For The Tourist

Historic Charleston Walking Tours By David A. Farrow
and Associates

Tours leave by reservation daily at 9:30 am from the corner of
East Battery and Murray Boulevard. $20 a person.

For reservations, call 843-478-2059

Did I Die Last Night? Your Call.

I had a dream last night. I dreamed I was dead – that I fell out of a car going at a high rate of speed, hit my head and died.
It didn’t hurt. It was all too quick. All I remember before I shot straight out of bed was that I thought to myself in the darkness, “I’m dead.” My next thought was, “Then where’s my consciousness coming from?”
Being a Christian of sorts, I knew that if I waited around long enough, I would hear the Lord call my name. I also knew that if I heard him utter it, the jig was up, the song was over.
I bolted out of bed, but I was not alarmed. I used the little boys’ room (at age 56, the bathroom and I are intimate at 5 am, so no big deal). As I stood there, I thought about the fact that I had consciousness, and decided that I really didn’t die. After all, according to doctors, had I bought the farm in cash, I would be planting furrows in God’s green acres. I was not at all upset. I was curious.
I got back into bed, watched Jack McCoy get in high dudgeon and fell back asleep as he was peeling the skin off a defense witness. I don’t remember dreaming.
I got up at 6:30, made the coffee, realized it was May Day, booted the computer screen and started to read about Souter’s departure of the Supreme Court. On the TV, Steve and Brian were talking about the swine flu.
From nowhere, like a freight train, the memory of the dream roared into my consciousness with the clarity of justice. I was not sitting in my room on Rutledge Avenue watching the sun rise, but falling from a speeding car vaguely aware of the impact… acutely aware that my thoughts – not my body — survived the devastating blow.
Just as quickly, I was back on my couch watching a video of an emu being captured out in Washington State. There was something vaguely salacious about it. I chuckled and read Peggy Noonan’s column.
About 7:30, I called my best friend. We chatted about the fact that while I ridicule the hype about the swine flu, I really had no clue about the long term consequences. True. However, one must keep in mind that there are six billion people on the planet; 30,000 people (mostly the very old and very young) die of the flu in this country every year. It bears watching, but I worry that an overreaction could spell dire consequences for an economy already on its knees. I am grateful to Vice president Biden for calming my ravaged soul.
Still, I had to concede the point. I then spoke about my dream. We decided that it came about for a number of reasons some involving the discussion of brain injuries the day before.
After I hung up and my morning started in earnest, I began to think about the consciousness part. “I’m dead?” How would I know? About twelve years ago, I wrote a sequel to the Root of All Evil (# 8 on the Oxford American Southern best seller list, thank you). As an aside, I wrote it to my current girlfriend as my ex-wife showed no interest in it.
It is quite dark in a fun-loving sort of way. While I was writing the first novel I became fascinated by quantum physics and near-death experiences. Let me tell you, nothing lights up a room at a cocktail party faster than a quick chat about the wave/particle duality.
“Yeah, so I caught that son of a bitch with 25-pound test…”
“Yes, and in the space/time continuum…”
“Harry, you old so and so, I saw what you did at the back bar last night. Nice talkin’ to ya, Dave. Hank, does your wife know you lost $600…?”
I would be standing there holding a shrimp in my hand, my thoughts centered on the uncertainty principle. I would argue that I eventually broke it all down to the point that I understand insanity. Just as I didn’t cross the line in the dream, I didn’t pop over to visit that realm for I knew if I did, I would never come back. Many would argue that I never did.
For a year, I pondered how intertwined the universe was. Did you know that twin particles no matter their location in the universe react in exactly the same manner even though they can be light years apart?
I poured over scores of books dealing with NDEs, quantum theories and various religious, theological and philosophical theories. I realized that there was no such thing as time – that it was a human construct as we perceive it. I pondered the story of Zoroaster who was conceived of a virgin, was killed and resurrected hundreds of years and in a far away land before the event in Jerusalem. I wondered how Mohammed was able to describe Jerusalem with such alacrity.
One story in all my research shook me to the core. In a book called “The Holographic Universe,” the author describes his experience at a birthday party in 1950s Hollywood when he was eight years old.
The parents hosting the affair hired a hypnotist to entertain the kids. What happened next not only changed the writer’s life, but mine as well.
The man put the birthday boy under his spell, if you will. While truly mesmerized, the child was told that his sister was not in the room. The girl would move from group to group. The boy was asked to name everyone clustered around and so he did save his sister.
I found that interesting, but what happened next, if true, changes everything. The hypnotist put the boy in a chair facing him. He had the sister on a stool between them. The fellow then opened a book to the boy and asked him to read it.
According to the writer, the boy read the book right through his sister. He had been convinced his sister was not in the room, ergo she was not on the stool acting as a wall between the two.
I was enthralled by this idea because it fit the template I had been following. I believe that what we experience on this plane is an illusion. A holograph needs two lasers to become whole. I believe that God is one, we the other. How it works from there is up to us.
My journalistic instincts kicked in. I called six doctors – psychiatrists — and four psychologists and two hypnotists. The results of the interviews were stark.
Those grounded in the physical sciences, the physicians were having no part of it. Not only was it physically impossible for someone to read a book though his sister, near death experiences were the results of chemical reactions.
The other six, not knowing up front how the doctors voted, declared to a person, that not only was it possible, but it most certainly could occur and most probably did.
Another thing I took from all this was how it might work after we shake this mortal coil. In the very deep NDEs, not only does one go through the tunnel, one goes through the life review. On earth as it is in heaven, there is no time. A minute is as a thousand years.
