The Nest of the Dead, part 1

I wanted to be doing more than just changing sheets and emptying urinals for my father. I wanted to be spiritually active. I asked for direction, and A’riquea came to me.
A’riquea: You will want to get the house in order. You have been doing that, in a very physical way. But there is another kind of house. It is the Nest of the Dead. This is the place where people rest after they die.
I tried to do this a few weeks ago, with candles and meditations. It seemed to irritate him.
It is something you do for the other person, but not necessarily with them. It is an atmosphere, of lightening the load, clearing the way.
I’m not sure I understand what this would look like, what it would be.
It is not something that can be described in physical terms, because he is letting go of the physical world, isn’t he? It is a clearing of the path, removing obstacles.
I thought that was up to him.
He is not capable of such direct action. He is ready to go, but his body is not. 

I thought about this intriguing information for a day or so, and I had many questions. First of all, there is the idea that there is some place that the dead go, where people rest after they die. I usually think of death as an un-joining of the body and the spirit. The body goes into the ground, or into the fire, and the spirit travels to other dimensions. But there is some in-between place where the person rests after they die? Who can help me with this.
Universal Wisdom: You are getting trapped in the duality of body and spirit, of physical and spiritual, as if the two are somehow separate. You can think of them separately, but they are not. A person is an energy configuration. The configuration shifts over a person’s lifetime, multiple times under myriad circumstances. The body is the house where these transformations take place, but all of the transformations are necessarily spiritual.

You can begin to think of this like crystal structures. Water, for example, can take many forms depending on the temperature. It can stay in one form for a long time, or it can change shape very quickly. It is still just water, the things that make up water. This is similar to the body with a spirit housed in it. The spirit can flow and change and move.

We have talked about this before. When the body “dies”, not all of the cells die at once, in an instant. Some body systems may stop, but cells continue to have energy and communication long after those systems shut down. Death appears to be a moment, but dying is a process. Death is but a milestone in that process. When a person is dying, before ‘death’ occurs, there are transformations occurring. In your father’s process, this is happening very slowly. 

As you know, there are gifts in a slower death, which is the family and community’s opportunity. These spiritual opportunities are available to everyone who is around the dying person. We will refer to the dying person as the Transformation Maker. The Transformation Maker is doing their own work. This is not the business of those around them. The business of those around the Transformation Maker is to create a path to the Nest of the Dead. 

The Nest of the Dead is not something that is easy to explain. This is because Westerners have very few concepts in place that will help you to understand it. The Nest is a ‘place’, another set of coordinates in the Zone, where the spirit goes to await the cessation of cellular energy in the body. The spirit would like to travel on with as much energy as possible, with as much continuity as possible. This is why people who have died and come back report that they were somewhere nearby, watching events that were occurring around the body they left behind––their transformation was not complete. 

And then I am thinking of how I saw my mother’s spirit at her graveside. It was a collection of small lights that winked out one by one.*

You witnessed the completion of her transformation. She was able to do this because she was able to rest while the transition occurred. You believe that you only witnessed this transformation, but you assisted her by bringing her along from the place of her death to the place of her resting.

Now I am thinking of the many cultures that proscribe a certain amount of time between the moment of death and the burial, often four days.

This is ancient wisdom in practice. These days allow the dead to rest while their transformation is being completed.

And when someone does not get this opportunity, by burning up in a fiery car crash, for example, then they become a Lost Soul?

This is another discussion. There are more pieces to it than that.

A’riquea said that I could clear the path, remove obstacles, to the Nest of the Dead. What kind of obstacles.

There are things that can clutter the path to the Nest of the Dead. Anything that prevents the body from fully transforming. 

I have puzzled many times about my father’s pacemaker––a man-made machine that is forcing his heart to continue pumping. He could choose to stop eating or drinking if he really wanted to help himself die. There are things I could do to help him along, like offer sedatives, or a magnet for that pacemaker. I have not brought these up. It doesn’t seem to be my place.

It is not.

It is not your place because these are things that hurry the transformation process. It is true that he will go when he is ready, and that is not just a physical action. 

Back to the obstacles.

The obstacles that lie in the path of transformation are Points. Points are places where the Transformation Maker gets attached, gets stuck. 

Money seems to be one of my dad’s attachments. He grew up in dire poverty but built a comfortable cushion during his lifetime. In his eyes, it is still something that defines him.

Money can be one of these obstacles, but once again you are stuck on definitions in the physical plane. This is not surprising, since most of the human world is centered on physical points. It would be more helpful to think of the energy behind these physical points. What is the deeper connection of any physical attachment. 

There can be fear of letting go, of not having enough, issues about independence, status, identity, recognition. The usual characters that prop up the ego. As you know, the more you focus on these, the more attached you become. What is required is a shift in attention. Not away from the attachment, because that continues the attachment by using it as a reference point. But a shift in attention to something else. 

What is the something else? The something else is another dimension. It is what many people think of as Heaven. Heaven is just the place where the body does not follow. After resting in the Nest of the Dead and completing the non-physical transformation, the spirit travels on. The spirit is not free of the body, it is free to travel without it. Many beautiful things come with this travel. Humans tend to focus on the loss of the body, which is the loss of a certain kind of manifestation. Transformation allows another kind of manifestation. 

Now you want to know what that other manifestation is. That is an entirely different conversation. Your directive to clear the path to the Nest of the Dead is to help your father feel what he will be gaining by going there. 

Of course, I also want to ask what happens in the Nest of the Dead. Is this the reckoning that is sometimes described as the Pearly Gates. 

This is not your business right now. You are to help clear the path.

*Discussed in chapter one of the next book, Traveling Light.