Dancing the Path of Love

 

IS THERE AN AFTERLIFE?

Various polls show that about 80% of Americans believe in an afterlife. The majority of these believe they will go to Heaven because they have embraced Jesus Christ. Only about 1% think they might go to Hell. It is not recorded how many believe that both Heaven and Hell are utterly absurd concepts. Surely the time has come to bring concepts about the afterlife into the scrutiny of a 21st Century spiritual perspective.

The commonly held concept of Heaven is a place of perpetual bliss without any responsibilities, where folks spend their time singing the praises of God Almighty. Why would the God of the Universe bother to create puppets to sit around praising Him? I don’t see it, but for all I know, there may be a really good answer. Maybe it’s just a fun thing to do. Or how can the God of Love possibly condemn miscreants to roast in Hell for all eternity instead of just gently snuffing them out or inviting them to reprogram themselves? One thing I’m pretty sure of – if all the fundamentalists are going to Heaven, I don’t want to be there. But then, “In my Father’s house are  many mansions...”

Imbued as I am with a Puritanical work ethic, I believe that God has new challenges for us when we graduate to the Afterlife -- if we graduate. If I were God, I wouldn’t see much reason to keep the consciousnesses of  humans alive in their very limited capacities and the various narrow ways they wall themselves into a reality small enough that they think they can handle it. What would be the point? Giving humans an afterlife makes about as much sense as giving it to lemmings, since we’re racing our SUV’s as fast as we can toward the precipice of ecological catastrophe. Furthermore, why would God want to keep Spirits in Heaven in a static state where they are not growing? In nature what is not growing, after a period of maturity will be dying. We cannot stay in perpetual bliss. After awhile it would become commonplace, routine. Only by experiencing both pleasure and pain can we come to appreciate either. So Heaven is an unrealistic myth. If there is an afterlife, it seems most likely that we will be born again as babies into a new reality, probably more complex and more fluid.

If we do not remember the lessons of our last life, what would be the point of being born again into a new life? We might as well be brand new Spirits. For this reason I think believing in past (and future) lives is pointless. If you believe in past lives and can go back and explore a previous life, and learn something from that life that helps you in this life, then I applaud your path. I will be most interested in what you learn from this research. I don’t mean folks who feel spiritually richer because they have uncovered a past life or past lives. I want to hear from folks who learned something dramatic in their past life that makes a clear practical difference in this life. My second wife was sure she had been burned at the stake as a witch in a past life, but what had she learned? Objecting to the prejudiced folks who so torture others is not enough – you can learn that from a history book.

It’s not like I’ve never had any experience with past lives, I have. In 2000 I was doing Naka Ima workshops. “Naka Ima” is Japanese for “here now.”  The workshops are generally about emotional clearing. I took the third level workshop in Nelson, British Columbia. At the third level, emotion processing was done thru silent muscle testing. We would pair up and locate an emotional issue. I was working on feelings of abandonment. I have always felt a fundamental abandonment because my mother chose to bottle feed me instead of breast feed me, despite being amply endowed for the maternal capacity. I also felt blame, because I assumed that women choose not to breast feed for fear it will make their breasts sag. They thus choose beauty over love. (In fact I believe that our society might be much more loving if all mothers who have the capacity nursed their babies so that their babies can bond much more deeply with them.) My partner in the exercise asked me silently when did I first have these feelings? She asked a series of questions. Did I feel them earlier than one year old? Earlier than six months? Three months? A week after birth? At birth? Before birth? Nine months before birth? A hundred years before birth? Two hundred ... seven hundred? For each question she had me hold out my arm and muscle tested me. If my muscles were strong, the answer was yes; if weak, no. Only when she had fixed the date at seven hundred years before birth did she tell me what she had been asking me. Then she asked, “Do you have any recollections of anything seven hundred years ago?”

I was astounded. In 1991 I had visited my good friend Bob Irelan, who at that time was the lawyer for the Zuni Reservation in New Mexico. One day he got permission for us to visit and explore what we could find at a large Anasazi village, perhaps 800 inhabitants, on a ranch near his home. It had been abandoned about seven hundred years ago. Because it was on private property, it was not protected, and relic hunters had dug quite a number of trenches looking for whole pots. A good whole pot could bring $7,000. Someone had even gone thru some of the walls with a backhoe. The place was a mess.  I sat down in one of the trenches and did a Mother Marijuana meditation. Almost immediately an old Anasazi appeared inside my head. “I don’t want to rip your culture off,” I said. “I’d like to honor it.”

