"Time" is not a continuum. It is an element of relativity that exists vertically, not horizontally.
Don't think of it as a "left to right" thing — a so-called time line that runs from birth to death for each individual, and from some finite point to some finite point for the universe.
"Time" is an "up and down" thing! Think of it as a spindle, representing the Eternal Moment of Now.
Now picture leafs of paper on the spindle, one atop the other. These are the elements of time. Each element separate and distinct, yet each existing simultaneously with the other. All the paper on the spindle at once! As much as there will ever be — as much as there ever was...
Excuse me, but I have to interrupt you again here. What about the person who is sick, but has the faith that will move mountains — and so thinks, says, and believes he’s going to get better… only to die six weeks later. How does that square with all this positive thinking, affirmative action stuff?
[...] The person who has the “faith to move mountains,” and dies six weeks later, has moved mountains for six weeks. That may have been enough for him. He may have decided, on the last hour of the last day, “Okay, I’ve had enough. I’m ready to go on now to another adventure.” You may not have known of that decision, because he may not have told you. The truth is, he may have made that decision quite a bit earlier — days, weeks earlier — and not have told you; not have told anyone.
You have created a society in which it is very not okay to want to die — very not okay to be very okay with death. Because you don’t want to die, you can’t imagine anyone wanting to die — no matter what their circumstances or condition.
But there are many situations in which death is preferable to life — which I know you can imagine if you think about it for even a little bit. Yet, these truths don’t occur to you — they are not that self-evident — when you are looking in the face of someone else who is choosing to die. And the dying person knows this. She can feel the level of acceptance in the room regarding her decision. [...]
The entire medical profession is trained to keep people alive, rather than keeping people comfortable so that they can die with dignity. You see, to a doctor or a nurse, death is failure. To a friend or relative, death is disaster. Only to the soul is death a relief — a release. The greatest gift you can give the dying is to let them die in peace — not thinking that they must “hang on,” or continue to suffer, or worry about you at this most crucial passage in their life.
So this is very often what has happened in the case of the man who says he’s going to live, believes he’s going to live, even prays to live: that at the soul level, he has “changed his mind.” It is time now to drop the body to free the soul for other pursuits. When the soul makes this decision, nothing the body does can change it. Nothing the mind thinks can alter it. It is at the moment of death that we learn who, in the body-mind-soul triumvirate, is running things.
All your life you think you are your body. Some of the time you think you are your mind. It is at the time of your death that you find out Who You Really Are.
My horse died when I was seventeen. It was like losing a member of our family. Anyone who has had a pet will understand the bond I'm talking about.
He was my world; my childhood best friend. I used to make him cakes out of carrots, iced with molasses for his birthday and decorated with chaff for sprinkles. I'd sit in his paddock and read him books when the weather was nice. And when a storm was raging, and the lightning was flashing, and the thunder was roaring, I'd sneak out in the night and ride my bike to his paddock just to comfort him. I'd find him in his little shelter, terrified. But he'd nuzzle my shoulder, and I'd give him a hug, and we'd both know that everything was going to be okay.
That's the thing about pets — they see you for Who You Really Are. No illusions. No polish. It's like they see right through you. They see the Truth of things.
And to see someone with such clarity? Unimpeded by your own insecurities and ideas of right and wrong? That was love if ever I felt it.
He was always kind to me. He was always around. He was always up for a little adventure: a picnic, a trail ride, a game of horseball played with broomsticks and beachballs; a round of jousting played with pool noodles; a quiet afternoon plaiting daisies in his mane.
And then I thought about his dead body lying in the ground, eyes lifeless. Gone. Entropy gently ripping his flesh to pieces; bacteria feasting on the adorable lip that used to quiver with delight when I scratched his wither in just the right place.
I believed the materialist lie and it was agony. My mother took me out of boarding school for a few weeks when it happened. I couldn't function. The head boarding mistress told me to stop crying, "get over it," and go back to class — as if the depth of love I felt for this creature were a nuisance; as if expressing anything human in this robotic world were off-limits.
