anxieties, loneliness, hopes, and so on. This is somewhat more real, because this is a level which is closely related to trauma, so this is more the real you and the real someone else.

The social role plane

Then you have another level or dimension which relates to societal role or function and which also gives us clues towards their perspective, from such things as education, background, occupation, interests, and whether they are wealthy or poor, working or retired, or unemployed, and so on. Note that only in some cases you can get a sense of who someone really is on this level, but often it's no indication of who someone is, because, you know, circumstances and opportunities in life.

The worldview plane

Then you have another level or variable which relates to worldview, beliefs, interests, and this also influences their perspective and how they come across. The exact same thing can be said about you. What belief systems and doctrines do you believe in? What ideology do you follow? What do you value and what do you feel is important or what matters in life?

The meta-physical plane

This is a level where it starts to get interesting. When you look into another person's eyes what you will find, invariably, is another person looking back at you, with a similar physical body, functioning on the basis of some psychology, social role, worldview and going through experiences in life which are just as unique and individual as your experiences. This is what the spiritually minded and religious among us call a soul, or spirit. But fundamentally you see another soul, another being just like you. You see someone who is, in reality, not that much different to you and who you are when you put all the other minor differences aside.

The reflection plane

So we take this to another level or dimension and we have what I can describe as reflection, and this is based on the understanding that when you look at another person you're essentially seeing a different version of who you are. The only thing which makes you different from someone else or that other person is trauma, or death, and being reborn into a new life. If we're going to get into actual reality and what's really real then it's understanding that we are all different physical manifestations of the same collective consciousness. We are all part of one awareness which takes on a vast multiplicity of different physical forms, each one of them unique and individual and unless all the other physical forms.

Some people talk about higher or lower planes or levels of consciousness, but personally I prefer more immediate and superficial and deeper or deepest which go right down to your 'core being', which is spirit.

Now some people tell me that they don't believe in spirit or ghosts, and I reply back - okay so what's animating you? If life was purely a physical experience then surely we wouldn't die because the body alone would sustain life, right? It's important not to believe in permanence of physical form, because all existence is change and all existence is relationship. Fundamentally we can only experience life and consciousness through energy, but we are spirit just like the universe is, and so to experience life we need to 'incarnate' and take on a physical form, and so we become reborn and become another incarnation as a human being.

This means we are all hungry ghosts attached to a physical body and hungry for life experience and love.

So above only the most basic three or four planes - most immediate - are physical planes of consciousness, those associated with our bodies, our brains, and our memories, everything that's physical about us. The deeper planes are far more conscious and more closely connected with consciousness and space, which is consciousness beyond our perception which we perceive as emptiness. Space and emptiness is what we understand to be reality, because it's reality which defines existence, which is consciousness.

Shared awareness v. individual awareness

So whenever we are involved in a deeper, more intimate relationship which is based on a karmic bond, such as a relationship with our parents or children, or a loving relationship with a partner, we generally take on or develop two different identities relative to each relationship we are involved in. This is because the deeper relationship is an entity in itself which creates a different environment, reality and in physical terms a specific culture which is only shared between those involved in the relationship.

Trust me, those more basic and immediate levels of consciousness which are more physical in nature are not as fixed or constant as you think. You are not the same person with your parents as you are with your children, as you are with your partner, your grandparents and so on. Central of course in all this is your Ego and sense of self and identity - the individual 'private' you who you are when you're on your own, but all the relationships you're in all feed into your Ego from the relationship entities you're involved in.

Often it's the differences between the different identities between shared and individual awareness in different relationships which create issues and conflicts between people for example when it comes to in laws, or when a former spouse or partner meets someone new and you share kids. You see your son or daughter behaving differently around their partner, and this is even before we get into the whole issues with mothers in law and fathers in law. Grandparents know that their grandchildren behave differently when they're with their parents from when they're not.

