Some years ago I conducted a thought experiment.  To those of you not familiar with that concept and on the less logical plane of brane waving (pun intended), pretend it's kinda like the old astral projection-new age stuff, but punctuated with a form of discipline called the scientific model.

 

I'm somewhat of a Uri Geller fan, although I haven't kept up with his stuff in years.  I also read lots of stuff like Telekinesis and Quantum Field Theory | Cosmic Variance | Discover Magazine.  My personal library has more books by physicists than anything else.  I've been fascinated with light and thought and the process of time since I was a small child, as I've mentioned in earlier posts.

 

In a very old book by Uri, he mentioned doing a thought experiment of going outside the universe.  That quite caught my attention in my younger days, as I was already wondering why most people seem to stop at our own earth being the epitome of spiritual evolution, why others can't seem to see beyond our own spacetime light cone of events, how even scientists operate on the premise that our universe is 'central'.  When the bubble theory first came out on a more civilian level (since I'm not an actual physics student), I was *thrilled*.  I had already envisioned what multiple universes must be like, although I think the whole bubble thing is finally being stepped up into a sort of patterned growth.  And when Uri suggested he'd been outside this universe and had seen God, I thought Hey, I bet I can do that, too...

 

But Uri thought small.  Very small.  There was very little about his experience to read in that book, and it's terribly lacking in frame of reference.  Before I try to describe my own experience, this thought experiment that I privately conducted over a decade ago, I want to disclaim that I'm not a 'new ager', I was never into astral projection theories, I think a lot of that is misguided and misinterpreted, and I think humans are as blind and stupid as amoebas.  You've heard the phrase "You get what you pay for."  Well, you also get what you expect, and if your expectations are limited by very small thinking, you don't get *much*.  (That was not aimed at Uri or anyone else, just a statement.)

 

I figured before I got started that I'd better prepare myself, because I might possibly wind up way over my head.  For one thing, we seem to be meant to be stuck in these bodies during these lives, not remembering much else even though we intuitively feel more.  For instance, children easily assume 'magic' is as real as any reality, and people the world over for millennia have dreams that they are flying.  Our bodies teach us the boundaries, and we spend years learning them, and then more years learning to handle the depression it brings.  We can't really just think it and expect something to change.  After we think it, our bodies are what make the changes.  We reach out with our hands to write or move something, we use our legs to travel somewhere.  It feels cumbersome to go through effort and time, unless you are naturally hyper and simply love movement for its own sake.  But it's funny, isn't it, how somehow nearly every one of us can just about believe that it really could (and should) be possible to 'do' things without our bodies in the way.  (Why else would 'Use the force, Luke' become such a common phrase?)  That suggests to me an intuition brought on board via something else.  After all, our bodies force us to adapt and define who we are, and how many of us are unsatisfied with that?  Isn't it odd that we feel we should be able to choose more about who we are, that we can feel displaced out of time or circumstance?  Some people feel this so strongly that they change many things about themselves, including their very gender, hair color, faces, and families.  We see ourselves not as our bodies, but as something we dream to be, or feel we should have been.  Some people are true to the DNA our bodies form from, but others feel the need to 'rise above' and be more, which, if you think about it, really shouldn't be possible if there were no such thing as a soul coming in from the outside operating the machine.  How can we imagine that which doesn't naturally exist in our own universe if we are merely products of it?

 

So to begin with, I had to recognize the person I really am.  I am not my body.  My body is part of the overall 'me', yes.  But it is ultimately not ME.  I won't even begin to argue consciousness because that one is so beaten to death by top physicists concerning artificial intelligence that it's almost ridiculous, not to mention centuries of philosophers.  Just accept that there is a ME here, temporarily occupying a body, if you will.  In order to conduct my thought experiment, I had to investigate whether I would need to leave my body.

 

This part gets a little hard.  Our universe is such that we feel like to 'go someplace', we have to move ourselves.  But what about going outside the universe?  I really don't literally leave my body, obviously, but can I still be 'somewhere else'?  Is there a misnomer in thinking that way?  Astral projection assumes we leave our bodies to go see other places.  More ancient cultures called it soul traveling, which I have also talked about in previous posting.  Some people are able to 'remote view'.  But let's stop thinking small.  My body is a teeny tiny grain of nearly nothing in a huge universe, practically irrelevant to the whole idea of soul traveling.  Which brings up a most obvious question.  Are our souls (consciousness, 'me') *part* of this universe like our bodies are, or are they something completely independent of it?  When the movie The Matrix came out, people jumped on that like frenzied enthusiasts, little realizing the mere thought of a matrix itself is an inescapable causal loop.  None of us really want an answer that basically means our souls are plugged into these lives in our bodies for the sake of experience.  Is that really all that being aware of ourselves in this universe is about?  An assignment to a body?  The purpose of learning is to be able to DO something, so what are we supposed to be able to eventually ~do~?  If there is assignment and expectation of learning something while we are 'here' (and decades of study into near death experiences and etc. seem to point to this), then there is a reason for it, because otherwise it is an empty exercise.  Eastern belief in cycling through a series of lives back to where we came from is well and good, but extremely pointless if it stops at that.

 

Can I actually find God and ask him about this stuff?  Uri claims he found God.

