When loved ones pass away, I don’t think we’ll one day be reunited as much as we’ll forget we were ever separated.
When we pass, I believe our pain and loss dissolves along with our physical and mental memories of the loved ones who passed before us. But, I also believe the folding back of those mental images will illuminate the source of our memories and deep feelings, which is the source of everything.
I think one reason losing a loved one is so painful is because they remind us of that source; the singularity from whence we came and will return. We love who we love because they remind us of the ultimate source, which resides within us both.
This is what marriage is all about; becoming one with another. Our love for our children takes us even closer to the singularity where there is no division, “where the soul never dies.”
This is why people greet each other in so many cultures with a slight bow, with hands pressed together, thinking or saying the words, “the divine within me acknowledges the divine within you.”
From this perspective, we won’t experience less of our loved ones when we pass, but infinitely more. The conceptual separation between us will disappear along with the dualism through which we view the world.
We and the people we love in this world will be what we were before – one and the same.
That’s how I believe we’ll be reunited with our loved ones.
The disciples said to Jesus, “Tell us, how will our end come?” Jesus said, “Have you found the beginning, then, that you are looking for the end? You see, the end will be where the beginning is.”
“Congratulations to the one who stands at the beginning: that one will know the end and will not taste death.”
~ The Book of Thomas
I believe the only thing we ever “taste” is the anticipation of death. Our clinging to impermanence and its resultant fear is what we actually taste. As the author of this quote from The Book of Thomas described, when you immerse yourself in a unitive worldview and realize the end and the beginning are one-and-the-same, your view of death is no different than your view of birth.
And, we celebrate birth like no other event in our lives! We obviously don’t mourn our loved ones before they’re born because we have no memory of them. Birth is a miraculous transformation of the unseen source of everything into a being who we can perceive with our five senses.
What we call death is merely another transformation of that original unseen source back to that which we cannot perceive with our five senses. Our lives are a natural arising from the unseen to the seen back to the unseen. One fantastic continuum with no beginning and no end. The eternal life we’ve all been promised.
What we mourn then is our memory of those gone before us. And, we can choose to celebrate that memory just as easily as mourn it and be filled with happiness and optimism rather than pain and remorseful nostalgia.
And that of course is what all of our loved ones, both past and present, want us to do.
Kinnaird 