At the Doorway of Death

If you stay at the doorway of death long enough, you can see your life pass before you, and you can experience a death. You can learn the one thing that everyone who has died learns (after it is too late), and that one thing is that 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 you and all humans to live in.

The single most important happening on the planet today is to experience death of the old mind and to return to a new life.  It will be happening all over the world soon, and it needs to be supported in every possible way. A new world for each of us can be born only from the death  of the old one.

When the happening of death takes place with no outside interference, the human mind dies. All of what was before dies, and there is 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 that 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, and that
is the problem of thought.  Thought has invented our present world and all
of its violence, so the problem that needs to be solved is thought itself.  We 
need to stop thinking our way through life.  The only thing 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 end the direction that we and our world have been taking. If we do not, we surely will get to where thought is leading us: destruction.

It is one thing to say, "end thought," and 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 from which there can be living.  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 for sure. Anyone not acting and not doing things like others do, face the possibility of being ridiculed, but may also be stopped by whatever methods are needed to stop them, given they do not look nor act the way they 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 different 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 action 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 then are 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 - not touch their egos.

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

The ego has a set of powerful protectors which include 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 at which 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."  Daily actions take
place. and we then look to see the results.  It is not having a plan and already knowing what reaction will take place given a certain action. It is taking a step and then looking to see where that step took you; then another; then another. It is never figuring out what to do next. It is  just doing what's 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, as the new direction has no fixed course.  This way of living is always 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 one designed to look at all of what you as an individual, or all of mankind, have 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 would hit him with a rock and take it.  Today if we want something that 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 that into consideration, you can see that all of what mankind has accomplished is nothing on the scale of Love.  We are still as violent as on day one.  With an understanding of this, 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. Will it be another war, the collapse of the USA leading to world collapse, or perhaps 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 in which our children can grow?

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 that, we would then be allowed 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.

I am saying that our forms of government, our churches, our families, and our 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 it has failed, and something new is needed.

The only way which I can see that happening is for a large number of people to undergo a Transformation, a death of their minds, given the fact 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 pointed toward 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 consequences, 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.  That is no easy task as it requires a death of all of one's mind, meaning that all of what was before dies and an emptiness is born, an emptiness that cannot be filled because each event or action dies the moment it is experienced.  That is the way of truth. When a truth is spoken for the first time, it is true and then 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 then a truth forever. It is not.  The truth has only a short life span; then a death and a birth if discovered anew by another.  That has been the mistake made by all of the religions.  There was a birth of truth with a human and a subsequent repeating of that 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 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 that cannot be found in thought.  Truth is creation in action, ever being born, and dying to be born new each time.

The essence of what I am saying is that 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, and hoping, 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 of my life story is that I have
always given 100 percent of myself 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.  I am indeed a success. While it is one
thing for me to say all of this, it is quite another to have an alternative to our current way of being. From this page on I will show what my workshop is about, some of the workshop shows up all through this book.

First we need to see that we are in a conspiracy, a conspiracy of ineffectiveness, and we all are in it.  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 drive 80 miles an hour on a 70 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 with our own friends.

These actions begin for our children the act of becoming just like their parents, and this has been going on for thousands of years -- fathers not knowing how to be fathers, mothers not knowing how to be mothers, and each of them teaching their children how to be parents.  It seems that we have all failed in the domain of father, mother, parent, and friend.

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 in which to live.

My first of four encounters with death was my birth.

I was born into a family that did not care to have me. I was neglected to the point of near death. After my birth, it seems that I 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 prompted her to call the police.

I was then taken to live with my grandparents for the next two years
where I was cared for by my twelve year old niece. It was her job to keep  medicine on my blisters and sores. The doctor said it was the first time he’d seen a baby come close to death from diaper rash.

My next two encounters with death occurred when I lived on the West Virginia side of the Ohio River in the steel mining town of Wellsburg.  One near death experience occurred when I was nine and beaten close to death by a group of bigger boys for entering into their territory.  I was taken to the hospital where I was given a 50/50 chance of living. Death lingered by my bedside for two weeks.

The other near death experience happened while playing a game of hide-and-go-seek. I climbed through a window to hide in the basement of an abandoned house, and my foot got stuck between the boards barring the window. As I fell head first toward the brick wall, I saw death, that space of nothingness, coming at me again.

After leaving the navy in 1963, I married, had a child, and started in the restaurant business before going into complete bankruptcy in 1978.  The importance of those circumstances is that bankruptcy, job loss, and business failure are all a form of death; and each of them, if we take responsibility for the failure (not have excuses), can teach us a major lesson. In each case, I told Nance, my wife, and my friends that it was my mistakes that caused the failure.

Eventually, Nance decided she wanted a divorce, and even though during my fifteen years of marriage I had wanted that to happen, it still came as
a real shock. I had been abandoned again! We agreed to stay together for six months to see if we could make the marriage work since we had a twelve year old son, Troy.

I spent those six months seeing my life in the context of failure. I saw
that I was going to lose my wife, my son, my business, and my home. I went to my parents and admitted my failure to them as a son; I went to my siblings and spoke to them of my failure as a brother. I began to experience a sense of relief each time I spoke the truth of my failures. I told my son I had failed him, and I told my wife I had failed her as a husband, and I experienced even a greater release.

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 there for us to figure out how to best 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.

I learned from action that each label cannot be defined, as each definition will in some way be different. Those labels are not real; therefore, no one can succeed at them. You can only be at various levels of failure, or if you prefer, success.

Later, I discovered another release related to the pain of being abandoned. It seemed that the pain of Nance leaving was more about losing a mother than a wife. I discovered the way to release the pain was by intensifying the pain, and 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, I experienced several instances  of a short, still picture in my mind: a few seconds of peace and harmony appeared. 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 Nance to catch the plane to her new husband-to-be.

When I returned home, I first sent Troy to his friend’s 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 death — many times and by now  knew what was coming.

This time I was ready. I lay down on my bed and began to scream at the top of my lungs. The screaming lasted for about ten minutes, and I became silent. Mentally, I 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. Next was violence, 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.

In that instant I discovered that the love I thought was love was not love. It was a thought-invented image of love. At that point "all hell broke loose!” That discovery began an action which had 100 percent positive energy, the act of speaking the truth, and 100 percent negative energy, that of 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 and 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 it 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 those four hours, Edward Jones was indeed dead, and was born anew. What told me this experience was true were the previous near death experiences. I already knew what death looked like, and his 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, yet alive from the place of death. From that place, which is creation, it is possible to create a new world, a world void of violence and the thought processes that had 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 or an impression or a 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 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.