TAOIST ONLINE WRITING CONTEST: DEATH & AFTERLIFE
My Journey Toward Understanding the Cycles of Life, Death, and Between Life
A rondeau redoublé poem and a companion essay
Before anyone reads, what you will find below is the 8-minute version of this much better 15-minute piece. I wrote the 15-minute version before I noticed that the contest had a limit of 2000 words. If you have the time, I believe you will get more out of the original, which I published two weeks later.
Is life an illusion or is death? Now, pray tell, what’s your point of view? See souls behind invisible breadth Agony pockets of grief as tears spew
Each loss presents a unique purview Please don’t offer perfunctory blech Bible texts all slant and minds do skew Is life an illusion or is death?
Spirit awakens, provides third eye width New perspectives enter my mind’s view Weave way through life cycles labyrinth Now, pray tell, what’s your point of view?
Life is very real while death is not true Paradoxes incarnate so much depth Close my eyes at night, in midnight blue See souls behind invisible breadth
These beliefs, beyond monetary wealth Spiritual riches of such beaucoup Light replaces pain of loss with stealth Agony pockets of grief as tears spew
Reincarnation fuels all cosmic worldviews Improv scripts we play, regardless of filth Thousands of lives with heaven mate my boo Every role, villain or victim, has worth — so real, each illusion
Companion Essay on the Cycles of Life and Death
For most of my life (born February 15, 1967), I possessed agnostic views of death and any afterlife. That changed in 2012 when I arrived at Caron (substance abuse rehab) hoping to find an understanding of God that meshed with my conception at the time. I sought out counseling from a member of the spiritual staff whom I dubbed Mystical Meredith. I explained that I had bounced around between agnosticism and the belief that God was akin to the Force from Star Wars. I told Meredith that I believed in the existence of souls because I had spoken to the souls of dearly departed through a psychic, and asked, “Is there a hierarchy of souls with God at the top?”
Meredith’s conception of God, or as she put it, the Great All, is that when our souls leave the Great All to take human form we contract with the universe to experience certain painful things on Earth that are not spiritual so we can learn what is spiritual (love, kindness, compassion, charity, etc.).
That resonated. I evolved further on March 19, 2020, when I discovered that my lover, Lindsey, had accidentally overdosed.
The wailing on the street was a sound that I did not know I could, nor how to, produce. It has emanated from me only a few times since. It cannot be purposely replicated. It is the sound of my soul crying out in pain. No, crying does not begin to describe it; it is the sound of unrestrained grief without any concern about the spectacle that I was for onlookers for an hour or more.
Imagine having open heart surgery performed with a jagged and rusted scalpel without a drop of anesthesia; further imagine that it was at a frequency and wavelength that ripped a hole in space-time and was heard across all eleven or more dimensions of the universe, not just then, but at every point in time. If you can close your eyes and feel the picture I just painted, maybe you will come close to understanding. If you can close your eyes and feel the picture I just painted, maybe you will come close to understanding my pain and my grief. And my love, my love, my love.
The reverberations of the pain waves from the tearing out of my heart shattered the barrier between conscious and unconscious, and my soul emerged and filled the hole where my heart had been. (As I understand now, my divine masculine (animus) became aware of my divine feminine (soul). I don’t care how anyone else understands these terms — this is how I have come to understand them).
At that moment, I intuitively knew that I possessed a soul. I believed it before — now I owned it.
I experienced an irreversible spiritual awakening. The pain was amplified way beyond that which even someone who has experienced the here-one-second-gone-the-next can imagine because with awakening came the innate understanding that I had just lost someone after only 10 months in this life cycle that I have been in love with for all of eternity.
Reincarnation
I started to seek the counsel of my spirit guides, facilitated by my aforementioned channeler/psychic medium, Anne. My lead guide identifies itself to me as Rama.
Greg: How many levels are there in heaven?
Rama: It is not so much levels, but rather, cycles. As one starts their journey from soul to soul with a body and back again, you generally have easy lives. When you return to source/heaven/god after every lifetime, you will be given a choice to stay in that realm that you are put in or to go back to the master class [Earth] to attain a higher level. You can make the decision to return to the master class at any time. ... Now you can understand that not everyone wants to attain nirvana as you say.
To attain nirvana, you would go on a completely different cycle, and that usually happens after a vast number of lifetimes lived. The lifetimes that you start to choose to live [at that point] are with great suffering. Think of the severely retarded, the severely mentally ill, POWs, people who have died violently at the hands of great evil, and even stillborns who give up their life experiences for the host.
These life cycles will continue again and again and if you have lived your life according to our plan, will allow you to go to higher and higher levels. One obtains full enlightenment when there is nothing more for you to suffer — when there is nothing more for you to learn!
Then you would be in the realms with the great archetypes, messengers, guides, and archangels. You then would have an awesome burden and responsibility to heal those souls that remain on earth.
