Does God Retire Any Jerseys? Do Life’s Hall of Famers only take One Trip Around the Sun?

By Greg Evans

Does God retire jerseys after the mortal life of any of the greatest of the greats shuffle off this perverse rock, thus preventing certain souls from reincarnation?

If you aren’t a sports nerd and don’t understand what retiring a jersey means, is that, generally speaking, that number is never worn again by later players. Aaron Judge’s #99 for example, will one day be retired and hoisted for eternity to the rafters of the stadium that Judge built, beside the ghost of the stadium that Ruth built. What about Jim Brown’s #32, or Michael Jordan’s #23? Is the same true for the Marie Curie’s of the world?

Which ones get reincarnated, if such a thing exists, and which souls are safeguarded against having to go through this psychotic world again? Who gets the golden ticket to remain in paradise for eternity and who has to come back? Even if you aren’t a huge contributor to humanity by creating things like candy corn or the Porshe 911, what if you had just a good and pure soul that you are deserving 24/7 beachside paradise, no more having to stomach the woes of the mortal world.

Most civilizations, it seems, believed in some form of afterlife. The Celts who lived between approximately 700 BCE to 400 BCE didn’t leave behind writings that would allow us to examine their beliefs in what happens after death, but we can surmise their beliefs by exploring how they treated their dead by examining artifacts discovered in different tombs.

In 1899, a rare interview of Nikola Tesla, conducted by journalist, John Smith, with Immortality Magazine, at Tesla’s laboratory in Colorado Springs examined how Tesla thought and spoke as if he were an ancient Greek poet or one of the scribes of the Bible, or a man lit on highly effective blotter acid.

When discussing the soul of a living creature, such as the Deinocheirus (a humped-back, duck-beaked, dinosaur with arms like a body builder), or the Pegomastax (with their fangs and quills), or Brian Sikes (with his horns and long snout) Tesla refers to the eternal light that glows within us. He says, “Everything is light. In one of its rays is the destiny of the nations, each nation has its own ray in that great source of light, which we see, like the Sun, or the pretty Hooter’s waitress. And remember, there is no man who has existed and who has not died!” 

That statement is open for interpretation but thinking with reason, as I do, I recognize it as Tesla defining humanity as having an eternal soul that reincarnates from one body into another forever. From an ugly, incorrigible man into a drop-dead gorgeous Hooter’s girl with a magnetic personality. 

Brian Sikes, for example, is CEO of Cargill, the largest food additive company on the planet. His company produces chemicals. Those chemicals you see within an ingredients list fkr a product, such as, red 40, blue Lake 1, yellow 5, yellow 6, artificial flavorings (too toxic to even name), natural flavorings, etc.; he’s the wizard behind the curtain, pumping you and your children’s food full of this pernicious garbage. Would a guy like that even be allowed to return despite leaving nothing constructive in life? Or would such a villain be banned from returning? Not sure we want someone like him reincarnated anyway. Is it wrong to feel like that? It is legal for his company to put toxic chemicals in the food so therefore it is ok. 

I have never seen a ghost or a spirit, but many people to have. Many years ago, I worked for a cable television company in Kingsport. One day while me, my co-workers, Bobby Johnson, and Chris Absher were working through tasks, Bobby started telling us an intriguing story. We had been talking about the possibility that ghosts are real, and he looked over as we were cleaning and synching boxes and said, “I saw one once.” Up to this point, I had never met anyone who ever admitted to seeing any kind of paranormal activity in the form of a ghost or spirit. “Yeah, no joke,” he said.

Old Bob O., lo who had been working for the company for over 30 years looked over, “I hate you all. No dang peace and quiet,” his voice trailed off into a mumble.

“I never much believed in ghosts or the supernatural before that day,” Bobby Johnson said. “It happened a long time ago, but I’ll never forget it. So, to give you some context, the way my room was set up, my bed was against the wall and my head was up by the wall. Down by the foot of the bed was a door that looked down a hallway where a staircase was located. One night, I lay down to go to sleep and I suddenly saw a ghostly woman, dressed in old-fashioned clothing, as if she was from the 1800s, wearing a bonnet on her head and everything, literally floating down the hallway.”

“Was she hot?”

“She was from the 1800s. When have you ever seen a picture of a woman from the 1800s who was hot? Anyway, when I looked down at her feet, she had none. She was actually fixed in mid-air with no support. I just lay there watching her. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing.”

