Chapter 7: Death

It had been raining in Oakland, where I grew up, and the sun had just come out to shine on my friend and me. The year was 1950 and I had just started grade one. We were playing in a shallow drainage ditch not far from my house. The dance of the sun's reflections and the delightful sensation of the cool pressure on the sides of my rubber boots, the earthy smell, and the constant murmur of running water were like a symphony to the two of us. By then, we both had specks of mud all over our faces that looked like extra freckles. We jumped in and out of the water, raced tiny splinters of wood, and reveled in watery innocent bliss until it was time to go home.

The next day, my friend's desk was empty. He had drowned sometime after I'd left him, playing in another much more dangerous flood channel on his way home. I was too upset to hear anything else my teacher said.

I was busy contemplating a horrible proposition, rolling it over and over in my mind, trying to find some way to disprove it. Somehow, I knew I had been responsible for my friend's death. I was the last one who saw him on earth and now he was gone and no amount of thinking that I could do on the subject could bring him back.

When I looked at his vacant desk, I'd never before felt so terrible and empty. I resolved never to look at it again.

On each succeeding morning, my nanny would drop me off at school. I would wave to her and walk in the front door, just as I had always done. Then, I would do something that I had never done before. I walked straight past my classroom and out the back door. I was in mourning.

I found a kindred spirit in the kindly old man who ran the local grocery store. We both had a lot of time on our hands. Each day after I fled from my school, I helped him to clean the store and stock shelves. I found a treasure trove under the floor-a place where change magically collected, like it had been left for me by leprechauns. The truth was that the storekeeper had arthritis, dropped it, and didn't care to look for it. After work I'd draw my salary from under the floorboards and go to the Rexall drugstore next door to buy candy bars, my pockets jingling like sleigh bells. Sometimes I found as much as a dollar and a half, which would buy more candy bars in 1953 than I could ever hope to eat. Instead, I took them home and put them up in a dusty china cabinet at the end of the hall that my mother had forgotten about, where they slowly overflowed shelf by shelf until the cabinet had more sugar in it than the Hawaiian islands.

Two months later the jig was up. The school finally called my mother to ask her when I was returning. The drug store conveniently called about the same time to ask why I kept coming back. I showed my mom the chocolate bars. I was busted, but it didn't matter. I'd done what I needed to do to survive. I'd found solace in work and isolation. It was a pattern that I'd spend years trying to undo.

Much later, after my life had returned to normal, I allowed myself the pleasure of playing in the water again. Four years after that, another friend and I were catching pollywogs in a creek behind my house after school. The day after we played, the hospital called to tell my mother that my friend had contracted polio. I was rushed to the hospital the same day to be tested. I never saw my friend again. He died only days after he was diagnosed. This was all of the evidence that I needed. I was a dangerous person to be with. This belief would complicate all of my relationships for nearly the next forty years.

My next major lesson about death came more than thirty years later, in 1984. The stress of running my multi-million dollar empire was causing me chest pains and a spreading numbness on my left side. My first fear was that I had some sort of heart problem, but after I had been thoroughly checked out medically, the conclusion was that my illness was in some way psychosomatic. My wife Rhonda recommended hypnotherapy. She had been seeing someone for help with weight control and was very satisfied with the results. Although I wasn't all that open minded back then, I decided I had nothing to lose by trying hypnosis. I couldn't have been more wrong.

The therapist's name was Fred Liedecker. He had an office in a beautiful old victorian house in the town of Middleton, where he greeted me warmly with a firm handshake and a welcoming smile. We sat down in his office together and I told him about the pain and numbness that I was experiencing. He asked me if I had any other problems. I took a moment to tote up my life. I was married to a beautiful woman who loved me, had two beautiful girls by her and two wonderful kids from my previous marriage, and I was worth several million dollars. I shook my head. Obviously, I had no problems.

Fred handed me a form on a clipboard to fill out. As I scanned the long list, I realized that I indeed did have problems. I had more problems than I knew what to do with. I'd just gotten so used to overwork that I'd come to associate all of the symptoms of the stress that went with it as normal.

