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The Perfect .400 Hitter

Thursday, September 2nd, 2010

I’d like to divert from my usual topics to discuss one of my hobbies today.  Baseball.  The national pastime.  For those of you who are unfamiliar, baseball is a game played with a ball, a stick, and a baseball diamond.  I’m not going to get into all the rules here, as I’m sure someone else has already done this.  I’ve studied baseball history for about 15 years now and in that time, no one has come close to hitting .400 (that is, having a base hit in 40% of at bats).  Tony Gwynn in 1994 hit .394 in a strike-shortened season, but who knows which way he would have went if the season went all 162 games?  My guess is he would have ended up somewhere in the .370s or .380s.  No offense, Tony.  It’s just that the media pressure would have driven you crazy, much like what happened to Roger Maris in 1961 when he broke the single season home run record by one in a longer season than the previous record holder.  But if anyone could have done it, it would have been Gwynn.  He was a pure hitter, with little power and a knack for hitting line drives and a good eye.  His career batting average nears .340, which is the highest in the last 60 years.  And there’s the rub.

For the most part, people don’t hit for obscenely high batting averages anymore.  Why?  There are plenty of reasons, and I’ll start with what is the most prominent one.  Strikeouts.  Batters strike out quite a bit more than they did 70 years ago, when Ted Williams became the last baseball player to hit .400.  Statistics show that somewhere between 25 and 30 percent of balls put in play are base hits.  That would add around 20 or 30 points to someone’s batting average if they never struck out.  Pitchers are far more skilled than they were in the first half of the 20th century.  I’m not saying that there were no skilled pitchers back then,  just that there were fewer in proportion to the amount we have today.  They throw harder, have more movement on their pitches, and with the use of multiple relievers in a single game, there are fresh arms pitching the majority of the game as opposed to the 1900-1960s era where most starting pitchers pitched at least 20 complete games in a season.  There are specialist relief pitchers today who come in just to face one batter.  There are more pitches today than ever before.  The hitter is constantly guessing at which pitch out of dozens is going to be thrown.  Thus, there are many, many more strikeouts.

Every .400 hitter struck out less than 8% of the time in that respective season.  How many players today strike out less than 8% of the time?  It would be cumbersome for me to look that up, so I’ll estimate that it is probably between 1 and 5 percent of all Major Leaguers.  Also, it helps to walk quite a bit in a quest for .400.  The less at bats you accumulate, the better chance you have to hit .400.  Why?  Because that means you don’t have to get as many hits.  If you walk 100 times in a season, that is 100 plate appearances that don’t factor into your batting average.  It definitely pays to have a patient presence at the plate if you truly want to hit .400.  If you look at what Ichiro Suzuki did just a few years ago, breaking the single season hits record, you’ll understand what I mean.  He hit .372 that year, which is excellent, but he had over 700 at bats.  Not plate appearances, but at bats.  Granted, he is a leadoff hitter and would not have been able to break the record had he walked 100 times or hit much deeper in the lineup.  But he would have had a much better chance of hitting .400.  But he is not exactly a power hitter.  Pitchers don’t mind giving up a few singles, so I highly doubt Ichiro was intentionally walked much.  He has a threat of hitting the long ball, but for the most part, he is a contact hitter.  His speed and contact ability allow him to collect many infield hits, therefore padding his batting average to higher than your average player.  Speed is a definite advantage when it comes to hitting .400.  So, patience and speed are two other factors that would contribute to the creation of the perfect .400 hitter.  If you can steal some cheap hits with your speed and be patient enough to take a bunch of walks so that your at bats total goes down significantly, you are upping your chances for .400.

I would also argue that in this day and age, a player with respectable power would be more likely to hit .400.  Not your typical slugger, but someone who hits maybe 20-25 home runs a year.  Someone who will occasionally be pitched around to get to a weaker batter.  Obviously, a consistent hitter would also be at the top of the list.  Someone who has similar stats each year would be more likely to be able to reach the .400 mark due to their well-disciplined personality.  Somebody an awful lot like Ted Williams.  The year he hit .400, he also led the league in home runs.  He was known as both a power hitter and an average hitter, and struck out very infrequently.  He walked quite a bit, as his #1 ranking of all-time in on-base percentage shows.  Quite frankly, someone with his caliber would have a hard time hitting .400 today, but that doesn’t mean it is impossible.  Lady luck must be on your side if you ever hope to get into this exclusive club.  Certain flares that you hit must fall in.  You must accumulate at least 10-20 infield hits.  For some reason, you must be a left-handed batter.  Why?  Because left-handed batters have an advantage against right-handed pitching, which is still a majority to this day.  Both Wade Boggs and Tony Gwynn were left-handed batters and they both had the highest career batting averages of the last few decades.

