Wake-Up-and-Die-Right Manifesto

Quality and the Quantum Theory of Consciousness:

 A God I Can Believe In

by Dr. Joan Nelson

The Death-and-Dying Committee in the (over-the-hill-old-folks) Park (Joan calls it her last parking place in the space-time physical world) gave Dr. Joan Nelson four questions to answer, which were addressed in abbreviated form in the October 2018 issue of the Echo and are answered more fully in Joan’s “Wake-Up-and-Die-Right Manifesto” below, following some introductory background.

Joan was raised with a taboo against talking about either sex or death. End result? She became a student of what Greek mythology dubbed Eros (love) and Thanatos (death). She achieved a doctorate in clinical and research sexuality, thus becoming a sexologist: one who studies sex. Heads up: For her manifesto, she addresses sexuality only once. Here it is:

 “As usual, French speakers have words that English will never have. What better example could there be than the phrase representing the deep link between sex and death, the phenomenon of orgasm:
 ~
[Directly from Wikipedia] La petite mort (French pronunciation: ​[la pətit mɔʁ], the little death) is an expression that means “the brief loss or weakening of Consciousness” and in modern usage refers specifically to “the sensation of orgasm likened to death.” In modern usage, this term has generally been interpreted to describe the postorgasmic state that some people have after having some sexual experiences. More widely, it can refer to the spiritual release that comes with orgasm or to a short period of melancholy or transcendence as a result of the expenditure of the “life force.” [Note Wikipedia’s use of the word transcendence].
~
Joan has been a lifelong thanatologist — one who studies death — since age six when a favorite great-aunt went to bed in the guest room, died, and was swept away in the middle of the night. Also, the woman next door, whom Joan counted on for freshly baked cookies, committed suicide by putting her head in her oven. She was told the woman had moved away to a new town.

Upon questioning the disappearances of these women, and the comings and goings of various strangers speaking in hushed tones, Joan was told it was “grown-up business” and not to “bother her pretty little head” about it. Nevertheless, she put her twos together and remained fascinated with the phenomenon of death itself, as well as the life-sapping ways that our death-denying culture dealt with it.

In recent years — and “none too soon,” she says — “death has become a trendy topic,” People identifying as “longevity entrepreneurs,” see it as something to be eliminated.

More realistically, the trend is turning toward “normalizing” death. “Death salon” or “death café” networking events are hosted in cities worldwide. These intellectual gatherings explore the undeniable fact of mortality by sharing anthropological, historical, and artistic insights.

Joan attended several of these conferences and came away with an informed opinion on home funerals vs. funeral homes, and memorials vs. funerals vs. celebrations of life. At a deeper level, she came away from one presentation (by a nondenominational minister) with a profound sense of the awe-inspiring phenomenon of what she calls …

Transcendent Consciousness

The Energy Source of everything … soul, life force, ground-of-being, Love, god

This definition, like a mantra, bears repeating. The repetition will help you “transcend” the ordinary thinking process and move closer to a state of pure Consciousness.

 She contrasts Transcendent Consciousness with the failure of the “NON-transcendent,” “UN-conscious” human species to wake up and “get it”:

In a recent audio interview, Joan stated, “I’m now acutely aware that the first breath-to-last-breath trajectory of my body has always been arching toward these, my final days. Perhaps that’s enough to explain the ‘end-times’ feeling I get when I pay attention to the news or notice the dystopian themes in new films or videos about global catastrophe.”

Joan believes it is still possible for a critical mass of us ordinary folks to “transcend” the limits of our three-dimensional (3-D) space/time world. She speculates about 4-D, 5-D, and other possibilities for us if we can rise above our cultural mindset and “get” that we are ONE. “Once enough of us get-it,” she says, “if it’s not too late, humanity will be able to … Yup. You guessed it … make Love instead of war.”

 She attributes her own awareness and understanding of Transcendent Consciousness to her “Transcendental Grandmother.” In little Joan’s early formative years—before she was restrained by the limits of social/cultural conditioning—a friend told her about “Heaven” and “Hell.” Grandma set her straight by instilling in her a deep awareness that all there is … anywhere … everywhere … always has been, still is, and always will be just one thing (just to see how it feels, say it out loud this time!):

Her grandmother created a child-friendly name for it: “Everything Mind.” As Joan explains, “Consciousness”, should really be a verb. Because it is not an entity or event. It’s an ongoing process. Energy is a vibration. It has momentum based on frequencies. But for now, just remember as you read Joan’s Manifesto, below, that she uses uppercase “E” for “Energy,” “C” for “Consciousness,” “L” for Love, and lowercase “g” for “god.”

At school one day (fourth grade, age nine) during an exercise to distinguish between mineral, vegetable, and animal, little Joan raised her hand. When the teacher called on her, she stated clearly that mineral, vegetable, and animal were all the same thing: Energy. She even went into the “one-mind” thing and tried to explain what she now calls “Transcendent Consciousness”: Energy Source of everything … life force, ground-of-being … Love, and yes, god.