Fred used a repetitive conditioning process to move me into an altered state. I stared at a candle, closed my eyes, opened my eyes again, going a little deeper each time. After about half an hour Fred had me right where he wanted me, laying in an altered state on his couch like a a stalk of over-cooked asparagus. Fred leaned closer and said quietly: "Now look around and tell me what you see."

What I saw was a dark figure towering over me, at least eight feet tall, its face invisible beneath a drooping dark hood. From beneath that hood, unseen eyes impaled me like skewers. Blood roared in my ears like water coursing through a dam. I looked around desperately, but wherever I looked there he was. I was trapped, face to face with death itself. I knew that if it touched me I would die. I knew that if I didn't get away I would die. "Tell me what you see," Fred urged a second time.

I exploded off the couch. "I've had enough of this shit!" I yelled over my shoulder, as I pounded down the stairs like a linebacker. I heard Fred's voice plaintively calling after me as I nearly knocked his front door off of its hinges. Seconds later, my tires were screaming as I weaved down the road in a cloud of blue smoke, Fred's puppet-like figure bobbing and waving from the curb. I threw the jeep around a corner and drove like a bank robber for the interstate. I didn't slow down until I was safely home with the door locked behind me.

I had never looked inside myself in all of my life before and I didn't like what I saw. I stayed away from Fred, told no one what happened and worked harder than ever. It had always worked before.

Three weeks later I skulked back to Liedecker's office. I had tried everything I knew to avoid going back there but once the genie was out of the bottle there was no putting it back in.

Fred nodded sagely when I explained to him what had happened. What I had seen, he explained, was a communication from my subconscious. It couldn't hurt me but like an unopened letter from the war department, it deserved my full attention. I didn't completely believe him but the fact that I was still alive was evidence in his favor.

We went through the complicated induction a second time. "Now," Fred intoned significantly. "Look around and tell me what you see."

I gasped like a goldfish out of its bowl. It was still there. It had been waiting for me all along. I could feel those terrible eyes boring into me again like knives.

"Stay with it," Fred urged.

I could barely hear him. My body felt frozen. "There's no way out," I whispered. "I'm going to die."

"No, you're not," Fred insisted. "Ask this being what it wants with you."

There was no way that I was asking that being anything. All I wanted to do was get away from it, yet I knew that if I got up and ran away again it would only lie in wait for me. There had to be some other way.

Then it came to me. The only way out was through. Summoning all of my dwindling resolve, I stepped forward and past death.

All at once everything changed. I stood blinking in bright sunlight. I had a brief feeling of great peace and then a moment later I groaned out loud.

"Where are you now? What's happening?" Fred quizzed.

"Jesus," I murmured, "I'm with Jesus." Later Fred would show me the notes his wife had taken, which described the red stigmata that appeared on my wrists and ankles at that moment. I was on the cross with Jesus, in agonizing pain, gazing out with Him at the ragged crowd of people that had gathered to weep and gloat at His death.

Then I was a small boy lost in the crowd, watching in horror as the savior of mankind died with torturous slowness under a baking merciless sun.

The scene changed again. We were walking down a road together. He held one of my hands in His, and with the other I held a stick. I batted at rocks as we walked. Jesus looked down at me and squeezed my hand.

"You are my son," He said smiling. My eyes filled with tears and then suddenly I was back in Fred's office and the session was over.

I had posted death as my sentry, faithfully guarding the portal that led to my inner world. Until that day in Fred's office when I finally met his challenge, my world was completely external. I would move into these new worlds slowly at first, like a spelunker, not knowing what other tests I had designed for myself. Eventually, I would travel to worlds beyond my imagining, and when I did I would learn that there are many other ways of dying and that the road to enlightenment is paved with the bodies of our former selves. Whether I surrendered to this process or not would have no effect on the steady progress of the seasons of my life.

The stage was set for me to become a hypnotherapist. I had observed hundreds of Fred's sessions, completed a 200 hour certification course, and then enrolled in an advanced seminar with a gentleman named Bill Baldwin. At the time Bill Baldwin was one of the great pioneers of hypnotherapy, who along with people like Edith Fiore, was spearheading a movement that was taking hypnotherapists into territory formerly reserved for a few daring clergymen and the shaman healers of indigenous cultures. One of Bill's specialties was entity releasement, which was also the subject of Edith Fiore's landmark book, The Unquiet Dead.

