I Ain't Afraid of No Ghosts
Some folks get weird when I talk about the "dead".
My mom for one, has always been creeped out by it. Some friends and co-workers too, afraid of “demons” or bad spirits or something.
I don't know if any of that "demon" stuff actually exists. I do know that I've never met any. Not in over 30 years of talking with the unseen have I ever encountered anything of which I've been afraid.
Except my own darkness.
In every encounter of fear in any conversation with the unseen, the scariest things have been the shadow I have been afraid to see in myself. I think the idea of demons are just a projection of our own rejected darkness.
Click the etymologies to open in a lightbox.
Ghost
So what is a ghost? Spirit? Good? Bad? Breath? Person? Man? What is it? Unclear, but related to “Spirit”. Ok.
Spirit
Animating force. Nice. Also wind and breath. Still unclear, but related to Ghost. At least we’re consistently unclear.
Haunt
I think we’ve misunderstood. Haunt has been portrayed in our society as something we don’t want… but don’t we? Who doesn’t want their loved ones visiting regularly?
Demon
Welp, this one… It’s evil, it’s divine power, it’s genius… oh, it’s only evil if it’s not the divine power that WE subscribe to - then it’s the devil.
I see.
I don't know if "real demons" exist.
Poltergeist, Amityville, the Exorcist, Supernatural... Movies and fiction tend to portray the dead as mostly dangerous - which is what's so delicious about horror films; the experience of fear without the danger.
“Fear is excitement without breath.”
I'm not worried about demons.
Maybe what we call demons or possession is a leftover perception of an actual trauma response or undiagnosed mental illness from a time when limited religious perception determined our whole reality.
Love and the light of wholiness dispels all darkness.
I trust myself and my frequency and intention to connect to love. I'm more on edge over shitty, psychopathic people than I am about ephemeral "demons". If there is only wholiness and all is one in love, then even the monster and the demons (and the psychopathic Wendigo people) are also part of wholiness, so what do we do with that? I suspect the fear of separation and projecting our darkness is at the core of it all.
Even the demons and the monsters are just hurt and afraid.
Christianity supports a prohibition on empathetic ways of knowing and communicating with the unseen. For a religion based on the incarnation of Spirit in the flesh of the world, they are really good at separating ourselves from the wholiness of 'god' and separating our bodies from Spirit.
Look to Heaven, but..
The message from religion is that our bodies and Earth are shitty and sinful - so look to your reward in heaven and the everlasting love-song sung with divinity. Oh, but now that your loved ones are dead and in heaven (maybe, if they were good enough... maybe not though, maybe they're burning in hell for eternity...), they are NOT available to us. They are GONE and SEPARATE and if you communicate with any of them, you're a witch or a sorceress and you're talking to demons.
BURN HER.
Make it make sense. It doesn't.
Prohibition on communicating with the 'dead' and the unseen is all about controlling the message and gate-keeping the wisdom of spirit. ‘The only source of spiritual wisdom is from the Pulpit and everything else is suspect evil.’ (coff-coff-bullshit-coff-coff)
The religious authorities want no competition to their message so they must demonize and sew fear of any source of wisdom that isn't church supported, oriented, sponsored and controlled.
Sometimes I forget how Christian was my mom's upbringing.
It was the default belief of everyone in her community. My Gramma wasn't vocal or loud about her Christianity, but the family found little prayers and Saint cards and Bible sayings tucked into all of her belongings, all over the house after she died.
I have absorbed Christian belief systems and strictures just from living in Western society. My mom attended Church and was raised by a believer. If asked, my mom does identify herself as a Christian.
I can only assume my mom's fear of the "dead" is from the same source as her grief; that death is total and all consuming and those that release their bodies stop and disappear and are gone forever. Except for some vague and far away heaven that is completely and forever separate from us and our world.
That WOULD be devastating.
Except it's not true.
Great Grampa wasn’t afraid to die.
I don't totally understand my mom's insistence on the pain of loss in death, when I consider that my Great-Grampa had a near death experience and came back with a story for the family of love and peace and continuance. Literally, Grampa Wright gathered all the family to tell them about his experience and reassure them all that death was not what we thought, it's not to be feared and he's no longer afraid to die. Thanks Grampa!
I don't claim to know what happens when we die. I know we go on. Of this I have absolutely no doubt. There is no stopping in death, there is just change.
Western society is disconnected and fearful of death in a way that is wholly based in the belief that we are forever separate from those that have died. That death means stopping and distance and a gulf of blackness that cannot be penetrated until we take our own trip into the abyss.
The abyss.
That is a perfect encapsulation of our Western view of death as a dark fathomless pit of fear. What a nightmare.
We are disconnected from death to our detriment. We are disconnected from death in the food that we eat. When we eat we create death in another living being. Animal, fish, plant, fruit - all consumption of food is life for us at the death of another. This is the joyful suffering of our existence in the physical plane and we have disconnected ourselves from this ongoing in-breath and out-breath of wholiness, to our great inconsolable grief and terror.
Being present with the death that occurs on every level of our lives, every day, allows us to come into relationship with that shift, and change and become acclimatized to death as an integral aspect of the whole and not the black end to everything we love.
