More Thoughts on Death and Dying

[kimberlysteele]

Halloween seems to be as good a time as any to talk about the dead, ghosts, revenants, and the afterlife, I think, as it is one of the days of the year when the veil between the living and the dead is the thinnest and it is somewhat easier to communicate with those who have passed on.  My father left this world at the age of 85 a week ago and I have found that his transference to the more subtle planes has been smooth sailing, all things considered.  I have known others who shall remain nameless who were not so willing to make the transition, and because our civilization has such a problem with open discussions of death, I would like to discuss death and dying in this rare forum where we can honestly talk about the kind of ending of us can escape.

There seems to be an unwritten law in place that the amount of dissonance a person will have about death and dying (including his or her own death process) is proportionate to the lack of genuine spiritual work they have done while on the meat plane.  The scanty few Christians I have known who have done legitimate spiritual work are completely at peace with the idea of death despite Christianity's schizoid views on what happens after death.  Atheist agnostics who are generous to a fault or grateful to a fault have the same peaceful, accepting vibe.  Spirituality is not the same as religion, though the two are not mutually exclusive.  

I'll Say It Again: Meatworld Sucks

The ultimate goal of spiritual literacy seems to be not the factoids one can memorize about the history of magic and religion or the verses of holy books recited from memory but sincere and earnest attempts at communication with the Divine.  Meatworld sucks and the only way it can suck less is by talking to entities far smarter than we are who are mostly not found among the ranks of other human beings.  The only way we can try to talk to these intelligent beings is to put effort into reflecting their best aspects.  Like us, many intelligent beings are flawed: just because someone is much further along on the path than we are does not mean he or she completely lacks faults.  Athena got so angry at Arachne, she regressed the girl back into a spider's form.  Perhaps Arachne deserved it, but it does seem a bit harsh.  The Christian god contradicts himself every five pages of the "infallible" Bible, and Allah does the same every five pages of the Quran.  Rather than discarding Athena, Yahweh, and Allah for their inconsistencies and blunders, I think it may be a better strategy to look at what they have done right, because despite them being wrong every now and then, they are still far smarter than I am and I still have much to learn from any given one of them in my primitive, ambulatory ape condition.

The Lucky Winner

I hit the jackpot at ten days old when I was given up by a twenty-two year old sansei college student who fled from the East Coast to Chicago in order to bear the shame of unwed pregnancy.  Through a bunch of uncanny coincidences, I was brokered to a thirty-something couple in an up and coming suburb.  Adoption being what it is, my white parents were charged a small fortune in order to get a half-Japanese, half-white baby.  I looked a hell of a lot more Asian back then, and my parents realized it and decided to name me Kim (hilariously a Korean surname, but what did they know?) instead of naming me after one of my adoptive grandmothers.  As a baby, my parents tell me I slept an extraordinary amount, to the point where they worriedly checked on me to make sure I hadn't died.  Within the window of a year, my mother was pregnant with one of my brothers.  I like to believe my adoption had something to do with it, or at least with the kind of relaxation required for nature to work its course in accordance with will.

I started out with what appears to have been a single lousy parent (birthfather reportedly was not at the birth to sign the papers) and quickly got passed into the hands of the world's best parents.  Despite life's dramas and troubles, we all stuck it out and I was never away from my family for any significant length of time.  Along the way, I grew up, got married, forged a career in music teaching, and realized an odd part of my destiny.  

When I was about fourteen, the phrase "My eyes have burned with the living and shone with the dead" burned itself into my consciousness like an annoying ad jingle.  I still don't really know what it means.  I have some suspicion it refers to a predisposition on my part for talking to dead people.  In junior high, one of my classmates who I did not know or hang out with hung himself in his bedroom.  Though I never saw his detached spirit, I am fairly certain I had a bunch of conversations with him for about a week after he took his own life.  I also talked with dead historical figures in my head -- if I was studying them or reading/listening to their life works, I tended to talk with them as if they were conversing with me.  I don't feel this is unusual at all.  I think the dead kid talked to others besides me the week after he died; the difference is that other people did not have the natural ability to talk to him as easily as I did.  The same is true for the dead historical figures.