Amazingly, when Whitton hypnotized patients and regressed them to the between-life state, they too reported all the classic features of the [near-death experience (NDE)], passage through a tunnel, encounters with deceased relatives and/or "guides," entrance into a splendorous light-filled realm in which time and space no longer existed, encounters with the luminious beings, and a life review. In fact, according to Whitton's subjects the main purpose of the life review was to refresh their memories so they could more mindfully plan their next life, a process in which the beings of light gently and noncoercively assisted.
Like Ring, after studying the testimony of his subjects Whitton concluded that the shapes and structures one perceives in the afterlife dimension are thought-forms created by the mind. "René Descartes' famous dictum, 'I think, therefore I am,' is never more pertinent than in the between-life state," says Whitton. "There is no experience in existence without thought."
This was especially true when it came to the form Whitton's patients assumed in the between-life state. Several said they didn't even have a body unless they were thinking. "One man described it by saying that if he stopped thinking he was merely a cloud in an endless cloud, undifferentiated," he observes. "But as soon as he started to think, he became himself" (a state of affairs that is oddly reminiscent of the subjects in Tart's mutual hypnosis experiment who discovered they didn't have hands unless they thought them into existence).
Dr. Francine Howland, a Yale psychiatrist who specializes in treating multiples, relates an even more striking incident concerning one multiple’s reaction to a wasp sting. On the occasion in question, the man showed up for his scheduled appointment with Howland with his eye completely swollen shut from a wasp sting. Realizing he needed medical attention, Howland called an ophthalmologist. Unfortunately, the soonest the ophthalmologist could see the man was an hour later, and because the man was in severe pain, Howland decided to try something. As it turned out, one of the man’s alternates was an “anesthetic personality” who felt absolutely no pain. Howland had the anesthetic personality take control of the body, and the pain ended. But something else also happened. By the time the man arrived at his appointment with the ophthalmologist, the swelling was gone and his eye had returned to normal. Seeing no need to treat him, the ophthalmologist sent him home.
After a while, however, the anesthetic personality relinquished control of the body, and the man’s original personality returned, along with all the pain and swelling of the wasp sting. The next day he went back to the ophthalmologist to at last be treated. Neither Howland or her patient had told the ophthalmologist that the man was a multiple, and after treating him, the ophthalmologist telephoned Howland. “He thought time was playing tricks on him,” Howland laughed. “He just wanted to make sure that I had actually called him the day before and he had not imagined it.” [...]
The systems of control that must be in place to account for such capacities is mind-boggling and makes our ability to will away a wart look pale. Allergic reaction to a wasp sting is a complex and multi-faceted process and involves the organized activities of antibodies, the production of histamine, the dilation and rupture of blood vessels, the excessive release of immune substances, and so on.
Again, it appears that in a reality created solely out of interacting thought structures, even the landscape itself is sculpted by the ideas and expectations of the experiencer.
At this juncture an important point needs to be made. As startling and foreign as the near-death realm seems, the evidence presented in this book reveals that our own level of existence may not be all that different. As we have seen, we too can access all information, it is just a little more difficult for us. We too can occasionally have personal flashforwards and come face-to-face with the phantasmal nature of time and space. And we too can sculpt and reshape our bodies, and sometimes even our reality, according to our beliefs. [...]
In fact, it appears that this reality and the next are different in degree, but not in kind. Both are hologramlike constructs, realities that are established, as Jahn and Dunne put it, only by the interaction of consciousness with its environment. Put another way, our reality appears to be a more frozen version of the afterlife dimension. It takes a little more time for our beliefs to resculpt our bodies into things like nail-like stigmata and for the symbolic language of our psyches to manifest externally as synchronicities. But manifest they do, in a slow and inexorable river, a river whose persistent presence teaches us that we live in a universe we are only just beginning to understand.
