What is the purpose of time? Psalm 90 attributed to Moses gives us a hint in verse 12. “Teach us to number our days that we may get a heart of wisdom”. This reminds me of the 2012 movie “A Thousand Words” where a shady character “Jack” played by Eddie Murphy is cursed to die as soon as he mutters 1000 words. He begins to pick his words very thoughtfully and sparingly to no avail until he learns from a guru that to remove the curse he must make peace with all relationships. One broken relationship stood out from all the rest – Jack was angry at his father for leaving his mother when he was born. With only three words left, Jack’s life is redeemed when he finds his father and tells him, “I forgive you”.
Since the day we were born we have been aware of time. From toddlers to teens we proudly watched ourselves grow taller every year, with some of us, when we became more aware of our surroundings, noticing another side to this equation in our parents’ faces beginning to wrinkle and hairs starting to gray. The seasons continually remind us of the cycle in the passage of time. Solomon the Wise in Ecclesiastes 3 suggests that there is a time and purpose for everything under heaven, a time to be born, a time to die, and that God has set eternity, like a great mystery beyond the veil, into the heart of man, so that Man is awe struck by the concept of eternity, but unable to fully comprehend it.
A renowned 20th century American writer, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., in his 1967 best-selling novel “Slaughterhouse-Five” introduced a metaphor that has never been forgotten “Take it moment by moment, and you will find that we are all… bugs in amber.”
This was advice given to the character, Billy Pilgrim, an optometrist from upstate New York, when he is captured by Tralfamadorians from a distant planet, who have the view that we exist simultaneously in all points of time, but unaware of them, being trapped, as if in amber, in any particular moment.
This post is about getting ourselves out of the amber, so we can experience timelessness. Timelessness would have no meaning without time. But time may be a mixed bag, both curing us and killing us. So what is this entity, time, that is so influential?
Relatively Speaking
At the turn of the 19th century scientific breakthroughs began springing to life. The industrial revolution had allowed better scientific instruments to be constructed. The renaissance in Europe had established academic institutions of excellence which gathered the brightest and the best into participating communities. Thanks to Gutenberg a few centuries back, and the European railway postal system, research publications were easily and quickly distributed. And industries which needed technical solutions for new processes were perfectly willing to fund research. The time was ripe for innovation.
Everyone understood time then. There was a master train schedule that everyone followed and the same time reference was assumed to apply to everyone regardless of their motion or location. You got from A to B by using the schedule, otherwise you missed the train. No one had a clue there might be a flaw in this perception of time as absolute. Then a lowly patent clerk in Switzerland who had a lot of smarts, about an average memory, and a very active, almost obsessive imagination scratched some notes on scrap paper during his boring job whenever he was inspired, and stuck them in a desk drawer. No one knew that Albert’s notes would later give birth to the most monumental scientific discoveries of his age and ours – The Theory of Special Relativity and the Theory of General Relativity. From the moment Albert Einstein had his first inspiration, time would never be thought of in same way.
Special Relativity considered the concept of time of one person relative to another when one or both were moving at constant speed relative to the other. At high speeds unusual effects were theorized to occur based on the idea proposed a little earlier by James Maxwell, that the speed of light is constant. Einstein’s intuition led him to guess correctly that the speed of light is constant in every frame of reference. As shown in the illustration, if Einstein, in his frame of reference, is on a large, fast spaceship that has a light beam moving downward vertically through a given distance in 1 unit of time; Maxwell, in his separate frame of reference, who is stationary relative to the space ship, watching it passing overhead, would observe the light moving through a much longer diagonal distance. It would have taken light traveling at a constant speed to travel the longer distance that Maxwell observes 3 ½ units of time. During this event, Einstein will have aged one unit of time, while Maxwell will have aged 3 ½ units of time. The faster the ship, the longer the diagonal distance, the greater Maxwell ages compared to Einstein.
If you slow the ship down to that of cars, trains, and airplanes, the effect is so small that it is not detectable. As is often the case in science and spirituality, the finer principle is hidden by the coarser until a new understanding is revealed.
Special Relativity was a simplified case, considering objects moving at constant speed and not affected by gravity. When Einstein plugged in everything he knew about gravity and acceleration into the Theory of General Relativity, the mathematical solution revealed an earth-shaking conclusion. Gravity is not like magnetism pulling matter towards it. Instead, gravity causes distortions in the fabric of space-time so that both light and matter are both affected. The first graphical representation shows the earth following an orbit around the massive sun. As a result of these distortions depicted as a well in the space-time continuum, the earth appears to follow a path of balance between a straight line and falling into the well.
The proof of this theory would be observing how light would be bent by the same distortion. The second graphical representation shows how the distortion in the space-time continuum causes light that passes close to the sun to bend. Such an observation could be conducted by observing the stars that appear close to the sun during a total eclipse. Their positions would appear slightly spread out from the sun and from each other because their paths are bent, compared to their normal positions. Sounds easy to verify. But it took 10 years of trial and error by teams of astronomers from all over the world to travel to a total eclipse, have all their gear working, and a clear enough sky. World War I broke out in the middle of that period which totally disrupted travel and scientific expeditions. It was not until 1919 that a successful observation was made. As it turns out, the delay worked out for good, because during that time mistakes were discovered in Einstein’s calculations which claimed half as much distortion as the corrected calculations. His theory might have been discredited if an eclipse would have been successfully observed before the corrections were made. In all this, Einstein never lost faith. His biography almost sounds like the Book of Job. His trials did not end then, but continued with his critics and later with the Nazis.