The old man scratched his head. Just then I saw a bird fly off quite a ways from where I was sitting. “Go to where that bird flew off,” the old man said.

I hiked over to where the bird left. There was a large conifer, and as I approached, I noticed a shirt hanging from one of the branches. I thought someone might be there, so I came up on it very quietly. No one was there, but before me was a brand new trench. Whoever dug it, looking for whole pots, had left all the shards he found around the edge of the trench. I sat down and examined them closely. Some were Indian red with black lines, some were gray-white with black lines; some were plain off-white; a number were stained dark with age, a few black lines showing thru; a few were completely black; and a number were plain gray, corrugated with the indented patterns made by fingers pressing into the clay. On many, the black lines formed the intricate patterns characteristic of the Anasazi. Altogether there were over a hundred pieces. I knew if I didn’t pick them up, the next person would,  so I figured I was supposed to, and resolved to do something with them to honor the culture. When I got home, I used the shards to make a large, intense mosaic of Kokapeli, with a flute of tiny agates that I had found and polished. Kokapeli beckons us to the fertility rites of corn and love, and has been a cheerful presence near my altar ever since.

Now it was clear that the old Anasazi was a previous incarnation. The Anasazis had been experiencing a twenty-five year drought, and were feeling that the Great Spirit had abandoned them. In recognizing this past life, I wept and sobbed for about forty minutes, a heavy duty emotional release. Perhaps down thru history many of us have felt abandoned by God in all kinds of ways.

As I reflected on this experience in the following days and weeks, I was grateful for the recognition and the release, but what did it mean? Altho I would be honored to be an Anasazi, the possibility raised more questions than it answered. The facts that the muscle testing brought me there and that I had such a strong emotional release were very persuasive. But the entire experience could be just a powerful projection of my own unconscious. It could just be that God works in mysterious ways. It did not necessarily mean that I had uncovered a previous incarnation. Altho I have been attracted to the Southwest and have visited it three times, exploring extensively, I have no other memories or sense that I might have been an Anasazi.

A long time ago I read an old book exploring people’s remembered past lives, those who could actually remember names, dates and places. The author checked these out and found them to be real. But then he found that some of the dates overlapped. How could the same Spirit be alive in two different bodies at the same time? He concluded that what is really happening is that his subjects were tuning in to the Oversoul that contains all lives, and through that to any individual life, which then appeared as a previous incarnation. So what may actually be happening may be subtler than we might imagine.

I have had other experiences of life after death. In Guidance I mention that when my brother died in a one car accident, my mother received a message of peace from him. I also talked to my step-father-in-law Frank after he died and to Jesus. In 1978 at the faculty Christmas party I learned that the power mechanics teacher, George Tomaski, had stomach cancer. He was going in for an operation over Christmas vacation. A short, stout, jolly man, about fifty, he got up and made a little speech. At the end he said, “And just remember, I love you all.”

He was coming from such a deep place that I turned to the teacher sitting next to me and said, “That’s a farewell speech.”  Then I forgot about it. When I went to a New Year’s party at my friend Marce Gearry’s, I learned that George had died after the operation, even tho the operation was completely successful. A teacher had visited him in the afternoon after the operation and said to him, “Isn’t it great, George! Now you’ll be able to eat anything you want.”

George said, “I’ll never eat again.” That night all his systems failed and he died. Marce wanted to go to the funeral, but she was disturbed by open caskets. She asked me to go with her to keep her company. I agreed, but I wasn’t close to George. He used to call me “the professor.”  If it weren’t for Marce’s request, I probably wouldn’t have gone.

When Marce and I arrived at the funeral parlor in time for a 10:00 service, we discovered the service wasn’t beginning until 10:30. Marce went off to socialize and I went into the sanctuary, sat down, and began to meditate. No sooner did I get into the meditation than George popped into my head. He was beaming, radiant. “This is pretty heavy,” I thought to myself. “I better get in touch with my guru.”