Bill would begin by asking his hypnotized client a question like, "Is there anyone there with you?"

"Monty is with me," the client might reply. At this point a hush would generally fall over the class and we'd all lean forward in our seats-whatever your beliefs about entities were, they told some great stories. Once you've heard someone describe their own death, their adventures in the spirit world and their final reunion with God, well, you tended to stop reading a lot of fiction.

"Monty," Bill would ask, "What are you doing here?" Monty would generally respond through the client by saying something like, "I love her and I need to be with her."

Bill would glance down at his notes, or his assistant would help him to find the relevant passage. "Is this the Monty who died in 1965 in a car accident?"

"I'm not dead!" Monty would exclaim angrily. Bill would then regress Monty to the time of the car accident and have him take a look around. At this point the client might start to manifest some of the symptoms associated with Monty's violent death, in the same way that I had appropriated some of what Christ had been going through on the cross. Sometimes the spirits had done such a good job of convincing themselves that they were alive that Bill would have to hold a mirror up to the client and ask them whose body they saw.

"What's happening now, Monty?" Bill would inquire.

"I'm choking!" his client would gurgle. "I'm drowning in my own blood." This was often a very significant moment, as clients tended to recreate whatever illnesses the attaching spirit had died from. If this was the case, when the attaching spirit was released, whatever illnesses it had helped to create tended to clear up miraculously.

Once Monty had been convinced of the reality of his death, the fact that he was interfering with the life of whoever he had attached himself to, and that he couldn't evolve spiritually where he was, he might say something like "I'm ready to go now." Bill would then call upon his legions of angelic helpers, along with the spirits of the dolphins and the whales, to help transport the lost soul back to the light. The result, after all had been said and done, was very often a phenomenal healing on all levels. I couldn't believe that I was learning to do the same work myself.

Although I had heard Bill lecture on the topic and observed several sessions, somehow the truth of the entity releasement process had eluded me, until the one memorable day when everything suddenly became clear to me at once. The force of my insight brought me straight to my feet, like someone filled with the Holy Spirit at a prayer meeting. Bill stopped in the middle of a sentence to accommodate me. "Wait a minute!" I demanded. "Are you telling us that entities are spirits?"

Bill looked at me quizzically. He didn't normally take questions until the end of class. "Yes," he replied.

I fell back into my seat, thunderstruck. I don't know why I hadn't made that simple connection before then, but now that I had I felt like a blind man who had suddenly been shown how he could see. Entities were spirits who had somehow gotten lost after death. Spirits had souls. Spirit were therefore lost souls. I was going to be a rescuer of lost souls.

Not only did it all suddenly make sense; it was also magically exciting. The idea of rescuing lost souls and reuniting them with God resonated with me in a way that none of my various forays into business ever had. I knew right away that this was my true occupation, what I had come to earth to do, and I knew how to do it.

Feeling that I had more to learn about death, and something to offer the dying, I chose to volunteer my time at a hospice. Although I had told the people in charge that I was a hypnotherapist, I didn't tell them about some of the weirder things that I was into, such as speaking to the collective consciousnesses of diseases, or releasing entities. Hospices were very conservative organizations. In actuality they were businesses, and the last thing that they needed was a volunteer witch doctor running around upsetting their patients and donors. I didn't believe that I was a witch doctor, but there really wasn't any other way for people who didn't know me to understand what I did. We've forgotten the words for these things in our culture, like civilized Eskimos who have forgotten all of their words for snow.

My first client had cancer and was in so much pain that she was unable to rest. I was able to help her, and her evaluation of me to the hospice authorities bordered on the ecstatic. Soon, I had three clients assigned to me at once. I would see each of them in the evenings when I was finished with my jobs at the printing company and at the stables. It was a stressful routine, mainly because between my business setbacks and my separation from my wife and children, I felt I was dying inside at the time.