Einstein’s new set of equations for his Theory of General Relativity indicated that time could, in one sense, be considered the 4th dimension to be included on equal ground with the 3 spacial dimensions of length, width, and height. At any moment, your location in the space-time continuum could be specified by four numbers representing the 4 dimensions. If time was just another of the 4 dimensions, then maybe we could go back in time, just like we can move back and forth in the spacial dimensions. Einstein was skeptical about that. A suggestion was later made that this could be accomplished by circling a massive object such as a black hole, but Stephen Hawking, the modern expert on black holes, remarked that he did not think nature allowed it, and that the conditions necessary to make that happen would always be unachievable. He was willing to reconsider only if tourists from the future were to visit us. As would occur again and again, nature would take precedence over the equations that have tried to describe it. Like the monk meditating on a hill searching for truth, or a crusader searching for the Holy Grail, scientists would continue to search for the primary principles of nature, and although they would seem at times to elude them, they would never cease to be amazed. As Einstein remarked:
“I’m not an atheist, and I don’t think I can call myself a pantheist. We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library filled with books in many languages. The child knows someone must have written those books. It does not know how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. The child dimly suspects a mysterious order in the arrangement of the books but doesn’t know what it is. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of even the most intelligent human being toward God. We see the universe marvelously arranged and obeying certain laws but only dimly understand these laws. Our limited minds grasp (at) the mysterious force that moves the constellations.”
A Theory of Everything
A limitation with Einstein’s theories is that they did not describe the behavior of subatomic particles well enough. For instance, many problems regarding the behavior of electrons and their interactions in the atom could be better described by modern quantum theory through using a complex mathematical formula known as the Schrodinger equation. It was based on the probability of the electron being distributed in the atom like a cloud, rather than a single particle with known position and velocity. This worked well for simple cases. No one was quite sure why, even Schrodinger. The formula kind of produced itself when certain mathematical techniques were strung together, and then took on a life of its own. But it got harder and harder to solve the formula when there were many particles interacting. It also painted a picture of reality that was not accurate, claiming an electron could exist and not exist at the same time with equal probability until its condition was detected by an observer. This resulted in some rather weird descriptions of the real world. Imagine a world in which you would exist and not exist with equal probability until you were observed. This is strongly refuted by the words of Descartes, “I think therefore I am”. Plus there was no way to combine relativity with modern quantum theory. The formulations were incompatible when they were blended together. On top of this, modern physics with the help of particle accelerators had predicted the existence of a slew of sub-subatomic particles, one of which was the graviton – the one that was supposed to cause mass and gravity. But it still has not been detected.
Then along came string theory. Instead of thinking of the primary elements of existence as fixed particles or clouds of probability, they were now considered as vibrations of hypothetical strings. The type of vibrations determined their properties. Now there would be a vibration that caused gravity… on paper. Many theoretical problems of modern physics that could not be solved by quantum or relativity theories could now be solved with string theory … on paper. It was the meeting of the minds. However, the meeting did not always extend to reality. All of a sudden there were parallel universes predicted. But the fact remains we are stuck in this one. We have no scientific evidence of other universes. Many critics claim string theory is nothing more than an elaborate mathematical exercise and waste of time that could be better spent on something else. But it did create a kind of mathematical fantasy in which, for the time being, everything could be explained.
A Theory of Everything has long been the dream of physicists. Being able to put a small set of neat equations on an index card that describes all the underlying principles of the natural world. This is the Alpha and Omega of the natural world. We can almost do that, except when it comes to gravity.
In Douglass Adam’s 1978 radio spoof “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”, a compact solution to the theory of everything is calculated by a supercomputer as the number 42. When asked what the answer means, the supercomputer instructions are to find the original question from a bigger supercomputer – an interesting twist in the search for truth. Since Adam’s story includes a romantic element, rumors are that this British satirist chose the number 42 from the song “Tea for Two”. A later work of his “The Long, Dark Tea-Time of the Soul” lends evidence to this.
The Invisible Universe
We do not have evidence of parallel universes, but we do have some evidence of a much more intriguing anomaly that suggests the universe we know and love is only 10% of everything. There is another 90% of it that is invisible to us, that we cannot directly interact with although it dwells among us. It is composed of Dark Matter and Dark Energy.
The word “dark” in this case is a misnomer. The word ‘invisible” is probably more accurate. Dark Matter has mass but no charge Therefore it does not generate or interact with electromagnetic fields. The reason I do not fall through the floor when I stand up is because my mass has electromagnetic properties that repel the electromagnetic properties of the floor. The floor is not “solid” because it has mass. It is solid because it has mass with charge. The charge produces electrical waves with their magnetic counterpart. I can see the floor because of electromagnetic waves interacting with the floor entering my eyes and stimulating electromagnetic interaction in my neurons. But particles with mass and no charge can penetrate right through my body, right through the earth, without any significant effect.
Dark matter was discovered by observing how fast galaxies rotate like a pinwheel of stars and discovering that based on how much visible mass we estimate that galaxy to have, the star should be flying off the pinwheel unless there was a very large mass that is invisible holding them in. Also the mysterious dark matter is evenly distributed throughout the pinwheel, not concentrated in the center, so that the outer stars circle at the same speed as the inner ones. It was confirmed in 1970 by a female astronomer who died last year without having been awarded a Nobel Prize which she deserved – Vera Ruben. Because she was a woman she was largely ignored and had to take a back seat in the circle of male astronomers. But she persisted quietly in her pursuits until she and a partner accumulated enough evidence to blow the roof off of modern physics.
In 1990 astronomers discovered that the universe is expanding at an ever increasing rate, exactly the opposite of what the big bang model of the universe predicts, that energy is dissipated as matter is thrown out from the big bang until gravity causes the expansion of the big bang to slow down and coalesce In order to explain the accelerating expansion, they hypothesized that the universe is made up of “dark energy” that is a property of empty space, or what we once considered empty space. Dark energy is otherwise undetectable because it is not electromagnetic energy. Some have speculated that dark energy is similar to what Eastern religions refer to as Chi. The more the universe expands, the more empty space is created, the more dark energy is available to make it expand faster. Not only that, but the universe is about 68% dark energy, 27% dark matter, and 5% of what we know as normal matter and energy in our beloved visible universe. Our visible universe is totally outnumbered by an invisible universe that dwells within it and penetrates every space. We are ants in a vast jungle we cannot see and know very little about. Either that or our basic assumptions are all wrong, and after 204 Nobel prizes we now need to erase the blackboard and start all over again from scratch.