It would also help to miss a small chunk of time if you are going to hit .400 for a season.  As long as you amass 502 plate appearances, you still qualify for the batting title and your record will be official.  I know it could be called cheating to some, as I was extremely mad in the 1990s when Mo Vaughn narrowly missed a batting title to go along with his 40 home runs due to rival New York Yankee Bernie Williams, who had much fewer plate appearances than Mo.  Not only that, Bernie Williams, on the final game of the season, went 2-for-2 and was taken out of the game.  Mo, who had over 600 at-bats, had a batting average that was within 0.2% of Mr. Williams, and came up short.  But for the .400 hitter, there will likely be no one even close in terms of BA.  So, no harm, no foul.  I would say between 550 and 600 plate appearances would be a good number, with maybe a 15 day disabled list stint placed somewhere during the season.  Look at Chipper Jones.  He won the batting title in 2008 with a mere 534 plate appearances due to I believe 2 stints on the 15 day DL.  .364 BA is nothing to sneer at.  He only had 439 at-bats, due to his patience at the plate.  90 walks certainly helps your batting title goal.

So, here are the criteria for the perfect .400 hitter:  A player who strikes out very little, walks rather frequently, has speed to beat out infield hits, has formidable power to attract intentional walks, has fewer than 600 plate appearances (although this is not a necessary requirement), and has to be a pretty consistent hitter, and most likely left-handed.  Or a switch hitter.  This would have to be someone who can avoid cold streaks and be able to rattle off some hot streaks.  It would also have to be someone with very thick skin, as the media can create a ton of pressure.  A player who can recognize pitches very easily, someone with the great eyesight of Ted Williams.  Not to mention a knack for being lucky when others are not.  So the question is:  Is there anyone playing in the MLB right now who I think could hit .400?

Right now, I just don’t see it.  I don’t see a single player who possesses all of these qualities to the extent necessary to truly put together a .400 season.  I could be wrong and someone might get lucky.  There are just so many factors that contribute to a season like this that it would take some sort of miracle for any current player to hit .400 for an entire season and qualify for the batting title.  It’s a long season, and you never quite know what’s going to happen.  Perhaps in the next 20-50 years, we’ll find someone who can accomplish this feat.  But I don’t want him to be handed this .400 crown, like a team out of contention giving him fastballs down the middle because they want him to succeed so badly.  I guess .400 is baseball’s version of the 4 minute mile.  Although, it kind of goes backwards instead of forwards.  The mile record is well below 4 minutes now, but it’s been almost 70 years since someone hit .400, and even before that, very few did.  It’s only been done 35 times, all before 1942.

I think we have a .400 hitter on the horizon, but I can’t say for sure.  If things fall right into place for a player having an already amazing season, then it can happen.  As for hitting .500, forget it.  We’ve got to hit .400 before we can even talk about .500.  Most of the .400 hitters did it before 1900.  That was when baseball was in its infancy.  Whoever eventually does this will have to be a superman.  And be extremely lucky.  But I have faith and so should you.

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Take the Red Pill

Thursday, August 26th, 2010

Remember The Matrix?  The scene where Morpheus tells Neo that he can take either the red pill or the blue pill?  The red pill will open his eyes to what reality truly is and the blue pill will keep him living the way he is now, but never knowing the real truth.  I find this to be a great metaphor for conscious living vs. unconscious living.  Some people prefer to live in denial and ignorance (the blue pill), while the  others choose to expand their minds and their consciousness by taking what I’ll refer to as the red pill.  Which would you prefer?  Which would give you the best results?  Is it better to be blissfully ignorant or consciously aware?  I would personally say the latter, but the choice is entirely up to you.

The truth is that most people swallow the blue pill because it is simply easier and requires less effort.  It may give you subpar results, but at least you don’t have to work so hard for them.  You don’t have to grow if you don’t want to because you are running the same patterns over and over, with similar results, what I would call a stagnating life.  You don’t question your reality, you simply accept it and keep living as so.  That hardly sounds inspiring, and it is probably rather boring to keep your life in such a small box that it doesn’t seem to change a whole lot over decades.

