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Minutes to read. A lifetime to master. Okay…more like weeks to slog through. A lifetime to master.

Here on Why Am I a Duck you’ll find answers to perennially unanswered spiritual questions. If you’re tired of “It’s a mystery of God” cop-outs, this is the place for you. You’ll also find poetry, humor and other stuff.

The spiritual meat is found in the Questions category—see the column to the right. The knowledge builds sequentially. You can dive into any question, but it will be a far richer experience if you start with Question #1 and take them in order. I will try to reference previous posts as much as possible.

If you come across phrases that frequently appear in bold, like Reality Stapler, Under the Bed, Crazy Step, etc., enter that word as a search term in the box on the upper right and it’ll take you to a post where it’s discussed.

I recommend taking one question a day and having at it. Should you disagree with anything in that post, or just want to add your thoughts, please leave me a comment. If you leave comments like, “This post is stupid” or “You’re an idiot” or some other generalized nonsense, I won’t respond to it unless it is particularly creative. Truly inspired insults will make my top ten list, which I’ll post from time-to-time.

Disagree with something specific and I’ll try my best to offer a coherent response, time permitting.

And by all means, please leave ideas for future questions in the comments field.

Peace and love,

Tom Whitney

#28 How did Jesus walk on water? Part 9: The tools of projection

(This post is a continuation of Question #27.)

Our young, imaginative boy named Jason continues to play his game of pirate in his family’s living room, while our perceptual psychology grad student, Ellie, notes her observations from the kitchen. 

In Question #27 Ellie watched as Jason took some cushions off the back of the family couch and stacked them up two-high. Then stood in front of that stack, twisting and turning the top cushion while he leaned from side to side.

Now Ellie hears him say, “Avast ye swabs! Hoist the mainsail and prepare to come about!”

Ellie very carefully notes what he was doing (turning the pillow stack) while he said this and where he was on the sofa when he said it. Over the next several minutes she sees Jason walking back and forth from end to end of the sofa, making the following statements as he goes: “Mr. Hanson, get a crew of men and swab the poop deck!” “Where is my parrot? It’s time for his lunch.” And “Polish these cannons until they shine like the sun.”

In her notes Ellie draws a picture (see Fig. 28.1 below) indicating the location on the sofa where each statement was made. If any actions occurred, she notes that, too.

Over the next few minutes, Ellie observes more and more pirate-themed words and actions on the sofa. So she jots down “sofa=pirate ship?” in her notes. Even though she can’t help coming to conclusions, she remains open and neutral to each observation and as bias-free as possible. The processes of mind are subtle and she doesn’t want to miss anything by prematurely jumping to conclusions.

(To move our story along, we’ll combine her data-gathering with ongoing data analysis, which in reality would be done at a later time after all her experimental observations were recorded.)

Renaming and repurposing are tools of mental projection

So what does Ellie know so far? We observed in Question #27 that Jason gave himself permission to change the location of the pillows, to make what Ellie now concludes is a pirate captain’s steering wheel. So her first observation was that he has the capacity to cause a change, which we defined as energy.

Secondly, she observes that change is not an actual change, but a perceptual change. In other words, to make his pirate ship steering wheel, Jason didn’t take the pillows downstairs to his dad’s workshop and hammer wood on them in the shape of a circle. No, when he looks at those pillows he perceives a steering wheel.

This perception colors his experience of the cushions. No longer does he experience them as boring, old sofa cushions; he now experiences them as a wooden steering wheel on an exciting pirate ship.

Through careful observation, Ellie will eventually conclude that Jason has mentally renamed and repurposed the sofa cushions as “steering wheel.” And the entire sofa has been renamed and repurposed as “pirate ship.” We will call this mental projection. Ellie can observe from her map that this renaming and repurposing extends the entire length and width of the sofa. She knows this because her map details where the pirate-ship-themed words and actions are occurring.

The particular type of mental projection Jason is using is geographically based mental projection. His projection of pirate ship is geographically tied to the region of the living room where the sofa is. He could have imagined that pirate ship anywhere in the house, Ellie observes. He also could have simply sat in the middle of the living room floor and dreamed up the pirate ship purely in his imagination. It didn’t have to be geographically associated with the sofa. But it is and Ellie makes a note of it.

The Red Sea that Jesus walked on was similarly tied to a geographic location. Every drop of it is full of energy. And gravity is present throughout it. The apostles perceived that this body of water was like any other and that therefore it was impossible to walk on it. They accepted the common perceptions held by every human that has ever been on a body of water. 

Jesus saw through those common perceptions, including the idea of energy, which is simply changing what cannot be changed via mental projection. Coming from a changeless reality of Heaven, he knew that what he was seeing was simply not real. 

Mental energy is physical energy

If she observed long enough, Ellie would also notice that Jason’s projected thought is tied to physical energy. After a couple hours, if Jason didn’t eat anything she would observe his game beginning to slowly fall apart. Food energy is fueling his imagination. If you doubt this, try not eating for a day then play with an imaginative, well-rested and well-fed child and see how tired your mind is compared to theirs.

There are other types of mental projection besides geographically based mental projection like Jason is using. There is emotional mental projection, like when you project something unpleasant about yourself onto someone else in order to avoid admitting it is part of you.

Is a renaming process behind the structure of spacetime?

Could this renaming and repurposing process be at the heart of the illusion of maya, the mind-trick generating all of spacetime? Could is be a fundamental mechanism in the construction of spacetime? Here’s the opening lines of the Tao Te Ching:

    The Way that can be told of is not an unvarying way;
    The names that can be named are not unvarying names.
    It was from the Nameless that Heaven and Earth sprang;
    The named is but the mother that rears the ten thousand creatures,
    each after its kind.

To me this says our true Self, essence, or Spirit does not vary and cannot be named in spoken words. As we explored in Question #27 energy is the capacity to cause change. In light of the Tao, then, energy is the capacity to vary an unvarying name, to create multiplicity from where there is only unity.

The sofa and its cushions have one basic purpose in Jason’s family life: to be a comfortable place to sit. This purpose is identified by one or two “unvarying” names: sofa or couch. Yet once Jason ignores this multilaterally held truth about the sofa’s real name and purpose, he is free to change it at will. Every day he could play a different imaginary game in which that sofa has a new name and purpose. It could literally have thousands even millions of unilaterally held names and purposes in his imagination.

The Tao is saying that from an unvarying name—our true Essence or Spirit—multiplicity (division) occurred to create the “ten thousand creatures.” Actually far, far more. 

Spacetime and its animal residents are all about division and replication. Division and replication is a basic mechanism of cellular reproduction and a foundational process of human life. We humans grow when our cells divide and replicate. Heaven, in contrast, grows by unity and sharing. Heaven is spaceless so it doesn’t grow like our body or a tree—out into space. Neither can it divide, which again is a space-based idea in which two or more things stand apart in space. Heaven has spaceless growth, which A Course in Miracles calls extension.

Heaven grows like the Internet experience; through spaceless, non-dimensional sharing

The experience of the Internet is growth through spaceless extension. When new Web sites are added we don’t think, “Now I’m really going to have to go far to get to the end of the Internet.” Or “Wow, is the internet getting fat.” The experience of the Internet is spaceless growth—like Heaven. (We know all those Web sites are taking up more storage space on servers around the world, but I’m talking about the actual experience of using the Internet.)

The Internet grows by sharing. More and more people want to share what they know and who they are so they make Web sites. This doesn’t make the Internet taller or fatter or deeper. It is spaceless growth creating a non-dimensional experience of togetherness—like Heaven. The Internet has no top, bottom, left, right, front or back.

