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Chapter 4 - Life
Pain means that something is not whole or complete.
At the age of 15, my father died. He was 39 years old. I was the one who found him. He was hanging by the neck. His name was Alan.
When I touched his hand it was cold and felt like wax. You can imagine how I felt as a 15 year old. I was neither a man nor a child who had found his father dead in violent circumstances. You can imagine, but you cannot truly know until you have experienced it. This is true of any situation.
We, including my mother and younger sister, never spoke about my father again for thirty-five years. When I gave my sister away to be married twelve years after my father had died, my brother-in-law did not even know his name.
I finally talked to my mother about my father and what had happened when I was fifty years old. During that conversation it was clear that she still carried a lot of pain about what had happened, as we spent much of that hour talking about how she felt. In truth I had wanted to talk to her about how we had both felt for all those years. I just did not have the courage. It was just before the start of The One Project that I knew I had to deal with this, to clear this taboo subject and help the soul healing that was required.
Before I recovered from the experience of talking about it, I confess that I quickly descended into the depths of despair, the abyss, the darkest place you can ever experience, before starting to recover and learning from the experience. I now describe this as a transformational breakdown, followed by a transformational breakthrough, the self-imposed limits of my mind. In other words, I had to go through an enormous pain barrier in order to learn and grow, many years after his death, and it started with the courage to confront the demons, both within and without.
When you lose someone to suicide you can blame yourself, thinking what would have happened if only I had done something different. My sister, then only thirteen years old, said one of the wisest things I have ever heard: ‘If is such a big word, and yet so small’.
Incredibly, I found out not long after talking to my mother about it for the first time that one of my uncles, one of my Father’s brothers, had actually felt the same way, that he had also blamed himself for what had happened. He revealed this sentiment for the very first time at his wife’s funeral. He had carried a similar pain to mine for the same thirty-five years. Experience of another’s death, especially those close to us, has a strange way of revealing how we feel about life and life’s events, and what we feel we should and could have done during life.
Pain tells you that something is not correct, that something is incomplete, or that something needs changing.You cannot mask pain with something positive, like an air-freshener covering up a nasty smell, because the underlying cause of the pain remains. To avoid pain is unrealistic. To avoid dealing with it and learning from the experience you deceive no-one except yourself.
Each of us must first understand the cause of the pain, which is within us, because it is ours and ours alone. Then, through a deep understanding and acceptance of the change within you from what you have learned, the pain will disappear as though it no longer exists. As the Dalai Lama puts it, invite suffering to make it disappear.
If something no longer appears to exist, then it will not exist. There is a new perception, an additional learning, and a new reality. No pain from what you have learned becomes a new reality.
I will tell you some of the things I learned later, mainly about pain and its’ relationship to love. First, I will share a universal truth.
The circumstances of each life are how each soul learns, and will therefore grow. Each life is unique; therefore each and every learning process is unique, including understanding something positive from the death of my father, which impacted everyone who knew him in different ways.
Each time the circumstances and the individual perception are different, in each and every life, until all the required learning of the nature of life, death and creation is manifested and understood within each and every soul.
When this happens, a return to Source, to God (or the common good), is possible. Except with this also comes the realization that service to Source is also a service to others, and that helping and supporting others is the ultimate honour and therefore serves the ultimate good. By this, the will of God is manifest and fulfilled. This is the basis of universal intention, which I will cover in Chapter 9.
Therefore the enlightened always choose to come back until all souls have learned to serve each other and help one another through each and every life. I have learnt many important lessons through the experience, words and wisdom of others, past and present, those who were also prepared to share.
So what did I learn from the death of my father?
Suicide is one of the worst forms of death, mainly because it seems to defy explanation. I now know that it relates to a lack of self worth, connection with others and a love of one-self.
However, I only learned this lesson fully thirty-five years later when my eldest daughter and her fiancé lost a dear friend who had taken his own life in his early twenties. This means that the learning can take many years, and sometimes only with the benefit of reflecting on information shared and received through the related and connected experience of others.
When I spoke to my daughter about her experience, I asked her how she felt. She said that she regretted something: That she had not told her friend that she loved him while he was still alive and that if all his friends had told him how special he was to them that he might not have done what he did.
I also asked her if she had learned anything from this. She replied by saying that from now on she would tell all those she loves how important they are to her. From that moment, the pain of my father’s death disappeared. The barrier had been broken through, because I had learnt what I truly needed to understand.
I would like to say how proud I am of my daughter to have had the courage to say that and, in doing so, I think she may have taught many of us a valuable lesson. If what she said is true, and we can all learn from this experience, then neither her friend’s nor my father’s deaths were in vain. Their deaths were part of the circle of life which is here to teach us how to live, with others in mind, that their innate need for belonging and to be loved are no different to our own.
I also remember something my grandfather told me just a few months before he died.
We were in Spain on a family holiday and my father, sister, an uncle and I had been horse riding together for several hours in the hot sun on very hard leather saddles. When we arrived back at the hotel, my uncle, who had been wearing thin cotton shorts, was walking with his legs apart and couldn’t sit down properly without wincing. At dinner that evening I asked my grandfather if he would go horse riding with us the next day. He made us all laugh when he replied, “No, I have learnt Ross’s lesson”. Ross was my uncle’s name.
Wouldn’t it be good if we could actually learn from others’ mistakes? Unfortunately we sometimes have to learn the lesson ourselves.
My grandfather was a very wise man. He was a professional soldier in the Second World War, and risked his life many times. I never understood then why he was so wise. I do now.
That was the last family holiday all of us had together, as within just over two years my family lost my grandfather, grandmother and my father, my father exactly two years after my grandfather’s death.
When my grandfather died, I cried for week. When my father died, I could not cry for six months. That is the nature of pain that is individual and cannot be shared, our own life’s journey from which we must learn.
Why does God give us pain? So that we can learn about love.
Why does God want us to learn about love? So that we can become like Him or Her.
Why does God want us to become like Him or Her? So that God can be fulfilled, manifest within us, as a part of us, as One.
Does God feel pain? When we, His children separate, I am sure that this is true.
We separate to learn how to unify, keeping that which is sustainable as individuals. Love is the super-glue.
This little poem might help an understanding of how we can all learn about life and each other:
I think what this is all about,
The way it’s meant to be:
At one with all upon this Earth,
Enough of ‘you’ and ‘me’.
Learn to do what you can for others, when you can, while they are still alive. Then you will be able to understand the purpose of life, and in the process to find your higher self.
Through this, you will also find your own reconnection with Source, which is the same thing for all of us and within all of us. After all, love is when someone or something is more important than one-self, by seeing one-self without the ‘self’.
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