Taking the red pill is a risk.  It is not based in security, but rather curiosity.  It is like taking an adventure.  You’ll learn things about yourself and your reality that simply cannot be learned from the perspective of the blue pill.  It is the path of growth, where you are constantly expanding your mind, consciousness, and sense of self.  It is the way of conscious evolution.  You are constantly growing, constantly learning new things to aid you in your pursuit of growth.  You become stronger and more intelligent through this process.  You become more of a human being and realize the true greatness within all of us.  This seems quite inspired, now doesn’t it?  But it is far more difficult than just staying in “normal” mode.  It requires courage, self-discipline, willpower, persistence, and a whole host of other qualities that will take time and effort to develop.

You can choose to take reality at face value, or you can choose to actively participate in the creation of your reality.  What seems more intelligent to you?  What is a better predictor of success in whatever field you find yourself in?  To let the tides of life throw you around or to take control of the ship and start directing your course?  Imagine if in The Matrix, Neo took the blue pill and the rest of the movie was him working in a cubicle for the rest of his tired, wretched life.  What kind of movie would that have been?  A lousy one at best.  He would have been like an NPC in a role playing game, just sleeping through life, not really making a difference.

When you work in conjunction with the universe to manifest your goals, they will be easier to manifest.  Doesn’t that make sense?  Logically and intuitively?  If you either don’t work at all or work against the universe in manifesting your goals, wouldn’t you imagine you’d have a much harder time getting to where it is you want to be?  But what about going with the flow?  That works great for water, but lousy for humans.  If you ever want to accomplish anything in your life, you will need to create your own flow and work with it, not the flow of social conditioning, which is suboptimal at best and self-destructive at worst.  The big question is:  Which flow are you going with right now?  And how can you create your own flow?

You create your own flow by going with what you are passionate about.  It is easier to do something you love than to do something you don’t like.  Even if the work is harder on the love side, it will be intrinsically rewarding as well as extrinsically rewarding if you become successful at it.  Even if you are extrinsically successful at something you do not like, there is no intrinsic motivation to keep doing it because it is not something you are passionate about.  It is better to fail at something you love than to succeed at something you hate.  Succeeding at something you hate is not truly a success.  It is more of a tedious waste of time.  Why devote yourself to something you hate?  You will be working against the flow of your passion, so it will be many times more difficult to succeed, and it will be less rewarding.  Why paddle upstream when you can ride the currents of your passion?

Taking the red pill is consciously following your passion, being committed to it, becoming it.  You live, breathe, and eat your passion.  You do what it is you have to do to become what it is you wish to be.  You ride the flow of passion and inspiration, combined with willpower and self-discipline.  You may not be where you need to be in terms of success yet, but the sheer joy of doing the work you love makes success irrelevant, as you are enjoying the journey, and not just the destination.  You are no longer attached to outcomes, even if you are successful, because it is simply a continuation of the wonderful journey that you are on.  And the more you do the things you love, the better at them you become, and success is all but guaranteed.  As long as you follow your self-created flow, you will get to where it is you wish to be.

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Beliefs and Context

Friday, August 20th, 2010

I’m really looking to ramp this blog up.  By that, I mean seriously working much harder on it.  By that, I mean putting in conscious effort to create meaningful and lasting content that truly makes an impact.  I like where I’ve taken this blog in the last couple of months, and I wish to continue that trend, only with more focus and intensity.  I feel that blogging is a real contribution I can make to this world by expanding people’s minds and hearts to new ideas that may or may not be outside their comfort zones.  I really want to make a difference in people’s lives.  That is my main motivation.  I want to challenge people to think outside their box and to move beyond close-mindedness into a new way of thinking that allows for multiple perspectives.  This will, in turn, create a field of perspectives from which to make decisions more accurately, rather than relying on one context alone.  Challenging?  Yes.  Impossible?  Certainly not.

There are so many perspectives you can take when looking at reality.  There has to be millions if not billions.  Your perspective, or context, is what defines how you approach certain situations.  For example, if you are a Christian, you may believe that everything that happens in this life is a result of God’s will or other divine being.  So you surrender your life to a higher power and live knowing that whatever happens, some greater intelligence meant for it to happen.  How would that affect your life?  I would say that it would absolve you of some personal responsibility and make you feel good inside, but at the same time it would make you feel that you are not in control of your own life, that some super-intelligent being is.  A super-intelligent being you’ve never seen or heard from (unless of course you have).  Another part of Christianity is the concept of Hell.  That if you do certain things, after you die, you will be placed into a place with torture, pain, suffering, and the likes until the end of time.  How loving of our compassionate God, huh?  Using fear to control the masses.  Sounds more like human planning, not divine.  But if it works for you, adopt it.