When it extends itself via sharing, the Internet becomes a richer and more amazing experience. Similarly, God and Heaven don’t grow or expand out into space, because they are spaceless, so the only way God and His creation—collectively known as Christ—can grow is to share. To generate new thoughts that are shared and experienced by all.

Because Heaven is also timeless, as we have explored in this blog and as numerous mystics have said, this sharing happens in real time. There is no such thing as “learning” in Heaven (the Course says) because nothing is withheld from others, and must therefore gradually become known through a time-based process called learning. All is known right now.

All knowledge in Heaven is absolute knowledge (as compared to relative, time-based knowledge in spacetime) and is experienced as one thought arising together in real time. This thought is not geometrically one, i.e. one “chunk” of thought or a “single” idea, because those concepts of “oneness” are based on numbers, which require space in order to exist. Oneness means sentient beings drawn together voluntarily by the law of God’s love into an experience of perfect togetherness.

This togetherness knows no bounds (the Buddha called Nirvana unobstructed), so any thought arising in conjunction with God’s “love-sharing protocol” is instantly “posted” and experienced by all. Since there is no such thing as time in Heaven, this “post” is known instantly by all in real time. Any thought not arising from love remains fantasy and is not experienced by all—just as the inner workings of Jason’s unilaterally defined fantasy of pirate is not known to his family.

Heaven is reading your loving posts, all else remains in draft mode

Spacetime is a unilaterally created fantasy. Only the loving contents of it are “posted” to Heaven; because only love is real according to God’s laws. Just as only the “real” contents of Jason’s fantasy are “posted” to the living room—for example when he moves the pillow. That is a real, physical action that is translated into physical reality and one that Ellie can observe.

In Heaven, the only thing entering from spacetime is that which is love. So you can imagine yourself each day going about your work and fun and family life, but it all remains fantasy except for the stuff you really love. That is posted to Heaven in a formless, multilateral experience that all can share forever.

The ideas you hold that are partially loving remain internal to spacetime until you allow the Holy Spirit to “polish them up” and make them suitably loving enough to be safely communicated in Heaven. They are like unpublished drafts of a blog post; the aren’t real according to the laws of Heaven until they are shared and experienced multilaterally by all—safely and eternally.

Your totally non-loving ideas are pure fantasy; they have no basis in anything real and cannot be posted in Heaven. You have two choices with these ideas. Make them semi-loving and have the Holy Spirit help you polish them up and get them ready for “posting” in Heaven, or release them into the nothingness from which they came. 

The dude playing ping-pong with himself analogy

Have you ever seen someone fold up one side of a ping-pong table to its vertical position so they can practice by themselves? The balls bounce back to them rapid-fire.

Now imagine that your thoughts in spacetime are like dozens of ping-pong balls being bounced against the folded side of the table. Imagine the real you—your true, non-dualistic Self is like an invisible, formless Spirit behind the dude playing ping-pong. The player is the transtemporal mind, as author Gary Renard calls it. 

(You may wish to explore the idea of the “quantum foam” in physics that parallels this metaphor.) 

Since your true Self exists in a non-dualistic reality, this ping-pong playing transtemporal mind realizes “Hey, every thought I have is really me. There is no separation between thought and thinker.” So each ping-pong ball thought that the transtemporal mind is bouncing out into spacetime is really the Self extending itself into “space” through a dualistic mind-trick.

Your Self, which cannot be divided, needs to create a divisible “observer” in order to experience those thoughts being kicked out into spacetime. Similarly, Ellie could observe that Jason has created a “false observer” version of himself that believes his fantasy is real. This false observer perceives his game as real and believes it is actually seeing, perceive and expereincing the thoughts of his fantasy.

In human symbology, this false observer is the “all-seeing-eye” we see on our dollar bills, or as Sauron, the evil, disembodied eyeball in Lord of the Rings. It’s seen as evil because we carry tremendous guilt over this primal separation from our true Self, which observes nothing and is everything, and our transtemporal mind, which observes things in spacetime without becoming them. If you consider it carefully, you will see that to observe is to believe omething is outside of yourself, which is a dualistic construction.

This observable thing can be kept at a safe distance; you certainly don’t have to become it. Jason knows that no matter how involved his pirate game gets, it’s always kept at a safe distance. He can always let it go and doesn’t have to become any part of it if he doesn’t wish. He is voluntarily self-identifying with it—an allegiance that can always be withdrawn. We can see why this is an inversion of God’s laws because God never withdraws his allegiance to His children. If He did, they would cease to exist.

The disembodied eyeball observer doesn’t have absolute knowledge, which is knowing by being, but relative knowledge, which is knowing by perceiving. To see as a human sees is to perceive, which can be totally untrue (as is the case in optical illusions). To see with spiritual vision is to know by being, which is totally true. 

This divisible observer, floating eyeball thing we will call the transtemporal mind, as author Gary Renard does. Obviously, to perceive those ping-pong balls as “separate” and “apart” and “moving” this transtemporal mind must believe in separation, therefore it is obviously dualistic.

But this transtemporal mind (akin to the aspect of Jason’s mind that is focused inside his game) observes all these thoughts bouncing back towards itself. No matter how many thoughts it shoots out in spacetime, they all come home to roost. This is what is known as karma. It can be simply understood as a thought never really leaves the mind of the thinker. This is a law of Heaven; God’s thoughts (us!) remain with Him forever.

No matter how complex this transtemporal mind believes spacetime to be, complete with countless universes inhabited by countless beings with countless imaginary lives, it’s still really just like a person standing at a ping-pong table knocking balls out into spacetime—literally projecting a universe via the power of mental energy. This is specifically mentioned in the Hindu Vedanta, in which it is said the self projected a universe of evolutionary energy.

So this transtemporal mind is bouncing out mental ping-pong balls into spacetime. But it knows that it is truly the Self, made of indivisible love and only love. And that no matter how much it is perceiving itself to be separate and “outside” of Heaven watching the ping-pong game, it knows deep down that love animates all and nothing can exist without love, the only one, true, ultimately causal, animating source of anything. (Jesus came to realize that love was the only thing that empowered anything—including gravity.)

The transtemporal mind, knowing that love animates all, knows that the core of each ping-pong ball thought is love and only love. Nothing is animated in spacetime without love at its core. (I call this the Radiant Core.) Yet the transtemporal mind is free to perceive and believe that hurtful thoughts can be wrapped around this core of the ping-pong ball thought. (Symbolically this is represented in spacetime as a “molten core” of a planet being surrounded by cooler rock. Compare this to how an oyster creates a pearl. The pearl begins when something organic—usually a parasite—penetrates the oyster’s shell and is enveloped by layers of chemicals by the oyster. Thus the pearl contains a “parasitic core” or a “core of irritation” which is the exact inversion of the truth; every idea contains a “core of love.”)

This transtemporal mind believes it can dress up the core of love with as much painful, hurtful thoughts as it wants. But in doing so, it is creating a mental barrier to wholeness at the edge of its fantasy world. Just as Jason creates a mental barrier to wholeness (his family life) at the edge of his fantasy.

Ellie know this because she can observe him directing speech interior to this world. He also tunes out things outside his world. She knows there is some kind of mental dividing line in his mind, creating an “outside” of  his pirate world and an “inside.” (The Gospel of Thomas says the outside must become like the inside.)

So in order to “observe” this spacetime thing that is “separate” from Heaven, the transtemporal mind must create a mental dividing line—which we have identified as mental resistance to wholeness or the Spam Filter from Hell. So each time those ping-pong ball thoughts come flying back at it, the transtemporal mind bserves that they bounce off the mental barrier it put in place. They “echo” off this barrier, like a soundwave bouncing off the side of a canyon wall. 

