"Of Passing On"

2016 is a young year. It's just now the middle of the Season that we pagans call

Beltane, a season where the ancients believe that the God and Goddess were united for
a time of bringing in new life to the year.
2016 for allot of us has brought death, several of them very recently, of people young and old, famous and common, some close, and some very far away.
"Death" is defined in dictionaries as "the act of dying; the end of life; the total and permanent cessation of all the vital functions of an organism." ¹
That description of the noun we so commonly use today is a crude, modern definition of a process that everyone goes through at some point in their existence on this plane, and some like my father, my nephew, my brother, and two of my Army brothers; way too soon for our preference.
Other families witness/experience this event much too early in their lives, or in the passing person's life. Like the detective that was shot trying to stop a crime yesterday in Kansas City, or the five year old girl in Detroit that accidentally shot herself eleven hours ago, or the thousands of innocent people in Syria that have died and will die because of a senseless war kept alive in the name of God.
But that, dear friends, is only the beginning. Death of the physical body is the crude part of the eternal process of the path of the soul, spirit, chakra, of whatever term you choose to call the life essence of a human being.
Death as an entity is signified in ancient beliefs as a ghastly figure wearing a tattered cloak and carrying a scythe, and that being was charged with carrying the soul or the spirit to where it was headed; some eternal place. Several ancient beliefs personalized this character as the boatman, and two coins were place (on each) on the eye lids of thedead, so that the boatman received his pay for the task of ferrying the dead across the "river."
The spirit of a human being is the energy that makes up their life essence; it is neither good or evil, it is pure energy. The body and mind of that person chooses or is made to choose how that energy is directed. When a person "dies" or "passes" physically, that energy instantly leaves this plane and goes to the Source, a great pool of energy, at an unknown place. That place may be in space, on another plane, in an other dimension, or simply out of our sight. When a new human is created inside it's mother, a "soul" or "spirit" leaves the Source and takes up residence in that body for it's natural life. The Source is inhabited by trillions of spirits, because it is the energy pool for hundreds of worlds in thousands of galaxies across the mega-verse, the greater expansion of our universe. That's my belief. Death is a gate-way, not an end, although we are typically saddened when someone passes, because their time with us on this plane is ended.
Modern religions describe various ways that they soul passes from this plane to the next. Some are pleasant, some are awkward and downright scary as Hell, if you pardon the pun.
Whatever you believe, however you feel, take care not to judge the dead. There is way too much of that going around today. The people that were here yesterday and "gone" tomorrow are just passing on. They will live again.

-Jim Culp, 2016

  { ¹ Dictionary.com }