Making one’s transition is so much bigger than any other ritual on this planet. Souls come in. Souls go out. Birth is a joyous event. Death is beyond our comprehension.
We live in a material reality that limits our ability to experience the sacred and celebratory side of death: the final passage from this reality to a nonphysical and eternal one.
This nonphysical reality is Spiritual, ineffable and a part of the Divine Mystery. It is the reality of God’s world, not our earthly world, and sometimes we can only sense it through our hearts. As the Little Prince said, “It is only with the heart that one can see rightly. What is essential is invisible to the eye.” (Saint-Exupéry, 1943)
The enormity and elusiveness of this nonmaterial reality can perhaps only be understood in metaphor. As a respiratory therapist, I used large tanks of oxygen. Each tank contained enough compressed oxygen to make the pressure on the inner walls of the tank 2,200 pounds per square inch. That is an extraordinary amount of pressure. Yet we hooked the tank up to a patient who was receiving the oxygen in a gentle slow stream. The oxygen at the patient’s nostrils felt like a soft gentle breeze because of a little device we used called a “reducing valve.” Twenty-two hundred pounds per square inch went into the reducing valve, which brought the pressure down to a gentle stream going through the tubing that went to the patient.
As we take in reality, our brains work the same way as the reducing valve. Reality is huge. Its pressure is too big and too much for us to handle. Our brain, our reducing valve, allows reality to flow in a gentle stream so we can handle it without exploding ourselves.
Helping someone die is as close as I can get, as close as any of us can get, to the huge reality that is beyond our individual ability to perceive. Ultimately, all this is a mystery, but we can get closer to the mystery by allowing ourselves to experience death with openness, loss of ego, and willingness to be aware of and open to our subtle experience.
When someone calls me and asks for help when someone they know is dying or has died, I help them to learn what it is to be open to the experience and I model a safe and supportive environment in which to learn and practice this deeply important soul skill.
I talk about these ideas in-depth and share more of my experiences in my books. You can read more about them here.
What are your thoughts and experiences with transitions and the Divine Mystery? Click the "Comments" link, below, to enter your comments.
--Barbara
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