Epilogue: An Electrician’s Guide to Our Universe, and a Life, Love, and Death Upon Its Unlimited Bandwidth
An Electrician’s Guide to Our Universe has taken on a life far more expansive than I originally imagined — and perhaps that is fitting for a book that dares to explore the unlimited bandwidth upon which all life, love, and death unfold.
Writing the “Death” section brought me face to face with what I know intellectually and feel viscerally:
All things are impermanent.
Entering my eighth decade, I carry the weight of that truth not as abstraction, but as lived experience. I have witnessed much death. I have absorbed much loss. The circle of those I cherish has grown smaller — and quieter.
Many people at this stage of life turn inward toward family and church networks, drawn by the fear of diminishing capacity, an ever-receding world, and the dread of what waits beyond death’s doorway.
Pam, Sharon, my deceased father Beryl, and me
My family is largely gone. What remains is my wife Sharon, and my older sister Pam — both of whom understand what I have accessed and support what I attempt to share. The Universe is my religion, and my body is the portable temple that remains my primary vehicle for consciousness. Unlike many others, I cannot retreat to a childhood religion to find its familiar faces, stories, and comforts.
Sean is on the right
Of my two remaining long-term friends, Jim has entered hospice care. The other, Sean, is a man I first met in my sophomore year of high school, and whose path diverged from mine for decades. He has briefly re-entered my life several times over the last 49 years and has done so again recently in a moment of profound synchronicity. He encountered the two chapters on psychedelic experience just as he was investigating a spiritual community that uses entheogens to deepen healing and vision. That convergence felt less like coincidence and more like confirmation.
I continue to meet new people, and I never know which acquaintance will blossom into something more. I mentor no one — even my grandsons find little relevance in what I have discovered. Beyond them, I lean into the world itself, toward the few who still reach back.
When the infinite touches the limited, three common responses emerge:
- The limited awakens to its own boundaries, embarks on the arduous work of self-healing, and—ever reaching toward its Source—gradually dissolves into the limitless nature it always was.
- The limited recoils in terror at its own insignificance, retreats into denial, and ultimately crowns its delusion with righteousness. To dignify this retreat, it constructs elaborate religions and philosophies—monuments to itself, and snares for the unsuspecting (Joseph Smith and the early LDS Church stands as one enduring example of this tendency).
- The limited, overwhelmed by the vastness it has glimpsed, fractures under the weight of what it cannot carry. Neither healing nor hardening, it splinters—giving rise to minds that are brilliant yet broken, visionary yet ungovernable, forever suspended between revelation and ruin.
There is an uncommon fourth response, the response of the person who has touched all three poles across the span of a lifetime, and who arrives, in the end, not at resolution, but at acceptance. Not at just answers, but at a willingness to sit quietly with the questions. This is not the awakening of the mystic, nor the retreat of the denier, nor the fracture of the overwhelmed. It is something more modest and, perhaps, more durable: the grace of the one who has stopped performing their understanding and simply allowed their life to become the argument.
Where I fall on that spectrum is for the reader is welcome to make their best assessment, but, at times, I have touched all poles, though number four now feels the most comfortable for me. I make no grand claims. I am a retired electrician who stumbled upon something far greater than I could have imagined, with no truly accurate schematics to make sense of these endlessly intricate circuits of life.
The work goes on, fueled by a vision I’ve been lucky enough to glimpse, one that keeps shaping my days even as most of the world looks elsewhere. There’s a certain sadness in offering something freely to those not ready to take it in. History is filled with such moments: the choice between Barabbas and Jesus under Pontius Pilate, an election where Kamala Harris lost to a known criminal, rapist, insurrectionist and fascist Donald Trump, and the way people so often choose noise over clarity, comfort over change. My own version of that sadness comes each time I think I can break through the fog clouding human awareness—only to find the fog still there.
Still, a small but earnest group continues to awaken around the world.
That is not nothing.
I used to live a second-hand life, with my overprotective ego hiding behind other people’s stories and experiences to mask my own sense of inadequacy. When I finally discovered my true self, I found the real meaning of life and the joy of living free from culturally and religiously ingrained fears and desires, breaking away from the oppressive urge to fit in where I never truly belonged. It’s about finding peace and living in resonance with love’s vibrations, even if it means often walking alone in this world.
It might even mean stepping through the gates of hell into the underworld, as I once did, in search of the truth that gives life its meaning.
We must all walk new paths of consciousness. The worn grooves of patriarchal tradition must give way to a living understanding of the sacred — of Mother Earth, of our radical interconnection, of the shared reality we too often pretend is separate from ourselves.
We must meet our individual, cultural, and historical wounds head-on, with courage and the genuine intent to heal. We dare not turn away from our own suffering, or from the suffering of others, for they are one.
All life—human, animal, and plant—is sacred and incredibly precious. Live as though this truth is vital to your existence and evolution as a spiritual being, because it truly is.
Love has insights, and ignorance has slogans. Watch out for those who promote personalities while peddling idolatry. While watching out for those who attempt to deceive and control, watch your thoughts too, for they usually misrepresent reality in convincing and often tragic ways.
The “One” — whether you name it God, Yahweh, Krishna, the Buddha, Christ Consciousness, Mother Nature, the Cosmos, or any of the other ten thousand names for Truth — will not work out your salvation for you. That work belongs to you alone: to awaken to your true nature, or to suffer unnecessarily while you fail to connect with the Infinite’s quiet embrace hidden within you.
The Truth is free, but the ignorance of it can cost you everything.
As the “One” stated two thousand years ago,
‘The poor will always be amongst us.’
Yet, hope springs eternal.
This is all part of the work.
For now, it is enough.
