The Master of Deadlines

 

He is there again, by the fire. He does not warm his hands, which are always cool. His clothes are immaculate His hair and mustache are glossy with pomade. His eyes are black holes.

 “I hope you have not forgotten our arrangement.” His words fall like cards on green baize. His accent is perfect Oxbridge, a little dated, the kind a maharajah might have spoken at Royal Ascot or the tennis club before the fall of the Raj. “You haven’t brought me a fresh story since yesterday, even though we have agreed that you will continue to live in your present body only as long as you tell stories that entertain me.”

I protest that his demand is unreasonable. A fresh story a day is hard to deliver. Worse, the bargain reeks of plagiarism. “I am not Scheherazade,” I point out.

“And I am not a minor monarch in an Arabian fairytale, my dear. Nonetheless, a story a day is the requirement. You used to say that you like impossible deadlines. I am the master of deadlines.”

I tell him, “I am not afraid of you.”

For an instant, he lets his gentleman’s guise shimmer. I see through it, to the terrible, mountainous form he is given in temples that rise from steaming jungles and peeling tenements in the East. I bind him with my will to the playboy maharajah guise. If I cannot choose where I will meet Death, I can still insist that he wears the costume I choose. No lolling, multiple ayes and arms, no tusks or butcher’s knives, no bouncing skulls.

He opens his dinner jacket to reveal the noose that is swinging from his cummerbund.

“I just delivered a story,” I shift my approach. “It is a story about you. It helped her.” I indicated the sleeping form of the lady in the window seat of the airplane. “She is going to Bangalore because the doctors told her that her mother is dying. I told her that you can be a great healer and teacher. I made you sound like the mentor they make you out to be in the Katha Upanishad, the giver of the Nachiketas fire.”

The flames around him flare up. None of the dormant passengers in the cabin notice. The flight attendants in the galley go on snacking and gossiping.

 “I came because I heard my name. But you did not tell it to my face. Begin again. And make sure you come up with fresh words.”

I have written many stories about my encounters with Yama, most of which will remain in my journals. You will find a longer and memorable one, "A Storytelling of Crows" in my book Mysterious Realities. 

Death is lonely in company

Death is lonely in company.
He is always the unwanted guest.
The party stops when he comes in.
Bubbles go flat, petals drop from the flowers,
pink leaves the cheeks under any amount of Rouge.
People don't see his good side.
They see the skull without the skin.
They see teeth and tusks and sickles.
They taste metal and smell decay.
So he dresses up to meet awful expectations.
Death needs a friend who can see beyond the masks.
I think his friend is the shaman.

- Robert Moss

Photo: Autochrome of Tibetan skeleton dancer taken by Joseph F. Rock in 1925. A Buddhist monk is performing the Durdak Garcham, “Dance of the Lords of the Cemetery”. 

Reclaiming the Art of Dying

In most human societies, preparation for death and the afterlife is a central part of life. The practice of the ars moriendi  -the art of dying - does not reflect some morbid preoccupation. It is actually life-affirming rather than life-denying. By coming to know Death as a friend, you release the energy you have invested in trying to bottle up your darkest fears. When you establish for yourself — through personal experience — that there is life after life, you will find you take a more relaxed and generous view of the vicissitudes of everyday life. When you examine your life from the standpoint of your death, you will surely find that there is no reason to perpetuate old quarrels and jealousies. You will wish to put things right between yourself and others, to give up petty agendas and live fully and creatively for the years allotted to you.

In postindustrial Western societies, the neglect of the art of dying has led to a vogue for spiritual practices drawn from other traditions, such as Tibetan Buddhism, which offers a detailed geography of the afterlife that may or may not be relevant to you if you are not a Tibetan Buddhist. Our general neglect is fed by both fear and denial. The denial thrives on our hurry sickness, our tendency to fill up our time with compulsive, external activities — interspersed with infusions of passive consumer entertainment, IV-fed through the TV tubes — leaving no space for the inner search. Filling our lives with a bustle of responsibilities that leaves us with “no time” to commune with soul is mockingly described by a Tibetan master as “housekeeping in a dream.” Sögyal Rinpoche asks, “Would anyone in their right mind think of laboriously redecorating their hotel room every time they booked into one?

