welcome lurker! glad to hear from you. please feel free to join in to your interest.
Alysia

Thanks for the welcome Ryan & Alysia!

Long post alert! I got a bit carried away although I could have typed a lot longer!

Quick introduction from myself, I don't yet know the boards etiquette so don't know if this is the right place but I'm sure a moderator will move the post if not! (is there a new user's forum?)

31 years old, from the UK (yorkshire originally, moved to the Midlands through university then work.. incidentally I work for a water company that lost clean water supply close to 100,000 properties recently through flooding. It's amazing how we take water as a basic requirement for life for granted, myself included! That was a busy week but we got them back on!).

Christian upbringing - sunday school, children's edition of the bible, fear of death, judgement, hell etc. Nothing too serious as I had a very open minded family. I didn't subscribe too heavily to the bible though, got stuck at the old testament with god losing his temper too many times - didn't ring true in my mind and decided to make my own mind up in future (although not dismissing god, just the way the bible was written).

As a child I was truly a curious being. If I didn't understand anything I would take it apart. My Parents' must have has infinite patience with me as I dismantled radios, clockwork music boxes, lamps, telephones - anything really to see how they worked. If I didn't understand how they worked I, at least, saw how they were constructed.

My curiosity overspilled into darker things occasionally as I did wonder a lot about death & life beyond death a lot and read lots of books at the local adults library (I was too young to have a library card but they couldn't stop me reading ) from Arthur C Clarke etc. Kids are like sponge at absorbing information and I took it all in - the universe seemed like a very scary place for a time and I remember being scared as hell of ghosts and evil spirits in my house. Paintings used to fall off the walls in my bedroom every night. Lord knows what really happened there but it could have been down to dodgy picture hooks more than anything!)

University - got a decent grade in Physics - I wanted to know how things worked, the world, the universe etc. The one thing I learned is the more you study Physics the more you realise the less you know about the universe. It kind of opens your eyes to how much we really cannot explain on Earth. The more you explore, the less you know - it is a very frustrating subject to study if you're looking for answers!

Fast forward a bit, found a great girl a couple of years who I am marrying in February. I always thought I'd be happy alone with my own thoughts, ideas and creations but She changed all that!

Just over a month ago, my Father died at age 61 following a stroke two weeks previously. I grieved in my own way - I didn't cry much because I honestly didn't believe (or don't believe) that people are gone forever. In this society, you're kind of torn between religion or pure athiesm. Anything in-between and you're judged as a bit "out of the ordinary" (to put it politely). It seems very taboo to have your own belief outside of a common belief-system (but maybe that is how life is supposed to be).

Anyway, about my Dad. When he died, I had the initial shock but my Mum told me that when we grieve we were, in fact, grieving for ourselves. Our own loss, not theirs. This made a lot of sense to me - grieving is very important yes but it's good to understand why we're doing it.

Which brought me back to thinking about the afterlife, death is terminal yes (as Monty Python's "life of Brian" pointed out) but it isn't necessarily the end. So I began searching the web. My precise search term in Google was "life after death" (an oxymoron I know) and the first hit was this site.

So, why am I here?

I'm not here to contact my Dad. I'm content in the knowledge that he had such a strong belief that death isn't the end and was reasonably religious enough to know that he had a higher purpose to pursue after death. He'll be alright.

I've been reading the forums for a couple of weeks, reading about TMI, Bruce Moen and all your experiences, beliefs and philosophies on life and death. I would love to experience something beyond the physical dogma laid out before us all within every day life and I love it when people have an absolute open mind about such things without being swayed by religion, politics or peers.

Take care all and god bless (whichever god you subscribe to),

Mark

Hiya Bets!

Yes, I suppose that makes sense, I didn't really think of it like that. Everything in our known universe is energy or can be equated to energy in it's rawest form, human's are just a part of that.

I apologise but I have to refer to "Star Wars" here, when obi wan feels a great disturbance in "the force", the end of a human life must have an effect on others beyond the physical and psychological. I wouldn't like to believe that the connection breaks in actuality but maybe the physical human mind considers this possibility when losing the physical companionship. It really is a shame people aren't given the space and time they need to come to terms with these events.

When we went to scatter my Dad's ashes on the Yorkshire moors a couple of weeks ago, my Mum told me she knew my Dad wasn't in the house any more - she would "just know" if he was still around. He had found somewhere and that gave her comfort. I didn't ask her to explain how she knew, we were just kind of on the same level at the time and I knew what she meant and I honestly believe her.

Thanks for the great welcome and for the water/flooding thing - it was an amazing feat of human resourcing that got people's lives more or less back to normal in such a short space of time! We had 2,000 company employees from accountants to engineers out restoring supplies, distributing water and clearing sewers. There is still a lot of devastation to peoples homes and will be for a long time unfortunately - these lessons we all have to learn longer-term unfortunately as freak weather events happen more and more. I won't digress any further anyhow!

Take care and god bless (whichever god you subscribe to),

Mark