Well someones got to do it, so it may as well be me, although I am looking for a band of merry helpmates! (Picture above is Father Ted demonstrating the technique on Bishop Brennan).
A friend recently introduced me to a wonderful book by a gutsy Aussie lady. At one point she has this to say "While you are learning new things, you can help yourself to learn it by teaching it to others. As you teach what you need to learn, the more you say it to others, the more it makes an impression on your consciousness."
Through my writing over the past year I have come to see that by putting my thoughts into stories I have allowed myself to integrate & work through muddy areas in my life. So now I find myself called to look into the murky waters of death - no I don't have a terminal illness, I'm just pissed off & have been for a long time.
My introduction to death came at an early age when I asked that question that all children ask their parents - no, no, not "Where do babies come from?"- the other one - "Does everyone die?" My mother's blunt reply of "Yes" without any follow-up stories that included angels & harps, left me traumatised for a very long time indeed. Somewhere along the way I buried the panic & got 'used' to the idea.
However I have retained a 'beef' with death & it goes like this (I prefer to use a child's descriptor) "it's just too mean."
I'm tired of hearing that it's just how things are, it's inevitable, it's nature, it's a part of life etc, etc. I don't buy it. Nobody knows what death is or what happens afterwards - every answer you or I are told, is made up.
My anger with death thing is for the people who are left behind -I am speaking of the intolerably cruelty of losing someone beloved. I walked through a graveyard last week, on a research jaunt - again & again & again I saw the words of pain that come from the disconnection that is death. Now if you get nabbed for committing a serious crime (like speaking your truth), you are entitled to one phone call, if you get the death sentence for it, you get to choose your one last meal, but when you or one you love dies, that's it - finito.
So what is it all about - we are so used to death, we do not question. Why does death happen & why is connection so completely severed. If we were booking our lives through a travel agent, would anyone really take the earth/human option - when we go away on holiday, we need to know that we are coming back to those we love.
So I've been having some wacky thoughts on death & in doing so found it to be a far more invasive energy than I had at first thought.
So with boot at the ready lets administer a bloody good kick up the backside of the Grim Reaper - unfortunately I couldn't find any pictures of this on the internet, but use your imagination, go on get a good mental picture! (ok time for a quick laugh, I was thinking of a Father Ted scene when I wrote that last phrase - no one should ever, ever contemplate shuffling off any mortal coils without having seen at least a little bit of Father Ted.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SzzCPHdpISo
Did you have a look at the link - ah go on!
Ok back to death.
Now a popular conception (a deliberately chosen lively word), is that the world would be overpopulated if people didn't die - great, so that reduces our lives to disposable cells in a 'greater' entity - well damn!, this disposable cell has a programming fault & thinks her life & those of others are valuable!
OK then, we're spiritual beings in human form, great so get this life outta the way & on to big & brighter things - well wtf am I doing here then?? Oh yes I forgot Great Granny & Grandad pissed off a jealous god & thus all our kind were damned as everlasting castaways. Oh hang on a minute didn't Janus, sorry Jesus come & save us, well how come we're still here - oh that's right it's all about the next life, the afterlife - be very, very good now & when when 'fate' pulls the plug & you shuffle off your mortal springs, you'll get a big spiritual payout - backdated of course.
It could be all roses on t'other side - but we don't know, however if the effects of death on this side of the veil are anything to go by then why would we be so sure?
I talked to a friend recently whose young niece died of a brain tumour some years back. I started asking her how long it took her to 'get over it', then realised that was all wrong, so rephrased with 'How long did it take you to get used to it?' She told me it took about a year, she was very, very deeply affected by this death. Hers is one of untold stories of immense suffering.
I just don't buy it - what if we were meant to understand death & keep in touch with those we loved, but our communication system got switched off? or... What if death is an invention, a device to ensure that we never have enough time to learn that which we need, to find our way off this hamster wheel? If reincarnation is real then that would work well with the latter theory because it keeps us recycling, but blocks out all our previous knowledge. I reckon if we really came here to learn something, we must surely have learned it by now - I know I sure feel like I've been round the block a shitload of times.
Last week my wondering took a wilder turn.
I wondered if death could be a red herring, a trick or camouflage to turn our attention away from real death.