Just in case you get any idea that we may somehow figure this out a few more Nobel prizes from now, there is one more wrench to throw into the works to make everything impossibly unsettling – “quantum entanglement”. This is the proverbial straw that breaks the camels’ back. In quantum entanglement, two subatomic particles may become mysteriously linked so that if they are moved apart each to a different end of the universe, if a change happens to the first particle, the second particle instantaneously changes the same way. Whatever is connecting these particles happens at the speed of light multiplied by infinity. Naturally Einstein did not like anything traveling faster than light which would totally unravel all his theories and so he referred to this phenomenon in a derogatory way as “spooky forces acting at a distance”. But the effect was confirmed, another Nobel Prize was awarded, no one asked Einstein to give back his Nobel Prize money and the theory of everything took a quantum leap into becoming infinitely elusive.
The Weight of the Human Soul
Various experiments have been performed trying to detect a weight loss when a person dies. The most accurate one was performed in 1988 by East German scientists two years before the fall of the Berlin Wall. This experiment compensated for every variable imaginable including release of feces, loss of water vapor, and final breath. Results for 200 cases conclusively indicated that after all the natural sources of weight were subtracted out, there was still a consistent loss of weight of one hundredth of a gram. One hypothesis is that this is the weight of the human soul that leaves the body when it dies. It can also be caused by another process we do not yet understand.
Memories of Past Lives
At the University of Virginia Medical Center Department for Perceptual Studies, Professor Jim Tucker continues the work of Professor Ian Stevenson studying children around ages 2-6 who have memories of past lives. There have been 2500 documented cases worldwide since research began in 1961. The memories usually fade after age six as the child’s brain begins to mature to encounter the present life. The average time between death and birth is 16 months. Some children remember the time between death and birth. It is acclaimed as first rate research by expert research psychiatrists. This is evidence that our consciousness can live on long after our bodies perish. Jim Tucker as well as a number of physicists also believe this implies that out material world may grow out of our consciousness. The scientist who started quantum physics, Max Planck, is known to have stated in 1931: “I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness.”
Study of Psi
At the same Department of Perceptual Studies, research psychologists, neuroscientists and electrical engineers have joined together to study what is referred to as “Psi”. Psi includes various kinds of anomalous interactions, not presently explainable in conventional scientific terms, between human individuals and their environments. They study people with special skills such as advanced meditators, those who can voluntarily control their Out-of-Body experiences, trance mediums, and gifted psi subjects who demonstrate such phenomena as accurate remote viewing and the ability to voluntarily effect observable changes in the physical environment via mental processes. If you possess any or all of these skills you are invited to contact the Department of Perceptual Studies to report your experiences with full confidentiality (refer to https://med.virginia.edu/perceptual-studies/research-area/studies-of-psi/). The department is also using advanced neuroimaging technology to study exceptional individuals. Similar programs at Princeton and Duke Universities were closed down ten years ago because they were too mathematical and mechanistic, which resulted in very little confirming evidence. The University of Virginia programs have a more productive approach and better results. Seriously, scientists would not keep pushing against the odds to explore these areas if there was not something to it. Being funded by private endowments that cannot be deferred into building up the US military is also a distinct advantage.
Benefits of Mindfulness and Meditation
Meditation and mindfulness training are now standard therapies for people with health conditions such as heart disease and other stress-related illnesses. It has also been shown to be medically effective for mental illness. It is now a regular part of the Alcoholics Anonymous toolbox to stabilize lives and connect with one’s non-denominational higher power. Scientists borrowed it from Eastern religions, standardized how to use it and how to measure its effects to verify the remarkable benefits in scientific papers published in reputable Western journals. Some corporations offer programs to their employees to improve productiveness, job satisfaction, and wellness. And of course it has been around a whole lot longer in the esoteric spiritual communities, online and offline. Some progressive religious organizations have begun to embrace it. But many of the more conventional Western religious organizations, especially the more fundamentalist Christian ones, do not want any part of it. In fact I was flatly turned down when I wanted to start some activity along these lines at my local Messianic Jewish Synagogue. If only they knew how much this kind of suppression inhibits spiritual growth. I think the major fear is that it will turn their congregations into Buddhists. But Reform Jews and members of Chabad have begun to practice it, and none of these congregants seem to be racing off to Tibetan mountaintops.
Stuck in a Rut
Nature dictates that we cannot go back in time. But we do this all the time with our minds. It is one thing to reminisce about good times, and another to ruminate on experiences we have suffered or wish we could change. Past trauma can also affect us consciously and subconsciously. And then there is guilt and remorse that can be carried way too far. Reliving the past can be toxic. Many times we would be better off if our minds copied nature and just moved forward. The apostle Paul hints at this in his letter to the church in Philippi, “Not that I have already obtained all this, or have already arrived at my goal, but I press on to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of me. Brothers and sisters, I do not consider myself yet to have taken hold of it. But one thing I do: Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ” (Philippians 3:12-14, NIV). A shortcoming of Christianity practiced in modern times is that although followers profess to live up to Paul’s standard, many of them are in therapy because they are not able to. Many live in denial that they are not able to, do not seek some solution to this, and then the hidden consequences leak out on themselves and the people around them. So much of Christianity is founded on relieving followers of the negative aspects of the past, pardon from sin, for instance, or forgiveness for the wrong doings of others. These are good principles, mind you, because they keep the majority of us from becoming uncivilized. But if we have trouble living up to them, and the church in practice seems to fall short of our expectations, should we choose to settle for mediocrity? What would Jesus do?
