“You best start believing in ghost stories, Miss Turner… you’re in one!”
So says Captain Hector Barbossa in the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie. I have rarely enjoyed a Hollywood line more than this one. It’s creepy. It’s ironic. It’s humorous. But most of all, it’s true.
Once upon a time, (like you perhaps?) I believed myself to be a single individual of an advanced ape-like species living in a solid, somewhat clockwork universe. I say “clockwork” because this existence seemed regulated by chain-reactions and set in a framework called Time. I say “somewhat” because the whole thing was always a little fuzzy around the edges. Like I was being forced to concentrate on a single character in a play I had not written. I had a beginning that I could not remember and would face an ending that I could not predict. Sound and fury, signifying nothing and rounded with a sleep. (Sorry. Bard-o moment!)
Just about every religion and belief system in the world holds to the idea of some kind of afterlife. Heaven or hell; reincarnation; tunnels and white lights. Even some atheists express a hope that their “energy” might continue on in some different form.
Most people know they are going to die. Since very few of them know what will happen to them afterwards, they avoid thinking about it. There is fear. There is hope. But mostly, there is ignorance.
When I was a young man and newly Enlightened, I would drive my friends crazy with my detachment. More than once they feared me suicidal because I would so often give away my possessions. “Dude,” they would say, “you need to come down to earth and quit trying to see everything from God’s point of view!”
So I tried. I walked the common path. Son; student; worker; husband; father. Many adventures, few regrets. However, as Oliver Holmes once so rightly observed, “A mind that is stretched by a new experience can never go back to its old dimensions.”
I am no different or better than any other single individual of this advanced ape-like species. I’ve merely climbed a little higher than most so my horizon goes a bit farther out. I can tell you what I see out there though. There is no death. There is no afterlife. There is no spirit world that follows this physical world. There is only the spirit world. An endless Dream where you call the shots (or don’t) according to your own will. What happens when you “die”? Whatever you want.
How scary is that?
So you best start believing in ghosts, Dear Reader… You are one!