“Don’t bother with him,” George said. “This is my show.”  For the next twenty-five minutes, George stayed in my head, beaming joy so powerfully that tears were running down my cheeks, not in sorrow but for the intensity of it. Then the service started and George went away. I can only guess that because I was meditating, I was open to his energy.

But even tho many of us have had similar experiences, they don’t prove in a scientific sense that we live on after death, however persuasive they may feel. Such experiences may be unconscious projections of our own energy. Or the situation may be more subtle than we can currently grasp. Imagine what we knew about electricity before Ben Franklin’s famous experiment with the kite. Or imagine what we knew of radioactivity and atomic energy before Madame Curie. These energies exist and have proven to be extremely valuable to us, yet we had no awareness of them. So in regard to the afterlife, the only thing I can safely say is that I don’t know what’s going on.

We seem to be faced with three possibilities. First, reincarnation does not exist and none of us lives in any form after death. Perhaps all dreams and experiences of  Spirits living after death are just self-generated fantasies. Only our wishful thinking and a powerful capacity to generate real-seeming fantasies make us believe in an afterlife. If this is the scenario, what we do in this life has no effect on our progress after death because there isn’t any. We can still give thanks for this incredible experience of Life, and we may still choose to live as moral and upright a life as possible, because following the Path of Love is what is most pleasing in the long run.

The second possibility is that all of us go on to further adventures after we die. What happens next may be determined by how well we do in this life, but since we are immortal, it doesn’t matter too much. We will be reincarnated at this level until we get it right. Obviously, the more we can figure out what “right” is, the faster we can progress to higher levels of existence, which many may call “Heaven.” Maybe our path is more likely to be filled with the flowers of happiness rather than the horrendous pain and suffering that so many of us are exposed to now. Or maybe just the opposite. As the story goes, if you pray to God for strength, He gives you hardships – through which you develop strength.

The third possibility is that some of us may progress to further adventures in an afterlife but the rest of us do not, depending on what choices we make and how we behave in this life. As Jesus says several times, as in Matthew 22:14, “For many are called, but few are chosen.” If I were God, I would let just some of these experimental critters go on to further life. Those who most seem to get themselves together in this life, or who are most extraordinary in some way. It’s just natural selection. Survival of the fittest!

Some seem to think it is sufficient to be “saved” by Jesus even tho they don’t pay much attention to his two commandments – to love God with all our hearts and to love one another as he loved us. Many seem to think it’s perfectly ok to support a government that does not follow the Path of Love, and it’s perfectly ok to support an aggressive war against Iraq or Iran, even tho they are our brothers and sisters just as much as our next door neighbors are. To me, if only some of us may progress to an afterlife – The Book of Revelations says 144,000 – the most important lesson we can learn here is to take charge of our energy. I suggest elsewhere that the Pilot Paradigm may be the best way to do that.

If we are Pilots, and we are in charge of our energies, we go into the next life having gained this much capacity to know we are in charge of our emotions, our minds, all our drives, fears, and ambitions, and we are now entering a new reality that may be more complex, may be more daring, may be more joyous and beautiful and loving. This is our challenge on how to develop, how to hone our talents and our abilities, and what we need to grow into ever more conscious beings. We can give thanks for what we have learned in the life just finished, and thanks for whatever we are being offered to grow in this new life.

Part of taking charge of our energy is choosing to follow the Path of Love, as recommended by all major religions. Contrary to some theological doctrines of the past, what matters is what we do, not just having faith alone. Anybody can experience God if you know where to look, so having faith is just a halfway step that should be relegated to history.

If there is an afterlife, what might it look like? One possibility is that if we do well in this life, we become god of a world in the next life. Perhaps we begin as a baby god and gradually learn how to shape the life in the world under our control. A possible example of this is Jack Miles’ A Biography of God, which traces how the god of The Old Testament gradually evolves in his dealings with humans from a wrathful, vengeful god, almost to the loving god of The New Testament. But the idea that we might aspire to such a position of power after only one life seems a bit grandiose to me.

