Will I See My Mom Again?
In a spiritual conundrum submitted to Spiritual Insights for Everyday Life, a reader named Tom asks:
I just stumbled upon your website in my spiritual search and I am glad I did. Over the last 3 years I take lost both my parents and these events accept made me consciously enlightened of my own death. I used to feel more comfortable with what awaits united states on the other side but I am now more scared than ever there may be nothing. I judge I am looking for some comfort that my parents are ok and I will come across them again one 24-hour interval. Thanks.
First, my thoughts are with you, Tom, on the loss of your parents.
Rising from Decease
Both of my parents also died within the past few years. I wrote nigh their passing in an commodity, "When Death is a Celebration."
It is very common for usa to contemplate the significant of life and death when our parents' fourth dimension of death arrives. Whatever our relationship may have been with them, knowing that they are gone changes our view of ourselves. There is no longer an older generation above us. Now, in a psychological sense, we're on our ain. Now we have to recall nigh why we're here on earth, and about where we are headed in life and in our own eventual expiry.
And so your spiritual conundrum raises at to the lowest degree two issues that confront us at the time of our parents' deaths:
- Are my parents okay, and will I see them again one day?
- What does my parents' death hateful for my own life?
Let's look at these questions in contrary order.
The changing of the guard
First, this commodity is about when our parents die having lived out a reasonable lifespan, then that we, their children, are well into adulthood ourselves. I sense from the mode you phrase things that this is your situation.
As long as our parents are alive, even if nosotros ourselves are well forth in years, there is a sense that the older generation is still present and bachelor for us to turn to. In an odd mode, this is true even if they can no longer have intendance of themselves, and no longer have their full mental capacities. Nosotros may even be taking care of them. But assuming they were reasonably skilful parents, fifty-fifty then we take a feeling that those who took intendance of us, and who we turned to in trouble, are still here with u.s.a.—even if they may be hidden away in a deteriorating physical body and brain that prevents them from being fully themselves.
When our parents dice, the reality settles in that they are no longer here. Whether they were salubrious and with it right up to the finish or spent years not being truly themselves before they died, there is a sure finality about death. The people who raised usa and to whom we turned more times than we can count are gone.
This causes united states of america to re-evaluate our own life and to realize, sometimes with a stupor, that we ourselves are now truly the ones in accuse. There is no parental safety net to fall dorsum on. Whatever nosotros make of our life, that'due south what it is.
And of course, though we may have faced the decease of friends and acquaintances, the death of our parents ofttimes hits much closer to home. Information technology causes us to think about "ultimate things" in a style we may not take thought of them before.
In short, whatever the circumstances of our parents' death, that issue causes a image shift in our consciousness, our sense of life, and our sense of ourselves and our place in this earth.
The lessons of death
I sense that much of what you are feeling at present is not only nearly your parents, merely near your own life, and its meaning and ultimate fate.
Even though it tin be uncomfortable to reconsider and question things that seemed and then certain to the states before, this is both a natural and a spiritual role of life.
Ultimately, it is not good for us to take things just because that's what our parents instilled into us. Yeah, practiced parents can be a great influence for skillful in our ain life. Simply as long as we are living on their borrowed force and values, our life is not truly our own.
In a sense, the death of our parents is a wake-upwardly call for united states of america. Information technology is a bulletin from God, if you will, that we must at present live our own life, make our own choices, and be fully responsible for ourselves in a way that may never have seemed quite then real when our parents were still alive.
In particular, anything we have accepted automatically and without question, just considering that's what we were taught, is not a full and potent part of our own self and grapheme. Beliefs and ideas that we have only and uncritically accustomed from others are borrowed values. Perhaps in our parents' graphic symbol they were tried and tested in the crucible of real life experiences. But even if we ultimately accept many of our parents' values, nosotros must make them our own by trial and testing in our own life and experience.
In other words, no matter how fine and good the instruction and example of parents, teachers, ministers, mentors, and so on may be, those things are non ours until we accept questioned them, tested them, tried them out, and hammered them into the shape of our own unique mind, life, and feel so that they are truly our own.
And of course, many of us also have the experience of trying and testing things our parents taught us or instilled in the states, and finding that they no longer fit. Many of u.s. have the experience of replacing what nosotros were taught as a child and as a youth with different beliefs and values that make more than sense to us, and work better in our own life and feel.
All of this questioning, testing, and working things out in our ain mind is a healthy and necessary part of becoming the unique individual that we ourselves are.