At recess time, the teacher asked Joan to stay in with her for a few minutes. It turned out that she was upset about Joan’s reduction of “God” to “some kind of “Energy.” Joan wanted to explain but couldn’t find the words. Now she has the words, and wants you to know …

In the space-time physical world, Everything Mind manifests as

•  all things mineral — universes, solar systems, and your telephone.
• all things vegetable — carrots, cotton t-shirts, junk mail you find in your mailbox.
• all things animal – cute little doggies, your blood-and-bone body, even your thoughts and feelings. Think about that!

 In the limitless, nonphysical world, Everything Mind manifests as Transcendent Consciousness. You probably have the words mastered by now. But just in case:

 Transcendent Consciousness. The Energy Source of everything … soul, life force, ground-of-being, Love, god.

She says that she “got-it for the third time” in fifth grade, when “the “science lady” came to her classroom and used a candle to demonstrate the second law of thermodynamics in terms a child can understand: when candle wax is transformed by fire and turns into carbon as smoke. What Joan “got” was that Energy is neither created nor destroyed. It simply changes its form or expression.

Between Transcendental, Everything Mind Grandma, the fourth-grade god-is-not-Energy teacher, and the fifth-grade thermodynamics conservation-of-Energy lady, young Joan “got” that, in the physical world, as well as the nonphysical, nothing dies. It just changes form.(See her answer to Question #4.)

 Some of today’s “holistic,” “spiritual” or “Energy” healers have tested many of the early 20^th-century Transcendental mind-over-matter concepts and incorporated them into practical 21^st-century practices.

Today, she recommends a practical way to wake up to the nonphysical while still stuck in the physical. She advocates meditation as one of the best — precisely, the one very best — thing we can do for ourselves here in the material world.

Meditation

 One well-known kind of meditation actually has “Transcendental” in its name. Transcendental Meditation (TM) like most meditation techniques, is about avoiding distracting thoughts and promoting a state of relaxed awareness. The late Maharishi Mahesh Yogi derived TM from the ancient Vedic tradition of India. He brought the technique to the U.S. in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when he achieved fame as the guru to the Beatles and other celebrities.

While meditating, the person practicing TM sits in a comfortable position with eyes closed and silently repeats a mantra. A mantra is a word or sound from the Vedic tradition that is used to focus their concentration.

 According to supporters of TM, when meditating, the ordinary thinking process is “transcended,” i.e., replaced by a state of pure Consciousness. In this state, the meditator achieves stillness, rest, stability, order, and an absence of mental boundaries. Meditation — TM and other forms — is generally safe and may improve a person’s quality of life.

 If meditation per se isn’t your thing, you might still be looking for a discipline or model that utilizes awareness of energy as the building block of Consciousness, which is everything. There seems to be convincing clinical evidence for many schools of Holistic or Energy healing: Contact healing, biofield Energy healing, remote healing, Reiki, Qigong … the list goes on.

 One Energy-based healing system refers us back to the transcendentalism of two centuries ago,“The ideal method of healing has already been predetermined about 200 years ago by central and revered figures such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau …” They go on to advocate the “direct [meaning intuitive] understanding of nature” that comes with awareness of the nondual “totality of the universal whole.”

 Noting that human babies are still coming onto the planet, Dr. Joan proclaims her Manifesto at age 82, as a Hospice patient with a growing reverence for life. Particularly reverence for the phenomenon of “Transcendent Consciousness” the “ground of being from which all experiences and phenomena arise.” She hopes, for you, that it “manifests” (demonstrates, shows, displays) something useful as you proceed toward your own death. You might not have the luxury she has enjoyed: a terminal diagnosis within a relatively specific time frame to manifest for you her privileged understanding of the Energetic Source of all being. You might get run over by a bus any day. So, just in case, think about what it would mean to you to wake up and die right.

Wake-Up-and-Die-Right Manifesto

Energy is the building block of Consciousness, which is everything.
—or—
Consciousness plus nothing equals everything (as in Everything Mind).

A little time with these four questions can give you greater clarity about stuff I’ve known all my life that many other people haven’t seemed to know. Decades ago, they laughed, criticized, and called me crazy, even dangerous. So I shut up. Now, in my final days in the space-time physical world, I have nothing to lose. So …

I solemnly affirm that the evidence I shall give, will be my own inarguable truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

Question #1. How Did You Decide To Go On Hospice?

This was a no-brainer. Not even a decision. Nothing to decide. It was a given.

I had worked with Hospice many times as a relative/friend, also as a chaplain or minister with the American Humanist Association. In 1977 I signed up for this certification in order to legalize my marriage ceremonies. As an “official” officiant, I presided over rituals, services, or ceremonies: child dedications, weddings, and other transitional events, including divorce celebrations. And, of course, funerals, often called celebrations of life. These rites are sometimes loosely referred to by clergy as “hatchin’, matchin’, and dispatchin’.”

Officiating put me in touch with the Hospice movement that had begun in England in the late ’60s. I became involved in San Francisco as a member of the AIDS Interfaith Network. As a card-carrying Humanist (atheist, agnostic), I joked that I officiated at funerals for people who “wouldn’t be caught dead in church.” At these events people always came up to me and exclaimed how the deceased would have loved the words that were spoken. I always replied, “Yes. Most of us should have our memorial services while we’re still alive to enjoy them.