Talking to the Ecosystem

Talking to yourself is common.  My Dad did it a great deal -- he was a funny guy and would often speak funny, self-deprecating comments aimed at himself.  I talk to myself.  I don't think people who talk to themselves are actually talking exclusively to themselves.  I had a schizophrenic neighbor who would yell obscenities and unpleasantries as he walked up and down the block.  Sometimes he would run down the sidewalk, charging like a bull.  Though modern psychiatry considered his ailing brain a faulty universe of one, I think he carried with him a host of malevolent non-corporeal beings who liked to torture him.  Perhaps some of them were demons -- I don't know.  Though I could be an exorcist in a future life, I don't think that is going to be my occupation in this one.  My hypothesis is that we all have communities of beings who hang around us all the time and we are constantly conversing with those beings.  When we become spiritual, we raise the vibe of conversation and leave behind the more hopeless and negative beings in order to "hang out" with some of the smarter, more helpful ones.

My friend's mother died at the age of 90 in her home a couple of years before the whole Coronatarian debacle.  I was there at her bedside along with my friend with one of us holding each hand as she slipped away.  Some deaths are fast and some are slow.  In her case, her deterioration was slow but sure.  In the end, she was sleeping nearly all the time.  I visited my friend for one of the holidays and she had been sleeping and going in and out of consciousness all that week.  Once I got there, she had a moment where she rallied, her eyes opened a bit, and she looked into her child's eyes and said goodbye.  Her consciousness ebbed as we cried and watched.  

I was grateful for that experience because I was able to see the signs when my father started to leave this world.  When an elderly person is getting close to death, they become much paler and their mouths change shape.  It becomes harder for them to smile; death seems to love a frown.  Their chins recede.  Their muscles become soft, flabby, and atrophied, like wet sand in a rubber balloon.  For the sensitive, their energy is different.  My father's life force weakened considerably after a series of prostate events and medical procedures that started about six years ago.  His death was as much due to old age as to iatrogenic injury, but that is a topic for another time.

The etheric body is the layer of energy that animates the physical body.  All physical beings have etheric bodies.  In the case of humans and other animals, our etheric bodies are what make us alive on the physical plane.  When we die, the etheric body takes longer to die than the physical body by anywhere from a week to a few months.  When my cat Kiki died, it took a few months for her etheric body to die.  If the dead person is cremated, the etheric body is obliterated upon the moment of cremation.  The pyramids of the Pharaohs were attempts at keeping the etheric body alive by nourishing it with sacred and blessed objects (and often slain servants and pets) which also had their own etheric bodies. There is something about preserving the flesh form that seems to sustain the etheric body far beyond physical death, but those ghoulish arts have been all but lost in the modern era.

Dealing with the Old and Dying

In a civilization that fears, hates, shuns, and avoids death, it can be a real undertaking (see what I did there) to deal with the aged in a rational and sane manner.   I love lists, so here is mine for handling the aging and dying process with an elderly loved one.

1. BE THERE.  If you live far away, move closer.  As much pride-swallowing as it took to move back in with my parents when I was at the ripe age of 41 and my husband well into his fifties, I regret absolutely nothing.  Yes, it was humiliating to reveal to all the nice neighbors that my husband and I were fiscal idiots.  Sometimes it was unbearable to be so childlike and dependent and that is why we ended up in our own house about 40 minutes away by car.  The trend of atomized families makes sense only if the relative in question is thoroughly horrible and awful.  Otherwise, living with or near family is a blessing. 

2. Let them eat coffee cake.  I have been an ethical, whole foods vegan since 2010 and I did my level best to change my parents into vegetarians back in the day, especially when I was living at their house.  I cooked my parents lunch almost every day during a two year stint of living with them so much that my husband complained he missed my meals because he was at work!  As my father became more aged and infirm, I walked away from trying to get them to eat healthy, in fact, I was the one buying them KFC and kolachky because that is what he enjoyed.  Once again, I have zero regrets and I know letting him eat junky garbage was the smartest and best thing I could have done.  The end of life is a hospice and if someone is eating the "bad" stuff or taking the "good" painkillers, it's too damn late to worry about their deleterious effects.  If they have anything even close to the look of death I described above, it is likely they won't have much of an appetite.  From what I have seen of the aged in my life, if the elder is anywhere north of 75, it seems like a good time to loosen dietary restrictions and get out the opiates and marijuana.

