A view of life from 40,000 feet

Introduction

This essay assumes the existence of the soul, or the animating principle – a non-physical consciousness independent of the physical body. The soul is a concept that has been a part of every culture in human history.

Time

We perceive time in a straight line and it only goes one way, from past to present to future. Everything in our world has a beginning point and an end point. Life is born and it lives for a while and then it dies. From a purely physical point of view, time is linear.

Let’s take that line and close the left side of the line with the right side of the line:

We have gone from one dimension (line) to two dimensions (a circle in a plane).

What happens to our timeline?

Well, there really isn’t a beginning or an end anymore. We could arbitrarily choose a point anywhere on the circle and call it the beginning. But past, present, and future doesn’t make much sense now. The flow of time can go either “backward” or “forward.”

There’s a lesson here. It has to do with the next higher dimension (dimension three).

Imagine a spirit (soul) incarnating into a body. The point of birth is at A on the circle, where the spirit enters the physical universe. From the point of view of the circle, the entry of the animating principle is invisible. It comes from outside the circle, and the circle can’t see it come in because it can’t see outside the two-dimensional plane of its awareness. The entry of the soul appears to be magic from the viewpoint of the circle. It says, “Well, something is here that wasn’t here before but we don’t know how it happened.” The same thing happens at death. Whatever that “something” is, leaves, and the physical body is dead. The soul is no longer in the flow of time, from the circle’s perspective.

A life can be graphed by showing the soul entering the circle at point A, traveling along the flow of time (living) until it gets to point A again, which we call death, and then leaving. Birth and death are the same point.

The same thing happens in three dimensions, if you imagine the circle being drawn on the surface of a sphere:

 

Three lives: the black circle (a) on the sphere represents a life, and so does the green circle (b) with a different life path. A shorter life is represented by the red circle (c).

Now imagine the circle getting smaller and smaller, and shrinking to a tiny dot (dimension zero. Imagine the dot is infinitely small).

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What happens to time?

If the circle of time shrinks infinitely small, then past, present, and future merge. Time essentially disappears. The dimensionless point represents something timeless: the non-physical soul or animating principle. It appears invisibly at birth and returns to its non-physical home at the time of body death.

A timeless entity is a strange concept because in the physical universe all events are separated by time. A world where past, present, and future happen all at once would result in incomprehensible chaos. To a physical entity, timelessness makes no sense, but this is the soul’s perception as it exits the physical universe and enters a timeless state.

Dimension zero is a singularity.

In math, according to Wolfram MathWorld, “zero is the integer that, when used as a counting number, means that no objects are present. It is the only integer (and, in fact, the only real number) that is neither negative nor positive.” This definition suggests that zero has no physical qualities at all.

In cosmology, the dimensionless point can represent an infinite amount of matter and energy within an infinitely small area. The Big Bang theory of the universe says that everything in our universe originated within a cosmic singularity.

If the soul is itself a dimensionless entity it would be invisible in our three dimensional physical world. Indeed, science (correctly) rejects the idea of an animating principle or a soul, or any non-physical awareness, because it cannot be observed or measured. Science does not deal with the intangible, and the soul by definition is intangible and dimensionless.

The concept of the soul – an awareness beyond the physical body – has persisted for millennia throughout every culture in human history.

Conclusion

The point of this little essay is that it is impossible to understand the soul from our physical perspective. The closest we can come is an intuitive approach. Intuition, by definition, is that which exists beyond the five human senses. Intuition could be defined as the non-physical soul communicating with the physically incarnated human being.

Mostly we dismiss or ignore or don’t recognize our intuitive impulses. However, in my experience, intuitive flashes occur when I am meditating, or when I am completely calm. They seem to occur “out of time,” which suggests a non-physical source. It is comforting for me to think that, as a human being, there is more to “me” than just a physical body and the limitations of the five human senses. Perhaps, if we paid more attention to our intuitive/inner voice, we might learn something more about a greater or higher aspect of ourselves.

Human society has reached a massive inflection point

Definition of Denouement:

1. The final resolution or clarification of a dramatic or narrative plot.

2. The events following the climax of a drama or novel in which such a resolution or clarification takes place.

3. The outcome of a sequence of events; the end result.

—— Wordnik

Spiritual Principles

“All Endings are Happy Endings.”

This was the theme of my former radio show called Interview with Spirit. On the show, which went from 2008 to 2014, I looked at current events from a spiritual perspective.

The meaning of the phrase, “All Endings are Happy Endings,” is simple. All life, all consciousness, comes from the Creative Source (God, if you prefer), the benevolent, non-physical source of all consciousness in the universe. No matter how bad your life is in the physical universe, no matter how evil you have been in your physical incarnation, or how good, the divine essence that makes you, you, returns to the Source of All.

All endings, therefore, are happy endings.

Another saying I had on the show was, “What happens on earth stays on earth.”

This just means that the evil, or good, you do on earth is stored in your personal “soul space” associated with the planet, lifetime after lifetime. When your body dies you leave all that shit in your personal karmic space and ascend, unencumbered, back to the Creative Source. When you are ready for another lifetime, you pick up all of the crap that happened to you and begin again.

Every time you come in, you come in completely clean. Every time you leave, you leave completely clean. It’s like playing a board game. You take your piece out of the box and play with it, then you take it off the board and put it back after the game is over. In this analogy, the player is the soul and the board piece is the body.

Just as each board game is unique, each physical lifetime is unique, and will never occur again in the history of the universe. But consciousness (self-awareness) continues.

Reincarnation is the process of soul evolution in the physical universe.

Looking at life from the lens of these two spiritual concepts simplifies living. No matter how bad life is, there is relief at the end. No matter how evil you are you can start over afresh.

