[Thursday, January 19, 2006]
7:95 a.m. Starting again, not without apprehension. Can today’s transmission possibly measure up to yesterday’s? Can it continue and flow into a seamless and meaningful whole? Stay tuned.
You are doing fine. Faithfulness is all. It isn’t up to you to provide the content. If it falls down, it falls down – but yesterday didn’t turn out so bad, did it?
Yesterday was wonderful. I’m ready if you are.
We proceed. Again, much of what we have to say, you and Rita will already have heard and absorbed. So much the better – it will aid in the process of transmission from us to you.
Separation in space produces the illusion – or perhaps it would be better to say the condition – of separation, of individuality, of non-belonging, of difference, in a way that would not be possible otherwise. There is separation in a way non-physically but it is not as it is in the physical world. As a rough analogy you might think how your world would be if you – and everyone – were continuously and unpredictably teleporting though time and space both. Nothing would seem as solid as definite or as sequential to you as everything does now. It is only an analogy but not so bad a one.
Well, if space produces the illusion of separation, time produces the effect of delayed consequences. Time in the way you experience it sorts out everything just as space does. Last Tuesday is so definitely a different space from a given date three years ago that you could (and do) stack different people and things in the same space and different time and not have them collide.
We’re going to repeat that, so that you know that we meant to say it that way, and why. In space-time, you can be in one place at one time. Two people cannot be in the same place at the same time: They can be in the same place but not at the same time; they can be in the same time but not the same place. Same time and same place is not possible. This ought to tell you that space and time are indeed (as science is currently telling you) functions of each other. They are the same thing seen slightly differently. Now notice – when we say it one way it is almost obvious; when we say the same thing another way, it is so strange as to be scarcely comprehensible.
Time is not different from space, in that each separates, sorts out, the world around you. But time is experienced radically differently than space, of course: Nobody is frog-marching you in space, inch by inch by inch in one direction your whole life.
People who say we have no time on “this side” mean by that (though they often do not know what they mean, mostly parroting others who have said that on this side we have no time) – they mean that we are not subject to that unvarying tyranny, moving us along. That is true, sort of, in the same way that it is true, sort of, that we have no space. Neither statement is true except in reference to your experience. We have time, we have space – how else could we structure experience? But they are not what they seem to you to be. They are neither prisons nor constrictions – but they are real limitations. Try to envision a life without limitations and you will end up with fog. But there is all the difference in the world (so to speak) between our world and yours.
No, that isn’t how to put it. It is the same world. Canada – the physical Canada – exists “here” as it does “there,” because we are not someplace else! The non-physical components of the physical world are – right here! Why would you think they are elsewhere? It isn’t even true that you cannot perceive it; it is true only that you cannot perceive it in the same way or using the same faculties that you do the physical world – we might almost say the rest of the physical world.
We know that this is a radically different thought for many, so we will try to say it carefully. The non-physical world is right “there” with you, and right “then” with you. How far do you think it is from Baltimore to the non-physical equivalent of Baltimore? And why do you think it doesn’t have it’s non-physical equivalent? What do you think you build on earth, anyway? But because you misunderstand time, you think that things “pass away” on earth and do so presumably in the non-physical earth. Not true in either case – but it never was the way you assume it to be.
Where is ancient Rome, say March 1, 250 b.c.? That world on that day is where it always was and always will be. We on this side can “go” there at will; you on your side cannot (normally). This is the chief difference between our experience of the world and yours – and will help you perhaps to see why on this side you do not get bored yet on that side you get to play with greater consequences.
We are moving your quickly here, we know, but we will stop periodically to pick up stragglers. And, with words on a page, you have a time capsule that helps you to retrieve information when you have been moved beyond it in time. (That is a side-trail. So many entertaining side-trails we never have time enough – that is, you never have time enough! – for us to follow.)
It is a simple concept, but foreign to your usual ways of understanding. We are trying to express it in simple terms devoid of jargon. Frank is good at that – should be; he was shaped for this work!