On the other end of the spectrum, you could adopt a perspective that says that there is no God, no afterlife, and that this life is all we have.  Another fear-based context, but a valid one nonetheless.  If you never know when you are going to die and this is the only life you have, it would make sense to try to prolong it as long as possible as long as you are enjoying yourself.  Otherwise, it would be best just to put an end to this awful nightmare.  Because there will be no suffering beyond life, ending it is a guaranteed way to end suffering.  At least from this perspective.  Another thing is that there will be no consequences after death for your actions on Earth.  It may feel liberating, but deep down most of us still have a moral code and would not harm others just because we feel that after we’re dead, nobody can hurt us.

There are beliefs that we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively.  That there is no such thing as death.  That life is nothing but a dream and we are the imagination of ourselves.  That it is simply just a  ride that is fun, for awhile.  That one day, when we supposedly “die,” we will finally see the true nature of our existence.  We will still exist, in some spiritual form and still be able to develop our consciousness even after our “avatar,” or physical body, dies.  This perspective seems to be very popular in the spirituality movements and creates the notion that we are all one and that we should cooperate instead of fight, that life should be enjoyable for all, because we are all the same, all together in this experience.  And what a wonderful experience it is.  It gives us a feeling of unconditional security, meaning that no matter what happens, we are safe.  It is a very empowering belief system that definitely benefits humanity, rather than detract from  it.

There are tons of belief systems, and tons of times when each one will work better than another.  Practice makes perfect in these areas.  What’s better for a certain situation will be up to you to decide.  But calibrating your decisions over a long period of time will eventually lead to becoming an expert on which context to use in which situation to the best effectiveness that you can perceive.  It is really an  experiential procedure that takes a lot of trial and error.  Of course, you may find one belief system works for most of the situations in your life and that only on rare occasions do you have to step outside that box and into another.  And that’s great.  It’s all about living to be the people we want to be.  But being aware of all the other belief systems is important because you never know when they will come in handy.

I’d like to say you should do this process gradually.  Don’t try out 10 belief systems in one month.  Take your time to really absorb each one and take the good and leave the bad.  That is, take what resonates with you, and drop what doesn’t.  There are no rules that dictate what you must believe.  But it is better to believe things that you actually feel are true than to try and convince yourself of something you feel to be untrue.  And you have to immerse yourself in new  beliefs.  You have to truly feel that  you believe them, otherwise, you will just know of them, but not truly understand them.  I have to say that no belief system is entirely wrong, but no one belief system is entirely right either.  Reality is perceived through filters (i.e. our senses, our beliefs).  It all depends which filters you are using that determines what kind of reality you will experience.  Of course, we all live in the same reality, but our differing beliefs create for an interesting variety that makes the world different in every being’s eyes.  And that can make for some pretty interesting conversations.  And wars, but hopefully one day we’ll get past all that.  I believe it.

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Brain Tumor Experiences and Inspiration

Friday, August 6th, 2010

Brain cancer sure takes a lot out of you.  I’ve been cured for seven years and I still can’t exercise without having to take pain medication afterwards.  My eyes and head flare up at the first sign of cardiovascular activity.  That is what happened today.  I figured I would go for a walk for about 30 minutes.  I hadn’t gone for a long walk in awhile, but I just wanted to see if I had progressed at all in the exercise field.  Sure enough, about halfway through my walk, which was not a brisk walk, just a garden-variety walk, I noticed pressure behind my eyes and a general overall headache.  I had to keep walking or I wouldn’t get back home.  So I kept walking and now my eyes feel really stiff and strained.  I guess I should really get to accepting my limitations.  But I want so badly to be able to exercise.  It seems we have a catch-22 here.  I don’t have problems if I walk a short distance slowly, but any strenuous activity puts me feeling much worse.  I guess it is the price I paid for having brain cancer and this has been a constant for seven years.

