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 networks, drawn by the fear of diminishing capacity, an ever-receding world, and fear of death’s path and its doorway into the unknowable.
My family is largely gone. What remains is my wife Sharon, and my older sister Pam, who both understand what I have accessed and support what I attempt to share.
Of my two remaining long-term friends, Jim is entering hospice care. The other, Sean — a man I first met in my sophomore year of high school, and whose path has diverged from mine for decades — briefly re-entered my life several times in the last 42 years, and now, in a moment of profound synchronicity. He encountered the two chapters on psychedelic experience just as he was investigating a Colorado church that uses entheogens to deepen spiritual vision and healing. That convergence felt less like coincidence and more like confirmation.
I continue to develop new acquaintances, and I never know which will blossom into friendships. I mentor no person, as even my grandsons find little relevance in what I have discovered. Beyond them, I lean into the world itself — into the few who still reach back to me.
The work goes on. The vision I’ve been blessed enough to glimpse keeps shaping and guiding my daily life, even as the world, as always, stays mostly indifferent. In Christian mythology, the crowd always chooses Barabbas, the thief and criminal, over the One offering a more spiritually elevated path. My own crucifixion comes each time I think I can cut through the collective fog that clouds human awareness and show people what our potentiality truly is, even with the support of a small but passionate group now beginning to awaken worldwide.
We all must walk new paths of consciousness. The worn-out ruts of all patriarchal religions must be replaced with a new understanding about the sacredness of Mother Earth and the interconnected and interdependent reality that we share.
We must meet all of the individual, cultural, and historical demons head-on, courageously, and with the intent to heal from the wounding they incurred upon humanity’s soul.
The “One”, whether you name it Jesus, the Buddha, Christ consciousness, or the Cosmos will not work out your salvation for you, it is up to you to either awaken to your true nature, or to stay asleep within its infinite embrace.
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.
