Today we laid to rest the body of Troy Davis, whose execution last week stunned the world and attracted more than 1,000 mourners to his funeral in Savannah. Davis’s state-sanctioned premeditated murder exposed our interminably slow costume change from Ardipitheus ramidus to fully civilized human beings.

Yes, our bodies have evolved over billions of years; but it appears that we have not yet shed our Neanderthal nature. We still have a death grip on barbarism, justifying our behavior with man-made scriptures mandating that offenders “shall surely be put to death.”

With every highly publicized act of inhumanity such as this, it’s beginning to dawn on us that our primordial behaviors are just as beastly now as they were then. Were it not for souls such as the one who came to play the role of Troy Davis, we might still be brutally clubbing each other for sport, and offering the bodies of dead innocents as live sacrifices to imaginary mountain- and sky-dwelling gods.

It’s no coincidence that Davis came to Earth during a period when electronic communication galvanizes millions in minutes to advocate for a cause. He made us stop whatever we were doing and cry out for justice, compassion and reason. Rallying around this cause reacquainted us with the dormant Divine within our souls. It felt good, it felt right to declare that the man-made law of capital punishment is always a barbaric and inappropriate response in a civilized world.

So why were we stunned and outraged the next day by news reports that the Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles, which had been so adamant about killing Davis, had aborted the execution of a confessed killer in 2008? Samuel David Crowe was only three hours away from a lethal injection when his sentence was commuted to life imprisonment.

“Unfair! we screamed. “Double standard!”

More than meets the human eye

Limited by the sight lines of Earth’s stage and blinded by its footlights, all we could see was the inequity the treatment of the two Death Row inmates: The black man, whose guilt had not been proved beyond a shadow of a doubt, was murdered. The white man, whose guilt had never been questioned, was spared.

On the surface, we saw blatant bigotry. But in the balcony of this drama, our Higher Self saw something else. Of course It would: It has crystal clear vision. It sees many dimensions beyond this fantasy called physical life. It sees real Life.

The Higher Self knows that real Life is always fair and it always makes sense—no matter what it looks like from Earth’s stage. An omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent and unconditionally loving God would not have created it any other way.

Looking through that lens, what could logically explain the heartbreaking scene we were witnessing? Rather than give God the benefit of the doubt, most of us are satisfied with concluding that Life and the God who created It are simply unfair. We are too afraid to look on the other side of the stray thread of the Universal blanket protecting our fearful little heads to see what’s there. We are not open to the possibility that anything exists beyond the physical world.

If we dared to believe in an awesome God, we’d discover that real Life is not constantly deteriorating matter; it’s invisible, invincible and immortal energy. Life cannot be saved or taken. It has no beginning or end. Its governed by divine laws that are simple and cause no harm.

The rule is golden for a reason

One of those laws in real Life is balance. Like gravity, the physical law with which we’re most familiar, balance is in play all the time; it applies to everyone, equally. Balance is the “eye for an eye” undercurrent that flows through real Life. When we create imbalance in our relationships with ourselves and others, the process of restoring that balance naturally begins. It doesn’t require our awareness or effort, much as gravity doesn’t require anything from us.

We lose sight of that law when our souls are weighted down by human body costumes. Everyday is Halloween: We become totally immersed in our characters; we lose ourselves in our roles; we focus our attention on achieving stature and acquiring physical things. We treat others based on the costumes they’re wearing. If they’re not the same color or class as ours, we become suspect or worse, superior.

We lose awareness of real Life’s simple law of balance: Do unto others as you would have them to do unto to you. We forget that the process of restoring balance is the reason the rule is Golden: Whatever you do will be done to you.

We tend not to believe that, or we think that there are exceptions to the rule, because we don’t always witness or experience the restoration of natural balance within the bat-of-an-eyelash time frame that our souls are wearing a particular body. It only means that we’ve forgotten something else: Consequences are not attached to our mortal body costumes; they are tied to our immortal souls.

It’s the lucky soul who experiences the reaping while wearing the same costume of the sower. At least some dots can be connected. Imagine the whiplash when what goes around comes around while a soul is playing an entirely different role. The occurrence seems inexplicable, maybe event unfair. Those who are familiar with my soul’s checkered past, which I discovered during many years of spiritual sleuthing expeditions and shared in my memoir, EARTH Is the MOTHER of All Drama Queens, know precisely what I’m talking about.

Every goodbye ain’t gone

We’re deluded into thinking that we’re mortals; when our bodies die, we’re dead. But anyone who has felt the presence of a loved one who has “passed” (note the active verb) or experienced a “something told me to…” moment knows that there are more life forms here than we can see with our human eyes.

If you’ve ever attended a seminar with author Rebecca Rosen, as I had the great privilege of doing during her book tour a couple of years ago (Thanks again, Lyle), it’ll remove all doubt: Life is invisible; it’s not a physical body. I didn’t doubt it at all when I walked in the door, and was stunned and exhilarated to witness the exchange of information between souls and the relatives they’d left behind. One of the skeptics there, a young widower whose wife died following childbirth, left the auditorium believing in eternal Life, after speaking with her soul that evening.

It seemed that she and the others were determined to prove that they are still alive. Some repeated things their loved ones had said in the car, on the way to the theater, or talked about food they had just eaten or prepared. One soul thanked his widow for still leaving his slippers next to his favorite chair. He even mentioned that he was hanging out with his long-time buddy. The widow didn’t even know the man was dead! They’d lost contact.

What I’ve learned is that no one “rests in peace,” a phrase highlighting our delusion that at some point, we will be dead bodies, not vibrant souls. On Facebook right now, there’s an “R. I. P. Troy Davis” page. True, Troy’s body is supine; but he’s not resting in it. He is the soul, the life, and the breath that left it.

As an immortal soul, he lives and is active, just as he was actively living before he donned that body costume 42 years ago. I have no doubt he was relieved last week to awake on the other side of the prison walls for the first time in 22 years. But how did he get there in the first place?

Spirit is directing me to delete the rest of this post because everyone’s not ready for the answer. For those who are, meet me at Part Two: The Dreaded Karma Conversation.

Yes, I am going there. If you have the stamina and an open heart, I invite you climb to the next level in Balcony of Life. Quite possibly, things will become even more clear from that viewpoint.