Speaker: the Rev. Dr. Randolph W.B. Becker

SPIRITUAL PERSISTENCE and ENCOUNTERS WITH THE AFTERLIFE

"You keep wanting to know where the road leads; but the road only leads somewhere for those in transit, not those in arrival. If you found out the ending you'd be there, and where you were would be the end. So don't seek that, unless you are ready to stop and let all Creation pass you by on its flow to its evolved self. Hint: Fossils know exactly what they are and where they are."

"Don't reduce your visions to words. One of the problems of many people is they feel they have to put words to insights, visions, and feelings. And if they do, they reduce the insights, visions, and feelings to words and lose something in the translation. So maybe they should be tools, not answers."

"The trick is to be able to share yourself without expecting or requiring anything in return. If you can do that, you can stay whole no matter who you're dealing with or whatever the situation."

"Fears keep things from happening; they don't make them happen. Fears keep you from good things."

"You know, truth never has to be proven and/or forced. Just reveal it and they will come. If you toss out enough tasty tidbits, they will eventually want a whole meal."

"Grief is the recognition that we have to surrender to the past something we wish were in the present and future. When we find balance we can stop grieving, because then we will lose no more. We keep grieving until we can do that.

"About the meaning of time if time is eternal. Time is a construct of the mind and spirit to see the sequence of spiritual development as more than just a lump. In one sense we have already become all that we will be, but in another we are still getting there. Time is a measure of getting there--meaningless in its own right, but with extrinsic value as opposed to intrinsic.

"Use the past only to look to the future with hope and inspiration. Climbing a mountain, it is better to look where you are going and use the skills you've learned than to look back down and get trapped by those mistakes that brought learning, or they would lead you backwards. Have you ever taken a test where an answer you know is wrong is all that comes to mind, so you think it must be right?"

Eight pithy statements, any one of which could provide an opening to a deep and thoughtful conversation. Did one particularly grab your attention?

Eight statements, all the more intriguing because they were shared, along with many others, during the past three and a half years. They represent a portion of the wisdom about the meaning of life that has become known as Spiritual Persistence.

All of Spiritual Persistence, like these eight statements, has been given to my wife, Elissa, and me by our daughter, Ericka.

Ericka died on August 20, 1995, the victim of a drunk driver going the wrong way down Interstate 64 in tidewater Virginia. Twenty years old at the time, about to be a junior at Yale, Ericka was a lively example of the world that is yet to be. She was African- American and Caucasian; her families background was Roman Catholic and Jewish; she lived as a middle class person in a wealthy suburb, most of her life in a single parent home amid the nuclear family majority; she was a spiritually seeker in a materialist culture. At the time of her death, it seemed to us, and to so, so many, that a great promise had ended.

In the midst of the great pain of our loss, we ached for some meaning beyond the immediacy of what felt like a finality. Those who have lived (and died a bit) through similar experience know what I am talking about. Less than two weeks after that apparent end to her promising existence, Elissa suggested that we attempt to contact Ericka's spirit, looking for a window beyond the dark room of grief. I agreed.

Now to understand the significance of this, I need to share with you some of my own religious journey. Raised in a Universalist Unitarian congregation (one that merged decades before the rest of the movement), I embraced the freedom of thought offered to me by becoming a scientific atheist. To meet my own needs for certainties in my adolescent years, I wanted a religion that was based on empirical evidence. If I could not touch it, taste it, see it, feel it .... if I could not test it, measure it, record it, I did not want to believe in it. One of my undergraduate majors was physics.

Yet, in those same years I was companioned by a continuing series of spiritual moments of a very contradictory kind. Especially through music and nature, I was moved to the core of my being by experiences that held ultimate meaning to me and which did not lend themselves to words or descriptions, much less to scientific validation. Here, tonight, decades away from those germinal spiritual events, I still find them ineffable. I can give you labels that might awaken recognition in events of your life, but I will never be able to fully and truly share the essence of those experiences. Passionate scientific skepticism and equally passionate spirituality; a peculiar and yet, I believe, a more common pattern than is admitted in our movement. To reduce the tension between the two elements, I adopted the stance of the religious humanist, one who could admit to religious feelings and interpret them in human terms, not divine terms. My other major was in sociology, a compliment to the physics. In my religious life, as in my academic life, I was seeking some kind of balance between the world of my thoughts and the world of my experiences.

