Kimberly Steele

A middle aged woman recently went viral on TikTok for an innocuous Get Ready With Me video. For those unfamiliar with the genre, a Get Ready With Me video is a casually-presented opinion or bit of information given by the video’s creator while putting on makeup. The woman plainly stated she had every intention of remaining single for the rest of her natural life. Her main reason for remaining single was the poor quality of men in the dating pool and the fact that most men her age and older were looking for a hospice wife. “Hospice wife” is the newest term for a woman trapped in a marriage of convenience for the man. This commitment entails the typically-younger wife providing the kind of in-home care one would expect from a dedicated, live-in elder nurse. The “hospice” part implies the wife will care for her sickly husband until he dies.

Comments sections are always the most fascinating part of social media and this one did not disappoint. The video’s comment section was full of older women declaring how transcendently overjoyed they were to be living the single life after being widowed or divorcing their insufferable, middle aged husbands. Every ten or so comments repeated the snarky phrase “nurse with a purse” in reference to to the suckers who were stuck caring for their aging husbands. Every twenty or so comments featured a hospice wife bemoaning her dire situation.

This hit close home for me because my husband of a quarter century is nearly a decade and a half my senior. To add insult to injury, I have been the primary breadwinner of our modest household since the early 2010s. As someone in relatively good health who has never been alcoholic, an abuser of food, or drug addict prescription or otherwise, I seem to be set for a vigorous old age. He, on the other hand, has a debilitating suite of chronic health problems that cause constant pain. Some of his health problems are genetic, some are the logical result of an adventurous and well spent youth, and some he caused all by himself via stupid habits and decisions.

When my father was still alive, my parents represented a more traditional marriage arrangement. My mother worked a few years after she married my father in 1965. She was a switchboard operator in downtown Chicago and she was very good at it. It was her seed money that bought the beautiful house I grew up in. After us kids arrived on the scene, my father took on most of the financial burdens until the day he died in 2023.

The single, middle aged women of TikTok and elsewhere are a group of disappointed souls. Men have let them down and now they swear they are done with men. The truth is that marriage — especially long marriages like that of my parents and my marriage — is not easy. I myself have often said that if my husband leaves me a widow that I won’t marry again because I don’t like people enough to marry a second one. This is a funny lie, however, because I love people. I am just extremely unsure that I could successfully match myself to a second one.

Taken for Granted Goes Both Ways

The number one reason driving divorce does not seem to be money or even cheating per se. I think it boils down to a lack of gratitude. For a long time, women in the industrialized West have been taken for granted. I coined the term etheric labor a few years ago to refer to the kind of mundane work both women and men do to keep a household up, running, and functional. Women tend to take on the lion’s share of basic etheric labor (think of it as a fancy term for housework) like cleaning, cooking, laundry, tidying, and decorating. Men tend to take on less frequent but equally crucial tasks like home repair, remodeling, and maintenance.

The TV and movie tropes of the last seventy five years led us to believe women’s work was replaceable and invisible. We are a long way from Disney’s Great Depression era Snow White, who cleaned up the seven dwarfs’ homestead in hopes they would put her in the role of house mother and allow her to stay. By the 1960s, Star Trek suggested that one day all cooking would be done by a replicator. The 1990s featured romantic comedies with sets by Nancy Meyers where characters wallowed in luxury. No character was ever seen tidying or cleaning the palatial, upper middle class rooms; that seemed to happen on its own. By 2016, Disney put out the animated film Sing!, which featured Rosita, an anthropomorphic pig with 25 children. In order to secretly audition for a singing contest behind her husband’s back and spend entire days away from home, Rosita constructs an array of clever machines to feed, diaper, and soothe her brood of piglets. If only it were that easy!

When a woman’s work is seen as soulless and essentially replaceable by unseen hands, hired help, or an array of machines, women feel taken for granted. Thanks to mass media of the types mentioned above, women have felt under-appreciated for nearly a hundred years. This kind of sentiment has built a powerful astral pyramid with nearly overwhelming gravity. Legions of women are remaining single after being married and bearing children or after being widowed because of this pyramid’s gravity. Many on the younger side are choosing never to marry or procreate at all.

The Marriage Trap

The old stereotype was to depict men as being reluctant to marry. Once the woman got the man to “put a ring on it” he was now settled into a role of long-suffering victimhood with the wife in the role of parasite to his host. In the television series of the 1950s, 60s and 70s, he was Ralph Kramden of the Honeymooners or Archie Bunker of All in the Family. The 80s and 90s brought Married With Children, with Al Bundy dreaming of a harem of suppliant blondes who looked suspiciously like his daughter. The Man Show and Sex and the City perpetuated kissing-cousin versions of the recalcitrant male stereotype. The pilot episode of Sex in the City featured women complaining they could not get a man to commit because they were considered well past their prime by the age of 41. The Man Show had its infamous Girls Jumping on Trampolines, with the girls in question being twenty-something young women wearing flimsy undergarments to the chagrin of cuckolded, age 35+ wives everywhere.