3. Start talking to the dead NOW.  Chances are you are already talking to them.  Talk to your dead grandma as if she was still there.  Resolve the emotional baggage about the dead people now and those who die later won't be so difficult.  When someone dies, he or she dissolves but does not go away entirely.  His or her higher self, the self that made him or her incarnate in the first place, is still there.  My Dad's higher self, with his compulsive generosity, excellent sense of humor, and cheerful helpfulness, is now part of my spiritual ecosystem.  Whenever I choose  generosity in the face of worried parsimony, humor in the face of fear-mongering, and helpfulness in the face of selfish greed, I invoke my Dad and his higher self lives through me.  I can still talk to him without pining away in despair that he is gone. When you talk to your "ancestors" or in my case my adoptive ancestors, you are talking to their higher selves.  When you die, it is my profound belief that like my Dad you will go to a place beyond space and time where you will hang out with the higher selves of the people you loved and who loved you in this and other incarnations.  Your higher self is likely hanging out with dead people from your current and past lives right now.  The more you work on your higher self by discarding greed, hatefulness, covetousness, and other deadly sins the easier it becomes for you to commune with your community of higher selves.  You become conscious of them as much as a being trapped in Meatworld can become conscious of them.  

Comments

[randomactsofkarmasc]

This post has helped me. Thank you.

[kimberlysteele]

Thank you. Glad it helped.

Such a comforting read

[miow]

Thank you Kimberly

Re: Such a comforting read

[kimberlysteele]

You're welcome Miow!

[bofur_the_dwarf]

I'm going to read the rest of this later, seeing as it's my favourite time of year and I am convinced Halloween "exists" as a holiday because Man has a need to grapple with death and horror.


But I want to comment on this, which you left at JMG's:

"My Ogham were fairly insistent that a mass die off was in store for the vaccinated, though they don’t do a good job with specific timelines."

That gave me serious chills, just because, I never forget the Ogham reading you did for me roundabout two years ago, which came true exactly.

[kimberlysteele]

Thanks Bofur!

From what I have seen, there is a die-off already happening of the vaccinated, but at this point it has mainly consisted of the vaccinated elderly. For instance, people who would have likely made it to 90 are getting cut off in their 70s and 80s. The silver lining to this cloud is that their most productive era of life is not the one being abbreviated. Far more worrying is what could happen among the younger crowd, where there are huge upticks in disability claims. We can presume, I think, that the quaxx will shorten their lives. The question is "By how much?"

[(Anonymous)]

For what it's worth -

Kimberly, your Ogham readings for me have been eerily and consistently accurate - except for one thing. The time frames can be a bit off. Sometimes things you predicted for one week or month's reading don't show up by the end of the week or month, and I think, huh, her Ogham got that one wrong - only to have it happen just as predicted, but a few days or a week or two later than the time frame for which the reading was requested. One time you "predicted" something in a Sunday 'what's up this week' that had just happened the night before, right when I was thinking about asking for a reading.

Time is weird. I'm not sure it "works" the same way on all planes. The one thing I have learned to do is to always take time frames with a grain of salt, and pay attention to the prediction without assuming it will happen exactly when it's "supposed to".

Maybe that applies to other readings as well. Which is not good news in this case.

[kimberlysteele]

Thanks for the observations! Yeah, I really do not want them to be right on this one. They predicted a Black Plague level die off.

[(Anonymous)]

Thanks for this, Kimberly.

So many people I know are unwell (physically or mentally) right now. And there have been more deaths than usual too. Good and timely advice.

I am trying to cultivate gratitude and forgiveness now. That way if things or people decline further I will have more practice being appreciative and letting go.

Heloise

[kimberlysteele]

The hardest thing for me to handle right now is that "end of an era" feeling. I don't trust it -- I never trust feelings I have about potential futures. My Ogham were so insistent that there would be a die off in readings a few years ago that I am afraid to even ask them if they have changed their tune.

