There are three topics that make people feel uncomfortable: incest, military criticism and death.
The first two I can more or less understand, but why death? It’s inevitable, yet no one wants to think about it.
For me, I’ve always thought about it. It’s not an obsession, but more a curiosity in the sense of “hey, where we off to next?”
People who are metaphysically sensitive, better understand the immensity of the universe with its trillions of galaxies composed of another trillion stars each. You grow up with a third eye, an innate feeling that you’re surrounded by other realms of reality. Sometimes those realms even manifest: a fleeting image out of the corner of your eye, a livid dream, a premonition, a disembodied voice just above your head as you wake.
Then there are the unbelievable odds of “chance” meetings with curanderos, psychics, medicine men/woman, sorcerers, ufologists, remote viewers and other individuals of a similar metaphysical ilk.
Yet, I’ve always considered myself a practical person. When people say they don’t believe in ghosts or other unexplainable phenomenon, I get it. I wouldn’t believe either if I hadn’t personally experienced it.
My contact with these other realms began at the age of two.
My family lived in Louisville, Kentucky, in a modest house at the end of a dead-end street next to George Rogers Clark Park. I remember standing in a room at the front of the house. I suspect it might have been my room because there was a wooden toy box against one wall filled with toys, including a real bowling pin on top.
I was alone. It was late in the afternoon. The room was getting darker, yet there was a brilliant beam of light coming through the window. I remember being mesmerized by the light. As I walked over to it I noticed it was filled with specs of colorful dust dancing in the sunbeam. The light made me happy. It filled me with a joy I had never experienced. I reached up to touch the light.
That’s when I heard it. A kind, gentle female voice very clearly said to me: “Always remember this moment.”
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I have given a lot of thought to that voice and the message behind it. And, even though I still don’t understand it, I do have ideas …
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For many years I worked as a journalist for the Arizona Republic newspaper in Phoenix. For several of those years I wrote about medicine, health and fitness. I spent time at local hospitals interviewing doctors and on occasion even scrubbing in as an observer.
Curiously, the healthcare profession steps around death every day, yet is careful not to linger. Most doctors are pretty closed-lipped about death and dying – until they get to know you and trust that you won’t write about everything they say.
I got to know quite a few medical professionals on a personal level. They actually have quite a bit to say about death and dying. Inevitably, patients who are resuscitated from near death experiences come back really pissed. They describe a peacefulness that they did not want to leave.
This always reminded me of the peacefulness and happiness I discovered in the sunbeam.
Of course, brilliant bright light has always figured prominently in anecdotal near death experiences. Extrapolating on all metaphysical roadways involving death, it would appear death may be divided into two parts:
- Hanging around, even having possible encounters with those still living, and
- Disappearing into “the light,” which may serve as a kind of conduit into a more permanent ongoing existence
Also well-documented are the abnormally high number of metaphysical experiences encountered by young children. These can range from hearing disembodied voices to ghostly encounters with entities that the child names and even describes – descriptions that often have meaning for shocked adults who knew or knew of the apparitions.
Psychologists write this off as normal childhood fantasies. However, non-technological cultures have taken a much different view of the line between imagination and reality.
Besides studying journalism at Arizona State University, I also minored in cultural anthropology. Like my acquaintance Carlos Castaneda, I was intrigued with Yaquis and their rather substantial presence in Tucson and Guadalupe.
Traditional Yaquis believe that we are born into a clear dome, and our reality is everything we can see inside and outside the dome. But as we grow older and are told what is real and what isn’t, that dome darkens. By the time we are young adults, are reality only consists of what we can see on the inside.
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It has always seemed to me that people tend to look through the wrong end of the telescope when it comes to life and death. We think our 70 to 80 years on Earth as existence, and anything that came before or after our time on Earth as non-existence.
The problem, of course, is that most of us have no memory of an existence before birth. It’s like trying to visualize a new color that you’ve never seen. Therefore, if we can’t think of it, it must not exist.
Like the colors that we know, we are only familiar with one set of physics. Could there be others, which we return to upon death as pure energy? Traditional Yaquis believe there are 48 realms of reality. Even quantum physicists believe it’s possible life goes on in a parallel universe regardless of what happens in this one.
A parallel universe is one of those intriguing ideas that’s imaginative, compelling, but very difficult to test. They first arose in the context of quantum physics, which is notorious for having unpredictable outcomes even if you know everything possible about how you set up your system. If you take a single electron and shoot it through a double slit, you can only know the probabilities of where it will land; you cannot predict exactly where it will show up.
Even Einstein jumped in on this idea, while adding that death signifies nothing, and that in physics the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.
This thought is firmly entrenched in quantum physics laws which tell us that “life” is not made of matter but of vibrations that escape time and space. In other words, our short physical existence isn’t really physical at all.
So if we’re not actually “solid,” then what are we? Given the ideas of quantum physics, is it more reasonable to assume that life as we know it is not corporal but rather just another manifestation of energy?
In fact, the law of conservation of energy, also known as the first law of thermodynamics, states that the energy of a closed system must remain constant—it can neither increase nor decrease without interference from outside.
