Posted by Roberta Grimes • March 09, 2019 • 17 Comments
Book News, Jesus, The Source, Understanding Reality
Scientists never make anything like the public fuss that they ought to be making about the fact that they cannot understand time at all. Apparently there is no scientific reason why time should run in one direction, why it should be constant and measurable, or even why it should exist; so pretty much the best they have been able to come up with is more scientific-sounding versions of the famous and perhaps apocryphal quote that is generally attributed to Albert Einstein: “The only reason for time is so that everything doesn’t happen at once.” Physicists have concluded that the passage of time is probably an illusion, so in desperation they have of late turned to philosophers and other non-physicists to try to gain some further insights. They even talk about wishing they could do away with time altogether. Some physicists are eager to find a way for time to have existed before the Big Bang, but apparently for most of their theories to be right, that pre-universe time must have run in reverse.
Mainstream physicists’ core problem remains what it long has been. They assume that this universe is solid and stable; that it began 13.8 billion years ago in a physical event that we call the Big Bang; and that it continues to chug along as an independent machine. The fact is that time is just one of many fudge-factors that the Collective which is the only God makes use of as It creates this physical universe. The great Rupert Sheldrake very enjoyable discusses a few of these adjustments that are continuously being made in his famously banned Ted talk. It turns out that objective time as we think we are familiar with it does not really exist at all.
I first wrote about time five years ago, when I was freshly fascinated by past-life regression therapy and how it meant that in a more enlightened age we might be able to heal the world’s past. Two years later I addressed an emphatically non-particle-physics version of what matter-bound physicists call spacetime. I am surprised to see how well those blog posts still hold up! Let’s just bring them forward now to help us better understand creation and the nature of the material universe that we believe is all around us.
Scholars of the greater reality of which this material universe is a part have come to understand that the following things are probably or certainly true:
another. Something like reincarnation does happen, but it happens outside of time. Early in my research I encountered the suggestion by a discarnate that we might consider ourselves to be like a bucket out of which each lifetime is dipped and back into which each lifetime is poured. A corollary of this simple understanding is that as each of us makes or avoids making spiritual progress in this lifetime, we affect for good or ill all our other lives, both past and future. The effectiveness of regression and progression therapy as a means of curing our present-life mental and physical ailments suggests this to be true.Wonderfully, some scientists are beginning to talk about time in a way that is consistent with what the not-really-dead have been telling us is true. Bernardo Kastrup is a European computer engineer who has worked at some of the world’s leading research laboratories, including the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN). His upcoming book is The Idea of the World: A Multi-Disciplinary Argument for the Mental Nature of Reality. Not having read it, I cannot vouch for his book, but it does look to be an important step toward obliterating the entire notion that time is objectively real and linear! To give you a flavor of it, Dr. Kastrup wrote a blog post for Scientific American in which he said in part:
“There can only be experiential flow if there is experience in the past, present and future. But where is the past? Is it anywhere out there? Can you point at it? Clearly not. What makes you conceive of the idea of the past is 
the fact that you have memories. But these memories can only be referenced insofar as they are experienced now, as memories. There has never been a single point in your entire life in which the past has been anything other than memories experienced in the present.
“The same applies to the future: where is it? Can you point at it and say ‘there is the future’? Clearly not. Our conception of the future arises from expectations or imaginings experienced now, always now, as expectations or imaginings. There has never been a single point in your life in which the future has been anything other than expectations or imaginings experienced in the present…
“Let’s make an analogy with space. Suppose that you suddenly find yourself sitting on the side of a long, straight desert road. Looking ahead, you see mountains in the distance. Looking behind, you see a dry valley. The mountains and the valley provide references that allow you to locate yourself in space. But the mountains, the valley, your sitting on the roadside, all exist simultaneously in the present snapshot of your conscious life…
“You see, whether time flows forward, or doesn’t flow at all, or moves back and forth, our resulting subjective experience would be identical in all cases: we would always find ourselves in an experiential snapshot extending smoothly backwards in memory and forwards in expectation, just like the desert road…
“The ostensible experience of temporal flow is thus an illusion. All we ever 
actually experience is the present snapshot, which entails a timescape of memories and imaginings analogous to the landscape of valley and mountains. Everything else is a story.”