However, as time passed, I found that the spiritual experiences of my life would not allow themselves to be explained away. I knew them to be more than just human brain impulses. I knew them to be other than wishful psychological constructs. I knew them to be expressive of some transcendent meaning other than the immanent facts of the moment.

So, I moved on once more, now moving from defining myself as a religious humanist to being a spiritual humanist. I explored and experienced past-life regressions, the most significant of which was a lengthy session of return with the aid of a hypnotist, a birthday gift from Elissa. We also marveled together at movies such as "Defending Your Life".

Elissa had been involved with spiritual matters much longer than I. Her has studied astrology for year, her discovery of the Seth materials were literally a life-saving experience for her, and she had a growing sense of her own mediumship.

And Ericka herself had, as I said, been intensely interested in spiritual matters; in life she had explored, experienced, and expected that there was more spiritual possibility than was being accepted by most people. That set the stage for the experiences the three of us have shared since that late summer of 1995.

You see, in retrospect what I had been doing was searching for a definition of my essential self. I had tried being an atheist who acknowledged only empirical evidence. That was not me. I had tried being a human being who had religious experiences. That was not me. I had tried being a human being who had spiritual experiences. That also was not me.

But, that last definition allowed me the freedom to be open to the possibility that death is not the end of one's spiritual existence. My personal experiences had already shown me that there was more in existence than could be shown empirically, and that the "something more" transcended physical existence.

So it was, with great expectancy and great trepidation that I joined Elissa that night in late August, 1995, and sought to communicate across the divide between life and death.

Although hopeful, I was still the skeptic. Although needy, I was still the doubter. I was soon to be proven wrong.

That first attempt at communication succeeded, but not as we had hoped. In what has become our usual practice, of recorded sessions of both automatic writing and use of an Ouija board (well blessed, with protections invoked each time), we made contact, but not with our daughter.

It would take several more attempts before we "talked" with her directly. But, once we made contact, the communications have continued ever since.

Now, before I go further into what we have been given, let me respond to the question I am usually asked at this point in the story: "How do you know it is for real?"

We could have a lively debate, I am sure, about what is real, so let me respond instead about how I have come to accept these communications as coming from some source other than my wife or me.

One the hallmarks of the communications has been a recognition on our part of the spirit of Ericka, in traits of humor, kindness, and insight that were evident in her life. The spirit with whom we speak expresses the style and manner of that which was best about her. In so many ways, her tricks on us, references to school and childhood toys, jokes, and private information known by only one of us , she comes through.

As a skeptic about this process, in the beginning at least, I looked for signs of subterfuge. If I lifted my own hands a little, would the pointer still move, as if manipulated by Elissa? Could I force certain words? The answer, in each case, was no. This was a shared, spiritual experience, not an expression of a single, physical will.

But, the most telling point that led me immediately to my acceptance of what was happening was that we began to be given insights into the nature of existence that had not been part of the thoughts of either my wife or me. We were in new territory, and it was territory that demanded a paradigmatic shift in our thinking. This was not the same- old, same-old. If it wasn't coming from us, then it must be coming through us, but from somewhere else.

So I accept the validity of the communications because they seem familiar, genuine, and revelatory, all elements which would be hard to fabricate or simulate.

During the time of those first communications I began to see myself defined as a spiritual entity that happened to be having a physical experience, maybe what could be called a humanistic spiritualist.

Now, before I go any further, I want to ask you to join me, if you will, in a simple invocation, the one that we use in all of our work.

