A statement by the author:

This is the story of a life of a common person and his struggle to
remain alive in a world of violence and destruction. The intent of this
book is to convey a message that is impossible to convey. If readers
can remove their normal, or ordinary, way of looking at what life means
to them, there is a possibility for understanding to develop between the writer and the reader.

This story is all true as far as I know given I am using my
memory and deals with a much disliked happening, death and near death.
While some of the narrative may be shocking and difficult to read, it is
nonetheless an important document about Transformation and its effect
on humans. This may be the most important story ever told as it has to
do with creating a world not presently here and is NEW in every aspect
which makes it indeed difficult to see, understand, and for that matter,
even read.

The Story of My Death
By Edward Jones
_____________________

My first of five encounters with death was my birth. I was born
into a family who did not care to have me, and I was neglected to the point
of near death. I do not know for sure about the circumstances as they
are a family secret. I just know that I was taken to live with my
grandparents for the next two years. I will reconstruct what happened
from the place in my body where the memory of the experience was stored.
After my birth, it seems that I was not wanted and was left in a
bassinet for so long that the bottom of it was rotten when our neighbor
finally called the police. She had watched my mother leave each day
with my older sister and be gone all day. The constant crying is what
caused her to take an action. I was then taken to live with my
grandparents for the next two years and was cared for by my twelve year
old niece whose job it was to keep medicine on my blisters and sores.
I had no knowledge of this other than from the place in my body where
these physical happenings have been stored for all these years. 
(However, I verified this "family secret" at family reunion I attended
in Ohio in 2005.) 

Another experience that tells me this is true happened one day when I
was about four. My father told me we were going to visit my
grandparents and that it was my first visit with them. When we arrived
at their house, I did not want to go in because I knew before going in
what was inside. When I did go in, I went to every room, stopped outside
the door, guessed what was behind it, and then went into the room. My guess
was correct with every room. It was not until I was about twenty eight
that I was told by a relative that I had lived there for two years.

I remember one morning in the first grade when my father returned
home unexpectedly and found me standing on a step stool doing as I
always did during the week, washing the morning dishes. I do not know
what happened that day; he told me to go on to school, and I was never
asked to wash the dishes again. My older sister, later in our life,
told me one of her earliest memories of our childhood was watching me
from her school desk running as fast as I could across the school yard
to get to the front door of our school before the janitor closed the
front doors, all of which meant I was late again.

My second look at death happened in a house across the street. We
were playing a game of hide and go seek, and to hide, I climbed through a
window covered by three pieces of wood, one on the inside and two on the
outside of the window. My foot caught between them causing me to fall
head first against a concrete wall.

It looked to me as though the wall was coming at me rather than me
falling towards it. When I awoke, I was bleeding and upside down. I
could hear the others yelling "all in free; all in free. "Bud you have
won; we cannot find you!" I said to myself, " if this is what it takes to
win I never want to win again". Bud was my nickname. I did not like
the name Edward as I had seen it on a cigar box and someone said Edward
was a king. I did not care to be a king, so I changed my name to Bud.
Until I was forty years old, I was known as Bud Jones.

My third experience of closeness to death was the result of a fight
with five boys in the next block. I was beaten and left on the ground
for about two hours before I was found and taken to the hospital. I was
given a 50/50 chance of living. For about five days, I lived at the
doorway to death with bronchitis, while the doctors were treating me
(and almost operated on me) for a kidney infection. It was just before
they were to operate that another doctor diagnosed bronchitis rather
than a kidney infection. With the assistance of penicillin, I was cured.
These first three experiences all happened before the age of six.

The importance of these first three experiences is that I have a
clear view of what death and near death look like and can recognize
either at a glance. I had already learned what this world I had entered
was and what to expect. I was abandoned at birth, which told me I was
not loved; I had almost died while playing a game, which told me games
were no fun; I had discovered what fighting was and did not care to
fight.

The above are the things that had a profound impact on my life,
leading up to my death at the age of thirty six.

The greatest impact these experiences had on me was that I had a
difficult time believing that many things in life were important. Money
was not important to me. Education was not important. There was
no real reason for me to do things like studying for good grades.

An experience of something like “near death” was the death of
prejudice that happened in the fourth grade. We had just moved to
this new school in a new town, and it was integrated (my first three
years of school had been in a segregated school). We were all playing
in the playground when the teacher called the end of recess. I yelled
at the top of my lungs, "Last one in is a nigger baby". Well, Leonard
and Philip Morris caught me about one-half way up the hill, and
suddenly a fight ensued. During the fight, each one of us was cut open
on the hand, and when I looked, I saw two hands. One was black and
one hand was white, but what I saw startled me completely. I saw that
inside the cut we were both pink. This experience cleared from me all
prejudice, and I have been "color blind" ever since.