Brilliant. Dr. Kastrup’s book will be out on April 1st, and it looks as if he will be ripping the bandage off the scientific wound that is the false notion of objective linear time. In doing so, he brings us one step closer to what we now understand from those who are not dead after all is the actual nature of this material reality. There is one explanation of time that makes it possible for everything that Dr. Kastrup and I have said here to be true, and it fits with what we have come to understand with the assistance of a host of elevated beings about the nature of God, the nature of reality, and why this universe even exists. It all comes together and begins to make sense, even to these minimal minds that are all that you and I can access while we are still in physical bodies! Better understanding the illusory nature of time is the key to our finally making sense of how this universe came into being. Next week let’s take a peek behind God’s curtain….
Hi Roberta,
Great title this week! Here is my “timeless” comment: The notion that all existence is happening at once, vs. all EXPERIENCE happening based on what physicists have started calling the “arrow of time” is troubling mainly because it sounds as though each of us can make up our own past (thus placing ourselves into a disturbingly anti-social world of our own here among our friends and relatives). But once we realize that none of us has the capacity acting solo to manifest what we call past, present or future — and that the key is acting as a collective (yes, there’s that word) — we can then understand the importance of how we behave and think with respect to one another. In short, bringing the kingdom of God on earth is what will align a “past” with a “present” and integrate with a brighter “future” experience. Collaboration is what is needed to influence our EXPERIENCE because it’s the only way to reach a shared EXISTENCE in we think of as the “universe.”
Incidentally, the word “illusion” that scientists like strikes me as a misnomer because illusion suggests someone is pulling the wool over our eyes. I like “distortion” better because it is WE who are creating the difference between our shared experience and our would-be shared reality.
Dear Mike, I agree that the word “illusion” is inaccurate. If what the scientific community studies is real – all those subatomic particles and so on – then what we study and discuss here is every bit as real!
I like better the term “consensus reality,” but that really isn’t accurate either because we are not consciously – or even unconsciously – creating either the past or the future, never mind this illusory present. All of it is being worked out far above our pay grade! But what does seem to be true is that in its (literally) infinite wisdom, the Collective which is the only God works through our individual guidance and allows our minds – if they are either very positive or very negative – to shade our individual experiences of the consensus reality toward more positive or negative experiences for each of us. This sort of shading does seem to be happening in fact, and there is evidence that our guidance is that close and that carefully tailored to what we need to spur our spiritual growth. More next week….
I like consensus reality better, too, but agree, it doesn’t quite fit. That’s the problem with these things, we don’t have any “good” words. Also, I do see a lot of contemporary “spiritual” discussion and advice that talks about how “we” are creators that bothers me. So there’s that confusion as well.
This is truly fascinating. There are a few afterlife researchers who claim that after we die, we can choose a part of our life from the “time grid” as one author put it, and relive it, making changes to it and correcting mistakes we made. Although it is not possible to know if this is true, it makes sense to me, especially if the “past” can be changed for the better. In that way, we could be considered creators. As the commenter said above, there are no really appropriate words to discuss this, but I’m doing the best I can. What do you think, Roberta? Do you think it’s possible that we can relive parts of our past and learn from our mistakes? I honestly don’t see why not, If time as we know it doesn’t really exist, why couldn’t we create a different outcome to situations we experienced on earth in what we think of as the “past”?
Dear Lola, this notion is new to me, and I am trying to make some sense of it. Here is what we do know:
1) Soon after we die, we experience what is often called a “life review,” where in the company of our guides and often also people who have been important in this lifetime we experience a difficult-to-envision holographic review of the whole life just lived, and we experience how all our actions made others feel. This is often quite traumatic, as you can imagine! Its primary purpose seems to be to better capture the precious lessons learned, and also to help us with forgiveness: we are helped to forgive everyone else in our lives, and also to forgive ourselves. It seems to be a tidying-up, so we can put that lifetime on a shelf, and I suspect that when we get curious about other lifetimes it is the life-review holograms of those lifetimes that we revisit.
