The energy of the universe

I’ve known a lot of people who have passed over the past year. At first, many of them were my dad’s friends. I believe they all lived until their 80’s, which is pretty good for men, especially from a developing country.

In my opinion, that shows you what privilege can do. Because if they had stayed in the Philippines, they would have faced a lot more stress. Not that there isn’t stress related to immigrating to the U.S., obviously. But that’s for another post.

One of my mom’s friends died fairly recently. She was the mother of another good friend of mine from college. I knew all of his brothers well, too. My mom took it hard. It really made her face her mortality, and for a while, she really thought she was dying. She even had her last rites. She is 83 so it’s possible, but my gut instinct said that it was existential anxiety.

Still, we went to visit her after the new year, and I told her she had to stay alive at least until we got there, and while we were there, since we bought the tickets to see her. That made her laugh, and the trip made her focus more on what she has going for her and to enjoy life more, thank goodness.

One of my best friend’s mom died in the fall. We had been talking about it for a while. Like, 9 months before it happened. And although I don’t think she was doing it on purpose, because she didn’t believe her mom when she said she was dying 9 months prior, I think we were talking to each other more to help my friend prepare for it. By the time it happened, she was in a much more peaceful, accepting, and loving place.

I could keep going, but that would be pretty morbid, wouldn’t it?

I will say that I’m working with a client who has known that her mom would have a shortened lifespan for a long time. But she never brought up her mom in therapy until recently when she knew, unconsciously, that it was going to happen in about a month.

She has been struggling with the funeral rituals of her Indian culture, especially not being religious herself. I asked her what she thought happened to our energy when we died. She said she hadn’t thought about it much. So I told her what I thought. The science part, at least. Not the God part.

From science back in elementary school, we know that the energy in the universe stays constant. It can change form, but it can’t increase or decrease. And the energy of a life is undeniable. Therefore, when you see it leave the person, or pet, for that matter, it has to go somewhere.

I believe that some of it goes into the people they knew. So every culture has funeral rituals because it’s bringing most of the person’s energy back into a single place. That energy is literally fueling the firing of the neurons in our brains as we talk about them. Remember them. Laugh. Cry. Every we time we think of them, we tap into their energy. It’s inside us and around us. And likely in places throughout the universe we haven’t visited yet.

If you’ve read my blog from the beginning, you know I have an obsession with Near Death Experiences (NDE’s), so I believe heaven is real. Since Jesus says repeatedly that heaven is available to us right now, maybe it’s like string theory where you have to cross a portal that most of us don’t cross until we die. But maybe some people can.

Edgar Cayce, one of the first documented psychics, said that every way there is to understand God is true, but Christianity provides us with an embodied model of how to live our lives. What I’m about to say isn’t exactly the way he describes the ebb and flow of life, but it’s how I interpret what he says about the life of a soul.

The soul and God get together before the soul is a living being and God tells them that he’s sending them to a planet where they have lessons to learn. I think of each planet being like a video game. The soul will keep getting reincarnated in that life until it learns what it’s supposed to learn by winning the game. Sort of like the movie Groundhog Day. Which I just realized was yesterday.

Huh. I don’t even know what old Punxsutawney Phil predicted.

Anyhoo, after you learn what you’re supposed to learn by winning the video game, you meet up with God again. He tells you what your next adventure will be and puts you in another game.

So it’s like play. Life is souls playing and learning in the process. God wants us to learn through play, just like kids do. We are God’s children, after all.

Maybe this seems blasphemous to some of you, but that’s what Edgar Cayce said. So don’t blame me. Blame him.

Anyway, it makes me feel better to think of all these people enjoying themselves in another life, learning new lessons, playing. As well as knowing that I’ll see them on the other side, as Hamilton would say.