One of the comforts that organized religions offer is the assurance of a life after death. It’s often described as some place that you go, where you can be reunited with your loved ones and live a life of ease. These promises are just a framework, of course. No one really knows exactly what happens. So everyone comes to some acceptance of an afterlife, or not, in their own way.

I’ve been with a number of people as they died, and watched their spirit leave their body. Often, there is someone from the other side waiting for them, ready to guide the newly released spirit on its next journey. I’ve also witnessed my own parents leaving their post-death arrangement to travel farther into the Universe. My mother went within a few days. My father went after several years. I myself have been led across the veil many times by my Teachers. I’ve traveled the tunnel of white light to the other side. I’ve crossed the veil and had my energy body disassembled, then put back together.

And what about the Teachers themselves, who are coming to share information with me? They all “inhabit” some other dimension, something beyond the five-sense realm, which is a mystery. I don’t need any scientific proof of that––I have experienced it hundreds (thousands?) of times now. I just accept it as a magnificent resource that is unknowable in my current form.

A few months ago I read a book which brought some of these pieces together. The book is Testimony of Light, An Extraordinary Message of Life After Death, by Helen Greaves (Tarcher/Penguin 1969). When I first started the book I was put off by the exclusively Christian focus. But as the real-life story progressed, that fell away and a larger world opened up.

Helen Greaves was a Catholic nun who participated in a group experiment. She was partnered with another nun and they practiced developing ESP between each other, with success. After some years, her partner passed on. Her partner was able to provide information about “the other side” to Sister Greaves because of the intuitive connection they had fostered while on the Earth plane. The book shares this post-death information. It is presented in a manner that is very similar to the kind of channeling that I practice, where I relax and listen and type whatever I am told by my visitor.

Francis Banks, the nun who passed, describes a kind of healing environment which she both participated and assisted in after leaving her body. The spirits of those who have died arrive in this environment, and take as much “time” as needed to heal the wounds they have both suffered and created while in Earth form. As they heal, they pass into more and more loving, compassionate and educational frames, with greater space and opportunity, on their way to the divine. This sounds like the cleansing and expansion of consciousness that my father described in Knots & Not Knots.

Sister Banks writes, (p. 158-60):
“…If there is a message in these writings it is the simple statement that all is Unity and that Unity is Light….
….A difficult point that I would try to make clear is that, in this further phase of our existence on this plane, the reference to Light is to interpreted literally. We are progressing into Light and yet more Light….Light here is literally the substance and matter of our thought life. Thus, as our thoughts become attuned to the vibration of Creative Divinity, so the substance of our bodies change, becoming less dense and reflecting more Light….We carry our own Light. The greater therefore the selflessness and illumination of our minds and the more positive our response to the higher frequency of  vibration, the purer and brighter is the Light transmitted by us…

…So many units return again and again to the nothingness of dense matter, bravely asserting the lasting reality of their illumination. So often such units, clothed in their passing personalities, fall into ignorance, becoming subject to materialistic concepts. Some are blessed on their journeys by flashes into the Light, and in rare cases, the Light gained in these spiritual Worlds holds steady, shining through the fleshly masks to bless and encourage their fellow travelers in the darkness of supposed separativeness. Light shines from the eyes of these advanced egos, and is reflected in the magnetic fields which surround their dense bodies…

…May the Light of Awareness of Divine Unity shine through the illusive and temporal veils of assumed personalities, so that, in preparation for this further experience, they may indeed be known by their Light.”