Well first off, death is presented to us on a daily platter through the media. We are reminded of it through religion, through the 'evidence' of our physical bodies, through illness, through history & time & .......................... (please feel free to fill in the dots). I think the only virtually death-free zone is in the mind of a child.
But....just suppose that death is a trick of the mind? What if it's role is to camouflage something else? You see it is only in recent angry weeks & as I contemplated this article that I got to notice how death has accompanied me all my life - through apparently living people.
Now I don't know what life is, haven't a fucking clue (excuse my french, just trying to make a point) but I've been wondering if our world might actually be the Underworld of mythology. The amount of suffering here beggars belief - look into history & you just can't take on board the hideous scarring of oh soooo many generations.
But what if this world is like some kind of sticky fly-paper that we've gotten trapped on - either by accident or design. Perhaps we were playing around with spirit glue & done got ourselves stuck! Then perhaps some other energy came visiting & it's favourite toy was humans trapped on fly-paper, so it stayed & found a way to keep us stuck.
Perhaps we started getting clever, so a method was needed to keep us dumb & wriggling. A new type of cunning fly-paper was invented - it was double-sided & when a fly, sorry human manged to get free it would buzz off ecstatically only to get caught round the other side. To all his buddies he seemed to have disappeared & they were deeply saddened & held memorial services. Over time, the sticky humans accepted this Great Vanishing & called it Death & created many rituals & beliefs
The real death energy chuckled endlessly over this, for it knew what they did not. It was the living energy of the humans, scrupulously harvested, that created the glue that kept their fly-paper super sticky in the first place ho ho ho.
And how was this energy created & harvested? Why through the living dead of course.
So this is where I stand now & look with new eyes.
I've have at last become aware of the living dead. I've known them all my life, but I was tricked because they walked & talked, & we've all seen enough tv to know that the only thing dead people do is decompose. But oh how foolish I have been. My intuition has poked & prodded me for a truly embarrassing number of years & I refused to pay heed. You see, unlike the boy in the movie, Sixth Sense, I could not see the dead people. But I felt them, oh how I felt them. However I could not see them, therefore I could not prove, therefore I knew that I could not speak up.
But now I do, & I say "I feel living dead people" & I feel them everywhere. But there are some who are so much more intrusive - we could call them the tax collectors of the living dead.
I am actually intimately aware of these living dead people because I grew up with one. I do not know if the souls of these people have been stolen or interfered with or if there is a foreign energy or entity that resides within them or something else again, all I know is that something is very wrong within them & that they seem to seek to impact on the lives of the living, either to create great pain &, or to reduce others to the same lifeless state of living dead.
My mother is one of these. I cannot tell you the number of years I spent trying to understand what was going on within my family as I grew up. I still do not have words for it - if you've followed my blog you will know I have words for many things, but not this. It was a feeling, always & only a feeling.
It is only in the last week or two that I have been able to give a name to the feel & effect of her presence - it was Death. This is not an attack, simply a fact. My father has told me, that had he stayed with her he would be dead now, psychically I think he came very close. He even told me that at one point she wanted to buy a pair of coffins to store under the house, in preparation for their demise. Being in the presence of this energy over many years wore my family down in different ways. I became anorexic & spent four months in hospital, holed up in glass cage. I think the extended break away from her gave me enough strength to free myself from both her energy & that of the Catholic Church. I believe it was Ben Fairhall who wrote recently about the Catholic Church being steeped in death, I had never seen it in that light before, but that really hit home.
I could never explain the effect of my mother & there was never any proof - the living dead don't leave proof - they operate on a completely different level - it's some kind of psychic energy suction & I could go so far as to say attempted soul murder - well lets not beat around the bush, for I'm almost sure you will know, or have known someone like this. Their eyes will be very cold or in some way inhuman. They lack empathy & they lack humour. The sound of their voices drains you. Somehow they seem to know just where & how to strike for greatest effect - just as Dracula goes for the jugular, they seem to hone in on your weakest (& I presume juiciest) points.
Another thing with the living dead is that they won't hear you. So here I must speak up again for I believe that "To hear is to give life to."
In my growing up years I experienced being ignored & made invisible as a method of control - very bloody effective it is too. To ignore is to kill - something must be known or taken within us to exist. The living dead will not hear your voice, they will only hear you if you speak in their language.
Now this is where I think we need to cast our net very wide indeed, for I'm pretty bloody certain that the language we are forced to use today is death's language. I'm not saying that the English language is death's language, rather that it has been manipulated in some way so that it takes a detour through Hades on it's way to our ears.
