I bought a homeless man a mocha and muffin at Starbucks and I'm still coasting off of the high it gave me. I did not do this to win points with God. I did not do this because I feel like a worthless sinner who must love in order to make restitution for my wrongs. I did not do this because I am supposed to, or was taught to.

I did it because I had also enjoyed a mocha and muffin myself, and it felt good for my fullness to overflow. I did it because that guy is me and we are both worthy of love and generosity. There was a period when I was recovering from warped Christian teaching where I just needed to treat myself to Starbucks, and that was all I could manage or afford, and it was a necessary season. Now I'm shedding that skin too. Everything is process.

Stephen Colbert interviewed Bill Clinton about his Clinton Global Initiative work, and asked him "Why do you do all of this? You're a retired president, you don't have to do this." Clinton replied, "Because I'm selfish - because it makes me feel really good." That is the truth.

Something so fascinating to me is that the Bible contains nuggets of gold which, if you really listen to them, will disintegrate many or most of the extrapolated teachings of the religious culture ("cult"-ure) you may find yourself in. I suspect the same holds true for the Koran and the Kabbalah and all other spiritual literature with a direct experience at their core.

The Bible says, for instance: "Everyone that loves is born of God and knows God." That pretty much does away with all concepts of handing out tracts, "four spiritual laws," Calvinism, evangelizing, and most doctrinal interpretations of original sin. But there it is, one of the most beautiful phrases in the whole Bible. You don't require "being born again" to know love; simply by loving you know God. (That truth does not lend itself to spreading a religion and taking over other tribal territory, though, and we humans seem compelled to do such things.)

Or "there is no fear in love." Sometimes I feel like a vast majority of popular Christian teaching stems from anxiety, and anxiety and fear are interchangeable. Granted, anxiety is hard to manage for everyone, and much of it isn't our fault - it's a genetic inheritance, or fallout from unprocessed trauma, or even the result of a lack of amino acids in our modern refined foods leaving us with nothing to convert to GABA in our brain. One kind of fear can save our life, the kind we've developed over eons to avoid things like an attack in a dark alley. But non-body-based, mental anxiety can't coexist with love, not in the same moment and space. We have to be careful about creating rigid rules and fearful theology (or political policies) in the pursuit of illusory and ultimately unattainable safety. We're going to get hurt, and our loved ones are going to get hurt, many times during our lives. "The only way out is through" - healing comes as we are brave, facing and experiencing suppressed emotions. "The truth will set you free," including heart truth: I'm sad, I'm happy, I'm hurting. It would be great if there was a Father-God who could fix us instantly if we "just believe," but that theology is another very sneaky form of spiritual anesthesia/escape.

That's one way the archetype of crucifixion still makes deep sense to me - it's the willingness for love to take us to a place where we feel everything we want to numb ourselves from. "Mourn with those who mourn" - including yourself - is a very challenging Scripture verse. (Or maybe it's just challenging for stoic Scandinavians like me.)

So lastly, "God is love." !!!!!!! Whaaaaattt!!!!!! This is crazy, and those are the best three words. Not God is loving, which is the traditional Christian spin. God IS love. That means monkey mamas mourning over the bodies of their dead babies for days has God at the center of it. That means God is already everywhere, because love shows up everywhere, on every level of existence. God is in your golden retriever's loyalty and your grandma's pillowy hug and "love-making" with your partner. I know the word God has been destroyed for a lot of people, it means "puke" or "rape" or "asshole." That is perfectly okay, and I'm sorry if it's infuriating to even see those three letters in succession here. Just try to empathize with me for a sec and know that semantics are always limiting.

We die so many times in our lives. Every time we get hurt, physically or emotionally. Every time we hurt someone else. Any form of suffering is an experience of death. It's ironic that we fear it, when in the meantime we are actually living the reality of it over and over.

There is nothing that doesn't have some death in it. Love always does; I get tired of taking care of my children, but I've got at least ten more years of it to go. Marriage does; I'm preparing for adjusting to more sharing and compromising soon. Death and rebirth is the way of nature and of our bodies, down to their very cells. It is the way of our core.

To extrapolate Jesus's sayings about being "born again" into a black-and-white perspective of "you suck and need God for permanent fixing" is a misunderstanding. You do get to be born again - and again, and again, throughout your life. Our souls are like caterpillars, who shed their entire skin four or five times before they even make it to the chrysalis stage. As life unfolds we lose and gain perspectives, we learn more empathy and compassion, we get better with boundaries and self-love - these are all components of spiritual transformation. Granted, some people don't seem to change much, which is maybe why we need words and analogies to inspire us. There does seem to be a component of choice required for our growth to happen, but it is a mysterious process not dependent on religion.

