Sometimes the universe simply shifts in its entirety all at once, affecting everything that it contains. This was one of those moments. Kalisia Andrea felt it shake her being from head to toe. She physically shook herself afterwards, stunned a little, wondering what it was that she had just felt. It was a strange sensation, as if time and space had just ‘changed’ and she was standing there for the first time ever, as if transported to this place, yet the room was as familiar as it had been mere seconds ago. But the air tingled. It felt different. This wasn’t the same place where she had been just a moment ago.
“Oh, drat!” she exclaimed inwardly to herself. “I was just getting used to the way things used to be!”
Somebody had just accelerated all the systems into a higher gear, and she felt pretty sure she knew who it was.
“It's that technician again! How did he figure this one out? He’s supposed to forget all those tricks!” She was secretly glad that he did remember himself somehow each lifetime, even though his rebirths were always into a body/mind shrouded with a certain amount of forgetfulness as to his origins and purpose. His intuition was a far more valuable thing to them than mere knowledge could be. It was uncanny how he could always wind up in the right place at the right time, especially since he really didn’t know how or why these things kept happening to him. Or, at least, he didn't seem to remember.
Sometimes she wished he would simply remember himself once and for all and let it be done with!
* * *
Back on the dusty, flower-strewn dirt road where they walked, as if he had heard her thoughts, the one she'd referred to as 'that technician' continued to his friend, “You know, sometimes I think all of this is, like, planned, and yet is unplanned. That is, like there is fate, and even destiny, but there is also accident and chance happenings occurring at the same time. I know they contradict, but… well, I don’t know how to explain it. For instance, I have had these strange “future dreams” all my life, always of events that were totally uneventful – just snippets of things that were to be, like being in someone’s house with the television on and the living room arranged just so, or of rounding a corner and being among people I never would have thought I’d be among.”
“You mean like déjà vu’? Isn’t that lately just attributed to two parts of the brain receiving input at separate times, the one getting it second comparing it with the part getting it faster, thus thinking it already had the memory?”
“I’ve definitely thought of that, but once they started happening regularly, I started noting the dreams that have that ‘flavor’ to them, and when they took place. So, I can recall when the dream happened now that predicted the event. Not a déjà vu kind of thing at all. They always make me very nervous!”
“Nervous?” asked the other.
“Yes, an ominous feeling like something dire was about to happen! But nothing ever does. These dreams are always of life simply happening like normal – everyday events, unimportant visits, and inconsequential happenings. I still have to control my nervousness when these happen, though, but nothing odd ever comes about as the dreams are coming into becoming reality.”
“I can imagine that must be very unsettling! To have a known dream come true! I’d be certain it was a portent of something! Something important!”
“Well, nothing important ever happens. But it does force me to acknowledge that the future already is in place somehow – that is, fate and destiny really do exist. But at the same time, the route to such events is full of accidental turns and such. Accidents do happen. Somehow the destiny stuff works in spite of or because of random events, it seems.”
“That is very confusing! How could that be?”
“Well, for example, when I am driving in the car and in a pleasant frame of mind to be nice to people, I often stop my car at a red light to create enough space for someone to pull out of a driveway into traffic. My random act of kindness has just changed their entire timeline, getting them somewhere sooner than they might have. Back when I used to be a rushed person, always in a hurry to get to places, I was always cutting people off from talking to me. But once I allowed conversations to flow easily and end at a natural letting-off point, my meetings with important people became more frequent just along the way to places. Letting other’s determine my timing made me be in the right place at the right time all the time!”
“I’ve had that happen to me, where I allowed things to flow naturally, being delayed a bit, but that delay put me right in the path of an old school chum or long lost friend at the next corner, who I would have missed had I not been delayed!”
“Yes, that’s the idea. How could our act of letting things be delayed have accounted for that impossible chance encounter to have been timed so perfectly?!”
“People call it ‘synchronicity’ but I have never been satisfied with that explanation. It is like you say, chance and destiny becoming intertwined somehow!”
“Yes, and sometimes the accidents seem to define the destiny – or is it the other way around?”
“I shudder to think that accidents could be products of destiny! That couldn’t be a fair way of running things! Think of all the tragedies, birth defects, car accidents, and awful calamities that befall people! I don’t believe that people bring such things upon themselves, to punish themselves or fulfill some perverse view of ‘karma’!”