I speak two versions of the English language - there is the one I speak here, in this blog & with my 'living friends' - it's lively, likes to joke & play round with words, gets personal & also pissed off. And then... there's the other one - a sort of flat-toned & empty verbalising that is, like visa 'accepted everywhere' - but ohh I don't like it, I get tongue-tied all the time & my emotions & feelings are like unwashed vagrants - unacceptable everywhere.
When I look at the big topics of this world, I feel this same death energy. Money has got to be the biggest bloody fly-paper around! I wonder if it, like language, has been charged with death - is there perhaps another way to use it, that we are not seeing? Govts, media, pharmaceuticals - don't they all just deal in death? - look around & around, this world is based on living death. Forget the casket of the future, you'll find it right now in the job & the bank & the newspaper - everywhere raucous laughter is missing, there will you find living death & this is where we are creating our own private fly-paper adhesive.
I wonder too if our focus has been deliberately turned towards the methods that are slowly killing us, in order to misdirect our attention away from the living dead or 'death eaters' that are their instigators. Just how much effect do the living dead have on us? Are they absorbing our energy or perhaps syphoning it off - I return to my own personal knowledge via my mother. No matter how much attention or energy I gave her, it made NO difference. I used to think she had a hole in her, for nothing would fill her up. So where did that energy go?
I'm reminded of a short story I read once about an 'All You Could Eat' restaurant & a man goes there, pays for his plate & then proceeds to eat non-stop for days (I think) - it turns out that he is long-distance-feeding his starving planet. Do the living dead syphon off energy that is then transferred somewhere else? Are they 'the living dead' because their energy has already been consumed?
I started writing this article because I had to, for myself. I finally got honest about a situation in my life ... ahem it only took about 3 years. I found myself once again having the life sucked out of me by a living dead person. This person changed & I guess I kept waiting for things to improve, giving another chance, making excuses plus I used my intellect (naughty wise woman) instead of my intuition & thus kept fly-trapping myself by seeing no way out. This is a work related matter & at present I still don't see a way out, but this is not the crux of the matter, the crux comes with my speaking up & out for myself & for what I know, but have not allowed myself to know. A great part of my rage has also been to do with the deafness of this person - where once I could speak, things changed & it was as if all doors had been padlocked shut. I am an intuitive person, developed perhaps in part from an extreme childhood, I learned to read signals & use any tiny openings when offered. My feeling-knowing of a padlocked door is very real to me, as real as any locked vault, yet I can offer no photos & no CSI investigation will find any evidence.
Yet isn't this the same experience that any & surely every truth seeker & wonderer has met with on so very many occasions - the triple padlocked ears of the media educated. These tight-shut minds are the sculptured works of the living dead who populate media & govt. Is this, I wonder, the deadliest onslaught against truth-seekers - a type of soul-death-contract taken out on all who would open their minds. I do not think we should underestimate the effects of non-listening.
Nevertheless my life force has buzzed again through the pages of this blog & the pages of others who write & the great hearts of those who lend their ears - not necessarily agreeing, but nevertheless hearing. My thanks goes to all of you.
So where does that leave us? I'm sure that way beyond the small life that we're taught to accept, is another one - in that life feelings & intuition are real, they are 'accepted anywhere.' HOW did we ever let ourselves get caught in such small lives that we could not say 'this is so because I feel it to be so?'
Still, I feel triumphant. I am bloody sure that there is a deep connection being created. As I have contemplated this article over the past few weeks, others have brought their honesty & pain forward to weave a far greater masterpiece of living. Ben from HPANWO has a marvellous story of personal remembering & healing that came through his reading of Ellis Taylor's new book Dogged Days. Ben had emailed me prior to his story & it had allowed me to tell him some of mine in return, as a result we have both posted our stories, for ourselves & for sharing.
I was walkng through a mall this week, merrily blogging away about death (in my head), when directly in front of me a young girl turned to her mother & before my very eyes & ears asked, "When you die will you come back alive again?" - I realise synchs are very personal, but I was amazed, it was like reliving my childhood all over again - this article is, in a sense, a loving & feisty answer to the child I was who asked that same question, & for all who wonder.
Here is Ben's article
http://hpanwo.blogspot.com/2009/01/eyes-of-centaur.html
