California Launches Another Soul Outta Here

Does anybody ever wonder (as I do) if when a state executes somebody, they really vanish? We can clearly kill their bodies, but do our execution procedures really do what we think they do?

What If Death Doesn't Truly Kill Us?

Here is yet another case where it would be very useful to know what the real nature of death is. What if death is not termination, but transformation?

Would it not fit as a fundamental in the issue if we knew that in death we change form rather than wholly self-destruct?

My Perpetual Question Returns

So I am back at it again, wondering this: why can NASA spend $168.4 million dollars on a dust-gathering satelllite in an attempt to study the origins of physical space...yet we as a society aren;t willing to cough up serious research into near-death experiences?

Stardust brings home 'cosmic booty' talks about the space probe Stardust. I think it;s great. I have always been a fan of the space program.

However, I'd also like to research the origins of life by investigating the experiences of those people who have left their bodies and experienced wondrous worlds in other dimensions while their bodies flatlined.

Another View of Murder

If there really is no death--and we'll get into that in a minute--how does that affect murder?

First off, here's the murder story. Some guy killed his kids. Blah, blah, blah. For the purpose of my exploration here, the details are not all that important. The article acts as a background piece. You read murder stories all the time, right? While each individual case has its own claim to fame, and stakes its own territory in the trappings of tragedy, it's all pretty much the same show.

So I want to explore what might happen if we the people, in order to form a more perfect union, decided to consider the possibility that there is no death--that there is transformation and not termination.

Some of you might go bonkers with that suggestion. I like to play "what if?" games and explore good ideas even if I cannot prove them. I know enough people who have personally experienced clinical death and been revived--and have great things to say about the experience--to seriously consider the possibility that death of the body does not mean death of consciousness.

In other words, the crime of murder may truly be limited to destroying someone's physical body. And I wonder how that would affect the mind of murderers and potentiual murderers if they knew that and if it were true.

Could it be more persuasive than capitall punishment?

Imagine if you will what it would be like to be this guy in the newspaper piece who killed his kids. To his mind, he killed their bodies so he killed them, because that's how most people think. That's how the news reports it. That's how the law sees it. That's how medicine views it. But what if there's more to that picture?

Religion often has this way of saying that when you die, you're in God's hands now. You're off the clock. You've disappeared through the black hole and you don't really exist anymore even though you're with God. It's this going through the black hole idea that seems to keep us from acknowledging a continuing existence of spirits.

Well, if a great deal of society believes that when you're dead you're gone, either to the great void or to some heavenly afterlife, one would assume that murderers think that way, too. Out of sight, out of mind. Bang, bang, you're oblvion.

But what if a society integrated what the near-death experiencers are saying--that there's a whole bunch of life going on in the universe including a whole series of natural laws of cause and effect? What if our society was much more conscious of the idea that people who die don't die, they transform? What if the kids who the man thought he killed are watching him this very second? What if he came to suspect that at some point, he would have to face his children again in a form that he could not obliterate as easily as people obliterate flesh?

You may not believe in any sort of afterlife, but one thing to consider is that if we keep alive the massive cloaking device that says that death is the ultimate end, it automagically provides a killer with a promise that death will terminate his consciousness. This is the same hope that people who commit suicide are banking on--the ultimate off button. Our society makes death the scary story, when the scary story should be, if you inflict pain on others, that life goes on and you can't escape life. If you do bad things you have to be accountable for them, not by some heavenly judiciary, but by your higher self that is personally monitoring your progress through Earth School.

That may be very far-fetched for some of you, but I contend that before you make your judgment you sit down and have a long chat with a few people who have consciously and spontaneously left their bodies during a traumatic episode like a car crash or a rafting accident or an involuntary electrocution. Or perhaps read something like Lessons from the Light by Kenneth Ring, one of the best of the NDE books by one of the best of the career NDE researchers.

Many NDErs who have life reviews during their experience say that they had to "endure" feeling everything good and bad that they caused others to feel. Further they feel everything that anyone else felt down a chain of experience. If you beat up someone and out of frustration that someone kicks the dog, during your life review you would feel yourself beating up the person--and feel what the person felt being beaten up--and feel the pain of the dog getting kicked, and so on.

