Yesterday I wrote about getting a hug in heaven. It was just off the top of my head in reply to a question someone asked in a group that I’m in. As I was coming awake this morning, the idea percolated to the surface again. I had a reading with a medium recently where she said that Shayna said she helps me with my writing and that I am “not that good”. I’m sure both things are true. I usually get my inspiration between 4-7 AM. This morning, I was inspired to rewrite what I wrote yesterday.
In some of the NDE groups I hang out in, there is a question that keeps coming up due to “new age” teachings that on the other side, we are simply light beings. We have no physical bodies. We can’t touch. Some even say we are pretty much devoid of emotion. I guess they think we just float around all day just “being”, according to this model. I’m not buying it.
A self described touch/feely person asked about being able to get a hug in heaven. She’s hesitant about going to heaven because she’s going to miss out on that physical contact. She likes hugging her kids. Someone even suggested one of the reasons we incarnate into this world is so we can experience physical sensations. So, over there, we are missing something because we can’t experience the physical. So, we have to pack up and move here to this world of pain and lack to experience the physical sensations we miss there? That makes no sense to me. This place is reflection of a greater reality (physicists tell us this is like a hologram, a projection). Swedenborg says what we experience here are “correspondences”, reflections or analogies of what the spiritual world is like. So, why would we expect the real real to be less real than this?
Why do we want hugs? What we want to feel is the love. In this realm we experience love through words, through glances and through touch. We gaze at each other. We hug. We kiss. We have sex. We equate sex with love so much that we call having sex “making love”.
Here, we can’t experience love directly. So, you glance at me. My eyes pick up the photons being reflected off of your eyes which stimulate nerve cells. My brain senses you are looking at me and interpret that glance. You speak to me. Your vocal cords create sound waves which strike my ear drums which causes a fluid to vibrate which creates an electrical impulse which my brain hears as words a and interprets as ideas which I take as love. You hug me, which causes nerve cells in my skin to fire and send impulses to my brain and I feel your touch. We get as close as we can, putting our bodies together. My 60 pound dog Zoe can never be close enough to me. She squirms on my lap, puts her face in my face, looks into my eyes. I swear that dog tries to climb inside of me.
With a special few people, we “make love”. For most of us this is confined to one person for the bulk of our lives, if not all of our lives. We have special sensors for this function only. We keep them hidden from the rest of the world, covered by clothing. We don’t even show them to strangers. We can’t make love with anyone else no matter how close we feel to them. And, as we age, for many of us, we don’t make love nearly enough and our bodies make it difficult to do it at all. When we do make love though, we experience a physical sensation like no other- an orgasm. This is the ultimate physical merging of two people here on Earth.
All of these things are expressions of love, but they’re not the love itself, which we cannot feel directly. They are approximations. They are the best we can do. We feel love and we express it the best way we can, through these intermediary senses, hoping it gets through to the other person.
Why would we think we are going to miss the firing of these neurons in the afterlife? Are we going to lack a way of expressing and feeling love? Is there no equivalent to a hug, a kiss or an orgasm? I would expect we will experience a more direct feeling of love, a more intense experience. I don’t think we’ll sit there looking at each other wishing we could hug and finally resigning ourselves to the fact that we have to come back here to do it. I think the feeling of love there will be one that we can’t even imagine, because now all we have ever known is being trapped in these meatsuits. I’m not worried about missing out on any physical sensation in the afterlife- chocolate, whiskey, or even making love. I think there, when we want to make that love connection, we will and we will have a soulgasm that will make everything here pale in comparison.