We are told that Christ is timeless, having existed before the creation of the world and through eternity. All things were created through him, and apart from him not one thing was created (John 1:3). If a spark of Christ is in us, then should we not have the potential for experiencing this freedom of timelessness? The question is not so much if, but how. In extreme cases electrical shock treatments are effective in freeing mental patients from accumulated negative mental patterns, a kind of reset button, but with negative side effects. We are all students of life, in the same boat as mental patients, needing a reset. Bad thoughts from the past can flow like a flood. How can we learn to shut them off and keep them shut off on a regular basis? How can we learn to discover and control the hidden unconscious influences? Many of us have found the reset button in meditation and other spiritual practices. It each of them there is a focal point to which we can keep returning. A piece of timelessness.
Miracles Born out of Weakness… and Weirdness
Einstein did not fit into the normal mold of society. It is rumored that he had a mild form of autism called Asperger’s syndrome. He learned very slowly during childhood, had underdeveloped social skills, was introverted, and could become easily obsessed. Later in life he did not let his children touch him. He had difficulty getting a job. And yet it was this kind of isolation that helped him think creatively instead of the encultured patterns of the scientific establishments. Vocationally he had become a loser, and it took a long time for his particular kind of genius to be recognized. When he put his intuition and math together, he discovered that our ordinary understanding of space and time were an illusion.
Marie Curie had to work in a shack with makeshift lab equipment when she was isolating the first radioactive elements polonium and radium. Thomas Edison was deaf in both ears which enabled him to develop an undistracted focus on his work. Nikola Tesla who invented alternating current never seemed interested in monetary gain, although a possible downside of that was he never seemed to have enough money to do what he needed to do. Tesla claimed to have required only two hours of sleep a night, although he occasionally napped. He loathed jewelry and round objects and wouldn’t touch hair. He was obsessed with the number three and polished every dining implement he used to perfection, using 18 napkins. Leonardo Da Vinci was believed to be dyslectic. Stephen Hawking was paralyzed. The list goes on and on. Many of the keys to unlock the secrets of the natural universe were given into the hands of people under handicaps and distress. If we were to select these people to be on the team of the great like we select sports champions, they would have been third string choices at best. This is not too unlike the Western world’s most famous religious figure being born out of wedlock in a manger and raised as a carpenter. The same concept is in the Old Testament, with the family of Abraham’s grandson, the beginning of the twelve tribes of Israel, being rescued from drought by the youngest grandson, Joseph, whom they once betrayed. Regardless of whether these scriptures are real or allegorical, they reveal remarkable characteristics of our universe. Call it restoration or unmerited favor. It is like an ice cream cone appearing out of nowhere on the hottest day of summer. It is not supposed to be there. Who or what put it there? Everyone has a different explanation for the same ice cream cone.
Marriage of Science and Spirituality
We now have an interesting parallel between science and spirituality. Modern science now tells us that dark (invisible) matter permeates ordinary matter. It obeys different rules than ordinary matter and exerts unusual effects on ordinary matter that have been confirmed but are still not quite understood. Many spiritual schools of belief have been telling us for ages that a finer type of matter referred to as subtle matter permeates what we perceive as the material world. They tell us our physical bodies are permeated by various levels of subtle bodies, the highest form being pure consciousness. There is so much more to us and our universe than meets the eye.
Perception of Truth
I once thought that there was one clock for the universe and everything went by it. Now I know that time is relative. I also once believed that there was only one objective understanding of reality. I guess that was a good place to start until I matured. Imagine when I was a child and my parents told me when to go to bed, but instead of doing that I told them that I was experiencing a different perception of that reality. As we mature we may realize things about our differences. As the saying goes mean are from Mars and women are from Venus. Gender can change the way we perceive and react to our surroundings. Our genes and environment make us the individuals we are and since our reality is what we individually perceive it to be, we may all have a different perception of reality. Add being permeated by an invisible consciousness to the mix, and I could easily begin to become confused. Am I the consciousness or the one being permeated by it?
The reason I am not confused is that by practicing a technique I learned one day by accident, I can for brief moments sense that I am the consciousness, there is no confusion, no uncertainty, instead an incredibly positive feeling, a pinpoint moment of total but simple clarity that is accompanied by a calm urgency to exert my being toward healing something. It could be saving the world or not stepping on an ant. It is all the same. And it is as natural as scratching an itch, rather than any attempt to be heroically altruistic. It feels so good. I don’t know what to call it but I seem to settle on saying that I am experiencing timelessness. This is the closest thing to a perception of truth that I know. It makes everything else I have sought after outdated. To me all inconsistencies in theories and beliefs are the result of missing this experience. It is here that all the corruption shakes out and everything merges. Everything that I know that is good can be derived from this. It surpasses a theory of everything. It is my most effective reset button, liberating me from the amber, if but for a brief moment. It is all I need. Maybe this is the timeless Christ within, or something like that. When I go back and read scripture, it seems that what I read simply highlights in a less perfect form everything that is already self-evident from my encounter with timelessness. As I read some profound or hidden truth, I nod to myself, “OK, they almost got that right”. It is exceptionally uplifting and incredibly enabling. Everyone should have their very own personalized reset button, and in the way that is most suitable for them, take time for timelessness.
Great read! So much remains a mystery.
Thanks for taking the time and effort for showing all the delicate details and where we stand in physics. Also great to hear you’re making progress in meditation.
Keep on doing what you’re doing!
I’m loving and sharing your works.
Thank you!
Thanks Gerard, its so good to be part of an open-minded caring community online.
Fantastic and enlightening! I too am experiencing being the consciousness and all seems to be in a ease of being able to allow or change perception. THANK YOU FOR THE GREAT WORK!