The end to my meteoric career as a hospice worker came when I was given the assignment of working with a nurse who also had cancer and like my first client was in constant unremitting pain. I followed the same winning strategy that I had used previously, which was to put the nurse deeply into an altered state and then ask to speak to the consciousness of the disease.

This time the cancer had an iron-fisted grip on her consciousness and had no intention of leaving. It refused to allow her to separate herself from it, and responded to any attempt that I made to budge it by creating waves of excruciating pain. The pain made communication between the client and myself impossible. I had to stop a few minutes into the session when it was clear that the energy would kill her before it would leave.

Naturally, my client's report to the hospice authorities was as damning as my first one was laudatory. The fact that my client was a nurse made her testimony even more compelling. No more clients were referred to me. I would continue with what I had learned but I would do it outside of the framework of any institution. It was time for me to learn just how much that I could do on my own.

I got my first assignment in 1991 as I relaxed in a hot tub at my mother's house in Fremont. My mom's place had become a kind of a halfway house for me after my divorce from my wife. I was lying back, mesmerized by the sound of the bubbles, and the dance of the earth and the stars, when suddenly it came to me. A voice spoke to me from deep inside myself and it said: Thirty million souls are about to be lost in Africa, and many more will die. These souls will be lost because of tragedy, fear and parents who refuse to let them go. Will you help us?

Yes, I answered immediately. I repeated it out loud to be sure. Thank you, said the voice politely. By the way, it added, you are from the Order of the Messiah. Then, whatever it was left, instantly, leaving me with pruned-up fingers and a head full of unanswered questions. How would I get to Africa? How could one man possibly help that many souls? My questions would go unanswered for almost nine months. In the meantime I searched for the true meaning of the word messiah. When I found out that it simply meant "messenger" I almost wished that I hadn't.

I didn't suspect anything out of the ordinary when someone who worked for me and knew of my unorthodox sideline, asked if I could come out to Kaiser Hospital. Her mother was dying there. I met Dorothy, my employee's mother, in intensive care. Most of her immediate family had gathered there, as incarnated souls have always gathered, to see one of their number off or to greet a new arrival. In this case the vigil was not held by candlelight or in a temple, but under cool white fluorescent lights against a background hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of glowing and blinking electronic medical equipment, all of it completely impotent.

Dorothy's frail 80 year-old body had been lain to waste by a galloping cancer that had metastasized beyond the reach of any conventional cure. The medication that dripped constantly into her veins had rendered her virtually comatose. I could sense an awareness in her however, and a deep and overriding concern over the needs of her family. It was November and they were about to face their first Christmas without Dorothy there to unify them. Dorothy's worries about her family had kept her alive, and subjected her to excruciating pain in the process.

I set up ideomotor responses with her, touching her head lightly as I showed her the route that I wanted her nervous impulses to take to her feet. Communication was very difficult; it took several minutes to see a response arrive at her toes, and by then we were scratching our heads trying to decide which question it was that she might be answering.

In the years that had elapsed since I saw my last hospice patient, my technique for working with disease had evolved to a point where I could simply take the energy of the disease into my own body and release it back to Source myself. It was a strategy that had developed out of my work with children and animals. I soon found that it was often much simpler to work this way, sparing my clients the trouble of understanding a different reality, and myself the trouble of dealing with recalcitrant energies on a level that might cause unnecessary pain. This is what I did with Dorothy. The family thanked me profusely, all of them noticing that Dorothy seemed to be much more at peace in her stainless steel bier.

That evening, when I went up to my aunt's house to clean up after my chores around the stable, there was a message waiting for me from Dorothy's family. She had been calling out for me. I turned around and drove straight back to the hospital.

This time, there was standing room only at Dorothy's bedside. Her family somehow knew that she would be leaving very soon. They were all there, just as they'd gathered at her behest so many other times in their lives. I could see all their stories written in Dorothy's old, lined face. They stood watching her carefully, like Moses' mother might have stood watching his little boat of reeds before the current caught it and took it away down the Nile. I cleared a small space at her bedside and sat down to do what I had been called for.

