Time, as we perceive it, is a stubborn illusion...one that Einstein himself dismantled with the razor’s edge of relativity. "The distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion," he once wrote, hinting at a universe far stranger than our linear minds can grasp.
For nearly four decades, my studies in metaphysics and near-death experiences (NDEs) have echoed this revelation: time, as we measure it in seconds and sunrises, does not govern the deeper layers of existence. Instead, it dissolves in dreams, in death, and in the unseen dimensions where the soul may wander.
Consider the dream state...that nightly voyage where minutes stretch into days, where lifetimes unfold between heartbeats. This morning, as I drifted in the liminal space between sleep and waking, I experienced a phenomenon familiar to many who study the afterlife: the presence of loved ones, not as faces or voices, but as essences. A friend from years past, Zach, and his wife, Ernestine, appeared not in form but in feeling...an imprint of recognition without the need for sight. This aligns with countless NDE accounts, where the departed are known not by their earthly visage but by an ineffable resonance, a vibration of love and familiarity that transcends sensory input.
As Carl Sagan mused, "the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence." Just because we do not see does not mean we do not know.
Yet, one element often described in NDEs remains elusive in my own dreams: the overwhelming, unconditional love reported by those who brush against the beyond. Perhaps this is because such love exists beyond the constraints of our physical dimension...a frequency too pure for the static of earthly existence. We are here, after all, to 'create' such love, to build a fragment of heaven in a world that often resists it. But as Stephen Hawking once observed,
"We are just an advanced breed of monkeys on a minor planet of a very average star. But we can understand the Universe. That makes us something very special."
Our task, then, is to reach for that understanding, even if the universe’s deepest truths flicker at the edges of our perception.
Dreams are more than nocturnal stories; they are experiments in timelessness. I have logged dreams where hours of sleep contained epochs of experience, where the mind traversed weeks in the span of a nap. Einstein’s relativity explains this elegantly: time is not absolute but relative, bending to the gravity of perception. In the spiritual realm, time may not flow at all. It may simply be, a vast ocean in which our linear lives are but ripples.
Which brings us to zero-point energy...the humming baseline of the universe, the infinite potential of the quantum vacuum. While it doesn’t directly explain time’s illusion, it hints at a cosmos teeming with unseen energy, a substrate from which reality arises. If time is a construct, then energy (our energy, our consciousness) may be the truer currency of existence.
So where does this leave us? In a universe where death may be no more final than a dream’s end, where loved ones linger as vibrations in the dark, and where time itself is a story we tell to make sense of the infinite.
As Tyson often reminds us, "the universe is under no obligation to make sense to you."
In dreams, in death, and in the quiet moments between, we catch glimpses of a truth far grander than clocks can measure. The boundary between this world and the next may be as thin as a thought...and just as timeless.
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