 

We could turn this into a wonderful maze of discussion that would take us nowhere in the end.  If you would like to understand where I'm coming from, read Flatland and then Flatterland.  It's very important that you get the concept that we can be seen from the 'outside' before you go assuming anything further about 'traveling' around with your mind.  You say Ah, but you did your thought experiment before this last book was published, and I say Yes, I was already familiar with those concepts through the physics books in my personal library.  Then you point out that these books are talking about dimensional properties, and how in the world does that have anything to do with our souls?  And I say back to you that God isn't in a 'box'.  We are so used to saying "Think outside the box", yet we put God ~into~ a box and define him by our very limited expectations according to our experiences in these bodies.  Learning to think beyond 'common sense' and what your body shows you helps you learn to think outside your virtual box.  A little deep thought never hurt anyone.

 

Several phrases by one author in particular that I have collected who is *not* a physicist are helpful.  You might recognize him immediately when I say that "Aslan is not a ~tame~ lion."  You might also be interested in Puddleglum's way of determining what is real and what isn't, by simply not accepting what he is told is true when his intuition tells him that even if something he wants to be true might not be true, doesn't mean he can't wish it to be true, and live as if it were true.  This might seem like nonsense, but in our world, I'm sure this kind of thinking has seen many people through the hardest of times during wars and imprisonment.  It's not the truth immediately around us that is so important that the rest is irrelevant, it's that there is ~more~ truth 'out there' beyond our ken, beyond our ability to perceive it in our present circumstances.  Interestingly, some have even been able to create more truth based on this.  The U.S. constitution is a case in point.

 

So I had to open my mind very much before I set out to see outside this universe.  I had to accept that 'seeing' is a concept taught to me by my physical eyes, and that my physical brain has reasoned the symbolism of the word 'seeing' into 'understanding'.  If I want to go outside the universe, how do I know I'm not already there?  What if my intuition is closer to truth than my experiences?  Because my intuition tells me I should be able to do this, and that as hard as it may look, maybe I'm looking at it all wrong, and maybe all I have to do is turn and see something a little differently.  How many movies have I watched where a lack of the simplest information made someone's journey so difficult?  And that is what our lives are like here on this earth, lacking so much information that we intuitively feel must surely be out there somewhere.  We seem to crave more information, about ourselves, about the world, about possibilities.

 

And do I really have the audacity to tell God that I want to know something and show it to me?  It's interesting that we have religious books saying all we have to do is ask, and yet we don't dare to really ask.  Why is that?  What are we afraid of?  That it's not real?  Or that it WILL be real?  Will it be different from what we *want* to be real?

 

So if I were to do this, I must be prepared for something more real than I can comprehend, and I have to be able to accept what I get from it, regardless.

 

I laid in a quiet room on a bed.  I didn't expect anything.  I knew it wasn't about traveling past stars to an 'edge'.  I don't think it's possible to get 'out' that way, since this universe is (or seems to be) entirely self contained.  It's like The Neverending Story.  Atreyu travels far and wide and never comes to the answer, not realizing it was there with him all the time...

 

I turned inside out.  I was There.  Outside of this universe, outside of all the universes.  I saw myself 'sticking out' of my own universe, clustered among many thousands of others, and was so surprised to see it was part of a garden.  The universes were all tended, all admired, all different.  All beautiful beyond imagination.  I saw colors I can't describe.  It felt so different from being inside a universe.  It wasn't 'contained'.

 

And I saw The Ancient of Days.  I can think of no better words that those already given.  He was seeing all the universes in the garden.  Knowing all that was going on in each one.  Giving personal attention as a gardener would a flower bed.  And when he got to me, he smiled and said "You must go back", and I was gently pushed back in.  My eyes popped open and I was on the bed.

 

I laid there for some time.  I didn't move.  I didn't know if I was breathing or not.  I did my best to hang onto what I saw so I would never forget it, because it felt like something my brain wouldn't be able to keep in it.  There was so much more, but the impression is about all I can hold onto while I am in this tiny puny grain inside a universe.

 

Who knew?  Who would even guess???  When I suddenly came to myself, the questions flew around my head.  Why THIS?  Why so much trouble and pain?  For ornamentation???  But it was like I was still back there in the garden.  I had never left it.  I realized we are ALL THERE.  All the time.  We just can't see it.  We are inside the universe, inside the garden.  And I say garden for lack of a better word.  We all have pictures of gardens in our heads, but this wasn't anything like a sculpted lawn or an English cottage garden or anything in rows.  The things I saw were so amazing that I have no frame of reference, and remembering it in this brain feels like only a flash of something half forgotten.  But the *feeling* that it was a garden came, I think, from it being tended.  Brought about.  Becoming.

 

My first regret was that I'd forgotten all about asking my question.  But as soon as I thought that, I knew I had the answer.  I just hadn't arrived to the place where I could understand it yet.  I'm too tiny to see it all at once, I have to experience it slowly.

 

In one of my earliest posts on this blog, I describe an evolution of becoming over a long period of time, and how we learn through many steps of experience.  If you haven't read that, this is a good spot to stop and go do that.

 

Ever since that experience, I have felt free to ask anything I want, and the answers all but walk right up to me and say hi to my face.  Anything I want to know, it's 'free for the asking'.  I've given a lot of thought to that.  I think people are afraid to ask, as if asking is almost a way to test God, and we get indignant if we don't feel answered.  If you don't get past that trepidation, you don't get answers very well.  If you feel you have to test God, you aren't ready for the answers.  They have to come slowly so they won't knock you down.

 

I don't know what all Uri saw, but his impression, I think, was a reflection of his very small expectations based on his experiences in this life.  He briefly described a lonely God.  Who I saw wasn't lonely, far from it.  I don't believe joy comes from this earth or this universe.  I don't believe joy comes from within ourselves.  I believe The Ancient of Days IS Joy.  And what is joy?

 

From joy - Definition from the Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary