Nah. You're Not Worm Food. (Part Two)

There’s that old trope that’s so often heralded in our stories and fictions, that death defines life, it gives life meaning, that if we knew we’d never come to a final end, we’d take everything for granted. We generally believe a story must have a beginning, a middle, and an end for it to be truly meaningful.

That’s not always true.

Some stories are interrupted, here on this plane, in this aspect of existence. Some earthly stories are left unfinished. Unfinished stories are all too ordinary. Too many of us know that, particularly those who’ve lost loved ones at early ages, and most especially parents who’ve lost children. 

Here’s another pro tip: none of our stories ever end.

Our true reality encompasses all those aforementioned maxims and none of them. There are aspects of both the scientific world and the spheres of organized religions that are on the right track, and there are components of each that are wildly off base. And you might be wondering…

What makes you such an expert?

Why are your perception of universal dogmas and facts worth more than a dog fart?

Why should I care about what you say?

There’s little I can tell you to assure you I’m telling the truth. I would never expect you to take me at my word. Nor should you take any single human at face value, be it a president or a pastor or a parent or an expert, when it comes to your personal existentialism and how you’re soldiering through life as best you can, with the beliefs you’ve taken on to help you navigate a sketchy human society on the brink of vast change.

Suffice it to say, it would a fair thing to assert I’ve briefly, through little to no effort of my own, been privy to a handful of vibrational frequencies outside the norms of the standard energy signatures of our universe…the ones we monkeys can perceive, anyway.

That’s as good a description as I can offer, unfortunately.

I wish I could elaborate, but I cannot, not because I don’t want to, but because I simply don’t have enough information to formulate a more complete picture. What I think is, our collective neurology hasn’t yet unlocked our ability, or evolved to a crossover point, to perceive beyond three dimensions, and that our reality is part of a much more complex meta-structure we can’t comprehend yet.

I know, I know. All sounds like fancy pant words to combat a fear of dying.

Honest, it’s not. I’m not afraid of death, and nor should you be.

There’s much compelling firsthand evidence derived from NDE’s (Near Death Experiences) and their cross-cultural commonalities. Most who’ve gone through such extremes report out of body sensations, senses of overwhelming peace, unconditional love, timelessness, rapid travel through a dark tunnel into an immersion of otherworldly light, angelic or messenger type beings or passed loved ones greeting them, a ‘life review’ of sorts, and a reluctant choice to return to our bodies for unfinished earthly business. I think there is some actual merit to these rare experiences.

They’re too commonplace and uniform to dismiss, considering their range across nationalities, races, and cultures, many aspects corroborated by physicians and neurosurgeons and health care workers. I have come close to experiencing death a few times in my life, but to my knowledge have never left my corporeal body. I would’ve loved to experience that. Astral projection sounds like a kick.

My bestest edjumucated guess? 

If I’m pressed to compile a patchwork conclusion, given my studies of metaphysics, philosophy, religion, biochemistry, neurology, medicine, and spirituality, the evidence available seems to marginally favor our energies having access to at least one dimension relative to our three-dimensional one. My scientific side continues to consider the possibility that after our brief consciousness of self awareness, we’ll simply return to the earth upon our demise, into oblivion, dust to dust. While I’m sure crafting religious or philosophical tenets to make our pending deaths more palatable was a basic survival instinct forged over thousands of years of evolution, it feels like that’s too simplistic, given the grandeur of the universe itself.

I admit that might just be a hope.

But I don’t think so.

All my existential invocations seem to imply we’re part of a bigger picture.

To what degree and in what regard, I haven’t a clue.

This ‘next’ place, whatever and wherever the fuck it is, according to most temporary visitors who claim to have experienced it, seems to be removed from linear time. Perhaps it’s a way station en route to elsewhere in a multiverse sort of construct, or maybe it is indeed where we end up dwelling after this life, though I would wager there’s no place or existence in which we reside for eternity. Sentience (sapience) kinda feels like it’s an ‘on the move’ sort of deal, does it not?

In my debut novel, a work of magical realism, my protagonist alluded to windows looking upon otherworldly dimensions. It made for colorful narrative. He called it shifting, attempting to divine a kind of surreality beyond his understandings of his known reality. Glimpses of a hyper reality beyond our perceptions are common in human history, often gleaned through meditation, isolation, and transcendental explorations of mind and soul. They’re often reported by dudes who aren’t necessarily Tibetan monks or Indigenous shamans, sometimes they’re neurosurgeons or laboratory researchers or hardcore atheists. While crackpots abide, more credible and reputable people have come forward with NDE reports, as the stigma often associated with such revelations has eased.