So whether or not you believe it, the possibility exists through a growing amount of anecdotal accounts that the universe has a grand and glorious justice system built-in that we don't pay much attention to just yet. And the possibility exists that murderers will one day stand before the people they murdered.

But of course this brings up another issue: if murderers face the victims they murdered, is murder as bad as we have been led to believe? Clealry murder is wrong; that is not even in question here. But society has a great love for tellling scary stories about how horrible murder is, and I wonder if in the great big picture beyond our mortality if it is literally much worse than actors playing a role of someone who dies in a movie. People who have had NDEs in car crashes consistently say that they are out of their bodies in no time, not feeling pain. (Many experience excruciating pain when they have to come back to their flesh bodies.) So while murder often appears brutal and bloody and nothing short of awful, that may mostly be an illusion we create through our obsession with scary stories.

If life is all there is, if there is no death, then murder is just a ticket to another world, and it may not be a bad ride at alll. So while an earthbound murderer may have visions of being tortured in some hellish afterlife, and while the press may be having a field day writing about all the misery that was caused, the victims may be snacking on cosmic cupcakes and have no ill will at all. "Didn't feel a thing and the food here is great!"

I know that this may sound flip to any of you who have had personal tragedies in your life. This is just my attempt to figure out the big picture of life here, and I would truly like to know that murder victims went quickly, painlessly, and are enjoying themselves in another place. I get weary of all the dramatizing that our society, especially local news, puts on murder victims. It’s all speculation. And as I said, I know people who have been to another world before coming back to this one.

For the most part I think that death is portrayed as one of the great out clauses in our land, and one of the great deterrents would be knowing that murder gets you in a lot more trouble than mere lethal injection.

It’s also worth pointing out that it’s almost universal among near-death experiencers that suicide is not an answer, either. Those whose NDE came as a result of a suicide attempt are particularly vehement about this point. You don’t end up in oblivion and you may have to experience up close and personal all the pain you caused when you took your life. Rather than solving problems with sweet eternal rest, you end up having destroyed your body, feeling all the pain you felt before, and then have the added burdens of that mess.

I think a re-design in the popular usage of homicide, suicide, and capital punishment would be another giant leap for mankind.

Same Memo, Different Views

One of the great things about the Internet is the profusion of source material. On any given story, a search engine-enabled news reader can choose differentg sources for the same sgtory. This often gives a semantic glimpse into spin on a story.

Commenting on the story about the political war between the State of Louisiana and the Feds, stories told of the memos being fired all over the universe. It's interesting to see how the different organizations portrayed one such memo.

On CNN.com:

For the state's part, Blanco's chief of staff Andy Kopplin e-mailed employees September 4 saying they needed to get national supporters to say "that the federal response was anemic" and asked them to point out budget cuts to levee programs.

In the New York Times:

"We need to keep working to get our national surrogates to explain the facts - that the federal response was anemic and had been shortchanged by budget cuts and avoiding responsibilities like protecting Louisiana levees and wetlands," Mr. Kopplin wrote in one e-mail message a week after the storm hit.

To me, the CNN version seemed to imply a creepier Kopplin who seemed more into manipulating the press. The NY Times version seems more like a frustrated public servant.

I don't have time to expand this idea, so I'll just post this. Maybe someone else can run with it, like a college kid looking for a goood term paper subject.

The Semantics of Reporting Executions

Partially I have been looking at stories of executions because they are there. In our numbers-loving, milestone-loving country, we are approaching the 1000th Execution since the death poenalty was re-instituted in the US.

Partially I have been reading accounts of executions and Death Row activities because one of the characters in one of the novels I am working on is a convicted murderer.

Something I would like to see attention drawn to is how the news media with its semantics builds realities that may not be true. In the story of Kenneth Lee Boyd (see previous link), the lead paragraph says: "A man who killed his wife and father-in-law pinned his hopes on last-minute intervention from the governor or the courts as he awaited lethal injection early Friday in the nation's 1,000th execution since capital punishment resumed in 1977."

Pinned his hopes?

How does anybody know that? Makes it sound like he's desperate. How do we or the reporters know that he'd just as soon get it over with and die?

