Eternity? Who me?

I’ll just come right out and say it: I don’t like the idea of spending “eternity” playing a harp. I wouldn’t even want to spend eternity playing a French horn, which happens to be the musical instrument I played from 5th grade through high school and love. I love to hear it starting at minute 1:05 HERE , if you’d like to hear it too at which point at least one of my kids will say with maybe just the tiniest bit of an eye roll: “we know mom- –listen for the French horns.” The french horn is such a lovely instrument- I also love just looking at it. Who could not find this anything but beautiful?

I know, right? I’d love to play it as well, but unfortunately, it’s well over 30 years since I’ve even held one in my hands and I doubt I’d remember many notes. Then there’s also that niggling fact that even though I knew the notes (e,g,b,d,f and a, c – -if memory serves) I didn’t know the notes. In plain English: I couldn’t read music. I could play the music (my sister would play the French horn part for me on her clarinet and then I could play it just fine once I’d heard what it sounded like) but I couldn’t look at a piece of music and tell you by looking at it what the tune was.  As I’ve spoken of many times before, it also parallels my not being able to get the given in geometry. “But the given is given!” everybody would tell me in the same slightly puzzled manner that they give me when it seems that the rest of the world is in on something that is simple and necessary to know and I was absent the day they all found it out. This happens to me often. I do understand now, as I did then, that the given was given and that is why I do wonder why I was blocked to receiving it in the same manner as most others do and if it is the same blockage I had about reading music. Perhaps if I took a crack at it now with an open mind or under the tutelage of a person who understands such blockages and does not regard them as stupidity or an unwillingness to learn, I might finally get the given, learn to read music and write my own songs. Then again, perhaps it is not the universe’s plan for me to get any of this because it would prevent me from seeing geometry and music in a way that is individual to me and not obscured by human interception (i.e. the “right” way).  But to get back to the point (of course I planned to get there!) though playing the French horn again may be on my bucket list, neither that nor a golden harp is how I want to envision eternity.

I believe people are generally afraid of death because they don’t know for sure what comes next. Some of us know what we believe comes next, but we don’t have any proof and God forbid you try to run something by people without solid proof.  Oh how we “woo woo” types love to keep those data driven types (who most likely ALWAYS got the given and probably are reading sheet music as we speak) rolling their eyes in impatience… Well, I don’t happen to have any solid proof of what I believe goes on, but that’s the great thing about beliefs: they’re your own. As it took me far too many years to learn: your beliefs do not require anyone else to believe them in order for them to be valid. They’re yours. You know what you know for a reason you may not yet know, but if you know that you know it, then stand by it. Things will be revealed to you as you need to know them, but take my word for it: trying to convince yourself that you believe what you don’t really believe for reasons you may not even realize, is an effort in futility and frustration. I was not fully aware I did that -I say fully because somewhere inside I just had to have known, at least unconsciously– until the day came when I was called out on it by a person whom I duly respected. The details are unnecessary, but she opened my eyes to what would become the beginning of my having to get real with myself. About many things, but we’ll touch on those another day… Anyway, to make a long story even longer, I realized that the reason that the thought of me playing a harp in heaven for eternity was horrifying is because I don’t believe for a second that we spend eternity in white robes playing the harp, nor do I think that we can comprehend a word such as “eternity” since our understanding of time is based solely on what we practice as human beings in the physical realm. It is my belief that time as we know it here does not exist in the same manner in other realms. And “going to Heaven”? Don’t even get me started!  Why would an energy force powerful and great enough to create us put us in what’s imagined by some to be a fluffy place forever with an instrument that most of us have never played and consider it “our reward”?  I also don’t think you get slapped into Hell because you’ve done “wrong”. Whose definition of wrong would we be referring to? Why would we be created out of love only to be destroyed for being the human beings we were created to be? I believe it is nearly impossible for us to understand the kind of unconditional love that is not of this dimension, so we use our human reasoning and end up applying the same kind of “rules” that apply to love on this Earth, which includes conditions and requirements. Unfortunately, sometimes religion has only served to further cement these beliefs, which then lead people to feel unworthy, unloved, and constantly aiming for a perfection we are incapable, as humans, of achieving. I am here to tell you that whoever and however you are, you are already loved- as is.  No, I don’t have a signed document to prove that, but tonight I want you to go outside and look up at the sky and ask for a sign that you are loved. Be open. You will get many. You already do. You’re just not seeing them. *p.s. you don’t have to be outside, but in the beginning especially, when you’re new to receiving information, it helps.

Once I could be honest about the truths of what I didn’t really believe, my honest beliefs about other things I thought I’d been confused about spewed out of me as well. Turns out I’d actually known what I believed all along. I guess I’d just been too afraid to risk rejection by admitting them to myself, in that I often saw things in a much different way than others, sometimes in ways that others found unacceptable. In the end, I realized it was no different than me playing my French horn in high school: I didn’t need to read the music in the same way as my band mates in order to play the songs with them. I just needed to do my part. How I arrived at it didn’t matter. If we can remember that about everybody we encounter we’d definitely be capable of making some beautiful music together. Let me just go round up my sister and her clarinet before we get started…