Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (or SIDS) has caused enormous grief and guilt for countless couples. It generally occurs when a parent puts an infant (or child up to about three years of age) to bed, seemingly perfectly healthy and then finds the infant dead the next morning.
Western medical science, our "traditional" source of answers for diseases and disorders of the human body and mind, continue to come up clueless for an explanation. Time and again they have ruled out the possibilities of suffocation, infection, diseases, or poison. It's as if one moment the lights are on in the child, the next they are out.Actually, this comes surprisingly close to describing the real circumstance. To understand SIDS, you must first set aside the Western-cultural understanding of what a human is. The perspective that we are a highly evolved animal species with primate ancestors and can be treated as such is incorrect and must be discarded. So must we also discard the medical notion that we are a biological machine which can be described by the sum of our physical parts.
Humans are first and foremost spiritual entities. We inhabit a human physical body for the purpose of experiencing life on the physical level. We are a consciousness, an eternal divine being. Birth and death are attributes of the physical body, but not of our true selves.
When we enter as a spirit into a human body, either before birth or shortly thereafter, we naturally find it to be terribly confining, even painful. Our memories of previous incarnations have been erased prior to our "descent", so we forget how restrictive the physical body is compared to the total freedom of spirits. An infant's whimpering, whining, and crying for no apparent reason is often due to this unpleasant adjustment, which is why just holding and comforting an infant in these moments can be so important. Sometimes this confinement in the body is more than the spirit is willing to bear, and in spite of its earlier commitment to accept the body, now decides to release itself. The life-energy which the spirit brings to the body being withdrawn causes an abrupt stillness in the body and it dies.
Prior to about three year years of age, the spirit is not fully "engaged" in the body and can free itself rather easily. This is why SIDS beyond this time is quite rare. Other reasons the spirit may decide to disengage itself from the body are that it may find that the parent beings are not appropriate for the experiences it came to go through. The life circumstances may also be wrong for it. Or perhaps the spirit wanted to come into a crippled body and didn't get one or vice versa. Whatever the reason, the spirit, upon leaving the body, simply reverts to its true self again feeling no remorse, only joy.
To the grieving parent who does not understand the true meaning or process of birth and death, finding a still body where there previously was life will suffer a difficult wound. Yet if the parents can come to fully understand that the child was never really "theirs" to begin with and therefor they have suffered no "loss". If they can also understand that the spirit of the child, like the true selves of the parents lives on, and they need feel no guilt or shame for the circumstance of the sudden death.
Copyright (c) David Moyle 2003