A second possibility is that the boundaries of our reality might widen considerably in the next life. We have accounts of learning how to be in two places at once, such as in Yogananda’s Autobiography of a Yogi The transcendental meditation folks who were guided by Maharishi have been trying hard to levitate, altho I have heard no clear reports of success. As I discuss in Guidance, I myself have experienced a man who could make an object disappear and reappear at will, and who could kill an animal at a distance simply by projecting the appropriate vibration. Thus, the next life might be more like the reality of Carlos Castaneda’s Don Juan, where the standard laws of physics no longer apply, and where we move in a vibrational field rather than fixed time and space. We might become spirits in a spiritual world rather than material beings in a material world, and all sorts of new possibilities might open up before us.

However, my preference is simply for a next life where we all know we are parts of the Great Mystery and we all choose to follow the Path of Love. This would be Heaven indeed!  There are enough conflicts in determining exactly what is the Path of Love to keep us busy for a long time. If there is still sex, is polyamory appropriate or committed relationship or both? When is it appropriate to exercise control over another? In this life a mother will snatch her baby out of the street. In the next life will there be similar situations? Will our dark side still occasionally lead us astray? Will there be endless possibilities for music and art, or does great art require great suffering? Clearly there would be no war, no greed, no selfishness, no taking advantage of others or exercising arbitrary power over them. We would have a base of stability and trust upon which we could build a magnificent, harmonious society. This vision might also partake of the fluidity of the second option, depending on how wide a scope our free wills can handle.

The beauty of this vision of the afterlife is that we can work to achieve it in this life. We don’t have to die to get there. We can know now that we are all parts of the Great Mystery, and we can dedicate now to following the Path of Love. Imagine what an amazing transformation would take place if governments dedicated to the Path of Love. Never in history has this been the case, altho in a few golden eras governments came close. When I finally understood that the exercise of free will gives us this tremendous diversity between good and evil, sensitive and insensitive, rich and poor, loving and hating, etc etc, then I could accept it all. This is our play, our lila, and thru this process we learn and grow. I’m not suggesting that we do away with the process, I’m just suggesting we might be able to do some refining so that government is not controlled by the dark forces, but is committed to the Path of Love. The exercise of free will gives us both Hitler and Beethoven, Einstein and Charles Manson, Obama and Glenn Beck. It is always up to us to choose our direction of travel.

So what exactly does the “Path of Love” mean? For me it means recognizing that we are all equal beings, since we are all parts of God, and treating everyone with honor and respect, not taking advantage of anyone. It means helping our brothers and sisters when they need help, without expecting anything in return. It means that it feels good to be here, projecting a vibe of joy, so that other folks find pleasure in being around us. It means knowing that we are complete in ourselves, not emotionally needy. It means honoring the environment that sustains us, using it sustainably, appreciating and supporting the wonderful web of life. It means living simply, not excessively or extravagantly, not taking more than we need as a sign that we appreciate all we have been given. It means giving thanks for the food we eat, the water we drink, the air we breathe, the comfort and bounty in which we live. It means honoring and appreciating ourselves, giving thanks for this magnificent gift of life. Love is an appreciation for the joy of being alive. Love ultimately is a vibration which we can tangibly feel as holy bliss, and we are capable of projecting it.

Which is not to say the gentle Path of Love is easy. We all have programs that tend to prevent us from dancing the Path of Love. In my case, I found myself asking how can I love my fellow humans? In general they do such stupid, cruel, selfish, and unconscious acts. Individually I often find them very present and beautiful, but collectively, our society is such a mess. When I meditated on the question, an answer immediately flashed back: How can you love yourself? In my old age I’ve found myself often remembering all the times and ways I have acted like an idiot. I still have fantasies of how I would defend myself or do something nasty if someone attacked me – even tho being disabled I am fragile and virtually defenseless.

Meditating on the question, I was blessed with a vision. The challenge was do I love myself? When I make mistake after mistake, when I screw up and screw up, when I act like an insensitive slob over and over again, how can I possibly love myself? The answer came: that’s the way free will works. All humans make mistakes and screw up. Sometimes we go thru a period of life of mostly success, and sometimes we go thru a period of challenge. I don’t know if everyone has a long list of past actions they now feel are inappropriate. In any case, what Guidance told me is that is the way free will works: you try anything. Your biocomputer is not complete, so it sometimes acts in a dysfunctional manner. It will become more complete. The vision I got is that it’s like you build a silver pillar, and each mistake is like slapping another piece onto the base of the pillar and onto the column, building it. Then on top are all your successes and what you’ve done that brings society together, an ornate statue of your accomplishments. Here the silver is delicately put on with great care and beauty. That’s the way it works, so the mistakes are no big deal and are in fact a necessary part of the process. As a caterpillar builds its cocoon, we build our web of foolishness. When we know the truth of our being and fly forth, we break out of the cocoon and leave it entirely behind. It is utterly important to forgive oneself, so that one can let go.