Thank you Denise, it is an amazing experience when it happens, and that is available to so many of us.
Robert,
Way to blend science and spirituality! As you seem to have come to see it, I can only believe that consciousness is all that there really is. I think many mainstream scientists are coming to this conclusion too, but if they admitted that they would no longer have a job since we don’t have the means yet to offer good evidence, at least scientifically speaking.
Overall a great post. I enjoyed brushing up in my history of science here and the conclusions you drew. Good writing, thanks for the contribution, Robert.
Hi Josh. Glad you and others were interested in the science parts. I was wondering how that would go over. But I thought I needed to explain my new experience of consciousness in a creative way that is personal to me in my journey, rather than explain it in models of spirituality that were concepts I have read about but not quite firsthand experiences. I have a much greater appreciation for those models now.
J0sh, so true, most of science is funded by governments and industry seeking short-term tangible benefits. Some physicists have branched out on the side when given latitude but more than half the particle physicists in the world are employees of the largest collider in the world in Switzerland. They are busy splitting subatomic particles and developing better and better technology to do so. Ironically, the collider’s most popular mission is to confirm the existence of the Higgs Boson, also referred to as the “God Particle.” Also we humans are a race of explorers. We will likely establish a successful colony on Mars by mid century. We seem compelled to answer the big questions – who are we, where did we come from, and are we alone? We are searching the stars for one with an inhabitable planet. We listen for signals from outer space, waiting to find a message, some kind of organized code sent by an intelligent species. Maybe they are waiting for us to evolve enough so it is safe for them to make contact with us. Maybe they are part of a greater consciousness influencing our development behind the scenes.
That’s an interesting thought, Robert. If we truly are all connected through the umbrella of consciousness, this would make complete sense.
Personally, I am excited to see how the first manned Mars Mission goes. I remember in elementary school I read a book that predicted we’d do it by 2020 back in 1987. We probably won’t accomplish that, but I hope its not far behind. I’m guessing 2030?
Ignorance thrives through ego (yEgo/YH [empty throne]) connected to eEl/ill, to the mud-bound Fish, and, without elevated love, forms recreators, cocreators, and creators of evil, thus fosters Evil. Time has now come to dismember into 144 thousand individual parts [disconnect], gather all but one, and form a whole greater than the sum of all the original parts. Besides loftier illusory literal meaning, Science, as Bible, principally contains wisdom preserved in allegory…
Raymon
Hi Robert,
What an exceptional piece of writing, thank you for posting.
I particularly enjoyed your last extended paragraph and your personal experience with timelessness. Gosh, you described really well what I would refer to as bliss-consciousness, or Christ Nature within. Experiential timelessness is regarded as Transcendental Awareness, or Transcendence — direct knowing of our true eternal Higher Self.
I liked your balanced treatment of blending well-informed science with the spiritual. Thanks again, Robert, great article.
Blessings,
Raymond
Thank you Robert.
This is an awesome article and love the way you blended the Science. The same night my wife and I watched a NOVA special that further elaborated the science (see link). Not to be a pain but can you elaborate on the technique you practice that you accidentally stumbled upon. I do realize it is individualistic and am not trying to copy anything. I am just curious how you maintain it.
Thanks,
Joseph
https://www.amazon.com/The-Illusion-of-Time/dp/B0060DYHV4/ref=sr_1_1?s=movies-tv&ie=UTF8&qid=1495970477&sr=1-1&refinements=p_n_format_browse-bin%3A2650306011
Joseph, I’ve been experiencing synchronicities at times where I come across a media presentation that is closely related to a subject I have been exploring just previously. The last time was yesterday. during a lull in the day when I was looking for something to watch on Amazon Prime just to pass the time. I selected the Celestine Prophecies not knowing anything about it. It is about higher consciousness explained through a hollywood type drama. Even though it was fictional, it introduced me to some new concepts, like drawing energy from within instead of trying to obtain it by manipulating and draining others in a competition to succeed. When a group of people draw from within a wonderful unifying of energy occurs. I like movies and it seems to be a route for me to receive wisdom from whatever the sources are that teach us. More to say tomorrow. I look forward to checking out the Nova program.
Thanks Robert. Synchronicity seems to be the path for me too!
Thanks Raymond. We’ve learned a lot from each other’s experiences. I think I did experience what you would call bliss consciousness. It has other names I suppose depending on the spiritual model used to define it. It amazes me that perceptions of truth seem to merge into the same experience.
Awesome.
This is a link to a NOVA documentary that enhances this.
