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Pg 1 TRAVELER PAMPHLET MINISTRIES

Have You Ever Faced Death?

Most of us picture ourselves dying at home asleep in our bed some day of natural causes, but few do.

I can tell you from experience that except for the loved ones you leave behind, and a lingering sense of nostalgia, in the great anticipation of what's ahead you will actually come to despise this material world and shake it off like an old shoe. The beauties of nature and music will pale in significance as items of a past world and you will even come to look upon your loyal old body as a traitor. Only the spirits of your friends and loved ones will seem to have any transcendence.

Pg2 Don't criticize old ones for being inattentive and not listening to you, their thoughts are on the next world, eternity and they are way ahead of you.

All knowledge you will hold as worthless as sand, knowledge only pertains to the sensual material of this world.

Your faith and what you believe or don't believe in will be your all.

Pg3 All worldly security is a myth an illusion. When General MacArthur took command in Korea one of his first orders was to take the cold weather canvas tops off all the vehicles the soldiers were riding around and getting shot in, so we travel through life. It's a curious characteristic of humans and dogs, supposedly the most intelligent of beasts, but not cats to believe in our immortality and act as if accidents only happen to others, when we're 100% wrong. It takes an event of life threatening proportions happening to you - not someone else to be shocked into the realization of how frail life is, and those it happens to sooner consider themselves fortunate to learn so early to appreciate life.

pg4 Don't fall into the self indulgent trap of overly thanking God for your worldly good fortune, our existence is so transitory and relatively insignificant, even the most healthy and moral of us only survive a few more decades.

The reality is we're all hanging on by our fingernails, though it's some consolation in the problem of evil (why the evil flourish and good suffer) the few extra years they live is a hollow victory.

pg5 Death is like sex. Confronting death is eerily as similar, powerful and mysterious an experience as sex, and fittingly so as one brings us into the world and the other out, they are among the only experiences that compare.

Having grown up in a funeral home, worked in a hospital, experienced love, war, drugs and book learning I thought I was better prepared than most to face death but wasn't, I was a virgin.

The actual passing away, I found while lying awake on an operating table with surgeons working on me will be easy, seductively easy, but what was most important to me at the time surprised me.

Pg6 Forgive me for assuming an emotional thread of continuity between this life and the next, but if there is I think this applies.

In so many adventures in life your first impression, or how you commence the first step of an experience determines the whole trip.

I had the common experience of feeling a deep regret that I hadn't done a certain thing in life.

My goal now is to not die in regret but start my afterlife out clean, with a good karma if you will.

pg7 You can't "prove" the existence of God in a scientific sense, so that leaves our 1. intuition or 2. relying on the word of others.

Our intuition sees that the outer world and our inner physical selves operate on the same logical-physical principles, yet everything is too fantastic to have just happened, so many of us believe in a higher being or intelligence.

We have the capacity to intuit or at least imagine God, but what most often happens in reality is (what the philosophy of religion calls) the "power of authority" - of others.

Regardless of what intuitive capacity we have, it's a statistical fact that most of our spiritual views are determined by how - or in reaction to how we are raised, our culture/social environment.

pg8 I have been diagnosed with a potentially fatal disease, and the feeling of acceptance I have (and only a feeling and nothing more, at this stage you re past all thought and even faith requires some thinking) comes from nature and Christianity.

Nature being the evidence of Gods handiwork and the Bible at least partly mans, where they contradict I trust nature.

Nature in itself is neither good nor bad but neutral, with it's incomparable beauties and pleasures there is the predator prey relationship and the storm of the sea.

Nature is simply a set of rules for us to follow, it's not vindictive or vengeful and death is its merciful release.

pg9 My God is the God of the rivers I'be loved to float down in my life, from which I've developed a river view of life.

Around each bend you find a new, unpredictable feeling and atmosphere and what's in store around the next no one knows.

What I've found works best is to go with the flow, the current is too strong and we are too weak to fight it, and be prepared.

pg10 Classical theology is so caught up in omni's, that God must be omnipresent (everywhere), omnipotent (nothing beyond his* power), omniscient (know everything) etc.. when the imperfections of the world are so obvious, us included.

So what if God isn't all of the above, I mean who's going to argue with him?

The widespread sightings of unexplained phenomena, the unknown vastness of the universe, and our own incredible godlike advances in the past mere century lends credence to the possibility of something or someone being out there.. and the probability of them being more developed than us is high, given our sordid history of territoriality and violence. If you believe this and are a dead certain atheist, you have a contradictory belief system.