A couple of weeks ago I came across a book about spirit animals. I listened to the CD with an open mind and did the exercises instructed in the book. It lead me to read several books about metaphysics and different religions of the world and really opened up my mind even more to life beyond life.

The most fascinating one I've read so far is on Buddhism and the Tibetan Book of Living and Dying. It discusses the bardos and how the soul moves on or reincarnates to the next "life." The passage I just read about how important our state of mind at death is got me thinking.

"... the last thought and emotion that we have before we die has an extremely powerful determining effect on our immediate future..... With our friends and relatives, we should do all we can to inspire positive emotions and sacred feelings, like love, compassion, and devotion, and all we can to help them to "let go of grasping, yearning and attachment.""

I wonder if Ryan's soul has been reincarnated already. Surely it has.

Dreams

I had a dream about you last night. We were in a house that was hanging on the side of a cliff. It was in pretty rough shape - and some of the house was hanging off the cliff and going to fall into the abyss below. We were in the basement for some reason and started disassembling the walls. When we finally knocked off the wall we discovered a room with uncased glass window panes in it. Before you started to throw those down and smash them into pieces, I wanted to crawl up to the first floor through a small opening in the floor. At first I didn't think I'd fit but you encouraged me to do so and that was the last I saw of you. The first floor room was recently abandoned and my mind concluded it was some older man who was in the last days of his life. Laying around the tidy room were remnants of his nursing tools - paper changing gowns like they have at the doctors office and what not - and on the ledge above the sink were a bunch of funky monkey figurines. I was thinking about wrapping them up in the paper gowns and packing them away - to hear Chris's voice summoning me from another room.

In part of that dream - or maybe a separate one entirely - I was trying to scale a rock wall after taking some delicious grapes from some natural health food grocery store. I was nearing the top, but for some reason couldn't make the mantle move to get over the wall. My right hand had a super good grip on a jug but I couldn't quite get the proper foothold or commit to going for it. It was only a 15 foot drop but thoughts of injury kept me gripped to the wall. At that point I realized I should call for help and some random stranger passing by lent me his hand and hoisted me up.

Weird. I haven't had bizarre twisted dreams like that in a while. What does it mean? I wonder if having Ryan there in my dream in the basement was a allegory to life - in that he'll always be there, cheering me on and encouraging me to do the impossible? What about being in a room by myself, discovering the different items in it and using them to my likening?

Or maybe it was one too many margaritas.