https://www.amazon.com/The-Illusion-of-Time/dp/B0060DYHV4/ref=sr_1_1?s=movies-tv&ie=UTF8&qid=1495970477&sr=1-1&refinements=p_n_format_browse-bin%3A2650306011
Hey Robert,
I love this new side of you, it seems like you’ve grown/evolved so much in a year. Maybe this really IS the elusive Christ consciousness within we all talk about on this wonderful blog site. Can you expand on your meditive technique a little? I love hearing about this and respect your opinions and intellect. Thank you for writing and sharing 🙂
Claudine
Thanks Claudine, my meditation technique has usually been on focusing on the breadth, returning to the focal point when I become aware that my thoughts have drifted. The smart phone app “Calm” is a fun way to learn how to start doing this. I go through periods when I do not do this regularly but still practise a mindfulness mindset when I can remember to, or I do something else like center my chakras by chanting under my breath. I try to avoid excess stress but when it gets bad I seek refuge in mindfulness and a lot of times I come out stronger in spirit than before the stress, also helpful people , events, and information pop out of the woodwork to encourage me. I have three close relatives who frequently fall into a state of panic and begin to contend with each other over nothing, so at times I find myself able to calm them down, other times I have to distance myself to avoid getting swept into it. I learned a lot about my own potential for negativity by watching other people play out theirs and thinking to myself, if these are the semi-futile games we all play, then I know there must be is a better way for us all. There has been a growing sense inside me that there is an amazing, positive, secure existence that I am in some mysterious way invited to become more a part of and that what I have normally thought of as the real world is to a large extent a fog of deception. In my own words of renunciation in response to it, “It’s all crap”. The fear. The sense of painful limitations. Sense of irrecoverable loss. Just getting by. The negative thoughts. It’s all complete and total crap.” I admit, this is not the eloquent declaration of enlightenment most people would expect. But it works for me. I think this is related to what we refer to as the Christ consciousness emerging from within. So its not just the meditation technique. I don’t think there is a perfect technique. And I was falling behind in the practice of the technique when something else good and new happened. It is something instilling us to reach out through various imperfect channels to grasp perfection. I am trying to have more regular meditations now. Scriptures pop out at me at times. My wife studies them and some of the ideas and practices of conventional Christianity are like a familiar, common language that helps us advance, even though it is imperfect. At times when I have felt so overwhelmed to the point of panic and mental paralysis, I have felt soothed by the presence of a personal savior who whispers stabilizing guidance into my soul. Because I know that I am being guided by models of spirituality that are imperfect into something that is more perfect, I am able to warmly embrace other people’s models that may have seemed strange to me before. It leads them to the same place it leads me, to be stable and to care for others. Its an amazing journey we are on.
This is an incredible read. It makes my want to literally go inside myself to knock on doors I know not. Greatly informative.
Thanks Paul. I’m thrilled that it inspires you. I like your expression “knock on doors I know not”.
Great article Robert! So very well put together!
It’s interesting how there are spiritual teachers who talk about the idea of “multiple universes,” a concept I never bought into. (I understand now, after reading your article, where they may have gotten their ideas from.)
The way I see the concept of timelessness: We access “timelessness” when we access our soul, or higher self, because our soul /higher self has been around forever, and will be around forever. It’s a simple concept and we can access this part of ourselves through meditation, dreams, and more.
Thanks for your article!
Christine, thanks for your comment. Yes, I agree, the concept of accessing our eternal soul (higher consciousness) through these various activities is the most straightforward way of understanding this. We come to experience this in our individual ways. Our explanations and methods differ in the details because they represent the lower consciousness trying to comprehend the higher. What we all have most in common is that by experiencing higher consciousness we are transformed for the better.
ANNY VOS’s COMMENTS. I am including below some comments from Anny Vos who lives in the Netherlands and has been having some technical difficulties receiving the full content from this website and sending to it. She exercised considerable effort to digest and relate her point of view about things I wrote about and has overcome some health issues and the technical obstacles to find a way to share this with us. Her persistence is truly inspiring.
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As I already wrote to you before, I love your article and appreciate the amount of energy and time you must have put into it. As many others obviously do also. Of course you know by now that I am not capable of totally understanding all these scientific details but I have read a lot about these things over time and formed my own opinion about some of them. Which is just that, an opinion. However, I’d like to share some of it with you.
In A Theory of Everything you write:
“…. It also painted a picture of reality that was not accurate, claiming an electron could exist and not exist at the same time with equal probability until its condition was detected by an observer. This resulted in some rather weird descriptions of the real world. Imagine a world in which you would exist and not exist with equal probability until you were observed. “
You mention here ‘reality’ and somewhere further down ‘the real world’ but regarding this I would like to remind you of the idea (not only mine) that this world we live in right now is not a real world at all but a world of illusion, a game, a dream or a deep sleep (tardema) as it is called in Genesis, in which we wear a blindfold (or = animal skin equals iver = blind) , so to speak, and in which our consciousness is much diminished.
Another thing is that I have read somewhere that we do indeed exist in two worlds at once, oscillating between the two as it were. Don’t ask me what that means exactly. And also that this world is being kept in existence by a ‘Silent Watcher’, which could maybe be connected with what you wrote above (detection by an observer). Could that mean that God keeps this world in existence by constantly watching us in order to enable us to have our experiences here and grow in conscious awareness from them?
David Wilcock writes in his books The Sourcefield Investigations and The Synchronicity Key about there being a Space-Time Continuum and a Time-Space Continuum which might or might not refer to the same concept of there being two worlds. I find his books intriguing but you would probably understand them a lot better than I do.
And further on you write: “….. Many theoretical problems of modern physics that could not be solved by quantum or relativity theories could now be solved with string theory … on paper. It was the meeting of the minds. However, the meeting did not always extend to reality. All of a sudden there were parallel universes predicted. But the fact remains we are stuck in this one. We have no scientific evidence of other universes. …”
Here I would like to remind you of an example I once gave you in one of my replies to a comment of yours to Joshua’s article about Genesis 3, the Transformation of the Serpent Ego of April 23rd, 2016:
“As you know I see this world we live in as not the real world but a fictional world in which we can grow in conscious awareness through all our experiences in that world, which we experience as real but in themselves are not real.
I see this world as an illusion, or a dream (‘tardema’). It has also been called a game and indeed it can be compared to a computer game in which all possible choices are already there as potential realities. As such each person will create a different world on the basis of the choices he or she makes. …”
These potential realities could also be called parallel universes and our focus would determine in which one of these universes we would end up in any given moment.
You seemed to like this example at the time and if what I conclude from what you have written in this article is right, you really are in a different universe right now from the one you were in before. Claudine also mentions something like that.
In The Invisible Universe you write:
“…. In quantum entanglement, two subatomic particles may become mysteriously linked so that if they are moved apart each to a different end of the universe, if a change happens to the first particle, the second particle instantaneously changes the same way. Whatever is connecting these particles happens at the speed of light multiplied by infinity…..”
