“What happens when you die?”
My friend Rob (a devout Christian) would constantly ask me this and a myriad other challenging questions about the afterlife and God in order to test my atheistic faith. I admired his tenacity, but I was somewhat of a child prodigy in mathematics and science growing up, so I could always logic my way into an irrefutable solution to keep him and the mild discomfort I felt from his questioning at bay.
Here were my goto replies:
Total darkness: when we die it’s like the lights go out and there is nothing to see, nothing to think, and nothing to feel.
A never-ending dream: when we die it’s like a dream that never ends without any imagery.
Nothing: when we die we don’t even realize it. Nothing happens.
Can you relate to these response? They make total sense if you truly believe that the “I” of our ego is simply the collection of atoms that comprise our human brains. And just like a TV screen that goes blank when the plug is pulled, why wouldn’t “I” do the same thing if my heart stopped pumping blood to my brain? My scientific training was very pleased with this conclusion. It allowed me to go on with my day to day life without having to life’s big questions, such as “why are we here”, “what is our purpose”, and “what exactly am ‘I’“? I simply didn’t care to search any deeper because it frankly didn’t matter. If the brain stopped, then I stopped. Why did anything matter if the end game was so bleak? So I simply lost myself in all the distractions of life (video games, sports, etc) and deflected Rob’s questions each and every time.
And with no one able to refute my reasoning to a degree that I deemed valid and/or worthy, I remained an atheist for the first 20 years of my life.
A Crack in the Wall Appears
Around age 20 I had a crisis happen in my life. In short I essentially got so stressed from school, injuries, and personal drama that I was at the end of my proverbial rope and simply couldn’t take it anymore. I knew something needed to change immediately if I was going to keep my sanity and live to see another day. But when I reached out for mainstream solution, I feared “pills” and all the other symptom smashing solutions that offered no real long term benefit.
Thank God (pun intended) I was a scientist and an athlete. The scientist in me was willing to experiment with myself to find a solution. The athlete in myself was determined to stay disciplined and see this through to the end. And being that I didn’t have all the time in the world, I decided to be courageous and start my search 180 degrees away from where my MIT training would have directed me. I began to dive into information on acupuncture, holistic diets, meditation, and anything that had “Eastern” in the title or description. But still being a rigid scientist, one of the first things I tried seriously was binaural beats, which is essentially a form of induced meditation through audio technologies.
My first experience fucked me up, but in a very good way! Within 10 minutes of playing that first track from Centerpointe (HoloSync), I was crying uncontrollably. Then a few minutes later, my head was bobbing (apparently) all on its own. If this sounds crazy to you, try being the one experiencing it while you have zero frame of reference or expectation that something like this could happen. It was literally a mind fuck in every sense of the phrase. By the end of the track, I knew that I could never un-experience what just happened.
Now was that mere self delusion? Did I merely fake this experience with myself to simply give my belief system something to latch onto? Or did something really happen where my body went into a semi-trance? My honest answer is I believe it was a 100% authentic experience because it happened to me several times over the course of the subsequent years. And in that time I explored other energy medicine modalities (such as EFT, Sedona Method, etc) and found that I had some other amazing results and experiences that mainstream science would simply shrug its shoulders at for lack of a scientifically rational explanation.
And while this not really a ‘religious’ experience, it was perhaps the first time that I knew I was something more than my physical body. This was the beginning of the end of my time as an atheist.
Finding My Religion
A few years later I was the graduate resident advisor (GRA) at my old fraternity (Phi Delta Theta). One of my duties there was to help support initiatives the helped foster community activities. So when a brother started a bible study, I wanted to participate to see if people from various backgrounds could benefit from an open dialogue on what can be a hot button topic.
I also had my personal reasons for attending, mainly that I knew very little about the bible and wanted to at least have a better understanding of it so I could at least have an intelligent conversation about it. After all, I find it very disingenuous of scientists who leverage their knowledge and credibility in one field to feign expertise in another. And if I was to maintain my opinions on Christianity and atheistic views, I wanted to at least do so with good reason from this point forward.
What I liked about my experience with Tony’s bible study was that it didn’t feel like a sales pitch or that we were being pressured to believe one thing over the other. By comparison, my 3-4 previous experiences going to church functions had been horrific because it felt like I simply couldn’t open my mouth without being condemned, and simply biting my tongue was no way to have a meaningful conversation on such an important issue.
This Phi-Delt bible study was very much based on the Socratic method. We’d simply read a few passages and then there would be some open ended questions. Everything was up for discussion and there were no wrong answers or wrong statements. And because of my previous experiences with meditation and alternative healing modalities based on the human chakra system, I no longer had easy answers to questions like “what happens when we die?”
Being an all or none type of guy, I decided to study this as thoroughly as I could. However, reading and interpreting the bible (particularly the old translations) is certainly not an easy task because of the difficulty in the vernacular and because the context isn’t always clear. So I followed up with Tony for some additional resources that would be helpful.