This to me is how the news dramatizes things. We have this assumption that people on Death Row are terrified of dying. I guess we need to have that to help justify why we are killing them. If we keep calling it the "ultimate penalty" (similar to "the ultimate sacrifice" in warfare) then we can keep the whole processs going. We give the illusion of diabolical punishment to the crooks who did the bad deeds way back when.

Prison doesn't look like much fun to me. I could really be missing something here, but if I had to face the rest of my life in Shawshank or get a nice ride out on lethal injection, I suspect I'd choose the latter.

We seem to think that all convicted murderers want to live. But there are different ways of looking at things, as is true for any terrorist who blows him or herself up in a holy war. They're thinking eternal reward somewhere else. My point is not that convicted murderers think they're going to be rewarded anywhere, but they most likely don't share the same outlook on life as do the people who want to see the murderer gonzo.

They may see execution as government-assisted suicide.

Or then there's this story about the once-"normal" Belgian girl who grew up to be a suicide bomber in Iraq. Not everybody plays by the same paradigm.

I am not saying that convicted murderes truly want to die; I am mostly just commenting on how news reporters characterize these people. I suspect thaqt those who did commit the crimes may be quite afraid of what happens after death. If they are worried about punishment above (or below) and beyond the court system, they might want to put off their reckoning as long as possible.

Ghost Whisperer

I don’t watch much TV, but recently I have become “hooked” on Ghost Whisperer.

Here’s the high concept: Melinda Gordon is a young newlywed with the unique ability to communicate with the earthbound spirits of people who have died--and who seek her help. Melinda uses her gift to relay significant messages and important information to the living, but sometimes the messages she receives are intense and confusing. As a result, she is often met with questions and skepticism by the survivors. But when Melinda is able to help both the lost souls who contact her and those who are still alive, she knows that her unique talent is an asset and not a liability.

Opening Narration: "I just got married. I just moved to a small town. I just opened an antique shop. I might be just like you. Except from the time I was a little girl I knew I could talk to the dead. Earthbound spirits my grandmother called them. The ones who have not crossed over because they have unfinished business with the living and they come to me for help. To tell you my story, I have to tell you theirs."

A lot has been made in the gossip and fan media about the star’s frequent show of cleavage. I say woo-hoo, but that’s not why I watch the show. I watch it because there are so few shows that venture into the woo-woo territory of afterlife.

Yet that brings up the whole point of my message—why are programs like that so rare? Why are we so afraid to explore the nature of death in prime time (or anywhere else?)

I think there have been eight shows so far (they are already about to start re-runs!) and so far, this is what happens. Someone dies and resists going to the light. Sometimes they are clueless about the light and sometimes they aren’t. Each hold-out is an earthbound spirit. Melinda Gordon (the one with great cleavage) can see them and talk to them, and she eventually nudges them into the light.

Yet amazingly, she never talks about what the light is or what happens after you go into it. “Go to the light.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know why. Just go to the light.”

But actually, they don’t even say that. They don’t ask, “What’s so great about the light?

This just astounds me. You have someone who sees spirits, yet there’s no frigging conversation about what it’s like to be dead or why go to the light. In none of the shows I have seen has anyone said anything remotely like, “You know, I’d always heard that when you’re dead, you’re dead. Well, guess what, I’m not dead. The media is wrong. Medical science is wrong. Encyclopedias are wrong. World politics suck. People suffer needlessly. I was killed but I am still alive, and that changes everything.”

No matter how terrific Melinda looks in lingerie, it’s hard for me to imagine that she can be such a dense spiritualist. I want her to wake up from her nap.

Melinda mostly acts as if she has no true conviction about what happens when we die. She seems to have no big picture perspective about the whole life/afterlife thing. People who come back from near-death experiences have riveting stories about what they encountered during their adventure out of the body. You would think that some of this knowledge would rub off on a lifelong psychic channel like Melinda.

As I see it, death is a huge shake-up in perspective. Anybody who wakes up on the other side of the flatline and is still conscious has turned a huge corner in life as we know it. Yet none of the characters in Ghost Whisperer, including the iconic all-seeing seer, seem to grasp that fundamental.

So much of what we consider tragedy is based on the premise that when you die you end. You are gone. Show is finished. That’s all, folks.

But if “death” is just a transition—an ejection from a physical body—what’s tragic about that? You don’t end. You begin.

