One more piece to this strange journey:

Subject: Re: Conclusions
Date: Wed, Oct. 19, 2000 8:41 AM
From: Cbreaux
Message-id: <200001019114101.23228.0000>

After those last posts made before sleep last night, I lay in bed for a long time thinking about having shared what must seem like some pretty extreme views, and wondered how I'd feel this morning. I feel just fine. No regrets. That seems to rise from the fact that I'm convinced that there was nothing unusual about the experience and that others have had similar events in their lives -- by whatever name.

The medical report confirmed that there was nothing physical going on to account for what was being lived in those hours. Except for a rather steep drop in blood pressure prior to arrival at the hospital and in the immediate period following, there was not a single contributing factor present anywhere in the medical record to explain events.

It also became clear that this was something primitive (in the good sense of that word) that has -- for reasons unknown -- simply not been either civilized out of nor layered over in me. I'm convinced that the kind of primal connection I experienced in those hours with Rick is the stuff out of which all of the cultures of the world have fashioned religions and philosophies as a means of explaining the inexplicable. It rises out of our very humaness, and pre-dates the institutionalization of it. The ability to leap across all barriers -- time, space, age, -- is universal and not specific to any person, culture or faith. I suspect that many of the world religions have layered over such powers with ritual and ceremony to the extent that most have lost touch with what is the most human about us. I also think that in those religious practices such as meditation -- where we peel back layers to a void -- there is the greatest potential to tap into it. Adversely, the most homogenized and ritualized forms of religions may have placed it far outside the reach of many of the civilized.

I'm also beginning to believe that there is but one life -- and that we are all sharing in it. That this life force is like a great river with all drawing from it -- entering and leaving it at ramdom.

At least that's what appears true for me this morning. But that may change -- as of course it will. What will not change is the fact that the unfolding will continue until I close my eyes for the last time. But right now, in this space, in this time, I feel at one with everyone and at peace with Rick's leaving. I also am quite certain that there will be other times and other places where -- without warning -- I will find myself using information that I don't yet have, and drawing upon powers that I can barely understand but which I know with deep conviction are embedded within me.

Betty