What he ended up giving me changed my life forever. He had a 36 audio track series of recordings of the Sermon on the Mound by pastor Don McClure. If there was ever a single passage of text to study, this was going to be it because it was (allegedly) the longest and most complete message from Jesus ever recorded. I found the entire series extremely detailed and fascinating. What I enjoyed most was that the sermons didn’t feel like I was being beaten over the head to reach a forgone conclusion. Rather, it was simply being presented for me to make my own decision on the subject.
I don’t know why or when it happened, but something struck a chord with me. Was it Jesus? God? A higher calling? A great story? I honestly don’t know anymore because I’m not the person I was 10 years ago at the time of this writing. I can say that something resonated loud and clear with me, and I had to temporarily put my scientific brain on pause while I explored this even deeper.
I Go All In With Christianity
Imaging my mom’s surprise when I told her (matter of factly) that I was now a Christian. A funny thing happened when I chose to join a religion. Friends that were once close to me soon drifted away, even though I didn’t even talk about this part of my life. And my colleagues? You’d think I had given up on science and started peddling snake oil or had suddenly suffered a brain damage. And the looks? I felt like I was no longer in the “in” crowd among my peers. Nevertheless, I knew I had to walk this path and fully explore it in order to appease the curiosity that had been unleashed several years earlier from the binaural beat meditation experiment.
Well I didn’t have to wait long. My opportunity to join a church started with a simple card handed out while walking out of the MIT student center. This kind man named Robert simply invited me to a dinner and made no bones about the fact that we’d be able to ask any and all questions about God. Seeing as I had a deep desire to explore this, I quickly jumped at the opportunity and plugged myself immediately into their community.
Honestly, I almost couldn’t comprehend how welcoming, loving, and inviting the people were in this Church. They opened their homes, fed us food, and offered caravans of transportation for anyone that couldn’t make it on their own. And when I told my friend Rob what had happened, he was so ecstatic that I was going to church that he bee-lined out for a 3-hour drive just to give me a hug and congratulate me. Although we had been best friends since age 5, this was a topic that was simply a non-starter and now we had some common grounds for discussion and understanding each other.
Cracks Begin to Form Again
For awhile, this experience was amazing. I learned so much, felt so accepted, and finally felt like I was part of some higher purpose beyond little ole me standing on this giant rock called Earth spiraling amidst millions of galaxies and billions of stars in this universe.
The good times soon came to and end when I started asking open ended questions again. What about meditation? Chakras? Reincarnation? Subtle energies? If there’s the Holy spirit, aren’t we all spirits? What about consciousness and even connections to science through the higher dimensions of string theory or quantum mechanics? And so on, and so on, and so on.
My questions comments were met with blank stares within the church community. When I received answers, it felt more like I was being talked at versus being taken seriously. I had strayed beyond the boundaries of what was acceptable conversation and questioning. Perhaps they were thinking that I was trying to subvert their beliefs. Perhaps they were merely trying to retain the integrity of their teachings, which left no room for these outside questions.
Regardless of why they didn’t like what I was doing, I simply couldn’t turn off my curiosity. After all, I escaped the belief system of atheism through my prodding, questioning, and searching. If I didn’t allow myself to search the entire answer space while being in a religion, I was simply putting an artificial boundary around myself again.
It was not easy to leave the wonderful community that I just embraced, but I had to honor that part of me that started out on this quest. So with that, another wall came tumbling down as I left the church to renew my search.
A Believer Without a Religion
It would seem that I was in quite the predicament. On one hand, I had both an intellectual understanding and experiential knowingness that some form of God existed (after all, something had to have created all the lego like atoms that make all of us up). But on the other hand I knew it would be pointless to join another religion only to find myself constrained again to their particularly set of beliefs, decisions, procedures, and allowable topics of discussion.
I love the comparison by Carolyn Myss where she equates religions to a costume party. Underneath it all is the real truth and most religions and spiritual communities share a significant amount of the same teachings. But each group puts on their unique garb and they tend to only commune among their tribe while condemning others in a different costume. Not to be rude, but it’s similar to a sports rivalry like the Yankees versus the Red Sox. Underneath the costumes are just men who making a lot of money playing the game they love. But we cheer the ones on our team while we jeer the others. This competitive nature between religions never sat well with me, so I decided to leave the costume party for good.
Solely Alone Soul Searching
Isolated from my atheist and Christian friends, I began the next phase of my search alone, which turned out to be a huge blessing. Having been so outspoken before (as an atheist) and so quickly sucked into a specific belief system (as a Christian), it was much healthier for me to test drive at a distance instead of diving in without doing some due diligence. In the ensuing years I discovered a lot of interesting things as well as things that can only be classified as ‘out there shit’ that was not for me and a little too dark for my tastes. If anything, it taught me to better discern what was useful from what was another trap.
I eventually found myself on a plane to visit The Monroe Institute for a week long exploration of consciousness using binaural beat technologies. I must say this was extremely out of character for me as I had not even an outline of what this conference/workshop had as an agenda. At one point I had a fear pitted in my stomach because I was afraid I was going to be the only normal person their in a room full of palm readers, crystal ball readers, and all the stuff that would indicate I had left my senses (at least from the vantage point from my belief system at that moment in time).
