Twins - Life After Birth

Once upon a time, twin boys were conceived.

Weeks passed and the twins developed.

As their awareness grew, they laughed for joy: "Isn't it great that we were conceived? Isn't it great to be alive? "

Together the twins explored their worlds.

When they found their mother's cord that gave them life, they sang for joy! "How great our mother's love is, that she shares her own life with us!"

As weeks stretched into months, the twins noticed how much each was changing.

"What does it mean?" one asked.

"It means our stay in this world is drawing to an end." said the other.

"But I don't want to go," said one. "I want to stay here always."

"We have no choice," said the other. "But maybe there is life after birth."

"But how can there be?" responded one. "We will shed our life cord and how can life be possible without it? Besides, we have seen evidence that others were here before us, and none of them has returned to tell us there is life after birth. No, this is the end. Maybe there is no mother after all."

"But there has to be," protested the other. "How else did we get here? How do we remain alive?"

"Have you ever seen our mother?" said one.

"Maybe she only lives in our minds. Maybe we made her up because the idea made us feel good."

So the last days in the womb were filled with deep questioning and fear.

Finally, the moment of birth arrived. When the twins had passed from their world, they opened their eyes and cried for joy - for what they saw exceeded their fondest dreams.

That is birth ... and that is death.

Author Unknown 

Death and Dying are not Inevitable

You should not meditate or contemplate on death unless you want to die which is not a good idea. If you really, really don't want to die you won't die. Death is just a mistake that humanity has embraced but in the Golden Age that is going to come we will come to know that there is no need to die. (more)

... Dattatreya Siva Baba

Dattatreya Siva Baba







.

GREEN FUNERAL GRASS ROOTS MOVEMENT. USA TODAY

USA TODAY


Moving on from life, naturally

By Marco R. della Cava, USA TODAY

SEBASTOPOL, Calif. — For most mortals, talk of death is about as pleasant as a paper cut. But Jerri Lyons stands poised with a psychic Band-Aid.
Why pay for a coffin that costs as much as a car? Final Passages leader Jerri Lyons poses with a cardboard casket.
By Jack Gruber, USA TODAY

"We're fine with birth, but we've become so separated from the passage of life to death," says the dulcet-toned grandmother. "We need to accept death with all our senses."

All five of them.

Lyons, 56, runs Final Passages, a non-profit concern an hour north of San Francisco that has helped more than 200 families conduct funerals of loved ones in their own homes.

No embalming. No funeral directors. No sticker shock.

Instead, for about $1,000, Lyons will help wash, clothe and give a wake for the departed. Or for $45, she'll sell you a do-it-yourself handbook that tackles everything from how to move a body (the expression "dead weight" has real roots, she warns) to how to keep it cool (dry ice is best, but frozen peas are fine, too).

Ripped from a B-horror movie? Try history. Before Civil War-era doctor Thomas Holmes found a way to embalm the bodies of soldiers journeying home, most funerals were held in parlors and many burials on the back forty.

Only now, the natural approach has a hip, eco-friendly bent and a growing baby-boomer base whose take-charge attitude has embraced death. From modest caskets to burials in tombstone-free nature preserves, the emphasis is on finding a greener way to go.

"This movement is growing," says Lisa Carlson, author of Caring for the Dead: Your Final Act of Love. "Boomers wrote their own wedding vows, they had home births, and they will create their own funeral traditions."

Though they aren't pushing their unorthodox views on aging parents, some boomers may well challenge their peers to think differently about the dead.

Lyons addresses the inescapable "ick" factor in her home funeral seminars by having participants decorate cardboard caskets and take turns climbing in. She also suggests talking friends and family through what a green funeral may involve.

Shortly before Dwight Caswell's wife, Anne, 56, died in October 2002, she asked to have a wake in their home in Sonoma, Calif.

"Friends would just walk into the room (where her body was), close the doors and say whatever they had to say," Caswell recalls. "I knew nothing about home funerals, didn't even think they were legal. But I've learned that death is an intimate thing, and this provides an experience I just haven't seen at funeral homes."

Not that your local funeral director will be looking for work frothing lattes anytime soon: The $20 billion-a-year mortuary industry offers a service that remains the third-largest personal expense, after a house and car.

In five states — Connecticut, Indiana, Louisiana, Nebraska and New York — green funerals are tricky because laws require funeral directors to be involved to some degree, according to the watchdog group Funeral Consumers Alliance. (Nationwide, burials on private property are all but impossible in cities and require local zoning approval in rural areas.)

But in 45 states, citizens can legally bypass funeral homes and obtain permits to handle the body on their own.

A change of image

"The soil is right for experimentation," says Gary Laderman, author of Rest in Peace: A Cultural History of Death and Funeral Homes in Twentieth-Century America. "There is an environmental movement that didn't exist decades ago, as well as an interest in customization and customer empowerment."

Though the traditional funeral has become "deeply rooted in society," the green trend could gather momentum if boomers express interest in some aspects (forgoing embalming but favoring traditional cemeteries) and force the industry to go along.

Funeral directors know their Six Feet Under image needs a makeover.

"We're changing, and our new campaign aimed at boomers is 'A life worth celebrating,' " says Bob Biggins of the National Funeral Directors Association. "We'll set anything up, whether it's on a golf course or even at home. Remember, we can bring about ceremony and ritual in a very short period of time."

Proponents of green funerals insist their approach promises mourners a more personal experience without the risk of a financial nightmare.