So as uncomfortable every bit is your radical questioning of issues of life and death that used to seem so comfortable and solid to you, this is a necessary passage as you make up one's mind for yourself what your own beliefs, loves, attitudes, and deportment will be in this life.
I way to look at it is that in dying, your parents take given you the gift of exploring life for yourself, on your own terms, and deciding for yourself what you desire to believe and who you want to be every bit a person.
Though this can exist a scary and discomforting time, it can too exist an exciting and audacious time of renewal, discovery, and reshaping your life!
Where are they now?
If what I've written so far makes some sense to you, then perhaps you will empathize why I believe it is actually part of God's program that in the ordinary grade of life, there comes a fourth dimension when our parents are no longer with the states. For many of us, this means we accept to experience that our parents are gone.
Merely of grade, the questions still linger:
- Are they really gone?
- Where are they now?
- How are they doing?
- Volition I always see them again?
Though there are many more than questions nosotros ask ourselves when our parents die, let's await at these for now, and see if nosotros tin can find some answers and some comfort.
Of form, we could debate these things, and contend over whether my responses to your questions are actually true. If you're in a doubting mode, please read the article, "Where is the Proof of the Afterlife?"
Beyond that, I would simply say, listen to your mind, and to your middle. There is more to life than logic and proof. There is the experience of the sages and deep thinkers of all the ages. And there is a response inside our own heart when we encounter something that has the ring of deeper truth.
So, sidestepping all the questioning, debate, and skepticism, for now I will simply give y'all my responses to these questions.
Are my parents really gone?
Your parents are gone . . . and they aren't.
They are gone from this physical, material plane of life, and from this globe—and they will never return. There will be no physical resurrection at some hereafter Apocalypse. (Run into "Is the World Coming to an End? What about the Second Coming?") Your parents' bodies, whether buried or cremated, will "go the way of all the globe" (Joshua 23:14; 1 Kings 2:2) The materials of which they were composed volition "return to the dust" (Genesis three:nineteen; Task 34:15; Psalm 104:29) of the physical ecosystem from which they came.
And still, your parents themselves are not actually gone. Yes, you knew your parents through their concrete bodies, their actions, their words. Just your parents were not their bodies. It was their minds and their hearts that made them who they are. And those things are not concrete.
The spirit of your parents is still very much alive. Their true cocky is all the same very much alive. That's because everything that made them who they are is not physical, but spiritual. It is their loves and beliefs, their graphic symbol and their personality, their humor and their sadness, their wisdom and their silliness—and everything else that made them the unique people they are.
These things tin can never die.
What we hither on earth call "decease" is simply the removal of the existent person, which is the spirit, from the physical body that had housed information technology hither on earth. From a spiritual perspective, physical death is the birth of a soul from the womb of the material world into the fullness of life in the spiritual world (see "When Death is a Celebration"). And though we cannot encounter spirits with our physical eyes, they are every scrap every bit real and solid to themselves and to i another in the spiritual globe every bit our physical bodies are to us hither in the physical earth.
Your parents are notwithstanding very much live. And if you were shut to them, and they cared for you, they are still nowadays with you lot even if you are not consciously aware of it. In the spiritual world, thinking about people brings their presence. If your parents are thinking of yous, then they are still subtly nowadays with you lot in spirit.
Where are my parents at present?
Here's the funny thing. Since your parents died inside the past few years, they might be living a life very like to the i they had lived before they died. If you similar, y'all tin moving picture them living in a house similar to the one they had last lived in before they died, and going on near their daily lives with one another and in their community.
Of course, they volition no longer be with the people they left behind who are nevertheless alive here on world. But they volition be coming together and greeting former friends and family members who passed on before them. They will be reigniting quondam friendships, and finding joy in reuniting with the people whose passing they had mourned while they were still alive on this earth.
To answer this question more technically, it is most probable that your parents are now living in what Emanuel Swedenborg chosen "the world of spirits." This is a vast region of the spiritual world situated between heaven and hell. Information technology is where everyone who dies offset goes immediately afterwards death. Some stay in that location merely a short time. Others stay for as long equally the equivalent of a few decades here on earth. Everyone stays there every bit long as necessary to get their lives sorted out and to gain clarity well-nigh who they truly are in their real, inner cocky.
For more on the earth of spirits and what happens to us after we die, please see the article, "What Happens To Us When Nosotros Die?"
How are my parents doing?
During the course of their fourth dimension in the world of spirits, your parents will gradually grow younger in body, until their spiritual body—which is only as real and solid at that place as our concrete torso is here—regains its youthful strength and vigor. Exercise you lot accept pictures of your parents when they were young? If and then, that volition requite you some thought of what they are starting to look like now.
