An Excerpt From "The Cosmic Internet "

Why Does The World Exist?

[Sitting with my journal one morning, I summarized what I understood of what the guys had told me to date, then moved to direct interaction.]

Some years ago, a friend asked me to ask the guys upstairs why we are here and what life is all about. The beginnings of an answer to that question lie in the nature and interrelationship of the physical and non-physical worlds…. [W]hen we try to think about the interaction of the physical and the non-physical world, the spatial analogy sneaks into all our ideas and distorts them. Thus we think of the physical as being “here” and the non-physical being “there.” But it isn’t “there”; it is here, in the only “here” there is. I think of the non-physical world as vibrating at a higher frequency than the physical world (an analogy, remember), thus in a way being both here and not-quite-here…. We in the physical can’t experience the non-physical with our senses but we can experience it otherwise. And if we can remember that what I call “the other side” – the non-physical world -- it is right here, we eliminate or minimize one source of error, the spatial analogy.

I suspect that it’s time for a word from our sponsors. How’d I do so far?

You show a pretty good working understanding of what we have been telling you…. Still your question remains: Why do you do this; why does the universe exist; why is there a God or a box of corn flakes, and what are they to you. You used to say that you in physical are in the position of a fish at the bottom of the sea trying to imagine a man on the top of a mountain watching television. Nice analogy, and still true.

“Why is there air,” Bill Cosby used to ask as part of a comedy routine. Nothing wrong with asking the question, as long as you remember (or realize in the first place!) that there can be no answer divorced from the interests of the questioner. “To blow basketballs up with” is logical, accurate, and germane, if that is where your interests lie. “To provide an exchange medium for plants and animals” would be equally true – but no more true, merely from a wider perspective. “Why” is a question whose answer is always improvised according to the nature of the person responding. In our view “why” does not rank with “how.” You may never know why you live, but you probably should give thought to how. Naturally the two questions are related, but either question is more meaningful in connection to the other than standing alone; that is why we bring “how” into the discussion.

Space, Time, And The Illusion Of Separation

Space produces the illusion of separation, of individuality, of non-belonging, of difference, in a way that would not be possible otherwise. And if space produces the illusion of separation, time produces the effect of delayed consequences…. Time, like space, sorts out the world around you. But they are experienced radically differently: You are not frog-marched through space, inch by inch by inch, always in one direction. But you are frog-marched through time. At least, that’s how you experience it. But your interpretation of your experience misleads you.

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 moving through time is like hopping from ice-floe to ice-floe to get across the river, with each previous ice-floe ceasing to exist as soon as you jump from it, and – even more startling, more hazardous – the next ice floe not even coming into existence until you land on it! 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 would you do when the floe 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. The ice-floe you are standing on does not cease to exist just because you jump from it (or, to put it more closely, are smoothly catapulted from it). And icebergs “to come” are not as-yet-uncreated but already exist, just as they would in a physical-geography metaphor. (Disregard for the moment the fact that you can’t see how that could be: Hold the theoretical possibility. All you are doing is creating a space in your mind for a new way of seeing things.)

People who say we have “no time” on “this side” mean by that (though they often do not know what they mean) that we are not subject to that unvarying tyranny, moving us along. That is sort of true, in the same way that it is sort of true 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. 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 would you think that the physical Baltimore doesn’t have its 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 presumably in the non-physical earth). Not true in either case.

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). And so we on our side we do not get bored, and you on your side get to play with greater consequences. This is the chief difference between our experience of the world and yours. 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….

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 to experience one time, one space, then movement to another time, and perhaps to another place. Spatially you may move forward, back, right, left, up, down. To Cleveland, to Greenland, to Mars, wherever. The only restrictions on movement are obstacles such as distance, or the nature of the terrain, or whatever. Overcome the obstacle 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 – not even freedom 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.” A continuing distortion in these discussions is that spatial and temporal analogies continually sneak in between the lines, because language as it exists reflects your concept of reality. If we were to drop your analogy of this side/that side, we would still need to pick up another, which would have its own defects. That can be a good thing when an analogy has become constricting or very misleading -- but until then, why not continue to elaborate on what we're building? It's just a matter of periodic reminders of the limitations of analogy.