He explained that the apparition moved slowly through the hallway and he didn’t take his eyes off it.

“It then reached the end of the hallway and descended down the stairs. I watched this thing for a long time, it wasn’t just some fleeting glimpse of a white mist.

“Were you drunk?”

“No, I wasn’t drunk.”

It was a convincing story. Several years later, I was out walking my dog, who himself is now a ghost, and was chatting with a neighbor, Judy, who lives down the street from me. We got on the topic of ghosts and ghostly sightings. Judy too confessed that she had, in fact, seen a ghost. It was a very similar experience to Bobby’s and she also admitted that she didn’t believe in ghosts until that night. “I couldn’t believe what I was seeing and the funny part about it was that I didn’t feel scared.”

Bobby also explained how seeing the ghost was startling, but it was not a frightening experience as you may expect with people screaming and running for their lives when they see an apparition.

In 2023, BBC put out an article titled, The Science Behind Seeing Ghosts. The content explores the interesting discoveries that scientists and engineers have made trying to explain why people “think” they see ghosts.

There are many incidents of people experiencing an event they can’t explain. There are apparent apparitions and disembodied voices, knocks, shrieks, and clanks in the night that give you goosebumps and have you peeking over your shoulder or out the window to try and locate the meaning of the disturbance. Dr. Chris French, head of the Anomalistic Psychology Research Unit at London’s Goldsmiths University, attributes many of the ghostly sightings or strange noises to sleep paralysis. As people move into rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, their brains prevent their bodies from moving. People can find themselves awake but unable to move. Dr. French says, “Sleep paralysis is a kind of glitch in the normal sleep mechanisms.” He explains that on occasion, hallucinations are reported during sleep paralysis. Sounds like psychedelic-therapy to me.

Dr. Shane Rogers, a civil and environmental engineering professor at Clarkson University in New York has explored the correlation between haunted houses and mold. He claims that many of the symptoms humans experience after mold exposure match those seen in reports of ghost sightings. Aspergillus mold, found in damp structures, may cause shortness of breath and optic nerve inflammation which tends to cause dark shapes to float across people’s vision. Black mold, or stachybotrys has been shown in lab mice to induce a feeling of fear.

Both arguments seem plausible, however, my friends were both awake during the incidents. Both also indicated that the apparitions were dressed in clothing that didn’t fit our time. The ghosts were dressed from the 1700s or 1800s and neither of the doctors considered the possibility of spirits or souls traveling through portals from a past dimension into our own. Though 

The question that itches in my mind is how many dimensions actually exist and what are they? Einstein talked about three dimensions of space and one dimension of time. This four-dimensional concept is known as space-time. Space-time, according to Einstein, was a continuum meaning that space and time can be subdivided without limit.

We think about traveling through time, moving in a direction to get from one point in time to another, but you don’t move through time, time is the one that is moving, but it doesn’t move in any direction. Think about that – time is always moving but it isn’t moving in any direction. It doesn’t matter, forward or backward, left or right, or diagonal, it’s all irrelevant because direction and time aren’t correlated, at least not in any way that I, just an average working Joe, can conceptualize.

Einstein truly had a remarkable grasp of the idea of space-time and four dimensions, how traveling at the speed of light to manipulate time and even aging, but it really wasn’t an original thought, was it? Just like the Book of Genesis and the foundation of the Bible weren’t necessarily original thoughts as we know them, however original in terms of their inception in some distant past. They were ideas that were expanded upon. Again, this is not a bad thing. It gives it far more validity than saying, “Oh, that happened.”

The internet and the computer also weren’t the original ideas of Paul Allen and Bill Gates, they took an idea and made it better. Mozart said something to the effect of, “I have never had an original idea, I am merely good at stealing other people’s work and making it my own.” Again, we mention how Shakespeare didn’t have an original story idea, he took stories he heard and made them his own.

This is a reoccurring them throughout history, throughout time.

In 1754, a French mathematician, physicist, philosopher, and scientist of mechanics, named Jean d’Alembert discussed in an encyclopedia article of the concept of time as the fourth dimension. When you hear about time being the fourth dimension you think of Einstein and later Minkowski, but long before these titans of the 20th century, there was d’Alembert and another mysterious character.