After I asked if anyone had anything to say to Dorothy before she passed, I leaned close to Dorothy's ear and led her through a meditation. In the meditation, she became an eagle, soaring on powerful wings in a clear blue sky, rising higher and higher. The higher she soared, the quieter the room became. I told Dorothy to feel the warm light of the sun in the air and on her wings, to breathe it in and feel it touching her inside, to feel the sun in every one of her cells. It was time. "Dorothy," I whispered, "you don't need air anymore. All is light. You have become light. Breathe in the light."

Like a newborn baby blinking in the artificial light of a hospital, I felt Dorothy breathe in the clear light of God for the first time. The heart monitor overhead began frantically bleating like a lost sheep. I heard gasps. No one in the room had ever seen someone given permission to die before. I stared at Dorothy. Something else was happening, something that I had never experienced in all of my life before either.

At the moment Dorothy took her light breath, the entire room began to vibrate with an energy more powerful than any I had ever known. There was a loud roaring, rushing sound as well. It felt like God was reaching right through me to gather up Dorothy in a great vortex of light and take her home. Then the entire room seemed to explode and suddenly I could feel the energy expanding outward, reaching all over the earth, until it had touched the entire planet. Then, just as suddenly, the energy drew inward upon itself and completely disappeared.

I blinked and looked around the room. The heart monitor still beeped incessantly, insisting that we all look at the flat line that was Dorothy's last signature. A nurse stepped forward and turned it off. All of the expensive equipment stood by without purpose, like disarmed sentries in an empty prison. A soul was missing. There had been an escape.

No one said anything. No one needed to. We had all felt it. I took a deep breath and excused myself, leaving the family to marvel at the empty vessel that lay as lightly as dew on the starched white sheets. Dorothy was gone, long live Dorothy.

I carefully closed the door behind me and made my way to the nearest chair. The vibration in the corridor had completely changed. It was as if the whole hospital and everything and everyone in it had been instantaneously bleached and steam-cleaned by the clear light of Source. The people passing me in the corridor all had the same stunned beatific look on their faces as the people who had been in the room with me, as I no doubt did. We had all been touched together.

Somehow, in holding a space for Dorothy to die in, we had created an opening for the angels to come in. One third of the thirty million souls in Africa had been carried home in that incredible vortex. The time I had spent in reflection and meditation amongst the horses at the stable was to prepare me for just this moment. If I hadn't have cleared myself so that I could become the "good hollow bone" that the First People spoke about, I would have been burnt out like a bad fuse by the force of the energy running through me.

I went back to the stables and my motorhome. That night, for the first time in a long time, I didn't think once about what I had lost, and how it felt to be an ex-millionaire, ex-husband, and ex-father living on a thousand dollars a month. It didn't matter that my life was a shambles. I was right where I needed to be.

I thought often over the next few weeks of the 20 million souls who remained lost and how I could possibly help all of them. All I could do was wait for further instructions, or for another miracle, but when neither materialized all that was left for me to do was to go about my business. I continued with my daily routine, going to work in the printing company in the morning, and coming home to the stables to shovel manure, clean water troughs and tote feed bags in the afternoons. The contrast between my two stations in life was starkly reinforced by some of the wealthy patrons of the stable, who tended to treat me like I was something less than human. The horses, on the other hand, reacted to me with complete honesty and would tolerate nothing less in return.

Of all of the horses that I had charge of, Cindy was my very favorite. She was a big chestnut mare, slightly swaybacked at thirty-three years old, and wise beyond measure. She had wonderful eyes that always brimmed with compassion, like dark brown windows that looked out over heaven.

I knew something was wrong when I came back to the stables after work and Cindy didn't appear, as she always had done, to greet me. I found her lying on her side in her stall, unable to get up. Every attempt she made weakened her more and more. Even breathing had become an effort for her. She wanted to live more than anything. Her love of life burned fiercely like a fire within her. Even as she lay panting and exhausted, her heaving flanks flecked with straw and manure, that bright flame stubbornly refused to go out.