To say a great deal of resentment was built in women over the years due to these kinds of images would be a monumental understatement. Women are officially fed up, and they are slyly laughing now that the tables are turned and men are begging not to be left to age and die alone. Now look who is discarded because he is no longer youthful and vibrant! Why should a woman marry herself off at age 50, they ask, after a largely thankless couple of decades raising children and cleaning the house of men who never truly saw them? Why should they feel any obligation to provide for a sick and ailing man who wants a mommy but cannot afford to hire one? In this age of women being forced into provider roles with no attendant relief from housework, why on Earth would any “girl” take the sickliest and neediest of passengers aboard her sailboat if it wasn’t at literal gunpoint?

For some, there is no reason good enough to fall back into the marriage trap. My grandmother was widowed before she was 40 and she never remarried. She lived alone in a condo for the 15 years I was blessed with knowing her. I can understand the charm. If she hadn’t smoked two packs a day, her sunny, one-bedroom apartment would have been paradise: clean, compact, and orderly with no yard to worry about and a darling porch overlooking a lovely park with a lake. When I was nine, I envisioned a perpetually single existence for myself living in a condominium a hundred feet from the library. In this idyllic fantasy, I had a well-paying job in downtown Chicago as a typist/secretary. I came home to one or two cats and sipped tea among my books and houseplants. A man was not a part of the picture. Then puberty and the non-fantasy economy happened and that all went sideways.

The question I ask of myself is how my wonderful apartment fantasy would have worked in old age? Maybe quite well. I will never know. From what I have seen, not all elderly female singlehood ends as well as my grandmother, who died in a doctor’s office at the age of 79. She was gone in a flash due to a massive heart attack. She never suffered nursing home internment. I stopped taking my music students to play and sing in assisted living facilities because no matter how “nice” the facility, the student performers were beset with an array of pleas to “go home” solely from old, confused female residents. The sadness and despair of assisted living facilities reminded me of the foul, septic vibe of the casino where my husband used to work. Both had the palpable aura of desperation and tragic, lost gambles.

What’s Good For the Goose…

The reaction to a huge astral pyramid that glorified single men at the expense of older women has now created its predictable mirror in a huge astral pyramid that glorifies single women at the expense of older men. Now instead of Archie Bunker, we have Barbie, who carefully avoids her abusive, incompetent, stupid Ken. Or we have the now-cancelled Star Wars series The Acolyte, which featured lesbian space witches who did not need men to procreate. This is not better; it’s actually more of the same. It’s like a novella where the same crew of actors switches roles. The same YOU CAN’T DO ANYTHING RIGHT narrative is the punchline and fundamentally nothing has changed.

I will likely catch hell for this, but I think we should stick together more are stay committed to our marriages and family relationships. Of course there are copious amounts of exceptions: sometimes we truly marry (and have children with) the wrong person. Sometimes the husband truly ought to be kicked to the curb. My aunt was married to a raging gambler who later killed himself in a motorcycle accident and my friend was married to a non-functional alcoholic.

Everyone ultimately dies alone, and this reality was directly stated in the viral Get Ready With Me Video. Nevertheless, it’s decidedly more pleasant to go that final leg before actual physical death in the company of loved ones. The saddest kind of elderly death is the one where there is nobody to care or mourn. Freaking elephants have the sense to mourn and gather around their dead, for heaven’s sake, and we as “smart” humans should be able to figure it out.

Maybe Trying a New Strategy

Some of the women gloating over their modern singlehood may not be seeing the big picture. My mother had bouts of disease during her 56 year marriage to my father that occasionally rendered her incapable of taking care of herself. My father always swooped to the rescue. The “in sickness and in health” part of marriage vows should probably be emphasized more.

I think I have enough married experience to say the only way to keep a marriage sane and healthy is to focus on the positive with at least three times the force that one focuses upon the negative. The negative exists and there is nothing wrong with that. Hiding it or burying it is counterproductive because it needs to be recognized as part of life. That said, the negative cannot be a primary focus in any relationship because it is a Wendigo and it will destroy that relationship. When I am angry at my husband for one of his many faults, I try to make an often-impossible seeming effort to recognize three or more of his good traits or deeds. The reason I do this is because I too have flaws and faults, but I would rather be recognized and seen for my strengths and not my weaknesses. I must be the change I want to see in the world, and in my case that does not involve changing my man or kicking him to the curb. It involves recognizing the good and amplifying it by being thankful for it.  

Ten years ago when I was still atheist, I bristled at any mention of the occult planes of existence. Like a good Christian fundamentalist, I rejected any bit of knowledge outside my preordained bubble, presuming it was trying to program me. The truth was that I had already been programmed.