Being a brain cancer survivor comes with positives and negatives.  There are things I probably will never be able to do again.  And there is wisdom that I have gained from this experience.  I no longer sweat the small stuff.  The small stuff is inconsequential to me.  It has made me into more of a big picture type of guy.  It has made me think all the questions of why we are here and what consciousness itself is.  I’ve had a lot of time to think about so many things concerning the nature of this reality.  I’ve been able to read online via ReadPlease2003 (to prevent any further eyestrain) thousands of articles about a variety of topics that I have an interest in.  While it is extremely difficult for me to read pages of a book without experiencing pain and eye strain, I have the whole Internet at my disposal.  Life has not been easy, but there is always some way to adapt.  I’ve heard stories of blind people using the Internet using a program called Jaws.

I’ve maintained a full-time job for about a year now.  I have benefits and vacation time.  I work the night shift, mostly because it is easier for me on so many levels and I don’t always have to be 100%.  It’s easy to fix up shelving and take care of the occasional customer even if I’m not feeling my best.  It is a job that I can do with the conditions that I have and it has worked out very nicely for me.  I always get great reviews from my boss and supervisors.  I am even en route to becoming a supervisor.  So, I’m making decent money and working full-time, which is a hell of a lot better than I thought my life would turn out after all the problems I’ve had after cancer.

I have had periods of months where I was in severe pain in my eyes and head 24 hours a day with no relief in sight.  I have been discouraged, depressed, and frustrated to no end.  But I always seem to come out of those periods to a functional existence.  If I push myself too hard, I will pay for it for at least a couple of days with severe headaches.  My tumor is gone, but for some reason, my brain never healed completely.  I have a dural leak in my brain that is very vulnerable to opening after any strenuous activity.  Life has not been easy for me these past 8 years.  But I’m still standing.  I’m still strong.  This has to be the best year I’ve had since I was 15, which is saying quite a lot.  That was before I had the tumor.

Now that I’ve got all this positive momentum going, a lot of times I want to push myself harder, but every time I do, I pay for it.  So I just ride the wave I’m riding.  I wish I could do more, but unfortunately, unless I want to totally destroy what I’ve got, I need to play it safe when it comes to doing things.  I need ample time for relaxation.  I need to get good sleep.  If I don’t, the same rules apply as when I overwork myself.  I feel kind of fragile for someone so young (24).  But, like I’ve said, I can’t change what happened to me and it has afforded me benefits as well.  I inspire others by my actions.  I overcame something that was potentially fatal to become a productive member of society.

I just thought I would write something that shows how I live after brain cancer.  It may not be all roses, but at least I still have my mind and for the most part, my overall health.  I could have had a relapse and more radiation or even chemotherapy.  I can say that for what happened to me, I’m pretty damn lucky.  I could have ended up in a nursing home if they botched my 9 hour surgery.  The surgery where they actually separated both halves of my brain to get to the pineal gland to extract a piece of the tumor.  My headache seems to be subsiding now due to Fioricet.  Thank the Lord for that.

I think somewhere down the road I’d like to become some sort of motivation speaker for cancer patients.  Of course, being humorous in my speeches is second nature for me.  I’ve got plenty of material.  I want to show people that yes, there is life after cancer, even if it isn’t always easy.  The fact is that you survived.  You beat the odds.  You are living proof that cancer can be contained.  It may be hard to eradicate cancer, but the rewards are timeless.  Your perspective will change dramatically.  If you’ve beaten this, what else can you overcome.  What else can you accomplish?  Your fear should no longer hold you back.  If it isn’t life threatening, then what are you so afraid of?  You’ve beaten cancer, so you can do anything.

My speeches would go somewhere along those lines.  I know that my calling is to raise people’s awareness and allow them to become who they feel inspired to become.  It may not always be possible to become what you most want to, but to not even make the attempt is foolish and cowardly.  I know that we all could become greater than we are just by committing to becoming a better person each day.  Small steps or large steps, you decide.  We can all move away from fear and towards love just by deciding to.  And what an amazing world we will have once everyone is on the love side.  Imagine a world without fear.  Imagine how wonderful such a world would be.  That is my ultimate goal.  It would be paradise.

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Who Really Has All the Answers?

Wednesday, July 14th, 2010

I still don’t know how or why the sun is so bright and how or why anything happens.  You can give scientific explanations, but that doesn’t cover the why.  You can give pseudo-spiritual answers in vague terms, but that just doesn’t do it for me.  You can make your reality whatever it is you want it to be, but there will still be so many unanswered questions.  Even if you think you have all the answers, you are wrong.  How can you truly know anything for sure?  You can believe you are certain about something, but how certain are you that you are actually certain?  You can say something like, “I am certain that if I do this, this will happen.”  And you could be right.  You also could be wrong.  But right and wrong are human terms.  They were invented, like everything else.  Even these words I type here were invented for my use.  If I were to give this blog entry to a dog, he would probably eat it.  There would be no thought to what it means or the ideas presented.

