Multi-Dimensional Time: Part 10

Before I leave this section another thought has come to mind in connection with those fairy tales. I don’t understand Einstein’s theories but I have been told that he suggested that if you faster than the speed of light, time slows down, so you don’t age as fast as those you left behind on earth.

Now there is an important point I want to make, and perhaps I should have made it at the beginning of this talk instead of at the end.

When I was researching my Egyptian novels I came across the concepts of ‘Everlasting’ and ‘eternity’ set over against each other. When I was young I had always associated them together, believing that they were the same thing. For instance in a Grimm brothers story I read about a diamond mountain in Pomerania which was two miles high. Every 1000 years a little bird came and sharpened its beak on it. When the diamond mountain is worn away, the story said, this would indicate that the first second of eternity had been passed.

In Irish myth I read that the Otherworld was remarkably like our own – but better.

At the doorway to the east,
Three trees of brilliant crystal,
Whence a gentle flock of birds calls
To the children of the royal fort.

A tree at the doorway to the court,
Fair its harmony;
A tree of silver before the setting sun,
Its brightness like that of gold.

Three score trees there
Whose crowns are meetings that do not meet.
Each tree bears ripe fruit,
For three hundred men.
There is in the sid a well
With three fifties of brightly coloured mantles,
A pin of radiant gold
In the corner of each mantle.

[Early Irish Myths and Sagas. Gantz. Penguin Books]

Even in the Bible I read a description of the otherworld using images from this and implying in both cases that That is just an extension of This.

Book of Revelations, Chapter 4:

After this I looked, and, behold, a door was opened in heaven: and the first voice which I heard was as it were of a trumpet talking with me; which said, “Come up hither, and I will show thee things which must be hereafter.”

And immediately I was in the spirit: and, behold, a throne was set in heaven, and one sat on the throne.

And he that sat was to look upon like a jasper and a sardine-stone: and there was a rainbow round about the throne, I sight like unto an emerald.

And round about the throne were four and twenty seats: upon the seats I saw four and twenty elders sitting clothed in white raiment: and they had on their heads crowns of gold.

And out the throne proceeded lightnings and thunderings and voices: and there were seven lamps of fire burning before the throne, which are the seven Spirits of God.

And before the throne there was a sea of glass like unto crystal: and in the midst of the throne, and round about the throne, were four beasts full of eyes before and behind.

And the first beast was like a lion, and the second beast like a calf, and the third beast had a face as a man, and the fourth beast was like a flying eagle.

In this century T.S.Eliot’s poem Little Gidding comes to mind.

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, remembered fate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
Quick now, here, now, always –
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.

When my husband died I avoided asking him for help because I feared it would impede his progress in the Otherworld – might take him away from doing something else more important. And then I got a message ‘loud and clear’ reminding me that in the Otherworld there is neither time nor space. He does not have to come from somewhere else to attend to me – because he is ‘here’.

Because we call it the Otherworld we think it is like this one – only insubstantial. It is totally, unimaginably different. For the first time I understood how God could be aware of every sparrow that fell. ‘He’ wasn’t somewhere else looking on as we would from a height surveying a landscape. The sparrow is ‘in’ Eternity with Him.

And we, if we were not seduced by others into confusing ‘Everlasting’ and ‘Eternity’, would know that we, as eternal spiritual beings, are ‘in’ Eternity even now, while we are simultaneously but only temporarily ‘in’ time because we have material bodies as well as our spiritual being.

If we had champagne this evening I would ask you to raise you glasses in a toast to the magnificence of the present moment, through which all the strands of multi-dimensional time are threaded!

Multi-Dimensional Time: Part 1
Multi-Dimensional Time: Part 2
Multi-Dimensional Time: Part 3
Multi-Dimensional Time: Part 4
Multi-Dimensional Time: Part 5
Multi-Dimensional Time: Part 6
Multi-Dimensional Time: Part 7
Multi-Dimensional Time: Part 8
Multi-Dimensional Time: Part 9