Not only does one feel everything that happened to him or her, one feels what one did to other people. In other words if I were to slap you, in the life review, we would both feel the slap. If I hurt you in any way in this life, I would feel the pain I caused in spades perhaps through infinity.
For about a month, I was concerned about stepping on roaches, but then August came and they started to fly.
PETA can say what they will, but I have no problem putting poison on ant mounds. One has to draw the line somewhere.
My concept of Christianity is that it is the Christ-head that not only forgives you, but helps you forgive yourself. George Sand wrote, “Guilt murders vitality.” That’s true as far as it goes, but we tend to bury guilt.
As that reels shines across the screen, it’s good to know that you won’t have to experience beating the crap out of your little sister for a billion years.
I came away from all this with a couple of thoughts.
There is a God. We are inextricably tied to this entity and have been since the big bang. One cannot destroy energy. One can only transform it. All energy that exists has always existed. Even when it suffers atrophy, it is morphed into something else.
We are nothing but energy that vibrates with the earth, solids in the wave particle duality. It has been proven that by sheer dint of the observation of an electron one changes its trajectory. Think about the trillions of electrons that we observe every second.
Our eyes are cameras that catch everything, although our brain (our mind?) filters out only what we think we need. That doesn’t mean you don’t catch the argument going on out of the corner of your eye in the supermarket parking lot, it means you don’t need it.
Ironically, everything we see is upside down. Our minds turn it right side up.
That in itself should make us question everything. It doesn’t. We can’t function that way. It might be an illusion, but space time is very real to us. We will still feel the slap. Natural law is real, and nature bats last.
People don’t want to talk about this stuff. Probably the one conclusion I drew from all of this years-long musing is that if God is everything, everything is God. You are no more separate from God and nature than your dog or your lawn mower is. Like it or not we are all made up of atoms vibrating at different levels of energy – measurably different – We are truly one with the earth and the stars. We really are made up of star dust coalescing in the wave/particle duality.
This concept drives people nuts for most people believe in rationality and physical reality being the end all and be all. Even in most religions, one has to jump through hoops to get the attention of the alpha — the representation of the Alpha and the Omega — when that priest, that minister, that rabbi, that Imam is no such thing. It’s an illusion. You have to figure it all out for yourself.
The thing is, if one were to take an evolutionary view, religion is the cohesion that allows human society to flourish under one main ideal. It becomes problematic when they collide.
Religion is a human construct to try to explain the Divine. Science is a human construct trying to explain nature. Despite the press, they are not mutually exclusive. Science and deductive logic dictate that if A is B, then it can only be that B is A – no way around it.
It doesn’t really matter on a day to day level. Or does it?
If one accepts that millions of dead dust mites – living, breathing alive things one micron large – are crawling all over your body as you read these words, their dead husks been eaten by their progeny (which sadly is true), then the concept that one is bundled vibrating energy through space time perceiving and observing and changing everything in our path can’t be so outrageous.
Life is too remarkable to be a coincidence. How do I explain it?
Let me quote the words of JBS Haldane in Possible Worlds and Other Papers (1927): “Now my own suspicion is that the Universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose. I have read and heard many attempts at a systematic account of it, from materialism to theosophy to the Christian system or that of Kant, and I have always felt that they were much too simple. I suspect there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of, or can be dreamed of, in any philosophy. That is the reason I have no philosophy myself, and must be my excuse for dreaming.”
Did I die in my dream?
Six hours after I began this the sun is over head. May is giving a taste of what will soon be full-on summer. Next door, the construction continues unabated, the Rutledge Avenue bus rumbles by shaking the house with a handful of people, bundles of energy hurtling through the continuum of perception towards their dreams never realizing that a chance nod might change their lives six months from now, little realizing how incredibly connected we are on every level.
The magnolia leaves are birthing blossoms of romance both in our perception and in reality. How can that be an accident? How can music, a deliberate progression of mathematical rhythms or vibrations, not be inspired as a result of the holograph?
How is it that someone I met accidently at a friend’s house twelve and a half years ago, gave me her card on which she wrote her e-mail that she got the day before she left home a thousand miles away? How can we think the same thing at the same time with no media input 1,000 miles away and call each other about it at the same instant (no, we are not engaged, we are not married)?
I don’t know, and neither do you.
Did I die? I offer the same answer. I don’t know.
When my friend explained to me that I had no reason to scoff at the swine flu, she was dead on right. What I had was a feeling.
Did I die? I’m not so sure I didn’t. I know that I am not disturbed by this, I am fascinated. I am not afraid because when your time is up, it’s up. Overture, cut the lights… I nearly died last September. That changed my life. I fully appreciate every smile, every laugh with a vibrancy I never did before. I was not horrified, but grateful on so many levels.
I am on Facebook and have been asked to join Twitter. One thing I have seen people do is talk about “25 things you didn’t know about me.” I have been accused of being non-participatory. This should clear that right up. If we are going that far, I would love your feedback on any threads or my blog site. If you have gotten this far, pass it along.
I have seen my life pass by on Facebook. That’s nostalgia, not a life review.
All I really know is that I am loved. To tell you the truth, that’s all I really need to know for now.