Hardcover
-
SHIP THIS ITEMIn stock. Ships in 1-2 days.PICK UP IN STORE
Your local store may have stock of this item.
Available within 2 business hours
Related collections and offers
Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781504380461 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Balboa Press |
| Publication date: | 05/16/2017 |
| Pages: | 250 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.69(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
Until a very few years ago, I was just an ordinary guy, living a fairly ordinary life; work, eat, and sleep like everybody else. I always had a passing interest in what some folks would call the paranormal. You know, psychics, past lives, stuff like that. But I had never really taken a lot of time to think about that type of thing. Then one day I was home from work during the week and happened to be watching The Montel Williams Show. His only guest that day was a psychic named Sylvia Browne. Hearing her talk about the other side and seeing her make connections between audience members and departed loved ones not only caught my interest but started to change my whole way of thinking. I had a few of Oprah's aha moments during that hour, and afterward couldn't do enough reading and learning about psychic phenomenon, especially when the teaching was done by Ms. Browne. Unfortunately for the planet at large, she transitioned home a short time ago, but she left us her body of work in the form of many books and writings.
While I kept reading and learning about all things psychic, I never felt a strong and personal connection to the other side until I had the opportunity to undergo past life regression with an amazing psychic/ healer named Barb Ruhl. I met Barb through my wife, and she led me on several regressions until at one session, we both encountered an entity from the other side. He told us his name was Jasper and that he was my primary spirit guide.
Jasper figures strongly in all the things I write about because he is not only a guide but a teacher as well. His methods of instruction are not exactly orthodox, but he acts the way he does to get and keep my attention. You'll be hearing a lot more about him as we go along.
Once I was directly reconnected with Jasper, not only did my channel to the other side reopen, but my life has never been the same. Barb has become my mentor but also a fellow student, both of us trying to learn and understand everything all the souls on other side are trying to teach us.
Believe me, it hasn't been easy. Some of the truths the other side has revealed have not only contradicted my early religious training but also things about dealing with life that I was taught to believe since childhood. I always thought of God as an angry, punishing entity far removed from caring about what went on in my life. My religion told me he existed, but mostly to judge me after I died and consign me to hell if I hadn't followed the many rules laid down by the church in his name.
Through my interactions with my friends at home, I have come to know there no such thing as hell, God consists of nothing but unconditional love, and we are all directly connected to that love without need of any clergy to intercede. Writing this and my other books has been as much about my personal learning and spiritual growth as it has been about sharing what I'm learning with others.
Which brings us to the subject of this book, death. And more important, life. I'm very happy to be able to tell you everything the other side has taught me so far about those two subjects. So let's get started.
Death is another of those words, like reincarnation and meditation, that has so many meanings to so many people that it almost takes on a life of its own. Ironic, isn't it, that the word death has a life of its own?
For something that is a complete illusion, death has become so ingrained in our psyche that it not only supports a $20 billion a year funeral industry, it has become a nearly complete obsession with some people. Or more correctly, the fear of death has become an obsession.
We even have given death a form, though not a face, in the personage of the Grim Reaper, a guy in a black hoodie, carrying an old-school farm implement. Really? That's what we are supposed to be terrified by? Surely, someone could come up with a better embodiment of death.
As I said, the real obsession is not with death itself; it's with the fear of death. Not knowing when or how it will happen, or if it will be painful, and most especially, insecurity about not knowing what, if anything, happens to the essence of you, your soul, after you "die" is what people are afraid of. Would it help you to know that you plan your death at the same time you're planning your life so that it can help you achieve your learning goals? Probably not. I believe the biggest fear surrounding death still is, without question, what happens after the fact.
Owing to the influence and teachings of our old friend organized religion, people are unsure. Organized religion has always held that it, and only it, knows the secrets that unlock the doors to heaven and hell, and only by believing certain church dogma and performing certain required acts, usually involving the transfer of money from you to the church, could it allow you to access heaven.
Hell, conversely, has pretty loose admissions standards. Basically anything that falls outside the requirements outlined by the various religions to get you into heaven can get you a one-way ticket to that place. Then purgatory, limbo, and any number of other fantasies come into play. It's exhausting just trying to keep track of it all.