To recap then: Souls released from the body quickly remember to monitor and control their thoughts very carefully, for whatever they think of, that is what they create and experience.
I say again, it is the same for souls still residing in a body, except the results are usually not as immediate. And it is the "time" lapse between thought and creation — which can be days, weeks, months, or even years — which creates the illusion that things are happening to you, not because of you. This is an illusion, causing you to forget that you are at cause in the matter.
As I have described now several times, this forgetting is "built into the system". It is part of the process. For you cannot create Who You Are until you forget Who You Are. So the illusion causing forgetfulness is an effect created on purpose.
When you leave the body, it will therefore be a big surprise to see the instant and obvious connection between your thoughts and your creations. It will be a shocking surprise at first, and then a very pleasant one, as you begin to remember that you are at cause in the creation of your experience, not at the effect of it.
Why is there such a delay between thought and creation before we die, and no delay at all after we die?
Because you are working within the illusion of time. There is no delay between thought and creation away from the body, because you are also away from the parameters of time.
In other words, as You have said so often, time does not exist.
Not as you understand it. The phenomenon of "time" is really a function of perspective.
Why does it exist while we are in the body?
You have caused it to by moving into, by assuming, your present perspective. You use this perspective as a tool with which you can explore and examine your experiences much more fully, by separating them into individual pieces, rather than a single occurrence.
Life is a single occurrence, an event in the cosmos that is happening right now. All of it is happening. Everywhere.
There is no "time" but now. There is no "place" but here.
Here and now is All There Is.
Yet you chose to experience the magnificience of here and now in its every detail, and to experience your Divine Self as the here and now creator of your reality. There were only two ways — two fields of experience — in which you could do that. Time and space.
So magnificent was this thought that you literally exploded with delight!
In that explosion of delight was created space between the parts of you, and the time it took to move from one part of yourself to another.
In this way you literally tore your Self apart to look at the pieces of you. You might say that you were so happy, you "fell to pieces."
You've been picking up the pieces ever since.
One man described it by saying that if he stopped thinking he was merely a cloud in an endless cloud, undifferentiated.
There is no delay between thought and creation away from the body, because you are also away from the parameters of time.
The phenomenon of "time" is really a function of perspective.
Why does it exist while we are in the body?
You have caused it to by moving into, by assuming, your present perspective. You use this perspective as a tool with which you can explore and examine your experiences much more fully, by separating them into individual pieces, rather than a single occurrence.
In describing the hereafter one child said that food appeared whenever she wished for it, but there was no need to eat, an observation that underscores once again the illusory and hologramlike nature of the afterlife reality.
See,
I observed Escher
I love Basquiat
I watched Keith Haring
You see, I study art
The greats weren't great because at birth they could paint
The greats were great because they'd paint a lot
You use perspective as a tool with which you can explore and examine your experiences much more fully, by separating them into individual pieces, rather than a single occurrence.
This Book is being written, and as it’s being written it’s already written; it already exists. In fact, that’s where you’re getting all this information — from the book that already exists. You’re merely bringing it into form.
[Jesus] allowed himself to be crucified in order that he might stand as man’s eternal salvation. Look, he said, at what I can do. Look at what is true. And know that these things, and more, shall you also do. For have I not said, ye are gods? Yet you do not believe. If you cannot, then, believe in yourself, believe in me.
Such was Jesus’ compassion that he begged for a way — and created it — to so impact the world that all might come to heaven (Self realization) — if in no other way, then through him. For he defeated misery, and death. And so might you.
The grandest teaching of Christ was not that you shall have everlasting life — but that you do; not that you shall have brotherhood in God, but that you do; not that you shall have whatever you request, but that you do.
All that is required is to know this. For you are the creator of your reality, and life can show up no other way for you than that way in which you think it will.
While I was in France in 2015, I ended up in Albi — a little castle village about an hour from Toulouse.