Practicing what I preached, I did this myself, identifying the event as “Joan Nelson’s 80^th Birthday and Premortem FUNeral.”

A More Personal Reason for Choosing Hospice

Were I younger, I might have chosen to endure the proposed second round of radiation/chemo etc. recommended by my doctors. But frankly, I’ve seen too many people endure needless suffering in the name of false hope. This is my second round with a cancer that has metastasized throughout my lymph system. The first medical round was aggressive. Nevertheless, the cancer spread. I refuse to go through exhausting medical treatments just to die anyway. I clearly do NOT want to spend my last chunk of time on the planet watching my body fall apart while I struggle to cope with decline, diminishment, and death.

My husbands #2 and #3 were Hospice patients. Husband 4 was kept artificially alive (many surgeries, oxygen, dialysis, and all the interventions he could find throughout the money-driven corporate, medical-industrial complex.

He was a Vietnam vet, who had been powerfully moved (in fifth grade) by General MacArthur’s “Old Soldiers Never Die” resignation speech. He refused Hospice for the same reason that I embrace it: because it would officially define him as a dying person. I appreciate the legitimate clarity of my official status as a dying person. I see Hospice as a care-driven support system to support my journey home from the party before the party’s over.

My 82 years have been rich and full of personal and collective joys and sorrows. I made a stab at producing more joy and less sorrow wherever I could. Could have done better … and enough is enough. I clearly do NOT want to stay at the party too long.

I feel privileged — or maybe just damn lucky — to have my end-of-life medications, the “self-delivery” pills, which are now available to terminally ill Californians about whom three physicians have declared have six or fewer months to live.

I am a happy beneficiary of the “right to die” or “death with dignity” laws that apply in Colorado, Oregon, Vermont, Hawaii, and Washington. Physician-assisted dying for the terminally ill is disputed in Montana and in my state, California, where I wagged my finger at the state legislators and told them to pass the End of Life Options Act, legalizing the use of the drugs. They did. Governor Brown signed it in 2016, and people began to receive their aid-in-dying medication. Two years later, a California judge overturned the End of Life Option Act. I became a litigant in a court case, which was eventually dismissed.

Note About Bioethics

Euthanasia (mercy killing) — either voluntary (patient requests it) or involuntary (patient’s consent is unavailable) — is  generally considered to be murder across the world. In some countries, however, there is a divisive public controversy over the moral, ethical, and legal issues of euthanasia. Passive euthanasia (known as “pulling the plug”) is legal under some circumstances in many countries. Active euthanasia is legal or de facto legal in a handful of countries (examples: Belgium, Canada, Switzerland) and is limited to specific circumstances and the approval of councilors and doctors or other specialists.

Right-to-die laws are based on the principle that a human being is entitled to end his or her own life or to undergo “voluntary” self-administered euthanasia. Administered by anyone else, it would be murder. I might never use my end-of-life medications, which I am required to administer myself. If I do use them, it would not be classified as murder or suicide. It would merely be a hastening of my death by lethal sarcoma.

Whether or not I use the law and the magic potion (concoction, mixture, brew), I am blessed with the luxury of knowing that I can check out of the planet at any time. This frees me of worry, fear, or anxiety about a downward spiral of diminishment, deterioration, declining health, wealth, abilities, and general quality of life.

Bottom line: Knowing that I have this end-of-life option has freed me to come into a time of extraordinary growth into the fullness of my own power.

Question #2. How Can You Have a Meaningful Death?

SO LET’S GET DOWN TO IT – What, exactly, is the “stuff” I’ve known all my life that other people don’t seem to know

You probably don’t identify, as I do, as a thanatologist — one who studies death. In my case, having a Transcendental Grandmother and scrutinizing death all my life has led to a mission to make death meaningful for myself, and, I hope, for you.

For me, it’s a luxury to know that three physicians have declared that I have six or fewer months to live. This awareness propels me as a “manifesto writer” sprinting to the finish line.

What is your answer to this #2 question about a meaningful death? Remember: Your death, or mine, might come any time. All too often I’ve heard about sudden, unexpected deaths—bus, truck, better yet, a bolt of lightning that courses through you in a mere three milliseconds. When people hear about a sudden death, they generally say something about how lucky the deceased person was to have avoided the suffering of a long, drawn-out illness.

As you can see, I would prefer to have this time of awareness to suck all the juice I can out of my end-of-life rite of passage.

You can’t know for sure that you still have decades—years, months, days, even hours—here in the space-time physical dimension. So, just in case, take a few moments to imagine yourself nearing the finish line. Perhaps you see yourself bowing as you take a curtain call. A terminally ill San Francisco cable car operator told me he was ready to “lumber into the car barn” for the last time. A violinist chose the image of a musical coda: the concluding passage in a piece or movement that resolves the piece to a harmonious end. An ultimate climax or finish.

In the proverbial nutshell: The obviously glib answer to this question is: Give meaning to your life. Reach … go the extra mile for the kind of meaning that doesn’t end at death. If you’re satisfied with the meaning of your life and death, congratulations. And, keep moving on to Question #3.

