I'm Bringing Bodacious Back... and it's COSMIC!

Wow. Sometimes, the timing on things just blows my mind. This'll be a woo-woo post, so if that's not your thang, skip it. However, if you're open-minded to other people's experiences, suspend disbelief for a few mins and let's chat. 

Bill and Ted Are Back!

First things first... OMG! Bill and Ted are coming back!!! Having a Gen X moment. We don't have many of them, so expect caps and exclamation graffiti. You have been warned!

Bill and Ted may seem a daft little Gen X film to many, but it's so freaking deep. Trust me on this. Philosophy, religion, visions of peace, and time travel. What's not to love?

Bodacious!

Second things second... this is FREAKY. At the time of writing, this news was literally just announced a few minutes ago. Bill and Ted did their bit in the 1989 (Second Summer of Love if you were in Britain. It. Was. AWE---SOME!) Anyway, I randomly thought about the word 'bodacious' the other day. I've heard maybe one or two people say it in the last decade. "That's it". I thought: "Bodacious is an EXCELLENT word. It is due a revival". Then I researched it and discovered it had British roots as the word 'BOLDacious' which was a blend of bold and audacious.

Bold and audacious. I'm that! Hang on... all Indiepreneurs are that... 

Realising that since Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure, bodacious has mainly referred to women, I thought: "Hell yeah! We finally got a word that's completely empowering and we are not using it. I need to bring it back for women, but also... screw it... let's bring the guys in too".

So I had a plan to do a whole "I'm bringing bodacious back" thing, thinking everyone would have forgotten Bill and Ted, and BOOM! They're back. Literally, days between these two things. I'll get back to the bodacious thing later in the week, because we're totally doing that. I'm absolutely a bold and audacious bardess, so I'm all about urging you all to step into your bodacious bardess/bard selves!

But, that's not the most freaky thing. Ready? TODAY, I posted that the world needs to calm the eff down, and that I missed the 90s, and then I looked at my timeline and ... hello gateway to the 90s! Not only that, but I also randomly decided to share a video of me on stage with a bunch of cosmic hippies, singing peace and love songs, 15 years ago minutes before I saw the news.

Warning: All Structures Are Unstable

How is this news? It's cosmic timing. You need to understand that 'God' doesn't just speak to you in cathedrals and temples. Cosmic Intelligence flows through everything. You're as likely to hear 'the word of God' on twitter, or on a demolition site, as in church.

In a discussion of ego's addiction to the physical, and to the ephemeral nature of physicality given that everything is energy and nothing is permanent, Eckhart Tolle tells of seeing a sign at a derelict property that said: Warning: All Structures Are Unstable. He turned to his friend and said: "Now THAT is a powerful sutra".

So, it turns out that the way The Divine chose to prove to me that there was life after death was via the medium of ... Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure. There were other things too - like the weird experiences I had in a coma - but this one's a great story. Ready?

Be Excellent to Each Other

My brother died. Sorry to bring the tone of the post down, but stick with it because it gets good again. Not the place to go into the dark cave of mourning and so forth. I'll do that some other day. This is spirit stuff, and spirit stuff is rarely sad at all. So, he died and it was pain that I can't put into words. Car crash when he was in his 30s. However, many years before he died we made a pact.

Since the two of us had been in a serious car crash together when I was 11 and he was 18, we talked about death pretty often. He was fascinated by what had happened to me in the coma - he just got cuts and bruises in the accident but I was pretty much written off. Had to rebuild myself with spare parts in my brain, hence the somewhat eccentric being I am today. Anyway, he became obsessed with proving that there is life after death. I don't know how many hours we spent discussing this over the years. Many. However, he was really into left-brained logic and I was more creative, partly because I'd trashed my left brain in the crash and partly because I've just always been a bit of a creative spooky hippy type. He insisted we must prove life after death scientifically or it would mean nothing. We must promise to seek out evidence of it when the other died.

Whomever remained was promise-bound to prove it, and if it were proved they were to broadcast this fact to a grateful world. All wars would stop, etc, etc. We didn't fully get how adults thought at this stage. We were still in the naive world of: "If you show proof, they have to believe, then... peace on Earth!" 

So, how would this happen? I thought a code word might do it. Survivor goes to a medium. Medium says code word. All good. Then tell the papers or whatever (no internet then).

No, he said. Not scientific enough. Anyone could guess a word. It must be a numerical code... and a complex one. Also, not a medium. It must come via an atheist or similar because, science. 

I pointed out there was no way I could remember a numerical code due to brain damage there, but agreed to the atheist bit. We sat for a while and brainstormed code words. Finally, we settled on one that would mean nothing to anyone but us. We promised never to tell it to ANYONE until we were dead because, again, science. Then we got on with life. Periodically, we'd check with each other that the code word was still safe and unshared. It was. 