Our fear of death is bound up with our confusion about who we are. We fear losing all the props, connections, and résumés that we confuse with identity. We are terrified of being stripped of rank and title and credit cards and cell phones and being sent naked into the next world, as Inanna must descend naked into the underworld.

Your death is a rather important subject, not just the when and how, but the question of what follows, and what it all means. On a subject this vital and this intimate, you would be ill-advised to take answers on trust from other people. But how can we know before dying what lies on the other side, and know this as personal truth? In two ways: through a visitation by a resident of the Otherworld whose information can be verified; or by soul travel, by making a personal journey to the Other Side. My book Conscious Dreaming explores dream visitations by the departed. Here I want to suggest a variety of techniques by which you can embark on conscious dream journeys to explore the conditions of the afterlife for yourself.

An art of dying adequate to our needs and yearnings today must address at least these five key areas: 

        Practice in dream travel and journeying beyond the body. By practicing the projection of consciousness beyond the physical plane, we settle any personal doubts about the soul’s survival of physical death.

       Developing a personal geography of the afterlife. Through conscious dream journeys, we can visit “ex-physicals” — and their teachers — in their own environments. We can explore a variety of transit areas and reception centers, adapted to the expectations and comfort levels of different types of people, where the recently departed are helped to adapt to their new circumstances. We can tour the “collective belief territories,” some established centuries or millennia ago, where ex-physicals participate ins hared activities and religious practices. We can examine processes of life review, reeducation, and judgment and follow the transition of spirits between different after-death states. We can also study the different fates of different vehicles of consciousness after physical death.

      Helping the dying. The application of insights and techniques gained in these explorations to helping the dying through what some hospice nurses describe as the “nearing death experience.” In many of our hospitals (where most Westerners die) death is treated as a failure, or merely the loss of vital signs, followed by a pulled-out plug, a disconnected respirator, and the disposal of the remains. As we recover the art of dying, many of us in all walks of life — not only ministers and health care professionals and hospice volunteers — will be able to play the role of companion on the deathwalk, helping the dying to approach the next life with grace and courage and to make the last seasons of this life a period of personal growth. The skills required in this area include the ability to communicate on a soul level with patients who are in coma, are unable to speak or reason clearly, or have suffered severe memory loss. A vital aspect of this work is facilitating or mediating contact between the dying and helpers on the other side — especially departed loved ones — who can give assistance through the transition. Dreamwork and meditation are invaluable tools in helping the dying to prepare for the conditions of life beyond the body.

               Helping the departed. We pray for our dead in our churches and temples, and no good intention is ever wasted. However, you may have a hard time finding a priest who is willing to take on the role of psychopomp, or guide of souls, and provide personal escort service to spirits of the departed who have lost their way and gotten stuck between the worlds, causing pain and confusion to themselves and sometimes to their survivors. Yet the living have a crucial role to play in helping to release earthbound or troubled spirits. For one thing, some of these “ex-physicals” seem to trust people who have physical bodies more than entities that do not, because there is comfort in the familiar, because they did not believe in an afterlife before passing on — or quite simply because they do not know they are dead. An art of dying for our times must include the ability to dialogue with these spirits and help them to find their right path.

              Making death your ally. Finally, we are challenged to reach into the place of our deepest fears and master them: to face our own death on its own ground and re-value our lives and our purpose from this perspective. When we “brave up” enough to confront our personal Death and receive its teaching, we forge an alliance that is a source of power and healing in every aspect of life. We may now be able to carry a sense of divine comedy that can help us weather whatever life throws at us on a given day.

Art: "Storm Bird Brings Me Back" by Robert Moss

 

Text adapted from Dreamgates: Exploring the Worlds of Soul, Imagination and Life Beyond Death. by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library. Here you will find detailed practices and travel repots.

 

The Angel of the Rushing Waters

 

 I have seen you as a purple bruise in a yellow sky,

as a Scottish soldier with drawn sword

at the edge of the tame land and the wild wood,

as a snowy owl with fierce talons and fiercer eyes

as an Indian death-lord traveling abroad

in a Johnny Cash outfit, swinging a lasso.

