When the Veil Grows Thin

During this time of year, when the veil between life and death feels thinner, we are invited to pause — to honor our loved ones who have passed, to remember our ancestors, and to face the ever-present reality of our own mortality.

Across cultures, this season has always carried the same sacred pulse: a remembrance that death is not an end, but a threshold. It’s remarkable how diverse and yet deeply similar our rituals of remembrance are — each one a way to continue our relationship with those who have crossed over, through prayer, offering, and song.

The Tz’utujil Maya, for instance, held a beautiful vision of this passage. They believed that the dead rowed themselves to the other world “in a canoe made of tears, with oars made of delicious old songs.” Our grief, they said, gives energy to the soul of the deceased, helping it arrive intact on the Beach of Stars — the luminous shore where the dead are received by the “last happy ancestor” and initiated into the next layer of life. After four hundred days, they are reborn as ancestors — not gone, but transformed.

This perspective — that death is a movement, a transmutation — echoes in many spiritual traditions and also finds resonance in the inner landscapes opened by psychedelics.

Psychedelic journeys can bring us face to face with death — not in the literal sense, but through the dissolution of the ego, the part of us that clings to identity, control, and separation. In these moments of surrender, we may experience what feels like a real death — a profound letting go that reveals our deepest fears and attachments. Yet on the other side of that letting go, something extraordinary can emerge: a sense of expansion, peace, and continuity.

The ego death experience can soften our fear of dying, helping us perceive death not as an ending, but as a return — a transformation into another dimension of being. In this expanded state, we may feel the presence of our ancestors, or a vast web of connection with nature and the spiritual forces that hold all life.

As the veil grows thin, may we listen to what death has to teach us: that love never ends, that every loss holds the seed of renewal, and that life — in all its forms — continues to sing across the worlds.