May we be connected to all things loving,
Protected from all things evil,
And guided in all was gracious. Amen

Again, from on of the Points to Ponder shared by Ericka, who is known in spirit as Rikkity, these words:

"The trick is to give up specific lives, but keep the accumulating insights of all lives and the meaning discovered between lives. At some point one gets enough meaning and understanding that one does not need to go back, but can go forward to be a healthy part of a larger entity--like Atoms- In-Training (A.I.T.s). When you are ready to fit in the spiritual molecule you will. Then you become an M.I.T. (Molecule-In-Training). We are climbing Jacob's Ladder, so to speak." (1/13/96) Here we have a basic statement of Spiritual Persistence - that each of us living as separate spiritual (and for the moment physical) entities, are on a path to union with other spiritual entities of our same spiritual complexity.

You, me, all of us at this level of spiritual development are working on refinement and fulfillment of who and what we are spiritually.

We arrived here, at this spiritual level, as the product of less complex spiritual entities combining to form us. What allowed them to combine was their own refinement and fulfillment of who and what they were spiritually at their level of complexity. In that combination that becomes you or me is the whole history of all of the elements of this new spiritual entity. We inherit, as it were, the learnings of the past as foundations of our being. Without that accumulated and complementary basis of spiritual experience, the spiritual beings that we are would be unstable, form from spiritual energy or matter forced into relationship, not connected into relationship.

At this spiritual level, we are offered as many lives as are necessary to complete the process of filling and filing, milling and molding, finding and forming, by which we find our fulfillment. For Rikkity this is summed up in the seemingly simple phrase: Learning and Remembering.

You all know people (maybe ourselves) who seem to learn a lot .... or actually they learn the same thing a lot .... over and over again the same thing. There are certain things which we need to know and incorporate ( make part of our body ... or actually part of our being) if we are going to be fulfilled in who we are spiritually. We will be given the privilege of all the lives we need at this spiritual level to finally "get it", to finally not only learn but also remember.

This spiritual level, like any other spiritual level, is about discovering through experience realities about ourselves and our relationship to others and to the world that surrounds us what will make us whole enough to be able to connect with meaning to other spiritual entities.

What came together to form us went through that process ... and we are the benefactors of those remembered insights.

And, by this point, I hope you are beginning to catch on to one of the major differences between Spiritual Persistence and much of what we have been taught .... this is not about differentiation, but about connection. This is not about how I, the single spiritual entity, can save myself, find eternal meaning, be whole.

The learning and remembering is not a key to heaven, but rather the means to move on in a process of ever growing spiritual complexity. It is not about any individual over-and- against the rest, but rather about all in connection to all.

In our process of learning and hopefully remembering, my wife and I have been given points to ponder that we have grouped into 8 categories, 8 themes of insight from beyond about the very present here and now. One you have already heard about - learning and remembering.

Let me share the other seven with a mix of words from Rikkity and myself:

First is ENERGY - from Rikkity "This is about relationships. There is nothing more frustrating or more glorious than the relationship between two people. It is fundamental to life and to growth. Life is relationship. Energy flows naturally between two points. If it stays static it turns in on itself and self-destructs. There is nothing that is static in the universe, because nothing that is static lasts.

"Growth is about the flow of energy. It goes out in one direction and comes back more than it was before. What comes back the same has no effect, and so it is not even noticed. Relationships like that have no effect on a person because they don't add anything to the person's life. There must be difference, there must be change, there must be newness in order for there to be growth.

"In relationships what stays static shrivels and dies. If you try to hold onto your energy and not let it flow between you and the other, it will eventually dissipate. You will eventually lose it. If you don't let it go it cannot come back to you. That old saying about 'if you love something, let it go' is so right! But the corollary to that is that if you don't let it go you will lose it.

