When I Think Of Home

The title of my talk today is home and that’s not home with a lowercase H but home with an uppercase H.

What Is Home?

I’ve been on this planet long enough to have had several homes.  I’ve had homes in different cities. I’ve lived in apartments and houses.

I’ve had temporary homes, like when I went away to college, and I lived in the dorms.

And there are even more temporary homes, like when you go on vacation. When you stay in a hotel for a week or so, when you return to your room from an excursion, it almost feels like home for a while. Then you remember your true home is back in the city that you live in. But none of these places are Home with a capital H.

Sometimes even when you’re on vacation, you get homesick. Even though you’re intentionally away from home, you want to be back sleeping in your bed. Even though you’re away by choice, you long for home. 

Home is relative. When I first moved to the house I’m sitting in, I didn’t consider it home for many months. My home was where I had lived the previous decade. When my daughter moved away to college, I was taken aback the first time she said she was going “home,” referring to her dorm. Once we’re here on Earth long enough, we begin to think of it as home. We settle in and almost forget this is just temporary.

What This World Really Is

I liken this trip to the physical, the walk in the physical, as Christian Sundberg says, to a trip away from home. It’s an adventure, an excursion. It’s a learning experience, like going away to college.

We live in a virtual reality. This is a simulation. I was speaking with somebody the other day, and they asked if I was talking about Simulation Theory. It’s more than theory. What we call physical reality is solely a matter of perspective. Whatever reality we happen to be in is physical while we’re in it. People often ask about the afterlife being physical or “just” mental, as if mental is less than physical. 

My thinking has been greatly influenced by people like Bernardo Kastrup- Why Materialism Is Baloney, and others who have come to the conclusion by observation of reality and logic that what we see is not all there is. We live in a reality nested within a larger, more real, more fundamental reality.

I’ve learned in recent years that everything is consciousness. Everything exists within consciousness. Nothing is physical. Therefore, everything is physical when you’re in it. 

When you dream, your dream world is physical when you’re in it. It has a rule set, although different from waking rules. You can touch things. You see things. You hear things. You have a body that you perceive as physical. Last night, I had a dream in which I could barely stand. My knees were stiff, and my legs were heavy. That was my physical reality until I woke up in my bed and deemed it just a dream. Imagine one day waking up after your body has ceased to function and realizing from that perspective this was not a physical reality. 

Physicists have even gotten to the point where they tell us that what we perceive as solid is not solid.  The chair that I’m sitting in and the chair that you’re sitting in feel solid to us, but they’re not solid. They are vibrating masses of highly dense energy. vibrating masses of energy. The particles that we thought were fundamental at one-time atoms, electrons, neutrons, and protons, then quarks and neutrinos, none of which are fundamental. At the very smallest level, they’re vibrating bits of energy. There’s nothing solid about what we live in. Electrons that were taught as tiny little balls when I was in college are now taught as being partly a wave and partly a particle. More accurately, an electron is neither but is a quantized fluctuating probability wave function. A hydrogen atom is 99.0000000000006% space.    

Why Do We Do This?

We come here for a time, to experience to learn to grow to love to learn compassion, to learn wisdom, to expand our capacity. We come here to evolve our consciousnesses.

Someone recently asked,  “Why, if we’re perfect, do we have to come here to grow” Well, what does it mean to be perfect? What couldn’t be improved? Are we omniscient in the afterlife? Some say we are. Once we die, we know all of the secrets of the universe. But that’s intellectual knowledge. To be genuinely omniscient, you must know what everything is like. Some things you can only learn experientially. To be an omniscient being is, in a way, an oxymoron. If you knew everything, you could not know what it’s like not to speak English. If you were never uncomfortable, you could not understand what it’s like to be cold. To know what it’s like to receive mercy, you have to be in a position where you need mercy. Hopefully, you get my meaning. Some things can only be learned by being experienced. To have these experiences, we must enter a simulation that allows us to feel these things, to be constrained.

We are fractals of a greater consciousness on a mission to have experiences to grow that consciousness and our own. Our lives are lives of service to continue the evolution of Consciousness. The idea of a perfect “God” that is omniscient and omnipotent is only relative to our small consciousness. In reality, no omniscient being exists. The reality is that Consciousness, Source, etc. needs us to grow.

