Exploring consciousness, reality, and the unexplained

Years ago, I worked for a wonderful woman who was a great boss and a good friend. She had struggled for years to conceive a second child. One day in a staff meeting, she grinned and told everyone the news — she was finally pregnant. As soon as she said it, a wave of complete nausea settled in the pit of my stomach. Dear God, I knew without a doubt she would lose the baby...

"We are not physical beings having a spiritual experience, but spiritual beings having a physical experience." A very wise friend told me this years ago, and it has never left me. Matter and energy are neither created nor destroyed, but transformed one from another in an endless cycle of renewal. Is renewal the only purpose or is there more?

Recently a colleague at work was given a bridal shower. That morning, I went to buy a card to wish her well. I found a pretty card with a wedding dress image on the front. But as soon as I held it, I knew I should not buy it. I did not know why. Later as we sat watching her open her gifts, she opened a card from someone else, and it was the card I had put back...

On the plane arriving into Chicago, we touched down and felt the strong pressure of braking. I was just thinking that it feels like we are going to run off the end of the runway. Within 10 seconds, a man in my row spoke to his companion and said, "A southwest plane crashed here in XXXX, you know. Yep, it was icy and it went off the end of the runway and through the wall and into the street..."

Recently, I asked my son who is almost 6 if he remembered telling me about the skeletons talking to him from under the road, when he was three. He readily admitted that he did not remember that happening, but he had heard a voice talking to him recently while we were driving down the road. A soft harsh whisper said, "You will join me here..."

As I walked early this morning on the peaceful tree lined streets of my 1960's neighborhood, I thought about the difficulty in knowing anything about our reality with certainty. Looking around, I tried to find some anchor that would help me reconcile my paranormal experiences to the everyday physical world. I look at the rust on a sign pole. I know the steel of the pole to be strong without needing to test it...

When I was a teen, my family was on a nature walk in a Florida swamp near the Everglades. As we slowly moved through miles of cypress swamps and oak hammocks, we started to hear a strange loud howl. It would call out every few minutes. Gradually the screaming howls got closer from both sides. We assumed it was panthers, but as they got closer we become utterly terrified and ran for the exit...

The dream of igniting a self-sustained fusion reaction with high yields of energy, a feat likened to creating a miniature star on Earth, is getting closer to becoming reality. Lawrence Livermore's National Ignition Facility focused all 192 of its ultra-powerful laser beams on a tiny deuterium-tritium filled capsule, releasing a neutron yield of nearly 3×10¹⁵...