Adventures in Spirituality: Top Shelf Speculation

Friends & Whippersnappers,

So there you have the story of two psychic safaris taken separately by Moonchild & me. I’ve written here about the psychic safari before, and those of you who’ve been with me for awhile are probably like Oh not that delusional nonsense again, so goddamn boring. And obviously a lie.

To which I respond Yes, that nonsense again & again & again. As many times as I want to talk about it here, I will. It was a big deal to me. And it’s hard to talk about in the casual itty bitty confines that pass for social interaction. So I write about it instead and you’re welcome to not read it if it bores you. Imagine how bored I get when you talk about all your concrete. 

Also, I call you whippersnappers because I’m trying to embrace my oncoming oldness. I tried to maintain my youthfulness for as long as possible, and I think I did a great job! But I feel I’ve outgrown youth and am ready to see what senescence is all about. So…Get off my lawn!!

Syringe mandala—first layer

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Let’s see. I guess in the last post I promised to get into what I believed about death & the afterlife & what happens to our consciousness when it escapes its humanoid flask.

Which makes me kick myself for deciding to write about spirituality all summer. Couldn’t I have chosen an easier topic like ‘How To Create the Perfect Alt-Right Eyebrows’ or ‘What You Should Never Say About Trans People When They’re Listening.’

No, I always have to go for the uncomfortably deep & esoteric stuff. As if I’m some kind of expert. Some kind of monk cloistered away, pondering our mysterium tremendum. 

I think that’s an apt description of my life. My inner journey’s so much vaster than the external “goings on.” No wonder I seem boring. Anyway… 

…what do I believe happens when/after we die? Like I said, I had a lot of experience around dead bodies, and grieving families, and funeral services at many different churches (and some not at churches). Life + Church = Death.

The raw materials

But the funeral business (including the church services) had nothing to do with spirituality as far as I could tell. I always thought it was more spiritual that it was against the law to store Clorox in the embalming room, because Clorox + formaldehyde = KABOOM!!!!

I’ve seen the various stages of what happens to our bodies after we die too, and I think decomposition is also more spiritual than people singing the hymn about rising up on eagle’s wings as the well-preserved corpse poses stiffly in its expensive casket. [Every goddamn cookie-cutter assembly-line funeral includes the hymn about the eagle’s wings.]

I think there should be body farms—not just for scientists who study post-mortem forensics—but for us to return to the earth naturally. We have landfills for our garbage—we should have landfills for ourselves. That sounds gross & harsh, but it could be done in a respectful and sanitary manner, and we would not be so far removed from our own mortality that we are in denial about it. [read The American Way of Death by Jessica Mitford]

But what about that pesky elusive consciousness—or soul—that seems to separate from its shell, whilst still retaining a seemingly human intelligence, a high frequency voice, an ability to inhabit space and even interact with objects here in the physical realm? What do we know about that?

Pretty much everyone who has died, then lived to tell about it, reports the tunnel, the beautiful light, the wispy forms of departed loved ones welcoming them home. Many scientists believe this phenomenon is what happens to the brain when it is shutting down, and that’s what I believe too. Just like how you go into shock when you’re badly injured so you don’t die from the pain alone, our final gift from the kind loving universe is this beautiful death sequence. 

The pituitary gland hangs like a tiny lightbulb from the ceiling of the brain, and it’s believed to be the gizmo that projects this universal art house film about the death-tunnel.

So what happens if we do make it all the way through the tunnel? Who knows—we haven’t heard back from the ones who made it that far. But I go back to the bottle of bleach (or formaldehyde). If you leave the lid off a container of a highly active chemical solution, it will lose its power as it separates & evaporates. When we die, and our net of nerves lets go, and our organ systems stop binding the soul to its earthly duties—it separates from its slushy human solution and evaporates away… 

…why then, have experts, beginning from the ancient Egyptians right up to today, not been able to capture this escaping afflatus on any of their spectrometers or barometers or manometers? We sure do give off lots of foul gases as we decompose—is the soul somehow a part of that? Possibly, but I think we’re thinking too big.

Next layer

I don’t think the soul is as big as a body. I think we look for something anthropoid when we wave our spectrometers around the recently departed. Some ghostly form of the person his/herself.

But I believe—and this is just me, no science to back me up here—that the thing that allows us to remain potential energy after death must be a tiny battery-like spark that “escapes”—however micro-particles escape a useless container—very shortly after brain activity (tunnel vision) ceases. This tiny charged micro-particle could be located in the pituitary or the heart—or could be a paired ion from both the dying brain and heart. It could be released through the final breath, or through the skin, or even as the body cools it could be pushed out of its comfort zone through any orifice or pore in the body. Whatever…

…it is this tiny bit of potential that leaves us and carries all our earthly data & experience (like an airplane’s black box) off into the ether—not necessarily up above us, but all around us. It can float dormant and serene, or it can be charged (via any magnetic field, including earth’s) into a full screen action shot of its former host. It retains voice and intelligence (much like a thumb drive of a personality). 

If we’re to detect the soul, I’m afraid we’re going to have to put away our telescopes (& spectrometers) and get out our microscopes again. The superpowerful nano-microscopes we all have lying around the house (funeral home. hospital. crash site).

Another view

So, yeah…I know you all thought I was crazy before, and now you’re laughing and throwing circus peanuts at me because Damn…. who do I think I am speculating on all this shit? Well this is what interests me, folks. If I were a real scientist, my area of research would be finding the link between our bodies and our souls.

I don’t want to get into it today, because I think what we’ve covered here is enough to process for now, but at some point I do want to explore the karmic aspects of the afterlife. WHY does part of us need to live on, like a data recorder? Why do we experience feelings of deja vu, and having lived before? What are we being sent back to earth over & over again to learn? Are “heaven & hell” both just aspects of this very planet? 

I’ve said it before and I’m saying it again—I feel like a time-traveler of the universe, and this planet is kind of a rest stop/university/penitentiary where we come to do what we need to evolve, then return to being divine microchips with all our story arcs & covenants stored within us. I think my chip is running out of memory and this may be the final run of the VT program. Then I will become a permanent time particle in the nowhere of space, never required to be human again…

…one can only hope!

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Friends, whippersnappers—today is my 10 YEAR ANNIVERSARY of sobriety from alcohol (my lord and tormentor).

10 YEARS!!!!!! I never thought I could do it. But here I am, celebrating on a Monday. In July of 2007, I was quite sick from heavy drinking, and I told myself if I could give it a break for 10 years, then I could renegotiate my relationship with alcohol. I didn’t buy into the AA “never again! Sober-for-life” propaganda. That would’ve been too much to ask of myself. I think I set the ten year goal because it was do-able. “Forever” was not do-able. 

So today I get to renegotiate the deal. We’re going on a little adventure for the next couple days, and I am free to drink if I want to. But Will I?????

Is it a mandala or a dainty snowflake?????????????????

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Find out next time, in The Octopus Diary. 

[This reminds me I want to include the “spirit of alcohol” in my Internet Thesis on Spirituality. So yeah, still lots to talk about for the rest of the summer… Enjoy the syringe art.]