Billionaires and dollar-a-day paupers, truck drivers and day traders, ditch diggers and hairdressers; champions and underachievers; politicians and prostitutes, evangelists and pick-pockets, movie stars and lesser bums; first lieutenants, second bananas, and third parties; vacuum cleaner salesmen, court clerks; queens and water carriers, sewage cleaners and roofers, talk show hosts and funeral home directors, car mechanics and computer wizards, addicts and psychiatrists, night club crooners and alpinists, punks and pinkos, true believers and the confused; the challenged and the challenging of every creed and credo - no matter how you fare in the gamble of life . . . your matter is moving - reluctantly as it may - on an unstoppable dissembly line toward union with timelessness.
Sybil the crystal gazer (or whoever happens to man the oracle in your neighborhood) is on safe ground when she says: I see a church. It's late in the morning. Festive flowers and organ music come to me. I hear mumbling about ashes and dust.
The past pursues us like a relentless stalker. The present is but a quick handshake with a passing stranger. And the future? A blank document in an unknown word processor that keeps filling itself on its own. We labor under the illusion that we create the text by touching the keys. In reality, the document writes itself and after a while we recognize for what it is: a decree of fate.
As our progression gradually erases the illusion that titillation, lilac, and laughter, along with satisfying the full panoply of appetites can outweigh the negative, we discover that life harps on a lone string.
The same sun lights up the day, the same moon mixes a little silver with the street light to knead puzzlement into the melancholic boredom of evening sidewalks - from October through September.
No mouthwash can ever remove the weird taste of existence. It's too full of itself to allow space for its complement or opposite. We cannot find nothing. Everywhere we look there is something, most of it is as banal as a one-note symphony, but it is still there.
We cannot fathom what is is!
Half-numbed minds on deathbeds around the world wonder: Why did I have to push a rock up the hill 24,150 times (the average number of days between arrival and departure) to see it roll back exactly that many times? Why did I have to go through all that just to be chucked out at the end, and for good?
It would be a poor sort of life if that was all there was.
Do not - I repeat - do not despair! Immortality is not a dream born of neurotic fear. It is not a complicit phantasm we create to justify our insistence on being despite all the toil and torment. The actuation of our hunch that we survive death and wake up in another world - independent of earthly senses and impenetrable to imagination - awaits us all.
Modern physics in combination with the testimonies of spiritual adepts and those who lived through near death experiences proves that there must be and indeed there is life after life.
As the central nervous system's control over the body fades in the wake of biological systems failure or as a result of deep meditation, the I-consciousness begins to accelerate at incomprehensible rates.
Time dilation (the slowing of clocks in Einsteinian physics) becomes complete at the speed of light, dissolving all humanly knowable cause and effect relations. Timelessness means being surrounded by all-pervasive radiance.
Yogis and returnees from clinical death attest to the fact that a trans-substantial luminosity exists beyond our common frame of perception. They report being attracted by intelligible brightness and are reluctant to rejoin the weary turmoil.
The idea of another world, once considered superstition or received wisdom, has been brought into the realm of cosmology and nuclear physics. Science now firmly upholds the existence of many more dimensions than Einstein's four (i.e., the three spatial extensions plus time).
Your atoms and molecules may be scattered, but even after the disappearance of this planet, your identity will not be converted into gamma rays. Its massless signature is grounded in an 11-D medium where scales are so tiny that our concept of physical substance makes no sense. But those scales match the highly concentrated immaterial subatomic energy structure that represents selfhood with its psychic volitions.
Life, the sort we know, is an exaggeration of the spatial domain at the expense of other dimensions. The ceaseless straining of this metaphorically untypical, lopsided, and transitory situation to correct itself appears to us as a unidirectional and irreversible flow of time. Upon termination of its earthly duration, inner consciousness simply returns to the perennial absolute - the parallel world - as if coming home from an excursion.
Becoming aware of all this ought to prevent people from thinking about death as the tragic final end to an insignificant biophysical episode - dying like ants incinerated by a forest fire, legs and antennae grimly sawing the air. Scientifically-grounded assurance should lift up your heart and engender not only philosophical but also empirical optimism. You can exit like a satisfied customer from a restaurant, asking for the check and leaving your body as a generous tip on the (dissection) table.
While knowledge acquired during the past two decades has revealed the possibility of life after death, credible, so-called supernatural phenomena (transcendental meditation and communication with the deceased through bona fide psychics) have confirmed it. This is the quintessence in the main. Talk about the subject could end here, but it does not have to. Just think of all the fascinating things Hamlet had to say besides what was the most essential for him - sorrow and anger!
The saber-toothed jaws of indignant dogmatic savants are already in frenzied motion - I know. They dismiss all this as nonsense.
Don't believe them! They are narrow-minded, old-fashioned, methodologically limited, complacent, hoddy-doddy materialist simpletons who feel easily threatened in their coordinate system-like thought world. A funny thing is that some of them are conspicuously devout. They need an antidote for the angst their hair-splitting, oppressively unambiguous, small-compass intellectuality secretes.
Certainly, if you have been blessed with the gift of faith, you are over-insured. The three religions of the Book may be comparable to a sturdy three-mast vessel that will safely convey you across the churning seas of this lamentable, erratic, inferior world to the Elysian dominion of ministering spirits.
But regardless of what you believe, or whether you believe at all, deathlessness is the whole, unsentimental truth. Mankind's eternal posthumous felicity is as indisputable as the day is long. Doubt has run out of subterfuge. The cloud of unknown that had obscured the unmanifest ray of divine will is gone. Since the dawn of homo sapiens, a hundred billion people perished. They must be somewhere out there. Any counterargument is self-delusion. An extra-galactic dystopia with a hundred billion disembodied souls - and hundreds of billions more to come!?
A trillion esoteric copies of all the humans who ever lived - marred by the injustices they endured at each other's hands, separated by the irreconcilable differences that successive epochs stamped on them - ending up together like a peaceful colony of microorganisms in a vial of liquid nitrogen?
Hmmm . . .
I'm beginning to feel like the knife-thrower's assistant who has spotted a large-print book on the boss's desk.