A New Level of Experience, Part 2

In my last journal entry, I described the first part of a major experience with my wife Anne. Since her death on August 11, 2015, there have been many such experiences, but none so powerful as this one, which took place on the anniversary of her death, August 11, 2016.  For details of the first half of the experience, please refer to my previous journal entry. Click here to read it.

When we met, Anne and I were both hurt souls. Her mother had committed suicide when she was seven, and she had been raised by a distant father and a stepmother who frankly and openly preferred her own children to Anne. I had experienced some very difficult things in my early life, which had colored my self-image and created a constant sense of unease about myself. Our love affair and our marriage was a healing contact between two souls very much in need of love. When Anne died, she was happy and content, deeply seated in our love and the love of the family we had made together. Her hurt was left behind, those who had hurt her forgiven.

This was not true of me, and I understand now that a major reason for Anne’s going first was so that she could help me from the other side. Neither of us was concerned about the afterlife issue. Anne had had a powerful near death experience in 2005, and I have been interacting with the dead since the 1970s, including a period in the early ’90s when a group of people from between lives meditated openly with me for months. So our objective as Anne passed was to strengthen the contact between us–to build that bridge.

On a deep level, we both knew why: I wasn’t healed. What was hurting me the most had happened when I was a baby, and was now locked in the amnesia of childhood. I remembered many past lives and also my entry into my mother’s womb in this life. As I reported in Transformation, the visitors enabled me to revisit the moment I first walked in vivid detail, so I remembered that, too. But I did not remember whatever it was that has filled me with so much unease about myself, and so much guilt. I have felt this all my life, beginning when I was about seven.

In part it was because of traumatic events that took place during my seventh years, when I was placed in some sort of program for bright children that had something to do with being placed in what I now believe to have been a ‘Skinner Box.’ I believe this because one of my dearest lifelong friends was also recruited. He was in the living room when two Air Force personnel came and asked his parents if he could participate in the program. As soon as they heard the phrase, ‘Skinner Box,’ the recruiters were sent packing. Unfortunately, my parents were more open, and did not remove me from the program until after my immune system had shut down from the stress and I had to be placed in isolation at a military hospital to save my life.

But the material I could not reach went even deeper. I knew that there was great trauma, because there is a fused vertebra in my neck that is characteristic of what happens when a baby is dropped on his head.

On the morning of the 11th, as I described in the first part of this journal, I sat at the bottom of a staircase that led up to a library where Anne was standing. I had in my hands a typescript that was the plan of my life.

That evening, I went to Olandar, the home of Leigh and Carla McCloskey in Malibu. (Subscribers can hear both events narrated in Awakening 18 and 19, and I urge you to listen, because the vocal description of these experiences is very powerful.) The McCloskeys host events twice a week at Olandar, and I often attend. I had a call to go to this one, though. No matter what, I had to be there. The Dalai Lama’s Gaden Shartse Phukhang Monks were offering the Vajravidharan Ritual, which removes negative imprints of body, speech and mind, subdues negative forces and gives protection.

I know little about Tibetan Buddhism, but the urge to go was crystal clear and it came from Anne. When I meditated on the morning of the 11th, I saw a man in a Buddhist monk’s saffron robe. I realized that the monks would be at Olander that evening. So I set out to go on what would be quite possibly the most important journey of my life, into the garden of healing.

When I reached Olandar, I joined about 90 other people in the garden behind the house. Before the pond that is at the end of the garden, in the very place where we had said a last goodbye to Anne the previous August, sat an elderly monk, silently meditating. Once the ritual started, the facilitator explained what would happen, and the monk began to chant. I closed my eyes and went into my meditative state.

A moment later, and I was back at the foot of that stair. Anne was standing in the library at the top. It was a full out of body experience. I could hear the chanting and feel my body, but I could also stand up and walk up the stairs, which I did. At the top, I came face to face with my wife. Her eyes were bright with love and filled with knowledge. I thought to myself, she’s more alive than me.