I got three people to help me turn her over. I could sense the numbness spreading through Cindy's side and down her legs. Every so often she would roll her eyes and try once more to throw her bulk over her center, heaving and kicking at the sides of the stall only to buckle and crash back down again. I watched her herculean struggle for two hours. She tried over and over and over again. Still she lay there like a great schooner undone by the tides. Both of our hearts were breaking.

I knelt down in the straw beside Cindy and gently stroked her head while I prayed. I called upon the assistance of all of my friends, the native american spirits who had come to my home to tell me about Blue Lake. I told Cindy that they were coming to help, that they had nothing but love for her, and that they would do whatever she asked of them. Gradually, she relaxed and stopped struggling. Her breathing became quick and shallow; her lips began to pull away from her gums in a kind of grimace. I had seen this pattern in horses many times. It meant only one thing. It meant that they were about to die.

I heard a horrified gasp from behind me and looked up. Cathy, Cindy's owner, stared at the two of us, her hand held to her mouth. She knew what Cindy's grimace meant as well. "I'm sorry," I said lamely.

Cathy asked me to leave so that she could be alone with her horse for a few minutes. I passed the veterinarian coming in as I walked away from Cindy's stall. I nodded at him and he shot me a tight unhappy smile in return. He knew what he was going to be asked to do. I sat down on a trailer hitch outside of the barn, preparing to hold a space for Cindy's passing. A minute or two later I saw the vet striding stiffly out of the barn. He was going to his pickup truck to prepare an injection. There was nothing else left to do.

The vet walked back toward the barn, swinging his black bag with the big syringe full of poison packed safely inside. Cindy's earthwalk would be over in less than five minutes. At that moment I heard them. The sound of native american chanting was drifting out from the training arena. They had come, just as I had asked. They were dancing and singing in the arena, twenty or thirty of them, beautifully arrayed in buckskin, beads, bone, and turquoise. They had come to offer Cindy a reprieve. Then the vet walked right through them, on his way to execute her.

I wished that I had tagged along, just to see the expression on his face, because a few moments later Cindy wobbled out of her stall behind her proud owner. The vet trailed them doubtfully, still carrying the poison that he'd never had the chance to use. The dancing spirits had vanished. Cindy was no longer the horse any of us had known. She had become a miracle.

I had never seen any of my human clients cling to life with such tenacity, such love. So many of us, myself included, lost sight of why we had originally chosen to come here and longed to go back. Cindy, at the moment when she was about to die, had taught me what it meant to really be alive.

That afternoon Cathy called Terry Ryan, a noted psychic, to come over and work with Cindy. Terry's specialty was telepathic communication with animals. Cindy told Terry about the Native Americans. She said that they came to her stall and spoke to her. They said that all that she had to do was think about what she wanted to do and they would help to make it real. More than anything in the world Cindy wanted to get up. She tried again, as the native american spirits stood over her. The next thing that she knew she was on her feet, with her owner draped around her neck kissing her and weeping for joy.

Cathy shrugged her shoulders when she told me this story, as if to say maybe it was real, maybe it wasn't. She didn't care as long as she had Cindy. I cared a great deal because I knew it was real. It was so damn real that I wanted to run outside and scream it to the world until I couldn't scream any more. I didn't share this with her-I had learned to be careful about who I told about my reality. Instead, I nodded sagely and scurried off to be alone with my wonder and my excitement. My last doubts had been erased. I knew that what I had seen was real, that my guides and helpers actually existed, and that I was able to help bring them forward into the physical world. I knew that I had been part of a miracle.

Cindy did well for the next few months, ambling out to greet me, following me around the stable, and sharing her great heart with us as she had always done. Gradually, day by day, she grew weaker again. It got harder and harder for her to get up until once again the time came when she couldn't get up at all.

We rigged up a kind of tent to keep the sun off of her. It had rained the day before and the only ground that was dry was beneath the rubber mat that Cindy lay on. I labored clownishly in the sucking mud, sliding more mats underneath her whenever she tried to move.

Cathy and I looked at each other sadly. This time both of us believed it was hopeless. While she went to call the vet, I knelt down in the mud beside Cindy and spoke gently to her. I read her a poem that she had inspired me to write. The poem was about the importance of being alive. I told her some of the things that she had taught me and how I had learned to look at my life in a completely different way in the time since she had shown me its true value. I thanked her for staying to teach me these things.