When I was in the seventh grade, my parents received a call from
the school saying that I was failing and that my grade average was
sixty nine. I needed a grade average of seventy in order to go on to
high school. It was decided that I would need to go to summer school,
but my mother decided to take control of my education. It went
something like this: "What is two and two?" I said, “Three“, BAM!
Down came the ruler on my head. "Oops, that must be wrong." "What
is two and two?" "Five". BAM, again the ruler, “oops must be wrong.”
"What is two and two?" "Four", and I ducked. No bam... “Hmm, must
be right.“ This indeed taught me how my mother got through school.

The way I got through high school was a visual one, meaning if I
could visualize it, I would learn it. If I had to memorize it, I would
not learn it. My school books were in as good shape at the end of the
year as at the beginning of the year, as I did not study them.

After high school I met Nancy. After six months of dating, we broke
up, and she began dating my friend Jack. After a few months we began
seeing each other again, and she told me she was pregnant, so we got
married. When a friend asked if I loved her my reply was,
"No but I can live with anyone, at least until the child graduates".
My first year of marriage consisted of eight different jobs, all of which
I was fired from or quit just in time. Over the next four years I lost
(or quit first) five more jobs. Never was I unemployed for more than a
day or two, and yet each new job I took I knew would not last long.
The biggest problem I had with work was the amount of boring
repetition needed to keep a job. I would start a new job and in one
or two weeks lose all interest in it. Most of the jobs were sales jobs
in the restaurant supply area where I was responsible for my time,

Three years and two jobs later, I went into another partnership. We
purchased a Kentucky Fried Chicken Franchise which was losing
$36,000 a year. The first year we lost $10,000, and I bought
my partner out. This time, I ran it successfully until selling it two
years later to buy two Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurants in
another town.

During this two year period, my wife went to the Kentucky Fried
Chicken school in order to assist me in the operation of our business.
There, she met a fellow from the Cayman Islands who invited her to visit
him and his wife and their new-born son. It had always been her dream
to go to a tropical island, so I agreed. She went there for two weeks
and fell in love with the fellow’s brother and after returning had to tell
me about it after a lot of letters from him started coming to the house.

Even though during my fifteen years of marriage I wanted this to
happen, it came as a real shock. I had been abandoned again! I still
had my own promise to myself to stay married until our son graduated
from high school. Nancy and I then made an agreement to see if in six
months we could put the marriage back together. I stopped drinking,
came home after work and spent time with her, but all of this was too
little and too late. She finally made the decision to get a divorce,
marry Jim, and move to the Cayman Islands.

During this six months, I realized I was going to lose my son and
wife on the same day. I came home and, in tears, told Troy that I had
failed him as a father and as a friend. From that day on, Troy and I
have been partners in our life. He stayed with me after the divorce.
This experience also showed me that I had failed as a son to my parents,
and I visited with them to tell them of my failure as a son. Although
they said they did not agree with me, it was the same release I
experienced when I told my son I had failed him, and the same release
when I told my wife I had failed her as a husband.

The release was the release of speaking the truth. Speaking the
truth freed me each time, and I could see clearly the truth of what
marriage, fatherhood, and friendship really are. They are all a context
that exists when we get there, and it is for us to figure out how best
to play our role. There is no realness in them; there is only an
already accepted set of circumstances, and it is our job to see how well
we can do. I failed at them all. What I learned from this is that they
cannot be defined, as each definition will in some way be different.
These roles are not real; therefore, no one can succeed at them. We can only
be various levels of failure, or if you prefer, success.

Another release I discovered had to do with the pain associated
with being abandoned. This pain I experienced when Nancy left. I had
lost a mother more than a wife. I discovered that the way to release
the pain was by intensifying the pain. The more the pain subsided the
harder I worked to bring it back up. I went so far with it that
suddenly I was experiencing the pain of being abandoned at my
birth, and in a moment all the pain was released.

During this same six month period, numbers of times I experienced a
short, still picture in my mind. It was a few seconds of peace and
harmony, and it was something I had not seen before--a different world,
a world of peace. The last time I saw it (before I became it) was on
the way back from the airport where I had taken Nancy to catch the plane
to her new husband-to-be.