This next joint and its reported commonality across cultures and all walks of life, from children to geriatrics, from Muslims to Catholics, from aboriginal Mongolian yak herders to Swiss bankers, seems to indicate it’s a place we’re all at least initially going to upon exiting this mortal coil, no matter who we are, where we hail from, or to what doctrines we hold dear. It also seems our individual energies can’t truly experience it while still tied to the confines of these bodies.

Whatever this stuff is inside us…call it what you will, a soul, an energy, a life force, a collection of electromagnetic neural pulses…whatever it is, it appears it must be permanently separated from our bio-matter to adequately perceive, or acclimate to, whatever lies beyond. This skin of ours, this bipedal form, perhaps it is indeed that long hypothesized curtain, one that’s drawn back upon death.

As has often been intoned through the eras of humankind, our corporeality may be a veil.

It’s as good a theory as any.

It outweighs the evidence for oblivion…barely.

Not by much, but enough to err on the side of hope. Whatever else is involved, where our paths go from there, whoever might be waiting for us, what sorts of worlds exist beyond it, who the hell knows?

Maybe the universe is a birthing place, a cradle of sorts, a provenance for whatever essences we are underneath the water and meat and bone, our bodies a type of chrysalis, and perhaps upon death we shed it much as a larva does in becoming a butterfly.

If all this space and energy and matter is a complicated yet balanced sort of nesting box, that might explain why it’s such a crap shoot here, why certain humans are luckier than others in terms of genetics and functionalities. The theory of evolution is sound and irrefutable, but it only addresses our biophysical progressions…so far, that is.

The core spark of what composes sapience?

We still haven’t figured that out, and probably won’t for some time to come. Our best scientists readily admit we still have little clue as to what truly makes these monkey brains tick inside our skulls. We’ve barely mapped 10% of their capabilities over the last thousand years.

Such a theory begs a few questions, however. It makes no sense to me some of us have to live our entire lives impaired or disabled from birth. I understand through the randomness of genetics, we’re subject to the impartiality of luck of the draw. Yet it irks me to think that ‘higher’ forms of life in other dimensions don’t do some little things about it, that they don’t offer a helping hand here and there, a hint, or a subtle direction to take.

The developmentally disabled throw a particularly heavy wrench in my scheme of things, when one considers the imbalances of ways in which humans coexist. I may yet have words with those at exceptional levels of sentience about it, though I fear (and secretly relish) my earthbound angst will resolve itself upon ascending to advanced understandings of existence.

If an essential component of our existence is we’re to be left to our own devices, to scratch and crawl our way up a tiered ladder of evolution sans assistance, like Star Trek’s Prime Directive, it stands to reason there are species throughout the universe that didn’t make the grade before they snuffed themselves out via their own misguided follies.

Are we going to be one of those life forms?

Odds unfortunately aren’t in our favor.

But we humans sometimes have a way of bucking trends.

In regards to the disabled, I suppose an enlightened sort of being might suggest it’s up to us to eventually figure out how to medically treat those disabled at birth, same as it’s up to us to overcome racism, poverty, and all the other social, physical, and developmental obstacles that corporeal life forms must face early on in their respective evolution.

Here we are again at appropriate allocation of resources.

If we spent a third of our defense budget on research for new medical or neurosurgical techniques to correct issues like cognitive or biochemical deficiencies, how long do you think it might take to start healing them successfully?

How about all the other life-threatening diseases or afflictions?

Let’s go ahead and put it all the way in (forgive me). What if every discretionary dollar we spend on defense, on nukes and tanks and ‘copters and bio weapons and all that juice we burn on maintaining the world superpower gig, what if those resources were applied to research and treatment of all these nasty things we eventually cave to in the end?

That’s over a trillion dollars a year.

Think about it.

Bye bye, Covid.

Cancer.

Alzheimer’s.

Parkinson’s.

ALS.

Sounds too idealistic?

That could be our reality, if only we could band together as the sisterhood and brotherhood that we really are and use the goodies on this planet for the greater good rather than the whims of a few, and stop worrying about who’s gonna get the lion’s share of the stuff and learn to fucking SHARE. Greedy, fearful monkeys.