 

I have felt you enter as a gentle breeze

stirring the curtains of a window in a hospital room,

and in the raw, thrusting horse-power

of the dark lord bursting into the sunlit maiden meadow.

 

You are a sexy devil.

I love you better than your brother Sleep.

Through aching nights of absence

I have longed for your embrace.

 

I have run your errands,

speaking in your voice to the old golfer on the plane,

negotiating with your razor-sharp precision

the terms for a possible life extension.

I have taken ailing humans by the hand

to your deep pools, to find you – if they dare –

in the troubling of the waters.

 

Few can look into your black sun

but those who do are different.

To know you, to walk with you,

to feel you always at the left shoulder

brings courage and October light.

 

You love to dress for occasions.

I have encountered you as a dandy in evening dress,

as a red Irish big-bellied god, and an Indian flame,

and a white lady whose footsteps are frost.

Your image is rarely in public places

though the medieval mind, like the mind of Mexico,

puts skeletal reminders of you at every turning,

mocking the vanities of the world.

 

On our wedding day

I want you to reach down in your robe of stars

and catch me in your voluptuous embrace

as we leave my old garment in the blanket of earth.

But if you choose not to come in your goddess form

I want you to be wearing my face.

This poem is published in my collection Here, Everything Is Dreaming: Poems and Stories by Robert Moss (Excelsior Editions). 

Art: "Swan on a Black Sea" by Robert Moss

 

Death Is Lonely in Company

 

Death is lonely in company.
He is always the unwanted guest.
The party stops when he comes in.
Bubbles go flat, petals drop from the flowers,
pink leaves the cheeks under any amount of rouge.
People don't see his good side.
They see the skull without the skin.
They see teeth and tusks and sickles.
They taste metal and smell decay.
So he dresses up to meet awful expectations.
Death needs a friend who can see beyond the masks.
I think his friend is the dreamer.

- Robert Moss

Art: "Faces of Yama" by Robert Moss

The Angel of the Rushing Waters

 

The Angel of the Rushing Waters

 

I have seen you as a purple bruise in a yellow sky,

as a Scottish soldier with drawn sword

at the edge of the tame land and the wild wood,

as a snowy owl with fierce talons and fiercer eyes

as an Indian death-lord traveling abroad

in a Johnny Cash outfit, swinging a lasso.

 

I have felt you enter as a gentle breeze

stirring the curtains of a window in a hospital room,

and in the raw, thrusting horse-power

of the dark lord bursting into the sunlit maiden meadow.

 

You are a sexy devil.

I love you better than your brother Sleep.

Through aching nights of absence

I have longed for your embrace.

 

I have run your errands,

speaking in your voice to the old golfer on the plane,

negotiating with your razor-sharp precision

the terms for a possible life extension.

I have taken ailing humans by the hand

to your deep pools, to find you – if they dare –

in the troubling of the waters.

 

Few can look into your black sun

but those who do are different.

To know you, to walk with you,

to feel you always at the left shoulder

brings courage and late October light.

 

You love to dress for occasions.

I have encountered you as a dandy in evening dress,

as a red Irish big-bellied god, and an Indian flame,

and a white lady whose footsteps are frost.

Your image is rarely in public places

though the medieval mind, like the mind of Mexico,

puts skeletal reminders of you at every turning,

mocking the vanities of the world.

 

On our wedding day

I want you to reach from the sky in your robe of stars

and catch me in your voluptuous embrace

and leave my old garment under the blanket of earth.

But if you choose not to come in your goddess form

I want you to be wearing my face.

Art: "Dancing with Azrael" (c) Robert Moss

Notes for the Road

 

To find yourself you must lose yourself.
The One you are seeking is not inside you.
You are inside the One.

To be present in every time
you must be here, now.
Now is the center of all times.

Here, now, you can step on and off
the trains to past and future
and travel on parallel lines.

To get to a place you do not know
you must go by a way you do not know.
Burn your maps to make beacons.

To wake up, you must dream.
Without dreams, you are a sleepwalker
who could join the ranks of the living dead.

There will be monsters, of course,
dark dwellers at every new threshold.
Without them, how could you be ready to pass?

In dealing with demons, you must learn
to choose the forms of your worst fears
and laugh at your creations.