2) We have a wonderful party soon after we get home, that many people from our recent lifetime and also close friends from other lifetimes will attend. We often discover at that party that our very worst enemies from this recent lifetime actually are close eternal friends! Everyone was just playing a role to help one another to grow spiritually. None of it was real in eternal terms and none of it matters now, so we hug and laugh and we are very grateful to those whose roles in our lives brought forth the most growth for us – very often those same friends we hated when we knew them on earth!
3) We then kind of settle in, and we indulge in favorite pastimes (like Mikey Morgan’s snowboarding), travel widely, maybe take a class or two that the lifetime just completed has made to seem necessary to us and to our guides, and enjoy timeless life with friends and family. It is playtime!
4) Oh, and one of our playtime possibilities, as I think of it, is traveling in earth-time, but we generally go back farther than the recent lifetime. We want to watch the Declaration of Independence being debated, or see how the pyramids in Egypt were built. I don’t think anyone really is clear on how this is done, whether we time-travel to big earth-events, but it is reported.
5) And another, much more recent diversion seems to be visiting areas – Old West Town; Nineteen-Fifties Town, etc. (my terms, not theirs) – where we can get into the mood and character of an earth-period ourselves, wear the clothes and hear the music, live in the surroundings (bobby sox and Formica, anyone?). This is apparently purely for fun! As I say, this seems to be a recent thing (fashions come and go there, too!). Apparently there is even a Dickens Town, where his characters come to life.
Dear Lola, as I think more about this idea, I am struggling to see how it would fit with what we know. For example:
1) Where would it happen? It can’t happen in the afterlife in any meaningful way, since there is no negativity there at all and negativity is the whole point of life in earth. Doing it there would be like standing in the wings of the stage without costumes or props and just running through our lines. I can’t see what the point of it would be. But how could it happen on earth, either? We will talk about creation next week, and I think you will see that for a lot of people to be busily fixing their individual lifetime booboos beyond the attention of the Godhead would vastly further complicate what is already extremely complicated!
2) How would it happen? Do we round up the key people involved and run through it again? We would have to ditch our vast eternal minds and get back into these earth-minds, which seems like an odd thing to do after we have already packed that life away. Wherever we do it, I cannot see why this idea doesn’t strongly clash with the wrapping-up process outlined above. It cannot be meant to erase the lessons that we learned by making the mistakes that we made on earth, so do they claim that it will somehow repair earth-history?
Dear Lola, you have suggested something entirely new to me, so bravo! I want to know more. If it’s real, I need to know about it and see how it fits!! But I really don’t think we know enough to say for sure what it is these authors were talking about, or how it might fit with what we know. And you have seen this in more than one place? I’m sorry to ask this of you, but you have my interest now and I wonder if you would be willing to send me more details, or perhaps post them here for everyone to see?
Roberta: I most recently read this in a book called Heaven is for Healing by Joe Gallenberger who was in contact with his deceased brother who committed suicide. He was allowed to live what he called a “simulated life” there in order to help him heal. During that time, he saw his mistakes and was allowed to correct some of them. The other two books I think were more in line with your comment about going to different timelines that you enjoyed while alive and experiencing them from a different perspective. I think the possibilities there are many and there may be some we haven’t heard about yet since we are just scratching the surface. This would obviously have to happen by mutual consent with at least one other “dead” person (likely even more than one) so I don’t think it’s a common occurrence, but I certainly wish it was. I like the idea of being able to correct mistakes there. I don’t feel it involves negativity as it is a way to turn negativity into positivity by admitting and taking responsibility for any wrong doings.
Thank you so much for sharing all of this, Lola! Now this makes sense to me. These look to be two different phenomena, and I don’t think that either of them involves changing events on earth retroactively; but rather, they are about what is Job One for those just returning home: everything possible is done to help them heal whatever damage to their minds (or souls, or spirits – the words are rough synonyms) has been done in this most recent lifetime.