Then he died. I thought it would be me. 

Next, things got trippy. I was to write and read the eulogy at his funeral. Immediately, I remembered a discussion we'd had about the nature of spirituality. He'd written an essay in which he'd examined a number of religious traditions and concluded that the wisdom that most summed up what united all religions was best expressed by Bill and Ted: Be excellent to each other. I loved that. He was my sibling so, naturally, I wanted to mock him for his conclusion but I found I couldn't. It was brilliant. It was so true. It resonated. So I told people about that at his funeral. 

However... while I was writing that, before the funeral... the weird stuff began to happen. I was watching the news with my parents and then boyfriend. The remote was on a table way away from anyone. Someone my brother had met in real life - and disagreed with on some points - was interviewed about his spiritual beliefs on the TV. As soon as he appeared, the TV switched channels onto Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure. Abe Lincoln was on stage. "Be excellent to each other and... party on dudes!" he said and the TV switched itself off. Nobody was near that remote. By this time, I should probably mention, someone had already said the code word. Someone I wouldn't have expected. I'd ignored it, thinking he'd maybe told them. The TV trick was good though. 

Because... Science!

Years passed. I didn't go to the papers about what had happened. It still seemed like it could be a coincidence. About two years later, I was watching TV and saw Derron Brown - a famous atheist and magician. He's not just a bit of an atheist, by the way. Much of his act is based on disproving spirituality. As I watched the program, he got someone to do automatic writing. This person wrote a lot of things that made sense, but he wrote something completely random that connected with nothing else... and it was our code word. 

Science enough? I thought it definitely was. Then I woke up the next day and decided it wasn't. Meanwhile, my bro had done a stack of other things, such as appearing in dreams and showing me things I would then see in real life the following day, but I still wasn't buying that this was scientific enough. 

More years passed. One night I had a dream. In the dream I was walking through a hotel. It was really distinctive. I know I'll see it in real life one day. The room numbers, though, were above the doors rather than on them. You could still see the numbers when the doors were open. And people kept opening the doors. Behind each door was a little story. Someone doing something or having a conversation or eating burgers. Whatever. But all the time I could see the numbers. I turned and saw Derron Brown walking down the corridor. He smiled and winked as he passed, then walked on. 

Immediately, I knew I was asleep. And I thought of my brother. I was fully awake in my dream. The actors kept acting. Everything kept happening around me. I walked down the stairs. I leant against the wall that faced the bottom of the stairs. I slid down until I was sitting on the floor, pulled my knees towards me and hugged them. Actors in the dream continued to pretend the hotel was a real thing. They walked past me as I sat on the floor, doing their work. Why were they even bothering? I knew this was a dream. They could all go home. I began to cry, thinking of my brother. Then, someone touched my left shoulder. I looked up. It was my bro, Martin. 

Me: I'm dreaming. This is just a dream.

Him: Yes. Tell me the dream.

Me: You're in it. You can see it. This is it. You're dead.

Him: That's not important. Tell me the dream.

Me: [what I told you above].

Him: Did you see the numbers? 

Me: The room numbers? Yes. Why?

Him: Tell me the numbers. All of them.

Me: [told the numbers].

Him: Again

Me: [Repeated the numbers]

Him: Now... wake up! 

I woke up. I scribbled down everything from the dream, then went to my computer. Opened Google. Typed in everything, including the numbers. I got a googlewhack. Googlewhacks were things we used to try to get when my brother and I worked together - it means ONE result across the whole web. Some people define it as two words resulting in one result, but back in the day most people called it a googlewhack when you got a single result regardless. They were rare back then, but by the time of the dream they were pretty much impossible. I got one. It was a forum post on the aforementioned atheist, Derren Brown's site. The title of the post was simply:

Be excellent to each other.

I've mentioned this story in limited FB lives in the last year, but not anything public. This is the moment that it feels right to go public. 

I don't expect you to believe what I believe. And I don't expect there to be world peace because I shared this, but I feel as if I've finally kept my promise to my bro'. And the timing feels right. 

I've never known a moment in my life where the world more needs to hear the immortal words:

Be EXCELLENT to each other and... PARTY ON DUDES! 

Rebecca (and Martin)

 P.S. The video I told you about earlier, that I was watching just before I saw Bill and Ted were coming back was from a festival I did the year my bro died. 

P.P.S. Please leave a comment below, and share it with people you think it might help. I told my bro I'd do this. Not quite the mass media immersion he had in mind, but I trust this community to help. You're good peeps.