If you wish to see marvels around you
you must carry marvels within.
A mirror can't show you what you don't bring.

The gates of the Otherworld open
from wherever you are. Don’t think
you have to drink jungle juice with anacondas.

Put your blade away, dragonslayer.
You only conquer the dragon when you raise it
and ride it and turn its energy towards Light.

Turn out the lights if you want to find the Light.
The visible is the skin of the invisible.
In the dark, it is easier to see with inner eyes.

Don’t list the Trickster among your demons.
He is your friend if you expect the unexpected
Everything interesting happens on the boundaries.

If you want to be fully alive, be ready to die.
How about now? You feel the cool breath
of Death on your neck. Give him some foreplay.

To find the One, don't spurn the many
Name only one God, and you’ll always end up with two.
Seek the nameless behind the forest of names.

Make your confessions on the road
not from behind a curtain. The hawk will hear you
and the rabbit, the lily and the stone.

Walk on the mythic edge. Let your life
become a stage for divine events.
Notice what neverending story is playing through you.

Look after your poetic health.
Notice what rhymes in a day, and a life.
Follow the logic of resemblances.

Practice real magic: Follow the passions of your soul
and bring gifts from the Otherworld into this one.
You’ll regret what you left undone –

the fence you wouldn’t jump, the dream you didn’t follow –
more than anything you did when your cool lover
stops licking your neck and takes you in his full embrace.

- My poem is included in Growing Big Dreams by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library.

Photo: "Path in Transylvania" by RM

Sunset Road

 

I

 

A piece of sky has fallen into the sea,

So this must be the time.

The Sound is banded pink and heron blue

By the gentle palette of the lowering sun.

 

I strip at the shore of the shelly beach

And fold my clothes neat as Christmas packages.

I was never tidy in life, except in leaving it,

So they’ll know that I left with intention.

 

The water receives me in a lover’s embrace.

Discreetly, the watcher on the reef takes off

And becomes a black arrow, flying west,

Beyond the lighthouse island, pointing my way.

 

There has been a sea-change. The chop and current

That resisted me fiercely, day after day,

Pushing me always toward the Old World,

Now streams with my strokes.

 

I am riding blue water, crested with burning bronze.

How my body loves the sea, its element and its nature!

I swim through all the colors of memory

And I remember the water-world that is my home.

 

Something slips from me like a swimsuit

Whose elastic has snapped, and I am free of human form.

I am a cormorant, fishing and skimming the waves.

I play with the shapes I remember:

 

I am a dolphin, leaping and plunging in its joy

I am a sea-king in his chariot, plowing the waves

I am the Blue Man, tireless lover from the deep

I am the one who fell from the sky like a shooting star. 

 

 

II

 

I remember the sunset road. Perhaps I looked too long

Into the black light at the heart of the sun

Because I have skipped a continent, and return to myself

On the white sand of Manly Beach.

 

For a moment, I am in the body and memory

Of an awkward Australian boy of eighteen

Learning how to make love. Quickly I am drawn

Through green shadows and groves of familiar dead

 

To the World Tree. It has an everyday name:

A Moreton Bay fig. The flocks of ibis birds around it –

Travelers from the precinct of Thoth the Star Voyager,

Measurer and Rememberer – herald its greater name.

 

Its corkscrew roots drill a passage to the Underworld.

Its manifold trunks and branches open many ways.

Its upper limbs are ladders to the World Up Top

Where a couple with black opal eyes help me up.

 

In the lubra’s opulent body I read a pattern of stars.

Her eyes shift. She is flying fox, and echidna,

And black Venus. Her eyes turn as spiral galaxies

And I find she is a way through the Milky Way.

- This poem is in my collection, Here, Everything Is Dreaming: Poems and Stories. Published by Excelsior Editions. 

