Today, Erik wanted me to post about the Sandy Hook tragedy. All day yesterday I felt so down. The lump in my throat seemed like it would never go away. Those babies. Futures that would never come. Smiles that would never shine. Christmases that would always be joyless. Erik relays this message through blog member, Robert, in a somber tone.

Erik: Mom, you want me to talk about the thing that happened in the school?

Me: Yeah.

Erik: Well, first of all, the guy that did this is a dick, but on a serious note, these kinds of events, they happen because they teach us. They give us opportunities to be the hero, the victim, and they give us opportunities to come together to show our love for each other, to show our compassion, to show our support, to reassess what we’ve been doing, to find out if it’s still working. That refers to gun laws and things like that. People having access to guns, but not just that—mental illness itself—people who are mentally challenged. And I’m not just talking about just from birth cuz it can be an environmental thing. We need to look at how they get left to fend for themselves. And what that does, you know, when people go and act out like this, they create all this chaos, we can think, “How can we better scan for that kind of thing. Check people out for that kind of thing.” So, that’s a big part of it.

Me: Yeah. There’s such a fine line between protecting the public and protecting individual rights, though.

Erik: Exactly, and that’s what this is about. It’s all a part of, um, we take little steps. That’s why people get down when they see something like this happen again and again and again. But if you start to take this in a totalitarian approach—

Robert (laughing hard): Erik, that was a big word.

Erik: Then you create all sorts of new challenges. So, it’s better to take incremental steps, to reassess little bit by little bit. And there are all kinds of lessons that we learn in the process. The mental illness thing gets taken care of, and everything surrounding that like the scanning for it and recognizing it and making sure that people are taken care of from birth to grave in way that maintains mental stability. The whole compassion thing. People coming together.

Me: Teaching people empathy.

Erik: Yeah, right. If you look at it, what’s been coming out in the news on the major networks—they’re all in sync, finally. They’re all saying the same thing instead of one against the other. We all come together, even if temporarily. That’s the nature of how things are in the physical world, especially for humans, because we just haven’t learned how to maintain a certain level of focus with that. But over time, what this does is teach us how to do it, and that will come with time. Down the road, we’ll get our shit together, and we’ll learn a lot along the way.

Me: Yeah, and these shootings have gotten more and more frequent.

Erik: And that’s part of what I—Robert’s used this term before, and I’ll borrow it from him—it’s part of what we call “the building.” You know, you have to build up to things, because, in certain cases, certain lessons may be lost in the process so we don’t see them. So we get another opportunity to go through it again, and this time the volume is turned up a little bit more. You know, it’s louder, and then we get a chance to look at what we learned the time before the event and learn new stuff from the new thing. A good example is when we developed the atom bomb. We didn’t really recognize how dangerous and devastating it could be until we dropped the bomb, and it took us getting to that point to realize how dangerous they are and how they can wipe us all out. In big lessons like that where a whole species can be wiped out, you need something that’s hard to ignore like Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Me: Yeah.

Erik: But in smaller things like this where it’s individual, you need lots of smaller events because they affect a smaller group of individuals. Throughout history, our tragedies—genocides and things like that—they’re still going to happen, but they’re not going to happen on scales as widespread as they were in the beginning. In other words, they start out really big—or actually, the way it really works is they start out where they’re not seen at all, and then in order for us to see them, they get big and very widespread. Then they die down and get smaller again, because we learn from them.

Me: We’re in the learning phase, I hope. Crash course.

Erik: Evolution is always about that. It’s about constant learning. Even those people who fall into the side of being pessimistic about things—even they, on an individual level, are learning something about themselves by going through that process. They’re expressing some kind of grief and learning, maybe unconsciously in some cases, how important it is to FEEL something—not just for themselves, but for people they don’t even know.

Me: I heard that this guy—people like that—they just want to do something that paints a canvas that represents how they feel inside.

Erik: Yeah. Even though I called the guy a dick, the dude had a lot of pain inside, otherwise he wouldn’t have done something like that. The lesson he was try8ing to learn for himself was how your own actions can affect someone else. It’s a bit of a lesson about empathy for himself. And his mom, she’s a really nice lady, and they’re trying to comfort her.

Me: She’s awake? She’s alive?

Robert: I don’t know if she’s alive or dead; I don’t know what he means by that. She got shot in the face, so I don’t know if my assumption is that she’s dead or—Erik says she’s dead. Yeah.

Erik: All the children are doing fine, Mom. They’re okay.

Me: Oh good.

Erik: I love you, Mom.

Me: I love you, too.

Thank you, Robert, for channeling Erik for us. Waiting an entire week to talk to him through Jamie would feel like an eternity. Please send prayers, love and light to those babies, the teachers, the school staff and their families during what should have been a time of merriment.

I’m sorry to announce that the recording of Thursday’s small group channeling call failed to upload into Mediafire, which sucks since I pay monthly for the service. Believing that the file was intact and needing the space for my session with Jamie Friday, I erased the original from my digital recorder. Sorry everyone. I need to find a more reliable service. Any suggestions that are not too expensive?