Gary Brandt delivers his most philosophically profound and emotionally raw chapter yet in this transcendent opening to Book Two from The Dimension Of Mind Dot Com, where Sally's years-long grief over losing her son Joshua in a tragic farming accident has created an existential crisis that questions the very nature of death in the afterlife—'we ARE in the fucking afterlife! So what does it mean to die here?'—while she desperately waits in Powder Junction's museum for her friend Josh to finally appear with the answers she needs to survive her devastating loss.
The genius emerges through Brandt's perfect balance of metaphysical mystery and human pain: Sally's raw confession to John that losing a child creates 'emptiness bigger than my heart, bigger than all of me,' her fury at Pat and Ben for the negligence that led to the accident, and the stunning moment when Josh finally manifests after years of absence, bringing Sally's first genuine laughter and hope since the tragedy.
What makes this chapter so compelling is how Sally's encounter with Michelangelo's 'Creation of Adam' becomes a meditation on Sophia—Wisdom personified—who was present during creation itself, suggesting that Sally's journey through grief will require not just answers but the kind of divine wisdom that understands how consciousness, death, and rebirth work across multiple dimensions of existence.
But the real philosophical earthquake unfolds through Josh's breathtaking explanation of consciousness and death, revealing that individual awareness exists as 'an aspect of the All That Is' where life energy 'can neither be created nor destroyed, only changes form,' with simple cellular awareness dissolving upon death while complex consciousness like Sally's becomes eternal, able to exist 'across multiple times or outside of time entirely.' The chapter's profound emotional resolution emerges through Josh's gentle acknowledgment that Sally's real question isn't about metaphysics but about her son Joshua—'You want to know where Joshua is, your baby boy.
You want to know what went wrong that made him die in a place where death shouldn't happen.
You want to know if you can have him back'—leading to his promise to show her these answers despite knowing she 'won't be completely satisfied.' Brandt masterfully escalates both the cosmic scope and the intimate healing when Josh reveals his nature as a coalescent being who exists simultaneously across all time and needed permission from Sally's past, present, future, and higher selves before he could manifest, suggesting that her grief and her healing are part of a much larger tapestry of consciousness evolution.
The chapter ends with perfect anticipation as Josh's mysterious 'surprise adventure' promises to take Sally and John deeper into the mysteries of existence, death, and the possibility that some losses open doorways to understanding so profound they transform not just individual lives but the very fabric of reality itself.
It's a haunting meditation on grief, consciousness, the nature of eternal existence, and the possibility that sometimes the most devastating questions about death and meaning can only be answered by beings who've learned to exist everywhere and everywhen simultaneously, bringing wisdom that transcends the boundaries between life and death, time and eternity, human understanding and divine mystery.