Similarly, Ellie could observe that Jason’s unilateral fantasy has created a barrier or threshold between himself and his family. They don’t experience this barrier, but he does. It’s almost like his imaginary thoughts fly out towards this barrier and it stops them—they are literally “bounced back” or “echoed” internal to the fantasy.

Ellie can observe this clearly if Jason’s mom comes into the room and asks him a question. In order to connect with her, he will need to turn off his mental barrier to the multilateral reality they share together and answers her question. Parents can observe that when children are deeply lost in imaginative play, they tune out the world to an amazing degree. Its easy to see there is some kind of mental barrier in place. Sometimes a parent will have to physically interrupt the game for the child to listen. 

When Jason’s mom leaves, he flips his unilateral barrier back on again and his thoughts are redirected—bounced back—into the interior world of his fantasy. 

Cleaning up your ping-pong balls

So, back to our ping-pong analogy. The transtemporal, observing mind realizes that every thought has a core of love in it, but some are dressed some up in painful “skins.” This creates an imaginary barrier between Heaven and spacetime, which the painful thoughts will appear to bounce off and be returned back into spacetime. The transtemporal mind will observe that painful, hurtful ideas do not translate between realities. Spatially this will translate as a perceived border between Heaven and spacetime—the gates of Hell, as it is metaphorically called.

The gates of Hell remain purely inside the fantasy side. Heaven has not gates. It is wholly free and unbound. Recall in Question #1 we said that a mirage of an island has a perceived border, but the ocean of pure love surrounding it doesn’t experience that border at all. The border remains internal to the fantasy. As C.S. Lewis said, the gates of hell are held shut from the inside. This is correct. You’re choosing to continuously animate spacetime and all the suffering it contains. The gates to this hellish universe are being held shut by your own mind.

Just as the border between Jason’s pirate world and his true family life remains internal to his game, and no one is animating it but his own mind. His mother won’t stub her toe on Jason’s pirate ship as she walks by, nor will she see a pirate ship with clear, delineated borders. But Jason sure does.

Only love passes through the gates of hell into Heaven

The ping-pong balls this transtemporal mind—an aspect of your split mind—choose not to dress up in painful skins pass right through it and right back into your Self. They are not reflected. The semi-painful ones eventually the transtemporal mind gets tired of playing with so it drops the painful skins and lets them pass through itself back into the true Self. The really painful balls, way out of alignment with love, the transtemporal mind eventually gets sick of too, and it eventually drops the “skin of evil” around the love core and lets it pass through back to Heaven. (Star Trek fans can reference the episode where Lieutenant Tasha Yar is killed by a skin of evil left behind by a race of people that became more pure and left a world.) 

So we can visualize this process of entering spacetime and resolving the ideas it contains with God’s laws of love, like a big inflatable, carnival “bouncing tent” kids jump and down in with trillions of balls being blown up into the air with a huge fan under the surface of the floor of the tent. The fan is the projective energy produced by the transtemporal mind—projected thought. It mentally projects out a universe with trillions (actually more than we can count) of ideas in it, like the fan flipping on and keeping all those balls bouncing in the air inside the tent.

The balls that are pure love are free to pass right through the floor of the tent and straight into the formless reality of Heaven, no matter how hard the fan is blowing. The balls that are partial love keep bouncing until they are polished enough by Grace to become pure love, then they are free to pass through the floor and into Heaven. The balls that are hatred keep bouncing off the floor of the tent.

So the transtemporal mind has a choice to make: how long does it wish to play with hate? When it eventually gets bored, the mind stops animating the dream of spacetime and its foundational ideas of suffering, competition, chaos, and death, the fan switches off, and the hateful balls evaporate into nothingness. They don’t fall into Heaven. Just like when you leave a dream, the animating forces “switches off” and all the contents that don’t jibe with your actual reality are “left behind.” When you come out of a dream, you don’t find all your dream thought lying around on the floor, as if they had fallen out of your dream when you stopped animating it.

Just like a dream may have some helpful, useful content for your waking life—you may get a great inspiration when you are asleep—so too some idea you had in spacetime are inspiring—literally animated by Spirit (pure love) and do translate into Heaven. Your love for others for example, is inspiring, and does translate into Heaven.

Nothing is left behind unless you mind remains split between fantasy and reality

So is the skin of evil “left behind” in spacetime? There is a metaphor in the Bible. Lot and his wife left the “skin of evil” behind when they abandoned the city of Sodom which had become totally evil. But God tells Lot’s wife not to look back. She does. And turns into a pillar of salt; metaphorically unable to move.

Similarly, Jesus says one who puts his hand to the plow but looks back is not fit for the kingdom of God. What these two metaphors are saying is that once you decide to shed the skin of evil, you can’t keep looking back at it. It’s like a guy trying to wake up who continuously looks back into his dream, fretting over the various scenes he sees there. You can imagine a guy in his bed continuously vacillating between looking at the rising, sacred sun welcoming him into a new day, then flipping over on his stomach and focusing his mind back into the contents of a nightmare he had the night before. (This is like Lot’s wife looking back at the nightmare of Sodom.)

Eventually you have to chose; dawning light of Heaven or nightmare of spacetime. It is God’s law that your mind cannot be split upon its return to Heaven. It cannot serve two masters. Wholeness is wholeness.

So the fact that you believe something might be left behind shows that your mind is still stuck in the fantasy of spacetime. You believe there is this place “outside” of you where “evil” ideas are being “left behind.” When you awaken from a nightmare into the golden, radiant sun of the dawning day, do you freak out and say, “Wait a minute! I’ve got to go back into that dream and rescue all the characters that will be killed when I wake up! I’m the only one animating their dream lives! They’ll all die if I wake up. They’ll all be left behind.”

The way to let go of the skin of evil is simply to release it. Not to solve it. Not to coddle it. Not to comfort it. Just let it go. Again, examine the process of waking up each morning. Do you solve your dreams before you wake up? Do you coddle them? Do you fret over which aspects of them will be left behind? Do you tell others in your dreams that they will be left behind but you will be saved? No. You just let the dream go.

Easy in. Easy out. No big freak-outs. When you stop watching a movie at a theatre do you freak out? Or do you just stand up and say, “That was fun, but it’s time to get back to real life”? (See Question #24 and the power of absolute confidence). When you leave a movie you’re in complete control. No big melodrama about who’s getting “left behind” inside the movie.

If you were to say those things about dreaming and death and being left behind in Heaven, your brothers and sisters would say: What’s a dream? What’s “killed”? What’s “left behind”? Look around you, all is whole, there is no division possible. All is eternal. The very idea that you could “split” your mind and have a “dream” that didn’t include this whole reality was nonsense to begin with. The idea that anything could be “left out” or “left behind” is similarly nonsense, because all that is true arises in conjunction with the whole. Nothing is ever left out.

There is no such thing as an idea that can be “created” or “animated” outside of wholeness with the potential to be “left behind” in some “spacetime” “outside” of what is real. Look around you, the minimum unit of our existence is wholeness—perfect togetherness. What you fantasized about as real simply was never recorded here. In order to be “recorded” or become real in Heaven, all must experience your idea multilaterally. Together, as one. (Just as for a Web site to be real, it must be open to all on the Internet, otherwise it’s a pretend Web site.) Obviously, since you created the fantasy of being an isolated singularity, you went “off the grid” immediately. Only your loving thoughts—multilateral, benevolent experiences of togetherness—did we receive from your fantasy of spacetime. Those thoughts are waiting for you right now. Here they are.”

Spirit does not change

Spirit does not vary or change. It is eternally changeless. When you’re dealing with anything that varies or changes or goes up and down, or comes and goes, you’re inside the illusion. Our true Spirit has an “unspoken” name given to us by God Himself and is ineffable, meaning it cannot be put into words.