Whether we learn here or learn elsewhere, we’re going to learn.

It’s marginally probable we’re not disappearing into the void, and that we’re not solely dog-eared for an average seventy-year run, destined to wink in and out of life, forever unknowing about what we were, or whether we were at all. 

If we do somehow overcome all these current semi-apocalypses only to end up succumbing to a full blown one, it stands to reason we’re still going to have to deal with our shit in the next phase.

Energy cannot be destroyed. Only displaced, rerouted, channeled.

If you ask me to grand slam it, Denny’s cuppa coffee at the midnight hour, and gosh yes, I sure want you to…no, there’s no end.

Death’s not the release we think it is.

Our baggage comes with us.

That’s my odds-on favorite.

Much as that might bum out some folks.

‘Heaven’ ought to be a chill sort of place, right?

Alas, I don’t think that’s the case.

If I’m intuiting the sucker, I’d say after we kick the bucket, some things get easier and some things get harder. Such is the nature of sapient energy existing perpetually through time, space, and dimension.

Marcus Aurelius was probably right. If you’re more inclined to follow my gratuitous, pop culture references, here’s what Russell Crowe’s Maximus Decimus Meridius rips off from Aurelius in Ridley Scott’s Gladiator.

What we do in life, echoes in eternity.

The trick is to learn sooner than later, so we can advance faster…so we can suffer less. 

Good old Bill Shakespeare also had a clue. His Hamlet, poor lost soul though he was, said it more eloquently than I have here. It’s a hoary, overused quote, but it applies regardless.

“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,

Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

I’ll leave off this segment with one of my very favorite Jean-Luc Picard quotes. Yup, I’m a Next Gen Trekker. When I wasn’t bonging out playing board games or studying the books, me and my Chico roomies were watching The Next Generation every week without fail.

Whichever show writer penned this dialogue for the infamously ethereal captain, may have had an inkling of the greater picture. In the episode Where Silence Has Lease, during a countdown to the Enterprise-D’s self-destruction, Lieutenant Commander Data asks Picard about the nature of death.

"Oh, is that all? Data, you're asking probably the most difficult of all questions. Some see it as a changing into an indestructible form, forever unchanging; they believe that the purpose of the entire universe is to maintain that form in an Earth-like garden which will give delight and pleasure through all eternity. On the other hand, there are those who hold to the idea of our blinking into nothingness, all of our experiences and hopes and dreams merely a delusion."

"Which do you believe, sir?"

"Considering the marvelous complexity of the universe, its clockwork perfection, its balances of this against that, matter, energy, gravitation, time, dimension…I believe that our existence must be more than either of these philosophies, that what we are goes beyond Euclidean or other practical measuring systems, and that our existence is part of a reality beyond what we understand now as reality."

That Trek episode dropped new way back in 1988. To be perfectly transparent, I’ve seen that brief piece of screenplay script as a more or less adequate guidepost ever since. The key phrase there is: ‘our existence is part of a reality beyond what we now understand as reality.’

That much of it feels spot on. Whether we return to stardust, our memories and personal identities gone forever, or whether our energy traverses somewhere else in this universe or another, what we understand right now as life, is surely going to change in the future, just as the Neanderthals would see modern day New York City as a magical place so fantastic they couldn’t fathom its meaning.

Spirituality matters.

It’s directly connected to emotional evolution.

If you’re thinking you should grab what you can, do whatever you want, run ragged through your lifetime gobbling up anything in reach, every man or woman for themselves, shouting fire in crowded theaters, because you believe this life is all we’re gonna get?

You’re mistaken.

Self-gratification will muck up your path and bog you down. Lucky for you, there’s no hell. Of that, I am quite certain. Perhaps less lucky for you, there will be you…waiting for you to become your higher self. No deity, angel or devil, is going to be harder on you than you’re going to be on yourself.

Deep down, in your heart of hearts, I bet you know that already.

Yes, I think Picard is right, that our reality is part of a greater reality we can’t yet perceive because we’re still so fucking dumb.

Someday, we’ll all see it.

Every one of us eventually arrives in that place of light and love.

Nobody’s exempt.

Not the worst of us, not the laziest of us.

Where we go from there, is anyone’s guess.

*Compiled from September 15, 2020