The problem is our feelings about death are so complex and come from concepts that extend so far back into the "mists of time," as they say, that we have difficulty sorting out what to believe. Just like the ancient Romans, whose culture still pervades our own, we simply have too many things available to believe. The Romans took pieces of religion from all the people they conquered and fused them into their own existing dogma. They eventually had so much religion that they ended up with no religion, just a hodgepodge of differing beliefs.
We all know in the early years of Christianity, the Romans had some big problems with the idea of another religion. One of the reasons they couldn't trust Christianity was because it was new to them. They believed that unless a religion had some age to it, it must be only a superstition, and as such, Christianity was not deserving of respect.
They also had issues with Judaism because of the one God thing. But the reason they destroyed the main Jewish temple in Jerusalem was not because they had anything against the Jewish religion. It was because the Jews were in a near constant state of rebellion against the Empire.
The fact that the temple was full of gold and jewels also helped in making the decision, of course.
The point is, our beliefs about death and the afterlife are so old and so wrapped up in the myths and stories the Romans borrowed from any number of cultures they conquered to create the Empire, that we have trouble getting to the kernel of what is perceived on earth as the truth at the center of it all. It also doesn't help that this kernel is an illusion because death, as defined by organized religion and modern society, doesn't exist.
The purpose of this book is to help you sort out your own beliefs about death by providing perhaps a new perspective with information I and others have received from the other side.
Nobody ever "dies." When this body you are currently inhabiting ceases to function, and an earthly life can no longer be maintained by it, you, the real you, your soul if you will, simply leaves that body and returns to your home in the dimension next to this one. Jasper says I should invent a word to replace death because like the word God, it's taken on so much religious stigma that its true meaning has been lost. I told him sure, I'll get right on that. I mean, introducing a new word into the English language to replace an old one, how hard can it be?
My best effort would be to substitute the word transition, but as always, that's not quite good enough for Jasper. Borrowing from the world of the theater, Jasper says death compares more to an intermission. The curtain comes down on one life, there is a brief pause, and when the curtain goes up again, there is a new set.
The star of the show may be playing a different role, but nothing changes all that much. So I asked, If things change on stage during intermission, wouldn't that be considered a transition to a different play? And then he said ... I will spare you the entire conversation, but seriously, these are the things that go on in my head.
The point is, just as the old hymn says, "There is no death, though eyes grow dim." The true essence of who we are lives forever, just moving back and forth between home and the earth plane for purposes of learning and growing. So our obsession with death and dying is a complete waste of sometimes large chunks of what little time we have here on earth. We need to, as Cher said to Nicholas Cage in Moonstruck after she slapped him in the face, "Snap out of it!"
The words in the title of this book, A Matter of Death and Life, are arranged that way because the first, and shortest, part of the book talks about the illusion of death. The second, and larger, part talks about the much more important topic of life here on earth and explores in greater depth how and why we pick the things we choose to experience before we incarnate.
I don't expect anyone to blindly accept what I tell you in this or my other books. I encourage you to be skeptical and question everything. I do expect, however, that you give serious thought to everything you read and not dismiss it out of hand because it flies in the face of many things you have been taught to believe. As Sylvia used to say, take whatever feels right to you, and leave the rest. If you can remain open to new ideas and concepts, you'll have more help than you can imagine in incorporating a new normal into your life to aid in your spiritual growth.
People always ask, "What is the purpose of life?" The answer to that age-old question is a simple one: spiritual growth. That is the one and only reason we incarnate here. We are not required to do so. We want to because like steel burnished by fire, living a life in the negativity of this planet and coping with all that it brings makes our souls grow stronger.
My desire for this book is to help many people move forward in their spiritual journeys by sharing all the insights I've been given from the other side. But if it turns out that I've only helped myself and a few others, it was still worth the effort.
CHAPTER 2
In the Beginning
It's only been about three years since I had the psychic awakening that started my spiritual journey in earnest. In the sixty years before that, I was slogging along through life like the vast majority of people, bound up in the guilt, fear, and anger (emphasis on the anger) generated by my interactions with family, jobs, church, friends and acquaintances, and the world at large. Somewhere in my forties, I figured out that organized religion just didn't have answers to the problems I was encountering, especially after my wife developed a near-fatal illness.