Several exercises in A Course in Miracles deal with mentally undoing the renaming and repurposing  we have mentally projected on everything around us. The master knows that unilateral renaming and repurposing are a fundamental tool of change that causes the illusion of spacetime. Along with renaming and repurposing comes judgment, which the exercises in the Course are intended to help you overcome.

Projection is used to undo wholeness; to separate the part from the whole

Buddhists have an exercise where they stare at a banana peel sitting in the garbage. They consider how just a moment ago it was part of the whole called “banana”; a desirable object they wanted to eat. The observer certainly wouldn’t look at the peel and say “yuck.” A second later that same peel keeping all that fruity goodness safe and protected is garbage. Renamed. Repurposed. And now regarded as undesirable waste.

Deep down in your mind you have tremendous guilt about separating from the whole we call Heaven. You have tremendous guilt about making something like spacetime that does not include the totality of all that is. In your mind, what was good and pure and total in an instant became partial, undesirable and frightening. Undoing this guilt takes disciplined practice, as the Buddhist exercise demonstrate.

The banana peel exercise illustrates just how quickly and willingly our mind separates part from whole, and to instantly make one desirable and the other trash. Of course the next day, that desirable banana moves through the eater’s body and becomes waste in the toilet to be flushed. Yet somewhere downstream that waste may actually promote the growth of plants. Which are in turn seen as desirable. The cycle perpetuates endlessly.

The mental separation of part and whole is, like energy and change, a fractral trap. It never stops cycling down into loops of despair, then rising again in loops of desirability. It is the sine wave; a rollercoaster bouncing between maximum and minimum. Endlessly oscillating between delight and repulsion. A foundational construction of duality.

A master learns to avoid the rollercoaster ride of fractal traps. True love and joy do no vacillate between maximum and minimum but endlessly increase via sharing; which is the non-spatial, non-geographic giving we call love. 

Why did Jesus rename Simon?

Christians may also wish to consider why Jesus renamed Simon to Peter. Imagine how weird it would be if you agreed to follow a teacher and he said, “I’m going to rename you.” It is when Peter embraces the truth that Jesus is the son of God that Jesus calls him Peter and says he is the rock on which Jesus will build his church. Consider this in light of the function of the Holy Spirit, which translates for the apostles on Pentecost. Giving ourselves limited names we fell into limited perceptions of ourselves. It is the role of the Holy Spirit to undo those names and provide elevating, lifting visions of ourselves in order to escape this illusion of spacetime. Jason has to do the same thing in order to return to his true reality with his family. He must undo the renaming and repurposing of the sofa and its cushions into the multilaterally accepted name and purpose his family agrees is real.

Ellie observes that Jason powerfully identifies with his renamed and repurposed objects. He really believes that sofa is a pirate ship and personally identifies himself as a pirate as a result. Imagine a child of God with the power of mind to create a universe with a single thought, and a power of self-identification beyond your comprehension. Now you see why releasing the effects of spacetime is not a walk in the park and requires continuous mental discipline.

Students of Carl Jung may wish to explore how he gave some of his patients elevating archetypes to consider. He showed them how, in their dreams, they were connected to the collective unconscious which contained ancient, powerful archetypes that even kings and queens wrestled with. So he showed them how their personal problems could be surmounted by identifying with these timeless, pre-patterned systems of thinking that had more power than their weak, personal problems.

For a future master, a basic knowledge of enduring archetypes can be helpful because you’ll run into them as you transcend your ego, as Dr. David Hawkins notes. Knowing what they are helps you see through them. Studying them endlessly is like studying sideshow exhibits at a carnival in order to be reunited with your family in the parking lot. Looking at the archetype, you say, “This is definitely not pure love and thus is not my family in Heaven,” and you move on.

The pirate has created a new perceptual level of reality

So the pirate’s capacity to cause change has altered his perception of the sofa, causing him to mentally rename and repurpose it, and causing him to experience it differently than his family does. They see a sofa and cushions; he sees a pirate ship and a steering wheel. We can summarize that using the power of his mind to create perceived change, he has redefined and repurposed a multilaterally experienced reality into a unilaterally experienced reality.

#27 How did Jesus walk on water? Part 8: The pirate game begins

Over the next several questions we’ll unfold a story of a young boy playing an imaginary game of pirate. The imaginary structures in this story will give you a glimpse into the deepest mechanisms of space and time and show you how those structures relate to your own mind.

This is the background information a master needs to know to overcome the forces of nature—including gravity—and walk on water.

Knowing isn’t enough; continuous application is the key to mastery

To know about the universe’s imaginary structures is one thing; to use that knowledge to overcome the “persistent illusion” as Einstein called it takes will-power, focus and discipline. It’s not enough to know you’re being controlled by these ancient structures of mind underlying spacetime; you have to want to understand their mechanisms and then do the work to overcome them.

Forces of nature are continuous. Gravity never sleeps; its force is in place 24/7/365. In order to overcome the forces of nature your mind must become continuously disciplined. Single-pointed, as the Buddha would say. The same disciplined thinking that helps take companies from Good to Great, author Jim Collins says.

Go through this pirate game metaphor slowly and rigorously, and everything you need to learn how to walk on water will be revealed. Once you can accurately visualize your situation—having in your mind the blueprints to the prison—overcoming it is far easier.

A little boy playing a game of pirate is observed by a researcher

Imagine a young boy named Jason is playing an imaginary game of pirate in his living room. A perceptual psychology graduate student, Ellie, will be observing him as part of her thesis on the structures of mind as they relate to imaginative play in children.

As part of her experimental procedure, Ellie is not allowed to talk to Jason, nor he to her. She will sit at the kitchen table and take notes while he plays in the adjacent living room.

Ellie told Jason he can play anything at all he wants, with one condition: He can’t use any of his toys in his game, just regular household objects in the living room. She wants to see the full power of his imagination in action.

Observation Set #1: Energy—the capacity to cause change by force

Since Jason isn’t allowed to use any toys in his game, he’s going to have to recruit some props from the living room. He leaps up on the sofa, grabs a couple of cushions off the back, and stacks them up. He stands in front of his pillow stack and appears to be turning and twisting the top pillow as he leans from side to side.

Ellie’s first observation is that Jason has changed the location of the pillows. Thus he has granted himself the capacity to cause change to his reality. We will define this as energy; the perceived capacity to cause change. (See Question #4 about how there is no such thing as change in an absolute universe like Heaven.) 

Ellie observes Jason has not asked his mother for permission to change the arrangement of the pillows on the sofa. His power to cause change is thus unilaterally assigned in this fantasy.

We can observe the same thing about energy; it does not ask permission to change the physical status of something else; it is a unilateral cause taking unilateral action. The energy released by the atomic bomb didn’t stop and politely knock on the door of the citizens of Hiroshima, asking for permission to annihilate them. It was a unilateral cause taking unilateral action, not arising its action in conjunction with the whole.

Thus energy makes change by force; it doesn’t create life by arising it in conjunction with the whole. This is the difference between being “made” and being “begotten.” To be made can cause others suffering and loss. A child is born and it’s “another mouth to feed” in the eyes of the world. Too many deer are born into a certain ecosystem, and the herd starves to death slowly in a harsh winter. So instead of letting them suffer, a “deer harvest” is authorized and local hunters are brought in to thin the herd, much to the outrage of animal rights protestors. The situation is corrected by the intervention and may remain stable for awhile, until the next natural cycle of gain and loss gets out of balance and the madness continues. 