The realm of purgatory, and sometimes hell, and sometimes heaven, is here. Hell is being trapped in the Ohio home of a crazed-animal-human for ten years being raped and having him force miscarriages on you. Purgatory is my dental hygienist's life starting a year ago, when a four-wheeling accident destroyed her husband's brain and personality, and sentenced him to a permanent nursing care facility down the street from her and their two daughters. One of my hells was holding my newborn Ella in my arms watching her face turn blue from lack of oxygen during a bout of whooping cough, asking her to stay with us, knowing it was partly my fault for delaying vaccinations in her older brothers.

This life is the hard part. If there weren't also heaven moments, we'd all be suicidal. But there are - like getting a call today from one of my best friends who was proposed to under a waterfall in Hawaii, and checking my Instagram feed and seeing three successive photos of couples I love looking happy and healthy together. Life is worth living.

I know, I know. I'm disregarding what I just wrote about keeping your mouth shut if you're having a conversion. Take this as me saying "Isn't this fascinating!" and draw your own conclusion. This blog is where I tell my story, and this is the center of my story right now.

Gallup did a survey in the 1980s and 8 million people reported an NDE/ADE - 4 percent of the American population. How incredibly arrogant to say that even half those people were "just hallucinating" remarkably similar experiences. (Nobody was describing things that sound like an LSD trip.)

The parts of all this that are most inspiring to me are what people with ADEs conclude after they come back.

"After his experience, he had become a caring, truthful, and positive person."

"I created a home of love and as a family we work together to love each other and the world - a small mirror of what I experienced in that land of light. After this experience I have no fear of death."

"[After she came back] she felt 'like a stranger in a strange land.' She also felt disoriented and couldn't grasp why everyone was running from place to place and task to task."

"She now hated to do harm to others, as she had felt the pain that she had caused others. She felt that the most important thing in life was to take the opportunities to be of assistance to others, even if these were sometimes the more difficult options."

"Some invisible force had opened up new paths along which I must travel, something to strive for. That my life was not in vain, and that I should have goals that fill the needs of those around me as well as my own, and that every day should be filled with good and meaningful activities."

Everyone who comes back talks about needing to do it a) for their children or spouse who love and need them, and oftentimes b) to fulfill some life purpose. Boy I want a guiding purpose and reason for being here, but I know outside of loving my family, it's not time for me to fully move into it yet. Maybe part of it was to attempt obedience to the Catholic Church's teachings about birth control, then go on record in the most powerful newspaper in the world as proving it to be harmful in a myriad of ways.

Consistently, during a person's life review, they find themselves judging themselves from "a place of absolute transparency and truth" (no "hands of an angry God"). Maybe the best part of all is that the being of light who guides them through it is so compassionate, they reportedly impart a message of, "It is alright, this is what humans do, humans make mistakes." For about five years now I've felt like an enabling liberal flake because, in my better moments, this is how I feel about myself and everybody else, too. We're given these faulty bodies with faulty brain chemistry in this flawed world. It is hard being here. Forgive us for we know not what we do (at least apparently until we honestly review our life for ourselves, something that can also happen long before death - AA is a powerful vehicle for this).

Or maybe my favorite part of all these ADE testimonies is that, by all accounts, the being of light has a great sense of humor and is "more human than us."

Oh I'm getting so frustrated! I feel like reading all of these after-death experience accounts is creating yet another conversion of thought or certainty for me (I was just blubbering like a baby in the middle of Starbucks reading one, and looked around me and felt so happy for everybody there). It makes me even more livid at dysfunctional religion for taking the most beautiful of realities - that unfathomable love is available to us after death - and turning it into something ugly. Guess what, you proud jerk faces: there are innumerable reports of atheists seeing incredible light and feeling total love after death. YOU ARE WRONG. NOBODY NEEDS TO JOIN YOUR CLUB. Stop ruining the associations with God for normal people! Wake up and change your emotionally destructive cultures and Biblical interpretations. See that little wrinkly blob of skin on the fifth stage of the caterpillar up there? Shed that puppy.

It really is like the rape of a soul, what bad religion does. And yet it is done by humans who are never completely bad; even at my most fundamentalist and fearful, I still wanted to love people, and thought I was helping them.

I hate bad theology so much. If I could leave behind some kind of change in the world it would be cleaning up the shit of off-kilter religious thought and teaching.

Let me try to calm down for a moment. ARGHHH!!!!

