I Asked Them to Go Away

After my brother died, I started having experiences I couldn’t explain. Hearing voices. Feeling as if I was communicating with long-dead relatives. After I while I had to draw a line. I said out loud, “This is too much. I don’t know which voice is my own. I need you to go away.”They did. And almost immediately, I wanted them back.What happened next was my journey into other people’s accounts of after-death communication, near-death experiences, and mediumship. Sometimes the accounts varied greatly. Sometimes the author had very specific interpretations about what happens after we die.But beneath all those differences, I kept finding a few common threads: some part of life continues after physical death. Communication is possible. And whatever lies beyond our understanding appears to be characterized by a love more pure than anything I’ve experienced on earth.I didn’t need to have detailed explanations of the afterlife. In fact, I was turned off by someone who thought their explanation was the one correct and true interpretation.How can we ever know all there is to know about Infinity? The Eternal?Yet I could trust what I experienced without pretending I understood it completely. I could listen to other people’s experiences without assuming their explanations had to become mine.And I could leave some of the Mystery as mystery.One of the greatest lessons I took from this is that our understanding is always incomplete. There is always more we don’t know than what we do.Maybe that is part of what spirituality asks of us — not to believe without question or to have all the answers, but to pay attention to what we experience, discern what we believe those experiences mean, and remain humble about how much we still don’t know.Joni Miller, Ph.D., is a writer, researcher, spiritual coach, and speaker who uses her knowledge, education, and love of all things spiritual to help spiritual wanderers find a place they can call home, navigating by the light of Love. www.SpiritualGeography.net Get full access to Spiritual Geography at jonimiller.substack.com/subscribe