The planes of existence are not OTHER. They are all right here, right now. They work in cyclical patterns and the phenomena on one plane becomes the phenomena of the next in a different form. I have made analogies in the past in an attempt to help people think their way through them: one is the Gobstopper analogy, which has the added benefit of being Everlasting:

“If each human’s existence is likened to the Everlasting Gobstopper/Jawbreaker, the material plane is the sour candy shell on the outside. One layer in, there is a different flavor called the etheric plane. This plane of energy is what Chinese people call “chi” and Indians call “prana” and is what feng shui, acupuncture, and Ayurveda works with. The etheric is invisible to us humans while we are awake in our stodgy plane, but some sensitive people can see it and most can feel it whether they realize it or not. The next candy layer in is the astral plane, which is most easily understood as the world of dreams you go to when you sleep. The dream world is part your own brain and part collective, meaning, other peoples’ dreams are part of your world/vice a versa and you can interact with them and they with you. Dreams are not what you choose them to be: just like other people’s emotions or the weather, they aren’t controlled by the dreamer. There are rules and limits to them just as there are rules and limits on the physical plane. Of course these rules and limits are different than the ones on the physical plane. The next layer in is the mental plane, which is the plane of learning and mastery that separates humans from other animals. For instance, being able to figure out how fast an object falls to the ground because of scientific laws falls under the mental plane category. Another layer into the Gobstopper is the spiritual plane, which is the primary reason you were incarnated and is the core from which all of the other layers of the Gobstopper emanate and cannot exist without. Take note that all the planes are the same Gobstopper, they are just different layers of a whole candy.”

If you are familiar with the kind of sticker that shows up on SUVs depicting family members and their pets, that is what I am talking about. On the physical plane/Meatworld, the window cling film is made of plastic, which is the long-decomposed parts of plant and animal matter we have processed into a sticky film. The etheric plane is where the sticker gets the static electricity that gives it the ability to stick. Though static electricity is invisible, we recognize it as present and we can feel it if we shuffle across the carpeting in a cold and dry room. The next plane "upwards" or "inwards" is the Astral Plane, the plane of ideas and images. When we see a crude stick drawing and associate it with a family of four with a dog and a cat, it is our Astral Plane development that enables us to perceive the drawing as a depiction of a family. Non-human animals do not have the same ability to translate that sort of visual symbolism, and that is the main thing that separates us humans from them. The Mental Plane is the concept of family and the ancient force that causes humans to band together in the first place. Humans do not understand this level of existence very well, but the few who do are often perceived as masters, gurus, or yogis. The Causal Plane is the divine force that created all of this stuff to begin with, and I won't even pretend to understand the first thing about it except that it is there.

Airplanes do not just appear out of thin air. In order for an airplane to exist on the material plane, we have to trace it all the way back to where it came from. The airplane is a construction of metal powered by petroleum. It is actually several inventions in one -- refined crude oil, engine, ailerons, wings, steering, wheels. The energy it is given by the oil and the resistance given to it by wind currents and gravity are etheric plane phenomena. Without the etheric plane's energy, the airplane would not be able to be made, let alone fly. The next subtlest plane the airplane comes from is the astral plane, otherwise known as the plane of images. The airplane began as images in a person's (or a few people's) heads. If there had never been an image of a flying machine, the flying machine would not have been invented or "made real" with metal and fuel. The minds that invented the airplane also did not get the idea from nowhere; on the mental plane we have the mechanics of birds and insect wings that illustrate the concept of flight. Only when the concept of how that happens is understood do we get men capable of making an airplane. The spiritual world is the force we call Divine that seems to have created birds, flying bugs, wind currents, and flight in general.

In The Rosicrucian Christianity Lectures, Max Heindel says:

A little thought will soon make it apparent to any investigator that we live in a world of effect which is the result of invisible causes.  MATTER and FORM we see, but the FORCE which molds the form and quickens it is invisible to us.  Life cannot be cognized directly by the senses; it is invisible and self-existent independent of the varied forms we see as its manifestations.  

Let us quarantine some images that are better off put aside for now.  One is the American Buddhist notion of nonexistence, which acknowledges reincarnation and seeks to supplant it with the ultimate turn off/tune out.  The Buddhists I have met seem to confuse it with an unsullied afterlife realm of bliss.  This innocent land for "good" Buddhists sounds like Christian heaven with the tags removed.  The last time I checked, heaven may be a nice place, but it is definitely still existence.  Speaking of Christian heaven, there's another farce explored in countless television shows and movies, though not as often as Christian hell.  Long story short is all the interesting people go to Christian hell, leaving Christian heaven a fairly boring place.  Even ancient Greek concepts of the remote lands of Hades and Mount Olympus should be put aside for the time being, or at least until you can use them to train your mind instead of inform it.

