May--June 2005

A Kiss of Sunlight in a Windowless Room

Speaking to the Dead

By Sarvananda Bluestone

A wag once said, “I speak to the dead all the time. They just don't answer me.” That touched something in me.

Communicating with those who have died has become popular again. It has become a media thing. There is a
popular TV. show, “The Medium”. There is Whoopi Goldberg in “Ghosts”. There is Bruce Willis in “Sixth Sense”. And there is Sylvia Browne, John Edwards, James Van Praagh and many others. I don't doubt that these people see what they say they do. It's just that other people aren't seeing it.

Now I am an incorrigible skeptic. I'm not any old skeptic, mind you. I have been a psychic reader for over thirty years. I like my skepticism. Keeps me honest as long as I keep open. But I am suspicious of anything that becomes a fad. And connecting with those who have gone beyond seems to have become another fad. So let me get a few thins off my chest.

We humans are the only species that know we are going to die. Some people have concluded that this is the very reason for spirituality. These folks say that humans need to believe in something more than mortality. And there's the rub: belief.

Belief is the acceptance of someone else's experience. There is a great chasm between belief and knowing. And people have believed in just about everything from the desirability of eliminating one's neighbors to the man in the moon. But what we know is in our hearts and souls and belongs to each of us alone.

The notion that those who have died are still around is comforting. But it can easily be a false comfort. There is a wonderful book used by grief counselors who deal with children who have lost parents. Its title expresses it clearly: The Loss That Is Forever. The book cautions people not to tell children that their dead parent is still around, will return, etc. the loss is forever. And, as a person who lost both of his parents by the time I was nine, I can tell you there is a relief in that clarity. It would have been important to hear when I was nine that my father was gone forever. Because then, paradoxically, I might have more easily allowed him to be here in whatever shape and mysterious way that he might.

It is the mystery of death that eludes us. We so desperately want to see thins in ways that can understand. We want lost loved ones to have the same form as when they were alive. We want to be able to speak with them. We want to know that they are not gone. And this desire is as old as the human race. We don't want to accept our loss.

So we are open to the Disneyfying of the mystery. So we have people who become telephones from the dead. We have images of ghosts in forms that we can recognize. We have, in short, the demystifying of the mystery. But wishing something doesn't make it so.

The irony is that the more we try to make the mysteries commonplace, the more out of reach they become for all of us. Hollywood has rendered the supernatural both horrible and familiar. In truth it's neither. For example, energy healing is a reality. Edgar Casey did in fact heal people on the other side of the globe. Reiki works across tie and space. But neither of these take the form of little demon flies emerging from mouths as in Steven King's Green Mile.

The mystery is exciting. From my experience it is not scary even though it is unknown. We are taught to fear the unknown. My experience of those who have died is limited but very real to me. Again, it is not a belief.

When I was a child, two important people died. One, my mother, died when I was nine months old. When I was two my father married the woman that was to be my mother for the next fifty six years. My father went off to the war, returned and died when I was nine.

I don't remember my birth mother. A linguist friend of mine once said that my ability to emulate a Scottish accent might well have been a memory her speech since she was a Scot. I did experience her after she had died.

It must have been 1941. I was two. My father had remarried and all three of us went on a kind of honeymoon. It was a cottage as I remember. There were two things that stand out vividly in my memory of that trip. It was the first time that I had ever seen and tasted golden raisins. They were so sweet and seemed to glow. It was also the first time that I was terrified of spiders.

My father and my new mom were in the bed. After all it was a honeymoon. I was on the floor puttering around. I remember that I noticed an electric outlet and started to crawl towards it. (Even though I was fleet as a deer on my feet I still liked the lower level of reality afforded by crawling). I knew now—I knew then—that I would see if I could fit my fingers into those little holes.

A shout from the bed probably wouldn't have stopped me. Neither is it likely that either grown up could have physically reached me in time. I was right there. I was reaching out. And then, out of nowhere, racing in front of me, between me and the outlet, was the biggest blackest hairiest spider in the history of childhood. I remember my terror. I remember falling back, away from the outlet. I was pulled on to the bed and did not go near that outlet again. That spider had achieved what neither of those adults could have. It had come from no where.

Years later my friend Hariet removed a little spider from my car's rear view mirror as we drove to the movies. When I commented on my fear of spiders she said simply, “the spider is the mother.” I knew that. After all I had looked at hundreds of cultures while working on my two books. So many people around the world respected the spider as the wise old mother who saves her children through the use of ingenuity. Now I realized in a flash that that spider of so many decades was not just “the” mother. She was my mother. And she had protected me. She had done this without words and without a recognizable form.

My father is a more recognizable memory to me. There is a world of difference between the perceptions of a nine month old and a nine year old boy. But here, too, the form of his appearance was unique.

My friend Helen and I had been meditating in her basement. It was in the dark of winter—a gray February. And her basement had only a small window.

We finished the meditation and sat still with our eyes closed. It was then that I felt a kiss of sunshine on my cheek and knew it was my father. There was no whisper in the ear. No materialization of shape. There was just a kiss of sunshine on my cheek in that windowless basement. And I knew.

My other experiences with spirit have been similarly strange and unexpected. So they need to be. For there is no way to be familiar with the unknown.

All of us have had experiences that transcend belief and knowledge. All of us have experienced connections with those who have died. But the forms are unexpected and mysterious. They have to be. To translate these experiences into the familiar is to trivialize a mystery. The more we open ourselves to that which we don't already know, the richer will be our connections in all realms.

reprinted from Beliefnet.com January 20, 2005