We are to the point now where hundreds of thousands of people have experienced love after death and then resuscitated. Numerous irreligious doctors are studying the phenomenon. Sam Parnia writes, "Frequently, people – including doctors and scientists – say to me that if someone was brought back to life, then he or she wasn't actually dead. How could the person has been dead if the individual is now alive? But the fact of the matter is that death isn't what you and I decided it to be. Someone may have a philosophical idea that death is defined as when a person cannot come back and talk, eat, or share stories. That may have even been our own beliefs or our doctor's belief, but that's not death. People don't set the parameters for what death is; science does."

One very common element in all of the people who come back is that they are shy and reluctant to talk about what they experienced. WHY ISN'T RELIGION THE SAME WAY. Gah! Legend has it that Jesus would heal people and say, "Don't tell anyone." I understand being so excited that you just have to share*, but a twinkle in your eye, peace in your expression, and love in your actions are a million times more powerful and respectful of others' freedom and need to decide things for themselves than creating a system of exclusionary requirements.

So much of religion is just so evil.

*Eben Alexander comes to mind, although I'm exasperated with the Simon & Schuster marketing department for putting a full-page photo of him on the back cover of the newest paperback version. I get it that celebrity culture is the currency by which messages are spread in our country, but it is exactly that method that makes most people my age and younger distrustful of the bill of goods being sold.

I'm reading a book on near-death experiences (I still like Sam Parnia's "after death experiences" term better) and so far the most moving anecdotes have been about "shared death experiences," where loved ones sometimes experience supranatural phenomena *with* the dying person. There are stories about seeing unearthly light and even going through the dying person's life review alongside them.
Craaaayyyzee!

This book looks like a phenomenal read.
Again, just reading through the Amazon reviews... Holy crap. Family members talk about seeing the room distort into an hourglass shape, and an anesthesiologist was transported into another realm for a moment when he touched a dying patient's hand. I'm such a heaven nerd. I love this stuff so much.

Last night while I was falling asleep I saw a navy butterfly, almost fabric-like, with petal-shaped wing tips, moving like a peaceful dance. I haven't thought about blue butterflies in awhile but I was happy it showed up. (I don't think of these images as hyper-spiritual or prophetic, fwiw - everybody has them, they are usually personal and specific to your psyche and process. They come from both inside and outside us.)

Today I found myself in a butterfly room at the Tennessee aquarium in Chattanooga. I promise, I did not know it was coming last night - I'm still not sure what butterflies have to do with aquatic life. So maybe the image was a foreshadowing of my calm, slow-moving day spent surrounded by navy-shadowed water tanks and butterflies - but still not earth shaking.

The room had a window with hundreds of real chrysalises behind it, of at least thirty types of butterflies. I could have stayed there for hours. Two morpho auroras - the glamorous blue Peruvian butterflies - were flitting around with each other, spinning in love. Nate and I, and our friends Jeremy and Eve, were the same way.

I've never been too much of an animal person, but these recent scientific bolsterings of energy and connection opened my heart in a new way today. I put my hand in the stingray tank and thought about sending love to them through it, and I swear they all clustered to come and get it. Most of the animals seemed to be coming towards most of us humans on the other side of the thick glass walls, actually - the penguins, the river otters, the tortoise and sharks all seemed to know we were there, and would pause next to a child, or show off in a specific way. I wonder what our energy looks like to them. I wonder if they see pictures of loving human features flash through their subconscious before they doze off.

It was easier to love the animals than most of the humans around me, and that is a lack in me (though I wasn't beating myself up over it). But then I thought about everyone enjoying the animals just like me, and that helped. A minute later I rounded the corner into a Shakespeare quote: "A touch of nature makes the whole world kin." I got a little choked up. The quote filled the wall under a perfect-circle photo of earth with a silver geometric web stretching out from it over all the visitors. All of us creatures undergoing metamorphosis, so many varieties of cocoons and wings.

I have never, never considered reincarnation a possibility before, not even when Carl Jung started talking about it at the end of his autobiography. I know there are literalist Buddhists who rant about it, just like the many literalist Christians who drive me crazy by ranting about Satan and God's Laws.

It's an interesting thought. Suppose God wanted to become a family. Suppose we were all made as eternal pieces of him but something about freedom in the law of love required that we start out as single-celled forms. Over the course of time and history, through choice, struggle, and learning, we grow into unity with him. Suppose the earth will keep turning into something new, with more and more heaven in it as each of us grow closer to the saint version of ourselves - something that can only happen as a result of all the love we give and receive collectively.

Reincarnation stuff that strikes me as definitely distorted: "In a past life I was [insert dead famous person's name here]" or "You will be a dung beetle in your next life because of karma."

