Learning After Death

Shortly after our daughter Kathryn died last month, from the end of my drawing pen appeared this image of her.  Big mind, heart body, new left foot.  Nearly 50 years ago, the leg that foot was part of was amputated.

It would be no surprise to me that such a reunion occurred when her spirit and the spirit of Dear, my late beloved, Kath’s mother of the heart, met again in the special way spirits do after a given incarnation’s physical form has been freed of its worldly responsibilities.

I feel the joy at their mutual expansion of understanding that the role our body plays in our spiritual evolution is almost insignificant.   

That we, in the grip of stony egotism, allow that role to be predominant is surely at the core of our human fears and miseries.

Ramana Maharshi, I believe it was, noted that the essential question we face is whether we’re the body.  For a whole lot of incarnations, death of our physical being is the primary way we learn that the answer is no.

Unfortunately, we forget this when we take on a new body.  At least until our love affair with the question “What’s going on?” becomes ever-more consuming.  

Then, slowly if we go by my track record, we come to discover we are only Spirit.  Our body is simply the vehicle that, over countless incarnations, transports us to those experiences essential to that realization.  We’re engaged in just one activity: learning to choose love in every moment.  

My story is that helping us awaken to this reality is the overriding purpose of any experience.  

Being reunited with a lost foot, for instance.