©2001 Jon Youngblood Unity Through Understanding A Guidebook for the Recently Alive

Chapter Ten: Alien Apparent

10.4.4 What Happens to Me when I Die?

FEAR: Forgetting Everything is All Right - Bumper sticker

This question goes all the way back to the beginning of spirit and the Other World.  I listen to John Edwards on the Sci-Fi channel and I wonder what if we really do go on?  The question intrigues me all the more coming from a place where I was able to accept the cessation of my personality.  Here I am personally agnostic.  I felt early on that it was best to be prepared for the worst.  I don’t think I will continue, at least as I am in life with all my memories, personality traits, or anything that I identify as “me”, but if I find when the time comes that I will continue, all the more wondrous and exciting.  But I live for this life not that one because I cannot be sure.  Even with all the indoctrination into the Judaic Faiths I have just never been able to believe it.  I’d like to I suppose so that I could sit around and feel a connection to that particular group that does.  A group that is also part of the same reality that I am.  Yet I have always incapable of honestly believing in their teachings.  I just don’t buy it.  And yet, having embraced science because it was something that I could ‘get’.  And because at a troubled time in my life, when my self esteem was at a low, I got an “A” on my report card for a science report that I had done on organization.  Learning the classification of life, like the class, phylum, species, etc, we were to take something that was a mess and organize it.  I found a hardware drawer that was a hodge podge collection of miscellaneous nuts, bolts, screws, nails, washers, etc. and I organized it into like groups and wrote down what I did.  At a  time when my grades were poor and about to get worse, getting that “A” meant a lot to me.  Perhaps that was what drove me to see out and learn as much as I could about the physical world and the ways we have devised for understanding it. 

            In devoting my life to the comprehension of the sciences, I never lost sight of the religious experiences that has shaped much of my early life.  I tried to get involved with other Christian sects through my teen years, but the same inability to accept inspired truth kept getting between me and my inherited traditional beliefs.  So I have never held the comforting beliefs that I had nothing to fear from the apparent darkness that is the end of life.  Surprisingly however, that at the same time people look to their faith for their own imminent death, they often will find their faith tested when the death involves certain loved ones, particularly children.  Dramatized in many films:  the morning parent cannot believe that a loving God could do this and turn their back on God and religion.  But when we are dieing or those we love are in the process of dieing, we promote the faith to the ‘nth’ degree.  There is a clue here that again does not require a rocket scientist to figure out.  No one would go to the deathbed of a loved child or parent and say “gee, too bad you are going to cease to exist pretty soon.  Bummer, man.”  The very idea is a little blasphemous.  But why not?  Other than a kind of Santa Clause type deception (since survival of a ‘soul’ is not conclusive to the scientists by any means) that is meant to be a nice thing to do for the dieing person like the simple child.  What is it that so sends our psyche into a tizzy at the thought of not existing?  Why does it not equally bother us that we came from not existing?  Why is is ok to come from nothing but not ok to go back to it?  When I watch John Edwards in the background I feel the ‘rush’ of thinking that there is indeed some Other World where we all continue to exist just as we are in this life with all the same apparent faculties.  What would we do there?  Do we work?  Have jobs?  Sit around playing harps and singing day after day for ever and ever.  Going back to nothing starts to sound not so bad when I seriously consider existing for an eternity.  I hope they have a great Hollywood in heaven because I could see some real boredom coming around the infinite corner.  But if that is that case, well, I guess we will be given whatever it is we will need to deal with that.  Forgetfulness on demand perhaps.  Whatever.

            But oddly enough, what eventually gave me some means of comprehending even the possibility of an Other World in which some ‘essence’ of ourselves could continue to experience existence, was the study of physics.  The supposed opposite end of the spectrum from believe (based on the literal meaning discussed in part one).  Just as I found the invisible sprits that caused sickness in the sub-visual world of microbes, and the possible future discovery of superior beings in the super-visual world of stars and galaxies that gave us the notion of Gods or God, I catch a glimpses of the Other World in the hidden dimensions of string theory.  Wouldn’t coexisting dimensions fill the requirements for the Other World beautifully?  Dimensions that could very well come replete with its own life forms and Everything!  Wow.  Living literally shoulder to shoulder with us and yet totally invisible and, as far as we can prove, totally unapproachable.  At least by normal people like you and me.  Most of the miracles of faith can be debunked as trickery (usually using scientific principals not know to the gullible).  But what if a few were accomplished using methods that even science has yet to discover and using in some way a connection to one or more of these other dimensions?  Only time will reveal the truth of these other dimensions but current thinking is that they most certainly do exist.  What they might be like or if they may contain the same intelligence as ours remains to be seen.

It seems that with the advent of reason (an asset of language), came an ability to control and shape our destiny in ways that no other creature (on this world) had ever enjoyed before.  Because the newly evolved mind of man could, for the first time on our world, even conceive of the potential of the new "self" to do so.  Modifying their environment as a means of increased survivability.  All other creatures, great and small, seem generally incapable of this novel approach.  With the awareness of "self" as something separate and apart from the outside world, came the idea of "other".  Duality came into Mind.  We lost our tail and gained sentience.  We stopped running to the trees for safety  and used our minds to save our asses instead.  And we have done well.  We have gone forth and multiplied.  Now I wish some people (we won’t name them) would check it off the list so me can move on!  It’s about more than pro-creation at this point, OK?  With this ability to reason out the dual nature of existence, we came to know death as no other creature appears to know it.  And it scares the living daylights out of us.

            This is the one RBQ that most frightens people and which often drives them to seek religious comfort in times when someone dies or we are faced with certain death.  Do I survive?  If I do, do I keep my memories of this life?  If I don’t, why does this frighten me? 

****

                        Where does the soul go?  There is a division in thinking on this.  Some religions hold a view in which man is an integral part of his immediate environment.  Some Native American beliefs, for example, are of the idea that the dead and other beings in the spirit world, are here, on earth, surrounding them at all times, and yet in what we might (rather scientifically) call today, another dimension.  But still sharing the same place.  The same earth.  The Hindu believe that man reincarnates time and again in various bodies, even various animals as well.  But remaining in THIS world.  The Christian and Jews believe the souls are "take up" into heaven.  Somewhere "out there".  Likewise the Egyptians found they would rather the departed souls should "move on" to another place.  A place somewhere in the underworld (?) across the river Styx.