There were a spate of episodes of the cheesy, oversexed vampire TV series True Blood that featured the worst of New Age misconceptions about the realm of fairies.  Of course fairies or Faeries were depicted as having their own dimension, and this dimension was a literal forest with chandeliers hanging from trees.  White Ren faire gowns were the official dress code of the True Blood Faeries.  Just... NO.  This sort of Tinkerbellish conception of fairies is exactly what landed me in hot water when I tried to invoke them as a teen and ended up with night terrors.  Fairies aren't nice creatures; in fact, they are often brutes.  John Michael Greer speculates in his book Monsters that gray aliens and fairies are probably the same thing -- both like torturing and raping humans and occasionally mating with them consensually.  From my experience, I believe he is correct.  

When I say fairies dwell upon the astral plane, and I believe I have said those words before, what I mean is they are non-embodied beings.  They are strongest in the realm of images whereas humans are strong in the physical plane, and we have the oil rigs and strip malls to prove it.  Because fairies and other astral creatures are more active in their comfort zone of the astral level of existence, they can manifest on the next plane "down" towards the material known as the etheric, but if you put up a defense, such as a bent piece of iron in the form of a nail and salt amulet, they are easily prevented from taking form.  This is useful knowledge if you have a house that is prone to orbs, bad smells, weird noises, stressed out pets, and misplaced objects.  The defenses of natural magic are often enough to completely remove mild poltergeist phenomena from a living space.  

Humans have become more materialistic as our populations have swelled.  I believe the average person in 1924 saw more ghosts, shadow people, saints, and other paranormal oddities than the average person of 2024.  The further you go back, the more they saw.  In 1624, witches were taken seriously because it did not require hallucinogens to see what they were doing on the etheric plane.  This is why so many regular people made witch bottles in 1624.  A witch bottle is a device designed to trap and torment the etheric body of a would-be witch assailant.  In the year 124, dragons were real because the average peasant could perceive the etheric plane (I believe dragons, ki'rin and ki'lin are etheric plane phenomena) like modern humans perceive the physical plane.  Isn't it interesting that fairies ahem I mean aliens tend to haunt rural areas and the more remote, the better.  I's almost as if they take shelter where non-human ecosystems are in charge.  When there is a human lucky or unlucky enough to encounter them in the wild, they are anything but friendly.  
 
They saw it coming...

The material plane is extremely crowded at the moment.  The era in which we dwell was labeled the Kali Yuga by ancient Indians.  Nostradamus burned all of his collected knowledge in order to prevent it from falling into our bumbling hands.  Ancient Mayans and Incas tried to prevent our era from happening via blood sacrifice and a hell of a lot of it.  When white guys showed up in boats, they folded their empire like a paper napkin and let a few hundred Conquistadores take their empire.  Why?  They knew.  They knew this era would be materialistic, crass, ugly, and depressing.  They knew we would be utterly blind to things they saw.  

When you have a buttload of humans in incarnation, it follows there are lots of former animal souls being flipped into human existence.  I myself have distant past life memories of being a goose and later a cat.  It's not easy being a cat.  One of the reasons I treat my cats so well is because like Pepperidge Farm, I remember.  So the next time you, my gifted and intelligent reader, have the urge to throw your hands up (or a particular finger) at one of those dolts known as the Stupid People, please keep in mind that the Stupid Person may have been a squirrel, cow, or a dog all of eighteen years ago.  Be patient, for they are doing the best they can!

We are at peak population, peak Idiocracy, and peak materialism.  The bad news is that you are HERE.  The good news is there is no place to go but up.

If there is one habit I can recommend to foster gnosis of what on earth is happening (shout out to Mark Passio) it is discursive meditation.  For 5-15 minutes every day, you sit in a chair with your feet on the ground.  While you sit, your job is to unpack a single phrase, thought, picture, or symbol like a ZIP file.  Mine it for its information, its insights, its tangents, and its flights of fancy.  This limited focus becomes your rabbit hole.  For instance, you could meditate on deceptively simple statements like this:

• I am a spirit in the material world.
• The planes are separate and all at once.
• Time and space are illusions.
  
