Starting the Journey
December 19, 2012. That was the start of this journey for me. Late that afternoon, my life partner of 32 years died. At least that’s the way I looked at it then. After saying last goodbyes, I went home from the hospital with my mother, who had been in town to take care of our dogs while I was staying with Kieth full time in the ICU. After I dropped her off at the house, I drove to the store to pick up a few needed items. I drove in the dark down a road along the railroad tracks where traffic was almost non-existent.
As I drove, I was deep in thought. I had been caretaking for a few months. Before that, my focus was on making a living to help support Kieth, myself and our two dogs. I still had the dogs to take care of but felt otherwise lost. I felt the lack of a purpose. As I drove down that road, I found myself asking out loud, “What now?” And in the moment that I asked that question, a response came to my mind from an internal voice that felt like someone other than me. The response was: Find reality. It made no sense to me. The few months prior felt more real than I ever could have imagined. But the voice in my head was vivid and would stick with me from then on.
As I write this, nine years have passed since that day. Much has happened in those years. And all of it has changed my perception. I no longer see the day-to-day life of going to work, coming home, making a meal, watching TV, going to sleep as reality in the truest sense of the word. It is true that those things are really happening, but the whole picture is so much bigger. And now I feel driven to write what I am experiencing in hope that it will resonate with others. Who knows, maybe others experience the same and this experience could feel less lonely?
In the past nine years I have experienced connection to things and events I can’t claim to truly understand. In the past nine years I have read, in an attempt to gain a better grasp of what this “reality” might be. I have read on matters spiritual, physical and metaphysical. And I have come to see that science, through quantum physics, has made its way to explanations that could also be called spiritual. I don’t claim to have more than a simple grasp of quantum physics, but the most fundamental aspects of it have led me to where I need to be at this time. What I needed to grasp to find “Reality” was the understanding that everything is energy, and everything is in a state of vibration.
We have divided the world into the physical and the spiritual with ourselves in our lifetimes firmly established in the physical. Our ancestors have told us that “Heaven” is a separate place that we go to when we die. But we know that there are frequencies of light our eyes and brains cannot perceive, and yet they are there. We know that there are frequencies of sound that are too low and too high for our ears and brains to perceive, and yet they are there. We are conglomerations of energy that perceive some energies but not others. Why would not “Heaven” and, for that matter, anything spiritual not simply be on frequencies that are beyond our perception? I no longer see my physical experience as “natural” or “normal” and other things as “supernatural” or “paranormal,” but rather see all of it as natural and normal and understand that my senses and experiences are just limited. For reasons of which I’m unaware,
I’m temporarily in this body. If we are our bodies, then when they die, so would our perception. But I have had experiences since Kieth’s death that have convinced me that the death of the body is not the death of the true person. The word soul works as well as any other for what outlasts the body. We are not our bodies. Rather, our bodies function as filters and perceivers of energies outside our own that allow us to experience the world in a physical sense. This perception could be interpreted as what the Hindu have called Maya: the world of illusion.
By way of a quick example (which, if you’ve read my other posts, will be familiar), we say an apple that we see is red. Yet, the apple is a distance from us. All we experience is the light that reflects off of the apple. And we know that the apple has absorbed that light that does not comprise the red spectrum. It literally rejects the red light. We are seeing what the apple is not. That is one example of the work of Maya.
Animals live in the world of Maya. And humans go a level deeper into what is not. We devise explanations, justifications, warnings, etc. regarding what we see through the illusion of Maya. And we add judgement. X is good because it benefits us. Y is bad. This is the uniquely human experience that I call Story. We live in these stories. And given our advanced abilities to manipulate and alter our environment, we see the actions we take as making life better for ourselves.
But we don’t know what “ourselves” means. Science and mathematics show that the origins of our universe began as a singularity containing all energy that ever was and all energy that is today. The energy just recombines in pattern like a kaleidoscope. And we are that kaleidoscope. When we alter the environment, we alter ourselves. When we use our abilities to change our environment while seeing it through our Story and Maya, we don’t recognize that we are changing ourselves. When we see through Story and Maya, we don’t see that amassing huge benefit to ourselves means robbing energy from somewhere else that is, in the greater scheme also us. At that point we are playing God, but with the awareness of an infant.
After nine years of study and contemplation, I have come to realize that the answer of “Find Reality” to my question of “What Now?” on December 19, 2012 was not just an admonition to understand, but rather one to take the journey there.
So, as I am posting this on December 31, 2021, I’m making this a resolution, not just for the upcoming year, but for the years after as well. Contemplation will continue, but not just to gain an intellectual understanding of how to get to Reality, but to take action to do it. I can’t even truly say at this moment that I know clearly what that means. But I’ll let the journey begin.
I do believe that we are meant to be here at this time. That we are simply in one stage of our evolution, but it is a dangerous one. I believe that we can’t move backward into Maya and then to Reality. I believe that Story is our nature, but if we can find Reality, and feel our oneness with it, we can move our Story to one that is based in reality.
The topic is immense, and I can’t hold it all in my mind at once. So, I’ll begin one step at a time.
I had a journey experience once (kind of like a waking dream) in which I saw myself as a stream of light. It intertwined with a stream of light that was Kieth. Then our light intertwined with the light of others. Soon I realized it was a form of weaving like cloth or a basket. I then realized that my actions affect the entirety.
Later, I put this into song form and called it Threads. The song can be heard below with lyrics printed on screen.