Trigger warning: This is a newsletter about my Near-Death Experience in 2015, after I tried to end my own life. It discusses domestic violence, child abuse and suicide. It’s also funny and ultimately healing and inspirational. I just want to make sure you feel safe here and can choose to look away if these themes might trigger your own trauma and pain. Much love, A.
Read earlier chapters by clicking on them here:
Prologue & Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapters 4 & 5
The Reveal
The moment the cube said, “We’ll show you,” everything shifted.
We were no longer in the funnel. Instead, we were in a different place—floating in the middle of a room. A clean, newish finished basement, cozy and warm, like the kind you'd find in a nice house in Minneapolis. White Berber carpet, soft lighting, Scandinavian aesthetic, pale wooden, and walls lined with shelves of toys. It smelled of fresh lumber and clean laundry.
In the center, a little girl, no more than three or four years old, was having a tea party with an assortment of stuffed animals. She was completely absorbed in her play, pouring invisible tea into tiny cups and offering them to each of her plush guests. When I try to remember what she looked like, I get a sense of pigtails, but also a little short bob, and also a single plaited braid. She shimmered through all these forms, yet was always herself. I believe she was shape-shifting into different little girls throughout the encounter, while still always being the same child. This, too, was a message: Her appearance did not matter; her soul did. We are called to put less attention on the outward appearance of things.
Standing off to her side were her parents—a man and a woman—watching her with quiet joy. Side by side, arm in arm. I don’t recall their exact appearance, either, only the vibe they gave off. Young, fit, healthy, kind. Very J. Crew or Banana Republic casual in their manner of dress, nicely put together, the kind of people who’d shop at REI for their outdoor family vacations. People I’d have considered to appear stable.
The kinds of parents I’d always wished I’d had.
They were arm in arm, backs to me, watching the child, sharing a moment of pride and contentment. They loved one another, and they loved their daughter. I knew their feelings and ideas the way you know your own before you speak them.
The little girl poured “tea” from the empty toy teapot into an empty toy cup. There was nothing in either one but air. But I knew that in her mind, this was a fine event, with aromatic tea, and the stuffed animals were alive. I felt her impressions, and experienced her imagination as though it were another parallel reality.
She lifted the cup to the sewn closed mouth of a puffy beige teddy bear, and with great care, fed it. I felt her emotion and intent. Joy. Kindness. Generosity. Sharing. Being awash in happiness from the imagined pleasure of The Other. The self melting into the other, a holy act of giving. I felt her imagine the feelings of the bear as though they were hers. She was giving to another, as she herself had been given to. She did this because when others had been kind to her, she’d felt loved, and in that state of being loved, she also loved.
The child set the cup down, dabbed the stuff animal’s mouth with a little cloth napkin. She turned to her parents, beaming, and said, “Mommy! Daddy! Look! Teddy loves her tea!”
Sharing her joy in her friend’s joy.
Her parents smiled, their love and awe radiating through the room. They pulled each other closer. The woman rested her head on the man’s shoulder. He leaned his own head towards her in response. I felt their emotions. Their pride. Their delight in having made such a caring and tender person. As the girl felt about her bear, the parents felt about the girl.
The scene froze, then, like a video on pause, with me and the cube and cuboid floating in the middle of it as though in a wax museum.
The cube's voice, or rather his presence, rippled through me.
“What does a good parent say, Alisa?”
In that moment, I understood this was his answer to my question about who was right and who was wrong in their religion or non-religion on earth. This was an answer that was too big to be expressed in words, so big it had to be explained in story. This was a divine lesson, a parable unfolding before me, tailored for me, so that I would comprehend.
The cube's question hung in the air. What does a good parent say?
I understood, with a great opening of my spirit: A good parent, wise and mature, knows the tea is pretend, knows the teddy bear isn’t able to drink anything, knows these are inanimate objects. But they also know there’s nothing to gain from telling the child that Teddy isn't real, or that the cup is empty. They understand that this imaginary world is part of her growth, her practice in generosity, empathy, and love.
And so, as I watched this scene, the cube's message became clear: no one on Earth is entirely right or wrong in their beliefs. Our faiths, our philosophies, those ideologies we cling to and would kill and die for, are, to Source, like the little girl’s tea party—a way to practice the deeper virtues of kindness, compassion, and love. What matters isn’t the specifics of the belief, but how it shapes us, how it teaches us to grow into beings capable of unconditional love. What matters is whether we use our belief systems to be kind, or not. Source is not concerned with veracity of “facts.” Source is concerned with the song of the soul.
All of our beliefs are imaginary. We are too small to understand how the cosmos is run. And our imaginary worlds, like the child’s imaginary world, are part of our growth; they are our playground for the practice or rejection of generosity, empathy, kindness, selflessness, compassion and love. And Source, being the pure embodiment of those qualities, would never seek to correct us for the same reason the child’s loving parents would never admonish her or mock her for believing her toys were alive.
In that moment, I realized the cube was speaking to me in the language I understood best: storytelling. He chose this scene, this parable, this mode of communication, because he knew it would resonate with me—a writer, a storyteller, someone who has always sought truth through metaphor and narrative. He was showing me that our beliefs, our faiths, are like the little girl’s tea party—a way to practice the deeper virtues of kindness, compassion, and love. We are on earth to learn these things. And if we don’t?
We will be sent back. Maybe not to earth. Maybe to another planet, in another form. We will live, again and again and again, until we ascend to love.
The specifics of our beliefs matter less than the intention behind them and the way they shape us.
It’s not about being right or wrong; it’s about how we use our beliefs to grow, to love, and to become more than we were.
At the moment of my realization of this, I was back in the void. I could feel the cube smiling beneath me.
“So,” he said. “Are you ready to go back now?”
“Yes,” I said.
“You sure?” he asked.
I tried to move, again. And again, I couldn’t. I was still paralyzed. And it frustrated me.
“Help me!” I cried. “I have to go back!”
“You’re free, as we said,” the cube told me. “But you’ll have to do it yourself.”
“I can’t,” I said.
I directed my attention upwards again, searching for the body I did not want to be separated from. But the opening, the portal back to earth, was dark. I began to panic.
“Please,” I said. “I made a mistake.”
“Let’s take you somewhere else, where you can think about it some more,” he said.
And, just like that, we were there. Another somewhere else.
✨ More to come soon!
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Thank you for walking this strange and beautiful path with me.
With love,
Alisa
This is one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever read. ♥️
I read this in a waiting room the past week.
Mental illness doesn’t define who we are. We see the rain and feel the rain. But we are not the rain.
Matt Haig