I heard the steady squish squish of two sets of boots coming back to the paddock. The vet's shadow fell over us. He wore the same tight smile that he had worn the last time he had come for Cindy. The only thing that he liked less than putting animals to sleep was watching them suffer.

The veterinarian gave Cindy the injection. She took one last desperate gasp of air, the kind of breath someone takes after they've just been saved from drowning, and then I felt the same unexpected but unmistakable shuddering power that I had felt in the hospital with Dorothy. I felt it reaching through me to Cindy and then it exploded straight up and ripped outward to encompass the entire planet. Then, just as suddenly, the vortex pulled in on itself, like a tornado being pulled into a cloud, and all was still. Very still. Cindy was gone but instead of feeling empty and sad I felt full and complete. Satisfied.

I glanced over at Cathy and the veterinarian, trying to appear as though nothing out of the ordinary had happened so that I could gauge my experience against their reactions. I needn't have bothered to be surreptitious about it. They both looked like they'd just been struck by lightning. Cathy was the first to recover. She blinked the tears from her eyes and swallowed. "Kenny?" she asked. "Is she-" I nodded confidently. Cindy was most definitely gone. So was every entity for miles around. The trees looked like they'd just been washed, the mud and the manure that I was kneeling in felt sanctified, and every one of us was blessed. God's footprints were all around us. My mission was two thirds completed.

My grandfather had been diagnosed with cancer at about the same time that I'd first been offered the mission to rescue all of the lost souls. The cancer was spreading rapidly because he had refused to submit to chemo-therapy. His wife of sixty years, my grandmother, had died two years earlier and my grandfather wanted more than anything to join her. He was a devout Catholic and in the last month of his life he confessed to me that at night when he slept the angels came for him to show him all of the wonders of heaven. As a consequence, he liked to stay in bed and dream rather then get up in the morning, something which caused the family a great deal of unnecessary concern. Finally, they called me to tell me that he had taken twice his normal dose of morphine and that they couldn't wake him up.

When I got there, I could tell right away from the sound in his chest that his heart was failing, and that he had little time. The priest that we had called paced around the bed nervously. "You're letting this man die," he complained.

"Yes," I told him. "We are." I made it clear to the nervous cleric that if he was uncomfortable he should leave and he quickly acquiesced. He was as scared of death as I had once been. It was fine: We didn't need him.

I climbed up beside my grandfather, like I had when I was a little boy, and held his head in my hands. "Grandfather," I told him. "All of your affairs are in order. There is nothing to keep you here now. You can let go with our blessings." I went on to lead him through the same meditation that I had taken Dorothy through. When I felt it was time, I told him to stop breathing air, and to take the light breath. He did exactly as I said. The gurgling in his pleural cavity suddenly stopped. Before I could take a breath, the energy descended upon all of us like a tornado. It was even more powerful than it had been the two previous times. The roar was almost deafening. Then the energy exploded outwards and I knew in my heart that the rest of the souls had been collected.

Each time the energy had come, the feeling had been a little more intense, had lasted a little bit longer, and the afterglow had been more pronounced. Whatever I was doing, I thought, I was getting better at it. My aunt would later say that my grandfather's passing was the most beautiful thing that she'd ever seen.

I had completed a circle, or more precisely a spiral of awareness. Only a few years earlier I had run screaming out of a hypnotherapist's office because I had seen the grim reaper and I was afraid. Three weeks later I had gone back to face my fear. I learned first from speaking to entities, and later seeing them, that death had no dominion beyond the physical body, that life was eternal. I moved on from helping individuals to die, to helping tens of thousands of souls to find their way back to the light. I had become a gatekeeper. I held a gate open by momentarily affecting time, creating a space in which miracles could occur. This would be confirmed for me when I found a tiny gate lying on the ground between my feet during my workshop near Montauk on Long Island in 1994. Now instead of running from death, I was in partnership with it and through embracing death I had come to embrace life as I never had before.