It doesn't happen all at in one case. Simply before long, they will leave backside all of the frailties of age, and experience young and stiff again! That's because in our minds, fifty-fifty when we are old we are yet young. Toward the end of his life, my own male parent forgot everything that merely happened more than about ten minutes agone. But he would regale u.s.a. with stories of how he met his helpmate (my female parent) over threescore years ago. He would tell us over and over again how she would put on her jeans and jump behind him on his motorcycle so that they could go for a ride together. "That's my gal!" he would say!
Now, I don't know if my father volition get himself a pair of wheels in the spiritual world. Only I wouldn't put it past him! If you tin can moving picture your own parents in their younger years, enjoying the pursuits and pastimes that they did in those days, and then perhaps you lot tin gain some idea of how they are doing, and what they are doing.
Of course, there's more than to the spiritual globe than fun and games. Your parents volition at present be opening up their hearts and minds in a way that they may never have been able to exercise fully while they were still alive in the material earth. Social strictures and obligations often suppress our full personality, expression, and joy of life here on world. In the spiritual world, those external strictures are taken abroad more and more, until we can fully express who we truly are, centre, mind, and soul.
Did you have a glimpse of who your parents were in their middle of hearts? If so, and then you can get some deeper sense of how they are doing, and what they are devoting their lives to at present that they no longer take to worry near social customs or money or expiry or taxes.
In brusque, assuming your parents were good people, they are doing better than fine. Every day they spend in the spiritual world, they are able to limited themselves more than and more fully, and live more and more of the kind of life they truly love.
Will I e'er meet my parents again?
If you're with me so far, then the answer to this one is easy:
Yes!
When it comes our time to die, and nosotros leave backside this physical world and enter the spiritual earth, we will be able to meet and get together with all of the friends, family, acquaintances, and coworkers who take died earlier usa.
How?
Simply by thinking about them.
Every bit I said earlier, in the spiritual world, when we think about someone it causes them to be present with us. Of course, it'south really a little more complicated than that—just there'due south no need to get into the complications now. In the spiritual world, when we think about someone and want to see them, it brings the states closer to them. The very deed of thinking nearly them carries us into the same spiritual "infinite" that they are in, then that we tin meet them and talk to them.
And of course, the ones we will think nigh the most, and virtually want to meet, will be the ones nosotros have been closest to in this life. In the spiritual globe, at that place is great liberty to travel hither and there, and to become together with anyone we want to see. (It is also possible to get away from those we don't want to see.)
When our time to die comes, it is very natural for us to think about the people we loved who take died before us. And because nosotros are thinking almost them, it is very probable that they will be the beginning ones to greet united states when we wake upwardly in the spiritual globe.
From the brief words in your spiritual puzzler, you seem to recall of your parents with dear and affection. And I suspect those feelings are mutual. So I fully expect that you will come across them soon after you die. Yous will then be able to spend as much fourth dimension with them as you desire.
Where does all of this come from?
You may ask, "How tin can y'all speak about these things with such assurance? Where did all this stuff come from?"
These are not my own ideas. I did not pull them out of thin air. Yes, I've spent many years contemplating the afterlife, and coming to some of my ain conclusions.
I've besides read many accounts of nigh-death experiences, and found them confirmatory of what I had already believed about the spiritual earth. I even wrote a volume almost nearly-expiry experiences nigh twenty years ago, chosen Expiry and Rebirth.
Even so, if yous want the real story of the afterlife from someone who spent many years exploring that realm while still living here on earth, the book for you is Heaven and Hell, by Emanuel Swedenborg.
Are y'all a bit skeptical?
That'south only natural.
For a fiddling more background on Swedenborg earlier yous take the plunge, see: "Who was Swedenborg? What Should I Read?" This post and video likewise offer links where y'all can purchase Heaven and Hell as a print or Kindle volume, or download free PDF and Eastward-Book (epub) versions.
Beyond that, all I tin say is: Read the book! Then decide for yourself whether the spiritual realm that Swedenborg described in vivid item over 250 years ago makes sense to your mind . . . and to your heart.
This article is a response to a spiritual conundrum submitted by a reader.
For farther reading:
- What Happens To Us When We Dice?
- Who Are the Angels and How Do They Live?
- Where are my Children who accept Died? Will I Ever Encounter Them Again?
- Heaven and Hell, by Emanuel Swedenborg
- Sky, Regeneration, and the Significant of Life on World
Source: https://leewoof.org/2014/02/14/what-does-it-mean-when-my-parents-die-will-i-see-them-again/
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