"The effort of putting out the energy is what sustains life, and without it winter would not turn to spring and pain would not produce growth and what is destroyed by natural disaster would remain barren. The rain would not produce rainbows if the sun didn't make the effort to shine through it. In the end you really have no choice anyway. If you love you give. And if you give, you are given in return. "Energy is a precious commodity, but it is not rare or something you need to 'get.' It is the essence of life, and you will always have enough as long as you use it with love and for good. Use it in anger or doubt or despair or hatred and you will never have what you need. Use it in love and care and creativity and belief and you will always have what you need because you will always be nourished and sustained by it. Energy used for positive purposes will feed you. Energy used in negative ways will suck from you. It's always a two-way street and you always have a choice.

"Stay positive, stay whole, stay on your own course and you will not get lost. Look here for your guides, but look there for your companions. Keep your eyes on the stars, but your arms around each other." (5/15/97) How we use, invest, direct, focus our energy, our spiritual energy is one of the essential challenges of life. We are also confronted by others who would live off our energy, and so we to find ways to share our energy without being consumed.

LIVING AND ENJOYING is the desirable process of existence. Again from Rikkity: "We all seem to accept gifts if we can feel they are on our terms. If you only accepted the mail and calls you want, you'd always get what you wanted but you'd only get a little of what you could. It takes the risk of opening to the painful and the trivial and the whatever to also get the serendipitous and the spiritual and the redemptive.

"So ponder all this, and remember anger only begets anger and sadness and fear only begets sadness and fear. Live in your own little worlds and definitions if you want, but there's a universe out here awaiting your choice to change and flower and grow.

"The truly wise never feel they have achieved wisdom. They never would have the arrogance to say they know themselves or they don't need to know or consider anything. The truly wise are always on the road, not staying at the inn.

"In the face of great change it is appealing to journey that sad road only until a better vista is reached and then to sit there and say, 'I've dealt with change, and I know I have because I see beauty and hope again'--as if that first vista out of the valley is meant to be a final resting place. Greater vistas await and, yes, also deep and dark valleys. But the road invites. So give up the fears, or at least find courage in their face, and give up the sheltering walls and closed doors and get out there. As long as you stay stopped in anger and fear you will feel like you have nothing. Like the bard, afoot and light-hearted I take to the open road.

"And don't mistake friendship for companionship. You will meet many at the inns; but few will be willing to endure the long tramps of day, and even fewer those of dark and desolate night. So chat around the merry fire at the inns, but notice who is there on the road. Even in silence the companion is there." (9/27/97)

and

"In times of joy, a person needs to have an awareness of the pains of life. The balance of the two makes life whole. So, too, with grief. If one lives only in grief, she is not really living. Living is a balancing act; life is in the middle. So, you seek balance to be truly alive. The spirit heals by living, not by thinking.

"The future is beyond your veil of tears, and you have to risk the tears to move through them and live again. So, try living more expansively and see if the answers don't come. But more likely, the questions will fade in the face of life." (10/16/95) and this very important insight from her:

"The only measure of meaning is the person. The person is the only one who can tell you whether or not they fulfilled their purpose; whether or not their life had meaning; whether or not they accomplished and learned and remembered what they were there to accomplish and learn and remember. No one...no one...looking in from outside of them can understand or judge that. No one can truly know where that person fits into their life, into their entity, into the universe, EXCEPT THAT PERSON. That is why acceptance is so vitally important. When we don't accept someone, we make it harder for them to fulfill their purpose and the purpose the universe has for them!" (6/4/96)

I have already mentioned the theme of Learning and Remembering. Another of the themes is GRIEF, DEATH, and the AFTERLIFE: "If you focus on 'could-have-beens,' that dishonors what I did do. If we count the losses, we will miss out on all the opportunities for life. That's why I keep wanting to minimize details about my death. Every moment dealing with that shit is one moment less spent on what was valuable in my life.

