Time is an illusion–Albert Einstein
The way it stands is we experience ourselves as physical beings even though time and, therefore, space are illusions. Space cannot exist without a time to put it in and, if time and space are illusions, so are we. That is the Paradox of Existence, also known as the Trials of Illusion.
Our past is not here and our future is a filament of imagination—fireflies.
Even so, the illusions of time and space are usually enough for us. With them, we experience intention, dreams, thrills, expectations, miseries, mistakes, tragedies, bliss, orgasms, cookies, poems, snails, bunnies, paper cuts, families, and sense of self.
There are great mysteries here, and we will not solve them by believing in time and space.
Curiouser and curiouser–Alice from a place much like ours
There is a storyteller in us or beyond us, or both—and the storyteller creates stories with us at the center, which allows us to feel real because the story makes time and space feel real even though stories have no physicality of their own.
A case could be made that we imagine gods in order to believe in an Grand Storyteller with answers to what we cannot comprehend, such as where we come from, where we are going, who we are, and what is happening.
Or the case could be made that there actually IS a Grand Storyteller, an Ultimate Intention beyond time and space that we dress up as petty gods because it is the best we can do with such magnificence—and that Ultimate Intention creates stories, our lives, so it can “see” bits of itself. Perhaps It binge-watches Itself through us even as we strive to see It through the blinds of our limitations.
Have I made up my belief that I can think?
We are incapable of understanding the whole of It, but we inch our way like worms measuring marigolds to fleeting glimpses of what is beyond the usual resources of our illusions. Through quantum theory, mystical initiations, and exploration of the microcosm and macrocosm we inch our way to pure energy, to pre-story, all potential energy.
The Paradox of Existence, however, means we cannot “hold” these fleeting glimpses of what is behind time and space in normal consciousness. Our normal consciousness can hold only one thing in its awareness in any (presumed) moment. Beyond time and space is the whole thing at once, all time and all space as one before it presumes a separateness.
Nor can we fully know ourselves since there is no substantive “me” to capture, examine, dissect, and hold to the light. Held to the light, we are pure energy.
. . . and who would hold us to the light?
We are of stuff we cannot hold in our hands or minds. We cannot be labeled or contained. We are ever-dynamic energy. Few of us hear the space between lines of poetry or the silence between notes of music.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought. So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.—T.S. Eliot
Not having receptors for the non-material, we become faith-based in that we are material. We equate non-materiality with death. We want things to divert us, move fast, and assault our emotions, to lock us into the sensations of being in space and time. We ignore what is not easily sensed. We embrace what seems obvious and ignore what is esoteric.
We don’t want to ride that bicycle. “Look, Ma, no me.”
Still, there is a still place that calls us. We long for “home,” we can feel misplaced, sometimes even evicted. The untouchable essence of who we are wishes to return into its source.
We are worshipful creatures—we worship and we are to be worshiped. There is no apparent reason for us or rational explanation for us. That makes us miracles. We may be dreams that experience themselves as having substance or we may be manifestations of an Ultimate Intention wanting the company of bits of itself. Both are okay arrangements.
I experience a “knowing”—perhaps you do too—that love is real and core to the call “home.” It connects substance and essence, and cannot be captured or explained.
Does love come in innocent—pre-story—and, through the stories of us, is tattered and reassembled, new, expanded? Are we the Grand Storyteller’s venue to Its own love?
Let there be light—the Great Storyteller