Beyond our Givens - Part 2

Can the fundamental mass of life tendencies [with which everyone is born] be attributed to more than genetics alone? If so, on what basis might it be attributed?

Courtesy: yinvsyang.com

(PASO ROBLES, Calif.) - I know from my own experience, and from being told by others (relatives and friends) that deceased, or persons close to death have involved themselves briefly in the lives of the living, often for the purpose of comforting them.

They are not experiences about which one is prone to speak, but neither will they likely ever forget. Often they occur in the recesses of the mind where what occurs is not discernible to others.

Shortly after my father-in-law died, my mother-in-law volunteered to me that Frank had visited her. She woke easily, she told me, to see him standing at the foot of the bed dressed in a white robe and holding a cross.

Not a word was spoken, but his presence was wrapped in an aura of peace; she was not dismayed but palpably comforted by his presence. When she ordered a headstone for his grave [Frank had been a weak Catholic], she insisted that the cross correspond exactly as Frank held it in spite of being told it was opposite of the Catholic way. Was Frank trying to tell her something?

Another instance involved a neighbor who was absent when her husband was killed in an automobile accident. She bemoaned her inability to say goodbye. She sought to compensate for her presumed failure by fulfilling all the plans she and her husband had made together.

Then one night David visited her in her bedroom. “I can describe everything he was wearing,” she told me. Nothing seemed unusual [although she knew he was dead], she just felt gladness at having finally the opportunity to see him, and to say goodbye. David insisted she had to let him go, he was fine, and refused to allow her to kiss him as she insisted she intended to do.

She rose from her bed and walked to him before he simply dissolved. She awoke to find herself standing where he had been, and felt a sense of release from her despair that changed her life thereafter.

Tiger Woods, of golf fame, after his father died, absented himself from the PGA Tour for awhile, then missed the cut of the first tournament he entered. Later, I watched him win the British Open on TV, after which he let out an emotional ”YES!" as he buried his head on his caddy‘s shoulder and wept.

During play he appeared solemn and relaxed, playing steadily. His outcry at winning and the tears he shed seemed to me the moment of release he felt from a father whose approval he needed, and from whom it was given. Tiger settled down afterward, and won consecutive tournaments, one after another.

I am inclined to believe such experiences happen to more people than are willing to acknowledge them, primarily because afterward, one senses an almost imposed reluctance to speak of them. Symbols are communal, universal, and very personal, but encounters that involve them are purely for clarification, in my opinion, because they reflect what we have been taught. I do not consider them significant in any sense, except as they assume importance to recipients.

My oldest brother died in 1943 a month after my cousin took me to Minnesota for my health. Buford wasted away at home where he died in Oakland, CA. Yet his death was the last thing I expected, he had been around over a year. Two days before he died, I was in bed in the farmhouse of my grandparents when I fell into a sudden and deep sleep. No dream ever was so real; I was walking into a scene I shall never forget.

A group was kneeling beneath a cross [one of three], in a Calvary sort of scene. As I approached effortlessly, the people beneath the first cross moved away leaving me alone looking at the body on the cross wondering what was happening.

Suddenly, but with deliberation, Buford turned his head and looked me straight in the eye with a countenance of peace that caught me completely by surprise. Finally I knew the truth; I awoke awash in tears!

My grandparents slept not more than 10 feet from me and knew nothing of my agony; nor did I ever tell them. Later, in my uncle’s house when the phone rang and my aunt answered it, I knew instantly that my brother had died, and began to cry, nor shall I ever forget how competently I drove the car to my grandparent’s house that day.

I was just fourteen. I was composed and at ease, as was Tiger and others who have experienced a subconscious and comforting encounter.

Years later [I was married and had children by then] I was visiting mother who lived alone in Oakland CA. when quietly she told me she had seen Buford. She was a block from her apartment when she heard someone call, “Mother.” She turned to see, and saw Buford beside her, and asked him without apparent amazement, “What are you doing here?” He replied “I just wanted to know if you could see me,” then dissolved into nothingness. The sidewalk was crowded but no one noticed the encounter, a dream meant for mother alone. I told her then of my experience in Minnesota to which she replied, "I always thought there was something special about him."

Mother died in 1976. My remaining brother and I sat alone in a waiting room when he said he wanted to tell me something he had told no one, not even his wife. He had come home two days before Buford died and heard a choir singing in what he supposed was Buford's room. He walked down the hall to see, but found only Buford asleep. Mother was in the kitchen less than twenty feet away, but heard nothing, and was never told of what my brother thought must be a figment of his imagination, a figment that he harbored thirty-three years, and remembers vividly, I'm sure.

These revelations caused me to write my cousin Joyce with whom I traveled to Minnesota in 1943. She responded matter-of-factly, that Buford had visited her at about the same time I saw him on the cross. “He sat on my bed, and said to me, Yes, Joyce, there really is a God" [He did not mention Jesus]. She wrote to tell him, a letter that mother returned to Joyce unopened saying merely that he had died. Such encounters seem intended for selected persons, none of whom consider them unusual, but all remember them vividly. Gene still swears he heard a choir, and I don’t doubt he did.

I was alone with mother minutes before she died when suddenly she opened her eyes, and with a look of blind amazement, raised her arms to embrace not me, but whomever she recognized over my left shoulder. I made myself available for a final embrace, but I know it was not meant for me, perhaps it was Buford. I mentioned it to my doctor in the course of conversation in his office, and when I finished he related to me an experience of his own. His mother was dying, he said, when suddenly she opened her eyes and pointed to a picture of her husband [father of the doctor], at her bedside. The doctor could only speculate, but he believes she was leaving him a message.

The significance of these experiences I find impossible to ignore. Can the fundamental mass of life tendencies [with which everyone is born] be attributed to more than genetics alone? If so, on what basis might it be attributed?

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Kenneth G. Ramey was a 79-year old "writer without a Website" who is generating excellent, provocative articles on the subject of religion and world affairs. We are pleased that Ken's "lone wolf" presence as a writer in the world has been replaced by a spot on our team of writers at Salem-News.com. Raised in Minnesota and California during the dark years of the Great American Depression, Ken is well suited to talk about the powerful forces in the world that give all of us hope and tragedy and everything in between. You can write to Ken at: darken1@sbcglobal.net