HUMMING IN MY UNIVERSE By Jim Paredes (The Philippine Star) Updated November 15, 2009 12:00 AM

People like to imagine that there is a place and a time where all things will be settled, when everything will be accounted for and evened out, when all our thoughts and actions, good or bad, will catch up with us and our enemies. Most of us see that happening in the afterlife. For Christians, it’s judgment day. For Buddhists and Hindus, it’s the law of Karma.

There has to be such a time. And it has to be sometime after we die since the world as it is seems hopelessly unjust. Someday, when all of us are dead, justice will play out and everyone will get their comeuppance, or their vindication, and though everyone’s faults will be pointed out and everyone will eat some humble pie because of it, everyone will also have a chance to relish some I-told-you-so moments. And for many, this is one of the values of believing in an afterlife, and in a heaven and a hell.

While that may be something to look forward to, I am not too obsessed with finding justice even in the afterlife. I imagine and look forward to a different thrill when I die. I believe that the joy to be relished in the Promised Land of the afterlife is the reward of finally knowing all the answers to questions that bugged us in life with finality and surety. The jig will be up. We will know everything!

Knowing the unknowable, unraveling the secrets that life and the Universe have kept close to their chests, and finally deciphering correctly the coded signals that one imagined in moments when nature, when the very configuration of life, seemed to talk to us: this is what I am suggesting.

Imagine knowing the outcomes of what our lives could have been if we had taken the roads we opted not to take? Imagine how life would have turned out if we had chosen another career, another partner, another school, religion, etc? Or knowing whether God was actually talking to me at particular times in my life or was that only my own voice in my head?

Here’s a list of things I would really like to know, or would at the very least give me a chuckle knowing the Universe’s choices on the matter. A caveat: this is a list of deep and not-so-deep inquiries.

1) Are biological ties on earth existent in the afterlife or are we all spirits there, and thus “faceless” and without anatomy? How do I find my loved ones like my mother? Will it even matter that we find them? Or does the fact that we have become spirit mean we have become One and indistinguishable from everyone? Does it mean that we don’t need to find anyone since we have become “everybody”?

2) What is the “face” of God? Is it a human face? Or, considering that we are no longer human but spirits when we die, is God a “feeling,” a zeitgeist? I ask this because when we get down to it, every description of God in mankind’s history, every holy text in every religion and time is conceived by man. “God as father” is a man-centric description, isn’t it? Even if one argues that holy texts and metaphors were inspired by God, it is still expressed by men for the understanding of earthbound beings and thus has its limitations. This is probably why some religions do not even attempt to portray God in any image or likeness because they honor that unfathomable aspect of the Creator.

3) Do things happen to us or do they happen for us? Is there something deeper going on in our lives all the time? I was struck by this question when I read it as a tweet from Tony Robbins. Imagine the ramifications if, indeed, everything that appears or happens in our lives, the good and the bad, the important and insignificant, are in fact, actually there because they were tailor-made and sent to us for our growth, or our misery, or whatever? Imagine that every person we meet is an angel sent to us for a reason. Even without knowing whether this is true or not, just assuming that all this is true can awaken your consciousness to a point where there is nothing insignificant that is happening. Which can lead one to speculate on the meaning of everything that comes our way. There is nothing but God, and nothing more but the task of doing what is asked.

4) Are Hitler, Pol Pot and the other baddies of history in heaven? Neale Donald Walsch, the author of the bestselling Conversations with God says “Yes.” He asks, “What does God’s unconditional love mean, if not everyone is welcome in heaven?” This question has affected me profoundly because it makes me realize how great God’s love can be. And the mere prospect of it has expanded my own capacity to love and accept people a great deal more than I ever could before.

5) Is evolution the story of life and the Universe awakening to its own consciousness? This is a practical question because it leads us to understand why the states of consciousness throughout man’s history have been expanding rapidly. If the Universe is a young mind, it seems to be opening up to its own awareness in exponential ways. Is there an end to consciousness, like an apex where everything unknowable will be known?

6) Why did God, complete and perfect a being as God is, create man? Surely, it was not out of need since being God, He/She/It needs nothing. Could it have been have been because of a mere preference, or an act of will? Could it be because, as Ken Wilber speculated provocatively as simple a reason as, “no one wants to have dinner alone”?

7) Do we ever return to earth after we die? Is there reincarnation? Are the Buddhists correct? Or is the whole idea of reincarnation just a metaphor of how open-ended man really is? Is Walt Whitman correct when he says, “I know I am deathless. No doubt I have died myself ten thousand times before. I laugh at what you call dissolution, and I know the amplitude of time”? Or upon death, do we just gaze at the earth we left and marvel at how the living are wasting their lives living in a state of relative unconsciousness?

8) Are there other beings out there in other worlds? Are they of a higher intelligence? Have they really been visiting us and intervening in our lives throughout history?

9) Will mankind ever experience lasting peace? Ah, yes, the question of the ages.

One can wax mysterious and feel these questions deep in one’s being. But no definitive answer will be forthcoming. As the Bob Dylan song goes, “The answer is blowing in the wind.” That’s as clear as it will get.

Since we are still earthbound, and cannot always manage to lift ourselves higher into the stratosphere of the imponderable questions, let me end with the more profane and shallow queries that, however ordinary, are also still not answered with finality. They continue to be asked over and over again. I am talking about the lighter, sillier questions which “matter” but have not been satisfactorily answered. And these are some of the questions that talk show hosts, the media, and a crazy public like to dwell on, and what keep weekly gossip magazines selling like hotcakes. Though these questions are not imponderables, they are surefire curiosities.

• Boxers or briefs? Which is healthier? Sexier?

• Ateneo or La Salle? Which is the better school?

• Can a Virgo ever have a good relationship with a Sagittarian?

• Does a man’s shoe size reflect the size of his penis? Are so-and-so and so-and-so an item? Are they in fact a gay couple? Kapuso or Kapamilya? …ad nauseam.

Honestly, now: which questions did you find more engaging?