The universe itself is a closed system, so the total amount of energy in existence has always been the same. The forms that energy takes, however, are constantly changing.
This law, first proposed and tested by Émilie du Châtelet (later made famous by Einstein) means that energy can neither be created nor destroyed; rather, it can only be transformed or transferred from one form to another.
Spark to fire. Battery to power. Bomb to explosion. Pure energy to what we call life then back to pure energy? In other words, matter and energy are two rungs on the same ladder.
As far as humans go, all matter and psychological processes — thoughts, emotions, beliefs and attitudes — are composed of energy. When applied to the human body, every atom, molecule, cell, tissue and body system is composed of energy that when superimposed on each other create what is known as the human energy field.
At any given moment, roughly 20 watts of energy course through your body — enough to power a light bulb — and this energy is acquired in a plethora of ways.
Mostly, we get it through the consumption of food, which gives us chemical energy. That chemical energy is then transformed into kinetic energy that is ultimately used to power our muscles.
Looking at death from a physics standpoint, our material energy doesn’t disappear but it is redistributed after we die.
In death, the collection of atoms of which you are composed (a universe within the universe) are repurposed. Those atoms and that energy, which originated during the Big Bang, will always be around. Therefore the essence of your energy will continue to echo throughout space until the end of time.
In the context of the law of the conservation of energy, you’re not gone when you die – you’re just less orderly.
Assuming we are actually pure energy just passing through an illusional material phase (life), the question becomes what is pure energy?
Some would argue that pure energy doesn’t exist. Light, for example, is not really pure energy. While it is true that light has no mass, this fact does not imply that light is pure energy. Light is composed of fundamental quantum objects called photons which we list alongside other fundamental quantum objects such as electrons and neutrinos.
Light is essentially just another form of energy but has no mass.
Energy is an abstract concept, it is a measurement for the ability of a body or system of bodies to have an effect. The argument continues: The term “pure” has no real meaning and is an unnecessary embellishment or adjective.
Or is it?
The trick is understanding if any intelligence could actually be built on pure energy alone. As far as humans go, intelligence is a matter of consciousness or self-awareness and we simply do not know how this was achieved.
The existence of spirit might be a crucial component and one that science is unable to access. Could spirit be another component of existence of which we cannot determine its nature or origin?
So why not just call it pure energy?
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Dreaming, Starry Nights and Death
I’ve always suspected there’s a connection among these three things: dreaming, stars and death.
When Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, anthropologists asked traditional Aboriginees what they thought of that. Aboriginal leaders merely shrugged and said not a big deal, we walk on the moon all the time.
Non-technological people have claimed this is possible through enigmatic dream states. All of which begs the question: Why do we disappear when we sleep and dream in the first place? Is it possible this is our way of staying connected to our pure energy origins, and that dreaming is akin to whales resurfacing in order to draw oxygen into their lungs.
Perhaps the only difference between dreaming and death is that the body anchors us from completely floating away like a child’s balloon. This duality might also account for the nonsensical quality of dreams in that it’s this conflict between pure energy and a corporal existence that creates the “disconnected” sense of dreaming.
And the stars? Maybe space isn’t so much about distance as perspective. While the stars seem unreachable now, perhaps that barrier is lifted in the realm of pure energy, and heavenly bodies become blueprints of something we can’t imagine in our life phase.
Death of course is not a pleasant experience for those left behind. Families and friends of those who have transitioned are sad, and understandably so.
And for those of us still alive, death is not a comfortable topic because our physical realm is the only one we really know. We grow comfortable here, develop strong emotional attachments, enjoy a good meal …
Consequently, death isn’t discussed. It’s the worst thing that can possibly happen. Right?
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Death Education 101
If death wasn’t inevitable, than talking about it would seem an option. But given that our physical existence is ephemeral – and not really all that long – it would appear healthier for humans to acknowledge that we won’t be around (at least in human form) forever.
Religions, of course, have approached the topic (and still do), but with their rigid house rules, it’s pretty clear that religion does nothing other than truncate the learning process. That, and cultural anthropologists have proven religions are more about control than insightfulness.
Might it not be worthwhile to begin soft discussions on the topic of death in elementary school then progress in secondary schools to a worldview of life and death in terms of physics?
At the very least, if we learned what to expect as opposed to merely fearing death, that would seem to help with the shock of actual death, a subject matter that is basically ignored in most cultures – until it can’t be.
Our corporal existence would seem to be more like a bus stop than a European tour. Why we’re here I have no idea. This is one of those questions without an answer even though humans have always felt the need to answer it.
Perhaps what it comes down to is this: The universe is out there waiting for us to discover it – in the form of pure energy. Planet Earth is just one short stop on the tour.
Was my experience as a toddler a preview into where we come from and where we will be returning? Perhaps as we transition back to pure energy, this world collapses on itself and the stars that seemed so insular and distant become welcoming beacons of light like 1880 gaslights along a dark street.
Or colorful specs of dust in a brilliant sunbeam.
