Channeled by
Donya Wicken:
"Hello, my name is Ben and I’m a disembodied consciousness. I am writing with the help of my friend Donya who hears me in her mind. She was supposed to write this article herself but she suddenly had an attack of writer’s block so she handed it over to me.
We don’t think of what she is doing as “channeling.” She is fully conscious and knows what she is typing. Sometimes she disagrees with me but she still lets me say what I want to. Sometimes she helps me think of a better way to say whatever it is I am trying to say. We are both active participants in the writing process. We have a website called www.thezenofben.com. That is where we post many of the writings we collaborate on.
There are a number things I want to say to the people who read our blogs or anything else I write. The most important one is that you should not be afraid of death. You probably are, of course. And you probably think it is natural to fear death. Such fear is not natural. It is taught to you and diligently cultivated.
This fear benefits many entities in your society including insurance companies, the medical industry, the manufacturers of many safety oriented products, the weight-loss industry, the entertainment, news and information industries and especially the religion industry.
People who fear death also tend to fear dead people, who, by the way,
get a very bad rap from
all the so-called reality shows
about ghosts and spooks
and haunted places.
There is probably nothing on earth that limits your freedom to live your life to the fullest more than your own fear of death.
We recently heard a noted authority of some sort say that we can’t possibly know if there is life after death because no one has ever had a conversation with a dead person. That’s ridiculous. People converse with dead people all the time. In other times and places such conversations were much more commonplace and acceptable than they are now. Julia Assante, in her book, The Last Frontier, points to particular times in history when communication with the dead became forbidden.
The gods, that people had once turned to instinctively to ask for help in times of trouble and to thank in times of abundance, came to be represented by earthly rulers. Once gods became politicized the god you worshipped indicated which ruler you were loyal to. Talking to any non-physical being, other than the official god by way of the official representatives, could be construed as both heresy and treason. There were severe punishments for both. In later, more scientific ages, authorities took the position that communicating with the dead was impossible. Therefore anyone who claimed to be
communicating with the dead was either a charlatan or a lunatic. Both titles bear heavy penalties. Try being labeled as either when you are running for political office or engaged in a battle for custody of your children. It’s not any wonder if you never hear anyone talk about being visited by their dead relatives. People do tell such tales but usually only in settings where they feel safe from judgement.
Okay. I’ll take over now. Thanks, Ben.
I’m Donya and I was as surprised as anybody when Ben started talking to me back in 2012. At that time, he told me he was alive but struggling not to die before he could take care of important unfinished business.
Because Ben was a moderately famous person I was able to follow accounts of his illness and death in the news media. I was able to learn in retrospect that at the time he first contacted me he was undergoing emergency surgery for a bleeding condition that nearly killed him.
Later when he continued to talk to me I was able to learn from the news reports that he had gone into a coma
Still later I learned of his death. I asked him if it was true and he assured me that he had indeed left his body. To me the most amazing part of this experience was that through his near-death experience, his coma, and his death nothing about the way he was able to communicate with me changed.
I had long believed that our human consciousness is inextricably linked to our physical brains and thus to our physical bodies. Ben assures me that nothing could be further from the truth. Physical life is intentionally temporary and our real life begins when we leave the limits of three-dimensional reality behind.
A Visit from the Timeless Spaceless Place
By Ben Conrack and Donya Wicken