New Things, Old Things, Retired Things, Junkyard Things, Graveyard Things
2001 Newport Marathon
Over my lifetime, I’ve had quite the lineup of vehicles. It all started simply enough—with my own two feet, which I estimate have carried me over 75,000 miles through walking, running, hiking, and even limping. From there came a tricycle, a handful of bicycles, several skateboards, and eventually a parade of motorcycles and cars: a 50cc Honda, a 1970 350cc Honda, a ’62 Buick Skylark, a ’66 Ford, a ’66 Dodge Dart, a ’66 Chrysler New Yorker, a ’66 Chrysler Imperial, a ’74 Dodge Dart, a ’77 Datsun 310, an ’86 Honda, a ’92 Acura Integra, two Subaru Outbacks, a 2007 Toyota Hybrid, a 2018 Mazda Miata, plus a mix of hybrid and standard bicycles—including two tandems, one a Cannondale. All told, they’ve carried me well over 800,000 miles.
2016 Cycle Oregon-Indian Mary Campground
Each vehicle arrived with its own story. Some were given in generosity, others acquired by good fortune or reasonable negotiation. In the early days, repair was accessible and communal—parts were cheap, and unsolicited mechanical opinions were always free. I rebuilt two of my motorized vehicles almost entirely by hand: the ’66 Ford and the 1970 Honda motorcycle. I maintained every bicycle myself. And when the time came, I let each one go—some passed down to grandsons who completed their destruction with great enthusiasm, others surrendered directly to the junkyard. Today, only three remain in service: the 2015 Subaru Outback, the 2015 Cannondale tandem bicycle, and the 2018 Mazda Miata.
What is worth noting—and what took me years to fully appreciate—is how deeply I bonded with each of these vehicles. While I owned them, each one felt irreplaceable. I named two of them, which only deepened the attachment and made the eventual parting more difficult. Yet every single one of them wore out. Every last one ended up more suited to a junkyard than a service bay. No amount of affection, maintenance, or repair could alter that trajectory. The entropy of physical things is non-negotiable.
The Body as Vehicle: Who, Then, Is the Driver?
Here is where the metaphor deepens into something far more interesting than a personal inventory of transportation.
In many spiritual and metaphysical traditions, the human body is understood not as the self but as the vehicle of the self—a temporary conveyance for something far less perishable. The Vedantic tradition names it the pranamaya kosha, the vital energy sheath surrounding pure consciousness. The ancient Egyptians distinguished the Ka from the Ba—the animating spirit from its physical housing. Taoism speaks of Qi flowing through the body’s meridians, much as current moves through wire.
And there is A Course in Miracles, which states plainly: “I am not a body. I am free. I am as God created me.”
What does that mean, exactly? If we accept this premise—even provisionally, as a philosophical thought experiment—then the body is not the driver. It is the car. It is the wire. It is the lamp. And consciousness, awareness, spirit—whatever name you prefer—is the current running through it.
In this work on death and consciousness, I often use this precise metaphor: “The screen is not the image projected upon it. The current is not the wire through which it moves. When the wire fails, the current does not cease.” Elsewhere, I frame the body as cellular ornaments on a “Christmas tree”—a structure of molecules held in place by an invisible electromagnetic field. Remove the tree, and the ornaments fall. But the underlying field? It does not disappear. It simply reorganizes.
This is the question that truly animates the vehicle metaphor: when the car is totaled, where does the driver go?
Modern neuroscience offers a curious data point. At the moment of physical death, the brain does not dim gradually like a fading signal. It surges. Researchers have documented a massive spike in high-frequency gamma oscillations—the very brainwaves associated with deep memory recall and heightened, integrated awareness. In other words, the final moments of the body’s life may represent not a closing, but a crescendo. Not an ending, but something closer to a launch.
Quantum physicist Robert Lanza’s Biocentrism goes further still, arguing that consciousness is not a product of the universe but its very foundation—and that a conscious being cannot, by definition, subjectively observe its own non-existence. If consciousness is the observer that creates the experience of reality, then the death of the body is not the death of the observer. It is, at most, the retirement of one particular instrument.
The Name on the Vehicle
Now consider this: you likely remember a car you once named. Perhaps it was an old, battered thing that had earned a personality through years of quirks and repairs. The naming changed everything—it made the car feel like a companion rather than a commodity, a who rather than a what. And when it finally died, the grief was disproportionate, wasn’t it? Because you had confused the vehicle with the driver.
Your parents did something similar when they named you.
That name—your name—arrived before you had any say in the matter. It was attached to your body, your face, your developing personality. And over decades, you became it. You identified with it so thoroughly that the boundary between the name and the named grew invisible. Your attachment to your own continuity, to your own survival, is not entirely different from the attachment you felt to that named, battered car you refused to trade in for years past its time.
Both attachments are understandable. Both are, in a philosophical sense, a case of mistaken identity.
None of this is an argument for neglect. Quite the opposite. You would not run a beloved car into the ground carelessly, especially one you depended on for all of life’s terrain. The body deserves the same stewardship. Keep it well-maintained. Get the necessary diagnostics. Fuel it with care, rest it properly, and do not ignore the warning lights.
But hold it with open hands.