“My take on karma is that it is the culmination what we bring to the table in the present time when we have to make a hard decision about something – all the knowledge, wisdom and intuition we carry into the current situation – the ‘right now’ – that we use to make a decision and our choices in life with. The past is an illusion – though the events defining it actually existed once, it is only partial memories and dreams now – fantasies; and the future is the same way – only a bunch of ideas mixed with hopes or fears as we try to anticipate what we need to be prepared for. There is only the present time that is reality, and even that is hard to impossible to have a grasp on, because it is always in motion and changing!”
“So, you’re saying karma is not some bunch of baggage we bring along of punishments and rewards we are due as a result of previous positive or negative actions? I’ve always heard it expressed as ‘What goes around, comes around’ or ‘He or she will get what’s coming to them’ and the like! Doesn’t karma mean ‘getting what you deserve’?”
“That is a Westernized perversion of the idea. This would be a horrible universe to exist in if that were so! Of course, if you ‘bring to the table’ a bunch of bad data or poor values or bad wisdom and bad ideas, they will result in your making decisions that are equally bad, and then you will reap the fruits of your decisions, and certainly ‘get what you deserve’ by virtue of making such a bad move!”
“I see what you mean! Eat the fatty foods and you will get fat! Cross the road without looking both ways and be hit by a truck!”
“Exactly. But accidents still happen that had nothing at all to do with our having a choice to make in the matter. People shouldn’t be made to feel guilty for having been put into such circumstances – they certainly had nothing to do with the events happening. They were not their ‘karma’ happening to them!”
“What a compassionate viewpoint! That is so much richer than the other view, and puts more direct responsibility for the results of our choices and decisions into our hands.”
“Yes, one of the biggest problems with societies is when their people start to feel like everything simply ‘happens to them’, taking their power of having choices away, or allowing them to believe that their choices do not matter, because fate is going to dole out its punishments or rewards anyway.”
“But what of the destiny thing your future dreams seemed to be proving to you? How were your choices involved there, if you wound up in the places and situations described by your dreams seemingly independent of all of those choices and decisions on your part?”
“I don’t know. I really don’t know the answer to that one at all. Except to think that free will and destiny somehow coexist, as if the free will part was the result of choices already made years before they came to fruition.”
“That still feels difficult to swallow. It would mean there were ‘master choices’ made even before birth? Or pre-knowledge of even such fine details of future events as your dreams demonstrated?”
“I think it may be something else going on – as if we already exist in the future, drawing ourselves through events into it. Oh, what am I saying?”
“I surely do not know!”
“What were you saying about time and space again?”
“I wasn’t talking about time and space, exactly. Only choice, free will and destiny.”
“Oh, I’m sorry. I always just mix all that in together!”
“Well, you shouldn’t. I don’t think time and space are necessarily even real things.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Well, let’s suppose you can see the future. That is, have prophesies.”
“Ok. We’ll say that! It would be nice!”
“Oh, would it?”
“Why yes! It would be wonderful to have such a power!”
“Certainly it would seem so, except that it would undo everything you thought you knew about freedom of choice, about people having free will!”
“What? Why?”
“If your futures come out the way you see them coming out, then everything must be set in place for those things to happen. Nobody’s choices could upset the apple cart – their choices must all be part of some automatic, pre-ordained bunch of expected events!”
“I still don’t follow you. You mean they would believe they had made a choice of their own, but that choice was already made for them?”
“Or, the choice to make that choice was already made by them!”
“One can’t choose to choose a certain way, can they?”
“Why not? One can certainly choose whether or not to choose!”
“Oh come now! You are saying that some subconscious part of a person chooses to make a choice heading them off in some preordained direction? That’s just crazy!”
“And why is it crazy?”
“Well, it contradicts itself! The person is still making a choice, aren’t they?”
“Or is the subconscious telling them what choices they need to make? And what is that subconscious? Where is it getting its instructions from?”
“From the person!”
“And who or what is this person you are referring to?”
“An individual! A person, confound you! A unique human being with a mind of its own!”
“And where does this ‘person’ come from?”
“A mother and father? An idea? A previous lifetime? The universe? Their spirit? Their soul?”
“All of the above and none of the above!”
“Now don’t be silly! You’re just playing with words now!”
“Well, let’s say from the universe for starters. The universe creates this ‘individual human’ you say. But the universe has a long history of doings. It does all kinds of things, and already did all kinds of things, for eons and eons! What is to keep it from making an individual human with all the wires wired already? With all the choices programmed in? With all the knowledge of what every other part is going to do built into every atomic particle, like a giant hologram broken into tiny bits, each bit possessing the entire picture?”