Changing an individual lifetime in the recent past would be both trivial – since individual lifetimes don’t seem to matter much from their perspective – and also highly problematic, since an individual lifetime changed would also retroactively change the events of a lot of other lifetimes that one individual had affected. Oddly, I have recently read that scientists now believe traveling backward in time is impossible, and I think that in this one case they may be right: you cannot try to re-weave one thread of the garment without affecting all the nearby threads, and thereby affecting all the threads those nearby threads touch, and so on, until recent history is altogether changed in what might be devastating ways. I am more and more confident that we can change the past by elevating the consciousness of all humanity! But I don’t yet see how we can do it on anything but a macro-level.
Now, some thoughts on what you have kindly told us these authors said:
1) When someone has been damaged on earth at the level of the mind, those attending that person upon arrival will do whatever is necessary to heal them there. I have written about post-death fake “surgery” to fix the post-death body that our mind has created with flaws – a missing limb, etc. – because we had those flaws at death, and we need to believe that they truly are healed before our minds will create a perfect post-death body. Someone who committed suicide and had trouble getting past that event and whatever had surrounded it would no doubt be given help to simulate relevant aspects of the life that had just defeated him this way, or even that entire life, so he could feel that he had vanquished those issues and to help him better understand how choosing love over fear is possible even when it looks to be impossible. Reports of such extreme help will be very rare because they would need to come from the person being helped, but in this case we know that was the source. It did happen – no doubt! – but it was a kind of post-death mental surgery. They seem to do whatever it takes. I have written about the WW I soldier whose post-death repair of a genital injury still didn’t make him feel like a man, so – sure! – they arranged for him to be seduced by a beautiful young woman who was delighted to help, and he soon found that everything worked just fine. Heaven isn’t only for healing, of course. Heaven is our real life! But when we go home badly damaged by an earth-life at the level of our earth-minds, they will do whatever it takes to heal our eternal minds from the experience.
2) The other events described may be of the same type, or they may be of the playtime variety – it’s difficult to tell. Apparently this wanting to go to replicas of period-based towns and cities and steep ourselves in period-based memories – which doesn’t seem to have been mentioned in communications a century ago – really is a big thing now! And so Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley, John Lennon, and probably others who are not as much mentioned are enjoying a much-extended adulation. Mikey Morgan was a big John Denver fan, and happily now he has met the man personally.
This whole post-death period is about consolidating our gains in elevating our personal consiousness vibrations in the life just lived, and repairing whatever damage we might have incurred to our eternal minds in that lifetime, as well as simply resting and having fun. Being away from negative stressors for awhile. But all of the period following our deaths is about the only thing that matters, which is the growth in love of our eternal minds. And one earth-lifetime doesn’t matter much to them once it has ended, since each of us lives so many.
Dear beloved Lola, the reason why the lack of negativity there would be an important impediment to our actually growing much spiritually from these experiences beyond the healing of specific damage is that absent the negative stressors that caused us to choose wrongly on earth, it is easy for us always to choose love. That fact is the whole reason why the universe even exists at all! It’s like lifting weights: if you fail on earth at lifting a 100-pound barbell, then picking up a two-pound weight won’t make you feel that suddenly you are much stronger. It seems clear from all the evidence that until we get to the upper fifth level spiritually and are therefore strong enough spiritually to always choose love over fear and anger, we really need the earth’s basically negative environment in order for us to grow much at all.
Thank you for this! I love it when you give me new things to think about ;-).
It’s important to understand that the emphasis is on the lessons and not the lifetime. Experiences across the Arrow of time are sort of an overall “curriculum” for growth, focused, as Roberta notes above, on the spiritual needs of each of us and our “teammates.” Each point of earthly experience is important, but it’s as a set that our earthplane experinces have value. It’s not necessary to relive or right any wrongs. It’s the lesson that is important. Oh, and even though there’s jubilation on homecoming, the lessons are treated very reverently.
Heh – Thank you, dear Mike, you and I posted at the same time and said essentially the same thing!
