Valentine’s Day in the Afterlife
For me, Valentine’s Day has come to be a unique day in my life that has nothing to do with romance or anything like that (Given its bloody historical roots, that’s probably a good thing).
It’s a day that I commemorate with my late friend’s wife. It’s a day that I became a conduit for afterlife communication.
In 2017, my closest friend was diagnosed with stage 4 cancer. After nine months of suffering and a botched surgery, he was gone. Ken’s loss left a giant void in the lives of everyone who knew him.
In those dark days, I did the best I knew how to help prepare him for the worst-case scenario- something I don’t fear, but most people who haven’t had my life experiences, fear like nothing else.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m terrified of the kind of suffering that Ken experienced. I have, like everyone else who’s ever lived, experienced suffering. As the Buddha said, life is suffering. And, like the Buddha and Jim Morrison, I just don’t fear The End- if you can call it that.
For many reasons I won’t go into here, I’m not a religious person. The shorthand is that I was a philosophy student in college. Anyone who has studied philosophy knows what I’m talking about. I’m also not an atheist or even an agnostic.
I’ve had many mystical experiences. Some occurred spontaneously and others through intentional effort. I’ve done lucid dreaming. I’ve had out-of-body experiences and I’ve experienced cosmic consciousness. I’ve had close encounters of the highest kind. This was not something I was ever able to share with Ken, or pretty much anyone else.
Although he got married in a Catholic Church, Ken wasn’t a particularly religious person either. On Sundays we watched football. Yes, I’m a hybrid- part jock, part nerd.
In high school, Ken and I played against each other on rival high school basketball teams. Then we ended up at the same college and became best buddies.
We were also both techies. Ken started his career at Hughes Aircraft before becoming an IT guru to the stars. He maintained the personal devices of some of the biggest names in Hollywood.
I was also a techie, not by choice, but by necessity. I was a college graduate looking to start a career in graphic arts when the Mac transformed the industry. I was one of the few who could do graphics on the Mac. Back in those days there was no help desk. You pretty much had to be your own IT person.
So when Ken got sick and was suddenly face-to-face with his own mortality, I wanted to do whatever I could to help ease his worst fears. I wanted to be able to give him my collective studies and experiences, which had helped lighten my existential angst and helped guide me to many of the mystical experiences I’ve had, but it wasn’t right for Ken. He wasn’t interested. That kind of stuff just wasn’t his thing.
So instead, I used a computer metaphor called ‘Simulation’ theory – something we both could identify with – to help give him enough Big Picture perspective to defeat his very natural fear of death.
Simulation theory posits that reality is itself a computer simulation generated by perhaps the first civilization to successfully navigate the technological Singularity- when artificial intelligence exceeds human (biological intelligence) and becomes the driving force of technological development.
The best examples are computer games, which are becoming more and more realistic, and less and less distinguishable from reality. At some point, it will become impossible to know what is real and what isn’t. Hence the theory that this has happened before, maybe many billions on times, and what we’re experiencing right now is just another simulation within a simulation.
Elon Musk first made Simulation theory popular about a decade ago. It’s a very similar argument to Fermi’s paradox that I’ve written about in my book, The Day After the Singularity: UFO & the Great Technological Quantum Leap.
It’s gazillions-to-1 that we’re the first intelligent species/advanced technological civilization in the Universe in much the same way it’s gazillions-to-1 that this is the first Matrix-like computer simulation.
I thought that this possibility might be comforting and infinitely preferable for Ken than either the Western Judeo/Christian religious belief system about the very black/white concept of heaven/hell or the grim, science-based assessment that death is simply the end- the cessation of consciousness for all time.
So I took my iPad with me on a visit to Ken in order to, hopefully, give him a vision of The Bigger Picture that might resonate with him. I launched a Sim game that I play. Sim games have evolved over the decades since I first began playing SimEarth on my ancient Mac LC that looked like a pizza Box.
The difference between those early sim games and the latest iterations is so glaring it was like the difference between Fred Flintstone’s Dino the dinosaur cartoon and Spielberg’s Jurassic World CGI T-Rex’s, raptors, etc.