This is because out the shared awareness we develop expectations of that other person which can be based on an understanding of our they fulfill our needs, desires or how we anticipate their behaviour or feelings, which of course comes from the shared awareness and shared consciousness coming out of the relationship entity. There may also be a sense of completeness, particularly in loving relationships where we feel we are matched to our partner, they complement us, or they are our 'other half' and somehow complete our identity. It's okay to think this way, even if the other half is your shared awareness coming from the relationship entity. There's no right way or wrong way to have a relationship with someone, simply because the relationship is always as unique and individual as the two people involved.

When someone dies

Death is the ultimate traumatic experience simply because it usually happens suddenly even when anticipated and the shared awareness of the relationship entity which was once consciousness flips into space and emptiness. It's like being woken up from a dream, or the death of a dream into a new, very harsh reality. The impact of someone else's death with who you shared love or a karmic bond brings shock out of the impact. The frequencies of your natural energies spike and you might not be able to function anywhere near normal for some time. The sudden loss of the shared awareness takes away your feelings of security, so initially there's an overwhelming amount of fear and anxiety and then behind this the new reality hits you, engulfing you in a sense of emptiness through which you feel a profound sense of loss.

Out of this emptiness you get an overwhelming sense of sadness and loss, and you often feel a sense of being incomplete, because you've built up an awareness of self and identity which was inclusive of the shared awareness and the relationship. The loss of a parent, child or partner hits you the hardest because of the breaking of the strongest karmic bond, and the loss of shared awareness can be so profound that you feel that a part of you has also died. When someone close to you dies it's like much of your identity has died with them.

The death of someone close to you creates a kind of emotional and psychological death within you, and part of you dies because who you believe yourself to be has been developed on the basis of shared awareness of the close relationships in your life. Therefore it's not uncommon for someone else's death to shake up your whole identity, bring to your attention the reality of your own mortality and create an overwhelming sense of isolation and loss with a sense of emptiness all around you. Everything in your life may seem distant, disconnected, and unreal as a result. Nothing changes you like the death of someone close to you.

The death of my mother in my early 20's hit me very hard but it devastated my grandmother (her mother) with who I was very close so I was kind of shielded in some ways from a lot of shock by the closeness of my relationship with my grandmother. But when my father died 20 years later I was alone, I went into shock, and I was struck with the realization that I am now an orphan and the oldest surviving member of my immediate family.

Understanding grief

Grief is the mind's attempt to deal with the sudden loss of expectation and the emptiness and void coming out of the bereavement. Therefore bereavement can be seen as the loss of shared awareness coming out of a relationship entity and it is a similar process irrespective of whether someone has died, or you are going through the breakdown of a marriage and a divorce or some other loss of a major relationship in your life. Another example of grief and bereavement is when a son or daughter is rejected or disowned by family for being gay or transgendered.

What you do when you are experiencing grief and bereavement and experiencing that inner void is that you reach out and try to cling or hold onto different states of mind to make the emptiness and the grief go away or to try and diminish it - sadness, depression, crying, sometimes drinking, eating, drugs, anything to deal with the void and sense of loss and emptiness.

However the key here is to try and avoid reaching out and clinging to something prematurely before you are ready to move forward. Here I feel that I need to point out that generally trauma is motion and suffering is clinging and attachment, which is the opposite of motion. If you feel discomfort you move and the feeling of discomfort goes away. If you stub your toe hard on a hard wooden leg of furniture you tend to react by doing a little 'power dance', you dance around in circles, shouting and cursing, and the pain goes away. This is something you might feel worth remembering, trauma is motion, suffering is clinging or attachment and the opposite of motion.

But when it comes to trauma and motion timing is critically important especially when it comes to bereavement and grief. Understand that in losing a relationship entity you're dealing with a loss of consciousness, and not the physical pain of a stubbed toe or physical discomfort. The karmic process of healing, recovery and growth from emotional and psychological trauma - from which grief arises - is a lot longer because you're dealing with the deepest levels and planes of consciousness, which are the more refined, and the energies are of much, much lower frequencies.