[white_bear_chronicles]

Thanks for this Kimberly,
Please accept my condolences for the loss of your Dad and my appreciation for your understanding of the process. I've noticed that a special quiet state of mind is needed when communicating with the dead, who are, it turns out, not all that dead really.
It came as a tremendous relief to know that my Mom, swept away by Moderna in 2021, is having the time of her, um, life now that she has shed her mortal coil. She was a stern and serious woman during her sojourn here and now insists that I not make the same mistake. Still working on that one.
As to your response to Bofur above you are spot on. The crushing wave of disabilities in the 30 to 60 age group will be the next wave of fatalities over the next 2-3 years and it's grossly underreported using the same reporting shenanigans that at one time ascribed virtually all deaths to the dreaded coof.
I'm most fortunate to be able to pass through this time with the likes of you, JMG and the crew at Ecosophia. Thanks as always for the work you do.
Gawain

[kimberlysteele]

Thank you Gawain. I am glad your Mom has figured out that lesson in the afterlife despite missing it in Meatworld life. I have found it easier to deal with my father's death than my cat Kiki's death because in the case of Kiki's death, it fell down to me to decide to end her life. In my Dad's case, I was alone with him when he died. I felt two beings arrive during his death who I "saw" with my mind's eye as two horsemen. I am not clairvoyant so I usually don't see apparitions. Oddly I knew what was happening before he did. He is so much happier now, whereas Kiki was more confused as to why I did what I did. She was grateful to me eventually once the guides had revealed to her what was going on but it took a while. My father figured it out almost immediately and thanked me for my foresight several times. Nobody else thought it was the end except me; unfortunately I had seen the signs months ago and consequently did my best to encourage others to go easy on him and appreciate his goodness instead of nitpicking his weaknesses.

The trouble with the quaxx is karmic. Of course that's only my opinion and I could be wrong. Even those who suffer and die young of the quaxx have their karma to bear in normalizing it, much like all who went all in for Hitler, Franco, Stalin, and Mao have karmic fallout for making those genocides possible by paving the way with early compliance. After death, the quaxxed have to work a great deal harder in order to redeem themselves. This is what I believe the dead and the guides of the dead have told me. So if you were not a sh***y person in life but you quaxxed, even if you didn't advertise your vaxxed status or shame the unvaxxed, you still have to carry your part of the weight of the millions who have been/will be injured or cut down in the prime of life. Yes, that is collective karma, however, it begins when someone decides to go along with the crowd. From what I understand, you can sublimate your way out of the bad karma via generosity, gratitude, and good works. I have urged all the quaxxed dead that I encounter to accept their mea culpas (quaxxing and otherwise) with grace so they can potentially escape the "fall" I believe awaits most of the quaxxed. I have speculated the quaxxed could fall out of human evolution for a while and may have to work their way back up the evolutionary ladder after the current set of extinctions runs its course. But of course I could always be wrong. This is just what my gut says is happening.

[(Anonymous)]

Hi Kimberly, what is your opinion about the karma of the quaxxed who supported freedom of choice? Like, say the people who declined to show a pass out of principle. Or the the people who organized the Canadian freedom convoy.

Would their opposition to discrimination help mitigate the "fall" you hypothesize is coming?

Heloise

[kimberlysteele]

I would suppose the karma of freedom advocates is different than the go-alongs, the would-be enforcers, and various types who got washed away in the frenzy or who were eager to join it. Though I honestly have no clue. The way the quaxx alters the genome is weird, but in the end, the human genome never was sacred in anybody's case. Keep in mind I could be 100% wrong about all of this stuff. From what dead people have told me, many repent the quaxx after they die regardless of whether it contributed to their deaths or not. But these are only the tiny number of dead people I have talked to, and I have largely only talked to that small fraction when they were recently dead. The dead I talk with are not representative of all dead people; not by a long shot.

[kimberlysteele]

The one thing that seems to reliably happen is that when you are dead, you get a glimpse of the greater picture depending on how much the guides estimate you are ready to see.

[(Anonymous)]

Thanks for replying. Very interesting.

I often prayed about the health consequences of the quaxxes. Eventually I seemed to get an answer - "they chose". I followed with prayers asking if coerised people can really choose. I received the sense that my question was already asked and answered. I haven't asked in prayer since. The subject seems closed. This is just my sense, I have no idea how true it is.

Heloise

[kimberlysteele]

That is eerily reminiscent of the Saturnine “half of them will die” answer I got from the Ogham for a while. I sincerely hope my Ogham were wrong.

[(Anonymous)]

The only place I've ever seen your Ogham get anything wrong is timing. I hope they're wrong too, but given their track record and the signs I'm seeing of things starting to go very, very badly, I doubt it...