At the other extreme, if you think your life has never had, and never will have, enough meaning, I hope that answering these questions will propel you into creating a meaningful life or death, whichever you are assessing now.

This #2 question considers the moment of death: that brief instant when you stop being alive and start being dead. I’ve always treasured my awareness, standing at the bedside of a dying person, contemplating the number of breaths or heartbeats from the eight-week embryo to the moment starting what some call “the eternal now.” But that shared moment has been one-sided. Seldom has the person whose heart and lungs are winding down been free enough of drugs and other medical stressors to appreciate that moment.

For you, right now, Question #2 asks you to avoid last-minute meaning-making if you can. So take the time now to consider what meaning means to you.

○ Psychologists and philosophers say the path to meaning lies in connecting and contributing to something that is bigger than the self, such as family, country, or god.

○ With this in mind, ask yourself: How has your existence contributed to another or others?

○ Think about the times you have donated time, talent, or money to worthy causes.

○ Take into account the times you considered behaving badly, then decided against it simply because you knew it was not the right thing to do.

Be glad you are alive at this point in history when you can search for “meaning” online (too bad you can’t then order it from a website!). I haven’t enough time to write a book about my search for meaning, but I do have a story, the meaning of which is “manifesting” here.

My “old-soldiers-never-die” husband—stubbornly refusing to acknowledge that he was dying—nevertheless read the daily newspaper obituaries, calling them the “Irish Funny Papers.” (He had attended a few funerals of Irish friends and noticed that these particular events involved a lot of weeping, wailing, and “crepe-hanging.”) He would compare his age with the ages of the deceased. At his memorial service, people told stories about him that had added meaning to his life and to theirs. One of the stories was about his choice not to have Hospice because he was an “old soldier.”

You can always do as I did and have your own FUNeral while you’re still alive. It doesn’t have to be a big assembly. A small gathering at a restaurant or home can be preferable for many reasons. The point is that no matter how big or small, people sharing stories of your life will help you will grasp and appreciate the meaning of your life.

Note: Your search for meaning will always include some ratio or proportion of darkness, despair, and depression. You are not alone. So consider your personal share of darkness. Perhaps you believe you can find absolutely nothing that has given meaning to your life. Maybe you’re too sick to make a last-minute sprint to the finish line. Or you just wish for a beneficent deity of some kind to please come take you away.

In this case, I hope you will give “meaning” one more stab by reading my Quantum Physics and Nonduality answer to Question #4? As you read, please, simply allow yourself to imagine yourself “waking up” and “getting-it.” 

Question #3 – How Do You Involve Your Family?

All too often, people are forced to endure needless suffering because they wait until there’s a medical crisis or terminal diagnosis, and then find it’s too late to initiate the conversation.

So, this question? was designed by my neighborhood Death Forum committee for me to provide a nuts-and-bolts answer to what might be the most difficult situation you will ever have to confront, either as a caring friend or family member, or as the person who is dying.

I know that my now-dead ancestors are not the “family” members implied in this “involve-your-family” question. But my family included an unusually enlightened “Transcendental Grandma” who transcended ordinary reality so she could heal people (including me). In the same room. Across town. Even across our continent. So I include her here.

Ancestors

With the exception of one grandmother, my family of origin was embedded in the shared culture of death denial.

Transcendental Grandma was born during the Civil War and raised in Boston, which is recognized as the home of Transcendentalism. She was steeped in the American literary, political, and philosophical movement of the early nineteenth century, which centered around Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and the early Unitarians. Margaret Fuller and Elizabeth Palmer Peabody were the only two women who were original members of the Transcendental Club. Other women, such as poet Emily Dickinson, played key roles in that movement over the years. By the time my grandmother was born, the movement was already going strong.

Transcendentalists “transcend”—extend above and beyond—the belief systems of institutional religion in a spiritual (nonphysical, incorporeal, intangible) attempt to lift themselves above social institutions that they observe “corrupt” human awareness.  The early Transcendentalists promoted intuition, as opposed to scientific knowledge. Their philosophy was based on the ideal that all people are extensions of and outlets for the single, united, universal “oversoul,” because intuition overcomes duality and unites all people as one being.

I’m sure that my Transcendental Grandma, whose regular direct experience with the art of remote healing, was attracted to the Transcendentalists’ perceptive, intuitive way of knowing what she called the “truth that will set you free.” I surmise that her “Everything Mind” terminology was her way of helping her little granddaughter grasp the notion of an oversoul without having to delve into the meaning of “soul,” which has so many associations with institutional religion. Nevertheless, it and Grandma’s Everything Mind are the same thing: the spiritual or immaterial aspect of humans that is immortal.

I have no idea of the date when Transcendent Consciousness (awareness of the Everything Mind/oversoul thing) hooked up with my body. Was I an embryo? Fetus? Nor do I know when, where, or how it will disassociate itself from my body. (At the time of this writing, I haven’t decided when. Maybe Halloween, which celebrates death.) One date I do know was the day my still fully transcendentally “conscious” body was born. The day Hitler opened the Olympics in Berlin (August 1, 1936). Emerging into air for the first time in the hospital delivery room, my body was not breathing. I was told that the doctor wiped his hands, declared that I would not survive, and walked away.