In this example the part has become the death knell to the whole—evidence of the dualistic influence of the ego in the constructions of nature. The ego will continually attempt to vacillate you back and forth between the good of the whole versus the good of the part, when in reality their fate is forever intertwined and cannot be separated, much less one set against the other. Part vs. whole is an egoic fantasy in which its partial kingdom (spacetime) is “set against” the kingdom of God (Google John Donne’s poem “Batter my Heart Three Person’d God.” It was after this poem that physicist Robert Oppenheimer named the first test site of the atomic bomb “Trinity”).

This part vs. hole egoic perception is like believing a drop of ocean water is set against the ocean, or a sunbeam set against the sun—two metaphors used in A Course in Miracles.

A master is a changless agent

Energy and change cause a vicious natural cycle based on the perception of lack and loss. The master recognizes this cycle as a product of the ego and its belief in partiality. The master steps outside of this cycle of change, transcending it entirely. He doesn’t manipulate it.

The abandonment of wholeness creates a fractal trap—an endless, cycling, changing regress to which there is no logical solution (i.e the deer herd problem.) The master doesn’t play in fractral traps; doesn’t manipulate change, accommodate change, respond to change or become an agent of change.

Change is not real according to the laws of God and those laws are the only ones that will allow the master to entirely transcend the forces of nature (See Hawkins’ Power vs. Force assumption in Question #20). Multiple theologies across many faith traditions and many mystical accounts characterize God as “changeless.” Once you get that energy is the inversion of this true, eternal attribute of God, then the universe makes a whole lot more sense. It’s a unilaterally defined fantasy; just like Jason unilaterally defining the sofa as a pirate ship and the pillows as his steering wheel.

As adults we fascinate ourselves with change. An entire industry has grown up in the workplace helping people “deal with change.” As a child, did you really dream about growing up to spend your days dealing with change? Of the top ten things humans truly desire from life, change doesn’t make the list (see Yehuda Berg’s The Power of Kabbalah).

How does a master deal with change? The same way a mother deals with a monster under her child’s bed; by demonstrating through her actions and attitudes that the monster is simply not real. Certainly by not showing any emotional connection to it, or glamorizing it, or climbing under the bed and creating a “new discipline” called “monster management.”

Certainly not by becoming a “monster agent” intent on spending her days “masterings the subtleties of monster management.” Change is a perceptual illusion based on partial information. Failing to view the universe as a whole (which Einstein indicated creates our optical delusion of an individual self) we see its various expressions as partial, and thus changing.

Just like someone that didn’t know a car could accelerate might become fascinated with this “change” in the car; after all the velocity is changing when the car is accelerating. To Henry Ford—who envisioned that “change” as part of the total essence of the car—the idea that a car can accelerate doesn’t change its essence one bit. Only by abandoning total awareness of any essence does one become enamored with change.

Take the eye of the hurricane with you and the wind goes away

The master doesn’t glorify energy and change by making them real. To make them real is like sending someone out to endlessly study the ultra-complex comings and goings of the winds in the wall of the hurricane (which is what the study of non-linear dynamics, or chaos theory is about) Contrast the likelihood of mastering that complexity by sheer mental effort (our most powerful supercomputers can’t even predict the weather 100% accurately three days from now) versus learning how to stay anchored to our true reality which is the peaceful eye of the storm.

The ego will toss the intellect a bone of understanding (see there’s patterns in the chaos!) then use that as a thread to lure you into a realm way more complex than the human mind could ever hope to fathom. Seek and do not find accomplished! The ego’s mantra, A Course in Miracles says. You are lost in the storm.

Who would you rather have navigating your ship? A captain that can stay calm, focused and centered, or one who is continuously giving away his or her power to change by making such a big deal about it? Every little wave and ripple becomes an endless opportunity for pointless study, while the ship veers off course.

Understanding that the calm goes with them wherever they are (it’s holographic), the master learns that no matter how hard the wind is blowing, the truth is they have the power to make it stop (which Jesus actually does to the amazement of his apostles.)

Teaching people to focus on the shifting winds of change simply gets them to focus on that which takes away their power versus having them learn to stay wholly centered in their changeless, peaceful core. The guards came to take Jesus away in the Garden of Gethsemane and Peter—fearing change—drew his sword and cut off the ear of the high priest’s servant. Jesus, ever calm and centered, reached over and healed him. Change is a vicious cycle that never ends; a fractal trap. Wholeness doesn’t change. Wholeness is always with you. The Grace of God (the calm, centered, changeless eye of the hurricane) is holographically with you no matter where you are. Your port in the storm is not a place, it is your real Self and it is closer to you right now than your jugular vein no matter how complex the fantasy of spacetime gets in your mind. It is absolutely non-chaotic, non-patterned, non-shifting. Do not build your house on a foundation of shifting sands, but on the changeless, eternal peace of God that is forever with you. This is the truth that sets you free from a lifetime of neurotic accommodation to the endlessly perceived winds of change.

Center yourself in peace for the solution that heals all

Time to turn in your badges, change agents, it’s time to become changeless agents and provide true solutions that elevate all and threaten none. When you stop what you’re doing, center yourself, then ask the Holy Spirit for guidance—then wait for the answer—you will get a solution that is not created from the world’s level of partial thinking, but arises from your unbroken connection to wholeness. Consider viewing Carl Sagan’s movie Contact from this perspective. Einstein said we need to solve our problems from a level of thinking that is higher than that which created the probelm in the first place.

This wisdom from your higher self comes from the calm, centered connection to the whole, not from partial ego information based on energy and change (Eckhart Tolle writes about the amazing solutions that benefit all when you stay calm and centered and allow these solutions to arise.) Indian philosopher J. Krishnamurti wrote:

Meditation is to find out whether the brain, with all the activities, all its experiences, can be absolutely quiet. Not forced because the moment you force, there is duality. The entity that says, “I would like to have marvelous experiences, therefore I must force my brain to be quiet,” will never do it. But if you begin to inquire, observe, listen to all the movements of thought, its conditioning, its pursuits, its fears, its pleasures, watch how the brain operates, then you will see that the brain becomes extraordinarily quiet; that quietness is not sleep but is tremendously active and therefore quiet. A big dynamo that is working perfectly hardly makes a sound; it is only where there is friction that there is noise.

The master achieves a single-pointed focus in the calm, changeless center that transcends the forces of nature. 

Energy creates the pairing of opposites

Energy makes trade offs where one loses and another gains. True creation is not a trade off and does not create loss of any kind, but only continuous gain.

The yin/yang symbol is a classic statement of the fallacy of energy; the white side diminishes where the black side gains and vice-versa. Paired opposites in a perpetual cycle of gain-loss; a sure sign of duality that has nothing to do with Spirit or Heaven.

Spirit, God, Heaven and your true Self all have no opposite, are not divided into paired opposites, do not ebb or flow and do not require another to lose so that they may gain.

Energy is divided into paired opposites. We use the phrases “positive energy” and “negative energy” all the time. God just is. There is no “negative is” or “un-is.” A master transcends the opposites by realizing that the totality of absolute reality has no opposite. This totality is the truth that sets the master free from the forces of nature. Anytime a master sees, experiences or hears about paired opposites, he dismisses the pairing as unreal.

The devil is not the opposite of God, a point made clearly by C.S. Lewis. Fist you have to take the Crazy Step—embracing the belief that there is an opposite to wholeness, an “infinity plus one” idea—then you can start imagining paired opposites. The knowledge of good and evil is a classic example. It is the embracing of paired opposites along a spectrum. Now suddenly benevolence is just one position along a sliding scale; instead of being the totality of all that is.

