That subject that is speculated upon, the wonderings of where it all leads, is there something after this mortal existence, is there a life after death? We’ve probably just grossly misnamed the term, because by doing that we separate the experience so completely, it is almost out of our comprehension to understand what it might be. Believing ‘life’ to end at death, and then ‘afterlife’ to begin, rather than it be a transitional phase, but we don’t give much time to ‘beforelife’ it seems. Thinking perhaps that we just spontaneously start at conception, or birth, although ones who lean towards reincarnation being real have given thought to that side of it, as discussed in Simulated, Again and Again, and Deja Vu.

Afterlife – but we do seem to spend time thinking about what comes next, we write about it, talk about it, make films and fictional representations of the ideas of it. Some quite dark and disturbing, others full of charm and brightness. Although not everyone is ok with the subject, or entertaining the thought of it, which could be a response to the idea of mortality and how they say it follows us throughout our life. I guess for some it is a companion accompanying you on your journey and will be with you to the end, and others maybe see it as an evil stalker waiting for its moment to strike and end your time.

Ghosts – Further to the thoughts of where we go after this life, it seems there are others that have already made it, or are trapped in between here and there depending on the context of their ‘haunting’. Discussed in Lost Souls, or Just Trapped?, giving examples of how we have created some rather sinister and morbid visuals to go along with the concept, which just might of led into people forming certain beliefs about their own trajectory.

Rent a ghost (TV series 1976 – 1984)- this was a strange and funny TV series I watched as a child, of bored ghosts and mishaps, with them ‘working’ as ghosts for rent if you needed a haunting. Things like this are what started to get me wondering about it all, and then many things I watched thereafter.

Flatliners (1990) – one of my favourites, not just because it’s a great film, but because it touched upon the idea that everyone’s experience is entirely personal, to who you were, what you did and how you thought. There is the theory that hell is only created in the mind, so if you believe it, you create it. See my article Creating a Nightmare Reality for a bit more on how our thoughts might just have more power that we realise.

Beetlejuice – mentioned a number of times in various articles, this film made quite an impact for its various ideas around the afterlife. With the surprised and newly departed lead couple, and seasoned afterlifers with their different reasons for being there. Like the receptionist said ‘It’s all very personal’ pointing out the shrunken head, the smoker, and then revealing her own fate of tied to civil service because of her own ‘little accident’ of suicide. Giving us an idea of judgement in some way depending on how we met our end, as if we are assigned certain fates based on how we lived. A spiritual credit score that you can’t escape.

Ghostbusters – another great film for many reasons, and has given me much food for thought over the years around this subject. But the recent ones, although not quite up the standard of the originals, still do hold a certain interest, especially because they focused more on what they do with them. Extracting them from objects, then putting them in holding cells, as well as obviously their overall containment facility. And another film comes to mind along that line of thought, and a film I should probably watch again for an updated view on it as it was many years ago I watched it, but it was quite freaky, and although I thoroughly enjoyed the idea and it was technically a good movie, I did not thoroughly enjoy watching it. But that film was Thirteen Ghosts.

If you’ve ever seen the old Victorian photographs of the paranormal spiritualist movement and time, you may have come across ones which appear to show faces and spectral shapes forming within contraptions of wires and frames. Trying to bring spirits through to this realm, and photograph them. You can see how we might have ended up at such films as mentioned above, with much thought clearly being given to what is next, what came before and what it all means. But the overall similarity in many of those themes, is that it isn’t separated from here and now, and isn’t ‘after’ life. That whatever happens to our energy doesn’t always go to or stay on that ‘Other Side’, that it can be here, watching or having its own existence with no care or concern of ours or even any knowledge of us, just as we don’t of them. Thinking all we can see is all there is to see, as discussed in Seeing is Believing, not realising that there is so much more around you. And you never know, even right at this moment something could be sat right next to you…

(c) MKW Publishing

A reading of my article – A Prime Choice

(c) MKW Publishing

Or at least that’s what we used to say. You can trust your eyes and seeing is believing is what we were told, and that may be true to a point when you are looking directly at something with your own eyes, in the flesh as you might say. Not with a barrier or screen in the way. However, it is said that a witness is the weakest form of evidence, our eyes and mind can play tricks on us, the memory can distort, revise, forget things or just completely make things up, so should we really believe what we see? Even something that seems simple like colour, it not As It Seems, with some people what we call colour blind, who have a different range of what colours they can distinguish. But turns out that even what we considered ‘normal’ for colour isn’t, looked at more closely in my article Seeing Colours.

It really does depend what goes on in mind, when you consider they say our outward view of the world is a projection of all the input we receive from external stimuli, which is then processed internally to form that view.

