Fools tread where the wise won't.... sometimes I'm moved to utter foolishness.

I don't necessarily discount the possibility that some portion of what makes me "me" will go on after I die. Whether there will be enough "me" left to even BE me  remains to be seen.

I've had a few personal, non-verifiable experiences that I can no more prove to anyone else than their personal gnosis can be proven to me. I suppose some would equate them with religious ephiphanies, but I define them as moments of hyper-awareness....leaving me open to the possibility that there MAY be some other state of being that will continue to continue.

The first epiphany occured was quite a few years ago, as I was driving down a snowblown highway in the middle of winter. The Big Horn mountains loomed on the left, casting long shadows across the highway.... an open field with a small herd of antelope was on the right. I'd been driving for hours and pulled over to rest. Admired the herd of antelope because I hadn't seen them for so long...

Got out of the car, walked around and gazed up at the mountain. Mountains have always been as home to me... to this day, I  feel the lack when I have no mountain to aspire to. I cast my eyes up higher and higher, passing over each ridge, each crevice, taking enormous pleasure in the permanence of the mountain, until my eyes reached  the summit.... Observed a completely different weather system up there as winds whipped around a cornice that looked ready to fall at any time. Breathed in the cold mountain air and got the impression that the mountain was looking back down at me.... Have you ever had that feeling when you're being watched? It was kind of like that, in a very non-creepy way.

As I stared at the mountain and accepted it just may be staring back, all these pictures started popping into my mind.... bubbling volcanos, primeval swampy marshes, boiling oceans of water, billows of steam, fiery pools of molten crust, kilotons of rain, tiny lichens clinging to life, trees harboring the birds, squirrels and other creatures who depended upon their "home tree" for sustenance. Deer, antelope and bighorn sheep nibbling on grasses and shrubs, tiny caterpillars and insects munching on the leaves of the sparse wildflowers, Native Americans winding up a trail to pitch a camp for the night, an ancient shaman seeking shelter in a cave, a pioneer woman in a flowing dress with an infant strapped to her back, a bear cub looking for it's mother.... a wolf carrying her pup gently at the scruff of his neck... all these vivid images were as a snapshot of everything that mountain has seen since or experienced since the beginning of time.... and they were being communicated to me not because I'm anyone special, but only because I just happened to be there at that point in time when the mountain was moved to move so.

Was the mountain sentient? Reason and logic tell me no, yet reason and logic tell me we haven't discovered EVERYTHING there is to discover yet. YET.... Those moments of extra awareness granted me an insight that resembles the concept universal connectedness you've read in New Age books or some such.  Where others may attribute it to god, I attribute to a law we haven't yet met.

It is said that sound never dies..... it only attenuates, like ripples on a pond; until the ripples can no longer be seen and the sound can no longer be heard... Just because we no longer hear it, does that mean it no longer exists, or will an instrument capable of picking up the increasingly small vibrations of sound still be able to detect this?

If energy can never be destoyed and we ARE made up of ENERGY, where does it all go? Is it dependent upon consciousness or does all the energy join with the Universal mindspring? Do we travel to multiverse? I have no idea. But I'm open to the possibility of some level of universal consciousness.

The universe is much weirder and more wonderful than we can grasp all at once.