As Dr. David Hawkins observes, we do the same thing with light and electricity. We pair light with dark and say night is the opposite of day. In reality, night is the absence of the one, true physical entity—light. Dark is not standalone thing like light is. You can’t buy a darkness flashlight, flip it on, and make your room darker, as Dr. Hawkins says. Neither does a closed, dark box make the room darker when you open it, as Pastor David Mohn says. That’s because darkness is simply the absence of the one true force—light.

We delineate electricity in a circuit into “on” and “off,” again, paired opposites. But there really is only one true energy there—electricity—there is no separate, standalone force called “offness,” as Dr. Hawkins says. When you flip a switch from on to off, “offness” doesn’t flow down the circuit and replace the electricity. Electricity is simply cut off. Just like darkness does not flow into a room and replace the light.

Energy doesn’t ask permission; it joins via force, not invitation

Sunlight doesn’t ask my permission to warm my skin, nor does it ask permission to give me a sunburn. The transfer of its electromagnetic energy to my skin is not a permission experience. Neither does the sun ask permission to hurt my eyes when I look at it; evidence that energy is not a holistic, multilaterally agreed upon experience but a unilateral extension of force.

Like gravity. Gravity does not ask permission to pull us to the bottom of the sea. In the Bible story, Peter wanted to walk on water, and he partially succeeded, but he got scared and started to sink (see Matthew 14:22-33).

“Holistic energy” is an oxymoron; energy transfers itself freely without any holistic consideration for the entire system. A ball flying through the air with kinetic energy doesn’t ask permission from the window before shattering it; nor from the young boy who will have to do chores to pay for it; nor from his father who will have to give up his Saturday afternoon to fix it; nor from the young girl who steps on a glass shard and cuts her foot, nor from her mother who then has to run to the store because they are out of Band-Aids.

Similarly, the condition brought about by energy—change—is also not a permission experience, but is a unilateral extension of force. Conditions in the world don’t ask the permission of humanity before they change. The weather doesn’t ask our permission before it changes into a tornado or a hurricane. Dirt on a hill doesn’t ask permission of the village beneath it before turning into a rampaging, deadly mud slide in a rain storm.

Thus we see an important spiritual truth about energy; energy is the perceived capacity to violate the free will of others. Thus a master knows energy is not of God, Who always respects and preserves the free will of His creations.

A true master has no concern for energy at all. Does not manipulate it. Does not use it to heal. And does not confuse it with life.

God is the only source of all life and does not use the capacity to change to create it. 

All true life arises (is begotten) in conjunction with the whole; with all that is. The whole gladly and universally embraces the creation of all life and welcomes it into reality.

Energy creates by the unilateral extension of force; via change which may not be welcome at all. Energy kills; God is the God of the living, not the dead, as Jesus says. The same well can’t produce bitter and sweet water, the Bible writer James said. God is the “fountain of all holiness” Christian theology teaches. Suffering and death are not holy, despite how much the ego will try to convince you otherwise.

As Baruch Spinoza said, God is of one substance (love). Being only of one substance, he cannot create something made of a second substance (energy) that then creates a third condition—suffering—which leads to a fourth condition, death.

Love creates only love; never suffering or death. “That which suffers and changes is not my Self,” the Buddha said. Energy is change and certainly causes suffering. Ask the people in the burn unit of your local hospital.

Energy is not your Self, doen’t create your Self and is not part of any reality to which your Self belongs—i.e. Heaven. Energy is part of a nightmare caused by the inversion of God’s laws. E=mc^2 may describe energy in spacetime, but there is nothing natural about it. It is a perversion of your true home.

Energy violates free will and thus is not of God. As A Course in Miracles indicates, we exist wholly inside the mind of God. If God can violate our free will then we are simply a mental puppet in His mind—an inert plaything—and we are no more alive than a dummy on the arm of a ventriloquist. 

To violate the free will of another is, ultimately, to kill them. If God can take away our free will, then what power do we really have, and do we really exist? How would our eternal life not be a constant hell of fear and anxiety about God changing His mind about our worth and simply willing us out of existence?

The Bible paints God as a being one must continuously walk on egg shells around, or risk incurring His deadly, random wrath. Nothing could be more distant from the truth. God is rock-solid, eternal, unchanging love, maximally expressed, Who, by definition, includes His children as the completion of His essence. If they go, He goes. It’s that simple. That is His eternal commitment to His children, and is the foundation of their eternal peace in Heaven.

God’s laws create an absolutely benevolent holographic construction; one for all and all for one

Energy is an obviously dualistic construction that violates the benevolent holographic construction of Heaven. In ultimate reality, what happens to the part happens to the whole; one for all and all for one. That’s the true reality of a non-dualistic, absolute universe. Truth is union.

If we’re all non-dualistically bound together in perfect togetherness, how can something happen to one of us that doesn’t happen to all of us? The Christian study guide Foundations makes the analogy that Heaven is like a perfectly pure glass of water; one drop of cyanide (a metaphor for sin) would poison the whole thing.

That’s an good metaphor for an absolutely benevolent holographic construction; one drop of force and the whole thing is poisoned. Which is why force (and energy) is simply not allowed to become real in Heaven. You can imagine it all you want—you’re living in a universe built on imaginary energy—but it will no more become real according to God’s laws than a flying elephant will become real according to the laws of nature.

Energy is an obvious violation of the benevolent holographic construction. In an exchange of energy, object A causes an effect on object B that does not create that same effect on object A. Via an energy transfer, the sun causes a plant to wither and die, but the sun does not also wither and die in the process. Thus cause and effect are separated; a dualistic construction.

Energy—which as Gary Renard observes is nothing more than projected thought—creates a relative hologram, in which parts of that hologram perceive themselves causing effects on other parts that they themselves do not experience. By expending energy, someone can torture and murder another and not experience that same effect on themselves.

That’s evidence of the mental projection that causes a relative hologram.

In an absolute hologram like Heaven, the fate of the part and the whole are inseparably bound as one; what we can define as absolute interdependence (see Stephen Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People for an examination of interdependence.) Hence the metaphor of the perfectly pure glass of water; it’s wholly interdependent.

The Buddhists say it is nonsensical to consider the part without the whole and vice-versa; a principle called dependent origination. No part can be considered arising without the totality of experience to which it belongs. 

In a relative hologram like spacetime, the part and the whole can experience different effects. An animal can die without its entire ecosystem dying, for example. The fate of the part and the whole are separate. In a relative hologram, we have independence, in which one can exist independent of, or outside of, another. This is the first illusion which a dualistic construction requires; you can’t have energy without perceived separation.

Energy violates free will and thus, the spiritual bottom line is that it is the mechanism of death. The perceived belief that the changeless, living and eternal can somehow be changed by force against their will, even killed. It is a violation of truth; a lie. The real you cannot be changed. The real you cannot be forced. And the real you cannot have your will violated.

There is only one will in Heaven; that’s what absolute togetherness means. How can a “separate thing” violate your will if there is only one will? Think of a stadium full of 60,000 screaming fans all willing one thing; hit the ball over the fence so we can win this game.

Energy has absolutely nothing to do with Spirit.

The entire universe is built on the lie of energy—even empty space has energy called vacuum energy. Thus the master knows that this universe is not of God or Heaven, which is truth. Jesus knew this, he said the devil ruled this place, was the father of all lies, and that that there was no truth in him. 

True power—love—never forces anything. By definition it is an invitation to voluntarily join in a mutually agreed upon experience of togetherness. Energy is a unilaterally defined experience of change against the will of another.

Energy exists in levels; Spirit is a maximal expression of love that has no levels (see A Course in Miracles). Energy comes in little packets called quanta; Spirit is formless and does not exist in packets. Energy can be described by an equation: E=mc^2; Spirit is non-mathematical. Energy is dependent on time; Spirit is timeless. Energy exists in space; Spirit is spaceless. Energy can diminish: Spirit cannot. Energy can harm; Spirit cannot. Energy can kill; Spirit cannot.

