Читать книгу Soul Rescuers: A 21st century guide to the spirit world - Natalia O’Sullivan - Страница 23

The old and the sick mostly die in the quiet just before dawn as the metabolic rhythm of the body reaches its lowest energy point. It is the darkest moment before dawn, the time of the greatest peace. In Sweden they call it the hour of the wolf.

The Tibetan Book of the Dead gives a definitive description of the processes of death. As the organs fail, the senses shut down and the mind-body connection ends. At the moment of death the elements out of which the body is made are said to dissolve into each other: earth into water, water into fire, fire into wind and wind into consciousness or pure ether.

Air is the element of the mind and as that begins to dissolve it feels as though the whole world is swept away by a great wind as it expands into consciousness and all inner energies gather in the heart in the moments before the end of physical life. There are three final breaths as the three drops of blood collect in the ‘channel of life’ at the centre of the heart. Then silence. At this moment an atmosphere of profound peace descends in the room.

For spiritual practitioners this is the moment of liberation of the spirit from the confines of the body. The Tibetans talk of the consciousness flying out of the crown of the head, sometimes with such force that a fragment of bone in the skull is displaced. The Native American describes death as though the body were an old coat which simply falls away to reveal the naked soul underneath. The Sadhus (Hindi holymen) will discard the body when it has lost its ability as a vehicle for enlightenment with no emotion at all. It has become a burden to their onward journey, so they are able to arrest the functions of the body and journey in one seamless movement from life into death. Certain Himalayan yogis will simply go and sit outside, enter a state of deep meditation and allow their body to freeze around them.

There’s no real training for a soul midwife other than just doing it. I know that there are hundreds of people, men and women, who have dealt with just one death as a soul midwife. They were just there at the right time and were capable and moved to say and do the right thing.

Clare Proust

Emma Restall Orr, a Druid priestess and poet, explains that in the mystical tradition of Druidry the adept hopes to reach a state of ecstasy – a profound communion with the divine – at the moment of death. This moment of ecstatic union is said to cleanse the psyche of all the events, hopes and fears of the last life so that the lessons and emotions are not continued into the next. At the point of death you call out the name of your God. In Hindu tradition the aim at death is the same: to consciously give yourself over to the divine. When Gandhi was assassinated his last words were, ‘Ram, Ram’ (God, God), which according to Hindu belief ensures his soul’s place above the trials of rebirth.