As I continue on this journey, I find myself questioning everything. I mean everything, including the nature of reality itself. I think like most of us I think of the dead, the spirit world and, by extension, Shayna as less than real. After all, they don’t have bodies. And we all know what is solid is what is real. What we can touch is real. At least what we can detect with our instruments. If we can’t detect it, it doesn’t exist.
The spirit world is something we can’t see or even detect. It’s supernatural. I don’t believe in the supernatural anymore. But… I do believe there are things beyond our capability to detect or explain. If we were to travel back in time a couple of hundred years and to tell a man living then “Where I come from we can speak into a device on one continent and immediately, without any physical connection, we can hear and even see someone on the other side of the planet.” He would have thought that impossible. Even if we could demonstrate it, he would call it supernatural. Radio waves would be unimaginable. Today we think thoughts. We know there are thoughts, but we don’t know what they are. We deem it impossible for thought to have an impact on the physical world. We deem it impossible to share or project thoughts between people. What if one day we find out thoughts are like radio waves we just can’t detect them, yet?
We hear that in the spirits world, we can think of something and it appears. We hear we can travel to see a loved one just by thinking about them. This defies our laws of physics. When you’re in spirit you’re (just) consciousness. You don’t have a body. So, you’re not really real. Right? This magical place is a place that many of us are starting to believe in, but it’s still difficult to think of it as real.
Physicists themselves are now questioning the nature of reality. Physicists who thought everything solid and made of particles are realizing what we think of as solid is mostly space. It’s not solid at all. Even the “particles” we think of as the indivisible building blocks of all we see are (just) spinning vortices of energy. Ultimately we may find nothing at all is “solid”. It’s all (just) energy arranged in different configurations. And this energy has emerged from a Consciousness or a Mind. So, while for forever we have thought of the material world as “real”. It might just be that this is indeed the Matrix. Possibly (probably?) where live is no more than a simulation projected by consciousness.
As I ponder the afterlife, I wonder if when we get back there we will look at this as a dream. I think about the feeling when you wake up after a dream into which you were totally immersed. It felt so “real”, but when you wake up you realize you were never in any real danger. No matter how bad the nightmare was it’s over now and you’re fine. And you’re back here, in what we perceive as the real world. Could that be what it’s like to wake up “dead”?
This is a difficult thing for me to grasp. I’ve had mediums tell me Shayna is happy, very happy. I’ve been told she is reading. She’s told Kayla that she still watches Netflix. I’ve been told she is still here with us taking part in family life. Here with us every day. I’ve even been given evidence of this. I want to believe this and I do, but I must admit it does seem a bit less than real because she’s not in the body anymore. I imagine her sitting in the car with me or running along side me on my run. But, I can’t wait to find out what it’s like for her to be there with me because for me it’s just a little less than real.
I wonder though. We think of the poor dead people. They are disembodied souls. They are ghosts who can no longer eat or drink or do the things that we think makes life worth living. We, who get to draw breath are so lucky. Are we looking at it backwards? Are they missing anything by not being in the body? If they are pure consciousness, is that less than consciousness in a body? Maybe these bodies, which us who are awakened have realized are not us, are analogous to prison cells. Maybe those who have shed the bodies are outside of the bars and here we sit pitying them because they are no longer inside. They are free to go where and when their minds take them. Maybe….