When I returned home, I first sent Troy to his friends house about
five doors away, and told him, "Do not come back into the house until I
come to get you." I had experienced this facing of death many times
by then and knew what was coming, and this time I was ready.
I lay down on my bed and began to scream at the top of my lungs;
this lasted for about ten minutes, and I became silent. Then, I mentally
went to the place of anger and pulled it up at the roots, Next, I went
to the place of hate and pulled hate out at the roots. Violence came
next, and I went right to the very birth place of violence, and
with all of my strength, I pulled violence out. I then went to the place
of love and pulled until it came out. I learned in that instant that
the love that I thought was love was not love. It was a thought-invented
image of love! At that point "all hell broke loose".

This began an action which had 100% positive energy (the act of
telling the truth) and 100% negative energy (being a complete failure).
When that complete negative energy came together with the complete
positive energy, an electrical charge went through my mind and body. My
body was convulsing, shaking violently all over, it was like getting hit
by lightning except the lightning stayed inside of me. I do not know
how long the current of electricity stayed in my body that day, but I do
know that this was an experience like nothing I had ever known or heard
of before. It was a complete death of a consciousness and person. At
the end of that four hours Edward Jones was indeed dead and was born
anew.

What told me it was true were the previous near death experiences.
I already knew what death looked like. This looked much the same with
one huge difference: this time, I went all of the way through and came
out on the other side. I was a new human, needing to learn all of
life from a new place, a place where I still live, dead to the world and yet
alive from the place of death. From this place, creation, it is possible
to create a new world, a world void of violence and the thought
processes that have invented it.

When that four hour death/birth was over, and as I reached for the
door to leave the room, there came a message/impression/voice which said,
"You now know the secret of life." Yes, I do know the secret of life.
The first part of the secret is that it is impossible to speak it and
have it completely understood, as it is not understandable using any
current language. Instead one must BE life in order to see the truth of
life.

This experience was fourteen and one half years ago in 1979,
and I have spent over $25,000 going to leading edge seminars and
workshops to see if someone could explain this happening, and so far
there has been no answer, except my own answer. I have heard a
lot of talk about the other side, and there is another side, and this
human lives in it.

The strange thing about all of this is I still could see all of my
past life, and know all of the events that happened in it. It is like
being all of an old life--consciousness, and yet being a new life--
consciousness. Another way of saying this is: A new consciousness
Was born, and it includes all of the old consciousness, but the old
consciousness does not include or even know of the new one.

There were many things missing in my new life, and one of the
places I could see something missing was that for thirty six years I
walked in such a way, with a certain willed stiffness in my body that
seemed to say, "Don't come close or else", and this was missing. In
its place was a certain softness, or femininity. I would ask friends
if I appeared gay, their response was, "No", and yet the difference was
so great that I began to question it myself.

Another place of newness was when I talked with people: I could hear
the truth when they spoke it and could hear when they were lying. Some
became angry at me when I would tell them they were lying, and I lost a
few "friends" as a result of it. To this day, I am still looking to find
ways to speak with other people and get around their ego.

I was soon to begin experiencing what I call the residue, meaning
the things left in my body after the experience of Transformation. It
seems that the mind is not the only place memory is stored. It seems to
me that the residue of grief is stored in the colon, and anger, jealousy,
and fear are stored in the stomach.

Since that day November 19, 1979, and as I write these words, I
have been living what could be called "in the body life", a life of
living each second and watching every movement and emotion as they
happen. It has been, and still is, a minute study of what it means to be
a human on this planet. I have lived, and experienced while watching,
all the grief, pain, anger, jealousy, manipulation, and misery that was
inside my body.

If you stay at the doorway of death long enough, you can see your
life pass before you, and you can experience a death and learn the one
thing that everyone who has died learns (after it is too late). This one
thing is YOUR LIFE COULD HAVE BEEN DIFFERENT. This lesson, I am
convinced, is the most powerful lesson you can learn. It means ALL of
life can be different and this world can be a NEW world for yourself and
all humans to live in.

To experience death of the old mind and returning to a new life is
the single most important happening on the planet today. It is
happening all over the world now and needs to be supported in every
possible way, for only from the death of this world for each of us can a
NEW world be born.

When the happening of death takes place with no inside
interference, the human mind dies. All of ‘what was’ dies, and there is an
openness left, an open space allowing you to see what is real and also
to see all the unreal that has gone before. This indeed is a new
consciousness.

When a complete mental death takes place, there is a transformation
of our mind. We then have a mind that is aware and open, a mind born from
the mistakes, misery, and confusion of the past, a mind ready for an
action which is NOT the same action as that which went before.

This action has an intelligence all its own. It is not the effect
of the old. It is an action that says we have failed up to now and we
need a NEW action to solve the human plight of ever destroying ourselves
and our environment. Another way of saying this is: The consciousness
that created the problem cannot solve the problem. A NEW consciousness
must be born in order to solve the OLD problem, and in order for
something new to be born, the old must die. This something NEW of which
I speak is what humans have been waiting for forever: A NEW human
with a new consciousness and a new solution to our old problem.