As an example of what I'm referring to here is the rebound relationship. When two people end a loving relationship there bereavement and grief coming out of the loss of the shared awareness and loss of expectations. Often what happens is someone who's just lost a significant relationship and is grieving and heartbroken will reach out with someone else and jump into a new relationship. Sure it may seem to take away the grief and loneliness, however the relationship with another person is a different relationship which gives a completely different shared awareness. But the person on the rebound is trying to match up the shared awareness from the new relationship with that of the previous (failed) relationship and of course it's not going to work. It just creates further conflict and trauma from the mismatched relationship cycles, there's no chance of establishing integrity in the relationship (I covered this in a recent trilogy of blog posts) so you end up with two failed relationships and an even greater sense of grief and bereavement.

This is why I feel that any rebound relationship is a form of emotional and psychological cheating and infidelity because you're deceiving the partner by rebounding from another relationship. It's not fair on the other partner.

The need to properly cycle through the karma of grief

To modify on my definitions here grief is the karmic process from the trauma of bereavement. My shamanistic advice to people who are bereaved is the exact same advice I give to anyone who has got caught up in an addiction. There are no shortcuts or 'fixes' when it comes to dealing with trauma and karma. You cannot cheat or fool the universe and attempting to escape or cut short your karma or trauma only escalates it and makes things worse. Sure the bottles of wine or vodka, or shot of heroin might wipe out the pain in the short term, but you're always going to fall short and take on more trauma, more karma, more suffering, more conflict, more friction. It's also not helpful when you have people telling you to 'own' your issues, own your trauma, own your karma.

You cannot 'own' trauma or karma, because it's environmental and you have as much chance of owning your issues as you have of owning the rain or the snow. Would you tell someone with heart disease or cancer that they need to own their disease? Think about it, please. When it comes to bereavement and grief platitudes are unhelpful. The person who died was individual, as was the relationship and shared awareness, the death was certainly individual, and so it follows that the karmic process of grief will also be unique and individual. This is why I'm sticking to the principles. There is no set way to grieve or mourn someone's death. How you deal with grief and cope with the cycles and waves which overwhelm you is the right way.

You sheltered me from harm
Kept me warm, kept me warm
You gave my life to me
Set me free, set me free
The finest years I ever knew
Is all the years I have with you
And I would give anything I own
Give up my life, my heart, my home
And I would give anything I own
Just to have you back again...

Ken Boothe, 'Everything I Own'

Now this is where we get into the reality of reincarnation. Trauma and karma - both of which are based on energy vibrations and physical reality, and therefore waves, cycles, frequencies, resonances and vibrations, are essentially what reincarnation is all about. At some point in your grieving process you will reach a point where you will start to heal, recover and grow and start working the loose ends together, initially raw, but you will pick up on a rhythm and cycle out of your grieving process and evolve into a new person with the shared awareness still intact. Until you reach that point your grieving process is going to be an emotional rollercoaster where you're going to be triggered by various stimuli and memories, a place, a word, someone's shoes, a song, and you will be engulfed by a fresh wave of grief and sadness.

It's at this point you need to reach out to your friends and support, your animal guides (for example dogs), comfort rituals and healing objects, perhaps you kept one of the possessions of your deceased loved one. Talking about your loved one also helps, memorializing them, writing about them, anything which gives energy to the shared awareness and connection.

The above song quote, from Ken Boothe's 'Everything I Own' was one of my mother's favourite songs. Every so often despite the fact that she died over 30 years ago hearing this song still triggers me but generally these days it empowers me. I could write a book about my grieving process over my mother, and the various emotions, feelings, some positive, some not so positive, the anger, the resentment, the guilt, but this came with the realization some years ago that we were closer to each other than I felt, and with this there was a sense of profound appreciation of what she did for me and sacrificed, despite her short and difficult life. I come from a family of hard Scottish women, and while I may talk about my training and mystical journey, my maternal grandmother was my first guru and much of my passion and what drives me was inspired by my mother and what she never got the opportunity to achieve in her own short, lonely and often misunderstood life.