Confusion about life comes about when people muck around with human belief systems. “When you die you’re dead,” for example (“You only live once”), creates a franticness about life. You have to be very, very careful. If something happens to that body of yours, your consciousness is snuffed out forever. You gotta look out for number one and not let others get over on you, “because life is too short.”

But what if life is a continuation of consciousness interrupted by birth and death? Then, death is just an interruption in physical consciousness, and birth is an interruption in soul consciousness. But you are still you.

Living life without spiritual understanding stifles cooperation (“Why should I help the other guy? Screw him”), leads to a consciousness of scarcity (“There’s only so much to go around”), and creates degraded ideas about human nature (“We’re only slightly above the animals,” “It’s a dog-eat-dog world out there,” etc.). These attitudes about humanity lead to societal imbalance, poverty and injustice, and constant conflict and war. 

The source of human misery, at its core, is a lack of spiritual understanding.

Life is set up to be benevolent

There are two important corollaries to the two principles above.

1) Consciousness is eternal and does not depend on physical systems. A more limited consciousness results when the soul associates with a physical body, which limits perception and awareness to the five human senses.

2) Consciousness is inherently benign and benevolent, because all self-awareness is associated with the Creative Source.

Human history on this planet has been, essentially, the record of violations of these principles, due to limited understanding.

In the last post we saw how the human body itself is based on musical and mathematical harmonies. The design of our world, including animals, plants, and insects, is based on harmony, not conflict. The diverse ecosystems on this planet cocoon and nurture life. Their design is benevolent and life-supporting.

And so – all life on earth is set up for harmony and cooperation.

Now: throw in a wild card called Free Will.

Free Will means just that: the ability to turn away from the harmonious setup life gives us and do whatever we want. Free will creates tension that spurs new ideas and provides the engine for growth and evolution to higher (or lower) states. Because of this tension, nothing ever stays the same: systems are either contracting or growing, evolving or falling apart.

Life is a delicate balance between a harmonious baseline and the ability to choose differently.

Tensegrity 

I don’t want to get too complicated here, but we can model the tension between a benevolent setup and free will by borrowing some concepts from the genius of Buckminster Fuller. Bucky modeled the tension of life using what he called tensegrity structures. Tensegrity is a combination of the words “tension” and “integrity.”

(If you are interested in this concept in greater detail, go to the article The Geometry of Harmony on my website, which explains how tension creates energy and gives living systems a dynamic quality.)

Very briefly, a static system (once which can’t evolve) might look like this:

All of the blue struts are rigidly connected to the little white balls. This structure is very fragile because if you knock it even a little, the struts come out, or break, and the whole thing collapses. You could glue or snap in the struts rigidly to the balls to make the connections stronger, but if you play around with it you’ll see that it will fall apart under stress. This kind of structure can be beautiful, but it cannot adapt. It is fixed in position, and cannot change. It cannot change because the individual pieces of which it is composed have no freedom to operate. They are constrained to come together in only one way. There is no dynamic tension here.

Let’s compare this to one of Bucky’s tensegrity structures:  

Here, each strut has a notch in it at the end of it and is covered with a red tip. Each of the struts is connected to the others with a red tension wire that fits into the notch and is slightly shorter than the strut, separating each strut and creating tension within the structure. What happens when you hit this thing? The tension wires flex and the struts find balance because they aren’t rigidly connected. You can throw it across the room, or at a wall, and it will remain intact. None of the struts ever touch each other. They are independently islanded so that if forces act upon any part of the structure, the whole thing immediately finds balance. When a structure is built in this way, it can withstand tremendous forces upon it. If you push on it or strike it there will be an immediate, uniform, and symmetrical response around the entire structure. It is dynamic and can flex inwardly and outwardly, always finding equilibrium within itself. In other words, it can easily adapt to change.

So, tension isn’t a bad thing if it is accompanied by integrity! Tension gives life a built-in energy source that comes from within. To see this, build or buy one of these tensegrity models. If you work with tensegrity you can see that the structure internally generates all of the forces upon it and within it. Tensegrity generates its own energy and dynamically balances it. It does not require energy from the outside. It is self-contained, independently energy generating, and self-balancing.

Just like life itself.

Current Events

So – Life has tension, integrity, and flexibility built-in to it. If it didn’t, it would quickly collapse. The same goes for political systems and societies.

Tyrannical, dictatorial political systems constrain thought, speech, and action. A “one size fits all” society crushes diversity of opinion and new ideas under the guise of “hate speech,” or “misinformation,” or whatever the dictator doesn’t like. Such a system is like the first structure above. The more rigid and dictatorial the system is, the more certain that it will eventually collapse.

 Rigid, inflexible systems contain the seeds of their own destruction because they cannot adapt.

The Denouement

  If all endings are happy endings, why is there so much misery in the world? Perhaps it’s because humanity has adopted distorted and unworkable ideas about itself. We study the human body and fail to realize that its basic structure is designed around harmony. We design drugs to fight disease instead of promoting health and supporting the body’s underlying cooperative and harmonious nature. We design political systems based on mindless, ruthless competition. We denigrate the divine, creative impulses that generate new ideas and insist on a hive mind approach that crushes merit and ability. We do not let the human spirit soar!

Folks, the human race is rapidly approaching a denouement. We have struggled with a false conception of the human being for over 6,000 years, but we are now coming to a massive inflection point in human affairs. Either we recognize basic spiritual (and design) principles, and adopt a true understanding of who we are, or human society will go over a cliff.

It’s not about designing new political and economic systems. We are far beyond that now, for 6,000 years of human history has conclusively demonstrated that it is impossible to solve a problem with the same consciousness that created the problem. Therefore, we must abandon our failed conceptions and distorted ideas about human nature, and embrace the fundamental, core design principles that describe our divine, inherent, harmonious nature.