I have been musing over death for the last two or three weeks recently. It all started when I was asked to show my work at Legacy Arts Gallery in Todmorden, West Yorkshire, for the month of May to coincide with the Pushing Up Daisies Festival, 12th- 19th May.

After a lot of exploring I ended up painting a set of very colourful images that are Mexican Folk Art (Day of the Dead)/Pop Art even kitsch inspired! You see, they defy death! Death is a harsh word our western society knows little about since the experience is subjective only. If we are lucky enough to be with a beloved when they die, this can give us a much deeper understanding of the process and maybe into the nature of reality.

This is a controversial subject. There is a kind of blindness that most of us have about the nature of reality, unless we are jolted out of our sleep. My own story reads a bit like the DEATH card in Tarot (meaning transformation). This is centred around the death of my Pa. He phoned to say he had a couple of months to live. I packed my things and drove 8 hours so I could look after him for the remainder of his life. Brought up in an atheist family, he said, ‘when you die, you die, there is nothing’. Having seen, felt and heard the unseen at times in my life, I was less sure, I said, ‘can you let me know, though, if you are alive when you get to the other side? He agreed anyway. A few days before his death, he looked peaceful and very happy. He told me, with a big smile on his face that Granny was in the room with us, which, I thought, was strange coming from an atheist, but a clue that all is not as it seems. I held his hand when he died and waved goodbye to him, opening the front door of his house so his spirit could depart. And off he went.

I was grief stricken when he died and the emotional turmoil of my experience made me feel flat for a very long time. But then I started to look into this life and death thing. I started to read the cutting edge news within the scientific community about consciousness. I started to revisit ancient spiritual beliefs with a fresh understanding. I joined dots. Worked things out. I started to watch interviews of people who had died and then resuscitated to tell a fascinating tale. I learned how the Double Slit Experiment (quantum mechanics) showed us how observation, which requires awareness, changes the behaviour of light particles.  I learned that people are projecting astrally/leaving their bodies with evidence of non-locality all the time and were very common experiences, indeed, it has happened to me. But could this be real? I collected a wealth of discerned evidence, both personal and from others, until, one day I could deny it no more, ‘We might lose our body but the sense of ‘I’ doesn’t die'!

So, did Pa let me know that we don't die after we die? Well, we can never be 100% sure what happens until we have experienced it for ourselves, but, yes, in many ways, because he taught me how to listen to him as a radio tunes into a frequency and that life is primarily a mental construct and not a physical one, which is what we are taught to believe. But don't believe me, it is down to you to join the dots.

If you got something from reading this blog, if you are going through grief or that you have experienced something similar, I would love to hear your story and perhaps you would be interested in attending the Pushing Up Daisies, here is more information: 

http://www.pushingupdaisies.org/

To find out more about Legacy Arts Gallery, click the link:

https://www.legacyartsgallery.com/

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