"It's so easy to turn that feeling of helplessness that death creates into purchasing," says Karen Leonard, an activist who helped the late Jessica Mitford update her 1963 exposé, The American Way of Death. "When you're grieving, it's really hard to say, 'What's the cheapest casket you've got?' "

But boomers are asking such questions and in so doing are fueling new businesses.

Outside Dubuque, Iowa, the Trappist monks of New Melleray Abbey can't turn out their hand-hewn, wooden-nailed caskets quick enough. Sales have soared since 2000, doubling to 800 last year and projected to double again this year. Fashioned from sustainable wood, the caskets range from $695 for a plain pine box to $1,795 for a walnut coffin.

Price lures some to Houston's The Pine Box, where the cheapest casket sells for $395. "Families want to get back to basics, and that often means taking the funeral home out of the equation," owner Chip Beresford says.

'They want to call the shots'

The Pine Box also offers funeral consulting, which is aimed at helping shoppers find the best prices on funeral-related services. "Clearly, customers want options," Beresford says.

Barbara Kernan agrees, which is why last July she opened Thresholds, a funeral services company specializing in green ceremonies, just outside San Diego.

"I get the sense that plenty of people in their 50s and 60s are really starting to think about how they want to go. These are people who had free sex and questioned authority. They want to call the shots, even in death."

Not surprisingly, Kernan's biggest bête noire is Hollywood. "People aren't sure about a dead body in their house," she says. "I have to reassure them they don't explode or pop up out of the ground."

In fact, some advocates of green funerals want to do away with tombstone-studded cemeteries altogether.

Picture a woodland that is maintained but not manicured. Imagine headstones replaced by tree plantings or inscribed rocks. Welcome to Ramsey Creek Preserve outside Westminster, S.C.

Run by local doctor Billy Campbell, the 37-acre preserve is a prototype that he hopes to replicate across the USA. A passionate environmentalist, he took his lead from nature-loving Britain with its 200 green burial locations and created "a land conservation tool" that allows the eco-conscious living to preserve nature through death. Similar recently opened sites include the Glendale Memorial Nature Preserve in the Florida Panhandle and Ethician Family Cemetery in East Texas.

Most Ramsey Creek burials, which involve non-embalmed bodies in biodegradable cardboard or wooden caskets, cost around $2,500, with 25% of the cost going to maintaining the natural habitat.

"We are certainly not inventing anything new," Campbell says. "Buddhists, Muslims, Jews all essentially practice green burials."

You can even go digital

Campbell recently joined forces with Los Angeles-based funeral home operator Tyler Cassity on a new project near San Francisco.

In the hills of Marin County, the duo is closing a deal on property that would serve this land-preserving market. (Though the national cremation rate has doubled since 1982 to 27%, roughly 70% of Bay Area residents prefer to be cremated.)

"Cremation can be misleading. It does pollute, and it's almost a denial of death," Cassity says. "No one seems to be remember why we have ceremonies where bodies are put back in the earth. And that is to honor the dead and confront our mortality."

And to help them live forever in the digital ether. Cassity, who runs famed Hollywood Forever Cemetery, hopes to install a local area network that would allow visitors to walk the preserve with a handheld device that brings up still and video images of the deceased.

This perpetual rerun is embraced by green-burial fans who are as passionate about memorials as they are their dust-to-dust departures. "Think about Egyptians and their hieroglyphs," Cassity says. "Our idea is completely modern and ancient at the same time. Natural and virtual."

There is nothing virtual about a body. So naturally, when people come to visit Lyons, she has to work hard to put them at ease.

First, she brews some herbal tea in her backyard office, where massage tables share space with Buddhist statues. This is, after all, the heart of Sonoma, where the cosmic clock on the '60s never really ran out.

Next, she opens a brightly decorated binder. It is filled with photos of caskets and people. The caskets are cardboard, all elaborately personalized. The people are dead, all surrounded by family.

"Then I show them this," says Lyons, who pops in a video. It is the story of a woman dying of cancer.

She dies. Her hair is washed. She is dressed by friends. The house fills up. People chat, about her, about anything. When the wake ends, usually after a day or two, the group lifts the woman from her bed into a cardboard casket and takes her away.

Grim as this video life-lesson is, it also is oddly comforting.

"I'll tell you why," Lyons says. "Because this wasn't a place where you show up for a viewing at a certain hour and emote on command in front of strange people. This was as nature intended things."

Healing in peace

Norma Wilcox, 57, and her husband, Forest Harlan, 53, plan to leave life as peacefully as they arrived. The Chico, Calif., couple started thinking about their funerals when Harlan was diagnosed with cancer in June. They want a home funeral and a green burial.

"We want our friends to be able to grieve in a personal setting, and we don't want to pollute," says Wilcox, who recalls her grandfather's wake in the family's Vermont farmhouse in the 1950s.

"The neighbors came in and brought food. It was so nice, so healing," she says. "I'd certainly be happy with that."



Find this article at:
http://www.usatoday.com/life/lifestyle/2004-02-03-green-funerals_x.htm


Copyright 2007 USA TODAY, a division of Gannett Co. Inc.

MEDICAL DOCTOR LEARNS TO SEE ANGELS THROUGH MEDITATION

The true story of physician and psychiatrist Dr. Mitchell Gibson's discovery of the remarkable ability to see and communicate with ghosts, angels, and other supernatural entities.

To learn more go to www.tybro.com (more)

OR CLICK HERE to see ALL the interview episodes played back to back.


There is a whole series of interviews of this subject with Dr. Gibson. You can see them by double clicking on this You Tube video. Doing so will take you directly to the You Tube site with the other videos.