  

“If each human’s existence is likened to the Everlasting Gobstopper/Jawbreaker, the material plane is the sour candy shell on the outside. One layer in, there is a different flavor called the etheric plane. This plane of energy is what Chinese people call “chi” and Indians call “prana” and is what feng shui, acupuncture, and Ayurveda works with. The etheric is invisible to us humans while we are awake in our stodgy plane, but some sensitive people can see it and most can feel it whether they realize it or not. The next candy layer in is the astral plane, which is most easily understood as the world of dreams you go to when you sleep. The dream world is part your own brain and part collective, meaning, other peoples’ dreams are part of your world/vice a versa and you can interact with them and they with you. Dreams are not what you choose them to be: just like other people’s emotions or the weather, they aren’t controlled by the dreamer. There are rules and limits to them just as there are rules and limits on the physical plane. Of course these rules and limits are different than the ones on the physical plane. The next layer in is the mental plane, which is the plane of learning and mastery that separates humans from other animals. For instance, being able to figure out how fast an object falls to the ground because of scientific laws falls under the mental plane category. Another layer into the Gobstopper is the spiritual plane, which is the primary reason you were incarnated and is the core from which all of the other layers of the Gobstopper emanate and cannot exist without. Take note that all the planes are the same Gobstopper, they are just different layers of a whole candy.”

A good look for him... he should have stuck with it.

I was obsessed with celebrities from an early age. I was a religious watcher of Saturday morning cartoons: The Smurfs, He Man and She Ra, Richie Rich, and Dungeons and Dragons were my favorites, but I was known to stick around for Bugs Bunny and Fat Albert if nothing else was on. My mother taped a Christmas cartoon special about the Nutcracker accompanied by the full score of Tschiakovsky's Nutcracker Suite; that ancient Betamax tape also had a cartoon special on gnomes uncreatively titled Gnomes as well as a Berenstain Bears feature. I watched that video cassette dozens of times.

I am not sure how my love of cartoons morphed into a passion for live action, but it did. By the late 80s, I watched every sitcom aimed at my pre-teen demographic plus a few more: Different Strokes, Family Ties, The Cosby Show, The Greatest American Hero, and Cheers ate up the scant amount of time I had when I was not doing homework on school nights. For a number of reasons, the schools in the Chicago suburbs have always given ludicrous amounts of homework to children between the ages of 11 and 18 along with the weird presumption that pre-teens and teenagers can easily afford 4-5 hours of the stuff a night, six hours if they are "gifted". It was only by my mid-teens that I began to reject television for books, and this meant alienation from my parents, as they have always watched at least 3 hours of television a day from my earliest memories. Popular media had me from the short hairs even before I had short hairs. By college, I could name most of the famous supermodels and I had seen every big movie in Blockbuster video at least once regardless of the genre.

My own Generation X was the last one to regard celebrities as demigods. By the late 1990s, celebrities did not have to trash their images: the public was happy enough to do it for them. The celebrities of the 70s and 80s were the last to be given carte blanche by the public when it came to bad behavior. When Madonna stunt-queened in the 80s with her Like a Prayer black Jesus schtick, she was able to get the exact rise out of the public her handlers had planned. Her book Sex (1992) debuted and the results also seemed to go as planned. By 2001, South Park's Kenny called Madonna

"an old anorexic whore who wore out her welcome years ago, and that now she suddenly speaks with a British accent and she thinks she can play guitar and she should go f**k herself."

We live in a spiritual Dark Age.  Mainstream religions have wandered well into the ballpark of materialistic atheism.  Materialistic atheism has almost no tools to deal with human death, as it is in complete denial of the afterlife.  Because of this lack of tools, funerals have become yet another expensive, corporatized, dehumanized rite of passage.  To die is to pass through a depersonalized, one-size-fits-all grist mill for making money off the bereaved.  

Our age's terror at the prospect of the yawning memory hole of death manifests in psychotic symptoms.  Nobody is supposed to look old and death is better hidden and unobserved.  The elderly are warehoused so they can be forgotten in a kind of grift oubliette.  Families are atomized, begging the question, What is the point of having children if you cannot expect them to care for you in your old age?  

Many Ways to Die

Though there are many ways to die, there are two main types of death: expected or unexpected.  Overall, expected deaths are better for all parties because there is a chance to prepare.  Unexpected deaths are where things can get stuck.  Stuckness occurs in situations where death occurs by murder, heart attack, stroke, accident, suicide, or when an aged or infirm person has not made their peace.  

One way or the other, when we die we see parts of the astral plane fabric that are not visible in normal, physical life.  This is where the reporting of a bright, white light comes from in the NDE or Near Death Experience.  Unless you have gone out of the way and taken special pains to be a horrible person, chances are you will see the white light and be beckoned by its warmth and acceptance.  I fully expect to see the white light.  Though my life has been far from perfectly-lived, as it stands I have tried for many years to be a better person than I was yesterday, if only by the slightest amount.  Once you are received by the white light, there is a another reception on the non-physical side.  From what the dead have told me, we are received by our assigned spirit guides and by the HGAs or Holy Guardian Angels of our loved ones, including pets, places, and in some cases, objects.  This is why dying brings a feeling of going home, even if your Meatworld home was transient or a tar-paper shack on the side of a garbage dump.  You are briefly greeted by guides who comfort you and brought to a place of intimate familiarity, love, and genuine rest before being dunked into the Underworld.