We as individuals and as a world have only ONE problem to solve--
the problem of thought. Thought has invented our present world and all
of its violence, so the problem that needs to be solved is "thinking"
itself. We must stop thinking our way through life. The only thing that
thought can invent is more of the same; therefore, any solution that
thought invents will only deepen our problems. Thinking that thought
can solve the problems caused by its own thinking process has been our
plight since the beginning of time. It is now time to stop the
direction that we and our world are taking. If not, we surely will get to
where thought is leading us-- destruction.

It is one thing to say, "stop thought". It is for sure another to
do it. The space between two thoughts is a small space until one finds
it; then, it can be expanded to a size where it can be lived from. When
you live from the space between two thoughts, you are living at the
level of creation, at the place of nothingness from which all things
begin. Another way of saying this is "from nothing we can create
anything."

The most difficult part of all of this is the doing of it and the
perception others have of you while you are doing it. To say you may
look different may be an understatement because anyone not acting like
and not doing things like others will be not only ridiculed but will
be stopped by whatever methods are needed, given you do not
look nor act the way you "should".

This world is not a world for humans who do not have violence as a
part of their nature. Violence is a protector of violence and without
violence you must use a different kind of action, or you may well be
consumed by the world around you. This action could be called
intelligence or love, which gives you the needed actions to continue
living without the need to respond to violence with violence.

This action takes the form of telling the truth to yourself and, in
whatever way possible, to others as well. Telling the truth to oneself
is not difficult if you are open. It is the act of being truthful to
others that is a challenge. Humans, for the most part, do not want to
hear the truth spoken and will do almost anything to ensure that it
does not happen. The real problem with this is if another tells you
something that you know to be different from what they are saying and
you remain quiet, you are then lying to both yourself and to the other
person. It is a HUGE challenge to say what you need to say and not hurt
the feelings of others and not touch their egos.

The EGO is one thing that keeps us from being able to communicate
with each other effectively. Each of us must watch carefully not to
touch the other EGO. EGO is "the core of though," showing us what
we think we are and projecting that thought to others so
they can see how good, likable, smart, and RIGHT we are.

The ego has a set of powerful protectors which includes anger,
hurt, jealousy, pride, excuses, reasonableness, justification and
knowledge, all products of THOUGHT. Thought is always dead.
When you look at thought you will see that thought cannot take
place until AFTER the happening. By that time the experience
is gone, dead, and then thought takes over and says, "it was this; therefore,
you should do that." As humans we do what our thoughts say to do, no
questions asked. These thought-guided actions have led us to the brink
of destruction where we now live.

This idea of "not thinking" needs to be scrutinized, as all we seem
to do is THINK, so how is it possible to "not think" our way through life?
There is a form of mind usage that I call looking/seeing. While it
requires a form of what we might call thinking, it is not thought in
action. It is rather a way of evaluating progress and failure, a way of
evaluating what has been accomplished and then moving on to whatever is
next. This way of living is "living in the unknown." In this manner
of living, daily actions take place; and, then, there is looking to see
what the results are after the event. This manner of living means to
not already have a plan and to not already know what reaction will
take place from a certain action. It is taking a step and then looking
to see where that step took you and, then, another and another,
moving in the "unknown." It is never figuring what to do next, but
just doing what is next and THEN look to see if it was effective.

The role that thought plays in this way of life is a rhetorical role, as
thought enters only after the action is complete. When a mistake or
failure is seen, another course of action is begun from seeing that the
present course is counter-productive. No thought is employed in the new
direction, for the new direction has no fixed course. It is all ready
for a complete new direction at any moment.

A necessary ingredient for this way of life is what I call a
"backward map". A backward map is to look at all of what you as an
individual or all of what mankind has achieved from the beginning until
now. It doesn't take much to see that from the standpoint of violence
there has been NO movement. We are still the same as our caveman
ancestors. If someone had a thing we wanted, we hit him with a rock and
took it. Today, if we want something another has, we also find a way to
hit him on the head and take it. The only difference is the kind of
rock. Today’s rocks can kill hundreds or thousands at one time.

When you take this into account you can see that all of what man
has accomplished is nothing on the scale of LOVE. We are still as
violent as on day one. With this information it is easy to see that the
course of today's world is the course of destruction. The only question
is what will destroy us: another war, the collapse of the USA leading to
world collapse, a giving in of the planet in some form that causes an
irreversible loss of clean air or water? Whatever the cause, it is
clear that this world cannot continue on its present course for long.
So what can be done to have a peaceful and loving world for our children
to grow in?