"Here's a message for everybody: Focus on life. Death will take care of itself. You see, JC wasn't talking about salvation; he was talking about living without focusing on death. He was saying, 'If you live like I tell you, you will and can stop worrying about death.' Not because he could beat death or make death ok, but because living like that makes life the focus." (9/13/96)

"Grief is a lesson. It is what cracks the hard shell of our defenses and opens us to each other and to the full range of human feelings. It cuts into our ideas about ourselves and the world, and allows buds of growth to spring from those openings. Those buds can grow into branches that reach out into parts of one another that we would not otherwise know existed, let alone be able to connect with.

"That's the point, you know. Not to remain on the superficial level of connection. Not to find common ground in lifestyles or educational experience or economic level, but to connect to each other through the love and understanding that comes only through pain and grief and loss. Why it should be that way, why it needs to be that way is something I don't know. It just is, and it is very hard to accept. But depth of feeling and breadth of understanding come only through the pain that opens the hard surface of our hearts and reaches into where it is softer and more vulnerable and, yes, needier. If we didn't need each other's comfort and company and wisdom, there wouldn't be much point in connecting, would there?" (3/7/97) TIME is also one of the areas of Rikkity's communications:

"Here we do things for as long as they take or happen. We schedule activities, not times.

"Time is only a quantity if you choose. Einstein was right: you use time to avoid the infinite nature of reality. Time implies beginning and ending, but that ain't the way it is. Do circles have beginnings and endings? So, why must other things? You see a line, and you can't tell where it started. Maybe it is still happening. You can't say where it started or stopped. Rulers don't measure anything more than themselves." (10/3/95)

"Here's a little tidbit: Einstein talked about time curving, but it is neither linear nor curved. It has its own pattern that is not represented by any word or thought construct in your world. In later entity development you will experience this greater reality of time. Even I only hear about it, since I have yet to merge and move on.

"Your world has been both experienced and built on linear quantitative time, so it is right and true for you. But there are more worlds than you have dreamt of. But, once in awhile, the other senses of time break through and become manifest to you. Dreams are one place; deja vu is another; and inexplicable events are often, also--like foreknowledge, or events that seem out of time or place. Hint: building the Pyramids is not an issue of aliens, but a matter of time. Puzzle that one." (4/30/96)

"About the meaning of time if time is eternal. Time is a construct of the mind and spirit to see the sequence of spiritual development as more than just a lump. In one sense we have already become all that we will be, but in another we are still getting there. Time is a measure of getting there--meaningless in its own right, but with extrinsic value as opposed to intrinsic. And that's all I'll say about that now. Ponder." (4/8/97)

"We all need to put things in perspective. Either you let time order things, or you can order them. But since time is an illusion then such history of time is illusionary. But the glimpses of life's moments are better measures of life than time's arbitrary standard.

"Think of a snapshot album. If you arrange all the pictures chronologically you get one story, but if you group them by unfolding stories you get many strands. Sometimes the next thing to happen is not the next piece of the story. So we take the snapshots we get and weave them into a fabric, not a linear ruler.

"Nothing ends, and everything ends. That's a pair of ducks (paradox.) And with geese you can choose eider one, but don't let it get you down." (1/2/98) In our quest to understand how all of this fits together, we consider the DIMENSIONS OF THE SPIRIT:

"In the parallel realities, there are all the people you will ever need to know in all your lives--like spiritual green rooms of your drama. But, some who wait never get called by you. Those may try to get your attention through dreams, or events, or crises--you create a reality without them, and they show you how that turns out, so you can see how you need them. What you get is your reality, illuminated by them. A bummer day may not be inherently bad, but you did not include someone who could have given you something.

"We usually miss out when we go it alone, or not looking for new viewpoints. A host awaits your call--a whole host saying, 'Peace on Earth and good will.' " (10/10/95)

"The intensity of psychic energy is what enables you to see me. You don't always see me, either. It's a combination, it is not automatic. But hey, it's the old psychic problem. A group of believers gets together and something happens; but when a skeptic tries to recreate the event with only a part of the group, nothing happens. If the phenomenon is dependent on our energies, then it will appear subjective, not objective. But is subjective reality secondary to objective reality? I think not!