The sun forces my skin to get warmer; my skin has no choice in the matter. If I lie outside in the hot sun long enough, it will kill me. That is not love, (which is of God), that is force, which is of nature, as clearly delineated in Dr. David Hawkins’ book, Power vs. Force (see the Hawkins’ Power vs. Force Assumption in Question #20).

Having to protect yourself against anything—at all—is evidence you are living inside a fantasy based on energy and force.

In our next several questions, we’ll keep going on our pirate game and take it step-by-step to see how the master separates the rose of God’s love from the thorn of natural force.

#26 How did Jesus walk on water? Part 7: Borders and laws

Jewish Kabbalah identifies one of the earliest forces in the creation of the universe as resistance: a mental push-back on the wholeness of our union with God. We were whole; we resisted that wholeness and voila! billions of years of suffering. Ooops! Can we take a mulligan on this whole spacetime thing?

We live in a holographic universe created by resistance 

In Question #25 we explored the idea of the holographic principle which states that objects around us may not be the familiar, three-dimensional, freestanding objects they appear to be, but instead may be generated on a distant holographic bound; a thin membrane (known as branes in physics) on which our everyday 3D objects are encoded as 2D information.

The world around us feels solid and real enough, yet, according to the holographic principle, we exist inside a holographically projected reality projected from a bubbly membrane that surrounds us out in space somewhere.

Think of the holographic membrane as like a flat-two dimensional rear-projection television screen surrounding all of spacetime. Our entire 3D reality in spacetime is encoded on this thin, membranous 2D “screen”—called a holographic bound—and projected into spacetime (see Question #25, Fig. 25.2).

Our bodies, which we think are real, are simply 3D projections being generated by that flat, 2D brane out there in spacetime (see Question #25, Fig. 25.2)

Matrix fans unite: but watch out for Matrix blindness

Could this holographic projection be some kind of “code,” like computer code? Interestingly, atheist author Richard Dawkins says he has no answer to those who ask him, “How do you know we might not all be existing inside some kind of massive, computer program?” (This was the premise of the Wachosski brothers’ Matrix movie trilogy.)

If we live inside some kind of pre-programmed illusion running scripts—originating way out on the edge of spacetime—behind the Big Bang even—then we must be careful about becoming fixated on any one shred of that programming in our own world—like Charles Darwin’s evolution, or Richard Dawkins’ memes or Stephen Wolfram’s cellular automata. 

If the source of suffering and death is way upstream; investigating the details of that death way downstream is only going to get us so far. We have to challenge all the way back to the first causal link we have to the suffering we experience in this  world—which means the Big Bang.

I call this process of becoming fascinated with one small aspect of nature’s programming and elevating it to a god-like level, then using it to try and disprove the existence of God, Code Jockeying. The proponents of these so-called “God-killing” ideas will ride them with evangelical zeal. They’re going to ride that horse until it, or God, drops dead. (see the Zinger from Hell and the feelings it creates, below). 

It’s all part of the same observable phenomena; the ego tries to kill anything that can’t be observed in spacetime. Code Jockeying is a variation on Ernest Mach’s Horse (for those interested scientists, see Walter Isaacson’s Einstein, page 334.)

We can also recognize Code Jockeying as a form of Matrix Blindness. A small shred of the massive programming of spacetime—physical or biological—is discovered, and it seems revolutionary and exciting. So much so that the discoverer is convinced that fully understanding the idea renders faith in God meaningless.

They become so enamored with this shred of coding that they lose sight of the totality and brutality of nature; mamely that this deadly matrix kills everything inside its borders. (The matrix is a very real concept in modern physics; it’s called the non-commutative matrix and it is said to exist outside of the effects of space and time. Google it and check it out.)

In order for scientific observers to become saviors, they must abandon their Code Jockeying, zoom out their perspective to the entire universe and realize that our multi-dimensional universe my be only one universe of many, called a multiverse. And that each of those universes, physics tells us, can have unique physical laws that would determine how life would evolve. And that there may be countless such universes out there.

Countless.

So to find a single shred of programming in one of those universes, and to trumpet it as absolute evidence that God doesn’t exist, is like a man discovering one line of code in a video game and loudly proclaiming, “I have uncovered the total secrets of the cosmos! Having this totality of evidence in hand, I am absolutely certain God doesn’t exist!”

It’s just Matrix blindness caused by Code Jockeying. Stop riding that horse, Ernest.

Happens to the best of us. Forgive it. Bless it. And move on.

It’s all about mental resistance to wholeness

Scientific American says “Our innate perception that the world is three-dimensional could be an extraordinary illusion.” We’re right back to the Hindu idea of maya—that the physical world is actually an illuion; a veil pulled over our true reality.

The structure of that veil is mental resistance to wholeness; what we have also identified in this blog as the Spam Filter from Hell. (Check out that term in the search box in the upper right.) It’s the perceptual filtering that takes place inside a relative universe, versus absolute knowledge that occurs in an absolute universe, which is not relativistic.

The Kabbalah is correct about resistance and its place in the origin of the cosmos (see Yehuda Berg’s The Power of Kabbalah. The theoretical holographic boundary on which our entire universe is written, I offer is simply mental resistance to wholeness.

If you are a child of God and absolute, indivisible reality is your true and actual existence, and you want to separate yourself from that which cannot be divided, you use a simple device—mental resistance to wholeness. You simply push back and say “No thanks, but I’m making my own subset of that which cannot be divided.” That’s right, it’s a a crazy idea, but here we are (see the Crazy Step.)

Which is what a computer Spam filter, virus protection, or firewall does; it makes a subset of the network to which you belong, tailor-made to your preferences by selectively allowing only certain types of information to reach your awareness.

Once a master gets that mental resistance to wholeness underlies a great many structures in space and time, many secrets of the universe jump out.

We explored in Question #24 that the universe of ours is built on a fear of reaching infinity and of reaching intimacy—a fear of going too far or getting too close. 

We said physicist Richard Feynman wanted to leave one piece of wisdom for future generations, and that is when objects get too far apart, they attract, and when they get too close, they repel. We can summarize this idea in light of our psychological understanding as avoiding the infinite via restraining attraction, and avoiding the intimate via separating repulsion.

But these two phsycho-physical phenomena (which I combine freely using the Pauli-Jung Merger Assumption—see question #20), are simply indicative of the primal mechanism of separation from God: mental resistance to wholeness.

Deep down in our minds we know that this wholeness we share with God is both infinitely freeing and wonderfully, intimately connected. So in spacetime, which is a symbolic projection of a mind trying to avoid Heaven, we find symbolic recreations of structures intended to avoid both infnitely freeing extension, and perfectly intimate togetherness.

It’s an old ego trick: take a unified reality in which concepts are actually blended seamlessly as one (akin to the wave-particle complementarity), then separate them out and make them appear perceptually as paired opposites in spacetime, then have perception oscillate endlessly between the newly paired opposites—hence the sine wave; a primal, archetypal mechanism in the construction of spacetime (and a symbol that arose in one of Pauli’s dreams he analyzed with Jung.)

Spatial manifestations of the infinite-intimate perceptual flip

Oscillations between maximums and minimums are one such symbolic manifestation. A two-sphere hyperspherical universe is another; where the observer can perceptually oscillate between space appearing as extending infinitely, yet when the observer extends too far mentally, a perceptual flip takes him right back to their center point of observation—literally into themselves.