The reason why we can leave where we live is that we know it’s only for a time. We know that this experience is temporal. But while the experience is temporal, the benefits are eternal.  Everything in this simulation fades away when we leave the body. All of the money that we accumulate, all of the things that we collect, everything that we think we own, we are merely renting while our projection, our body, remains in the simulation.

Another Reason We Incarnate

Again, why do we come here? Is there more than one reason?

I mentioned above, it’s to improve consciousness. But there’s more. When I talk to people, many say, “I would never sign up for this. This is stupid.”

Let’s think about this from a different perspective. EarlierI mentioned college. I studied chemical engineering. It was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. I got my degree in four years. And I paid money to those people for the torment. 

I studied chemical engineering because I loved chemistry in high school. But a part of it was that I wanted a challenge. High school was too easy for me. I graduated with a perfect GPA. In college, I wanted to see what I could do. I wanted to test my limits. 

I love reality TV. There’s a show called Alone, and there’s a show called Naked and Afraid. In these shows, people put themselves in extreme conditions. On the show Naked and Afraid, they go into the Wilderness wearing nothing, and I mean nothing. No shoes. No clothing. They are allowed a bag and two items like a pot and a knife.  The goal is to survive for twenty-one days.

When I explain this program, some people say they must do it for the money. But there is no cash prize. They do it for the adventure. And they do it to improve their skills. At the beginning of the program; they are given a survival rating. They’re given a second rating after they have endured and hopefully overcome.  

The program Alone is, in a sense, even more extreme. They are clothed, and they get a lot more supplies. But their supplies are still extremely limited, and they are placed in the Canadian wilderness as winter is coming. What is more extreme is they are truly alone. There is no camera crew. They are given camera gear. The show is filmed entirely by the participants.

They typically last a couple of months. At least one person has made it longer than 100 days. In addition to the weight loss they all go through as they slowly starve, there is another profound change. 

As I’ve watched, every contestant everyone I can think of has gone through an amazing spiritual transformation. The hardships and the solitude makes permanent changes in how they view the world and in their character. Some people are physically altered permanently with internal and external injuries. Yet, they put themselves in that situation for the challenge and the experience.

I also love sports. Have you ever thought about how ridiculous it is to watch grown men strapping on pads, going onto a field, tossing a ball, tackling each other, one team trying desperately to stop the other, just to score points? We set up an artificial construct where one team tries desperately to keep the other from scoring. It’s designed conflict. They risk life and limb. We pay money to watch. All for the challenge. All to see what we can do.

Do you get my point? We deliberately place ourselves in challenging situations, conflict, and painful and uncomfortable circumstances. Why would we not have chosen this, given the incredible opportunity for growth and experience?

The Between Life

We often to the next life as the afterlife. More accurately, there is one Everlife. There is one eternal life that we all have. Yet, it’s broken into phases. I’ve recently begun referring to the next phase of life as the between life. This is where we come between the times when we are Home.

I spoke with the gentleman the other day, and I love the term he used to describe the day my daughter left this world. He called it “continuation day.”

I’ve heard the term Risen used to describe the “dead.” They’re not dead. A few days ago, someone said their departed mother had “moved upstairs.” These whimsical terms not only remind me that death is not the end. They remind me not to take this life so seriously.

This phase of life is not our “real life.” This planet is not our Home. This is where we come to challenge ourselves and grow. The Wizard of Oz is a movie that grows more relevant to me the older I get. Just like Dorothy and her band of adventurers on the Yellow Brick road, we go through hardships that we go through to come out stronger. We support each as we make the round trip back Home.

I’m not an adventurous person. The other day someone asked me the question, ”What’s the most adventurous thing you’ve ever done?” My answer was probably scuba diving. I’m not into skydiving or extreme hiking, or even running marathons. I’m not an adventurous person. 

But I say this to you. You may not feel like you’re an adventurous person, but if you’re here, you are.  We, my friends, are the baddest of the bad. We are the tough guys

Christian Sundberg has between life and pre-life memories. In Christian Sundberg’s experience, he talks about being in the prior life, the real life, I would say. In this “place, he comes across a being that impresses him immensely. What was different about this being is he had had a physical experience. He had incarnated. That experience changed him. It had grown him and expanded his capacity. 

When I interviewed Natalie Sudman, she talked about the perspective beings on the other side have about us who have incarnated. This what she had to say in her book, The Application of Impossible Things.