On March 26, 1885, in a science magazine titled, Nature, on page 481, a column appeared called, Four-Dimensional Space. The article begins, Possibly the question, What is the fourth dimension? May admit of an indefinite number of answers. The author, “S,”  as if that is not mysterious and cryptic, then says something very interesting, echoing back to d’Alembert, I prefer, therefore, in proposing to consider Time as a fourth dimension of our existence. Since this fourth dimension cannot be introduced into space, as commonly understood, we require a new kind of space for its existence, which we may call time-space. Does that not give you goosebumps? Einstein, revered for space-time probably read this article and built upon this idea. That is how it works. Steve Jobs, for example, is credited for creating all of these incredible inventions when in reality, he piggybacked on Edwin Lamb. I am not by any means saying Steve Jobs wasn’t incredibly innovative and brilliant, but he didn’t pull this stuff out of the clouds, instead, learned about the possibilities that existed and built upon them, just like everyone else has throughout recorded human history. This knowledge is powerful. For one, we can look at what is already in existence and speculate that you, or someone else, will build upon it to further fascinate the public and future nerds who will then write stories about it. At the same time, knowing that everything seems to be built upon itself or modified, we can then start looking backward, reverse engineering, if you will, ideas to locate the origins of where they come from. What this tells me is that we just aren’t there yet. Travel time could very well become a reality, but it will come from an idea that was built upon another idea that was built upon something else that eventually you could trace back to our time and even further back into the 1800s, 1400s, and so forth. Look around you, at all the amazing inventions that exist because of human ingenuity and the willingness to learn from those that came before you. The people who become successful in their fields are those who study the pioneers who came before them. Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Albert Einstein, the authors of the Bible, Shakespeare, I can keep going, the list would be eternally long. Is that not the secret to the universe? That was a joke. The reality, as least as it seems to me, there are many secrets. 

Ok. I went off on a bit of a rant. So, in 1885 an intriguing and somewhat confusing article is written about the fourth dimension. In 1895, H.G. Wells published his book The Time Machine, a fictional story of traveling through the fourth dimension. Wells grapples with the idea of why couldn’t it be possible to travel as unimpeded through the fourth dimension as an astronaut traveling through space.

Not get too convoluted, but it seems the earliest record of the fourth dimension was D’Alembert. Though I wonder if he was the first to think up this concept and why? What did he hear or read that sparked this ingenious thinking, or did he not invent it and it came from somewhere else and he built upon it? When researching D’Alembert one realizes how prodigious he was and the sheer volumes of work and all the different subjects and ideas he played with in his life are astounding. For the encyclopedia alone, he wrote over 1,000 complex, scientific articles. The list of things he is known for is long and mind-bending.

You think that the 1700s was just a time of people hoeing fields and living an old-fashioned life, you might need to rethink that. It was a time of invention, enlightened thinking on a renaissance scale, and what I have found is that every single era that I have ever read about was equally as incredible and puzzling to me in their ingenuity and push for advanced thought and creation.

How could the endless and uninterrupted passage of time be broken up into specific dimensions? Would it then be possible for a spirit or ghost from a different dimension to communicate with someone from our current dimension? On T.V. shows people have all sorts of gadgets and record various disembodied voices and all of that and I really should meet up with someone and take in a real-life experience before making any judgment calls, but at the same time, I understand the shows are competing for viewers and more importantly the coin and whenever the coin gets involved, you have to take what you see and hear with a grain or two of salt.

How much of ghost-hunting television is staged? Is every minute of it staged? How are these people able to communicate with spirits from a past time as if they are here right now, here in some dingy abandoned basement to torment people who just happen to show up? It is just hard for me to wrap my mind around. I would expect spirits to be more capable of sliding through dimensions to say Ravella, Mazatlan, Dublin, or some other exotic location as opposed to an old musty, moldy, abandoned speak-easy forgotten on some empty highway in Kentucky. 

When you think of probability and how chance impacts lives, we often think of say being born Jeff Bezos at the right time in history, with the right mind, ambition, and risk tolerance to create Amazon that would become a multi-trillion-dollar company. Or we think about those “unlucky” moments in life of say someone born with a severe disability. Then you have those shining lights in the world, those incredible people with so much to offer who happened to be unlucky on a specific day in timeand get killed, for example, legendary American warphotojournalist, Chris Hondros. In 2017, Netflix released a documentary movie about Chris Hondros’ life, written and directed by his best friend Greg Campbell. The information here is mostly compiled from that movie. Hondros was born on March 14, 1970, and even as a child he was interested in photography. Through high school, undergrad, and graduate school he pursued his interest in photography and visual communications. It seemed inevitable that his life would take him into the world of journalism, first a small local daily paper and eventually onto the national stage as a photojournalist concentrating on international reporting. While in Kosovo his interest in war photography would develop, being on the frontlines of history to tell the stories of people who otherwise would .