"Hey, we all live in our subjective realities. We would not know an objective reality if we met one, because by the time we met it it would have become subjective. Like trees in the forest and lights in the fridge. Listen to this (pun intended.) A person who is sound challenged--that is, deaf--goes into the forest. A tree falls. Is there a sound? No. A sound is not a sound unless it is a sound. How's that for sound reasoning.

"And if you get 30,000 scientists to say something is objectively true, then it is for 30,000 and those who believe them. It's like the Bible--it's true if you believe it is. So, a teacher teaches students what to see in Moby Dick. Not good. Another teacher teaches students how to read any book with their eyes open. Good. Otherwise, you give them your substance, not their own; and the truth is not in the book, but in the reading. And so for poems and paintings and beer. One person's brew is another's poison.

"Absolutes are absolutely not real. Not yet, anyway. When all the combining is done, and all creation is once more one, and there is no difference between Creator and creation, then the absolute is real. Not yet. It's where we are heading.

"What is important now is what each person perceives and believes and does, not if they are right. Genuine, yes; right, who cares." (3/21/96)

And one of my favorite items shared by Rikkity:

"Once upon a time, there was a dragon named Lester. He had a friend named Fred. Fred was a frog. Lester would lope and Fred would hop.

"One day Lester hurt his front paws. All he could do was hop. And Fred was so worried that he ran, or rather loped, to Dr. Possum's for help. When old Doc Possum woke up he gave Fred some liniment for Lester, and Fred loped back as fast as a dragon to Lester.

"By the next day Lester was loping and Fred was hopping, but Lester said he was happier about something else than loping again. 'Fred,' he said, 'I got to know more what it's like to be Fred,' And Fred said to Lester, 'And I got to know more about what it's like to be Lester.'

"Isn't that what friends do--share what they have in common, and try to experience what could be differences. So a frog got more dragony and a dragon got more froggy and the world was a little more friendly. The End." (4/28/97)

Under a title of PURPOSE OF LIFE, CONNECTION, AND THE EVOLUTION OF THE SOUL, are these thoughts:

"The history of the soul is differentiation then consolidation, over and over. We become our entity, and later we discover that we are part of a still larger entity. And when we remember that, we become that, and so forth...moving toward a single entity of all energy, which is the consolidation of all individual differentiations. But that single entity is both the sum of all that has been and is also always becoming more, and the process is infinite--like the Iroquois turtles. "You have just been given one of the great secrets and lessons of spiritual existence. You live to discover who you are--not as a differentiated individual, but as a component element of an ever-evolving, ever-more complex, spiritual being/reality. And boy, does it take time by your standards. But in infinite terms, it is as quick as electrons forming atoms forming molecules forming you." (1/5/96)

"If you picture forward in the history of our entity, you see a number of people coming together. Now, look back to see a number of personalities coming together to form each of those people. People have complex personalities because they are a combination of elements. You are already a sum of many parts. "The long-term picture is the drive to find meaningful and productive sums of ever-more elaborate and complex elements. From subatomic particles to compounds to DNA to us to beyond to God, which is the universal All. And, maybe somewhere, gods combine to entities we cannot and dare not dream of. Ponder this." (3/8/96)

"The universe is lacking in specific intelligence and overwhelmed in inherent intelligence, and all this development and merging is trying to get one into the other. When what is waiting to be known is known, the process will be over and we will be one with everything. But hold the mustard. All smart people do have a sense of humor. The universe is one big chuckle." (4/30/96)