We first must SEE plainly that the world which thought has invented
is indeed a world of ever increasing violence and hate and that such a
world has NO chance of success. If we can clearly see this, it then
would allow us to see that we as humans have completely failed to create
love and peace on earth. The clear seeing of this fact on its own will create
action towards peace, love, and compassion for ourselves and others.

Can we see clearly that our form of government, churches, schools,
family, and society have all failed and need to be mentally discarded in
favor a NEW way of life? This new life has no course; no plan; no
already knowing, except the knowledge that all that came before has
failed and something new is needed.

The only way I see that we can have this happen is for a large
number of people to undergo a Transformation, a death of their minds,
given our minds are full of the accumulated thought, the memory of the
past, and that this accumulated knowledge is of NO value, except to keep
us on our course of destruction..

The distinction here is the distinction between Love and knowledge.
Love has a movement of its own with no sameness or single direction.
Knowledge, which comes from memory. has a certain direction and sameness
no matter the consequence and does not solve anything. We as humans do
not seem to notice that our world is not working. We simply say we must
keep trying and trying. However, given the context of our world,
THOUGHT, which has invented religion, government, family, marriage, and
our schools is failing. Why keep on using thought as though some day it
will all come together? It will NOT.

In order to BE life one must live at the doorway to life/death
where all of life begins. This is no easy task, for it requires a death
of ALL of ones mind, meaning that all of ‘what was’ dies and an
emptiness is born, an emptiness that cannot be filled because each event
or action dies the moment it is experienced. This is the way of truth.
When a truth is spoken for the first time, it is true and dies as a
truth. If repeated by another it becomes the beginning of a belief and
is a lie.

All of life has this quality of birth, expression, and death. We as
humans do not see this flow of life/death; we think that a truth
discovered is a truth. It is not. The truth has only a short life
span; then, a death and a birth if discovered anew by another. This
has been the mistake made by all of the religions. There was a
birth of truth with a human and a subsequent repeating of this truth,
not seeing that a truth repeated is indeed a lie. What we end up with
is a new religion, passing on an already dead truth and these humans
making a belief out of it and then living as though the belief is true.
ALL belief is indeed a lie, and yet belief is what is leading this
world.

When a belief is invented, thought takes over and begins proving
the truth of the belief (which is only the truth of the thought itself),
and thus begins the process of repetition, ever repeating an already
failed effort, ever trying to succeed, not seeing the failure of
thought-invented truth. In the Bible there is the story about Adam
coming to the place of eating the fruit of knowledge. This story is the
same as what I have been saying here, the fruit of knowledge being
thought and ever repeating another’s truth, never discovering for
oneself what truth is. The truth cannot be found in thought. Truth
is creation in action, ever being born and dying to be born NEW each
time.

We humans long ago lost the joy and secret of life, which is to create
our lives as we go. Instead, we follow each other and our thought invented
beliefs, each of us thinking we are right, hoping and praying
that some day a God will at the last moment save us. Indeed
this world is a world of lost, confused people destroying all
that they touch.

One thing I have learned after writing these words is that I have
always given 100% of my self to what I was doing. Often, it was not
enough, and when I saw that I needed to sacrifice my aliveness to keep a
job or business, I would either quit, get fired, go bankrupt, or just
walk away. My own personal integrity is all I have after fifty one
years on this planet, and it is the one thing that I will take with me
when I die again. I have only succeeded at one thing--being human.

First, we need to see that we are all in a conspiracy, a conspiracy of
ineffectiveness. This means that we are all conspiring with one
another to keep ourselves ineffective. We tell our children not to
lie, and then we tell them there is a Santa Claus, an Easter Bunny, and
a tooth fairy. It does not take long for our children to discover that
we are liars. We tell them to follow the rules, and then we drive
85 miles an hour on a 75 mile an hour road. We tell them to be fair,
and we cheat the government out of all we can. We tell them to get
along with their friends, and then we get into fights with each other
and our neighbors.and we cheat the government out of all we can.
We tell them to get along with their friends, and then we get into
fights with each other and our neighbors.

These actions begin for children the act of becoming just like
their parents. This has been going on for millions of years, fathers
not knowing how to be fathers, mothers not knowing how to be mothers,
and each of them teaching children how to be parents. It seems to me that
we have all failed ourselves and our world.

Our first and greatest failure is to ourselves and next to our children.
We do not know that we do not love them, for if we loved our
children and ourselves, we would not have the kind of world we now have
to live in. Only each of us transforming oneself can transform THIS world.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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