Saturday, March 16, 2013

IN THE BETWEEN

In the Between is about a woman who dies and travels through the Bardo. The book opens with an explanation of that term: she is going from one life to the next. The word Bardo comes from the Tibetan Book of the Dead, loosely translated as: The In Between. According to that book, souls travel through it for 49 days, during which time they are encouraged to accept any one of numerous heavens being offered. Unless, as in this case, there is some karma left over from past lives. But our soul, in the story, is not Buddhist, she is from the West. And being the kind of woman she has become through all the countless lives—she believes she has lived—she developed her own ideas about living and what happens after death. Based on her ideas she re-lives some of her past lives to help with the evolution of her soul. But before any of that happens—right from the start—when she first arrives at the Bardo, she is surprised to discover something odd about her soul that is confusing. She learns there are two parts to her soul—the animal and the spiritual. The two soul aspects disagree about what is supposed to be accomplished while in the between and the book spells out those differences of opinion through lively dialogue. After achieving some harmony, our soul agrees to re-live her past lives that took place in Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, Jerusalem, Istanbul, Spain, Brussels, France, England, the U.S., and India. After each experience the two soul aspects review what happened—why she made choices causing karma that must be balanced in her future—and the two parts of our soul begin to grow together. She learns everything is much more complicated than she ever thought, including all of her relationships, whether they seemed good or not so good. She also finds out how it is that thinking people develop their personal ideas about God, the universe, and spirit, but most importantly why souls are on planet earth—at all. The book allows for all of us to ask ourselves: What if it is true? What if we don’t go to Heaven…or Hell when we die? What if karma does exist? What if we do reincarnate into another life to try to learn about our past mistakes and get to balance out misdeeds?

1 comment:

S Kay Murphy said...

Reading this brought me back to the 1950's... when often on a Saturday afternoon I would hear the steel whir of the push mower as my dad, in khaki pants and white undershirt, pushed the mower around the yard. The next sound to emanate from the yard would be the bristles of the push broom hitting the sidewalk....