When Did You Die by Temple Hayes
Too many people have come to accept death as an ordinary
way of life. We expect people to lose heart, lack enthusiasm as they age but dying in the middle of your life is not natural. I know, because I talk to people whose energy seems dead all the time.
No, I’m not a psychic medium; I’m not a Jonathan
Edwards. I’m a spiritual leader and people often come to our
new thought campus in search of a different way, a new life.
Some come to services or our 12-step or self-help programs,
and others browse the shelves of Wings bookstore not sure
what they are looking for, and when they meet me for the
fi rst time, I often ask them: When did you die? When did
your soul stop expressing your authentic self?
These are powerful questions because they address
our biggest fear and our greatest loss. It’s important to think before you answer, because it’s not your “near death” experience I’m interested in. I want to know about your “near life” experience – the times you did not bring all of your life and vital energy to an experience. These are the times you almost saw the light.
I started dying when I was a little girl. At the age of five, I had my first mystical experience. I knew God loved every body all the time and that I would be the one to bring the world this message. True, I didn’t have the vocabulary to explain metaphysics, and I hadn’t yet discovered my favorite mystic Rumi. But I had a knowing, and a powerful vibration erupting from deep inside me. So, I began to tell people, I wanted to be a minister. This was a daring dream for a young girl in a small southern Baptist town where women were not allowed to have leadership roles, much less become ministers. And little by little, people began to take my dream from me. This was the tumultuous 1960s when fear ruled the world. My early beliefs were heavily influenced by the confl icting tides of the times. There was the Religious Right and there were also Civil, Women’s, Gay, and Animal Rights. Guess which side I was on and what that manifested.
A favorite aunt disgraced me for not agreeing with her. A teacher shamed me for wanting to be original. My 7th grade peers turned on me because I welcomed the black kids coming to our classes. I became afraid to be me, so not long after ered the affects of alcohol. I could secretly believe what I wanted without having to feel the consequences of my thinking, and so I continued to drink for the next 13 years. It was a deep and painless sleep. I was unconscious and without dreams.
According to Jungian psychology, first we must realize we are asleep, then we wake up, then we die so we can be born.Think about it. You cannot be born until you die and you cannot die until you wake up. In the spiritual sense, dying many times is crucial to our growth and wellbeing in this lifetime.
Like Carl Jung, cats have always known this. These highly evolved creatures sleep about 15 hours a day. I think its because they liketo dream and if we pay close attention, they’ll lead us beyound this world and back. Because we must
open up to the reality that we’ll have many deaths in this lifetime.
In order to open up we must rid ourselves of fear. Have you ever almost reached a goal, a dream, but closed back down, afraid of the unknown, the uncertainty, that mystery of
not knowing? Like the moment you almost become vulnerable
to love and hold back. The promotion at work you could
have received and didn’t go for because of fear of rejection. The holding back in all relationships in general.Those times you almost saw the light.
Charles Fillmore, co-founder of Unity, says fear is the
dust that gets in our eyes. It keeps us from seeing what we
need to see. When we let go of that fear and make peace
with that fear, we make it our sacred friend. Then, we can
become committed and when we commit we begin to live
fully as these lines attributed to Goethe demonstrate.
“That the moment that one definitely commits ones self
Then Providence moves too.
All sorts of things occur to help one
That would never otherwise have occurred.
Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it.
Boldness has genius, power and magic in it.
Begin now! And like the cat who licked the platter clean,
you’ll live a very authentic, very satisfied life.”"
Temple Hayes is an ordained Unity minister,
international motivational speaker practicing shamanic healer, and CEO of First Unity
Campus, a New Thought center, in St.
Petersburg, Florida. Under her direction First
Unity transcends religious denominations
and national and ethnic borders. For more
information visit www.unitycampus.org or
Temple Hayes Ministries at www.templehayes.com.
Tags: Carl Jung, dreams, faith, fear, Life Rights, manifesting, New Thought, Temple Hayes, Unity