We want to know, though, don’t we?  We want to know what is out there.  We want to know how this reality works.  But the simple fact is that we don’t know the majority of how and why this world and this universe works the way it does.  And we’ll never know everything.  It is impossible to know everything.  Well, not impossible, but it will take billions and billions of years and a time machine to truly know everything.  But everything is everything that ever happened, is happening now, is happening elsewhere, at every time and every place in the known universe.  That could take awhile to gain knowledge of and even then, we would have more and more information to add to the pile every nanosecond that goes by.  Wouldn’t that be an exhausting task?  And wouldn’t it be a complete time sink?

What we are truly searching for is the core of our existence.  Why are we here?  What is the purpose of all of this?  But how are we to discover that purpose?  Even if we think we have discovered it, we could be dead wrong.  It is a self-fulfilling prophecy.  We find the answers we want to find and disregard the rest.  We become whatever it is we truly are.  Where we seek, we find.  And it’s not a complete picture, but it is certainly more settling than complete and utter uncertainty.  It is better to believe in something than it is to just spend your life believing nothing.  It is a bit of a shortcut to easing our pain of unraveling the existence conundrum.  We choose to believe in whatever we most feel is close to our experiences.  We try to have our beliefs be congruent with what it is that we see, hear, smell, etc.

I don’t truly think there is an omniscient god out there.  There is just way too much information to take in and it would be impossible to know everything.  Although, on different levels, other than our own, I’m sure that the spiritual world has a better grasp on reality than we do as a small planet in the corner of the universe.  I can’t say for sure what happens in that other world, but they seem to have much more wisdom due to extraordinarily more experience than us lowly humans.  They have seen whole galaxies crash and burn, entire solar systems wiped out.  It is a more holistic perspective.  Even if they do not have all the answers, they certainly have more than we do.  Much, much more.  We are just here for a short time and we go away, either to the spirit world or we rot in the ground, or both.

But believing we do nothing more than rot in the ground is a dead end, literally.  There is nothing more to experience after death.  It is a pointless perspective, and a very fear-creating one.  To think that this is the only life we have, ever, would place importance on survival and staying away from anything potentially dangerous.  But to believe that we will “return” to the spirit world after we die is a bit more comforting and exciting than rotting in the ground.  Sure, our bodies will rot regardless, but a part of us, our spirit or soul, will go to a place where we are around other spirits, or to a place where we are all one.  Although we won’t know the exact nature of this place until we are actually dead, we tend to have some idea of what it will be like.  And we will remember why we were here on Earth and gain some insight into what the hell is going on here and what it all means.

Will we have all the answers then?  Who knows?  It could even be a complete fallacy.  We could just rot in the ground.  But that would make our lives pretty much meaningless up against the test of time.  What would be the point of living and then dying for no purpose whatsoever after the world or solar system or galaxy is burnt out and destroyed?  It is hardly inspiring material.  And it doesn’t cover the why of anything either.  There would be no reason for all of this here, it is simply dead particles floating around.  As Descartes put it, “The scream of an animal being tortured is no different than the ringing of a bell.”  Nothing would truly matter in the long, long run.

So, I believe it helps to think that we are here for a reason, even if we do not have all the answers we seek.  And it is entirely possible we will never get all the answers or even a fraction of them.  But the main thing is that we are still growing.  We are opening our minds and our souls to new and interesting ideas that may or may not prove to be true.  Perhaps one day the veil will come off and the truth will be revealed to us.  It definitely helps to lean in that direction than to just proclaim, “There is no God, no afterlife, no anything other than what is here right now.”  It is extremely rigid and disempowering to just say that things like life after death in a spiritual form is impossible and not going to happen.  How much would that trivialize your own existence?

But as I said before, seek and you shall find.  If you are looking for evidence for no life after death, you will find it.  If you are looking for evidence of a spirit world, you will find it as well.  A self-fulfilling prophecy.  What you should truly see is what makes the most sense to you deep down in your soul, consciousness, or whatever you want to call it.  Being is another word for it.  Do you truly feel that you are something more than just a human being, or do you have low self-esteem and think that all you’ll ever be is a body and a mind?  The choice is up to you.  The answers are yours to find.  Whether through this life or in the spirit life, there are answers waiting for you.

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