Grampa’s Grief
My mom's parents were mixed farmers. They grew wheat and raised cows for milk and beef and pigs for slaughter. My grampa slaughtered his steer himself with a handgun. Can you fucking believe it?
He didn’t like it.
He did it because he had to.
Grampa gave the handgun to each of his daughters' boyfriends at one time or another and asked them to slaughter a steer. None of them could do it. Not one of them could pull the trigger.
I don't blame or judge any of them. I don't think it's cowardice. It is the natural response to causing death and my Grampa did it over and over and over again for his whole life, because he had to.
I think handing the gun to the sons-in-law was not just my Grampa having some fun with the city boys. I also think he did it because he needed to witness how hard a thing it is to cause death. Their refusal honoured his own grief and pain every time he had to pull the trigger.
I just had a huge cry while I was typing this out. HUGE. Feeling grief over all of this I asked my Grampa, "Is this mine or yours?"
"A bit 'o both my girl. A bit 'o both."
My Grampa couldn't love as completely as he would have liked because he couldn't feel his grief as fully as he needed in order to live in a world where he was required to kill those he loved to survive.
A friend of mine has similar stories of her farmer ancestors. They too had to kill to survive, and in hard times were forced to eat pets or starve and die themselves. They believed animals had to be less than humans to do this. They couldn't have souls, they had to be different, or else killing them would be like murder.
It is a murder.
It’s all murder. Even the carrot.
Denying soul and spirit to the beings we consume so we can live is rejecting the great gift they give to us. Denying their souls and spirit is denying the great sacrifice they give of their bodies to feed ours.
It is a disrespect and a dishonour to deny Soul to any being.
It is a shame and a sin to deny soul to beings that give us life through their death. It’s a denial that shits on reciprocity and the wholiness of body and spirit together in the Existence that IS.
All of it is murder. Every death of every being consumed by another is murder. Any hierarchy of value is an attempt to avoid the responsibility of killing when we consume.
We cannot avoid this.
This is the truth and reality of existence on the planet in a physical form. We are all kin here and denying the grief of the killing we have to do prolongs the grief and makes greater the fear of grief in death.
Feel the grief.
Feel the feelings and live in the horror and intensity of pain in that moment of death and it will dissolve. Being present and a witness in the loss is required.
Being present and feeling the grief allows it to be processed so we can continue living in the presence of love and not the loss of the presence of the body. These are beautiful feeling bodies that we have created to do this painful work with us.
Sorry vegans and vegetarians... you're murderers too.
Grandfather through Tom Brown Jr., said that we wouldn't understand the nature of the world and our existence here until we grieved the death of every blade of grass because each of us is kin to one another.
We don't get to turn away from death, nor should we. We might as well embrace it and bring it close. Denying and repressing death and grief only makes it linger, only makes us fear it more.
Denying and repressing our grief makes it drip out bit by bit so that we not only feel a constant and ongoing pain but then we also learn to fear everything associated with it. We learn to disconnect from any aspect of death and view the transition to Spirit and the feelings around it, as something shameful and feared.
Death is easy, it’s dying that’s hard.
I held my father as he returned to Spirit. Dying is hard. The transition and release of the body is hard. Death is easy, because it's continuing in a new way.
I held Blue Jay in my hands after they had mortally wounded themselves crashing into my window. I didn't want them to suffer or be in pain. I appealed to Creation to make them okay, to heal them and make Blue Jay well...
Then I remembered something my Elder Paul had said and I asked instead for Creator's peace for Blue Jay - whatever that was.
The clouds parted and the sun shone on us and Blue Jay spread their wings out and returned to Spirit.
In Western society, we have lost connection to the ceremonies of death that served to weave our grief and loss into the larger fabric of existence.
We have lost the thread of continuance and cycles of change on the small and grand scale that makes us fite fuaite with Creation.
The cycles of the seasons, marking the waxing and waning of the tides, the moon, all the living things in the physical realm, the honouring, respect, reciprocity and gratitude to the physical world for our continued existence has been lost to Western society to our grand detriment. Our disconnection from the cyclical turning of Creation has created a boogeyman of death as the final consumption of who and what we love.
Every part of Creation is changing - except our wholiness. Every part is in flux, except our united oneness.
Change is scary. We grieve the way they were. We grieve the loss of their physical presence in the world, but they did not stop being.
Love never dies, it just changes form.
Your loved ones still exist.
They go on and your loved ones are available if you want.
Would you like to hear from your “dead” loved ones?
I am one of millions of people who came to be a bridge for this message to root and blossom the World.
Speak w/Spirit is sharing the message that both Spirit + Land are communicating with us all the time. This is my little way to normalize the present Spiritual Reality of Beloved Presence; Spirit Present in the World of Form.
Speak w/Spirit is normalizing our constant communication + relationship with Spirit + Land.
Speak w/Spirit is a reminder to you that it’s all real - all your experiences of Spirit in the World of Form are real and they are wisdom and your body is Ancient Wisdom and Land is Ancient Wisdom, and Land and Spirit have never stopped talking with us.
Speak w/Spirit and remind the world of what is real.
Your best, most joyful, soul-filled visions are the map to the World we all want to create. Sharing your visions are the way we create it together.
Don’t wait to be ready to share. Sharing is how we get ready.