[kimberlysteele]

It's weird how I have heard this more than once. I will note they were spectacularly wrong when it came to predicting a good love outcome for one person who asked for a "What are the prospects of this relationship". This poor soul ended up with a semi-stalker.

[jpc_w]

As part of my daily prayers I ask that, for children and those coerced, "the symptoms fall gently upon them".

In another prayer, I've asked that treatment is found for the self-replicating components, "so those that might yet be saved get their chance".

That's what I've come up with after grappling with the issues.

[kimberlysteele]

This seems very sensible to me and I see a great deal of good in it.

[lp9]

I'm sorry to hear about your father's passing but glad to hear that it seems to have gone smoothly for him.

There does seem to be a lot of death and discussion about death hanging around my family and friend group these days. I've been very comfortable with the idea of death and my own death for a long time--I remember back in my 20s talking about what I want to happen to my body when I die--in part perhaps because I have a strain of longevity in my family and so have been around for the deaths of multiple great grandparents, grandparents, great aunts and uncles, etc. But I have a couple atheist family members who've gone totally bonkers since 2020. My grandmother just turned 94 and I would not be surprised if she passes away in the next year or so given the change in her physical state, energy, and personality. Her son (my uncle) is one of those atheists and he is having a really hard time with her decline. He's trying to make her wear masks again and not letting her eat junk food. It's a battle between him and my mom (her daughter) who is on board with letting a 94-year-old do and eat whatever the heck she wants.

Sort of a related note, have you found that brushes with death can totally transform a person's personality in a negative way? Any idea why that would happen? We have a (formerly) close friend who followed the party-line when it came to the pandemic. He was recently diagnosed and underwent treatment for testicular cancer (at the same time, his wife's autoimmune condition has severely worsened). He used to be a pretty down-to-earth guy, totally comfortable without much money, hanging out with old dudes at the blue collar corner bar. Now, all of a sudden, he's turned into an elitist, snobby jerk. My husband went to visit and help out right after our friend's chemo ended and the friend is literally saying stuff like "I wouldn't go to that restaurant, it's lowbrow" and "there's no way we would send our daughter to public schools here; the other kids are just not the right crowd [note: his daughter is only FIVE]." Like, what the heck?!? Total bizzaro world and we're not sure what to make of it.

[kimberlysteele]

Damn, I am rooting for her to eat what she wants.

I saw a lot of people turn on their supposedly down to earth values once quaxxed. It’s as if the snob within was waiting to emerge. Pretty much every vegan I used to pal around with quaxxed because it was more important to be able to fly on an airplane than to question the literal GMOs pushed by a group that tortured beagle dogs to death (NAIAD).

[(Anonymous)]

I'm quite psychically sensitive, and I once saw something profoundly troubling that I've never been able to shake: I saw my aunt die, and then another soul at the hospital try to take over her body. She never woke up, so that soul was soon ejected, but it was profoundly creepy to sense. In cases like the one you describe, ever since, I've always wondered if perhaps the original person actually did die, and another soul from someone else (who, of course, would need a massive fear of death/sense of entitlement) commandeered the now empty body...

[kimberlysteele]

That's so sad. This is an age of spiritual illiteracy, so there are no uniform practices (blessings) in place to prevent one confused soul from trying to take over the body of a recently departed soul. One of the issues with the current state of religion is its materialist, de-facto Satanist "experts" who are not connected to the Divine. Take some random suburban minister who spends 50% of his time wallowing in luxury and the other 50% hating people he perceives as threats.

He's a de-facto Satanist with an active connection to the demonic. If he comes into the room of a dying person, he brings his nasty ecosystem like Pig Pen and his cloud of ick. He can invoke the name of Jesus all he likes; we all know he is not at all like Jesus. The dying person might as well have painted a target on his or her back for demons.

Quite a few people go insane as they are nearing death, and this is common among elders. For instance, an elder will become violent and horribly mean as the end nears and fear combines with anger. This makes the dying person ripe for infestation, or infestation may have already occurred. Plus it may not be just another human soul looking for a home, but something far worse, like a demon.

[prayergardens]

Sorry for your loss. May his memory be a blessing.

[kimberlysteele]

Thank you, PG. It is.