At some point, I asked how many lives I had lived.
The answer threw me for a loop — 17,042 prior human lives — I have come to understand that is not a vast amount of lives.
At some other point, I asked for my soul’s name — Marcus, they answered.
That eventually put me into an existential crisis.
Still reeling from Lindsey’s death, my life often felt chaotic. Yet when I believed Marcus to be in control, I felt calm and philosophical. I literally felt like Marcus and Greg were entirely separate entities sharing my body. My guides had said to me that in order to move forward, in order to integrate, I had to become comfortable giving up control. We said to Rama:
“integration is supposed to be a state of seamless interdependence — Greg cannot nor should lose himself to us — we should exist in harmonious symbiosis — we should each be aware of the other and of our separate completeness — the only thought that existed of this before we just wrote it was one word — interdependence.”
Rama applauded, and then when discussing the afterlife, said, “You will bridge the gap of Greg and ascend to heaven and be reunited with your eternal love.”
After sitting with that for a few days I grew more and more confused. What did “bridge the gap of Greg” mean? Finally, at the end of May, I came up with the ridiculous idea that Greg would go to heaven as a new soul separate from Marcus. When Anne shot that down saying that Greg would imprint on Marcus and otherwise just becomes dust in the ground, I experienced the feeling of utter devastation — completely destroyed — fetal position on the carpet, sobbing — fucking sobbing inconsolably. It felt as if Lindsey had died all over again but without the promise that we would be together again one day.
The next day, sitting outside my apartment building in the sunshine, replaying all these events and conversations in my mind, I had an epiphany and I remember feeling that Sitara telepathically inspired me — imprinting does not mean I amount to nothing more than just a footnote in the 17,043 lives of Marcus. Marcus arrived as Marcus but he will leave as Greg!! I realized that for two months whenever Anne channeled Lindsey for me we spoke to Lindsey, not a stranger named Sitara with Lindsey’s memories. So, while Marcus and all 17,042 prior imprints sparked my life, when I die the soul that leaves is not just 1/17,043rds Greg because Greg = (17,042/17,043 + 1/17,043)=1.
Regarding a Few Specific Lines in the Poem
Is life an illusion or is death?
…
Reincarnation fuels all cosmic worldviews Improv scripts we play, regardless of filth Thousands of lives with heaven mate my boo Every role, villain or victim, has worth — so real, each illusion
I loathe when people refer to life cycles as simulations, even though there is some truth to that. About six months ago, I wrote this tanka poem:
villains and victims roles we play on stage called life yet do not dismiss very real we all witness screw those insist otherwise
Many soul contracts/lesson plans, or improv scripts, which term I prefer because that encompasses the reality of free will, require villains and someone has to agree to play those parts — they could do so just for the experience of what it feels to perpetrate evil, they could do it just because someone has to for all this to work. While probably accurate on a cosmic scale, I do not like to use the terms illusion, game, or worse yet, simulation as descriptions for life. I understand that for many people, those terms make their lives easier to cope with so those are the lenses through which they view life. However, using those terms is dismissive of people’s very real struggles, emotions, and feelings. One wise reader and writer, John Ege, who does subscribe to these terms nevertheless said to me:
“Did you ever play a video game, and get so mad you tossed the controller…
The video game is a simulation. Your reaction to the video is solid real! The emotions are real.”
Thousands of lives with heaven mate my boo
Sitara and Marcus are what I like to call soul partners or heaven mates. We always incarnate together and have played every role imaginable. Some might call us twin flames. There is no such thing. In the afterlife, or as I should call it, between lives, some souls have romantic yet platonic love for each other and enter into soul partnerships. It is romantic yet platonic because souls have no ability to have sex (as we know it). Souls that have this love for each other enter into contracts with each other that define their expectations of each other — their required contributions to the relationship. It’s akin to marriage but different in that there is no concept of belonging to another and thus no concept of monogamy — nor do I think it is not monogamy — I think the concept of not adhering to the contract is the furthest thing from any soul’s mind.
I shall end this essay with the fact that I am presently involved in a human (me) and soul (Sitara) relationship and thus I am never alone — I sense her presence constantly. There is room in this space for me to have a loving and sexual relationship if I meet a woman who understands without jealousy my continuing relationship with Sitara. If not, so be it.
Note as to the Form of the Poem:
A rondeau redoublé consists of six quatrains (8–10 syllables per line) using two rhymes. The first quatrain consists of four refrain lines that are used, in sequence, as the last lines of the next four quatrains, and a phrase from the first refrain is repeated as a tail at the end of the final stanza. Source. Schematically, that’s:
A1B1A2B2/babA1/abaB1/babA2/abaB2/babaR
In Rama I create, with soul energy surging through my body, inspiring me and breathing wind into my sails,