Day 199- The Flatlanders
I have been trying to get my head around some pretty difficult concepts. What does it mean to live on the Other Side? What does it mean to be in a place without time? How can reincarnation be a thing? Do we actually reincarnate in time- life after life or do these lives happen simultaneously? Do those in spirit know the future?
Physicists tell us time is an illusion. I cannot understand that from within time. My mind began at a time in May 1961 AFAIK. I have always been in this body. I cannot fathom what it means to exist outside of time. Physicists tell us there are other dimensions, up to 11 I believe the number is. We cannot with our brains comprehend this, but there is an thought exercise that helps me. I cannot add dimensions with my teeny tiny brain, but I can take them away and taking them away allows me to grasp an illustration that helps me.
Imagine there is a population of people we’ll call the Flatlanders. They live in a two dimensional world, much like a sheet of paper (a plane if you understand geometry). They move about and exist in this existence driving their two dimensional cars, living in their two dimensional houses. We come across these people. We look down at their two dimensional world and we can see them moving around, living their lives. Their homes are squares, not cubes. They have no roofs on their houses, because nothing can be above them to see in or to get in. There is no “up”. They cannot even see us. They cannot look “up” outside of their sheet of paper. We try to interact with them. We tell them we are looking down on their world and can see them. They say “From where?” We say “We’re right up here” “Up?” they ask. They have no word for up. They have no way to comprehend it. We explain we are looking into their homes. “But how?” “Well, we’re looking down into them and we can see everything that’s going on in all of your houses, at one time.” “But how does that work?” they ask. They can only see what is right in front of them. They have no way to gain the perspective to look down and see the whole landscape at once. “There is no way to be everywhere at one time.” they say “We’re not everywhere” we reply, “ but we can see all of your homes at one time because of where we are.” And, because we’re above, we could easily put a fingertip down into one home and then by moving in the 3rd dimension above them, almost immediately put a finger down in another home. The first fingertip would be only the tip of our finger, but it’s all we could fit into their world. They would ask “How did you get in here? The door is closed. Did you come through the walls?” No matter how we tried to explain we simply came through the opening above where we would have a roof, they could not comprehend. Moving to the second home without traversing across their sheet of paper would akin to teleporting in Star Trek for them. Our abilities would be magical to them who could only move by traveling across their sheet of paper world.
This is a crude illustration, but it helps me. We are the Flatlanders. Somehow when we come here, we squeeze what we truly are into this limited, dense body in the world trapped by time and space. We have forgotten the world we came from, a world where movement is effortless and time is immaterial. We are so limited we cannot even imagine home.
This illustration came back to me as I was discussing the Oversoul with someone yesterday. I read a pretty detailed article I’ll share later, but having this helped me understand things like how beings can exist out of time and look into our time. For them the universe would be timeless; as they could look at our timeline and see any point at any time- past present or future. Meanwhile we’re trapped moving from moment to moment without any comprehension of how it could be any different.