 

Photo by RM

Risen God, Goddess Rising

Today I give thanks for the risen god
The one whose blood became poppies
The one torn apart by the boar
The one who hung himself in the world tree
   sacrificing himself to himself
The one dismembered by his women
    in the ecstasy of their love
The wild bull called to the goddess
    who faces his killer in the arena
The ones who die when the seed corn
     goes into Earth, to sprout again
The deer king who is willing sacrifice
The one whose dark twin boxed him in
     and scattered his parts
     and rose under beating wings
The beautiful shepherd sent down
     to the Underworld by his consort
     to learn all that women endure    
The one who rose from the dark cave
     in a shining body but still wears
     a crown of thorns because of all
    the wrongs that are done in his name

Today I give thanks for the goddess rising
The one who chose to go down
    to the Great Below to meet her dark sister
The one who was ripped from the daylight world
    to bring treasures out of darkness as
    Queen of the Underworld and of herself
The one who fell through a hole
    in the Earth in the Sky and danced
    a new world into being on turtle’s back
The one who is always three
    maiden, mother, crone
    endlessly recreating herself
The ones who raise their lovers as sons
   and heal the wounded warrior in man
The one who raises the dead to give birth
    to the golden child
The Great Mother of a thousand faces
   whose bounty streams like milk
The Lady of Beasts
The deep mind of Earth
The bright intelligence of stars
The Divine Feminine we need
    to repair our world
    and redeem our kind

I give thanks for the power to die
    and come back on any day,
    Especially on this day.

- Easter Sunday 2020

Drawings by Robert Moss

No regrets

In my workshop "Making Death Your Ally", which I was supposed to lead in Ann Arbor last weekend but then couldn't, as our world stopped, I guide participants into a close-up encounter with a personal Death. You are required to imagine yourself at the moment when Death comes for you. Your Death will ask you a series of questions starting with this: "What do you most regret not having done in your life?"   
    Another question is: "What is the moment you most regret when your courage failed you?"

    The idea is that - if you are given a life extension - you will make a definite undertaking to do the thing left undone, or demonstrate the courage that failed you before, so that eventually you can pass on without regrets on these and other counts. You will find the full questionnaire in my book Dreamgates.

    Now that regular life has been paused for so many of us, I find it very helpful to reflect deeply on questions like this. The importance of the two that I quoted was confirmed when I chanced again just now on a list of the main regrets of the dying compiled by Australian palliative care nurse Bronnie Ware from her many years of experience in this field. The top regret on her list: “I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me."
    Other regrets of the dying that Bronnie itemized in her book The Top Five Regrets of the Dying included these: "I wish I hadn't worked so hard. I wish I'd had the courage to express my feelings.I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends. I wish that I had let myself be happier."
    Montaigne advised us that since we do not know where Death is waiting for us, we must be ready to meet Death everywhere. It is not morbid to hold that thought in a time of pandemic. If we can find the courage to meet our personal Death and make it our fierce intention to live and die without regrets, we bring courage and clarity to all of our choices.


Photo: "Night palms on the Island" by Robert Moss

Oh My God Peaches and a Picnic for the Dead

I am in Seattle, wake up early and decide to take a morning stroll around the Pike Place Market. I notice that the produce stalls are bursting with fresh fruit; the peaches look especially ripe and juicy. I consider buying some fruit, but do not want to carry it back to the hotel. However, as I leave the market, I have second thoughts. I just have to sample some of those peaches. I choose Sosio’s stall, where a sign above the mounds of fruit reads “Oh My God Peaches”. I joke with the vendor that the sign should actually read “Oh My Goddess”.

 I now exit the market a couple of minutes later than I would have done had I not gone back for the peaches.

 As I walk along the street, a VW bug slows to match my pace. A woman’s arm reaches out the driver’s window and plucks at my sleeve. “Oh my God! Robert!” she cries, “You got me pregnant five months ago! We have to talk!”

 I am so stunned I don’t immediately recognize the woman in the car. She reminds me, as we move slowly along the street together, that she came to a workshop I led in Seattle five months before. At the time, she and her husband were trying to have a baby through in vitro fertilization. She reminds me that I helped her to journey to meet the soul of the incoming child, and to develop a ritual to add spiritual depth to the medical procedures. She tells me she feels that our work helped. Though she is 45 and her doctors had anticipated difficulties, there have been none; she and her baby are happily on their way.

 She is on her way to the market and asks if she can take me for coffee or breakfast to celebrate. She has a sudden craving for clams, and it requires some negotiation to get them at a restaurant at this early hour. As I watch her sucking down her clams, she tells me, “It’s incredible meeting you here. I came for the peaches. Sosio’s in the market is the best place in the world for peaches.”