“The idea of such a thing denies us our having any free will at all, that’s what is to keep it from doing so! It is saying we are only fooling ourselves! That all our concepts of being in control of our lives is a fantasy! Like we all dropped into a trick world, full of mirrors and illusions and shimmering objects that have no intrinsic reality of their own! That is impossible to accept!”
“Why?”
“Because I have lived all my life knowing I am a unique individual having the free will to choose whatever direction I like for my life to take. You are trying to say that my feelings of having such freedom of choice is but a fantasy, a rude illusion, a trick played on my eyes and brain and consciousness! I cannot accept that!”
“Well then, so much for your ability to have prophesies. I guess it isn’t such a great idea after all, eh?”
“What? I don’t follow you.”
“If you could tell the future, as I said, then nobody could have free will. Your future would be everyone’s future!”
“Bosh! But… gadzooks, it seems you would have to be right there! What a paradox!”
“Well, yes, but an even bigger paradox than you suggest. What if both were able to exist without contradicting each other? I mean, what if you could tell the future, and that would be everybody’s future, but free will and individual choice still was able to exist?”
“It doesn’t seem that is possible. The two ideas conflict!”
“Well, I know of a universe where both of those things exist simultaneously, and you are living in that universe, my friend! What’s more, they intersect and influence each other!”
“What are you talking about? That sounds ridiculous!”
“No, it is not ridiculous. Choices, when properly made, ARE predictions of the future, and that future then comes into being though the power of choice and actually happens as it was foreseen! That is the magic trick that makes everything happen! Some choices are huge choices made by all of humanity. Those are the ones you see coming about in your prophesies. Individual accomplishments are visions of the future that are made by individuals. They are the ones people see in their individual prophesies – in their personal choices of what to make real! Their choices of what to make ‘so’!”
“Make so?”
“Yes. Make so!”
“So! You are saying we make things so by choosing, but some things are made so by everybody having made choices together in some primordial way? In some universal choosing of what would be so?”
“Yes! So…”
“Make it so. Make it so. Hmmm. We make things so, but some things are being made so by another, larger mechanism? Is that what you are saying?”
“Yes!” replied the speaker with confidence.
“Is that so?!”
“That is so indeed!”
“I am so confused!!!” his companion lamented.
“You certainly are! But aren’t we all!!!”
“What is so and what isn’t? It seems everything is so, then! Oh, my head is spinning!”
“Hah! Two little letters we’ve taken so for granted! Eh?”
“Ah, yes. So for granted!”
They walked along for a moment absorbing that thought. Then the speaker spoke up to break the silence.
“What you just said – ‘everything is so, then.’ That is a profound and deep concept.”
“Yes – it would seem to allow for both free will and universal will to co-exist – each makes choices, the universe “happens” them into being, co-coordinating the whole thing somehow?”
“You are beginning to sound like me!”
“Oh my! Sorry, but it is getting a grip on me, I guess!”
“Don’t be sorry. But the idea, ‘everything is so, then,’ goes so very deep – deeper than you even suggest. We must account for every being that crawls on the ground, flies in the air or swims in the vast seas, for every molecule and atom and sub-particle, for every moon and planet and star system, for whole galaxies and every bit of invisible space dust filling the otherwise empty vacuum of space! We must account for every cell in every living creature, in every organ and every symbiotic organism! Every rock and every tree, plant and flower. That is a lot of everything! And yet, as you say, everything is so, then. How do we know? Because: It exists right now, in our present time. And how does it exist? How does it come to be? By becoming – by constantly becoming into the present – by being so. By doing so, it experiences being. Everything experiences being by doing so, by being so.”
“Oh, that’s it! You’ve completely comfomulated me. My brain is fizzle-faddled. You’ve completely skirmished me! And that being so, I had better ask one thing: Is confusion and chaos and accident all part of this? It is most maddening to think that it is someone’s grand idea that I should be confused and bewildered, even if it was my idea!”