"It's not a dichotomy. There is no separation between the divine and the other. In most perceptions, one strives to become one with the divine or the universe or whatever. But this is how I see it: you and I and all will become the divine because we are all already part of it--it is in us and we are in it. No separation; no hierarchy. "A physical parallel: hydrogen is an element, water is a compound (see, I did pay attention in class), and polymagnesium carbohydrate is a complex compund, and a house is made of thousands of compounds, and the universe has many houses. But which is real. All of them are as real as the next, and all are part of the universe. Complexity is not a measure but a description. "So with entities, is the level before this less valid. Is the level to come more valid. In spiritual terms, no. Everything is! And everything will be! It has always been! How it relates and forms in ever-more complex ways is the process of all being; and someday--or maybe night--it will all be unified and that is what some would call the divine, All That Is in one being. But we are never separate from it. Nothing exists outside it, or maybe not. Maybe there are other realities, all moving toward their own unities; and when each and all are unified the process repeats all over on a grander scale. But All That Is is! It's not! about any individual act of communion with the divine; it's about infinite acts of union within the divine. Save yourself and miss the whole shabang. "Those who seek their own fulfillment simply delay the larger processes. It's not about differentiation; it's about integration, connection. Together we can move on, separately we are pitiful. So the task is not to seek the divine and find a personal connection, it is to feel the divine and make eternal connection with others. You can't build if you don't get together. That's all." (12/2/96)

One of the great treats we have been given has been introduction a number of Rikkity's friends on the other side. Some of these people have been great in history, but also humble in others of their lives. A great leader of our country has also been a Yugoslavian wrestling promoter, for example. From these friends, we have been given many gifts of insight, including these:

MW "Hello kind sir and madam. I was once called MW. Since then, I have lived in New York in a tenement and worked in a factory. I had so many friends, and I was just one of them. It was a relief to just fit in. Being MW wasn't always easy, but my husband was a truly great man--thoughtful, courageous.

"What you need to remember is that behind all the grandeur of those times was suffering and travail. Life was not easy, even for the best of us. I stood with endless women crying at the graves of hope. No day was certain, and pain was always just a moment away. We did what we could to secure a better future.

"You would be wise to follow EB's advice. If you do not look forward you will be consumed by the past so full of loss and pain and fear and doubt. Where and how you are now seemed far distant to us then, but we had to proceed with that vision rather than be consumed by our realities. So dream, and then work towards that dream." (7/16/96)

TJ "Too often people believe that community is based on proximity. We are in community, they say, with those around us. But I ask you to consider your own experience. Have you not seen a Greek, for example, who meets for the first time another Greek. They live miles apart, but they sense community. This is because community is different from society and culture. Community is that circle in which we eat or partake in common, but it need not be just those at our table. My brothers in Connecticut tasted the same meal of fraud and oppression as I. If I were to travel as a blind man within these colonies, I would scarce know where I was but for the accents--the meat of the conversations being so much in common. We always need to sense the largest community of which we are a part; and if we look only to those at our table, we will have neglected the larger good.

"But no community ever really exists without vision. A group going nowhere or backwards is but a mob; a group going forward is a community, for a real community is always about growth, development, and ideals. Communities that seek the status quo, they are prisons, not communities--prisons of souls.

LD: "What I want to talk about today is fashion--as in things coming into and going out of fashion. By the end of my life, I was out of fashion in Italy. Too often we measure an idea or tradition by how fashionable it is. One of your religious leaders spoke of the transient and the permanent; that is an apt phrase, and it has nothing to do with fashion. The test we need to take is one of permanence, even as we know that true permanence is eternally fleeting. But in our own small time it is not, and so we ask about what endures. For example, there are new experiences that transcend the ages. They are permanent. There are others which have reign for a span of years and are transient.

"Always look for what endures beneath, beyond, within the present moment. I speak as well to now as then because I did this. And it cost me favor and temporal permanence, but that is not a worry. When you travel with the permanent there are no real problems, just what she calls 'hassles.' If you travel the contemporary road only, you will have many troubles which will seemingly have no permanent relief. In other words, if you want to be in this for the long haul, then choose a path that has longevity. And, I must add, Christianity does not yet have longevity. It is as much about current fashion as about permanence.