This vision taught me that the way to love my fellow humans is to love them for the developing spirits that I know we all are. Forgive them for their foibles, they’re irrelevant. Each one of us has the potential to become a butterfly, to function in beauty and love knowing we are all parts of the Great Mystery. Even so, I frequently find it is very challenging to love what is going on in front of me, or at least to love the folks who are doing it to themselves and one another. I suspect no matter how much love we gave Hitler, he would have continued his madness. The river of love may wear down the rocks of our ill-conceived determinations, but it may take a very long time. Still, each person who comes to understand hirself as evolving consciousness separate and free from all hir inputs and who dedicates to the Path of Love, is one more tributary to the river of love, which will change the course for humans on our wondrous Mother Earth.

Does the Path of Love have anything to do with sexual love? The sexual dance is a wonderful arena to practice all the virtues described above. A soul mate is someone who is particularly compatible in a variety of ways, but in a looser sense, we are all soul mates, and we can all share love in varying degrees.

Recently I did a meditation with Aphrodite, addressing a statue of the Venus de Milo that Patricia gave me when we were in Rome in 1977. As I dwelt on her amazing calm beauty, Aphrodite said, “Love is how you bring out the best in a person. That’s what you want. Bring out the best in everyone you meet. Love them. It isn’t the body, it’s the Spirit that matters. Body is happy to come along, but Spirit leads. Sex is just one of the things we do in life. We have so many ways to connect and dance together.”

I said, “But there’s so much ecstasy with sex.”

She answered, “Sure, but everything in proportion. We can experience ecstasy and we can experience all kinds of other high vibrations. We’re magnificent beings. Let us enjoy life and love one another in all ways!”

In September of 2008 PBS put on a remarkable National Geographic show titled Killer Stress. The show cites a tribe of baboons in which by accident all the aggressive males died of tuberculosis. The tribe immediately changed from high stress aggression on one another to caring and cooperation, the Path of Love baboon style. If baboons can do it, surely we can renounce aggression, power over, violence, and hate, and choose the Path of Love too. It’s not a change just in belief; it’s not a change just in values; it’s a change in how we function toward one another. It is so important to give that respect and love, honoring the other being, which builds up the other’s sense of honor. This is how we can destress our lives. The baboons are living proof that such a transformation in a society can happen.

All this is possible, and more. Focusing our energy and dancing the Path of Love in this life is probably the best strategy to enable us to graduate to the next life. You don’t get to the next life by wishing you were there: you get there by preparing for it as diligently as you know how. Maybe you can’t move on until you love being here. Personally, I don’t need an afterlife to justify my life now. I find this life such a grace, such an adventure, fundamentally such a joy, that I give thanks every day, except that I live in an insane society, bent on self-destruction. I am presenting this view of who we are and what we are doing here as the best hope to prevent that self-destruction – or for rebuilding after the collapse. So thank you for life, thank you for this day! May I make the most of it! We are Individual Spirit Mysteries, infinitely deep, and that is enough to know in this life.

It’s possible that everybody has their own version of Heaven and what we need to do in this life to get there, and it may be that each one of us will have our own vision manifested. Perhaps we each get to create our own afterlife. My vision just calls for the basics – knowing we are all parts of God and following the Path of Love. It doesn’t seem too much to ask for.

I think that most of us would like an afterlife in which we survive as consciousness with a memory of this life. However, a totally different possibility is that when we die we do not survive as an individual consciousness. Death is the transition from this individual consciousness to the consciousness of God. The “I” is the same “I”. When the individual “I” merges with the Great “I,” the Great “I” realizes there was never any individual  there but itself. The individual “I” and the Great “I” become one. There is only one “I” there. Perhaps we can’t quite imagine it, just get a sense of it. We discover that we are one of the many branches of the Great Consciousness of the Great Mystery. From that position we look down on our individual life and say something like, “Oh yes! That was an interesting experience. I was that human form for many years, going thru those adventures.” We discover our small “I” is simply part of the Great “I”, and at that point our individual consciousness ceases to exist. Perhaps it is like our life was a movie on a DVD, which the Great Consciousness can look at any time.

