The Peace of the Eternal

I spent most of the wonderful times in my life grieving the loss of them in advance. As a child, I would lie awake crying night after night because my parents would die someday. I grieved the fact that my mom would age. Even the knowledge that the Earth itself wouldn't last forever made me sad. Basically, I was not okay with the fleeting nature of the material world.

I vividly remember a moment when I was a teenager: it was a perfect day--absolutely gorgeous and the perfect temperature, a rarity in South Louisiana. I was on the lakefront with a friend, trying to enjoy the perfection, but knowing that it would end and that I would have a very limited number of these days in my life, I was wistful, and I didn’t really enjoy the day. Moving forward, it was a struggle not to be sad during pretty much everything I should’ve enjoyed. I noticed that I didn’t want to connect to my body because when I leave it, it dies, which was so sad. You might feel that it’s the opposite, that when the body dies, you have to leave, but I feel that it’s my thoughts, beliefs and ideas that age the body and cause any ailments it might suffer and that it is I at a higher level who decides when to leave. And then my poor body ceases to exist. So I tried to detach from it, which meant that I didn’t connect to the body in the way I needed to in order to reach my potential.

I heard Matias de Stefano say that the cells grieve when the spirit leaves them because they’re designed to live, not to die. But he said it’s good for the cells to grieve because it's a release. Still, I didn’t want my cells to be sad. I realized that I rather desperately didn't want them to grieve, even if it was good for them. (You can gather from this the kind of mother I was. If you listen closely, you might hear the sound of my helicopter blades reverberating through time and space.) This is when it became clear to me how much resistance I was in. I was letting my lower mind decide what was good and bad, happy and sad.

I was the willing prisoner of a lower mind lost in illusion. In reality, the body is joyful to be in each moment that it is. It’s an expression of Earth, and when I leave it, it returns to oneness with Earth, which will also joyfully return to its creator one day. In reality, we seek the ever-changing experience of form because we're actually unchanging and eternal. What in the world was the point of resisting this, other than locking myself in misery? Yet we all resist Life in various ways without realizing what we're doing.

So where is peace found? I found some comfort in A Course in Miracles, which says that every bird that has ever sung for you will sing for you in heaven. To me, this means that our moments are not lost. Since time is only part of our experience in the lower densities and dimensions, every moment we've lived and will live exist as part of the infinite, whole Self.

The Course also says that life and death are two sides of the same coin, that heaven is not where you go after death, it’s living in a forgiven world. And what it a forgiven world? It’s what we see when we know that only Love is real. And what is real is eternal.

I saw the truth of this one day when my kids were young. My older son was going through a defiant phase, and after a particularly difficult time in the car that had me enraged, I sat and meditated, seeking clarity. What I saw was that reacting negatively to his behavior held zero power. It was just . . . nothing. But responding with love held ALL the power. Only Love is real. I saw that just saying, "I love you, baby," in response to his behavior would transform it, and that day is actually the last time I remember him acting that way. He could still be surly and difficult, but the defiant behavior must’ve disappeared because I don’t remember any more problems.

SO it was grief that led me to seek my eternal nature. As long as I was focused on the material world, I was in grief, but when I shifted my focus to that which is eternal, experiencing ever-changing forms for entertainment, I found peace. The eternal delights in every moment, and it knows that outside of linear time, which is where we really are, everything always exists.

May you find solace in the eternal nature of the good stuff.

Love always,

B