 “I know,” I smiled, displaying my bag from Sosio’s stand. “You came for the peaches and I came back for them.”

 She then told me that she was going to buy two dozen Oh My God Peaches to make peach pies for a very special picnic – a picnic in a cemetery. She and several of her friends had lost close family in a tragic Alaskan Airlines crash a few years before. The survivors had agreed to hold a picnic, as well as a memorial service, to celebrate the dead and the living. As we spoke, I felt the presence of her parents. Her father wanted her to bury a personal item at his gravesite; I received the clear impression of a corkscrew with a twisty wooden handle. I might have felt awkward about passing on the message if synchronicity had not opened our path. She identified the corkscrew immediately; it was a fine one with a vine root handle, one of many her father had collected. Since most his body had vanished underwater, it felt right to lay something more of him in the earth on the occasion of the peachy picnic.

Everything that happened around the market that morning was charged with meaning. From the moment I bought the Oh My God peaches, I seemed to have stepped out of ordinary time, into a deeper, juicier reality. The mother-to-be and I met because of the peaches, yet I took my walk with no thought of buying any kind of fruit, and the odds on our meeting in that way, with that connection, are beyond astronomical. There were important reasons for us to meet, involving birth and death.

But I was unaware of these at the time of our meeting, and had not thought of the mother-to-be since the workshop five months before, while on her side – though she had apparently had fond thoughts of me – she had no inkling that I was visiting her city that morning. Whatever brought us together was operating from far beyond the conscious mind, or any plausible notion of probability. As we enjoyed the shared sense that we had entered the play of larger forces, it seemed entirely natural that her parents should join the party – from the other side of death – to announce their wishes for the peachy picnic before it took place.

What is to be said about an episode like this? The first words that come to me are “Thank you.” The mother-to-be and I both felt blessed to have entered a realm of natural magic, where things operate according to dream logic, and the veil between the worlds thins.  I carry my drum - the one I use to power shamanic journeys in my workshops - in a bag from Sosio's fruit stand.

Text adapted from The Three "Only" Things: Tapping the Power of Dreams, Coincidence and Imagination by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library.

On Dying and Coming Back

I first died in this lifetime when I was three years old. My great aunt the opera singer saw this in the tea leaves but didn’t talk about it until long after. What she did not see was that – as a doctor at the hospital in Hobart, Tasmania told my parents – I “died and came back”. That is still the term I prefer to use of these experiences. I don’t remember much of what happened when I left my body at age three, only that it was very hard to live in a body in this world after I came back, and that I felt that my home reality was somewhere else.

     At nine, I died again during emergency appendectomy in a Melbourne hospital. This time I seemed to live a whole life somewhere else, among a beautiful people who raised me as their own. I came back remembering that other life and that other world. It still wasn’t easy for me to live in the ordinary world, and I was nostalgic for that other world. The gift of these experiences,  and my persisting illness (I had double pneumonia twelve times between the ages of three and eleven) was an inner life that was rich and prolific, and an ability to move between states of consciousness and reality at will.
    The first person who gave me a model for understanding what had happened to me was an Aboriginal boy. He told me, “When we get real sick, our spirit goes away. We go and live with the spirit people. When we get well, we come back.”