If the Great Consciousness chooses, it might plan a sequel to a particular movie. Perhaps the individual consciousness will remember its earlier life. Perhaps it will simply be in some sense the same consciousness, perhaps the same personality, without remembering the first life. Perhaps the sequel will be in the same reality; perhaps it will be in a brand new one. If we participate in the Great Consciousness, we will see that all life is not just a play, a lila, but an exploration. Much of the exploration is endless repetition, but enough of it is new so that the Great Consciousness expands and grows as it endlessly manifests into life as we know it.

The Great Consciousness exists in something like bliss, which is why we call it “Heaven” when we touch upon it. But it is only something like. The Great Consciousness exists beyond human emotion. It is not troubled by the various dramas that humans play in exercising their free wills, far less troubled than we might be watching the latest horror flick at the local cinema.

We cannot receive more than a small glimpse of the relationship between the individual consciousness and the Great Consciousness. Folks who get more than a glimpse frequently say, “I am God,” because they have temporarily crossed the line. If we fully understood what is going on, our entire reality and our very lives might simply dissolve. The game would be over and it would be necessary for us to die. It is therefore best for us not to probe too deeply, but to recognize our role as God’s experiment in free will, and exercise our free wills as best we can. We come from God; we go back to God. What matters is what we do in the meantime.

Still another possible variation is that we each have a soul that exists outside of this reality and manifests a succession of lives, or incarnations, to learn what it needs to learn. It would be too confusing for these individual lives with their individual consciousnesses to remember all the past lives of the soul, so they generally don’t, except for occasional hints. But the soul remembers all the lives it has projected and treasures the lessons it has learned. When the individual consciousness dies, that “I” is simply reabsorbed into the “I” of the soul, which then looks for the appropriate opportunity for its next life.

You can get your vision of the afterlife and I can get mine, but our filters are faulty.  Who can say whether either of our views contains any more than a small grain of truth? We can only make our best guess as to what is the best preparation in case there is an afterlife. For that reason, it is appropriate for society to develop a variety of paths and for each to choose the path that feels most felicitous. Therefore the Path of Love is not only to tolerate one another’s paths, but to establish bonds of mutual respect and cooperation. This applies to present religions as well as to what is coming. I see all the old religions dropping away, and new paths emerging which take in the core teachings of each religion and revitalize them with what folks know now. To me, the best preparation for the next life is to honor and appreciate this life and this wondrous living Earth, altho I know other folks hold very different views. That is ok, that is the way the world is, and as she should be.

Actually, I give the probability of any kind of afterlife for any of us less than 20%. Furthermore, only a very few of us will graduate, the rest falling away to well deserved oblivion. For the few, we may in effect be creating our own afterlife, having reached a stage of consciousness where such a monumental event is possible, because of course if we achieve an afterlife, it means that we are immortal, going thru life after life in ever increasing consciousness.

This means that the game has somewhat changed. Similar to the old paradigm of Heaven and Hell, how we behave in this life and how we grow in consciousness determines whether we will go on to a next life, altho of course there is no such thing as Hell. Perhaps you become just a memory in the mind of God. We can strive to dance the Path of Love, for righteousness, for mindfulness, for evolving consciousness, and if we achieve sufficiently to take charge of our energy, we may be eligible. So what does it mean to make the best of this life? This is pretty important, because you never know until the game is over whether you are one of the select few.

Perhaps we need a new myth about the afterlife. Here is one of my favorites: When Adam prepared to die, he expected that his consciousness would be terminated, and that would be the end of it. He had experienced an incredible life of discovery and joy and beauty and love. What a marvelous blossoming of life this human being is! It was quite sufficient. Who could ask for more? So thank you, Great Mystery, for this excellent experience. However, when Adam actually died, he discovered it was like his head was chopped off from his body, and his head continued to be conscious, continued to be “I.” He began to float down the birth canal toward a new reality. He called out, “Wait! If I am to continue being conscious, I insist on having my heart with me. I will not be just a head, I will be a creature of head and heart.” Of course the Great Mystery had to grant him this wish, and that determined his destiny.