We All Go to Hell, Regardless of Hand Baskets

The Underworld is my catch-all term for the kind of non-eternal hell or purgatory every human on the meat plane must go through before reincarnating into a new form.  The concept of hell and heaven is where most mainstream religions go absurdly and spectacularly wrong. Buddhists obsess about avoiding the incarnation process altogether, hoping and trying instead to escape the wheel of meat-plane cycling to skip the line to a subtle and masterful non-physical state.  They are not the only ones who fixated on escape: Aztecs and Mayans made the avoidance of our current demonic, materialistic age into an art, absorbing village after village primarily to attain victims for blood sacrifice.  The point of the sacrifices was seemingly to keep the priestly class out of incarnation and to prevent the world from becoming what it is now.  Christians misinterpret the Underworld cycle as an eternal pit of torture and pain for the unrepentant wicked.  The only alternative in this binary is an equally unbalanced assumption that they will sit for untold trillions of millennia at the right hand of Jesus based on the judgement of the works of a single human lifetime.  Only Hindus, who can proudly boast the world's most ancient and enduring religion, see the reincarnation process with a sense of balance.  Even they err by playing into the caste system, which has horrific repercussions for almost anyone who has ever believed in it.  The haughty presumptions that arise from belief in the caste system are kissing cousins to boneheaded Quranic and Biblical literalism.  

As I have mentioned in the past, an entity once shared with me that the grace with which we accept our judgements and descent into the Underworld determines how much bounce we will gain before going into our next incarnation.  My childhood as Baby Kimberly was terrible, and not because of anything my parents did or where and how I grew up.  My childhood was awful mostly because of the anger and sorrow I failed to resolve from my previous life.  In my most recent past life, I was a wealthy but embittered widow who lost her two sons in World War I.  Her unhappiness leaked into this life.  Many of her emotional issues were still on the table for resolution well into my current lifetime.

Once we have spent time in the Underworld going through the nasty process of sorting through most of our mea culpas and stupid crap we did that hurt our fellow sentient beings while in physical incarnation, we bounce back up to the higher astral plane in order to get ready for our next incarnation.  Contrary to popular mainstream religious belief and based upon what dead people have told me, we do not get a choice whether or not any part of these processes happen.  We cannot choose incarnation any more than a fish can choose to live in water.   As the world ebbs from its current peak, some souls will stay out of incarnation for longer periods and others will be reincarnated as animals.  Of course I could be wrong.  

Despite the way we have been trained to look at it, death is a good thing.  That said, ending your life prematurely can have dire consequences depending on the intentions behind the action.  At any rate, it does not speed up the resolution of any of your problems except on the most superficial level.

They're Still Here: How the Newly Dead Interact

I operate under the assumption that the newly dead can still see us and interact with us on the astral and etheric planes despite being divorced from the physical plane.  When my friend died of cancer in his sixties, he visited me during my daily Sphere of Protection and said that from his end of the astral, it looked like a fireworks show.  There is nothing strange about talking to the newly dead; in fact, it would be better if we all learned to talk with them.  There is also nothing strange about a dead person informing their loved one they have died.  This is usually called a haunting but I think this is far too dramatic a term.  The facts on the ground are the etheric body sticks around for most of the time there is still a corpse.  Cremation severs the link and immediately dissolves the etheric body.  When I die, I am specifically asking in advance not to be embalmed because I feel preservation of the corpse ties the astral and etheric bodies to Meatworld for far longer than necessary.  When I die, I expect to hang around Meatworld until I am either cremated or rotted in the ground from being buried.  Freed of my physical body, I will wander about visiting any friends or relatives I have left.  If they are used to interactions with spirits of dead people as I am, I will try to give them an etheric sign of my presence, such as a candle burning brighter or the scent of citrus, mint, roses, or incense.  If they are a normal person who gets freaked out by occult phenomena (likely) I will only observe and keep my energy to myself.  

Once my etheric and physical body separate anywhere from a few days to a few months after my death, I expect to be led by my spirit guides and my own higher self as I transit out of Meatworld and my old incarnation as Kimberly Steele.  If my experience as a dead person is a typical one, and I believe it will be, we can use it to inform us how to help the newly dead find their way in absence of their physical and etheric bodies.

Candles and Flame

Just as regular incarnated humans are drawn to burning campfires, fireplaces, and flame, candles draw both non-embodied humans and spirits.  Lighting a candle for a dead person has the same effect as giving them a powerful flashlight on a dark road.  Candlelight vigils should be done for any newly dead person in the spirit of helping them through the immediate afterlife process.  Candles burned at the place the newly dead person loved and/or considered home or best: they act as amplifiers of comforting energy and draw spirit friends to the corresponding area on the astral plane.

