As I relate the stories in my book Final Passage: Sharing the Journey as this Life Ends, I occasionally pause and explain this difference that happens as someone is preparing to make their transition. Their ego is becoming weaker and their Soul stronger. Observing this helps the reader to recognize the switching back and forth between their Soul or Real Self and their ego or false self. The longer I have worked with transitioning people the more aware I have become of an almost “flipping” mechanism that happens. When unsafe people are around, my patients stay in their ego. Bring in someone they deeply love and feel safe with and they move over and settle into their Soul. As a caregiver I can usually help them to remain in their Soul when we are alone or with safe others.
Being with someone who is dying provides an opportunity like no other to help us learn how to practice being real and feeling connected. Whether we are the person dying or the person assisting in the transition, this process is a chance to step out of our egos and practice being our Soul.
A Course in Miracles says in its introduction:
What is real cannot be threatened;
What is unreal does not exist.
Herein lies the peace of God.
What is real is God and God’s world — the world of the Soul and Sacred Person. The ego and its world is not real, and therefore, in the grand scheme of the Mystery, does not exist. Herein, when we make this differentiation, lies our peace and serenity. By learning to differentiate between identifying with our True Self and our false self, we learn the way to peace and serenity. We might even say we are learning to “stand in the Light of our Soul.”
Some of these ideas may be hard to grasp. Identifying with our Soul, our Real Self — and not our body — is a strange concept in a world in which we are being bombarded with messages about the way we look. Magazines, television, and movies tell us that we’re not young enough, thin enough or firm enough. Our society bombards us with materialistic messages that keep us locked in our body and our possessions as our only identity. In our world today, there are many people who don’t know about their Souls. They have become distracted by materialism and the media which defines for them what reality is.
They have fallen asleep to the Real World.
Much of the time people who are “asleep” find that, when they are preparing for their transition, they wake up to their true identity and realize that they are not just their body before they die. They let go of the image of themselves as just their body and at the same time realize they are not their ego. They wake up to their Spiritual nature, which is their Soul. Sometimes, as I meet a patient for the first time, they will tell me that. There is a sense of joy at the knowledge that this worn-out or diseased body is going to drop away and release them back into wholeness.
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