MEMORIES

                                                        AFTER DEATH


      Have you thought about what happens when a person dies? The answer to this question has plagued mankind from the beginning of his civilization. Use patience with me for just a short while, as I unfold a tale to be as true as your reading this piece at this precise moment in time and you will receive an answer I believe to be true to this question. I am an authority on few subjects. With death being one of those subjects. I offer a few credentials.
      It has been a total of seven different times now that doctors notified my family members that I would surly expire. Heart attacks, infections, sudden cardiac death, I have recovered to some extent from having all these afflictions and others. My heart actually stopped completely on more than two occasions. I have been “brought back to life” several times. I have been in comas, induced comas and on the brink of death.  By three various professionals in the medical field, I have been termed a “walking miracle.”
      I have always been interested in “consciousness awareness.” Being curious enough and perhaps fool enough to partake in several mind-altering drugs, lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), speed, marijuana, and my favorite drug of choice mescaline. Not to compare myself to a few brilliant minds but Aldous Huxley, John Lennon, Dr. Timothy Leary at Harvard Medical School are a few others who also experimented with several if not all the drugs I mentioned. It is said by some experts that tribes in Africa would partake in peyote (mescaline being a derivative of peyote) before going out on a hunt for two to three days, being conscious the entire time. In the southwestern United States, the Yaqui Indians believed that they could ask the Gods any question they desired an answer too and it would be revealed to them while they were under the influence of peyote.
      I have meditated, practiced yoga, prayed, and remarked one time as life support to me was being disconnected, “I talked to Jesus.” While married to my first wife Linda I would set the alarm for three hours from the time I expected to fall asleep to jot down the dreams I would experience, thus being awakened every three hours. I intentionally deprived myself of sleep for years, sleeping only three to five hours average for several years at a time in order to figure out where my consciousness was and what thoughts I had while asleep or awake. I wonder now, how Linda managed to stay married to me for ten years with the practices I made at that time in my life.
      So what happens to a person’s consciousnesses upon death? Mine is but one explanation. Certainly, it comes not from brilliance. In fact it is a simple mind. Mine. But it is a mind that has pondered the answer to this question through drugs, meditation, prayer, education and other states of mind. I have been in search of this answer for more than forty years. I have searched while being a vegetarian, being completely clear of mind, focused and again while being stoned on two tabs of LSD, hallucinating, not knowing who or where I was, or how I had gotten there. Now, for how I arrived at my conclusion.
      I have looked to Albert Einstein, the theory of relativity. Stephan Hawkins, Jung, Freud and other great minds for my conclusion.  Mine is not the mind of brilliance but I have delved into the minds of many brilliant people for the answers I was seeking. Let’s look at Einstein with a clarity of mind. E=MC2. A famous equation he derived at. We have taken his theory of relativity and expounded on the theory with the works of Stephan Hawkins and others. What else did Einstein have to say? There are certain laws of truth in physics that have been overlooked. Yet, Albert Einstein stated them. One of them being, “energy cannot be destroyed, only transformed.” Think about this sentence carefully. Stated by Einstein himself amidst his “theory of relativity.” What are we as human beings if not pieces of energy? Whether clergyman, atheist or somewhere in between, who will argue with this? Let me reiterate. Einstein said this. Now as to what or how we, being pieces of energy ourselves are to be transformed, that is where the argument can be made. Personally, after a lifetime of study. Not from a brilliant mind. Much closer to an average mind with years of studying, reasoning and experiencing, I am about to reveal what I believe happens when we die, with a question. By reasoning. By deducing. By experiencing and studying Jung, Freud, Hawkins Einstein and many other brilliant minds of our time and before. After living an entire life searching for the answer to what happens when we die. I ask you the question. What if our lives, our being alive as we know it, our total reasoning for life, our belief in God or a higher being than ourselves, our total existence-------were a dream in itself? And what if our dreams were the true reality of our existence.