She handed me a green book, not very thick, about the size of a child’s picture book. On it was embossed in gold letters the word "Life." She opened the book to the first page. On it I saw not writing, but a full color moving image. In it, I was standing across a room from a woman. My mother. On her face was the most dreadful of expressions. I was seeing real hate, and through my baby’s eyes this was not only terrifying but also seemed to be my fault. I was scared of her and angry at myself. I’d done something that had enraged her, and I thought that she now hated me, and would always hate me, and that entered the depth of my being, and has remained there ever since, an open sore that I could not see.

Anne then closed the book and I went back down the stairs. Back in my body, I opened my eyes. First, I saw Hunam, the McCloskey’s magical cat, who had died about a year before Anne. He walked right up the aisle between the gathered people. Then I saw, sitting on the bench across from me, Anne. She smiled knowingly and proudly, then lifted her right hand and gave me a little wave with her fingers. Then she disappeared. I just felt so much love in that moment, it was incredible. Love has no end, you know. It has no end.

From long experience, I knew not to stop just because of what had happened. Instead, I opened myself to the ritual and joined myself to it with all my heart. More came, this time in thought, not in images and interactions on the higher plane. When I was born, my mother was unable to give milk. I was fed until weaning on baby formula. Back in the 1940s it was not nearly as effective as it is now, and I had colic until I was weaned. This meant that I cried and screamed constantly for the first six months of my life. Apparently my poor mother just lost it, finally. She ended up in a rest home, and I was cared for by servants until she was able to return home.

The physical and emotional scars that I bear–or bore–date from that early time. What Anne did for me was of fundamental importance to me. I have been freed of a great inner pain that was there not because of anything I did wrong, but because of a situation that was simply too much for me or my mother to bear, that had nothing to do with right and wrong.

When I felt that freeing come to me–in that moment, in that lovely garden, with the chant drawing me into a higher and higher vibration, with Anne’s love cradling me as I had so needed in that long-ago time, I was healed. The scars have melted away and now when it is at last my turn to leave this life, I will be able to ascend just as Anne has, and not be left with unresolved fears and angers in this lower plane. I know, also, that my mother has been freed from something that has been holding her back ever since she faced it herself.

I had a wonderful relationship with her. My parents could see how smart I was. They’d been told by the crazies who had nearly killed me that an IQ test I’d taken at age six was unusual. When I was eleven, mother bought the Britannica Great Books of the Western World series for me, and let me lose myself in Plato and Aristotle and Descartes and all the other great thinkers. I was allowed to indulge my obsession with classical music by playing Beethoven symphonies again and again on our Victrola, to the distraction of my father and my sister. Mom was my advocate and my defender. My mind began because of her, and now when I go in the other level, I can join with her in love, embracing all that she gave me and forgiving what came from our mutual suffering.

Anne brought me to this, and my gratitude is beyond measure, beyond even understanding. In her life, she was a teacher, and from her essence. She still is, and stands ready to help anybody who comes her way. All you need to do is go into the meditative state that I have described in so many places on this website, placing your attention on physical sensation and taking it out of thought, then ask her to give you what you need the most and the wisdom to understand it. Simply say, "give me what I need the most and the wisdom to understand it." Place no conditions on it. Don’t be specific. The dead can see us much better than we can see ourselves.

In my experience, Anne works mostly in dreams, and may come to you in a dream with what you have requested. In physical life, she was the finest interpreter of dreams I ever knew, and this is her chosen medium of communication. (You can also use this technique with your own loved ones, or simply ask without specifying anybody in particular. It is a useful, practical and simple method of engaging with the other side.)

At the same time that I was having my experience at Olandar, a dear friend was at the Self-Realization Institute north of San Diego. He had a profound experience with Anne, too, that in many ways paralleled mine, and unfolded almost to the minute with my own.

I live in a state of love and gratitude for being. For simply being. I have been freed and my mom has been freed.

The picture accompanying this journal is of the bench where Anne appeared to me. It was painted by Leigh McCloskey. If you would like to get on their event email list, you can email carlamccloskey@aol.com.