How We React to Tragedy

Not that I have any answers, only thoughts to share. This is different, it’s a national tragedy on an overwhelming scale. I don’t know why things like this happen. However, I do know this much. Our focus has to be on love. Your thoughts and mine must be on beaming love from our hearts and souls to those little ones who’ve made their transitions into spirit, and to their grieving families. We cannot do anything to reverse what has happened, and we cannot hope to try to find reasons. It was irrational and made no sense. But our focus on the coverage, on the tears and pain, on witnesses reliving their horror, so that we live it too, over and over again (as we all did for weeks after 9/11/01) cannot help anyone. It cannot heal anyone. It can only tear open the wound over and over, adding our pain to theirs. They have enough pain. I promise you, torturing ourselves will not make anyone feel better. Sadly not much can at this point. But we can send love. We can visualize those little ones in absolute bliss.

There is no pain or grieving on the other side. There is no fear or missing anything left behind. There is only perfect understanding and absolute peace, absolute joy, absolute serenity. We also can imagine the soothing power of Divine love flooding over their families. We can visualize them showered in the energy of love from all around the world. We can think ahead to their joy when they are reunited again. We can imagine the relief of them gradually coming to believe their little ones are all right, in the arms of angels, and envision them receiving undeniable signs from the Universe that that is absolutely true. We can just love and love and love and love. And keep imagining improvement. That’s the only thing we can do. Don’t add to the pain with your own. Add to the love and the healing instead.

It sounds like so little, but it’s truly the most powerful force in the universe. Love. If you want to know what you can do to help, that’s the answer. Love them. Love them. Love them. Anger, outrage, fury, revenge, protests, new laws, arguing online about what went wrong or what must change–none of those things will heal these families. Only love can do that.

I had a beautiful vision about those little ones. I had just been listening to an interview with Dr. Eben Alexander, author of Proof of Heaven. He’s a neurosurgeon who didn’t believe in an afterlife because he said consciousness was created by the cerebral cortex, and once that ceased to function, one could not be aware of anything. But then he fell into a deep coma and his cerebral cortex shut down. And he had the most beautiful, most amazing, most vivid experience. He rode on a butterfly’s wing across a verdant paradise before moving on to unite with the Divine. And I wondered why some near-death survivors report being greeted and guided by family members, some angels, some meet the Goddess or Jesus or a childhood friend.  I suspect the difference there is due to whatever beliefs and expectations that person had in life. Those leftover beliefs create the experience. That doesn’t mean they are imaginary, not by any means. It means that being able to create our own experience happens instantaneously once we’ve left our physical limitations behind, and that the thing that will comfort us and ease us most during this transition phase, is what we will experience.

So I applied that to what (some of) these children believed in, what was most prominent on their minds and in their lives at this particular age and time. And I received this vivid vision of Santa Claus, swooping down to gather them all up into his sleigh, and taking them off on a grand adventure. It came clearly, and I believe in my heart this was what at least some of them (those who celebrate this holiday, at least) saw on their journey across the planes of existence. It made me feel better to think of them making their transition in Santa’s sleigh. That alone makes the vision worth believing in, in my mind. And I know the others had transitions equally perfect for them, according to their most cherished beliefs. The most comforting thing they could imagine is precisely what they experienced.

Beyond that, I wondered about children and death, and whether they stay children in the afterlife or “grow up.” I was shown that what makes us children here in the physical end of things is our lack of experience. As we spend more time here, we learn to manage our bodies and our physical world better, and we become adults. Our bodies grow along with our ability to manage them.  Imagine having the skills of an infant housed in the body of an adult. That wouldn’t work out too well. But honestly, the difference between child and adult is experience here in the physical world.

But in spirit, there’s no need for that. Spirit is ageless and timeless.  I do think children grow up on the other side, but I think it’s a matter of them forgetting that awkward stage of inexperience on earth and floating gently into the knowing familiarity of the ageless timeless souls they truly are, rather than the passage of any time. Time is non-existent in that plane.

They were immortal, ageless and timeless before they arrived here. And for these ones, they barely had time to forget that existence before they returned to it. Let’s leave aside the brutality of the moments before they left this realm. They have already released those moments. They are not being tormented by that memory or by any kind of fear or trauma.  Let’s think instead of the moments immediately after. Their transitions were beautiful and gentle, filled with wonder and delight.

In fact, rather than them “growing up” as spirits, I think the opposite is true. We adults, when we cross over, “grow down.” We become more childlike and innocent as we release all the resistance, all the habits of thought and self-limiting behaviors that made us “grown-ups” while we were in the physical.  We become that pure spirit again, which is much more similar to a human child than to a human adult. The more time we spend in physical, the further we get from that. When we cross over, we return to it in an instant.

This physical life is just a blip in the life we truly lead, which is eternal. We were on the other side before we came here, and we return to the other side when we leave these bodies. And from that perspective, everything we experienced in our lives suddenly makes sense, like seeing the completed jigsaw puzzle and realizing that every piece had to be precisely the shape it was, in order for it all to fit. Things that make no sense to us here, will be fully understood from the perspective of spirit. Death isn’t tragic to spirit. It’s simply returning to that which we truly are, and always were.

This loss is tragic to those of us left behind, however. I know this, and nothing can make it less so. So we love and we comfort each other and we carry on as best we can. But maybe we can find some measure of comfort if we know in our heart of hearts that they are okay, that they are in bliss, and that we will rejoin them when our work here is done.

This is what is true and what is real: There is no death. Only love.

Here is Dr. Eben Alexander’s interview. I highly recommend watching it, and reading his book.