That doctor had not counted on my Transcendental Grandma’s type of transcendence that included mind-over-matter healing. To the best I can surmise, it’s because of her healing abilities that I’ve been alive in the space-time physical world at all. I weighed in at a mere four pounds and two ounces. But lucky me: My Transcendental Grandma refused to let me go. Instead, she “worked” for me. She used the word “work” every time she performed her Energetic healing during the recurring near-death asthma attacks of my single-digit years.

I wheezed, gasped, stopped breathing, and underwent the out-of-body thing at least a dozen times. I would stop breathing and leave my body. More accurately, my body left me.

I remember one episode clearly. This time, I got to watch Grandma “working.” (To me, it looked like praying.) This time she “worked” in my bedroom with my parents and a doctor. Without a body, I recognized that I was hovering somewhere between the physical and the nonphysical world. In short: I knew damn well that there was far more to what-is-so than I had been told. Knowledge of this far more expansive reality—and the peace, emptiness, more precisely, freedom, that comes with it—has sustained me through thick and thin.

Lucky me hovered above my stressed-out body. Relieved of the desperate struggle to breathe, I did NOT want to return to it. At the same time, I could see “them” down by my bed. My mother crying, my father pacing, as the house-call doctor clutched his worn black bag and a vial of adrenalin.

Concerned for the grieving adults around my bed, I reluctantly dropped back into my (literal) corpse and began breathing again. I still treasure the day when Grandma held me in her arms and explained:

~

You are a lucky little girl to know about the Everything Mind. You’ve had these rare glimpses into the real world. This flesh-and-bones world isn’t the real world. It’s make-believe. Think about your class play. All the time you were on that stage you were playing the role of “The Little Princess Who Could.”

But you were so much more real than the princess. In the same way, you—here in the world in your flesh and bones—are, always have been, and always will be at one with the “Everything Mind.” At the same time, you will find yourself in a body, playing a make-believe role.

~

Once again, Grandma (and maybe the doc) had retrieved me. In truth, I didn’t want to be retrieved. In addition to the blessed relief to be free of the desperate struggle to breathe, was something more important in terms of this manifesto. That is my direct experience of Transcendental Consciousness: You know: the Energetic Source of everything, life force, ground-of-being,Love/God, call it what you will. The Energy is constant, ever present, unchangeable and is the essence of all existence.

So, as Grandma said, Everything Mind (i.e. Transcendent Consciousness) is much bigger and older than, as well as independent of, us. It exists everywhere. Always has and always will. Who would be a better authority than Grandma, with her direct experience of healing me from her house, sometimes on the other side of town?

Remote healing is where we get “entangled” in Quantum Physics. Before we go there, let’s get clear about the frequent use of the word “Quantum.”

Remember, a quantum is the smallest amount of any physical entity or property involved in an interaction. The word “quantum” in front of the word “leap” has been misused by many people to mean a huge leap. It is, indeed a huge leap. However, they miss the point that it was a teeny tiny little quantum that produced the huge leap.

For our purposes here and now, the “entanglement” message is that Consciousness itself exists in more than one place (indeed, everywhere) at the same time. In Grandma’s words: The “Everything Mind” (the process known as Consciousness) is, was, and always will be everywhere. Only sometimes does it get stuck going for a ride in an earthbound body.

According to the internet, “entanglement” occurs when two particles are so deeply linked that they share the same existence. In the language of quantum mechanics, they are described by the same mathematical relation known as a wave function. Einstein described “entanglement” as “spooky action at a distance.” He used the word “spooky” to acknowledge that, because entanglement seems so strange, mostly because we don’t understand it, we dismiss it. But the spookiness factor and fear remain in our brains.

At this point, one itsy-bitsy little quantum—perhaps something that you do or say or otherwise create and manifest in the world—can cause a huge leap that can save humanity from itself.

Grandma’s Transcendental “work” included elements of what today is known as mind-over-matter Energy healing. Energy therapy, psychic healing, spiritual medicine, or spiritual healing are branches of alternative medicine based on the idea that healers can channel healing Energy into a patient and effect positive results.

Various methods include hands-on, hands-off—even absent or distant where the patient and healer are in far-off locations! No wonder so many people view this stuff as unbelievable and lump it together with unbelievable aspects of traditional religious teachings. Their discomfort is understandable. But soon, nobody will be able to dismiss entanglement theory. Technology is already working to create sentient robots with “conscious” software. Given all the laboratory and other experiments, cutting-edge research might already be discovering an algorithm or other equation for nonmaterial energetic phenomena (maybe even god itself).

Along the same lines, there’s no shortage of mainstream scientific research into subjects formerly relegated to the realms of science fiction or the paranormal. Example: the process of transferring thoughts from one mind to another. In one experiment, today’s cutting-edge technology, Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), enabled neuroscientists at the University of Barcelona to send thought signals that were picked up by an Electroencephalograph EEG in India. The subjects in India generated EEG signals that they sent to France.

My first memory of being at Grandma’s house included her telephone. She shared a telephone number with nine other households. They powered their phones, each one encased in a wooden box, by hand-cranking. Although she lived to have a phone connected to a central switchboard, with an operator who said, “number, please,” she would never have imagined a small fit-in-your-pocket phone with a computer in it!