What happened was quite the opposite. Half the room was full of engineers and other people searching for their own answers. The other half were some of the most genuine people you could ever meet. Everyone shared what they knew to be true and we simply had thought provoking conversations: no judgements, no dogma, and no trying to convert people over to anything. After all, how could you convert someone over to something that you couldn’t fully define or label? There was a lot of comfort in that thought.
For those of you who have never heard of The Monroe Institue, it was founded by Bob Monroe, a former radio broadcast executive who would have sporadic out of body experiences. He later found out through the use of the binaural beat technologies that he could induce various states of consciousness. The only real ‘tenet’ that his work was founded upon (which is more of an affirmation than anything) is that we are more than your physical body. From that tiny seed, each individual discovers what that means for them.
Where that leads each individual is up to them.
My Discovery of the Inner Light
Paul Scheele once posed an thought provoking question during one of his seminars: (paraphrasing) “What if the light at the end of the tunnel was really a mirror?” The point is that so many of us are searching for this exterior version of heaven, nirvana, enlightenment, etc. But what if it was within us the entire time while we were otherwise milling about the darkness?
For me personally, I’ve had numerous experiences that simply defy any logic that my left brain can muster. I’ve had out-of-body experiences. I’ve had energy rushes so ginormous that I literally felt like my bones were vibrating. I’ve had friends bend spoons into shapes that I physically couldn’t do with all the might of my bare hands. I’ve had dreams so real and lucid that I honestly think they were real. I’ve researched remote viewing, psychic phenomenon, and even had the privilege of being up on stage at a Matrix Energetics seminar where the energy going through my body was more europhic than words can describe. I don’t remember the entire thing as I fell to the ground in approximately 3 seconds and found myself laughing uncontrollably blissed out of my mind.
So are we more than our physical bodies? In my experience, yeah… I think so.
It’s with a certain sense of irony that my PhD thesis work was on van Der Waals fluctuation forces. In short, every atom in the world vibrates and those vibrations send out electromagnetic radiation (e.g. light) and can attract and repel based on complex multi-body effects. In short, every atom in this universe is always sending and receiving light.
And I believe as spirits having a human experience, we do the same. And the more we can see that inner light deep inside of us (call it energy, your spirit, your soul, whatever), the more we can strengthen it and shine it into the world. It’s the only explanation that makes sense at this stage of my life.
If I discover that this is incorrect, I’ll certainly evolve my belief system as well. But for now, my search has brought me towards the infinite inner well of my own consciousness. And I can’t wait to see what else is in store for me as I dive deeper into the inner light.
Truths I’ve Come to Learn
So what label I now? I started as atheist believing in an afterlife of eternal darkness. Some experiences occurred and I then realized that science might not have the answers to everything. I took a quick detour into religion, learned a lot, but felt I was getting stuck versus moving forward. Now I don’t really know what I am.
I’d call myself a scientist but that’s too confining given the definitions of today. I’d call myself a truth seeker but that sounds overly pretentious and often is very loaded and ego driven. I’d call myself a light bearer but I still have moody days and that would feel far too hypocritical.
I can’t accurately say what I am, but I can say what I’ve come to discover through all my ventures ventures and adventures studying human consciousness:
We truly are more than our physical bodies.
We are spirits having a human experience and not the other way around.
There are subtle energies that exist all around us and that science can confirm these phenomenon, even if they would rather pooh-pooh the implications of the underlying research.
Heaven is an experience within.
We all have an inner light. Some just choose to shine it more brightly.
We do not die, but merely give up our human exterior and return towards being spirits for awhile.
There there truly is one mountain top with many paths that lead up to it. And my path may be completely different than yours (and that’s ok).
Religion isn’t inherently good or bad. It can a wonderful accelerator for many people to get on their path, but it’s also a limitation (much like training wheels) once you’ve outgrown its precepts and you’re ready to evolve your spirit to the next level.
These are my truths, for now, and always subject to change based on a new discovery. After all, that’s how science works.
Final Advice
Have you also found your inner light? If you’ve read this far you probably have some interest in discovering this for yourself in your own way. Therefore I offer some advice that helped me along my journey.
Quoting Bruce Lee: “Absorb what is useful, Discard what is not, Add what is uniquely your own.”
Quoting Socrates: “I know one thing, that I know nothing.”
Beware the company you keep. If you start studying some dark, esoteric subjects, you may find yourself in situations that can be quite harmful to your psyche.
Don’t hammer people over the head with your beliefs. If it’s appropriate, share. If it’s not, listen. There’s more than enough proselytizing to go around.
Things That Helped Me
I found these particular products, books, etc to be very helpful along my journey. And while I would love to list everything I’ve come across, I made it a point to not overwhelm and to stick to the ones that had the most impact. Your mileage my vary and you may have a completely different list by the end.
HemiSync
ZeroPoint Pendants
Claude Swanson’s Books
The Monroe Institute
Matrix Energetics
Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT)
Enjoy your journey!
perspective