Having followed the Facebook discussion of "In Loving Memory - Friends of Juneau - Past and Loved" something struck me very hard. It is the matter of Legacy. Into this Christmas time of cheer and giving I now write.
This bloke is still kicking strong and I do not plan to leave anytime soon, but my dear friends please, please, say nothing at all of my eventual passing if it would only be a lame eulogy of, he was born there..lived here...is survived by...and he was such a nice guy. If I have done nothing outrageous enough to have been noticed, nothing remarkable that has furthered the lives of others, if I haven't positively impacted the future, then say nothing at all. Dump my ashes in a dumpster, delete all memories from your hard drive, and move on to better horizons.
It would be a poor commentary of a lifetime not to have contributed in some notable way. A hermit is known for nothing but the amazement of others one could live a life so long so alone. To put something in the world deserving of a name and positive reflection by many is the best Legacy.
But if all has gone to hell in a hand basket by the time I pass on do not derogate me to whence you might some day regret. As it is I am not unaware, in my small take on omniscience, there have been some divergent opinions of me I am unconcerned about. What does concern me may be regarded by some as most unbelievable. Yet it must be said, with due regard to the emotions it may stir in others, damn the torpedoes.
You see, there is a secret I have repeatedly had to remind my elders and peers, all now being of the age that we will sooner or later, possibly sooner than later, discard the body. When I am "gone" I will still be here watching you at the funeral. So will you be at yours, if you want to be.
It is the biggest surprise to one not prepped for it to discover life after death, to find that the body may be most dead but that you are still here, thinking, perceiving and moving around, alive. Millennium of metaphysics subjects and religions have attempted to answer this question and generally pushed it off as unknowable. Don't buy it.
Consider this, despite your beliefs, your religion, a lifetime of indoctrination to the contrary, as the case may be, if only for the moments of reading this writing. Body death is not death for the being, the person himself, YOU. You can count on this. You are a being, a spirit, an immortal life. You have a body, but you are not your body. This may run against the grain of disbelievers but it is an easily demonstrable fact. People who talk of out-of-body experiences may not have been hallucinating or in a delusional drug experience but possibly have experienced this piece of truth.
This I told to my sister who didn't believe it. Not long before her death, however, she said to me that she was beginning to believe , though "you may not believe it," she had come to to think there might be something beyond death. "Come to me when you eventually die, and by simply 'being there' you can find me and I will help you," I told her. She did, and I oriented her to her new state of affairs, much to her great satisfaction. True story.
My dear friend Holly Sanders from Juneau and I had many fascinating conversations at the window of his drive-in burger stand. He told me of his near death experience. He "died", went through the various "between life" experiences that have been reported by others, grayness, the light, the long tunnel, until he came to the cognition that his wife could not raise his children without him and he had to go back. He did so, but says "the body was as cold and as clammy as could be", that it took some bit of doing to bring it back to life.
My school chums from High School have variously remarked, sometimes in complete disbelief, of their ideas of the vector my life took after my college years. Three life changing factors explain this completely.
First off, doing some powerful exercises to restore my recall abilities I started recalling past lives, completely aware and fully sober. When you remember a genuine incident in vivid detail with all its powerful emotions you come to know the truth of the matter: you were there.
Secondly, when I jumped out of the Army truck to face the Induction Center a wave of recognition struck me. This was the exact same Induction Center, at Ft. Leonard Wood, where I was for my last lifetime Army Air Force Basic Training. I knew this place intimately that I had "never been to". I could tell you where "building G" was, go there and it would be there. Where I had been viewing life from 1/4 inch of memory my existence now spanned a comparative potential of 300 yards.
This confirmed past lives for me but it also confirmed exteriorization, known as the out-of-body experience, as I also started bopping in and out of my body at that very moment.
When you really know something you know it. Where are you right now? Be three feet in back of your head. If you do that you'll will never again question it. It happened for me like this: I started to move up four to five feet above my head while in a rational, sober and knowing frame of mind.
One day in Douglas, Alaska, practicing with Bedrock, Richie Poor's band that I played base guitar with, this was demonstrated to me personally. It was an unmistakable out-of-body experience. The song really had me rocking and in error my heal hit the volume on my bass amp cranking it up to max. This resulted in an immediate loud feedback stopping the band in its music playing. The other thing this dramatic and unexpected occurrence did is throw me out of the body. I popped "out of me head", to the ceiling, and back into my head, several times in a row.
When you sit on the ceiling and see the environment from this perspective, for real, the truth of it is unmistakable. You aren't THERE, you are HERE, and your body is over THERE. You know where you are. Knowledge is certainty.
Then our drummer originated he had had such an experience. Driving in his car, he suddenly found himself out of the window looking in at the side of his head. He was on drugs though, so he wrote it off as hallucination.
The problem with a drug experience is that it can be a different deal altogether. Poisoning the body, which is what drugs do, causes a sort of near death experience. Mind altering drugs are supposed to give the thrill of psychedelic experience. A rope becomes a live snake, the world turns purple or into a glitter of of firefly pin lights playing to the music and all manner of false perceptions can occur. What confuses the matter even more is that the drug poisons also force one out of the body where, being exterior, one might perceive life for real from the viewpoint of a disembodied being. Amidst all manner of drug induced hallucination it gets hard to tell reality from delusion.
After my father died mother told me of this incident the next morning. Dad had come to her in the night and "sat on the foot of the bed just as real and as lifelike as could be". He didn't say anything to her, however, and that freaked her out.
The truth is, a being without a body does not have vocal chords. He communicates telepathically. So do we actually, but we believe that without vocalization we can can't perceive others thoughts. So mother very possibly got specific telepathic communication from father but, being out of practice, could not tell the difference between her thoughts and his.
When you have been thrust suddenly (over a years time, if that isn't sudden enough) into these truths one's view of reality takes on a different vector. What is truly important changes in a big way.
Thus my life went much differently that the expected. The way of life dictating one go to college, get a job, get married, have kids, buy a house with 2 cars, and retire after 30 years no longer seemed high in importance. Having been doing that very thing, lifetime after lifetime after lifetime without end, it was time to take a broader view. What was now sometimes viewed as my having gone off the deep end to a cult (not), or into complete diversity from this wild and free rebel I had demonstrated in High School, was in fact the obvious conclusion of this major rise in knowingness.
Some of the most unknown and presumably unknowable mysteries of the universe had fallen into my possession. What would you do with such knowledge?
Which brings us back to the opening statement, Legacy. In my mind there has to be one. Since growing up in Juneau I have had some notable physical accomplishments, such as the state-of-the-art music studio for which I did the architectural sound engineering and the blueprints drawn for the award winning historical restoration of an eight story hotel.
Even more important to me has been life changing wins I have orchestrated to graduates of a course I delivered and through personal counseling I have provided. Hundreds of lives and careers were propelled to much greater heights from my activities.
This is what this supposed "cult" (more knowledge of life in the universe than anything you have ever experienced) did for the greater scheme of things in my life. At the lowest levels one becomes better able to communicate with others and to get along better in life. At the higher levels one comes to know much more. My personal leaps in knowingness and ability beyond my wildest dreams are inconsequential to those gains I helped bring to others.
If one realizes that one lives on after the declared death, this puts ones life decisions in a new light. You will reap what you sow, in the flesh of your next lifetime. You don't go around just once. This salacious fact becomes very evident to you: you will be there in the future, so it is a good idea to think more considerately of the long range scheme of things you will inherit.
That you now know that I know these things expect more of me, and if I don't perform fire me, then look forward to the next first draft pick. Hopefully though, my Legacy will stand out in the field of dreams.
Here's to you and your Legacy as well.
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