When we lose our minds, where do they go?

Thank you to DailyOM for the image. Photographer unknown.

 

A former patient of mine, an elderly lady with severe dementia, passed on a few weeks ago. She had commented many times that she was ready to go whenever it happened, but that she hadn’t been invited yet. At last she received that invitation.

She had told me some years ago about seeing her husband a number of times after his death (long before she was stricken with dementia), and she kindly gave me a copy of her notes on those events. However, it wasn’t entirely clear that she was describing genuine spirit contacts; some of the instances sounded more like dreams, like the one in which she said her husband was driving, which I don’t really understand. I wasn’t sure what to do with the less-clear notes and I didn’t use them in a post. Now, since I’m thinking of her and since she did take the trouble to write them for me, I’m copying them here. She didn’t want her name used, she said at the time, so I’m respecting her wishes and referring to her as R. I’ve removed the names of her husband and other family members as well.

Numbers refer to addresses, and names are those of the family dogs. R. wrote “he had both legs” because her husband had had a terrible time with diabetes that sadly had included amputations.

Note that the events from 2000 and 2004 in particular do sound very typical of spirit contacts.
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1998
No. 1   at 1848— New room— he liked it
No. 2   at 8711
No. 3   with Reggie walking towards me on Stilwell [a street], I had Skipper walking to him (going north) he had both legs, and he looked good.
No. 4   8711— in the shower
No. 5   we were sitting huddled together on the curb— it was very cold.

Jan. 1999
No. 6   He was driving me from Eastdale to 8711 in a snowstorm— we had three dogs.
No. 7   S. came, we were having an estate sale at 8711
No. 8   S. came to take me with him to a gun show, going to England (8711)

May 1999
No. 9   S. came to new shop, he was sitting reading the paper
No. 10   We delivered a cake together from CIMM., we had to get more frosting to finish it

June 1999
No. 11   Saw S. and Zack, just for a minute. Zack was jumping up and down— they were going for a walk

July 1999
No. 12   Saw S., he was waiting for me with his arms open to me— made me very sad.

May 31, 2000
No. 12   Saw S. at Lagniappe (restaurant)— he was coming down the hallway, smiling, looking good.

Nov. 1, 2000, 11 am
No. 14   I did not see him but I felt him there at 8711, I was by B.’s bedroom and there was a distinct loud thump in the closet by his gun room— I opened the door & found N.’s duvet coverlet that we had been searching for. I know S. was there, I could feel him close to me. His love reached out to me.

Oct. 10, 2004
No. 15   I saw S. just for a few minutes, he was very agitated & did not speak to me— it was the day G. (cousin) had a heart attack— he was running back and forth— I had not actually seen him in four years

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(R.’s daughter told me that she heard the thump mentioned in No. 14.)

R. was a vibrant and talkative lady, full of stories about her life in three different countries and her experiences of being a child during WWII. (She had been particularly incensed at the Germans for dropping bombs nearby because they scared her dog.) She had been an energetic businesswoman throughout her adulthood and into old age. In the last few years of her life she was severely affected by dementia, and there was a kind of grey curtain covering her face, so that it was difficult to see through it to who she really was.

In Chinese medicine we have the concept of Shen, often translated as “spirit” but not quite synonymous with it. Shen is what you see when you look into someone’s eyes. You know what I mean— the Shen can appear bright, haunted, clouded, darkened, or spaced out and not all there. An animal can project these effects as much as a human can. Facial expression is only part of it. And when it fades, everyone can tell.

When we lose our minds, where do they go? Are they still there the entire time?

Did I ever tell you the story about Adyashanti’s mother and her client? I was reminded of it while thinking about R. Adyashanti is an American spiritual teacher, and in a talk I heard online, he related something his mother had told him about one of her home-health clients. She was working with a lady who was approaching the end of her life, who had such advanced Alzheimer’s that she no longer spoke. The lady suddenly popped up with this statement: “I just want you to know that none of this is really affecting me.” Then the lights went out again and never came back on. You can imagine that the caregiver, as she reported, thought that she must have been hallucinating for a moment. I wish I had more details— I don’t even know the name of Adyashanti’s mom.

Terminal lucidity is well-documented though not well understood. People with dementia also have moments of astonishing clarity. R.’s hospice caregiver reported that R. had at times been with it enough to teach her a few words of French. That’s amazing for a woman who needed explicit step-by-step instructions just to dress herself.

My best understanding comes from Bruce Lipton’s concept that the body and brain are only the receiver, while the mind is a program being broadcast from somewhere else. In dementia, the “TV set” works very poorly, but the program is still going on.