This quantum entanglement appealed to me right away when I first read about it. Not just two but all particles seem to be entangled, and so are human beings. We are not separate beings in reality but One, only imagining ourselves to be separate from all others for a while in order to have all sorts of experiences but in reality remaining One all the time. So there is no Other to judge or hate, or who judges or hates us. Everything we do to a so-called other, we do to ourselves.
In Memories of Past Lives you write:
“…. The scientist who started quantum physics, Max Planck, is known to have stated in 1931: “I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness.”
I could not agree more. In fact this insight changes our whole concept of life and I do not understand how many mainstream scientists still can be convinced that matter is all that exists and consciousness is a by-product at most. This insight proves that consciousness is the basis of all that exists. Or in other words that the Highest Consciousness, or God, is the Creator of everything that is Real.
The creations in our personal fictional world however are our own responsibility in my view, and those in our co-created world are our communal responsibility.
In Miracles Born out of Weakness… and Weirdness you write:
“…..The same concept is in the Old Testament, with the family of Abraham’s grandson, the beginning of the twelve tribes of Israel, being rescued from drought by the youngest grandson, Joseph, whom they once betrayed. ..”
Whatever happened to Benjamin?
Finally, in Perception of Truth
“… Our genes and environment make us the individuals we are and since our reality is what we individually perceive it to be, we may all have a different perception of reality. Add being permeated by an invisible consciousness to the mix, and I could easily begin to become confused. Am I the consciousness or the one being permeated by it? …. I can for brief moments sense that I am the consciousness, there is no confusion, no uncertainty, instead an incredibly positive feeling, a pinpoint moment of total but simple clarity that is accompanied by a calm urgency to exert my being toward healing something …….. It feels so good. I don’t know what to call it but I seem to settle on saying that I am experiencing timelessness. This is the closest thing to a perception of truth that I know.”
I love how you describe this and do so agree with you. It is an exciting journey isn’t it? In spite of all its roller coaster rides.
Finally a question: Did you ever study the concept of the Holographic Universe at all? You do not mention it in your article. This also is an interesting view, I think, although I do not necessarily remember many details.
Anny,
So good to hear from you. I’ll do my best I can to address your comments.
The easiest to address is your mention of “Benjamin”. You are correct, Benjamin is the youngest, not Joseph. You are very good at details. Definitely a strong skill to do your wonderful work with Gematria.
About “Reality”, we are very much in agreement. After looking into four or five different models of raising consciousness, I noticed they all describe a higher reality which we can experience while at the same time (or intermittently) inhabiting the lower reality. Each model has a narrative that explains this dual existence and it is framed in the metaphors belonging to the culture and experiences of the individuals following the model. If five artists were asked to paint a portrait of what love is, there would be five colorful, graphical depictions, each inspiring, each different, but each trying to capture the subtle qualities and effects of love. Each might move us to understand a little more. It is very unlikely that any one of them would be the complete picture of everything that is love. But all of us know what love is. The paintings are limited representations of it from the artists point of view. Love is not a painting or even an interpretation of a painting. Love is love. In the same way our models are like the paintings. One painting shows a super collective consciousness dividing itself into individually consciousness spirits that descend into the material world to learn lessons during their ascension that were planned to occur. Another shows bliss consciousness developing from persistent yoga and meditation. Another shows salvation through a savior dying on a cross which provides them access to a wonderful kingdom on earth and in heaven they would otherwise not feel they deserve. Another shows an initiate following advice downloaded by a channeler from an archangel, teaching them how to live and give. Another shows a physicist and a neuroscientist pooling together leading edge discoveries in each of their fields and together coming to the conclusion that consciousness makes the material world appear to us like a hologram.
I can understand by direct experience maybe two of those models really well and how they have helped my consciousness evolve. I am able to grasp a little about the other models from others explanations. I used to have fits of skepticism about anything I was not immediately comfortable with. But after my experience with my point of clarity, I realized the imperfections of each model, and of any model, to portray what I now knew. I understood how various models were leading those who follow them to the same wonderful goal. The models are not the goal.
Much of the models may seem like a lie compared to the goal, but they were useful nonetheless in jumpstarting us out of total disbelief in the greater reality and moving us forward on our path. From that perspective, it seems silly to argue about which lie is the most truthful, yours or mine. We do better just agreeing on the goal and respecting each other’s paths. In other words, I don’t have to perform the ritual of a tribe of American Indians to catch a rattle snake with my bare hands and then releasing it without me or the snake being harmed to prove I am a medicine man. But I believe those who perform this along with their other training, activates something that enables them to be effective medicine men, someone who provides guidance and healing to the community.
The holographic thing is new to me. I have heard of it. I found a free 30 minute video interview with Michael Talbot that explains it at http://www.thinkingallowed.com/2mtalbot.html.
I really liked his explanations about the placebo effect. When a patient with cancer intensely believed a medicine would heal him, his tumor melted like a snowball in mid summer. When he read that the medicine was not effective, his tumor came back. When his doctor told him he would administer a more potent form that is effective and actually gave him a placebo, he was healed again. In another study, patients were divided into two groups, one given medicine and the other a placebo, both groups were told they were given the medicine and that it would cause their hair to fall out. The hair fell out of a third of the patients in each group. A belief was downloaded into their consciousness which then caused the healing or side effects, rather than the medicine. our consciousness has power over the material world.
Thanks for your comments. Blessings and good health, Robert
Robert,
CGJung has some interesting findings on this subject, he calls his science empirical even though it also addresses the unconscious aspects of life.
30 years ago i read a book ‘Seth speaks’, it addresses similar tests and it explains that there is a place where the beings involved agree on the response they choose. Imagine that, what an idea !
Jung explains things with ‘participation mystique’ and a present day jungian studies ‘transferential chimera’. God, partly unconcious, experiences itself in Man.
