Imagine you have a personal time machine which can take you anywhere. Where do you go, why, and what could possibly happen?
Have you ever wished you had a time machine? Are you disappointed in life, and want to go back somewhere to "start over"? You might be happy with your life, and would just like to see what it was like (or what it's going to be like) in another time period. Perhaps you might want to visit somebody from "history", or maybe even make your own kind of history. The past has a lot to teach us, and being able to "live" in the past for a while would probably be a great teaching tool for most of us. And then there's the future. Who hasn't wanted to know what's going to happen tomorrow? And tomorrow? And tomorrow?
We tend to think of time as a linear line, the "timeline". It began a long time ago, in prehistory, around the "time" of that "Big Bang" or even earlier, and it stretches to "infinity and beyond", far after our corporeal death. We think of the clock, with it's endless rotating hands, or looping digital readouts, seeming to repeat the numbers as we find our bodies decaying and becoming more fragile. Time doesn't seem to "end", but "we" do. Time is something of which we long for more. We want to "beat the clock", but we know we can't. A "time machine" would be the perfect vehicle in which to stave off the feeling that we are finite beings in a finite place, for a finite time.
I wrote a "time travel" novel while in high school. The protagonist travels far into the future, and then far into the past, much like the 'time traveller' in H.G. Wells famous "The Time Machine", a novel written in the 19th century, and made into a movie in 1961, when I was a child. I have always wondered why I can't "travel through time". I've seen countless more movies with the time travel theme, and the theme is always popular. The USA network currently airs a televsion drama called "The 4400" with a time travel theme, and it is quite interesting. Some of popular culture's efforts at telling a good story have enriched this theme, and it never seems to go away. The theme is "timeless", to coin a phrase. In most of the fiction of the genre, the "timeline" is a finite construct, and anyone who "changes" the timeline, either in the past or the future, is apt to make "paradoxes" along the rest of the line. A famous conundrum mentioned many times is that if a time traveler went back in time and accidentally killed one of his parents before they gave birth to the traveller, he would of course have to disappear, because he in fact didn't exist. Of course then he never would have been able to build his time machine, and well, you get the idea. This plot has been written, permutated, and analyzed for a long long time.
In my novel, each "millisecond" of time was staggered along a much wider swath of "time-space". If one went to another time, they could create paradoxes, but only in that timeline. Each "millisecond" added to the "timeline" created a complete new dimension. If one were to travel "through" time, then one would travel "perpendicularly" through the different zones. "Sideways" instead of "behind" or "ahead". A computer would keep the time machine able to return to the time traveller's correct coordinates. It was a pretty neat theory, and I wrote it when I was 15 years old. I even added an appendix to the novel illustrating the "science" of the theory, which I credited to the main character in the novel.
Is time travel possible? I wrote my novel long before I ever heard of the theory of relativity, the existence of quarks, or the practice of quantum physics. Perhaps someday man will be able to develop a method to "travel" through the ages of time, observing, learning, and enlightening himself. What was "lost" could be found again, like the contents of the great historical library of Alexandria, Egypt, burned when the Romans conquered the ancient Egyptians. Or the great films of the silent era. Just recently, NASA "lost" the original tapes of the astronauts landing on the moon. All manner of "lost history" would be open to us. Gnostic scrolls could verify for us the truth behind some of the world's great religions. In fact, with a time machine, we could go back to the time of Muhammad's and Jesus' actual sermons.
I'm always wondering about what happens after we, as individuals, physically die. I know that the 70-100 or so years we are granted, with a "normal life", on this planet, are enough to bear witness to the changes of history. We don't recognize this as children, when time is one long endless summer, but as we age, and definitely when we've racked up more than 4 decades in existence, we can plainly see where cultural and historical wheels are turning all around us. Each succeeding generation is witness to new ideas, inventions, and methods of communication. I am in awe of the internet, and my parents were in awe of television. Their parents were in awe of the telephone and telegraph. We can go back farther, and go ahead further, and we will always find that in our lives, there are always many many changes. Almost too many to understand, it seems. I often say that if we were to live longer, we might get so confused that if dementia didn't come natrually, it would be forced upon us by the amount of change we would have to experience, understand, and live with.