In my article What You See, it discusses different versions of a veiled reality, viewable by way of sunglasses, mirrors and certain viewing tools, which give us the idea that we are not seeing all that is there to see. That we are hampered with our limited scope of view and require something extra to allow us a window or A Portal of sorts into that ‘other world’ that is happened around us, not just alongside us in some parallel dimension, although it is said that is occurring too.

Another one that turned out to be quite a fallacy is ‘the camera never lies’. Clearly, that was a lie to begin with, so that you believe what you think you are seeing. Which would greatly help to solidify a collective history, not just written, but with ‘evidence’ of the time, of the people, the story. And when some photographs look a bit off, or strange skies, or appear to be washed out, we just assume it is age and time and give it a pass. Allowing perhaps that original saying to do the thinking for us, and view the image as a Snapshot of reality, or what think was reality. Because we have seen it, or because we think we have seen it and cannot verify or check for ourselves. So, we allow ourselves to be deceived perhaps as it is easier than being left with nothing to work from or with.

People are known for Seeing Things Differently, having different viewpoints and opinions, and thinking in different ways. But to think so many are perceiving quite huge differences in thought, based on what they see, or think they see, then it makes it quite a feat that we even have a shared reality we mostly agree on. Or maybe that’s why it isn’t so cohesive anymore, because so much or what we are shown by way of a screen, is so heavily edited and manipulated, our skills or discernment haven’t quite caught up. Having had a rather long time to develop certain senses in person, for person-to-person contact, it seems we are bit naive and ill-equipped to deal with such a high volume of material, as well as the content of what we are told are people. With extra confusion entering the arena as mentioned in Seeing Double, Guess Who and Who’s Who?, of clones, masks, deception and other things to muddy the waters even further. And we knowingly allow ourselves to suspend reality for Music and Entertainment, thinking even then we know what we are seeing, because we have been told and are apparently ‘in’ on the illusion. And by volunteering our attention to it and playing our part as the audience, thinking we are separate and just watching, not quite realising that we too become part of the story…

(c) MKW Publishing

I Robot – random segments of code grouping together to form what we might call the beginning of sentience. Not programmed, or coded in, but a tangent that develops and takes its own path. Creating those ‘Ghosts in the Machine’ that was part of the whole premise of that film. But if you replace the idea of robots, with people, you could say that it how we develop thought and ideas. We are in groups, in new environments or finding ourselves under different conditions than we have been accustomed to. We change, we adapt and something else happens, that is not usually programmed in.

Matrix – Smith code, absorbed into the ‘body’ of Neo, when he expanded his consciousness and appeared to destroy Smith. And if you think of the characters as parts of one brain, as I now do and as discussed in A Matrix in Mind, then Smith ends up representing people generally, the average Joe, your ordinary self, any old Smith. You can’t be special and ‘The One’, if you believe you are just anyone or no-one.

DNA code – that special strand that hold the information for our entire make-up, the key to our design and programming they say. Reminds me of how they portrayed Superman in Man of Steel, that when he was sent to Earth, the ‘Codex’ for all the engineered people on his home world, was hidden in his DNA. Crossing into the idea perhaps put forward in Prometheus, of something being created, and a substance that seemed to disband and break apart DNA. We seem to spend much time trying to unravel what we are, from a physical perspective anyway.

Codex – the word comes from the Latin (as they all do) Caudex, which means the trunk of a tree or a block of wood. Funny, I as was only rethinking the other day about the wooden men of first creation apparently according to Mayan myth (currently in a work in progress follow-up article to Monkey Puzzle) book of laws / tree trunk

Safe – having a code to get in, the code meaning you can gain access to the valuables inside, whatever that may be. Perhaps that is actually what supercomputers get to work on, breaking that code which will allow access to something deemed valuable, the answer, the goal. To get to that all important number, 42.

And we also have made use of it to mean an agreed upon set of rules. Code of Honour being a good example.

Coding – for all the new-fangled tech, the AI, the systems, the future… apparently. And for a number of years, the tech people and job market couldn’t get enough of talking about coding. How it was the future of everything, send your kids to study it, it will be the job market of the future. That didn’t quite pan out, and only last year AI overtook all that and replaced people before they had even had time to get out there. Keeping the word active, but letting it change meanings and become part of ‘the machine’, which we see as separate from us. We are people, not machine. Yet, sometimes I think we are not so separate, with of their systems based on how life operates and functions, but processed into something mechanical and only based on the perception of what we think we are, for now. And people have likened some seemingly vacant types as NPCs, as if they are an extra side character within the game of life. My article Not Properly Coded took a look at those types, to see what it is that people think is missing in others to give them that label.

So, we follow the coded breadcrumbs, with twists and turns as the drama of humanity unfolds, as we try to get to The Heart of the Matter and understand our individual and collective purposes. Trying to see through the decoys and distractions, of which there are many, for a bit of clarity in amongst all the illusions and programming. There is much to mull over…

(c) MKW Publishing