The situation in that ravaged country has not been improving. Rather, it almost seems as if it’s been getting worse moment after moment. We pray that the next 12 hours and the day which follows will bring a respite from the bad news that has been flowing from the island nation almost non-stop since the massive 8.9 earthquake struck there on Friday.

I have been giving deep thought to this globally-impacting geophysical event, seeking to understand it from the perspective of Conversations with God. I would like to offer my observations here, not because I think they are important to record or are worth more than anybody else’s, but because—as after 9/11 and Katrina, the Indonesian tsunami and Haiti, and other horrific events—many people have asked me, “How does what is happening now square with the CwG message?”

With your indulgence I am going to offer my response to that question in stages over the next several days, because (1) I want to see what additional developments occur in the hours ahead, and (2) this blog would wind up being way too long if I put all of my present thoughts into one rambling article.

I would like to open my personal commentary by discussing the most important aspect of the Japan calamity: the high and rising death toll. As I watched the  numbers rise from early reports in the hundreds to later reports hovering near two thousand to current reports indicating 10,000 people, at least, have lost their lives, my mind raced to deeply consider the information I was given several years ago in the CwG text on death and dying, HOME WITH GOD in a Life That Never Ends.

In this conversation God said to me that no one ever dies at a time or in a way that is not of their choosing. Indeed, if the CwG message is accurate,nothing happens that is against our will, nor can it, given Who and What We Are.

Who and What we are, CwG famously tells us, is God. We are, says CwG, the localized, individuated expression of Divinity. Given this truth, everything that occurs, occurs for our benefit, in that it leads to the evolution of the human species and the grander and grander expression of Life Itself, in all of its forms and places. Just as in the cosmos, where entire star systems collapse into black holes and where suns burn themselves out, leaving the planets that rotated around them scattering into the icy cold darkness, so, too, does Life provide the fuel for Life Itself to continue. Nothing and no dies, but merely changes life form.

I say “merely” with a deep and sensitive awareness of the fact that human beings changing life form from physical to non-physical is experienced as a tragedy by those who are left behind. There is no greater loss, in our culture, than the loss of life. Yet for the dying it is not experienced as a loss at all, or as the end of life or awareness, but rather, as the transition into an even greater level of awareness and experience. So CwG tells us. If this is true, and I believe it is, then we need not mourn those who have departed, for they have moved to a place of greater joy than ever they knew while here on earth.

Yet if this is so, a thinking person must ask: Why bother living at all? Why not end our own lives voluntarily right now, and graduate to that higher and more joyful place?

That is a perfectly fair and perfectly logical question. The answer is that Life is lived in the physical (over and over again) for a reason; for a purpose that cannot be accomplished in the non-physical realm, joyful as it is. If I could draw an analogy, it is something like going to work. It is much nicer and much more joyful to be on vacation, but we cannot accomplish on vacation what we can accomplish at work. This is a simplistic example, but it serves, I hope, to illustrate the point. Physical Life has a reason for existing. There is something we are doing here that we cannot do in the purely spiritual realm. That is why we all eventually return—usually after taking a nice, long, and joyous rest.

Yet it is possible for life in the physical realm to be, CwG tells us, no less joyful than life in the spiritual realm. And in advanced civilizations where sentient beings know Who They Really Are and express that, it is. This is not happening right now on the earth, but humanity is moving towards that—all as part of its evolution.

So, with regard to those whose current physical lives were ended because of the earthquake and tsunami in Japan, we mourn with all those who have lost loved ones, as we understand the deep pain of their loss. Yet we rejoice and say thanks to a God who has created the process of Life Itself to be such that it never really ends, nor does the any Soul or Essence change life form against Its will. Put simply and directly, all those who died over the past several days died because, at a level other than the conscious level, they chose to.

I know that  is hard to believe, and it is certainly not something that I would tell a deeply grieving family member at the moment they are experiencing their loss, unless I felt it might help that grieving person to at least know that nothing occurred that was against the will of the departed Soul.

This leaves many other questions unanswered. I have had many grieving people say to me, “You mean that my wife (husband, mother, father, child, etc.) actually chose to leave me? What are you saying to me? What does that tell me about how happy they were with me?”

I think it is very important to not try to understand matters such as these at the level of Mind, but to seek to move to the level of Soul as we look at such questions. I will continue this exploration in my next entry here. For now, may we all join once more (I know you have done so often in these most recent days) to send our light and love and healing energy to all those who have suffered terrible anguish and loss in Japan—as well as in Libya, Bahrain, and anywhere else in the world where physical life has ended abruptly, unexpectedly, and tragically (for the survivors). God grant those survivors peace and release from their pain.

And God bless you, all of you reading this, as we venture forward together on our own still uncompleted particular journey, which will be explored and explained deeply here in the days ahead.

With love, Neale.