We've certainly got a ways to go as a collective, but there are great sweeping areas of love progress. No world wars have been fought or atomic bombs dropped for the last seventy-five years, and nonviolent change movements spearheaded by people like Gandhi and Martin Luther Ling Jr. have swept through multiple nations. There are always new wounds and crises arising, smaller genocides are still taking place - Rwanda, Cambodia - and the potential for destroying the earth through our technological advances is a pressing problem to solve. But maybe over thousands upon thousands of more years of growth and love on a spiritual level, and scientific progress on a care-for-nature level...

The Jewish tradition and Christian Bible talk about seven layers of heaven. After-death experiencers seem to allude to something similar, different levels once you leave the body. Maybe we touch the first heaven layer sometimes in our dreams, and the next few layers are places where, after we die, we get to be who we were on earth alongside everyone we loved (though if we have multiple lives here, I guess that would mean we would move in and out among all the various love connections we've had, with different family from different times?), and maybe the layers above that are where we experience no self and total oneness with God.

Who the hell knows. It doesn't matter too much to my current experience as Bethany Patchin, age 31, lover of Nathan, mother of four great kids, from Wisconsin and Nashville. It's weird to get too literal with it, kinda like getting literal about drinking a crucified man's blood. My grandma died two years ago, so would a reincarnationist believe that when I have another baby with Nate, conceivably it could be her in her newest body? Dr. Who keeps reincarnating, and there's something profoundly sad even in fiction about losing the actual features and characteristics of an individual you love.

"Our souls as well as our bodies are composed of individual elements which were all already present in the ranks of our ancestors. The 'newness' in the individual psyche is an endlessly varied recombination of age-old components." (Carl Jung) Maybe reincarnation is a clunky way of getting at something mind-boggling about our interconnectedness. Maybe I'm both Bethany and parts of my grandma already (epigenetics certainly points to this in the body), maybe we're all parts of each other.

Reincarnation is a possibility to me, in a lesser way than examining the Shroud of Turin makes the actual resurrection of a man named Jesus a probability to me. I'm fine with the Mystery - but it feels good to be open-minded and respectful of the held beliefs of millions of my human relatives half a world away.

The moral of all these stories is, do your part - be a healer and lover, to the extent you are able, in the place and body you've been given. Whatever we become aware of after we die, right now is always the most important moment.

..................

Along these lines, I am really, really interested in reading this book. I couldn't stop reading the Amazon reviews of it. ("It's no-nonsense, it's not pretentious, it's not 'new-agey,' and yet it isn't overly scientific in a materialistic sense" - that's the mark of a spiritual writer I trust.)

After a (necessary) period of great confusion and reductionist perspective, I've come back around to the supra-natural. I believe everything is magic, in a sense; we just lose our ability to see it as such because of hedonic adaptation. There is a "spiritual" part of being alive that I think soon even the most burned skeptic will be able to accept and relax about. Exploitative charismatics and exclusivist religions have almost ruined such ideas for regular folks, but it's time to take them back.

The spiritual part of being alive involves connections between living things, dreams, and life energy. There is a powerful web of love we're all woven into. The scientific phrasing is "the physics of subatomic particles in communication with each other." We didn't even know about subatomic particles when I was a kid, and now we're well on our way to explaining the "how" behind things like:

- my friend Megan dreaming in college that she was with her parents running away from a swelling ocean, the night before the tsunami hit half a world away.
- my sister's friend who wakes up crying, knowing lots of humans are about to die somewhere, before tragedies like 9/11 and earthquakes.
- how I frequently think of my heart friend Jenny 30 to 180 seconds before she calls me, no matter the time of day or night.
- my great-grandma knowing her previously-healthy son had died before her other children came to tell her.

(from Rupert Sheldrake:)
- a British woman's cat who always knew when her son was coming home on leave from the military, despite him never telling her ahead of time. The cat would go to the door and meow a few hours before his arrival, and his mom began to depend on it for her cue to start getting his room ready and cooking his meal. This behavior is shown by thousands of household animals.
- a British mentally-disabled blind boy who dumbfounded his opthamologist by being able to read - but only when his mother was looking at the letters.

(the power of sonic resonance:)
- why bacteria grows faster when a lab plays Mozart
- how Tibetans can have success using harmonic bowls for healing with sound

How to stay tuned to these realities? Read good spiritual books, take ten minutes of your day to be still and quiet, get out in nature, pay attention to your dreams. Pretty simple stuff that humans have done throughout most of history.

With dreams - yes, many are a kind of garbage disposal for your daily life events, but according to shamans in many different cultures, "Big Dreams" are ones with strong color or strong emotion (especially emotions that stay with you upon waking). Those are the ones to trust, and make decisions based on.