One thing I’ve learned from being immersed in a book about what happens after we die is that something that starts out as a theory can become a belief. A belief that can shape a life and a culture, but all started out somewhere as a theory or perhaps a spiritual or psychic download.
And, as anyone who’s been around others who regularly have spiritual/psychic downloads knows, they can be suspect. No psychic is always right. No throw of the tarot turns out to be pertinent.
I’ve had two of these downloads so far in this lifetime, two times I suddenly had a theory of what happens in the afterlife. I enjoy them, but they have not become my belief. I remain the only congregant of the Church of Deborah Oak as my main commandment is that we all are divine and our own spiritual authority. So I’m not encouraging that my wacky theories and downloads to become scripture for others. But, they are fun so I will share them in hopes of encouraging others to come up with or be open to downloading a theory of the afterlife.
The first download happened at Disneyland as a child. This was way back when there was different tickets for different rides. E tickets were the most exciting and they were the most expensive. The Matterhorn was an E ticket ride. The A tickets were for rides like the teacups or Dumbo. Standing in a long line in the hot sun for the Jungle Cruise I had my epiphany. The afterlife must be like Disneyland. If you want to get back in the game of life quickly, you get in a shorter line and get a more boring and tedious life. Like the Teacups. If you want a more exciting and entertaining life, you wait in an interminable line for an E ticket ride. Makes sense, right? It makes sense, but it has no reckoning which in the most stories and theories of the afterlife seems very important to us humans.
Reckoning is part and parcel of my second download, which occurred soon after Trump became president. This second theory is that when we die, if we have taken steps to make a better world, we go back in time. We don’t remain fully conscious of who we have been, but we do take back some sense of mistakes of the past and best practices for a better world. We would go back to a parallel reality and history of the world where more people tuned into how to make things better with an unconscious but strong understanding of what mistakes had been made in our current reality. We’d go back to a world that would get better as time went on for humans and all the species of the planet. Climate change would not be in the future. And, if we’d been agents of greed and evil, we’d simply die and go forward into the world we currently are in. Two realities, based on this reckoning.
My actual experience has been remarkedly different. I say experience as it is not a theory, it’s how it has felt at deathbeds. The most recent was my mother’s in April 2016. It was a rainy night, the first rain we’d had in that drought year. She’d been laboring all day and I was alone with her and knew it was close. I felt her gathering momentum to leavie her body. I imagined her going out into the rain and the daffodils she loved and that were blooming at that time. I told her I knew she was leaving and would be part of all she loved. This felt true. There didn’t feel like there would be a reckoning, just a becoming part of everything. I told her I was going to leave her alone for 10 minutes, knowing some people need to go alone. She died a minute or so after my sister came back to the room. I feel her now in the daffodils and in the rain.
Who knows if this feeling I had is what actually happens. Maybe not. I don’t know how it squares with also feeling I can still communicate with her and others of my beloved dead . I continue to be in relationship with many of them. Some appear regularly, some have never showed up.
It’s all a mystery. I am kind of beholden to my second theory as it turns out, I like the idea of a reckoning. I’m looking forward to the book club meeting and hearing if others have had these kind of wacky downloads. The Church of Deborah Oak preaches that we all are capable of coming up with our own afterlife. Every single story of the afterlife somebody somewhere came up with. Or maybe it was group project, something we fools could certainly come up with together. We are on a journey together, why not imagine what that journey entails after death?
Hope to see you on Monday!