Feelings of betrayal and forgetting the lost loved one

As you start to emerge from the emotional rollercoaster and the waves of overwhelming grief, when everything starts to even out and get easier, and the process of healing, recovery and growth takes hold and sets in, you may encounter feelings that with the waning of the sadness and feelings of emptiness you're betraying the memory of your loved one and forgetting them. Or alternatively, you may experience feelings of guilt if your relationship with one of your parents was traumatic and abusive, and you felt release and liberation when they died.

This is usually not the case.

You see once the healing process from bereavement and grief takes hold you may come to a point where you realize that the connection and shared awareness from the relationship still exists and who you were in relationship to this person is still pretty much who you are now. But then maybe, just maybe, you will further realize that this connection and relationship exists beyond time, beyond death and despite all the cycles of trauma and karma, coming and going, good and bad, praise and blame, he said she said, what happened and what didn't happen when you were both alive and in a physically present relationship.

You see all the sense of loss, of grief, of sadness, of loneliness, of isolation, these are all purely physical emotions and feelings. It's all energy, it's all physicality. This can only be your experience if you're wrapped up in the separateness of Ego and believing that your whole being is physical.

You see you cannot grieve for something that has not gone anywhere. People die all the time. Why are you not grieving them as well? Understand that you are grieving your lost loved one because of the shared awareness and love between you. They have moved on to another incarnation and new life and body. But you were never completely born. You only took on a new incarnation and physical body and a new life. Please try to understand what I'm writing here.

So we open up the quarrel, between the present and the past
We only sacrifice the future, it's the bitterness that lasts
So don't yield to the fortunes, you sometimes see as fate
It may have a new perspective, on a different day
And if you don't give up, and don't give in, you may just be okay

Say it loud, say it clear
You can listen as well as you hear
Because it's too late when we die
To admit we don't see eye to eye...

Mike and the Mechanics, 'The Living Years'

The death of my father hit me much harder when I learned of his death in 2007. I had two conflicting mental states. I was overwhelmed with grief, shock, but I also felt an energy rush because I also realized that i was free and liberated. My parents marriage was abusive, extremely acrimonious, and toxic. My father was the abusive one, a bigoted, bullying control freak and my Glaswegian mother tried to make it work and she fought back but the odds were against her. Then when my gender issues surfaced this opened up a new front and confrontation and my father and I became distant and adversarial. My father demanded control and obedience, and me being me he got neither. The relationship was defined by its anger, its resentment and its bitterness.

But there was shared awareness and a connection because despite the anger, the bitterness and the resentment and fear, there was also respite. Ironically what impressed my father most about me was my creativity and my deep interest in mysticism, interests inspired in me by my mother, who he despised and blamed for his lack of happiness. Had my father got past his bigotry, racism, anger and bitterness he would have been supportive but he had his own issues from his traumatic childhood and his karmic process was just too much. My guilt came from the fact that he died in the exact same way I predicted he would when he was in his 40's and I was aged 15 and I told him he would die prematurely if he didn't let go of his bitterness, resentment and anger. He died aged 64.

But see abuse, anger, bitterness, these are all physical emotions and feelings tied to an incarnation and physical being. So if you're wondering about the connection with an abusive parent don't simply because nothing physical can survive death. My understanding of reincarnation is that there is no transmigration of a soul. There is no After Life, there is no Other Side. There is only spirit and consciousness which connects us, we all share the same consciousness and the same spirit, and our incarnations and physical bodies and lives and our perceptions of separateness.

Therefore when you feel ready to move forward into new life and new consciousness you should do so, because this is the whole point of karmic bonds and soul mates. This is the physical, living side of reincarnation where after each death, each period of bereavement, grief and mourning which comes with the loss of every significant relationship. Trauma is environmental and we become who we become not because of our Ego and who we think we are or believe ourselves to be. We become who we are because of our connections to each other, because of our shared awareness and the love we have for each other, and out of relationship.

All existence is change, all existence is relationship.