The Rembis Report and Other Fascinating Topics - Volume XXXVII

I wonder about the future.

I wonder about the future.

I am sure lots of others do, too. What will happen tomorrow, next week, next year, in the next fifty or hundred years, and long after we are all gone? 

Nobody knows.

Whether or not you spent the last 15 seconds reading that article, or if that 15 seconds was just you reading this far, there is no way for you to know exactly where I am going with this, and neither do I, because I have not written it yet. But, I have a vague sense of what I want to say, so here it is.

The mind plays tricks and your eyes can fool you. Besides your brain and eyeballs working in tandem to create a visual perception that you can accept as reality, you can only know for sure what you know from the past, as the future remains a mystery until that fleeting moment we call right now, when it becomes the present and is washed away to pile onto your past, making it a bigger mess than it already is. And the past is concrete. It is solid. It is factual. You know what happened and you can attest to it.

You can’t do that with the future. You can suppose. You may predict. Yet, you can not know for sure what will happen as well as you know what has happened. Will hot dogs still be a thing next year? Will they start making them with real dog meat? Who can say? So, a guess is as good as it gets. An educated guess is great if you have a lot of information to work with, but no prediction, no matter how well thought out and emblazoned in your mind will turn out exactly as you imagine it.

So, the mystery of the future remains.

My recent thoughts have turned to that mystery. I can not say exactly why. For the last 15 seconds, I have been summarizing my thoughts to get them onto this page just so that I can convey these odd concepts, even as I struggle to understand them. My future is a blank page which awaits my mark. A ponderance of the past is what prompts me to plug my perceptions and post them. My knowledge of the future is that it is a blank space that will soon be filled by history. So, as time rushes, or slips by, and when what I have focused on in the last 15 seconds is all I know for sure is real, how are we to make sense of the past so that we are completely prepared for the inevitability of the future?

The short answer is that we are not. Because nobody knows what is going to happen. 

I knew an advertising salesman who would rebuff customers who told him ads did not work with “You got a crystal ball? That’s great. I got a crystal ball, too, but it doesn't work, and neither does yours.” to prove his point that nobody really knew whether advertising worked or not. Advertising may not work. Or maybe it does. Nobody really knows. Surprisingly, that guy sold a lot of advertising.

The only certainty there is, is what has happened before. How it shapes the future is up for debate.

So, what of the future? If existentialism is too deep a subject for an otherwise pithy newsletter, I apologize. A few years ago, I spent some time working at a cemetery. The death business is it’s own world, yet it touches everyone. It is always waiting. We are all customers of death. No matter what anyone believes about what happens afterwards, the evaporation of that lively “soul” everyone knows you as will happen. Mortality will cease. No need to go into grim, physical detail, or discussions of pain, but I do want to explore that invisible veil of what lies beyond.

Is there life after death? Existence beyond existence? This is obviously not a new subject. The questions go back as far in the past as anyone can recall. It is as ageless a question as any other.

I like TV - no wait - I LOVE TV! When I consider a series pilot, I watch it and give it a serious chance to entertain me. When I like something enough to make it to episode 3, I usually stick around until at least episode 7. If I get that far and still want more, I generally end up watching the whole series. There are occasions where a series will lose me a few seasons in, but that is exceptionally rare. When I commit to a series, I watch them all, and I can remember everything I have seen. Go ahead, test me.

What spurred my recent curiosity about the afterlife was the TV show The Good Place. It is a fun, comedic romp starring Ted Danson as an afterlife entity hosting human souls for eternity. If you have seen it, you know what I am talking about. If not, I encourage you to watch all 50 episodes from beginning to end like I did.

Without dropping any real spoilers, what intrigued me most was the concept that there could possibly be an afterlife to the afterlife, one more unknown barrier to go through that goes to - where? Nobody knows.

Without a doubt, the unknown is much more intriguing than the familiar. But I am in no hurry to visit that void, mainly because I like it here, and am highly unlikely to report back. So, for now, I will have to rely upon the reports and suppositions of others.

Watching that show led me to a few other shows. The Surviving Death documentary series delves deeply into the near death experience (NDE), reincarnation, and making contact with the deceased. I was mesmerized, and really disturbed, by one inexplicable story of a boy who reports knowing himself as a man from the past. He is deeply troubled by his experience because he truly can not explain his own vivid memories and knowledge of people he has never met. When he finally meets a woman (much older than him) who purports to be the daughter of the man he was before he died, that is where it gets sad, creepy, and quite uncomfortable for everyone, including myself, the viewer. It raises not only the question: how do you explain this? But also, what if it is true?

What if it is true?

A lot of people think it is. That there is life after death. There is a Facebook group called the Proof Of Life After Death Facebook Page, just one of many with similar content. This is a big deal for a lot of people. It delves into ghosts, angels, demons, and everything you have heard of regarding the subject. There are shadowy photos, stories of noises, feelings, strange lights, dreams, you name it, anything and everything to broaden the mystery.