This physical life is a unique experience and is entrancing from the perspective of expanded awareness. It is utterly lovely, deliciously strange, challenging, and wildly exciting. The razor focus required to remain in the collective physical is intensely satisfying for a Whole Self. Physical reality is a balancing trick, a performance high, an intensely concentrated speed test of complex skills. We’re each an F-22 pilot flying fifty feet off the deck through an impossibly narrow canyon.

Natalie Sudman- The Application of Impossible Things

How does that make you feel? Don’t you feel proud just to be alive? Do you begin to realize what you’ve accomplished by virtue of just living in this reality for as long as you have?

When I was a child, my favorite movie was The Wizard of Oz. It’s still in my top five. I don’t know why I just loved that movie.  It came on once a year. There were no DVRs or VCRs. If you missed it, you waited until the next year to see it. So, I made sure I always saw it.

You may recall in the movie Dorothy is on an adventure. Dorothy is taking an trip and feels weak and small and powerless. She meets other beings that feel weak and small and powerless. They band together. Through the hardships they face they realize that the things that they were seeking were within them all along. But they had to have the experience, they had to take the journey, to reveal those things. They had to be tested to bring them to the surface. 

And at the end of the movie, Dorothy woke up in her bed with her loved ones all around her and realized that it was “just a dream.”

There’s a song by Stephanie Mills that is in the updated version, The Wiz. Stephanie Mills sings it. Whenever I’m homesick, I play this song.

A snippet of the lyrics: 

And oh, if you’re listening, God, please don’t make it hard

To know if we should believe the things that we see

Tell us should we try and stay or should we run away (Should we run away)

Or will it be better just to let things, let them be, oh

Livin here in this brand new world

Might be a fantasy

But it’s taught me to love, oh, yeah

And it’s real, it’s so real, it’s real to me

And I’ve learned that we must look

Inside our hearts to find

A world full of love

Like yours, like mine

Like home

Like, like home

(When I think of home)

My friends smiling down on me

Givin me their energy, oh

(When I think of home)

I think of a peaceful world and joy

All around me, yeah

(When I think of home)

And love that we share can never

Never, ever be taken away from me, yeah, yeah, yeah

(When I think of home)

I just sit down and think

And gets on down in my bone, bone, yeah

(When I think of home)

I can hear my friends telling me

Stephanie, please sing my song

I wanna sing, I wanna shout

I wanna tell you what it’s all about

This is a strange place we’re in. This is a strange journey we’re on. Sometimes we forget why we’re here. We forget that we’re surrounded by people in spirit who love us. We forget our passed loved ones, like my daughter, are looking in on us sending us their energy. When we go home, and we see them, we’ll say “Oh yeah. I haven’t seen you in a long time.”

I want to share a sign I got from my baby on the fifth anniversary of her passing. I was taking my wife to a physical therapy appointment. Every anniversary of Shayna’s passing is a tough one. This one was no exception. I wanted a sign. But I dared not ask for one lest I be disappointed.

Sitting at a red light, I was lost in thought when my wife said, “Did you notice what’s on the back of that truck?” Of course, I had not. I looked up to see “I’m Right Here” stenciled across the tailgate. And, in the upper left corner of the rear window was a sticker “Home.” It’s one of those stickers that has the letter O replaced by the image of the state you’re from. In this, case, it was Ohio, where Shayna was born and lived her whole life. “I’m right here. Home.”

Here’s a comment I received recently from someone who had an NDE:

“while there, i went way out in the cosmos beyond the stars and planets, to where it was total darkness, tho i could see perfectly. i was able to look back at myself, from above myself. i was on tiptoe leaning as far as possible over the edge of the wisdom of gd, as one would a well, to gaze down into it as far as i can see. i was wearing blue jeans and im twenty three, tho i was fifty seven at the time i died and it had been years since id worn jeans. i was face to face, eye to eye when i was healed. tho i was first shown my family as forms, once together, we all had bodies and faces. and we loved as we’d always been meant to, laughing from that deep place of joy in the knowing that we were all safe no matter what. i recall trying to remember what it was that had ever made me feel unsafe and i could not bring to mind one single thing. it is an awesome place of love and happiness because we are totally united in truth.”

If you’re here today, and you are, you’re here for a purpose. It’s a long journey. But it’s a journey worth the adventure. It it will pay off in the end in ways we can’t even comprehend at the moment. When you’re feeling overwhelmed, remember the words of Ram Dass we’re all just walking each other home. Let’s hold hands and make it together. Just hold your neighbor’s hand a little tighter.