If I were a writer for the show (and I am not so no worries) I would be incredibly tempted to give Melinda some edge. I would make her more of a guiding light with a more sardonic humor. Instead, as written, Melinda often gets sucked into an emotional place that seems to depend on her being ignorant of universal law. She has a soap opera mentality with great cleavage.

She’s sweet, She’s luscious. I wish I’d met a clone of her sometime in my life. I wish I could talk to her and probe her mind.

I know a few people who do “soul rescue” work. They essentially wander around out of their bodies and assist earthbound spirits. It’s not “conscious” work as depicted in the show where at progressively predictable intervals, a ghost pops into Melinda’s face. It’s more subtle, like in meditation or sleep. It’s also a quieter process with more moxie about why a spirit should go into the light.

The problem I have with shows and movies like this is that they play in spiritualistic kindergarten. The show would be so much more interesting to me if the characters acted the part of someone having made a fascinating transition. Like the soldier killed in Vietnam in the show’s pilot episode (aired again December 2) could certainly have some pithy remarks about the war that took his life. “You know what? We don’t die! I killed somebody and now I know he’s wandering around the planet like me.”

“Turns out that ‘war dead’ is a misnomer, huh?”

“So why are we in Iraq?”

“We’re protecting our country from terrorists.”

“But nobody really dies. It’s a stupid strategy.”

“The government insists that we’re threatened.”

“The government should trust in God like the motto says.”

But no, the scripts don’t fly very high in the spiritual skies. I guess this is because if a show dared to talk too explicitly about what happens after you die, the religious lobbyists would toss their cookies. That’s the trouble with studying material of a spiritual nature; you’re suddenly thinking in an out-of-the-box way and you aren’t as earthbound anymore. You start questioning authority and tradition more. You start wondering if the philosophical goods we’re being sold are really good.

So Melinda the psychic keeps her vision of the universe pretty materialistic. She doesn’t talk about the law of attraction or the law of deliberate creation. No Abraham, no Seth, no Ramtha. She doesn’t channel wise beings, only confused ones. She doesn’t even quote James Van Praaugh (the show’s executive producer) or his medium competitors like John Edward or Sylvia Browne or George Anderson. She doesn’t mention God or Jesus or any other Christlike being. She doesn’t mention angels. She doesn’t broach reincarnation nor does she mention near-death experiences. She doesn’t mention astral planes or out-of-body experiences. Like I said, kindergarten.

In one episode, she was even shown watching and liking a horror film. I found that horrific. Why would any psychic sensitive deliberately dabble in phony fear?

In the spirit world, ghosts are generally regarded as troubled beings, which is why they hang around the earth plane. They don’t want to go to the light because they are afraid of the consequences. Perhaps they did something very bad and don’t want to face what they believe will be severe judgment. Or perhaps they are strong atheists so convinced that there is no God that they only attract a void or even a hellish place when they die (such as in Howard Storm’s famous NDE account.)

In the last episode of Ghost Whisperer that I saw, a bride was killed in a car crash on her wedding day. She never went to the light. She was pissed that she was separated from her brand new husband. Then she was really pissed that he fell in love with someone else and wanted to marry her. The nerve! So the bride decided to convince the new fiancée not to marry her husband by scaring her with a bunch of cheap special effects.

It would have been so much more interesting had Melinda had a nice heart-to-heart with the bride, but instead she got sucked into the ghostly theatrics. As I keep saying, I’d write an edgier Melinda. Rather than being such a great looking sap, Melinda could engage these miscreants (they all turn out to have big hearts no matter how the show originally portrays them as scary) in engaging dialogue about progressing into the light.

Death in the light is not tragic. James Van Praaugh has made a fortune teaching us that in his books. I’m not sure why his heroine hasn’t gotten the message.

Thinking About the Numbers

The death toll from the attacks on September 11, 2001 stand at 2,986.

Bush bashes critics who say that he won support for war in Iraq by exaggerating intelligence on Saddam Hussein's weapons programs.

Today's death toll on American troops for the war in Iraq stands at 2,065.

WIll deaths to American troops surpass victims from 9/11?

Then there's this!

Shouldn't we be figuring out what happens when we kill people?