On Awareness In the Time of Plague

There are only 2 possible outcomes when it comes to what happens to you, your consciousness, at death: either you become extinct, 'nothing', or your self continues as a sentient consciousness, one which existed before your birth and will exist after the death of your body and brain--what poets and the Holy Books call the soul. Many today would vote for the former-- that is nothing new. At the time of Christ many Jews--and Romans-- believed death meant extinction; so it is not because science is ascendant that materialism [the belief that only matter is real] seems the default position of so many. I held to that myself as a young man and might still do if I hadn't had an NDE when I almost drowned at 24: I allude to the details in some poems/essays on Soup. That was a terrible time, yet I am 50 years on grateful for it--to paraphrase a great writer, the hardness of God is kinder than the softness of men. A year later I was given further 'proof' of my soul in a much sweeter way when my former fiance and I were 'canoodling', as young folks are wont to--suddenly we are conscious outside our bodies, only for a moment or two, and no, there was no liquor or drugs involved--just love in the afternoon. Sadly, we were both still too neurotic/fearful to talk about this wondrous thing we shared, something I regret to this day. I write this on Easter Sunday, marking the return to life of Jesus, who freely and knowingly gave up his life for the entire world [ then as now ]. Many will say not possible, but there are myriad accounts of people who have been visited by deceased relatives 'in the flesh' as it were. A friend, a former psychiatric nurse and one of the most rational people I know, told me how 30 some years ago she was coping with stage 4 breast cancer, abandoned by her partner, with a young son, and at the depth of despair one day when her father, dead 15 years earlier, suddenly appeared to her in the flesh [he even touched her shoulder], and told her she would be completely cured--and she was! This plague has caused mass fear worldwide; perhaps that is less so for those who can 'sense' that life never really ends, and instead of being meaningless, as atheism must logically posit, there is a myriad of meaning to everything we think, feel, and do. That is why I chose as a title for a collection of my poems a trade publisher released last year, 'The Enormity of Existence' [under my pen name, Nolo Segundo], because your soul is truly enormous--eternally so.