Garnet Schulhauser - Dancing On a Stamp

DANCING ON A STAMP

Startling Revelations

From the Other Side

by

Garnet Schulhauser

Garnet Schulhauser 2012

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Schulhauser, Garnet, 1951

Dancing on a Stamp, by Garnet Schulhauser

A chance meeting with a homeless man marks the beginning of enlightening and soul searching conversations with Garnets Spirit Guide answering all of the probing questions we all want to know about life here as well as the here after.

1. Spirit Guides 2. Reincarnation 3. Life after Death 4. Religion

I. Schulhauser, Garnet, 1951- II. Reincarnation III. Metaphysics IV. Title

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2012946785

ISBN: 978-1-886940-32-1

Cover Art and Layout: www.enki3d.com

Book set in: Times New Roman

Book Design: Julia Degan

Published by:

PO Box 754

Huntsville, AR 72740

WWW.OZARKMT.COM

Printed in the United States of America

To Cathy, Blake, Lauren, and Colin.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

There are many people I want to acknowledge and thank for their contributions toward the writing and publication of Dancing on a Stamp. I truly appreciate all the advice, encouragement, and inspiration I received during the course of this endeavor.

First, my thanks to Ozark Mountain Publishing, Inc. for publishing my book and providing me with expert advice and guidance throughout the process and to IteRa Clehouse for her thorough and thoughtful editing of my manuscript.

I would like to acknowledge and thank Ron and Pat Smith for their comments on my manuscript and sage advice on how to maneuver through the enigmatic maze of the publishing world; Ivy Young for her skillful editing and much needed encouragement and advice; Dorothy Ellan for her insight and guidance at crucial times during this project; and our miniature Schnauzer, Abby, who demonstrated over and over the magic of unconditional love.

Special thanks to my sons, Blake and Colin, and my daughter-in-law, Lauren, for all of their love and support.

And last, but most importantly, heartfelt thanks to my wife, Cathy, for her unwavering love, encouragement, advice, and friendship over the years, especially during those times when I was disheartened and in need of a lift.

In 2007, my life was mostly on track. I was happily married to a remarkable woman who was a loving and devoted wife and mother. We had two bright and talented sons, both nearing the completion of their college degrees, and we took great pride in watching them mature into adulthood. I had a successful career as a corporate lawyer with a major law firm while my wife cheerfully embraced all the challenges and rewards that arose from her profession as a public health nurse. We lived in a nice house in an upscale neighborhood and enjoyed the material comforts of life that came with financial prosperity. We were happy, healthy, and blessed with many good friends.

Despite all of this good fortune, however, I yearned for something which had eluded me to that point in my life. I wanted the answers to all the big questions about life and death, which all too often roiled my mind, leaving me unsettled and dispirited.

Why am I here? I wondered. What, if anything, am I supposed to accomplish in my life? Did God select this life for me, or did the Universe assign it by chance? Is all the stuff I learned in Sunday school about God and the afterlife the real truth, or just a lot hooey? Will God judge me when I die and send me to heaven or hell, based on how I lived my life ? Does God really exist? Is it possible that when I die I will simply cease to existdisappearing into nothingness?

When I recalled my upbringing in a very religious Roman Catholic family, I remembered the answers to these questions that the Catholic Church had taught me when I was a child: God put me in this life to serve His purpose (which was not apparent to me) and to live my life according the all the rules of the Catholic Church, including those which dictated when, where, and how I was supposed to worship God. When I died, I would appear before God to receive His judgment based on what I did or did not do while on Earth. If I had been good, God would let me enter a wonderful place called heaven where I would enjoy nothing but happiness and bliss for eternity. If I had been bad, God would send me to hell to suffer in its burning fires forever. Or if I had been only semi-bad, I would have to serve time in purgatory until my Soul had been cleansed of my sins, whereupon I would be allowed into heaven.

The Catholic Churchs explanation for all this did not sit well with me. Although I had swallowed all of its dogma as a child, I had realized in my twenties that much of what the Church preached to its members did not make any sense when held up to the light and examined with a critical eye. For many years after that, I drifted in no-mans landnot accepting the Catholic Churchs dogma but not finding another paradigm to replace it.

At the other end of the spectrum, I knew that many atheists denied the existence of God and believed that we were slotted into our lives on this planet randomly, without any particular purpose, by an impersonal universe. Furthermore, death would be the end for uswe would not continue to exist in an afterlife of any kind. We would simply disappear into the void as our physical bodies returned to dust.

This belief did not feel right to me either although I had no rational explanation for this feeling. My gut reaction was that we all had higher selves or Souls that survived our physical deaths although I wondered sometimes if this was just wishful thinking on my part. Intuitively, I sensed that my life and all other life on this planet was not the result of a series of random events in the universethat there was a guiding hand of some kind behind it all. I did not subscribe to the Catholic Churchs depiction of God as a regal man sitting on a gold throne and dispensing rewards or punishment to the Souls who had finished their lives on Earth. It seemed illogical to me that God, the all-powerful, all-knowing Supreme Being who had everything and lacked nothing, would display many of the negative emotions that are common to humans, such as vanity, jealousy, and anger. If God had everything, I wondered, why did He need to be worshiped by humans in special ways or at all? And why would God give humans free will to live their lives on Earth when it was obvious that this would enable them to breach the rules that He expected them to follow? As well, how do we know that all of Gods rules, dictated to us by the religious holy men who claimed to be speaking for God, actually came from God? Was it possible that these holy men were just following their own personal agendas when they created these rules?

These questions swirled around in my mind for many years as I searched in vain for the right answers that would satisfy my mind and my heart.