It is difficult for us while we are in bodies to fully understand how useful but also trivial our lifetimes on earth really are, and in fact this whole universe is. And that is especially true when our earth-cultures give no attention at all to trying to understand what actually is going on! When all that we have as sources of wisdom are materialist science and various religions that are based in old earthly superstitions, of course our focus is going to be here. My hope in breaking all of this down into so much detail over weeks is that perhaps we might build a more realistic view for ourselves of what actually is going on, and thereby we can shift our emphasis more toward what is really and eternally important.
Thank you, Mike and Roberta. What you said makes sense. Maybe the “simulated life” this person was allowed to have was just a teaching tool for his benefit. I guess I wanted it to be something more because I was hoping to be able to repeat a selfish period of my life years ago and desperately hoped to correct it. However, compared to the larger picture, it is trivial just like you said. I fully agree that most people never try to find out just what’s going on and accept various religious dogma instead. It can get quite complicated but in the end, I feel that forgiveness (of yourself and others) plus love are the most important things. I feel that if you are able to accomplish those two things, everything else will fall into place
Oh my dear Lola, you cannot possibly have more to regret in your earlier life than I have! I cling now to knowing based on all the evidence that if I live all the rest of my life for God, and if I concentrate on learning ever more perfect forgiveness, I will nevertheless land at a higher level in the afterlife than where I began this lifetime, and I will be able to forgive my own past. For all of us, that really is the hardest task!
Dearest Roberta,
What fun I am having, learning the metaphysics of time and the possibilities that this topic raises.
I am new to this kind of ‘behind God’s curtain’ knowledge and I’m hooked. You and your erudite bloggers are opening my eyes to so much.
This temporal course has however, set me on my own trail of thought, which is both fragmented and associative like time itself.
You know I love the idea of living all my lives at once. This seems to be consistent if the reference point is consciousness itself and time and various lives arrange themselves around it.
The picture in my mind’s eye is of my higher self, robed in a white woolen cassock, standing in a room with many man high mirrors encircling me. I’m looking at each life in each tall, gilded mirror simultaneously. I’m growing brighter with the cumulative experience of all the lives in the mirrors.
Strange I think – And what is stranger is that I then look down on this higher self and see many of them in a circle; an even higher self is watching all these at once and is growing brighter. And so on, up the chain of consciousness.
– What I am aware of too, is that myself now, is only a small part of my greater mind/self..
Next; I’d love to live in an ‘arranged reality’ in the Afterlife.
My reality wouldn’t be the Formica and chrome 50s though.
It wouldn’t be Dickensian London. Nor would it be Elizabethan England.
My world would be the Middle Earth, of Tolkien’s ‘Lord of the Rings’. How I’d love to live in Rivendell with the High Elves in the mountains; or in Lothlorien will the Galadhrim, the Tree Dwellers, the High Elves of the forest. Sigh. I can but dream…
Also, I get the feeling that time exists to serve human consciousness. So it is really holographic! It’s mind created and flexible. Therefore it seems likely that it must be able to be entered, in the future at least.
Time relies on the mind for its existence. Ever had an hour meditation that felt like only ten minutes? Or have you ever been sooo bored that ten minutes feels like two hours ? It’s the mind’s perception that gives us the sense of time as fast or slow. So the ‘sense’ of time at least, is mind reactive…
Also, all over the world people loose or gain time strangely, during inexplicable anomalous experiences. I find such things fascinating if not somewhat elusive!
Each life has a time for everything, to give a person a variety of human experiences. (Ecclesiastes 3:1) All the joy, sadness, gain, loss, birth death etc.. are like facets of time. All of them make up the diamond.
My goal is to grow in awareness and see through the illusion as William Blake did:
‘To see a world in a grain of sand
And heaven in a wild flower
Hold infinity in the palms of your hand
And eternity in an hour.’
And something urges inside me, Roberta, that tells me of my time here on this Earth.
‘Perhaps you were born for such a time as this.’ -Esther 4:14
Certainly, though eternity is in fact the ultimate reality, this lifetime impresses on some of us the great need for the world to grow towards perfect Love.
