by Kenneth Harper Finton ©2015

Who am I? Who are you?

We limit our identities to what we think is our personal selves because that is the way we think at the moment. Our identities are composed of complex thought and memories of events past, present and yet those yet to be perceived.  When we look into a mirror we see only a portion of our self. Neither that self-reflected person in the mirror nor the self buried within us is our whole being.

Shakespeare said, “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players; they have their exits and their entrances, and one man in his time plays many parts.”  If we are the dream and/or the dreamer, if the universe about us is a play.

The Hindus will tell us that all is illusion. Physicists will tell us of the quantum world where existence only comes to be when it is observed.

These are metaphors for a greater idea. Calling this truth and wrapping it in holy cloth has been done for so long that people have become quite leery of the term.

To be objective, there must be a subject and an object, but ultimately, if the object and the subject are the same, then neither are truly substantial. That is why some people believe that we live in a world of illusion.

Our personal life is always struggling to find the balance between the light and the dark, the good and the bad, the happy and the miserable.

Some say that there is such a thing as enlightenment. Be it in a dream, a trance, a meditative revelation, or under the influence of a mind-altering drug, many of us have felt the awesome presence of that which is infinitely complete. The state of sleep is an altered state of consciousness from the waking consciousness. We often remember little or nothing of the time when we sleep. Thanks to the unconscious, the body continues to function automatically. Sleep is one of the continuing patterns of our conscious selves, putting us in direct contact with nothingness and dreams.

Enlightenment is good, but whenever we realize that we are not who we thought we were, we come back down to the same old problems and feelings we had before we discovered that our being might be some kind of an absurd trick or an illusion.

The devil is in the details, as they say. Our bodies require maintenance. Because enlightenment is a timeless experience, once it has been experienced we must return to the previous patterns of out individual lives. We  identify our being and become ourselves, the product of our lifetime of experiences and interactions. Like it or not, we must live in a temporal world. In the end, as in the beginning, each of us has a personal world.  Some of us may want to change that––and it will change whether we will it to be so or not––as change is the motion of the universe.

All is a leap of faith. Since we cannot logically prove anything other than something is being observed and this something is thinking, we call it ourselves. Even that is a leap of faith, as we cannot prove it is us doing the thinking and observing. This can only lead us to a metaphysical approach. The potential of awareness is the only thing that does not need time nor space to be.

Do we live in a dual world of illusion and self reflection?

The practical aspects of existence must matter for our own survival and thriving.

We must invent mechanisms and theories as to this being-within-ourselves as we are intelligent beings seeking to understand the mechanics of our memory and consciousness.

Is it illusion? Are we are just images on the great screen that shows the universal movie. The pain feels real … the hunger is palpable, the evil is just as horrifying.

This is the price of being. Would you rather not be? In some strange way we live in an nonexistent universe. How could it be otherwise when time is a ghostly illusion, the now is eternal and contains all that there ever was?

Yet, even if we realize that all is but experience that is experienced in the now, the realization begs answers as to how our personal and communal observations create the time and space that leads to the universe that we behold and study. In other words, though we can realize that we are in some ways both the dream and the dreamer. The history of how we passed through a continuous now to create the memories of ancient pasts as well as a continuous personal history remains foremost in our individual and collective lives.

Lorado Taft’s statue of The Fountain of Time is correct, Father Time stands still as the   world and its events parade before him.

Time is relative. It is relative to speed and motion. The now moves through time and time moves through the now. There has never been anything other than a now and there will never be anything other than a now. Both what we believe to be the past and the future is contained in the now.

How can this be?

As you read this paragraph, concentrate on the words before you as you read this line. You will notice that in your peripheral vision there are blurred lines that only have meaning when you look at them in the present. These blurry lines are like the past. The past is like the words you have already read. To make it come alive, you have to retrace and bring the now into the previous patterns of letters and vowels and words that created meaning and understanding.

The blurry lines that you have not yet read come after this line that you are reading now. That is the way the future and the past is laid out. It takes experiencing them in the now to bring them into consciousness. That consciousness is eternal, all things are within it, existing and not existing at the very same moment.

It is a more a quantum world than we realize.

There is a reason for this.

There is a reason that the only time is now. How could it be otherwise?

Who has ever lived for a moment in a time that was not NOW?

No one.

The reason is both absurd and obvious.

Before there was time and before there was space, what was there?

Before the universe existed and after the universe is gone, what is there?

If you answered nothing, then you are correct, but you may not know what nothing is, because nothing is No Thing.

There are no things in nothing. Nothing is infinite.

It is a place where there are no selves.

The thing that has confused us for generations is that nothing exists.

Nothing exists is where duality meets existence.

Nothing ever existed and nothing exists now.

That is the very primary tenant.

Because of the dual fact that nothing exists, we have an entire universe to explore.

If all the matter in the universe was compressed into one point, that point would be one dimensional,existing everywhere at once. Zero dimension is infinity. Infinity is eternal. A singularity is one dimensional.

The world is always changing because charged particles and wave forms become aware of one another and feel the presence of one another. They do this in a manner that Alfred North Whitehead calls ‘prehensions’. The term “prehension” indicates that the perceiver actually incorporates aspects of the perceived thing into itself. The term is meant to indicate a kind of perception that can be conscious or unconscious, applying to people as well as electrons.]

There are positive attractions and negative repulsions. We humans believe that feelings are unique to our brains and nervous systems, but the essence of feelings is reflected in primary particles, waves and magnetic fields.

Love is a primary feeling and is thus a universal force. In its simplest form, it is an attraction between two objects that fall under the gravitational pull of another. Is this why John Lennon wrote: “Love is all you need.”

John Lennon also wrote: “Let me take you down ‘cause I’m going to Strawberry Fields. Nothing is real. Nothing to get hung about.”

Did he mean no thing is real? Did he mean that all is an illusion? Or did he mean that nothing is real, that real is actually nothing? Or do they both mean the same thing?

Reality is a misused word. Diffent dimensions create different realities.

An example: The warp and weft of time and space are entwined in one another. The now is the weft, the stringy thread of time, the string that flows through universal fields eternally, We use it as a measurement by observing it and declaring it to be a reality. Being is the pattern woven from warps in space that the stringy thread of time becomes attracted to and as they wind into into one another.

As soon as there is one, there is two because there is an inside and an outside. That makes two. This is what creates duality. In order for the two to conceive of an inside and an outside, there must be another dimension. Two lines cannot come together without a third line, as in a triangle.

The third line is essential for any existent closed space. The simplest form is the triangle.

One line can only come together as a circle. This too encloses the space and requires an inside and an outside. In order to see the circle, one must transcend it. A third dimension is needed. A circle within itself is not even two dimensional, but has no dimension at all.  A circle within itself cannot know that it is a circle. It can only be seen from above and that adds a third dimension.

It takes a dimension to make an event of a singularity. If it simply had but an inside and an outside, then it would be like two lines that can never come together to enclose a space. Think of the world as a web of energy, vibrating strings of energy that moves slowly enough to create a sense of time and dimension. With the addition of time––the symbolic and theoretical line can cross its own starting point, creating an observable measurement. The same point is observed in time moving in curved space creates an orbit that forms the basis of matter.

Awareness recognizes an object by feel through the orbiting of its electrical charge–positive or negative. Elementary particles become a palpable form through the sense of feel and magnetism, but it takes a background of awareness to materialize and organize an event. The world of being is, in essence, an informational network

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