Every vehicle I ever owned—tricycle, skateboard, motorcycle, automobile—followed the same arc. I acquired it, I used it, I maintained it, I bonded with it, and eventually I returned it to the earth. The body will follow the same arc. The “dust to dust” of Genesis is not poetic exaggeration—it is biochemistry and entropy operating exactly as designed. The great recycling that sustains all life on this planet depends, quite literally, on the return of used materials.
What the traditions disagree on—and what no empirical instrument has yet settled—is what happens to the driver when the vehicle is finally scrapped. Do the currents of our life force dissipate? Does it seek another path, as electricity always does, toward the ground? Does it shift, as quantum language might suggest, from particle to wave—from a localized signal to something diffused across a wider bandwidth?
These are not rhetorical questions dressed up as conclusions. They are genuine openings.
The Odometer, and What It Cannot Measure
There is one figure in my inventory I keep returning to: eight hundred thousand miles. That is the distance my various vehicles carried me across the surface of this planet, and it is a staggering number. Yet it measures only the crudest dimension of the journey. For every vehicle I ever owned wore out or will wear out—and look again at that number before you call it a loss. Eight hundred thousand miles wore them down precisely because they were used. Because they were loved, driven, lived in.
A car that is never driven does not wear out. It also never goes anywhere. It never carries anyone home. The wearing out is not the failure of the vehicle; it is the evidence of its purpose fulfilled. Entropy, in this light, is not the enemy of a life well lived. It is the receipt.
And what a strange receipt it is, for it records almost nothing that mattered. No odometer ever measured the morning light through a windshield on a road whose name I have long since forgotten. No trip log captured the conversation with a grandson in the passenger seat, or the particular silence of driving home from a funeral, or the way a favorite song arrived on the radio at precisely the moment I needed it. No gauge marked the gravel roads and coastal highways, or the tandem bicycle carrying two people who trusted each other enough to pedal in rhythm toward the same horizon.
The vehicles logged miles. But the driver logged something else entirely—a mileage of meaning, of presence, of love given and received. That second odometer has no dial on any dashboard. And I have come to suspect it is the only one that travels with us when the vehicle is finally retired.
This is the quiet consolation that has emerged across all twenty-four of these chapters. The life circuit fails, yes. The tree comes down. The vehicle goes to the junkyard. But the wire’s whole reason for being was to carry the current somewhere—and it did. Every scratched fender and worn tire was a mile of experience that no junkyard can repossess. The miles that mattered were never stored in the machine. They were stored in the field of energy. And the energy, we have every reason to believe, is not something that ends. It is something that is released.
The vehicle returns to the earth.
The journey does not.
The Road Beneath Every Road
Here is what I know from a long life of vehicles and the miles they carried me: the attachment was always real, and the loss was always survivable. Every vehicle I grieved the loss of was eventually replaced by something new, something with its own character and story. The journey continued. The driver persisted.
Enjoy your time on planet Earth. Honor your vehicle of consciousness—this extraordinary, temporary, biological miracle that allows you to perceive sunlight and music and the face of someone you love. Maintain it. Respect it. But do not be it.
A Blessing for the Road Ahead
We have traveled twenty-four chapters together, you and I—through the deaths of my father and mother, through the underworld of addiction and the slow dissolution of friends, through hospice rooms and quantum equations, through the gamma surge and the sacred threshold. If this final chapter leaves you with anything, let it be this: the anticipation of death need not be a shadow that falls across your days. It can be a light that clarifies them.
The fear of death is, at its root, the fear of the vehicle being taken away. But you were never the vehicle. You were always its driver—the awareness reading these words, the witness behind your own eyes, the same unbroken presence that was there when you were a child on a tricycle and will be there when the last instrument is finally set down. That presence has no odometer. It cannot be totaled. It cannot be scrapped.
So let the anticipation of death become something unexpected: an invitation. An invitation to drive with the windows down. To take the scenic route. To name your companions and love them fiercely, knowing the parting will come and choosing to love anyway. Grief, as I have written throughout these pages, is the tax we pay on the bandwidth of love—and it is a tax worth paying, every time, without exception.
Death is not the great erasure the frightened ego imagines. It is a conversion event. A phase change. The current jumping the gap. When the wire finally fails, the energy is not erased—it simply stops being confined to a single bulb and rejoins the vast field from which it came.
We are the current and the field of energy that surrounds it.
Our biological life circuits will eventually fail.
The life force embedded in our energy field does not.
We will stop resonating with other bodies.
We will stop occupying our human body.
We will travel upon a new, wider path of consciousness.
We will be drawn onto the unlimited bandwidth of the universe,
While eternally resonating with its infinite life and love.
Will we return again?
If my dream life is accurate, I have been here several times before.
I will stick my neck out here, while I still have control of one:
We Have All Been Here Before.
And so we arrive, at the end of these twenty-four chapters, not at a grave but at a threshold—not at a full stop, but at an open road. Death becomes us. It shaped us, taught us, and clarified what mattered. And when our own turn comes to hand back the keys, may we do so the way I have learned to release every vehicle I ever loved: with gratitude for the journey, with open hands, and with the quiet certainty that the driver is going somewhere the odometer could never follow.
Safe travels.