When a moment of time “passes” – that moment does not cease to exist: You cease to exist in it. You have been carried smoothly to the next moment of time. If you are standing still for five such moments, it looks to you that you moved in time and not in space. But it could equally truly be said that you moved in time-space. That is, moment one exists next to moment two, and you moved from one to two. Then you moved to moment three, then four – and your movement is continuous, predictable and not under your control, so when you get to moment five you assume that the “previous” – which really means previously experienced – moments have somehow ceased to exist.
Your experience tells you that you hop like little Eva from ice-floe to ice-floe across the river, and that each previous ice-floe ceases to exist as soon as you jump from it – and – even more startling, more hazardous – the next ice floe doesn’t even come into existence until you land on it! Plus, you never can pause, nor can you do a thing about the situation except to jump in one direction rather than another. If you wanted to rest at any given floe you couldn’t, not only because you don’t know how to do it, but because what will you do when the floe presumably ceases to exist in the next moment?
What a situation! If it were a true description, you’d be in a pretty bad fix – and, we know, this is how many of you do experience your lives. But there’s a better way to see it, that will relieve the insecurity and remove the below-surface panic. There is no need for terror, any more than on any other pleasure cruise.
What if we told you that the ice-floes do not cease to exist just because you jump from them (or, more closely, are smoothly catapulted off them)? And what if we told you that the icebergs “to come” are not uncreated but actually exist, as common sense would tell you, were we in a strictly physical-geography metaphor? And what if we told you that we on “our side” – which is to say you on our side — visit the terrain however we please, rather than being tied to a conveyor belt? Disregard for the moment the fact that you can’t see how that could be; hold the theoretical possibility. All you are doing – all you need do – is creating a space in your mind for a new way of seeing things.
Now we are doing quite a bit of hopping ourselves! We are touching on this, touching on that, and not tying up anything. But it is necessary to present several ideas before we can create a model. Continued patience, please.
It is the nature of the physical world – and by “world” we mean not one planet but all of physical creation – to lead its inhabitants in experience. You experience one time, one space, then movement certainly to another time, perhaps to another place. You may move spatially in any way you can figure out how to do: forward, back, right, left, up, down. To Cleveland, to Greenland, to Mars, wherever. The restrictions on movement are in the nature of obstacles. Overcome the obstacle – whether it be sheer distance, or the nature of the terrain, or whatever – and you may move there. Temporally, however you may move and must move in only one direction – “forward” – and you seemingly cannot vary the speed or direction in which you are carried. In fact, because you are carried, it seems to you that you have no control whatever over your movement in time.
Now, that is a fair representation is it not, of your plight on earth? Freedom in three dimensions, no freedom – even to stop! – in the fourth. Not an incorrect model, but not a very helpful one either. Let us see if we can improve upon it.
We have said that “Canada exists” over here. By that we do not mean that we have a sort of Disneyland version of Canada for people to play pretend in. We mean – Canada here and Canada there are extensions of the same thing, just as you extend “over here” and we “over there.”
It is a continuing distortion that you are just going to have to factor in to these discussions, that spatial and temporal analogies continually sneak in between the lines. Given that language reflects your concept of reality, how can it be otherwise? If you had a language that did not reflect that reality — other than mathematics – you would use it, but if you were using it, it would mean that you were already living in that reality and hence would not need our attempted translations!
By the way, the note on mathematics was inserted for those who can properly appreciate it. The answers to many dilemmas about mathematics are included in that aside. This is the reason why only mathematics has forced scientists to see the world closer to how it truly is, rather than through the time-space distortions and illusions. They don’t necessarily like what they are forced to conclude, and many of them can continue to do so only because they divorce it from their daily lives keeping theory rigidly separated from application, but the logic of the mathematics leads them and they follow. This is because mathematics treats time and space differently than any other language does, or (at present) can.
Enough about mathematics. And – 80 minutes having gone by – enough for the moment. Take a break. A light breakfast, again, and some more water and coffee.
Okay. This has been a bit more strain as I don’t have much idea where you’re going – so I’m taking it on faith.
We know. You’re pretty good at that.
[The fifth installment — of eight total — posts April 27.]