Moments, Memories and Life after Death - Letters From Readers

I read every letter that comes to me.    I wish I could respond to them all.     But please don't let my lack of personal response keep you from writing to me.  I love to hear from readers. 

This post shares some sentiments from a reader (whose name is kept private as always) who writes to me about the death of his wife of 18 years.    He reads my posts, and asks this question:  how can I embrace a philosophy that says that the material world is not real?  When this world is where I met her, loved her, lost her?  How can I ever embrace a line of thinking that takes that away from me? 

Moments, memories...all of these are real to us.   They are all experiences we have - fixed points in our timeline that we can revisit within the filmography of our minds, so that we can feel the poignant weight of their impact on our lives.   We miss these times; we long for them when the people who filled them are gone from our sight.    I am not asking us to embrace a world where they do not exist.  Sometimes, memories are all we have that remains as a testament to something that once was the greatest time we lived.    A world where the memories we revisit were never real to begin with would be abysmal.   

Memories may reflect the "aliveness" of your consciousness - and they may be more real 
than the biomechanical world your consciousness creates as an extension of itself. 

These theories that I have suggested here - biocentrism, conscious agents, etc. - are not intended to subvert the validity (or value) of memories, or their place in the grief process.  Indeed, the theory of conscious agents (as hypothesized by Dr. Don Hoffman) may instead place memory (cognition) and the conscious experience of  living at the very forefront of life itself. In other words, you - the reader - may only be alive in your conscious mind, and the earthskin that you wear on the outside may be only a projection of that consciousness exploring itself. This means that cognition - on the subconscious level - may be who you really are, and those memories that  you use to revisit the moments that matter may be more real than real! 

Life, then, may be only cognitive, only conscious - there may be no biological life at all, except as it extends outward as a manifestation of universal consciousness.    This, to me, makes the experience of living through visions, trips and recalls the most important part of perpetual life, and may point the way toward the understanding of life beyond life - and most importantly life beyond biomechanical death. 

So please - hold on to those memories. Replay them. Relive them. Cherish them. They are you, after all.