Perhaps you and I — all of us — once liberated from our 3-D brain-and-bone bodies, will be watching the birth of a 4-D or 5-D revolutionary means of communication that will transform the space-time physical world in the way that telegraph, telephone, or television did. 

Then the 3-D space-time folks might figure out how to communicate (in both physical and nonphysical states) by simply “thinking” our messages. If mind-to-mind transmission proves a practical way to communicate subtle ideas, we might deepen, amplify, and enrich our lives. At least, we’d be living in a more honest world. Imagine knowing that your mind is being read. You’re in deep trouble if you aren’t honestly honorable; authentically truthful.

At this point, here’s what I do know: Energy, with all its momentum, frequency, and vibrations, in all its many forms, is both physical and nonphysical at the same time. And here’s the clincher: This includes thoughts. Yes, thoughts are Energy! A thought once thought into the collective Consciousness can’t be unthought out of it. Think about that!

For now, you can find stacks of books, websites, etc. about Energy work, near-death, and out-of-body experiences. Just remember: They only describe the very first stage of the dying process. The people who went all the way never came back and haven’t written any books yet. Perhaps my grandmother is already doing it. Maybe I will be able to do it. Hmmm.

Meanwhile, back to the immediate nuts and bolts.

Descendants?

Remembering that thoughts are Energy! And a thought once thought into the collective Consciousness can’t be unthought out of it. And that science is closer to developing the capacity to read minds—think about this!

Several decades ago, I kept running into death-related situations in which everyone involved, including the person who was doing the dying, spoke and acted as if they didn’t know what they actually did know. Even here in the 21^st century, I still run into this kind of death denial once in a while.

Given that I am an only child, and have no remaining cousins, aunts/uncles, nieces/nephews, Question #3 concerns my direct progeny. Once again, my answer is a no-brainer:

Acknowledge the reality of the death of whoever will be doing it. Own it. Talk about it. It’s not just one conversation. For the past six months I have been aware of death weaving its thread through the tapestry of my life. I give it the honor it deserves by making jokes about it.

Quite simply, for all their lives, I’ve been speaking openly with my offspring (four boys, now men in their late 50s/early 60s) about death. I talk about it here, there, and everywhere, weaving it through the process of daily life. In fact, with one of them, it’s been easier to talk about my death than to talk about politics.

Politics? No jokes … Death? Yes. Yes jokes.

Add to this the fact that, during their early adolescent years our backyard was, literally, a cemetery. This was in Aspen, Colorado, which had been a brawling silver mining town. The grave closest to our backdoor was that of a man who had died in a barroom brawl on December 31, 1899 — just missing the beginning of the new century. By the time we built the house, 1971, his body, except for a few mineral flakes, had long been transformed into pure Energy.

In order to write an article for a local newspaper, I contacted the folks whose ancestors had owned the original drayage company, lumberyard, hardware store, and cabinetmaking shop.

They lent me an old accounting ledger improvised as a cemetery recordkeeping book. Written with stick pen dipped in ink, blotter splotches and all, each entry told a story about the drayage company that went up the hill to the cemetery carrying the coffin that was made in the cabinetmaking shop, supplied by the lumberyard and hardware store.

Under the column labeled, “cause of death,” particularly for children, were the frequent words “summer complaint”: a noncontagious disease mostly of children who had been weaned from the breast. It occurred chiefly between April and October and was caused by tainted milk and water that occurred in hot weather. Sometimes called “cholera infantum,” the symptom was mainly diarrhea.

Over the past four decades my boys (I know, they’re men, with gray hair, approaching their own chronical advancement—but I can call them boys if I want to) have lost friends, many of whom were relatively young. They lost their father last year. And it looks like I’ll be next. So this year I created a family ritual for my last (and final) Mother’s Day.

A friend had lent me a book, The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning. You can find it and others like it just about anywhere books are sold. I explained the thrust of the book and asked my three sons who live nearby (and the fourth one via Skype) to come to my house and help me practice the Buddhist virtue of nonattachment: a state in which a person attains a heightened perspective by overcoming his or her attachment to desire for things, people, or concepts of the world.

I started the nonattachment thing with my dissertation, a thickly bound book that neither I nor anyone else had even opened in 34 years. There were drawers and boxes weighed down with my old sermons, newspaper columns, and photographs, only a small percentage of which mean anything to anyone, including myself.

A couple of weeks later, while conducting an informal seminar on “waking up and dying right,” I recommended this decluttering ritual. A woman whose house had been totaled by fire ten years earlier described a “never-ending” grief process. Despite a series of therapeutic support group “grief work” classes, tears began to flow as she spoke of her lost photo albums, favorite china, wedding dress, and such. I now wonder if I would have trouble practicing this Buddhist virtue of nonattachment had my items been swept away by fire. It seems to me that the issue here is about letting go. I’m deliberately choosing to let my items go. Her items were taken away. And violently so.

