Enlightenment: Life and Death are the Same?

God and Life started very early teaching me. I got whooping cough at age 2. This taught me that life and death are the same.

I learned that if I fought for breath between coughs that I just got exhausted and nearer to death. If I gave into the coughs and just turned blue and passed out, somehow my body, my life, my God brought me back to life. This went on for months until Archangel Michael appeared to me while I was lying in my grandmother's lap one night while she was singing "Hark the Herald Angels Sing!" and then I was healed and okay after that.

However, I was permanently changed from all this. I didn't really feel alive in a physical sense anymore so I had to convince myself that I was alive. So, I did this by taking risks physically. Because even if I got hurt at least I could feel the pain and then know I was alive and not dead.

Because life had taught me: "Life and Death are the same."

By age 3 I was okay for a few years until I fell and hit my head about 9 feet onto a rock on the back of my head from rock climbing. Then I started to have seizures (blunt trauma childhood epilepsy) which went away when my cranium (skull)grew enough to release the pressure on my brain by age 15. This is the only kind of epilepsy that goes away.

These two events in my life from ages 2 to 3 and from ages 10 to 15 changed me. So, the way I see it
God was teaching me. I didn't tend to have fear of life or death because of this in a physical sense. What scared me the most was uncomfortable social situations where I had to act very proper. But, life and death no longer scared me. Because I was big for my age kids usually my age never picked on me because they knew I had a temper and if they attacked me I might kill them. I liked it this way. I mostly got left alone (at least by people my own age.).

And I was always physically fearless because I needed to be to demonstrate to myself always that I was still alive and not dead. Because life had taught me traumatically and fully "Life and Death are the Same!" So, people knew that I was fearless and sometimes this scared them.

Since I was big my coach in High School Asked me to be a Lineman on the football team. I told him I didn't want to be injured and walk with a cane the rest of my life like our quarterback class president had to. He was upset I didn't want to play football but I wanted to buy a car with the money I made after school and to go on dates with girls which I did.

However, I couldn't see going to war to die. I had already died enough (thousands of times already) in whooping cough and epilepsy. I was sort of death traumatized out (if you know what I mean). Also, my father said, "I don't want you to become an uncouth drunk and be unkind to women and start to smoke cigarettes." So, he made sure to take me to a doctor who treated me for childhood epilepsy so I got a 4F and didn't go to Viet Nam.

Around age 15 to 17 I realized there were enough people who became doctors, lawyers, and other professions. So, I decided my best use to myself and to mankind was to become fully enlightened and eventually sharing my enlightenment with mankind as I aged. This I felt was the most powerful thing I could do for life on earth and as we travel beyond earth back into the Stars.

So, I learned early the Zen Koan of: "Life and Death are the same!" And it has become one of my keys to enlightenment. I don't know completely whether God arranged these experiences for me or if my soul arranged these experiences for me or both or what. I just know that:

"LIFE AND DEATH ARE THE SAME" and neither really is to be feared by a human soul who is kind to himself or herself and all other beings in the past, present and future of the universe.