When Eve died, she had the impression it was like she had been beheaded and her head was sailing off somewhere. Now she was just this body, still conscious, floating down the birth canal into some new reality. She called out, “Wait! Wait! Something is missing. I feel it. I gained a head in that last reality, and I want to keep it! I want to go on to new adventures with both a head and a heart!” Of course the Great Mystery had to grant her wish, and that determined her destiny. When she saw Adam again she smiled, a long loving smile of recognition.

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We can speculate all we like on what the afterlife might be like. Some folks think they know because they choose to believe what somebody else said. Some folks are sure they know because they have had a near death experience, traveling the tunnel and meeting dead relatives, but this could still be a projection of their own minds. Nobody knows for sure. All we can do is what my guru suggested when someone asked him if there is an afterlife. “Wait and see,” he said.

To me what we do in this life is much more important than hoping somehow the next life will be better. The possibilities of this life are astounding. In 1975 I had an experience so exquisite that it remains the highest point of my life. It was a once-in-a-lifetime experience, altho we didn’t know it at the time. We thought we were all entering a higher level of consciousness, but if we are, it is certainly taking a long time to manifest. Still, just to be alive, to experience something as beyond wonderful as this, makes life so worth living that who could want anything more, than the delectable fruits this life has to offer?

It began when I met Patricia in the summer of 1974. We very quickly knew we were deeply in love, and in August Bette and I separated, to complete the divorce in the following year. Bette had just met Clyde, whom she later married, so the separation and divorce were quite agreeable, altho of course our children suffered. I had been a devotee of Guru Maharaji since June 2, 1973, and Patricia also soon received the knowledge and meditation techniques that Maharaji was offering. We got up at different times and meditated at different times in the morning, but in the evenings we always sat cross-legged back-to-back and meditated for an hour before going to bed. Filled with the knowledge and peace of the Divine, we would then make love, and soon discovered that we could lie joined together without moving at all, sensing and appreciating one another’s energy as we simultaneously rose up into orgasm. This was amazing for both of us. We were riding the bliss cloud of permanent honeymoon.

About once a month we took acid together and made love for a couple hours. We experienced subtle or deep vibrational energy, and several instances of apparent telepathy. We knew we were each a union of spirit and body, and that union was magnificent. In May of 1975 we went to Lincoln City on the coast and took a motel room overlooking the ocean. Once again we took acid and meditated back-to-back as the LSD gradually took effect. When we went to bed, something happened that was beyond all our previous experience. We entered a space of endless bliss, which I have generally referred to as a 45 minute orgasm, altho any ejaculation was completely irrelevant. We were beyond heaven. All our previous exceptional love making had not prepared us for this. It was a new level of sensitivity and ecstasy, such that if either one of us so much as wiggled a little finger, waves of bliss enveloped both of us. We seemed merged into one being. It seemed to go on endlessly.

Patricia and I got almost as high a month later, but it didn’t seem to be a repeatable experience. Over the years I touched on that holy place in some of my other relationships, but the truth is it ruined me for about the next dozen years, because I kept trying to get back to that incredible experience and it was never quite there. Eventually I realized it was a once-in-a-lifetime experience and let go of it. But I know there are exquisite levels of bliss waiting to be explored, and having experienced that state just once, I know that I have lived life to the fullest. Other folks can take satisfaction in their achievements, their contributions, their children, their growth in consciousness, whatever works. Life is wonderful!

As I gradually reached the conclusions described in these pages, I discovered that my understanding is complete. I am at peace, no longer in search. I am completely satisfied to have been a spiritual adventurer over these past 40 plus years. What need have I for an afterlife? Maybe there will be more adventures, so powerful as to make these look trivial. I can happily look forward to that, even tho I believe that there is less than a 20% chance for any kind of afterlife. But I don’t need it, because I am complete now. I give thanks for this wonderful life I have experienced, and if there is more, I will do my best. My cup runneth over…

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donangelo@spiritualadventurer.com