I’d love to see R.’s latest episode.

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“The Source of Our Life Is Not Within the Body”

I’ve been trading treatments with an excellent healer who does polarity therapy. She is extremely competent in reading the body, mind and emotions, and working with her has been fruitful. In early November we had a session in which something quite unusual happened.

At the time I had a minor illness and among other things my stomach was upset, with a stuck, pressured sensation in my upper abdomen. I was in the midst of telling the healer how, back around the time I started this blog, a friend and colleague stopped speaking to me because she was convinced that I was possessed by an evil spirit who was sucking my energy and that of my patients— the “Evil One” being none other than Fryderyk.  (As ridiculous as that was, I’d never been entirely able to clear the event from my mind.  Knowing that someone believed that either Fryderyk or I could be involved in such a thing and doing harm to patients was terribly painful.)

“Isn’t it funny how when spirits are being talked about, the lights flicker,” said the healer. That was in fact happening. Speak of the “devil,” there he was a moment later, intensely in contact with me.

 Fryderyk attempted to help with my stomach, and the two of them had a professional disagreement about how to go about it.  The healer had told me before that she felt that my solar plexus area was functioning very well, but “functioning somewhere else.” She’d been trying for a while to bring all my systems online in the physical world, and I’d been seeing improvements in my health and energy level. Now Fryderyk was trying to connect me more strongly to that somewhere else, she told me, and she didn’t think that was the right approach.  In fact, she felt it was bad for me. “He wants to keep that going because it’s part of how he communicates with you,” she added.

Well, it’s always heartening when someone else can see one’s invisible friends, and better yet, talk with them. I wasn’t privy to the conversation they were having, though. As it progressed, the healer stuck to her guns and refused to be intimidated by contact with a Famous Impressive Dead Person, telling him that she was going to continue as planned because it was the right thing for me. Fryderyk disengaged and left, and she finished the treatment.

I was left feeling nonplussed and uncertain.  The healer described the interaction with Fryderyk in terms that were all too much like what I’d been told in the past when my ex-friend stopped speaking to me.  She felt that he was being “pushy and possessive,” and her perception was that energy was being lost from my middle under his ministrations.  I have always experienced inputs of energy from him, sometimes very large and powerful ones, and never the opposite, so this was confusing and distressing.  The healer was doing her best on my behalf, though, and I trusted her ability and her sincerity.  I knew, too, that when doing this kind of work we must trust and act on whatever we perceive, even if it seems outlandish at times.  (I used to be afraid to mention the most outlandish and unlikely things I’ve seen, but I’ve gained confidence because patients generally verify them.)  If we second-guess ourselves– such an easy trap to fall into– we cannot accomplish anything.

So what could I make of all this?  I can theorize about what was “really” happening, based on a couple of decades of both giving and receiving this type of treatment, but I can only be sure, at least more or less sure, of the parts I perceived myself.  At any rate, I hadn’t had any sense of being harmed or being under any malevolent influences.  Fryderyk packs a lot of wattage and can come on awfully strong at times, so that I can imagine someone feeling that he is being pushy even if that is not his intention.  I can also understand why someone might see him as possessive, which I think was sometimes true of him during his Earth life.

When I went to bed that night, Fryderyk immediately showed up again, and I asked him what in the world had been going on. Fortunately, the cosmic WiFi signal was strong and we could converse far more clearly than we could earlier that day. I asked what exactly he had been seeing in my middle. He explained that although it felt tight and stuck to me, like an excess condition, to him it seemed extremely empty and in need of more energy, and that was what he had been trying to work with.

I heard, very clearly, “The source of our life is not within the body anyway.” He went on to say that I needed, actually, more of a connection to that source. He then proceeded to pour a huge amount of energy into my solar plexus, which I saw in my mind’s eye as a stream of beautiful, brilliant orange flames. It felt fantastically wonderful. After a while he moved to other areas and did a bit more work on me, which also felt extremely positive. I did not become instantly well, but for weeks I had much more energy to work with than usual, and my understanding is that his efforts contributed greatly.

“The source of our life is not within the body” was exactly what I keep hearing from various sources lately, including, notably, cell biologist Bruce Lipton’s book The Biology of Belief. The body is like a TV set, whereas you are the program. The TV set is not the program; it only brings in the signal so that it can be seen in the physical world. Turn off the TV, or break it— the program is still being broadcast, and it exists just the same, regardless of the state of the receiver.

Stay tuned.

 

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