    At age eleven, I had the vision of a great staff of burning bronze with a serpent wrapped around it that seemed to fill half the sky. Right after that, I came very near death for a third time, back in hospital with pneumonia. But this time, I came back healed, and was able to live a relatively normal life – except that in my mind, the dream world was my “normal”.
    I had to be fairly quiet about these things, growing up in a conservative time in Australia, in a military family. But as I grew older, I was able to do more and more with the gifts of dreaming. My dreams of ancient cultures led me to my first job, as lecturer in ancient history at the Australian National University. My dreams of possible future events enabled me to avoid death on the road, quite literally, on three occasions.
    In the mid-1980s, I left the fast-track life of a bestselling thriller writer and moved to a farm 130 miles north of New York City, thanks to a hawk and a white oak. I found myself drawn into trans-temporal dramas and the spirit world of a Native American people. I became deeply engaged in issues and dramas from the life of an 18^th century Irishman, a major historical figure who knew the Mohawk very well. My engagement with him opened a link to a woman of his time, an extraordinary dream shaman, the Mother of the Wolf Clan of her people, who tried to influence him and most certainly succeeded in influencing me. She reminded me why dreaming is central to healing, and I cherish our continuing relationship across time. I learned what it means to be so deeply involved with a personality from another time that your lives turn together. I was eventually required to undergo death and rebirth in the mode of a shaman. I see now that, as with the years Jung recorded in his Red Book, all the important work of my subsequent life has flowed from this stormy period of spiritual emergence.   
    What happened to me in midlife was another experience of dying and coming back.  I learned that when you change your life, your true friends are those who will support you through that change and your worst friends are those who try to keep you in the frame of past expectations.
    Dreams showed me how to find my way in my new life as a dream author and dream teacher.    Young children, especially my own daughters, became my most important mentors in ordinary life on what dreams require from a family or community. Time among children confirmed my understanding that dreams are for real, that there is magic in making things up, and that we change the world when we tell a better story about it.

    I started teaching what I had learned, and learned through teaching. I found, as Emerson counseled, that “there is one direction is which space is open to us.” When I followed my calling, doors opened in astonishing ways. When I slipped back and away from my path, doors stayed resolutely closed. I am grateful for that.
     I was now able to give people who were willing to share dreams and other experiences of the larger reality the confirmation and validation I had desperately needed as a lonely boy. I developed an original synthesis of contemporary dreamwork and primal shamanic methods for shifting consciousness and operating in the spirit worlds, and called this Active Dreaming. I found people everywhere were hungry for this. The more I gave them, the more happy and fulfilled I felt. I knew joy every time I saw more of spirit shining in someone’s eyes in one of my workshops.

Adapted from The Boy Who Died and Came Back by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library.

My personal relationship with Death informs much of my teaching and practice. "Going Beyond Death: The Survival of Consciousness" is Part 4 of my new online course for The Shift Network, "Quantum Dreaming". Classes begin on August 14 and run for 24 weeks.

Notes for the Road

To find yourself you must lose yourself.
The One you are seeking is not inside you.
You are inside the One.

To be present in every time
you must be here, now.
Now is the center of all times.

Here, now, you can step on and off
the trains to past and future
and travel on parallel lines.

To get to a place you do not know
you must go by a way you do not know.
Burn your maps to make beacons.

To wake up, you must dream.
Without dreams, you are a sleepwalker
who could join the ranks of the living dead.

There will be monsters, of course,
dark dwellers at every new threshold.
Without them, how could you be ready to pass?

In dealing with demons, you must learn
to choose the forms of your worst fears
and laugh at your creations.

If you wish to see marvels around you
you must carry marvels within.
A mirror can't show you what you don't bring.

The gates of the Otherworld open
from wherever you are. Don’t think
you have to drink jungle juice with anacondas.

Put your blade away, dragonslayer.
You only conquer the dragon when you raise it
and ride it and turn its energy towards Light.

Turn out the lights if you want to find the Light.
The visible is the skin of the invisible.
In the dark, it is easier to see with inner eyes.

Don’t list the Trickster among your demons.
He is your friend if you expect the unexpected
Everything interesting happens on the boundaries.

If you want to be fully alive, be ready to die.
How about now? You feel the cool breath
of Death on your neck. Give him some foreplay.

To find the One, don't spurn the many
Name only one God, and you’ll always end up with two.
Seek the nameless behind the forest of names.

Make your confessions on the road
not from behind a curtain. The hawk will hear you
and the rabbit, the lily and the stone.

Walk on the mythic edge. Let your life
become a stage for divine events.
Notice what neverending story is playing through you.

Look after your poetic health.

Notice what rhymes in a day, and a life.
Follow the logic of resemblances.

Practice real magic: Follow the passions of your soul
and bring gifts from the Otherworld into this one.
You’ll regret what you left undone –

the fence you wouldn’t jump, the dream you didn’t follow –
more than anything you did when your cool lover
stops licking your neck and takes you in his full embrace.

Photo: Path in Transylvania (c) Robert Moss