“Well, it was your idea! I guess this expression of the universe we call being human beings is the universe’s best shot at figuring itself out, while having some fun along the way, I suppose. But with that comes also all the other human emotions and passions, the sense of loss and of tragedy and failure. It is not easy being this part of the universe. But it is one of extreme joy and bliss and happiness at times – of creativity and success and gratification on the sensual, physical, and spiritual levels that keeps it satisfying and whole feeling. It is when we are deliberately making things ‘so’ that we feel most empowered and complete as human beings, though. When we are but victims of circumstances, living according to the will only of our employers and financial stresses, the pressures of child-rearing or coming down upon us from government or from religious institutions that we feel weakest and least fully human. But society has so many ways of making us think that such is the only place for our energies. Our schools exist to create classes of ‘doers’ to do what needs to be done, and once out of school, we are given money in exchange for our lives. Our true, creative self becomes forgotten, if it was ever remembered to begin with.”
“But some people express that creativity within the framework of their work environment, and within the strictures of society, government and religion in order to manifest wonderful things!”
“Oh, yes. I’m sorry if I sounded like I was painting an overly harsh picture of humanity. The small creative efforts – every single one of them – are what make us noble as humans. When those efforts are interlaced with love and compassion, they do truly integrate into everyone’s lives in a positive and harmonious way, even if some are inconvenienced by the changes wrought resulting from such progress. It is important to note that every bit of progress or change according to one person’s will may be in conflict with another’s will – for security, for instance. If a person desires things to stay just as they always were, they will always be inconvenienced by movement forward and progress.”
“Not everyone can have their dreams be so, then. So, there is conflict among things becoming so, then – one person’s choices or desires becoming so may be another person’s experience of things becoming not so any longer!”
“Yes, yet ultimately, both chose the same outcome if there is anything to prophesy. Otherwise, how could it work?”
“Did they both choose the same outcome, even though they were at odds with one another’s professed desires?”
“That is truly an interesting question. There doesn’t have to be active choice in the manner we normally think of “choice”. There could be a symbiotic, synergistic, synchronistic connection between all of us that operates behind the scenes in a curious way – like chromosomes do in a female, for instance.”
“How’s that?”
“Well, a female is born with two complete sets of X chromosomes, one set taken from each of their grandmothers, hereditarily speaking. Their mother had a full X chromosome in the egg, and the father’s sperm added either an X from his mother or a Y chromosome from his father to that egg’s chromosome for cell division to start. In a female, their mother’s mother and their father’s mother both contributed hereditary information that was complete, all the info needed to build a baby and grow that baby into adulthood. Understand? Two complete sets, each with all the information needed to build a stomach or a brain or a hand or an eyeball, etcetera!”
“Well, what happens to the chromosomes that are duplicates, but, say, where one is a brown eye and the other would build a blue eye? Do they fight it out, one overpowering the other so that it wins and the female gets the trait of the winner?”
“That is the curious thing! By some mechanism nobody understands, the chromosomes seem to simply ‘agree’ that one will switch off to let the other be switched on! There is no war or combat, no obvious system of one chromosome being overpowered by a ‘stronger’ chromosome! The female simply becomes a matrix, or an amalgam, of their two grandmothers, with each and every chromosome ‘agreeing’ somehow which would be the one that played an active role in instructing its part to grow while the duplicate ‘agrees’ to simple switch out and be dormant for the rest of that female’s life!”
“That is very mysterious, alright! We are talking about mere atoms in molecules in DNA ‘talking’ to one another, somehow negotiating an agreement on who will be active and who will not be, all without any sort of battle going on? What kind of intelligence could be behind the making of such clear and permanent decisions being made?”
”Ahhh! What kind of intelligence, indeed! Intelligence at a subatomic level, you are suggesting? I mean, the DNA exists in a quantum physics reality, where time and space are quite different seeming from our take on such things. These are some sorts of agreements made at the moment of conception and evolving during our development in the womb. How could each and every chromosome in every DNA chain, in every single cell that exists or will ever exist in that body, remember and carry such decisions to be in such a strange agreement throughout the person’s life?”
“Indeed! How?”
“I do not know, but I think it has something to do with ‘so.’”
“Oh?”
“Yes. I am not always in touch with my subatomic consciousness, with that intelligence that permeates me throughout my entire body, filling every single cell, but I do sometimes. There is something in that vast intelligence network that connects it with every other intelligence in the universe somehow. With every other person’s DNA, and with every thing in existence, living or what we might consider ‘dead’. Though, nothing is dead – that is an important reality. Everything is permeated with this intelligence, and ‘thinks’ for itself as well as ‘thinks’ as a part of the whole of existence.”
