‘Channeling’: Living With The Dead

I was outside in the morning sun watering the garden and thought back on all the mornings my mother experienced the same sun, air, and morning dew. I was ‘channeling’ my mother who just died a few day ago. I want to jot down a few of the thoughts coalescing out of this stream of consciousness while they are fresh…

The popular version of channeling is the notion that one connects with the personality of another who is dead. In my view this is an illusion, given that my perception of the world around me, and indeed within me, is a reflection of who ‘I am’—my needs, fears, and everything in between.

The consciousness we experience, and indeed share, is universal. The awareness of particulars, the shades, the meanings, the interpretations that each consciousness evokes differs. A bee see the world differently than a human, biologically at the outset, and agenda-wise from there on. A bees sees the flower and needs to go for the pollen; we see the flower and often feel a need to cut it and put it on display. The initial spark—the light of consciousness—is mysterious sameness, universal, constant. When you return to that, leaving behind any personal agenda, you are ‘channeling’ the dead and the living. Life and death merge as One. [These links are to the Tao Te Ching verses they evoke.]

Even given that we may thus channel the dead, we still grieve for the loss of a loved one. Why? And even more curious for me has been why people grieve for the dead they have never met and don’t know. Even more basic, what is death really? To know death we must first know what life is—it’s meaning.

I now feel the simplest way to understand the meaning of life is to view life as a relationship. Our perceived relationship with ‘out there’ and ‘in here’ is life’s meaning—the why, the what, the who, the how of it all. Relationships arise from a heart felt agenda—our needs and fears. These lend context and personality to consciousness. Being highly social, the deepest relationships for us are generally those we have with people, then come the relationships we have with ideas (beliefs) and things.

That life is in sum, simply a set of relationships, is perhaps easy to understand yet no one in the world can understand and put that knowing into practice. We are instinctively set up to regard the objects of our relationships as real rather than as part of a process. We can’t help but judge the book of life by its cover. Its cover? The book of life is relationship; Its cover are the images that appear to us to be real. This helps explain the sometimes intense and irrational emotions that surround the causes we champion. We can’t help judge life’s book by its cover, and so we ‘believe’ that our particular relationship and agenda is the ‘One true way’.

The agony we, or any social animal feels, when a loved one dies is caused by the LOSS of the relationship and not death per se. Loss is the key, not the object of the loss. The loss of the relationship causes the suffering and it matters not one wit whether the loss is a car, a pet, a child, an idea, etc. The depth of the relationship determines how we feel. Also important is whether we placed all our relationship eggs into one basket. If so, the loss is profoundly devastating. Here we can see the advantage of having a relationship with ‘God’. A true ‘God’, in the broadest definition, is a relationship that cannot be lost, even through the death of the believer.

It feels fitting that death should be my greatest teacher. My first intimate experience with it came when my brother died in the early 60s. I was gripped in a quandary; what was life; what was death. After some months I had an epiphany sitting in the bus going home from work: life and death were two sides of the same coin. That was my first real sense of mysterious sameness. Now with my mother’s death comes a minor epiphany—I’m far too old and jaded to have any major ones . I have realized the final (for me) answer to the question, “What is the meaning of life?” Life’s meaning is the relationship. This ‘meaning’ applies not only to us, but all living things. Beyond that, words fail.