Yeah, yeah, yeah, so it’s my birthday…  I’m going to try to put this all in perspective.  Flying again, on my way to LA, at 38,000 feet, trying to get up above it all.  Each year I say, “This is the last I want to celebrate” – meaning not that I want out, just that it’s getting weirder each passing year.  I mean why should I get presents?  It’s my mom that should have been getting the presents.  Besides they don’t come with the frequency that they used to.

My tastes and wants or needs are now far too expensive for other people to fulfill and the rest I already have.  Well, at least I should be grateful for that.

Do I sound like a curmudgeon?   Probably.  Perhaps I should try to get to the real meaning of this celebration of life.

What is a birthday?  We really only have one birth day – the day we are born.  And even that is questionable.  All the rest are just celebrations of that first day – a day that none of us remember.  Odd.  Strange ritual.  Great for kids, but perhaps wasted on adults.

I believe in the eternality of life.  I trust that my spiritual being will go on past this earth experience in some form, some altered concept.  I believe that the continuation of the essence of me will go on and on.  I want it to.  I really like this thing called life, this being-ness called ‘me’.  Living is not always easy, but it is an amazing trip through it all.  I want to keep on experiencing life in some conscious form.

I don’t think I’ll remember Peter Link after I leave this experience.  I trust that my spiritual consciousness will remain, that my relationship to God (whatever that is) will remain.  That seems likely since I understand Him or It to be my Creator, but this mortal self of looks, personality, musician, husband, father, sports fan, blogger, will surely recede into some locked closet somewhere in the past with the name ‘peterlink period’ tacked on the door.

What will almost surely disappear is my memory of this experience.  Why do I think this?  Because I can’t, in this experience, remember the last one, the experience I had before this one.  I don’t have any recollection of me before my birth day, and as I mentioned before, I have no memory at all of the first couple of years of this life experience.

Maybe I’ll come back here, maybe I won’t.  There seems to be some legitimate proof that one might, but I really can’t say for sure.  I do not believe in the Heaven/Hell thing.  It makes more sense to me that we probably just pass through some form of ‘door’ into another space, dimension, reality, illusion.  It also makes sense that we take our attributes and our problems with us, though I believe they will be in a less specific or more universal form than those here on earth.

After this experience I don’t know where I’m going and before it, I don’t know where I was, but one thing for sure (as sure as I can be) I will go on in some form, and I existed before in some form.  The hard drive memory of Peter Link will probably get left behind or locked away somewhere.  Some day, some moment somewhere in time, I may find the key and revisit.  Who knows?  Maybe by that time I won’t feel it necessary or even care.

At any rate, all things considered, today’s celebration of my birthday seems rather trivial in the face of it all.  Even birth seems trivialized in the face of eternality.  What was born?  Certainly not me. If my spiritual being is eternal then I was not born back then, in fact, within the definition of eternality, I was never born at all.  I have only lived.  I’ll take that concept any day.

Actually, it was probably only just the momentary casing, the vessel, this wondrous yet baffling thing called my body that was born.  Back then I was little more than just a squirming, crying sucking blob of delicate intricacies and potential.  You know, mortal body, illusion, amalgamation of atoms in space, 6 feet of tubing in a fleshly wrapping, home to confusion of ego, apartment complex of brain and voice and heart and pleasure and mobility.
I grew up thinking that this housing was me, but have learned here in my latter years that this is probably not so.

Once I lay on my back on the floor of my apartment for several hours and diligently mentally searched through my body inch by inch and tried to find ‘me’.  I started at my feet thinking that that might be the least likely place and I could eliminate the small stuff.  I found no ‘me’ in my feet or ankles or knees or thighs as I went up.  Then it got interesting, but still no real ‘me’.

The stomach was just a processing plant, the heart was fascinating, but ultimately a giant pump (a metaphor for love, but alas, only a metaphor) and there was no love stored in the pump.  The throat was also interesting, but inconsequential to my exploration.

Then I got to the head.  A plethora of possibilities, but each was eliminated logically.  Last was the brain.  In the middle of the brain search, I asked myself who was searching and where were they searching from.  I then saw with absolute clarity that it was ‘I’ who was searching my brain.  I was not in the brain, I was searching the brain.  The brain and I were not the same thing, but in fact, two separate entities.  There was instantly nowhere else to search.  I was not to be found in my body.  “I” existed elsewhere.  At that, exhausted by the search, I quit and ate lunch.

Sometimes I think that I should have kept on.  Perhaps I stopped too soon.  I was on to something, but my stomach interrupted the quest for its own triviality.  At any rate, those 3 hours of meditative exploration convinced me that I do not live in my body, that I am not in my brain.

In essence, when my body dies, that does not necessarily mean that I will die.  I’m going to give ‘living on’ a shot.  I’m going to leave this dead body behind and step through the ‘door’ into the next great adventure.  I’ve liked the name ‘Peter Link’, I’ve loved so many things about this experience, but I’m preparing myself not to expect to take much of it with me.  I probably won’t miss it much – after all, I don’t miss the last experience stuff at all.

I hope to take forward love, and joy and creativity and peace and some form of laughter.  Oh, and perhaps Haagen Daz.  Couldn’t I just take a couple of months’ supply of that?  It would make the transition sooo much easier and best of all; I wouldn’t have to worry about getting fat!

Now there’s a worthwhile birthday present.

Birthday presents.  Bah!  Humbug!!  Who needs ‘em?  I got another day here on earth, heart beating, mind racing, music coursing through my brain, flying high above the clouds, looking down on the great expanse of America, holding hands with Julia!

What a great birthday!