Since the tail-end of the 1990s, Chris Hondros visited and photographed most of the world’s conflict zones including Kosovo, Sierra Leone, Angola, the West Bank, Kashmir, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Liberia. He also covered the Hurricane Katrina disaster and the earthquake in Haiti in 2021. Along with being a beautiful classical pianist, a great friend to many people, a loving son, and the fiancé to a lovely young lady, his work was recognized by the world appearing on covers of magazines and newspapers such as The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, Newsweek, and the Economist. In 2011, an armed conflict erupted in the North African country of Libya located on the Mediterranean Sea. The conflict was between the loyal forces of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi and the rebel militias determined to depose him from power. Protests had preceded the unrest, beginning in 2009 and lasted for two long years before it finally became violent in the city ofBenghazi on Tuesday, February 15, 2011. As the violence escalated, security forces turned their weapons on the crowd and fired. Before long a full-fledged rebellion was underway, and the rebel forces decided to self-proclaim an interim government called the National Transitional Council.

Hondros was employed by Getty Images and traveled to North Africa to cover the conflict now raging in Libya. In Libya,Hondros took some of the most important and memorable photographs of the war. While traveling around the country with some other journalists, the group decided to travel to the coastal city of Misrata where there were reports of war crimes taking place against the civilian population.

On the morning of the 20th of April, the group separated, half traveling to one area and the other somewhere else near the front, to record the conflict. After a while, the journalists returned to the hotel to relax. Later in the afternoon, some of the group decided to return to the frontline they had left hours earlier. Initially, Hondros said that he wasn’t feeling up to going back, but for whatever reason, he changed his mind joined several of the other journalists back to the front.

This would turn out to be a fateful decision, not long after arriving back on the frontline, Hondros and fellow photojournalist Tim Hetherington would be killed by a mortar shell shot by Gadafi’s forces. He didn’t have to be there in that spot at that moment. But he was, and he died for it. He was a 41-years old, photojournalist scheduled to be married in about a month or so after he was killed. Trying to analyze time in that sense, in terms of chance, luck, and why things happen to people is enough to drive you crazy.

Even though Hondros had a dangerous job, and was often in harm’s way, increasing the “chances” that something unfortunate might happen, why did the odds fall out of his favor, and not only him, but fellow photojournalist, 40-year-old, Tim Hetherington, also no stranger to armed conflict.

19th century, journalist and former American Civil War soldier, Ambrose Bierce saw an enormous amount of combat during the Civil War as a member of the Union Army, and despite that, he survived the four years of frontline action and went on to be a journalist in California. By the time he reached his 70’s he was once again restless and set off for Mexico to get a first-hand account of the Mexican Revolution. Bierce crossed the border in search of Pancho Villa’s forces. He would never be seen or heard from again. Had Bierce just stayed in San Francisco writing for the newspaper, there is a good chance he would have lived longer than he presumably did; or, he could have gotten run over by a car or murdered by a random mugging while out on a walk, or dropped dead of a massive blowout from not eating well enough throughout his life, there is no telling what might have happened. Both Hondros and Bierce are instances where the decisions they made influenced their time on earth.

In 2024, UNESCO reported at least 68 deaths of journalists and media workers in the line of duty covering armed conflict, and this year was a particularly violent one, across the globe.

Question: Is there any difference in the chances, the probability of someone losing their life unexpectedly while driving home one day and a car jumps the median and crashes into them killing them, or if they are in an armed conflict situation working as a journalist and a mortar explodes nearby killing them?

Some people might argue the scenarios are too different, and that the person who went into the war, to report on it knew they might get killed, whereas the person driving home from the grocery store never once thought in their wildest dreams that a car would careen over the median and take their life from them.

I think they are both the same though. Both individuals made a decision at that moment in time and that decision led them down a road, unexpected or otherwise, that they didn’t come back from. Had they made a different decision, the outcome may have been different.

Have you ever wondered how many times in your life you have skirted death and disappointed the Grim Reaper because you made one decision over another that day? There is really no way you could have known. I have talked about this topic before, when my grandmother visited a fortune teller. It is definitely not a topic you want to dwell on because it could psyche you out.

If you are one of those people prone to having a fatalistic or savagely pessimistic point of view, the last thing you want to do is try and manipulate the future when there are no red flags for when to duck.