Do you become a ghost when you die? One fellow I knew theorized that only if you do not believe in an afterlife does that happen, because your soul is then condemned to walk the Earth as punishment for a lack of faith, regardless of religion.

“So if you don’t believe in ghosts, you become one?” I asked.

“Exactly.” he told me.

I’m not in any hurry to check out that theory firsthand either, but I do like the TV sitcom Ghosts. I particularly enjoy the premise that not everyone becomes a ghost, but those who do find themselves bound to the vicinity where they die, wearing whatever they had on at the moment of their demise, and are limited to only mild interactions with the living. The sad part is the double edged sword of being able to smell but not taste food that the living enjoy. The ghosts represent a microcosm of society, coming from different backgrounds and thrown together for eternity, having to deal with an array of changing circumstances within the home they inhabit, while unable to do much about anything, other than make the best of their circumstance and deal with it. For those who have not seen it or yet caught on, it is an updated version of Gilligan’s Island, and it is a lot of fun.

One poster wrote to the Proof Of Life After Death Facebook group:

Hello lovely people

So this may be a silly question.

And I’m not denying nor confirming anyone's religious beliefs etc. I’m still working it all out for myself, but definitely believe in spirituality, divinity and loved ones communicating to us.

My question is - Why are we (humans) not allowed to 100% know what is on the other side of life on earth. Why aren’t we given a guarantee of what there is? Why must it be kept a mystery with clues and hints given to us from time to time? I hope this question makes sense.

The unknown is terrifying so why aren’t we allowed to know!

I know there will be answers from different religious beliefs that say we do know, but I’m hoping for a more overarching answer, as there are so many religious views I am finding too confusing to stick with just one.

Sending love to all x

You can imagine the replies. Or you can join the group and see them for yourself. They cover every aspect of why, sharing every belief and consideration. The group is huge, boasting over 420,00 members. It would take days to read every answer. What answer(s) would you give this person?

The reason we are not allowed to know is because we do not know, is the short answer. But nobody wants the short direct answer. And when I was a kid and said I did not know something I found it to be one of the most frustrating conversations I ever had (and it was quite common) when some adult would ask me something I did not know and then ask “Why don’t you know?”

And I would have to answer “I don’t know why I don’t know!” Then I would add “You don’t know either, do you?”

Whatever it was we did not know, I can’t recall and do not remember if we ever found out, but I remember those conversations.

I am not really getting anywhere in answering the question about “what’s next?” but I am having a lot of fun wondering. It makes me wonder what I will see in the next 15 seconds.

If the researchers who compiled this data are correct, I will be looking at the words I am typing now on my computer screen in short order. But what if I get up and run down the hall, charge down the stairs and outside and it takes 15 seconds to get there? How will the visual stimuli I will see collectively become exactly what I see the second I step out the door when I have only been looking at it for one second?

Will I recognize my surroundings because I have been through that hall and down those stairs and outside so many times before, that I know what to expect? The brain puts it all back together to stabilize the image, sure, but what about when you go someplace you have never been? For me, this is where the 15-seconds theory needs an exponential push. 

When driving down a road at 60 MPH I move a quarter mile in 15 seconds. If it is a road I have been on many times before, I know what to expect, and I can put it all back together. But what if it is a place I have never been to before? How does the brain gather that 15 seconds of data and stabilize the image so that it looks normal to me?

Watching a movie I have never seen - same question. When robots and superheroes flicker across the screen at 24 frames per second, that is 360 different still snapshots I am looking at in those 15 seconds. So how fast does the brain actually work? Taking in all that data in a movie alone shows us how the brain slows down time to microseconds.

Microseconds.

For a movie you get 24 pictures every second and you can probably recall one of them really well. You can freeze frame it in your mind. In real life however, your brain can do so much more. Your eyes dart about so tremendously quick that you may be taking hundreds, if not thousands of snapshots every second. Even when you are watching a movie, your brain breaks down each of those 360 stills into even tinier pieces, and when you are driving down a road, or climbing stairs, or eating breakfast, there is no telling how many little snapshots you are collecting.

So where does it all go? 

All that information that your brain has compiled about everything you have seen and heard, not just over the last 15 seconds, but throughout your lifetime, what happens to it?

Does it dissolve into the unseen ether? Even a computer captures digital data and stores every keystroke somewhere, so once something exists, is it ever really gone?

When you do forget something, I mean truly forget something, like it never happened, that does not mean it never happened. It means that you can’t recall it. Do those memories become ghosts? Do they go on and exist on another plane, like a computer you can crack into and find out what was typed and when?

If so, that is one possible tendril of a theory to explain ghosts, and it is curious to wonder if when we die, we are able to retrieve all of that information and use it in some fashion. If we are able to use all of that information, everything we know, have ever learned and gathered, and are unfettered by the temporal bounds of human existence, what will we be able to do?

So for the next 15 seconds, think about what you have read here, what it means to you, and what you will do with the concurrent 15 seconds of your life, and all those beyond that.

I hope it is as wonderful as it is mysterious.