Perhaps though, the most profound voices come from your Native American tradition, concerning time and the prophecy of hope for the peoples of the Earth:
‘ I see a time of seven generations, when all the colors of mankind will gather under the sacred Tree of Life. And the whole Earth will become one circle again.’ – Crazy Horse.
On a personal note, all I want is to follow in the vein of Bethany Hamilton, skilled surfer, who said upon returning to surfing after a shark took her left arm in 2003:
‘My passion for surfing was more than my fear of sharks.’
Love and hugs,
Efrem.
Dear Efrem, I always so much enjoy your ebullient thoughts! Here are a few of mine in response….
My dear friend, I think that many people, including you and me, have been born for such a time as this! I hear every day now from people who are hearing the call, some clearly and some as little more than a sense of anxiety about their need to do something that they can’t quite puzzle out. But our guides are revealing our roles to us ever more fully as the work progresses, so we need not worry about it!
I don’t know if there is a Tolkien world there, but there might be. Who knows? And if not, if there are enough people interested in making one happen, I’ll bet it can be brought into being. That is apparently how the Dickens world got started!
I agree that time likely moves differently and subjectively for each of us. We would never be able to detect the difference, since earth-clocks are not really measuring anything, apparently!
Your vision of yourself surrounded by mirrors is great, if it works for you. I don’t think there is one way for all of us to envision time and our earth-lives, and those who are not actually dead agree: they tell us that we shouldn’t even try to understand it all now, but it will become clear to us once we return home and regain our much greater eternal minds.
Unfortunately, I think we have had more than seven generations since Crazy Horse – but his vision is a lovey one, nonetheless!
And I do agree that this is lots of fun! There is so much more to the vast, eternal reality of which we always have been a part than ever has been imagined before, and much of it is being revealed to us now. What a glorious time this is! And aren’t we all so fortunate to be part of it?
I have done an awful lot of thinking on the mystery of time. It makes no sense that we, who are living or have lived on earth, can take this invisible circle of eternal Consciousness and convert it into a flat line just with our minds!
Yes, dear Kim, as always, quite poetically said!
For many people, though, the notion that time is not real is tough to get our minds around, since the only life of which we are aware – this present lifetime on earth – is so bound by clocks and timetables and deadlines. If I speak publicly and say these things, I get more questions and challenges on the notion that time is not real than on just about anything else!
Theoretical Physicist Brian Greene writes about a thought experiment of slowing down time to the point where an arrow can actually be stopped midair. He postulates that there is NO instant in which it could actually be captured motionless. He does a better job explaining why than I could here, even if I quoted that part of his book, because one has to first imagine the “big picture” of time to focus on the so-called moments.
One might naturally envision all experience happening at once as something that would be a jumble. But in the film Koyaanisqatsi by Godfrey Reggio, action is sped into time lapse and the effect is beautiful, hypnotic recurring patterns.
In a universe that is not a place but a phenomenon of energy, everything is vibrating, and characteristic of vibration, there are waves creating patterns. Perhaps time is another phenomenon that– similar to the way a lock channels river water — affects the energy of the universe to a point where it’s accessible for various particular purposes
All lovely thoughts, Mike! I think, though, that it really would be impossible for a theoretical physicist to make sense of time as it actually exists, since he won’t be able to think outside the small box that is the discipline of physics itself. Earth-physics is mechanical of necessity, since the university departments and the peer-reviewed journals will not countenance any work by a physicist which admits of the possibility that our minds are not generated by our brains. Sad to say, this core limitation means that no working physicist can make real sense of much of anything!
And it is only when we are thinking of time as important that the notion of non-time creates a jumble, apparently. This is so hard for us with our limited minds and foreclosed experiences to understand! It’s almost as if losing time’s arrow allows us to think in additional dimensions instead, as if we are Flatlanders here but with a third dimension – and then a fifth, sixth, tenth dimension – with sufficient dimensions, everything really does fit.
This is all fun to think about, but it does tend to give you a headache ;-).