
And that's what I am trying to train my mind to do, to find the place where my thoughts might get loose enough and spiritual enough that they could reach Corey, wherever she is living now. As I keep declaring from the mountaintops, just because the person's body isn't here doesn't mean you can't still sense her or his presence. They are, she is, here...but they don't understand these everyday thoughts we have because they can't relate to things, they can't relate to all the human doings. Most of us are not human beings, most of us are human doings. Busy, busy, busy, in thought and body. How to calm the mind so that it could find the mysterious field where God lives, the same place where Corey might hear me and, more importantly, I might hear her?
I am reading for the third time a Rudolf Steiner book, “Staying Connected: How to Continue Your Relationships With Those Who Have Died." I began reading it in 2005 after my mother died and I felt her presence so strongly. The following four paragraphs are from pages 166-167 of that book.
Once the dead have passed through the gate of death, they are removed from this world. Yet we can have a world in common with them if…we make the effort…to discipline our thinking and our outer life and not to allow them their customary free course. We can develop certain faculties that give us a common ground with the spirits who have passed through the gate of death. There are, of course, a great many hindrances at the present time to finding this common ground. The first hindrance is that we are, as a rule, too extravagant, too lavish with our thought life…too excessive in our thought life.
Remember that speaking is an image of thought life. Consider therefore what sort of thought life is involved when people chatter and wander from subject to subject, allowing thoughts to flash up at will. This means that we are squandering the force that gives us thinking!
…just when the talk ought to be serious, we have to struggle to remember how it began. The dissipation of thought force prevents us from receiving the thoughts that come from the depths of soul life and are not our own, but are rather thoughts we have in common with the spiritual realm: the universal ruling Spirit. The impulse to fly as we like from thought to thought does not allow us to wait receptively for thoughts to arise from the depths of the soul: to wait for insight…. We really need to create the disposition in our soul that allows us to wait watchfully, until from far down in the soul thoughts arise that clearly distinguish themselves as given, not of our own making.
…the creation of such a mood cannot occur overnight. But when we cultivate it, when we really take the trouble simply to be watchful and, having driven out arbitrary thoughts, wait for inspiration, the mood gradually develops. Then it becomes possible to receive thoughts from the depths of soul, from a wider world than our own ego…we see that there is a universal web of thoughts.