My Teacher

Not really sure what my teacher was. My teacher seemed human enough in form and disposition, except for those two small horns. I painted his picture when I was four or five, but lost it when I was 24 or so. He had a dark countenance of a reddish brown complexion similar in appearance to a Muslim guru whom I met through my father. My teacher would appear out of thin air in a burning ring of fire. We had no common language, but I needed only to look at him to understand what he was trying to teach me. So our journeys were spent in silence.
Time after time he would take me through his burning ring of fire and we would arrive in places distant in time and space. Typically we arrived on the scene of some horrific calamity or other; war, famine or plague seemed to characterize all of our destinations. Wherever we arrived the dead and dying were thronging about us seeking succor. My teacher would turn my mind back along the trail of cause and event leading to whatever disaster we were studying and each time I saw how human failings had led to these terrible events. One object of my teacher's lessons was to understand the chain of events, to be able to recognize disasters in the making and ultimately determine a means to prevent them in the future.
But, perhaps the primary lesson my teacher pressed upon me was a sort of post mortem therapy for the dead. You can best see a portrayal of something akin to the 'afterlife' I am familiar with in Robin Williams’s movie "What Dreams May Come".
I put the 'afterlife' in quotes because there is really only life and more life, life everlasting, and the place we may find ourselves in between lives is still a part of being alive, except that we are no longer in the 'real' world and occupy a world that is a projection of our mind and our expectations. The need for therapists in this interregnum between lives is relative. A soul spending too long in this non-place can become very ill because they have little or no authentic external feedback from the world they occupy because it is a projection like a dream with little or no grounding influences or 'reality checks'.
Typically people suffering sudden unexpected traumatic deaths are often unaware they have died and are continuing their lives more or less as if nothing has happened, except that they have disconnected from a world in which their experiences are shared with other souls and entered a shadow world where anyone they interact with is just an aspect of themselves portrayed as if it were a familiar friend or stranger. This sort of limbo state is unhealthful and the soul may rapidly or slowly deteriorate over time from lack of external stimuli.
Other souls die such traumatic deaths that they become encysted in a state of denial of themselves. They know they have died, but to block off the pain of their death they choose to believe their death is the final event of their lives and they recreate themselves in a state where they believe they no longer exist, because by no longer existing they can never again experience the pain or suffering that characterized their recent life or death.
Still other souls go on to the rewards or punishments their beliefs pre-dispose them to expect in the afterlife. They have strongly held beliefs in Heaven or Hell or Paradise or Purgatory and condemn themselves to act out these beliefs, recreating whatever form of afterlife they believe they have earned. A devout Muslim terrorist could easily be hiding out in an afterlife fantasy where he has a 1000 virgins, while a fearful Christian sinner might find himself suffocating in a Hell of his own making. All of these souls are in danger of trapping themselves in these belief systems as the worlds they create for themselves slowly wind down as in the odd afterlife described in Phillip K Dick's "The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch".
Irregardless of the sort of afterlife a soul creates for themselves, any world they create must eventually break down under an entropic drift toward disorder; the souls inhabiting them lose their identity and purpose, becoming more characterless and listless until little is left of them but a rather pure and sterile distillation of spirit without character or motivation.
However, there are support systems to prevent this sort of thing from happening, intervention will usually take place relatively quickly, and always the souls who embark on these solipsist journeys are rescued at some stage and are able to recuperate from their experiences.
I sometimes wonder when I write about this particular topic whether I am currently trapped in one of these solipsist creations myself, and if so, how will I work my way out, or wonder if I can even do so on my own; it seems to be the case that once a soul embarks on an afterlife journey of a solipsist sort that they can only emerge from it through the intervention of another soul or Divine Being.
My teacher would show me the cocoon worlds in which lost souls had trapped themselves and demonstrate how to draw them out.
Many souls evade these self-perpetuating dream worlds that plague so many other souls following their most recent deaths. But the souls who do not make the mistakes of making solipsist recreations of their past lives or future expectations may often require assistance too. When huge numbers of people all die at once there is a sort of logjam of disembodied spirits that hang about in one state or another in need of help to find their way back to life. Spirit guides are everywhere among them trying to get their attention and focus them back toward a state where they may either resume their interrupted lives or move on to new lives. Worlds call out to many of the recently departed and beg them to return, and many will return to their old lives and pick up the thread of their existence more or less where they left off when they died.
Each world receiving a resurrected spirit is cloned. The original world continues with the death of that spirit an established and incontrovertible fact. The clone world experiences a subtle shifting of events so that a fatal car collision becomes a near-miss where the victim that had died in one world survives in the cloned world. Spirit guides have an easier time returning spirits to worlds that long to receive them. But some spirits have lived their lives so characterlessly that the worlds they leave behind in death scarcely miss them at all, and the cord that attaches them to their old world is too weak to draw them back into it without a great effort on the part of their guide to assist them in their resurrection. Often these spirits will opt for reincarnation seeking a new life to return to, abandoning their old life.
The space-time between our lives, whether serial resurrections in a single lifetime or the leaps of reincarnation from one life to another cannot be characterized by the properties of either space or time; it is not a world like the one we call 'reality' where dimensions of any sort bear any relevance. We live in that other place eternally, our dips into the fleshy lives we lead in many different worlds are inconsequential in duration; in that place between our lives, we are always present, even while we are immersed in the business of incarnations in this world, and in other worlds as well. To think that this life where we share this blog is our only life is an illusion cast by our flesh, for all the other lives we will have ever lived are being lived now, even while we are living this one.
Our minds are designed to act as filters; each mind has the capability to perceive the infinite but not the capacity to encompass it. A mind that encompasses the infinite is Divine, but creation requires that there be room for more creation and to encompass creation is to stifle it, so the power to encompass the infinite must be surrendered to allow the infinite to recreate itself in even greater magnitude, such that all of the infinite's children may themselves bear fruit and infinitely multiply. Consequently our minds filter out the infinite, reducing it to a smaller set of the infinite, a set wherein we may learn the rules that govern our lives and what to expect as the consequences of our actions. So, while here in this world we are familiar with being an Earthbound human, we are not at all familiar with the lives we are living on Arcturus, or in our primordial past, or in the distant future. Or at least, we should not, ordinarily, be aware of these other lives we are living.
But thanks, in part, to my teacher, I have been assisted in encompassing a slightly wider arc of the infinite than it is probably healthy for me to be exposed to.
One price of that gift of knowledge has been service to the dead. I cannot pick the time or place when I am called but when I am called I arrive on the scene of great suffering with the dead and dying crying for relief and I respond as best I can to cajole them and tease them and wean them from their death so they may live again.
Another price paid for my knowledge is my differentness; I feel alienated among any company. My world view is too distant from those I hear reflected in other people's voices. I have no fellowship ties; my weltanschauung alienates others from me as effectively as it alienates myself from others. I find myself adopting local color, playing a role in other's lives, but never playing myself. I think this has to end somehow.