After we die, "time marches on". I believe that this is when the Godhead allows us to time travel. Some people might think that death is the end of thier existence, and it is, as a corporeal being on this planet Earth. (Or if you are reading this from some other planet in the Universe where there is life, then substitute your planet's name for ours) After death, if the final realization is not attained, then perhaps we will "live again", what the Hindus call "reincarnation", an attempt to experience life again in order to "do over" until we attain a semblance of enlightenment, so that we might experience the Universal without any of our life's inconsistencies and irreconcilable differences.
Time marches on, and our souls will march into Universality. After experiencing the Final Realization, where the soul finally understands existence, and is given the "keys to the kingdom", the "existence" of each soul is intertwined, and we can finally embark upon the great time travel vacation. Time exists in an instant. All of "reality" is but a blink of an eye. Our "realities" seem to be lengthy, but when we gauge our own corporeal lives against geologic "time", which lasts much longer, then we must understand that we are only blips on the radar of Universality. Here one moment. Gone the next.
Our minds, or our souls, what makes us "think", and ponder about our existence. These minds are freed from their Earthly receptacles, our bodies, at the time of physical death. Nobody knows for sure what happens after death, and various religions have made quite a cottage industry trying to let us know. And also let us know that we have to bow to the tenets of the specific religion in order to gain some sort of salvation for our lives, or else we'll end up in some kind of eternal damanation.
As far as I know, Heaven and Hell can be a part of the Universal Existence, but after the Final Realization, we all are linked to the Universal Mind, and no single religious or philosophical idea is any better than any other when the final curtain is drawn. I like to think of our Joining with the Universal as access to the Universe's greatest "time machine ride". Our minds, freed from their Earthly bodies, will be able to comingle with every other mind, and to "travel" to all the "times' and "places" in corporeality. The "unreal" becomes "real". No matter how the timeline is written, we will be able to travel it's length and breadth in a moment or an epoch, and our communication with other denizens of mankind, and of all life, even as we don't know it, if it exists elsewhere, will be crystal clear.
We will be able to understand, and put behind us, at last, the pesky problem of "human nature. It is "human nature" that causes the Earth's problems with trying to exist while mankind destroys it. It is "human nature" which dictates that humankind can bulid great cities and then destroy them in an instant. It is "human nature" which causes us to create art and literature to last, and kill each other over petty land squabbles which are never resolved. We bust open our psyches trying to understand why this happens. When we join with the Universal Mind, it will all become clear.
I've used the phrase "This is My Movie" when talking about my life. I am the director of my own feature. And this "life movie" will reach it's last reel, possibly sooner than later. When the movie of our lives unspools completely, and our physical "projector" is buried six feet underground, the "movie" has only begun to play. Our individual "movies" are joined together in the Universal Multiplex. We can visit our neighbors and view their movies. We can "time travel" to other eras and other planets, and watch all the life movies ever made. We will even be able to watch the life movies which haven't been made. Time exists relatively differently for us when we are freed of the constraints of our physical "timelines". Every "moment" will exist at once, and because we are Universal, we will be able to "experience" everything, from the "bang" to the "boom", at once, or as liesurely as we want.
Have you ever wanted to travel in time? You will be able to after this existence is finished. You're travelling through time at one rate of speed now, the physical rate. The Universal rate is somewhat faster or slower. You will be in charge of the controls. You will meet me in the hereafter, and everyone else. You won't forget their names, or their place in history. We will all be together, and we will finally be satisfied, happy, and forgiving of all the inconsequences of corporeal "reality" which seem so terrible as we exist on this plane. Your enemy will be your brother, and he will cease to disagree. All disagreements will be worked out "in time", and that time will be but an instant.
I'm in no hurry to leave the car on this rollercoaster of life yet. My trip isn't over. My "movie" hasnt' unspooled completely, and no matter what heartaches I suffer, the pure joy and exhilaration of existence is enough to keep me open to possibilities while I'm "here". However, I believe in a "hereafter" which is like a time machine. A Universal Time Machine which will be the answer to all of my Earthly questions. I've wished for a time machine, and my "time" will come eventually to travel extensively throughout the Universal. (originally posted on WhenWordsCollide on Aug. 22, 2006

Comments

Anonymous said…
Hey there! Do you know if they make any plugins to protect against hackers?
I'm kinda paranoid about losing everything I've worked hard on.

Any suggestions?

Here is my homepage :: rates home loans

Popular posts from this blog