Is it just plain chance or is it something like chaos theory? Chaos theory appears random initially, but in fact, it is a type of mathematics that analyzes deterministic systems where even tiny changes in initial conditions can lead to drastically different outcomes over time (I did not come up with that line on my own), making future predictions extremely difficult if not impossible (though nothing is impossible…right, Walt?). This differs from chance, or probability because probability works to quantify the potential range of outcomes within that system and offers a measure of certainty greater than anything you could presume through chaos theory. How does time play into all of this? No idea, but Kenneth Wilson could probably give you a cogent calculation providing a real-life answer.

There is a great book by James Gleick, titled, Chaos – Making a New Science, in the chapter on Universality, Gleick, is discussing how physicists Kenneth Wilson, Leo Kadanoff, and Michael Fisher were studying what happened in phase transitions, trying to understand the behavior of matter near the point where it changes from one state to another – from liquid to gas, or from unmagnetized to magnetized. This might sound like it is coming from outer space, but I think everything in the world is connected and we can’t ignore the similarities whether it is the decision of a photographer to go to the front line that day or a magnet at the verge of losing its magnetism. The scientists saw through the chaos a universality. I think that making a specific decision also somehow impacts the matter of the universe, changing, ever so slightly with each new decision the furthest possible outcome. People talk about your life is already a script written by God. I think chaos theory turns that fate-theory upside down and then shakes out all the pennies.

I think the true science of the world, not the man-made stuff, is universal, more than we give it credit for. Think about how eating healthy food impacts people and animals the same way regardless of where you are on the planet. Think of how the passing of time and aging from infancy to adulthood occurs for everybody at the same pace regardless of where you are on the planet. I am not a science geek, and I don’t know how accurate what I believe is, however, to me it makes sense and that is why I am including it here. I am trying to explain my thoughts so you can challenge them and call me out on my ridiculous ranting and raving. The back of the book defines chaos as a new science that offers a way of seeing order and pattern where formerly only the random, the erratic, the unpredictable – in short, the chaotic – had been observed.

Maybe some of what we think is random probability is actually something more complicated, and other times, it is just that, random. When we hear of a photojournalist killed by an errant bullet or mortar in a warzone people will say, they took a risk going there. There is a phenomenal book called Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk, by Peter L. Bernstein, and he explores the role risk plays in our society. Bernstein was well versed in risk as a professional investor he regularly saw how decisions could be impacted by a volatile market or unforeseen circumstances at a company or within an industry sending stocks either plummeting or to the stars. However, when Bernstein began researching risk, he says, the vastness of the subject matter is daunting. Risk touches on the most profound aspects of psychology, mathematics, statistics, and history.

In chapter 7, Bernstein tells the story of a Russian professor of statistics during World War II in Moscow who appeared in the air raid shelter during one of many German air raids. His pals though, were surprised to see him since he usually just ignored the air raid sirens saying, “There are seven million people in Moscow. Why should I expect them to hit me?”

On this cold, snowy night he miraculously appeared in the air raid shelter and his friends asked him what changed his mind? He said, “Look, there are seven million people in Moscow and one elephant. Last night they got the elephant.” Bernstein explains that the professor was keenly aware of the mathematical probability of being hit by a bomb. His experience essentially defines the dual character that runs throughout everything to do with probability: past frequencies can collide with degrees of belief when risky choices must be made.

That is complex and can be interpreted in several ways. What stands out the most is that information, it seems, is the most beneficial instrument when there is context, and it can be evaluated individually. Similarly, Bernstein writes, Which counts for more, the seven million humans or the elephant? How should we evaluate new information and incorporate it into degrees of belief developed from prior information?

Both timing and time become factors. The timing of whatever might be occurring to potentially end an individual’s mortal time, or a decision made to alter that timing and consequently alter their mortal time.  

Depending on who you ask, the Bible is arguably the greatest book ever written with . Some may whatever grievance might be had against it, but one thing that can be agreed upon is that no book has been so extraordinary as to stand the test of time, with such a command over the global population than the Bible. Genesis, the first book of the Bible, opens with the Hebrew word bereshit, which translates to “the beginning.” The beginning is when the clock starts. Time. Time institutes the start of the world. Was it a big bang, a whistle, a pop as if from a starter pistol at a track meet, or did everything just begin, silently, magnanimously, the total beginning of the weirdest and most inexplicable story ever to be told?