At the time. I wasn’t sure that my demo was of any help to Ken whatsoever. I’m not sure it wasn’t more than a minor distraction given his state of being, but it was the best I could do.
And then it happened very suddenly. He died. I couldn’t be there. I never got to say goodbye, but that was far from the end of the story.
About six months later I got a phone call from Ken.
It was very early in the morning and I wasn’t with it yet, so I didn’t answer when my phone began ringing with a very unfamiliar ringtone. Once I finally got going, the missed call came to mind. It was very strange. It wasn’t the default ringtone that plays when an unknown caller calls and it wasn’t any of the custom ringtones I created for friends and family that call on a regular basis. It sounded like a knock-off of a video game theme song- like someone made a mash-up of Super Mario and Ms. Packman, or something like that.
So I looked at my missed calls and saw Ken’s name, which didn’t make any sense. Not just because he’d been gone for a while, but because that was not the ringtone I had for him. I made a ringtone for him using the James Bond theme music in a nod to his work in both the MIC and in Hollywood.
When I looked at Ken’s contact info on my iPhone his custom James Bond riff that I made had been replaced by a ringtone that came with the iPhone called “Playtime.”
The implications didn’t immediately click. It was seemingly a very coincidental mystery that I stewed on for a bit, before it dawned on me that something unusual, and very strange, and very meaningful had happened.
It was a day later that I called Ken’s wife Lisa to talk to her about it. As it turned out, she was very likely the source of the call. She’d been going through his contacts in anticipation of ending his phone service and quite possibly might have sausage-finger dialed me.
But that wasn’t the end of the story…
It didn’t explain the ringtone shift or that “Playtime” was ultra-meaningful in the context of my video game analogy and Simulation theory. It was coincidence upon coincidence upon coincidence if it that’s what it was. What are the odds of that?
And that’s not all.
As I was discussing all this with Lisa, I realized it was February 14th- Valentine’s Day. I got chills as I thought that ultimately the message wasn’t meant for just me. I was also a conduit, a messenger. It was Ken’s way of wishing his wife a Happy Valentine’s Day from the afterlife.
That’s the way it felt to me anyway, which was the first time in my life I had something in common with arch-skeptic Michael Schermer, founder of Skeptic magazine and a regular columnist for Scientific American, who has been a leading UFO/paranormal debunker for the mainstream establishment for decades… until he had his own experience.
In 2014, Schermer published a column in Scientific American about an afterlife communication experience he and his bride had on their wedding day. In his piece, Anomalous Events That Can Shake One’s Skepticism to the Core, Shermer describes events eerily similar to mine, but involving an old radio instead of an iPhone.
Shermer’s confession was met with scorn from his skeptical constituency and glee from the other side (pun intended).
Apparently, Shermer really pissed-off the skeptical community by quoting Aldous Huxley: “The emotional interpretations of such anomalous events grant them significance regardless of their causal account… And if we are to take seriously the scientific credo to keep an open mind and remain agnostic when the evidence is indecisive or the riddle unsolved, we should not shut the doors of perception when they may be opened to us to marvel in the mysterious.”
If Shermer was shaken to his core over afterlife communication enough to quote Huxley in 2014 in such a way to alienate his base, one can only imagine the cognitive dissonance he must have experienced in 2017 when the government finally admitted that UFOs were, in fact, you know, real.
My friend Ken never got to see the publication of my book, The Day After the Singularity: UFOs & the Great Technological Quantum Leap. He died before I published, which was a great tragedy for many reasons, but for me personally, I never got to share my greatest success with my closest friend.
He never got to see my appearance on Whitley Strieber’s Dreamland podcast or hear him praise my book. He never got to see that astrophysicist Paul LaViolette endorsed The Day After the Singularity, comparing it to Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock, and nominating it for the Eric Hoffer Book Award for the Montaigne Medal for the most thought provoking book of the year in 2020.
He never got the chance to parlay all that with his Hollywood heavyweight clients and make the documentary we set out to make over 25 years ago.
But I get to celebrate his message from the afterlife every year with his family…
And that’s something I cherish.
Image: Heart Nebula:. Rick Wiggins/NASA Blueshift/Ken-Lisa