Flowers

Regardless of whether the person liked flowers while alive, fresh flowers are etheric plane improvers that act similarly to candles; that is to say they are amplifiers of comforting energy that bridge the etheric into the astral.   Once again, flowers provide a temporary energy source that draws benevolent helper entities.  What we think of as flowers are no more and no less than magical herbs.  Herbalists know that herbs have the power to drive away malevolent energy via banishing and draw helpful energy.  The result is greater illumination and purification on the path out of incarnation for the newly dead person.

Music

Music is an extremely potent purification tool and is very effective when assisting the newly dead to connect with their higher selves and helpful spirit guides on the astral plane.  Like flowers and flame, music repels malevolent entities and provides a bright spot on the astral plane so the newly dead can rally and prepare for their next steps.  It's especially powerful and helpful to play the music the dead person loved in life, even if it isn't the most agreeable music to the still living.  While playing the newly dead person's favorite music, send the intention of gratitude for their time in physical incarnation, no matter how brief.  Even unborn babies have "favorite" music that sensitive mothers can determine while they're still in utero.  While sending gratitude, also send wishes for their smooth and easy transition through the Gates until you see them again.

Prayer

Prayer is the most important tool we have in our arsenal for helping the newly dead.  The goal of prayer is simple: we ask a deity who is older, wiser, and smarter than we are to help with something they know a great deal about while we ourselves know very little.  In other words, we do what is perfectly logical.  The more connected the newly dead person is to the Divine, the easier their transition out of Meatworld will be.  The reason it is tremendously important to live a virtuous life by being generous, kind, compassionate, fair, modest, diligent, and moderate is because living the Word is far better than preaching it.  Unfortunately, it is common among monotheists to abuse prayer as conversion cacomagic: they take any fledging connection they have with the Divine and use it to guilt trip and browbeat others into serving their specific God.  This act is ironically Satanic and will likely earn them long stints in the Underworld where, as the Bible says, "they shall have their reward".  Instead of telling others how to accept your version of Jesus or some other god into their hearts, you go first by connecting to a god and doing your level best to serve that god with humility and grace.  Connection and discourse with the Divine drives out parasitic, opportunistic entities while affording glimpses of the afterlife process well before it is time to go to the afterlife.

Letting Go

As I mentioned at the beginning of this essay, our civilization has a problem accepting death.  We have a problem with divine grace and become dissonant when dealing with endings.  Grace means not clinging to what once was and not pining after what was not meant to be.  As far as I can tell, most of the dead move on fairly quickly -- a few days to a few months -- unless we compel them to stay with constant, intense, unrelenting grief.  When you are tempted to wallow in grief, light a candle and focus on the moments and legacies of the person, pet, or house that were given to you and ruminate about how your life is better because they were there for you in this world.  By focusing on the good and adding gratitude to the mix, you improve and sublimate their journey as well as your own, no matter where they are.  When you see them again, and I believe you will, they will thank you for it.  

When I vacated the commercial space my lesson studio had occupied for 13 years, I had to re-home my two pianos, an upright and a grand.  The grand piano ended up in my parents' living room where it seems quite at home.  The upright went to my little house in Aurora.   My two cats have different attitudes towards the upright.  To Shadow, my black cat, it is just another object to climb and sit upon.  To Ash, my thoughtful gray cat, it is a source of fascination.  One of my piano students, a little girl aged 6, loves seeing the cats when she has her lesson.  During one of her recent lessons, Ash watched and listened from a nearby chair in rapt attention as she played her songs for the week.  When the keys are exposed, Ash takes special care to walk over them and not on them.  I suspect Ash will end up as a keyboardist or at least a musician in one of his future lives.

Once I asked, "What's it like to be a god?" 

I got an answer.  I'm not sure who answered.  It/he/she said: "It's like trying to teach an amoeba to play the piano."

In other words, I think the entity who answered me was trying to sum up how much patience and benevolence it takes to work with our species.  I also believe the entity was implying not all gods have interest in teaching amoebas to play the piano -- of course they don't.  It is human vanity that makes some of us think that human evolution and development is the summum bonum of a god's work.  The gods willing to work with us are very special.  It was our bumbling mistake to (temporarily) forget about them in favor of the false gods of Progress and other demons who told us what we wanted to hear.  I think our species is beginning to rectify that long series of errors though, slowly but surely, one person at a time.

Doctor Strange's Magical Shapes

If you've seen the movie or read the comic Dr. Strange, you know it's about a brilliant surgeon who gets into a car accident, nearly loses the use of his hands, and goes to Tibet in order to find an alternative healer.  He falls in with a weird group of ascetic monks in Kathmandu and learns magic.  Doctor Strange first appeared as a Marvel comic in 1963.  Though he was ostensibly created by Steve Ditko and Stan Lee, the character has more than a dash of Eliphas Levi and Manly P. Hall.  Dr. Strange and his posse spend a great deal of time reading old books, shaping and controlling their minds, and drawing magical symbols into the air.   

