The Center for contemplative practice
A Lay Cistercian Looks at Spiritual Reality
THE TIME TRAVELER: A TRIP TO FOREVER
Here some crazy ideas about time travel and immortality.
I recently wrote a blog about taking a trip to California. I left for Los Angeles on a Friday and returned on a Monday. No problems. Nice flight, but somewhat tiring for an old geezer. In reflecting on this trip, I am reminded of original sin. Original sin, remember, is the result of disobedience and lack of humility by Adam and Eve. There are consequences to that archetypal act of our first parents. For one thing, nothing lasts forever, that is to say, nothing in the two universes of time and matter.
When I watched some episodes of time travel in the Star Trek series, there was warp drive or traveling at various times the speed of light. Nice touch for the television series, don’t you think? Time travel and nudging those hypotheses and theories of Einstein is well beyond the world I live in. Yet, if time travel is moving through time, we do that each and every minute of our day until we die. We move from Point A to Point B, perhaps not in distance, but in time. Case in point is my trip to California. I left on a Friday but returned on Monday. I traveled through time, although in only two universes. There are no exceptions to this effect of original sin. Even with a warp drive, it is still Point A to Point B, although the points are very far apart. Now add three universes to the equation about what is real. The spiritual universe does not exist in space or time. It simply is. So, there is no Point A to Point B time travel, only Point A. In the spiritual universe, Point A is Point B. It is also a person, whom we call God for lack of an adequate description. When I embarked on my trip to California, I knew that I would return on a certain date. The same holds true for everything that exists in two universes. I know I was born and I know I will die. I know that, if I go to college, and stick it out, I will be graduated in four years, all things considered. Why is that? Why can’t I take a vacation that lasts Forever? Maybe because I don’t live in that condition. My two universes have the limitations imposed on it as a result of original sin. Everything will decay, eventually. I will die, so will everything else around me, with a few exceptions. What we learn does not die. Only recently, we have had the technology to use information, wisdom, scientific studies and research into cancer cures and medical procedures to help sustain life. Unfortunately, humans still hate each other, drive cars into people they don’t know, in the name of a religion that disavows it.
Doesn’t sound like my trip to California was very productive. It was because I complied with the rules of nature. It was because nature complied with its own laws, i.e., the sun came out, there were no volcanoes, etc…
WACKY IDEAS
Wonder if the earth is actually its own spacecraft traveling through, not only space but through time towards a destiny in the future called Omega? Science can’t verify this because it is using the wrong set of assumptions and may not be able to let go of reason long enough to think outside of matter and time to something far more interesting, pure energy. In my book series on this topic, entitled Spiritual Apes, I talk about this in more detail. You can find them in the Store section of this blog. Pure energy is love, as set forth in The Phenomenon of Man by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, S.J. Jesuit paleontologist. It sounds crazy that love would be the energy that fuels all of reality. Agreed! Yet, we have reason for a reason, as I am fond of saying. Like a neutron star that spews forth its deadly cosmic rays to everything around it, pure energy radiates love and is 100% of a person’s nature. The significant thing is that this person is not human at all but divine nature. But there is more, in Philippians 2:5-12, my favorite passage in Scriptures and the center of my life, it tells of how God took on the nature of a man with all the effects of the original sin of the race, without individual sin.
If there is a place without space or time and we are headed there, it would make sense to warn us how we should live later on, so as to prepare for this new approach to life, one that has no end, one whose energy is not the Sun but the pure energy of God, one where our human nature can thrive in a climate of peace and fierce love. God would not hurt us nor give us cause to regret our choice. That is why Jesus had to show us how to live in the life to come.
We actually are time travelers, but when our time in two universes has expired (the body dies), we open another chapter in the journey, that of being with Jesus. This is spiritual time (three universes) and not two.
One of the admonitions that I have found in Scripture, used over and over, when the Sacred (an angel) meets one of us (the Blessed Mother) is “Don’t be afraid!” (Luke 1:31.) It is what I thought about when I was told I had cancer (leukemia) in 2014. Contemplation allowed me to wait in the presence of the Lord God and soak up whatever God wanted me to have. To be sure, salvation by faith does not mean we can ever take it for granted or that we are on a conveyor belt to automatically get to Heaven. Heaven depends upon God but if we get there depends on us with God’s help, of course. That is good advice for any time traveler who goes from visible to the invisible reality.
Hope is a theological virtue that gives us the ability to believe in a person or a concept. I believe in love as the purpose of life and am trying not to be afraid of what lies ahead.
That in all things, God be glorified. –St. Benedict
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