What can I do for you, dad?

NEWSFLASH: Father keeps giving son math word problems … but he’s not even alive anymore!

Attention dearest children and people who have parents (living or otherwise): if you are open to the idea, your parents are reachable and you can communicate with them. But be warned: things can get a little, well, unexpected. In fact, what you expect will not happen. You will only get what you don’t expect. I know, it’s a difficult concept to follow, but roll with me here.

Spoiler Alert: this post gets out there, really out there. Literally out there into the void, into the beyond, into the realm of talking with our loved ones who have passed on. I’m just the messenger here, I just write what I experience and what I think might resonate and help others. If you’d rather read about WiFi in Europe or how to make vodka kale smoothies, there won’t be any penalty for stopping reading right now. You’ve been warned. Also, did you notice that I’m giving all of these warnings but I’m posting it anyway? It’s the risk-taker daredevil that I’ve become. Scary, I know–and I love every minute of it.

Below is an account of what I experienced during a marathon 4-hour plus meditation where I connected with my dad.

He and I were chatting about completely ridiculous stuff. I was pretty excited to have such a clear channel of communication with him as previously it has been a little more foggy. I asked him what he did all day. He said that one thing he likes to do is pick out people on earth and help them. He showed me a man who picked up some litter (my dad always hated litterbugs) and so my dad dropped a little bit of love onto the man. “See?” he says to me. Very cool, I think to myself that my dad is doing exactly the sort of thing he would like to do.

As he tells me what he’s doing and more about life up there, a question comes to me and I just blurt it out, “What can I do for you, dad?”

I have no idea what he’ll answer. Maybe he’d like an In-N-Out burger (although I’m not sure how I’d get that to him). Maybe he’d like me to do something for him. I have no idea.

He replied, slowly and with great intention and clarity, “You can rain down love on your family.” He paused. His choice of words don’t sound like something that he would have said, but again, this is expecting the unexpected. As the words sink into me, I’m overwhelmed with emotion and I’m immediately swimming in tears as I have a feeling, a knowing, that he just has so much love to give that it’s immeasurable and the only bottleneck is not him or love but accepting it, allowing it. I don’t say anything as it doesn’t seem like he’s done talking.

He continues, again very slowly and deliberately, making sure each words resonates and rings through me, “So when you get to the point where you’ve given them all of the love you can give and don’t think you can give anything else, then give 10 times more.”

Let me pause here to give a little primer on what life seems to be like where my dad is now. It seems that things are all just lighter. Maybe in the physical sense, but also in every sense of the word. Less serious, less heavy, lighter on your feet, carefree. But there’s also a sense of play, of joking, even pranks and slapstick humor.

My dad continues, “Or,” he pauses as if to make sure I was paying attention, but my attention is solely on him, “Or you can give them all that love and raise it to the power of 3. So you can either give them all of the love you can and multiply it by 10 or raise it to the power of 3–whichever is greater.”

If there was any sense of heaviness that I, living and breathing dude on earth, am having a conversation with my recently deceased father during a marathon 4 and 1/2 hour 4:00 AM meditation where he is giving me the most serious (and best) advice I have ever heard on parenting, it is all gone as my dad is toying with me, tossing math word problems back to his son from beyond the grave.

Even better is that he doesn’t even think this is all the funniest thing ever. He is honest and truly more interested in me figuring out the math problem than any humor he sees in it.

But we’re not even done yet.

Later on during my meditation, I realized that it was an even more complex math problem than I had imagined. He had dropped a cryptic message into a puzzle. I figured I just needed to find out what was “X” in the equation:

X x 10 is greater or less than X³. So let’s try a few examples:

• 3 x 10 = 30 whereas 3³ = 9, or 30 > 9
• 9 x 10 = 90 whereas 9³ = 9, or 90 < 729
• 24 x 10 = 240 whereas 24³.= 13,824 or 240 < 13,824

You get the idea. I’d need to find out where the point was where X x 10 was less than or greater than X³.

If “(X x 10) was less than or greater than X³” is masking the true knowns of the equation.

DISCLAIMER: Dear reader, if you are this far down the page and are only interested in math, you can just please stop now and save yourself any potential disappointment for now we are heading away from known math and into the world of the infinite–and it’s not a number that’s easy to understand. Then again, if you’re a math person, you might understand infinity more than others.

It finally occurred to me that I already know the value of X. Remember in the word problem that X = love. Remember who is posing the question and where he is.

Love is infinite. Love is infinity.

Infinity multiplied by anything is infinity. Infinity to the whatever power is still infinity. It doesn’t matter if it’s multiplied by 10 or raised to the 3rd power, it’s still infinity.

The whole word problem is a trick! The test was to get us to realize that love is infinite and that there is an unending supply of it and whenever we think we have depleted the supply, we only need to reach deeper to find more–and there is so much more.

In fact, there is more than we can comprehend, more than we can imagine. There is more than 10 times more, there is more than love to the 3rd power. There is an infinite amount. There is so much that we don’t understand it.

All we need to understand is that it is there and available to us to distribute and give as much as we possibly can … and then multiply that amount by 10.