Back in the real, non-comic book world, we have the Sphere of Protection or SoP, one of many revived banishing rituals from Western magic.  The goal of the SoP is to create the non-literal, imaginary version of Dr. Strange's glowing pentacles and portals.  Dr. Strange can actually walk through the dimensional portals he creates to escape from his enemies into a desert or a mountainous taiga.  My landscapes exist in my mind.  Just like Doctor Strange, the better I am at drawing the magical shapes, the stronger my power becomes.  Unlike the good Doctor, I have an edge.  The gods help me with my shapes and they connect with me through the landscapes.  They help me in my daily practice to restore the balance I (along with the rest of humans) have lost.

Astral Gunk

Before I did the SoP, I had an astral gunk problem.  The astral plane is gunky enough right now that I often still have it though I never miss an SoP.  I can tell when it is gunky when I lay down to go to sleep and my mind races with images despite my intention to settle down and go to sleep.  There isn't much of a cure for this condition outside of constant prayer, which is why I sing the Orphic hymns.  When a popular music ear worm is burrowing through my brain in the astral muck, I replace it with one or more of the Orphic hymns for which I have composed music.  In this way I am able to bring gods closer and to drive demons further away.

The trouble with the time before I did the SoP was the closeness of the astral gunk.  Without any protection, the discord and upset of the modern collective astral caked me and insulated my poor, tormented brain from divine influence.  No wonder I saw God as indifferent, far away, and in the worst case scenario, non-existent.  The SoP repels the gunk like a daily shower repels body odor.  Prayer does this as well.  In the old days, the Catholic mass served the purpose for large masses of people.  These days, not so much.  

Demons Desire Dissolution

Demons are in their Golden Age right now.  Forget the horror movies that fixate on Satan being born a la Rosemary's Baby or Damien: that part of Revelations has already occurred.  Look at the broken families, the rioters with pink and purple hair and face tattoos labeling themselves as peaceful protestors, and the lies coming out of every pretty talking head on an airport TV screen.  This is Hell and we're soaking in it.  The Antichrist isn't just born, he's come of age, found a mate, and he's had his own pile of kids.  He'll become a grandpa soon, if current trends are any indication.

As a vegan I had multiple opportunities to join a group of violent Marxists called Direct Action Everywhere or DXE.  DXE was the group known for its PeTA-like antics of sending groups of people into restaurants and grocery stores to shame them for eating meat.  Unsurprisingly, DXE ate itself within a few years of its creation when it became apparent that nearly all of its founders and higher ups were grifters and sexual predators.  That's the problem with using shame as a weapon -- if you have a great deal to be ashamed of, it will come back to bite you.  DXE's approach was one of dissolution.  Though DXE stood for direct action, its actions were always fixated on dismantling the "evil" work of others instead of building up the powers of good.  If they were being truthful, they would have called it Dismantle Times Everything.  Demons want to dismantle things.  When Antifa or some random feminist agitator speaks of dismantling the Patriarchy, what they are actually talking about is the urge of demons to smash the good works of others into smithereens.  Clogged with astral gunk, the unwitting tools of demons become saturated with poison until their own families and friends are dismantled.  Religious practices designed to send the gunk away have become poisoned as the gunk itself, for instance a church service I once attended with an Erma Bombeck styled comedian who sought to convert Christians but was a thinly-veiled recruiter for the Prosperity Gospel.  In my opinion, Joel Osteen's Prosperity Gospel and its McChurch ilk is straight up Satanic, which is why I'll have nothing to do with it.

The funny thing about those who claim to fight demons and the demonic is how ass-backwards their approach is.  If I want to clear a clog from my drain, I don't attempt to force it out by clogging the sewer with more hair and other crap.  Any materialist approach to unclogging the astral is inherently doomed, which is why donating money to Joel Osteen never helped anyone get to heaven.  Antifa's antics create more miasma than they dissipate.  Smashing the windows of someone's store only helps the demons driving you to hurt others and eventually kill yourself and your family, especially if your motivation to smash the store's windows was materialistic, such as wanting the expensive shoes inside.

Hexing, cursing, and rioting only give the other side the appearance of being more virtuous.  That's why I don't do it.  I am very good at hexing and cursing as I have often explained.  I have dark, dark thoughts that are the product of my wacky past lives and my current quirks -- I just don't act on them.  I know a thing or two about it.  I don't do it though, because I'd rather not backslide into astral gunk.  I've already been there and it sucks; no thanks.  I no longer allow myself to become like the evil I want to dismantle.  I do want to dismantle tyranny, for sure, I've just had an epiphany that made me realize I was going about it wrong back when I was full of astral gunk.   The first step to get out of the hole is to stop digging.  This amoeba, with copious help, will learn to play the piano... eventually.