Be glad you live in a time when death talk with caring friends and relatives is growing as a niche market for book dealers. While I was roaming around the internet I noticed a nifty little ice-breaking tool: GoWish, a deck of cards that can be used as a game or simply as a conversation starter. According to their website, GoWish gives you an easy, even entertaining, way to talk about what is most important to you. The cards help you find words to talk about what matters most if someone, perhaps yourself, is living a life that you know will be shortened by serious illness. Playing the game with your relatives or best friends — sooner rather than later, please — can help you learn how you can best comfort your loved ones when they need you most. 

Given that talking about death makes caring family and friends feel terrified at worst and uncomfortable at best, I hope you will find something useful in my responses to Question #3 as it was intended: for those who will be involved in supporting one another physically and emotionally as you or someone else goes through what is now called the “death process.”

Question #4 – How Do You Think About Consciousness Continuing After Death?

This last question? should be asked of my grandmother, but I’m not up to speed on mediumship … bucket list, here I come!

Meanwhile, I’d like to respond to this one as a true Transcendentalist, saying I don’t need to think about the answer, because I intuit it with full clarity and assurance. Alas, I’m not all the way there yet. But this doesn’t bother me because I’m in the company of …

Serious scientists who are reluctant to embrace Transcendentalism’s philosophy that has morphed over its first hundred years into what most brainy academics dismiss as “pseudoscience.” This might have something to do with the “brain” thing. Because the Transcendentalists value intuitive awareness over linear, analytic thinking.

Ralph Waldo Emerson promoted the use of our “inborn intuition,” which gives us access to the “oversoul” that unites all people as one being.

Here in the 21^st century, there’s no shortage of theories — religious, mystical or scientific — about what happens when we die. Over the past few months, I’ve been looking into the latest in quantum physics, which the academics sometimes belittle as “quantum mysticism.” You might think this consciousness-after-death subject is too far flung and hard to believe. But, look at the daily news. We’re living in an unbelievable era in human history. A deep understanding of what happens to Consciousness after death might just make a big difference in the future of humanity. So hang in here!

This question is really about the collective as well as individual cutting-edge of awareness. You and I are still associated with our brainy bodies. Among many other hard-to-believe truths, your body includes miles of blood vessels. And there’s that almost impossible-to-believe thing in our heads: that three-pound wet pink piece of meat called a brain! The good news is that we are using our remarkable, amazing brains, here in the physical world during an exciting era of waking up to a collective global, nondual awareness that we are one!

When you start looking, you will find many brainy people at work on this last question.

For me,  it really asks, “What will I do without my brain? Am I ready for the body-free, brain-free consciousness that will survive my physical death?

The best analogy: Your 3-D body’s brain receives Energy (formed as thoughts) the way a radio receives signals from a broadcast station.

Now, imagine smashing the radio in the physical world. That won’t eliminate the broadcasts.

The point here is that destroying my brain won’t eliminate the Transcendent Consciousness. Energy Source of everything … soul, life force, ground-of-being, Love, god. The Everything Mind will still be “broadcast.”

Still with me? Great. So killing your brain in the physical realm doesn’t kill the “broadcast” of the Conscious Everything Mind in the nonphysical.

Mainstream neuroscience is very uncomfortable with this. So hang in here.

So, as Grandma said, Everything Mind is far more extensive and older than, as well as independent of, our brains. The energetic Source of everything…life force, ground-of-being, Love, god exists everywhere. Always has and always will.

Neuroscience tells us that the brain creates Consciousness, which can’t survive without the brain. But, Quantum theory tells us that Consciousness (Transcendent Grandma’s Everything Mind) preexisted and will postexist everything both physical and nonphysical.

For me, the recent popularization of Quantum Physics, specifically, the Quantum Theory of Consciousness, is nothing new. Because it’s what my Transcendental Grandma taught me about the Everything Mind and what my science teacher taught me about thermodynamics.

Consciousness is only one of the many forms of Energy. However, it was all there was before it created the Big Bang. It’s still the basic, central, primary force behind all that is.

This is where “wake-up-and-die-right” meets “getting-it:” Getting that everything—physical-material and/or nonphysical-nonmaterial — is nothing but Energy. Energy is neither created nor destroyed. It simply changes its expression, which, in turn, is either or both physical or nonphysical. Even both at the same time. Energy has momentum and vibrates to various frequencies. So, I was totally comfortable with the Quantum Theory of Consciousness, from the moment I learned of it—at age 81.

Neurobiologists, physicists, and other scientists, also theologians and philosophers, for the most part, don’t study Consciousness. They will tell you that this is sheer heresy. They study different forms of Energy. They will even tell you, as they have told me, to go back to school and get my head on straight.

I silenced myself early on because they called me “looney tunes,” “crazy,” and my favorite, “space cadet.” Back then, I had time on my side. So I shut up.

But smart people who seemed to function well in the world kept telling me about our physical as well as nonphysical bodies as “Energy fields,” intertwined with the nervous system and recognizable in the form of “auras, meridians, and “chakras” that feed the main ”meridians” with “Qi” energy (life force).

Since my terminal diagnosis, some of these Energy medicine, healing, light-working folks, who manage to live in what they know is the limited reality of the 3-D space/time world, have been encouraging me to give it my best space-cadet shot.