"The universality of the human experience tells of permanence. That's the best measure. Talk to a bushman about contemporary art and you two will have little to say to each other. Talk with him about dreams and the conversation has no end." (1/9/98)

With these samples of items given to us from Rikkity, you have a basic idea of the message we have been given: that through our intentional focusing of our energies to experience life in its fullest measure of meaning, joy, and promise, we can learn and hopefully learn and remember those things that will help us fulfill our spiritual selves. When we are fulfilled, through the passage of some or many lives of learning and remembering, we can connect with other fulfilled spiritual entities to create new spiritual entities of greater complexity. We, they, all spiritual combinations of whatever complexity, are part of the process of motion from individuation of spiritual energy toward a union of all spiritual energy into all that is. Central to this process are the themes of connection not differences, of growth not stasis, of forward vision not backward nostalgia. The messages continue to flow to us. More pieces of the puzzle are given, pieces which if given three years ago would have fallen on deaf ears and unappreciative spirits but which now enhance the unfolding vision of Spiritual Persistence. I would, however, be remiss if I did not add some cautions. Rikkity has made it very clear to us that she and we are not the important elements in all of this. What she and we do is not special - we all can connection in this way across the divide of life and death. What is important is the material shared, not the messengers. (Every religious system succumbed to missing this point!) AND, that the truths that you might find in Spiritual Persistence for yourself are but tiny pieces of shards of fragments of portions of reflections of glimpses of a whole beyond containment in any linguistically communicated system of thought. The intent in sharing all of this is to help people move along the road of learning and remembering so that at some point in the future, Spiritual Persistence will seem a simple, out-dated understanding in the face of more complex insights. With those understandings, Elissa and I have been sharing these insights and experiences with those who will listen to what we share, and ponder with us. We have created a website to share more of what you have heard today, we have a Sunday evening chatroom class that connects us worldwide to people pondering with us. This in addition to lectures (like this one) and various written articles and cyber-articles for such groups as Spirit Space. This path has not been easy. While many seem eager to talk about what we have to share, some of the greatest resistence we have found has not come from strangers, but from those close to us. Many UUs seem to want us to live by a spiritual "Don't ask, don't tell." In my own congregation, several have been moved to make official demands that informal links (with an appropriate firewall) between the congregation's web page and our site be severed, and that our site make no mention of my being a UU minister. Fortunately, I find that there are many more Unitarian Universalists who want to hear, consider and ponder than those who resist the possibilities. Yet, at the same time I think the growing openness to such deep spirituality may well foreshadow a paradigm shift in liberal religion (and the larger society) akin to the historical changes posed by the emergence of Christianity.

As I close, I share with you a piece of the latest conversation, from last Sunday:

"Hey, if we were everything, where could we go from there. In fact, ha, there's another tidbit that I wasn't going to share. Some elements, which are after all just entities themselves, are so complete they don't need to combine to find wholeness and so they are alone--ooooOOOOoooo. But you know what happens to them? [They move on] if they arrive and are all ready to combine, sure. But if they are complete--which is not the same as fulfilled--they can't go anywhere because they can't connect to the learnings of others, so they also get disassembled. Remember it's about connection, not about singular fulfillment. Dead ends are not appreciated. Whoa times 2. This was supposed to be a quick and dumb session. And if you're thinking of a hermit, you are confusing personality with spirit. Not the same. [It could look] like anyone. Some hermits strive to know what others think and feel, so don't get the idea of isolation that way. But look to see if a person goes through life without learning...note I didn't say remembering, just learning. Some people are very people-oriented but act like they have nothing to learn. First-timers and these look alike, for these are eternal first-timers--even after many lives. Now go, I've said too much already. Blew all my material." (June 20, 1999)

The old modes and models are increasingly inadequate to meet the spiritual needs for individuals to explore and express their essential connection to larger spiritual meaning. My life, my beliefs, my being, have been transformed; my spiritual needs have been more fully met not through the experience of the death of my daughter, but through my continuing connection to her in the after-life. There is much I have to learn, there is much we all have to learn, if and when we can move past the presumption of boundaries at the interface of life and death. Ponder that.

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