Anny,
You wrote “Could that mean that God keeps this world in existence by constantly watching us in order to enable us to have our experiences here and grow in conscious awareness from them?”
I have definitely experienced the encouragement, guidance, correction, and pull (or maybe calling) from something beyond myself that has helped me grow. You could label this something “God” in the sense of God the Father, God the Helper (Holy Spirit), and God the Intercessor (Son of God), definitions which I am familiar with from my Christian background. But like I mentioned in the post, as I progress along my path I could easily become confused, am I the consciousness or the one being permeated by it? In my moment of clarity there is less of an awareness of being separated from consciousness. There is a an urge to manifest that consciousness for good. Synchronicities occur around me and others that highlight and propel us toward awareness of consciousness and facilitating its manifestation for good. Three years ago I might have said “God did that”, a Zeus-like superior being and his angels. But now I am more comfortable not to assume these anthropomorphic images are real. I prefer a more unassuming unified source of consciousness that we share with the rest of everything.
Anny,
Thanks for the info about David Wilcock. I didn’t know anything about him so I googled around a little. The two books you mentioned made the New York Times best seller list when they came out in 2011 and 2013. He has been a contributor to the TV series “Ancient Aliens”. He has a website at https://divinecosmos.com/. He produces films and has held conferences where he lectures. He is producing a film “Convergence” that claims to give scientific evidence for higher consciousness and a whole bunch of other things. Some of these things are connected to conspiracy theories which I have tended to shy away from. Some of his newer productions are available from the internet site “Gaiia” which requires a modest membership fee.
He claims to be a psychic and a reincarnation of Edgar Cayce. His main method of presenting information is as a “disclosure” of things covered up by the government, the illuminati, and a sinister group called the Cabal, which is being countered by benevolent group called the Alliance. These groups include humans and aliens. Some of them live inside the Earth or the Moon, or have a secret colony on Mars. Within this sensationalist/conspiracy scenario he prescribes many of the popular methods for evolving one’s consciousness such as meditation, yoga, and interpretation of dreams which you can learn on a fast track from his books and DVDs. Nothing new about the methods.
The scenarios he presents may have an appeal to people who are questioning things and are attracted to sensationalism as a form of excitement and stimulation of the imagination. I guess some good can come out of this if it encourages his followers to use consciousness enhancing techniques, even if they are being motivated to do so to outwit and outrun the evil Cabal.
My interest is in finding similarities and goals in various religions and pseudosciences. As outlandish as David Wilcock’s sensationalistic approach to promoting higher consciousness might have seemed to me from my point of view as a conventional science minded kind of person, my new point of view from my moments of clarity tells me not to be overly concerned – this new pack of lies is not that different from all the other pack of lies that make up religions and pseudosciences. Maybe they are actually packs of partial lies, or maybe packs of partial truths depending on how you want to see it. Same thing to me. The Cabal, Satan, The Wicked Witch of the West, human carnality, Beetlejuice, the sticky clutches of the lower levels of consciousness, religious dogma, the claws of egotism – these all serve as resistance to evolving consciousness. I forgot to mention the boogey monsters who dwell in hollow earth.
Bottom line – something impedes us. Maybe a better term might be “moderates us” in our ascension. It fulfills a function necessary to evolve to reach what I call “the goal”. We can’t get to the goal by being born at the goal, we have to evolve following a path of resistance that strengthens aspects of ourselves towards reaching the goal.
We can get stuck in the road if we become too fixated on the partial truths. We become close minded and obstruct others by our influence to try to get them to conform to the partial truths we have become too comfortable with.
Hello Robert,
Thanks for your replies to my comment. I like what you write about Reality and Love. I believe neither can be captured in one concept or image though. Everyone experiences them in their own way, which can only be a part of the Whole. When I look at it from the concept that God = Love and Love = God, it becomes clear to me that there are many frequencies of what we call love and our experience of love changes in accordance with our own frequency of consciousness, I believe. In my experience Love is a Force most of all, that should awaken inside ourselves during our journey.
As for consciousness, I believe that God = Consciousness, and we, as parts of God or All that is, are consciousness as well. In our case that consciousness temporarily incarnates in a human body in order to have experiences on earth in order to learn from them and thereby to increase our conscious awareness. In my view that means that we are not our body, nor our personality, but the consciousness/spirit that temporarily inhabits that body and makes use of that personality.
I could have expected that you would start to investigate everything about David Wilcock. You focus very much on everything that is alien to you and I think that the picture you paint of him is therefore not complete. You focus on all these outlandish things without looking into the scientific part of what he writes and talks about. One thing that became clear to me when I listened to one of his talks is that Love is the force that is driving him. I just focussed on the scientific parts of what he writes about and which I found very interesting, the parts that I could more or less understand anyway. All the other things I just leave for what they are. They are either true or not but they are not necessarily not true, only because they do not agree with your or my view of the world as it is. You do not have to do anything with all these things but just keep an open mind. Some of it might be true and if so, then it will become clear to us later. If not, just leave it on the shelf.
Anny, thanks for your comment. You are right about keeping an open mind and “leaving it on the shelf”. Very glad you are able to contribute.
Robert, fantastic writing here! Really loved how you put spiritual and science together, it’s something I personally like thinking about quite a lot. These are the two tools we were given to better understand the reality/world we live in, as far as I believe. One shouldn’t be used against the other, we have more benefits by consciously using them together. Just yesterday I was watching one episode from Through The Wormhole: Is Reality Real? (I even recommended it to Joshua if my memory doesn’t fail me) and WOW! It is great to see Science coming to terms with teachings that ancient religions taught, such as that we live in a dream world, in tardema, as Anny says. Thank you! Blessings!
Robert,
I am missing the latest development on this namely ‘the Electric Universe’, not only it shatters all of above, but also redefines the concepts of ‘gravity’, the nothingness, the all what is.
Regards,
Leo.