Now, I find my space-cadet self in good company with the Dali Lama, who most people don’t think of as a space cadet when he talks about “space” as “the teeny-tiniest nanoparticles.

Here’s where he goes quantum on us. Because he calls them “emptiness (space) particles.” So, stick with me here and try to remain aware of (or just for fun, imagine) Transcendental Consciousness as the Energy-based Source of everything.

Decide for yourself whether you want to “wake up” and “get” that everything, including your physical self and your nonphysical self, is literally — yes, literally — an extension and outlet for the ultimate underlying basic Energy that we experience as Consciousness. Here, with your body, and after death, without your body, you are now, always were, and will always be an extension/outlet of my Grandma’s Everything Mind.

This is another place where mainstream scientists think that quantum theory is “really weird.”

First, they tell us that Consciousness is a function of the brain. But, look a little deeper and you will find scientists, anthropologists, astronomers, and such coming together (check out the SAND—Science and Non-duality—website) to help us transcend (remember: rise above and beyond) our culture’s still-limited mindset to discover the deeper truth that has always been there, but we just didn’t “get it.”

Consciousness is NOT a function of the brain. Consciousness was, and always was, still is, and always will be, all there is. Everything, physical and nonphysical, is a manifestation of Consciousness. Grandma, and lots of others (you will find them on the internet) also called it “Divine Mind.” Many still call it “God.”

Recent research into quantum theory sheds light on exactly what it was that Transcendental Grandma did when she “worked” for me.

To understand this and to understand the “god” that I can believe in, I recommend two cutting-edge resources that will give you scientific evidence of the reality of the nonphysical world and how you and I will be — indeed, we are already — part of it.

Emerson claimed that all human beings are connected to everything in the nature world by a common field of energy (oversoul) and stated that all human beings have access to the oversoul through their own intuition. Along the way, he and the other early Transcendentalists studied Buddhism, including the three marks of existence; namely: impermanence, suffering, and nonself.

What does this mean for you and me as we relate to this question about Consciousness surviving the death of the brainy body? Seems to me it’s the crux of the matter. If we can get-it with our brainy bodies while still in the physical world, we will have no trouble getting-it when we lose our brainy bodies.

The transcendental (above and beyond) worldview transcends consensus reality and includes Buddhist and Hindu teachings that there is no separate SELF.

The notion of selfhood is illusory. There is no separate, isolated “I” who experiences things. Some of them go so far as to say that all our problems stem from the illusion that we are separate from everyone else.

One metaphor that Buddhism and other formal belief systems use to describe the reality of no-separate-self is that of the wave and the ocean. In our nontranscendent state, we perceive ourselves as individual waves, separate from the whole ocean. But from the transcendent viewpoint, we realize our oneness with the ocean … we are the ocean.

You can have an identity as a wave at the same time you know darn well that you are part of the ocean. You can still function as an individual at the same time you function at one with the whole universe.

Last Words

About waking up and dying right, yes. I got-it. I’m ready to transcend the space-time physical plane and move on into the nonphysical Consciousness that transcends the limits of my physical brain.

I’m also convinced that humanity is about to get-it. To wake up about the oneness of the unitary universal Everything Mind. Yup, it’s still about making Love instead of war.

Figuring out what’s true about the world is hard for the highly intelligent, super-educated, brainy folks who have been debating the nature of reality. They’ve been generating conferences and symposiums with enough squabbling to fill entire journals. The squabbling is good, because it produces cutting-edge theory that integrates science with traditional religious views of the body, the soul, an afterlife, and the possibility of other fourth, fifth, etc. dimensions of existence.

I have a Post-it on my computer monitor: Consciousness is, was, and always will be ever-present because it both embraces and transcends the physical world of space and time.

Think about transcending time and space. Want to do it? Think it will happen?

Think you’ll just drift, or get dragged, off to oblivion?

Me? I’ve given this body enough wear and tear. Now I’m ready for postmortal, body-free, brain-free consciousness after death.

At this point, it looks like the transcendental movement has evolved into the new “religion” of the 21^st century. As a resident of the Bay Area, I find their “church” gatherings geographically accessible.

The Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS) is almost literally in my backyard. Noetic comes from the Greek word nous or intuitive knowing. Noetic theory is a branch of metaphysical philosophy concerned with the study of nature, the operation of intellect, and the relationship between human and divine intellect. In modern dictionaries, noetic is often defined as meaning “intellect.”

Check out their website. The Institute of Noetic Sciences Sis an American nonprofit parapsychological research institute that conducts research on Consciousness and its survival after bodily death. It was co-founded in 1973 by former astronaut Edgar Mitchell and others interested in purported paranormal phenomena in order to encourage and conduct research on noetic theory.

The other “religion” that’s geographically accessible for me is the religion of Nonduality. Go to the SAND website. Go to “Explore” to view video and podcast presentations from past SAND conferences. You might not be as fortunate as I, with your own Transcendental Grandma who imbued you with an insatiable curiosity about the nonphysical world from which we come and to which we return. Nevertheless, you can get-it now, that Consciousness, which embraces and transcends the flesh-and-bone world, is a “god” you can believe in.

According to Rumi:

All the particles in the world

Are in Love and looking for Lovers.