I don't think I ever had serious doubt about the existence of God, but I certainly couldn't continue to believe in the angry, vengeful, punishing God with all the rules that were being shoved down my throat by the church. Just looking around, I could see what might be called minor miracles happening almost daily, including my wife's recovery from her illness. Why would the same God who helped perform those miracles that improved, enhanced, and sometimes even saved lives then send you to hell for eternity for some infraction of "the rules"? Talking about bipolar personality! It just didn't make sense to me. It still doesn't make sense to me.
I questioned and searched for years until I became aware of the late Sylvia Browne. I became an avid fan of hers, tried to catch every TV show she appeared on, and eagerly read her many books. She taught me many things, not the least of which was to keep a sense of humor about the whole deal of living out an earth life to further our learning and soul growth. And even though Sylvia maintained her ties to her religion, she still was brave enough to teach that there is no such thing as the devil or demons, and there is no such place as hell. She used to say if you want to see hell, just look around; you're living in it.
She also taught us that God is not exclusively male. The source of unconditional love also has a female side for the balance necessary to keep the universe on an even keel. In short, she taught us many wonderful things before she went home, but I still felt something was missing. The connection was incomplete for me. Sylvia gave us an exercise in one of her books that was supposed to help us connect with our spirit guides, and I tried it time and again without success. For whatever reason, it just wasn't working for me. I felt like I was putting together a jigsaw puzzle, but I was missing a few important pieces.
So I struggled along, like so many people do, coping with life as it came at me the best way I knew how. Sometimes I made the right decisions, sometimes not. I always felt there was something more, that I was something more than a person to whom things were always happening, a victim instead of the star in my own little play.
Then, when I turned sixty and was beginning to feel my life was pretty much over, and the remaining twenty or twenty-five years I had left would go on much like the previous sixty, I had my psychic awakening. I can truly call it an awakening because the whole process has been like waking up from a bad dream.
I went through the same feelings we all have when waking up. At first, you're groggy and not sure where you are. Then, as you begin to wake up, you're not quite sure if what you remember really happened or if it was a dream. Finally, when you do become fully awake and aware, you realize it was just a nightmare, and none of it was real — even though at times you were terrified, and your heart was beating fast. Once you're fully awake, you might even chuckle about being so scared about nothing.
That metaphor is a perfect way to describe our lives when we are incarnated. These lives we pick are just scenarios we play out to help us learn what we want to learn about ourselves. They are not real, and the person we are while we are incarnated is not who we really are. He or she is just a piece of us that becomes an actor playing a role for a short time.
Unfortunately, we can be easily convinced that this is who we are, and this is all there is to life due to the amnesia we impose on ourselves about the reality of the other side when we are incarnated. Our subconscious is also easily convinced that what we're experiencing is real in the same way it thinks dreams and nightmares are real, causing you to have that rapid heartbeat and sweat on your brow when you wake up from them.
I have had interactions with people on the other side, including my mother and mother-in-law, that have convinced me people assume personalities here while they are incarnated that are absolutely nothing like those they have when they are at home and can be who they really are. We all assume different personalities when we incarnate for the purpose of learning and teaching.
My mother, who didn't enjoy her most recent life much, told me she treated me the way she did because I asked her to as a way of teaching me forgiveness and tolerance. Out of love, she, like all of us have at one time or another, was willing to completely change her normal personality to help another soul grow. Of course, she was learning at the same time, but her main purpose in the life she shared with me was to help me learn the things I mentioned before. When I see her now, I don't see the woman I sometimes actually hated. I see a being of pure love and joy, which is her true nature.
After my friend Barb helped me to reopen my channels of communication with the other side, I could see not only the whole of home but the actual place I live while I'm there and not incarnated. I saw a lot of my friends and was shown and told what my job is there, which is to help souls that are going to reincarnate plan their earth lives to provide the maximum potential for learning and growth.
Even without being given all the details I received about my life at home, it would have been enough to know there is more to me and to life than just what we're living through now. I had always been taught, of course, that heaven existed, and if I managed to make the cut, I would get there after I died and be assigned a cloud, wings, and a harp to strum for eternity.
Even when I still bought into the whole organized religion thing, the thought of floating around on a cloud until the end of time seemed like an incredible bore. That's why I was ecstatic to find out that I had a job there, like we all do. Life without a purpose, to me, is just an existence.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "A Matter of Death and Life"
by .
Copyright © 2017 D. L. Kline.
Excerpted by permission of Balboa Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.