“That is a lot of intelligence! And a lot of thinking!!”
“I’ll say!”
“Well, my life has been, up until meeting you at least, very quiet and uneventful. But still, what you are saying makes sense. I have been ‘prepared’ to be able to understand what you are saying, somehow.”
“Yes, and that was by choice. Think of the odds against us ever meeting and walking together on a wooded back road together and talking like this! I mean, first we had to get human bodies, a ‘human rebirth’ if you follow the reincarnation idea, and those bodies had to be healthy, with working senses – eyes, ears, etc., and an ability to learn a language so we could learn from and communicate with others, and be born at a time when both of us were alive, and be close enough to each other that we could even find each other, and be willing to talk and listen to each other, living in a time where such discussion is not forbidden, and as you pointed out, also have the accumulated experiences that led to our being able to understand what we were talking about.”
“And for you to have had the experiences that you could even tell me about such things!”
“Certainly. And we have only barely touched upon the miraculous and amazing experiences I seem to have ‘chosen’ to experience as part of this lifetime, and I still have not learned everything I will hopefully learn from them while I am still in this body and can share them with others in this time.”
“Experiences like finding dollar bills and turning on and off intermittent light bulbs? I mean, those are enough to make one ponder up an entire philosophy out of already! What other types of experiences have you had? And are you getting any closer to shaping up what you have learned, beyond what you’ve told me already?”
“To answer the second question first, I am getting closer, but there is still much that eludes my understanding – or at least it eludes my being able to stay mindful of what I had learned! The human form seems bent upon forgetting things, like forgetting the contents of a dream after waking up!”
“Heh! Maybe it is really all just a dream, like people say, and dreams are the real reality!”
“Ha! No, I don’t believe that. Dreams are just dreams, it seems to me right now, at least. Except, of course, when they are a those special kind of dreams – the future dreams! But reality does have a dream-like essence.
"Indeed it does!"
"Yet, I remember once walking in a relaxed frame of mind, and then suddenly the entirety of the universe filled me with the sensation, for lack of a better word, of its complete interconnectivity – with its having every single bit of itself connected to everything else, and yet how it all existed like a gigantic magical trick – not like an illusion, but as a perpetually manifesting act of real magic – stuff manifesting from nothingness over and over again, everywhere around me, all of it happening around me and yet inside of me – in me – in my cellular framework, in my mental being, in my spirit and in my soul! I was connected to everything that existed, a part of the magical appearance of things in the constantly changing present time – the real present time, where there is no mere illusion of past events as our memory serves us or of future events as our imagination projects, but where there is the simultaneous past and future emerging in the present, as if being a rabbit pulled from a top hat – everything that is manifesting this way, all part of a huge harmony, a gigantic song, all in synchrony, all in agreement, all in now.
"My goodness! All in harmony, all in now! What an amazingly huge idea!"
"It certainly seemed so at the time! And the most important thing we could possibly grasp is that we actually only really exist in this thing I am calling the present time – the present moment right NOW. The same right now that mistakes happen in – where computers crash and you lose everything you just wrote. The same right now that hugs happen in, that cars cross intersections in; that people smile at each other in; that bugs fly through windows in and that bugs fly out windows in. But it is all one single now, one single magic trick, all happening at once; but it’s not a trick, it is simply one single magical moment, one single magical act. The surrounding scene where I had been walking shimmered and glowed in my eyes, vibrant in its manifesting, and I felt all of the sky and the wholeness of the universe all happening together at once!”
“That is hugely profound!”
“Yes, I’m still sorting that experience out as well. It was years worth of information all arriving to me at once. It was profound, but as a lesson it is still emerging into my mind stream in understandable ways that I can actually use. The brain forgets what it cannot easily make patterns out of. Like dreams, like I said before.”
"Yes. Like dreams..."
And suddenly, both men looked around them at their surroundings. The world was shimmering and glowing, vibrant in its manifesting, and they felt all of the sky and the wholeness of the universe all happening together at once! They had awakened from their dream for a time, and were experiencing the true reality, the entirety of the present, all presents happening at once, all pasts and futures happening in the now, right then, right before their eyes. And they were experiencing it together.
* * *
Continue Reading: To Chapter 3 -->
___________________________
Name:
Email:
Location:
URL:
Remember my personal information
Notify me of follow-up comments?
Next entry: Opening
Previous entry: Notes on Messages of Hope