Just imagine an ant lying on his back on the surface of an expanding balloon. On the surface of that balloon there is a thin layer that contains all of the visible universe we can see—stars, planets, the earth, humans, everything. (This balloon/ant idea comes from astronomers Charles Lineweaver and Tamara Davis in Scientific American.)

So as this ant kicks back and rides on this expanding balloon, everything seems large and connected and unified in a continuous fabric of spacetime (like relativity sees the universe). He sees that the surface of the balloon is connecting everything together. But if he freaks out and thinks he’s getting too big and expanded, i.e. too infinite, he just flips over on his belly and looks into that balloon and back towards the single point where it is expanding from—i.e., in our metaphor, the neck of the balloon where the air is blown in—(although he is free to perceive this expanding point anywhere, as Lineweaver and Davis point out.) He can then mentally imagine himself rushing to that expansion point to be safe from the ever-expanding universe—as if our ant could drop through the surface of the balloon without popping it, and drop down into the neck of the balloon beyond the point where it is expanding. We’re all familiar with the fact that the neck-part you blow into on the balloon doesn’t expand like the rest of the balloon does.

This perception-built, two-step universe, where one can flip between big, expanding, riding-the-balloon mode, or retreat towards a single-point mode, is what we call the Riemann hypersphere, or the poet Dante’s visible universe and Empyrean, both described as essentially synonymous by geometer Robert Osserman in The Poetry of the Universe. (See Dante’s inferno for a description of a journey through a Riemann  hypersphere. Interestingly Dante says the Empyrean is located outside of space and time, but projected into it.)

We also can consider the Einstein-Eddington universe as described by Arthur Young in his book The Reflexive Universe. It is an expansive torus with an infinitely small singularity at its center—like a really fat, overstuffed bagel with a tiny hole in the middle. This torus would give an observer living inside that overstuffed bagel of a universe the option to flip their perception between, large, expansive “whole bagel” mode, or rush back to that center point singularity at the middle of the torus and just “be myself”—a singularity. 

Thus we see the overall mind-trick; instead of integrating and accepting whole and part as one, the transtemporal mind separates them out spatially and conceptually, then spends it times osciallating back and forth between the two perceptual choices. It take wholeness and splits it perceptually to create dualistic structures it can them oscillate between at will. Which is what the yin yang symbol is all about. As one perceptual choice diminishes, the other increases; like a light switch dimmer switching your perception of the light very gradually between on to off. 

A master grasping this is well on his way to walking on water. For all of spacetime is built on continuous oscillations between whole and part, maximum and minimum, peak and trough, on and off, ones and zeros. All based on the perceptual flip; a relativistic perceptual framework to a quantum mechanical perceptual framework. Constellation or individual star. Your call. Can’t do math to unify a free will choice; you’ll just get more probability curves.

Learn to not fear whole nor part, nor to wildly oscillate between, and you can literally reconstruct those sine waves any way you wish. And that is the theory behind building a mind-controlled, anti-gravity car. See Edgar Cayce’s detailing of a “conscious space ship” type idea appearing in the Biblical book of Ezekiel, I believe.)

It’s all about losing that confining, prison-like sense of “I”, that’s afraid of infinite freedom and absolute intimacy. Again, see the Einstein-Harris Assumption in Question #20 about how to come closer to the universe and its secrets.

The two primary perceptual orientations in the universe

A master understands that a split-mind observer has two primary perceptual orientations in the universe. In the first, you view yourself as free and expansive. So you view the universe as ever-expanding before your eyes; all interconnected and large and “we.” United. This is how Einstein’s relativity views spacetime; as interconnected, unified sheets of spacetime—the “we-mode” of spacetime, so to speak.

But, as you mentally zip through that expanded, interconnected, seemingly infinite universe of “we-ness,” you subconsciously fear accidentally running into the infinite God, so you want a fallback position; you want to be able to contract in a hurry; to withdraw into yourself. To head towards a single point you identify as your “observer position,” which can be anywhere in spacetime. So you drop your interconnected, unified, expansive, one-sheet of-existence, relativistic “we” percepction and become a quantum mechanical, individual point, lone-star “me” in a hurry.

You want the option to head towards a single point of awareness as quickly as possible. Similarly, when you head towards that single point of awareness, you want the option to get the heck out of there too, if you feel yourself getting too close—to contained. You want your space. So you give yourself the option to again flip your perception out to the big, expanded, “spatial” view. (You may wish to explore how a single particle of light, called a photon, will literally go beserk if it is increasingly cornered in a box whose sides are gradually squeezed in. The smaller the box gets containing the photon, the more chaotic and random its motion gets.)

Examples of this phenomena in everyday life

Go stargazing. This we-me flip is obvious as you flip your perception from individual stars to constellations. Either an expansive, connected whole joined geometrically by lines (vectors) stretching out into space uniting groups of stars in constellations. Or, you can shrink your expansive, vector-connected, “we the constellation” perception, and switch to isolated, point-like star mode.

Another example? Ever play the game musical chairs as a kid? The music starts and all the kids march around the chairs in an interconnected line—a “we” formation. Everybody is happy and friendly and having a good time. But when the music stops, watch out. That “we” becomes a “me” in a hurry and the kids all rush towards a single point—an open chair—pushing and shoving if they have to to claim it.

Another example? How about Jung’s ideas of extroverts and introverts? An extrovert is all about the connection to the whole. A “we” orientation; big, expansive, gregarious, outgoing. An introvert is the opposite, withdrawing into the single point that is themselves. Quiet. Contemplative.

The Zinger from Hell

The next time you’re at a party with friends and deep into a conversation where friendly jabs are being thrown around, notice you’re still deeply connected to the “we”: you love being with your friends. The personal ribbing just bounces off you. Who cares.

But occasionally a friend will say something that cuts too close to the emotional bone and “bam! that “we” connection is lost and you find yourself sucking into yourself, literally entering into the “me” mode in a hurry. Suddenly you’re all self-conscious; flustered, a racing heart, defensive all of the sudden. You get angry. You want to atack. Your friends notice your calm, joking veneer is suddenly gone.

That angry, flustering, self-conscious moment is a recreation of the moment immediately after your perceived separation from God, a choice you made but errantly projected onto God. We’ll call it the Zinger from Hell. 

That’s exactly how you felt after you really believed you dropped out of Heaven and were actually all alone (which you never were, btw). The first and most primal instance of self-consciousness, with a small “s.” Your true Self doesn’t have consciousness; it has total union with all that is. Consciousness goes up and down, we can lose it, we can raise it. Spirit doesn’t exist in levels. Can’t be raised or lowered or lost. So I recommend using the term “Spirit” or “Oneness” or perfect togetherness. (Because it is used incorrectly so often, I don’t use the term consciousness.)

Deeply focus on your feelings in your next “zinger” moment and understand that this combination of fear, loss, anger, betrayal, hurt pride, defensiveness, vulnerability, being exposed, wanting to attack, guilt for wanting to attack one you love, mental resistance to being one with them again—are all feelings you experienced immediately after separating mentally from God.

You could have Laughed about it and let it go, just like that. But you didn’t. You hung onto those feeling and let them grow; using them as justification to build a universe of separation.

You believe God did this to you, but in reality it was your choice to create the experience of mental resistance to wholeness. And from that primal fear (imagine Zinger from Hell times a billion), the ego arose to protect you from experiencing those feelings ever again. To keep you safe from those feelings now hidden in your subconscious mind.

But those same feelings towards God—fear, loss, anger, betrayal, hurt pride, defensiveness, vulnerability, being exposed, wanting to attack, guilt for wanting to attack one you love, mental resistance to being one again—still exist in our collective unconscious, as Jung called it, which means you carry them yourself (see the Whole-Part Assumption in Question #20)—and will need to heal them before you return to Heaven.

Heaven is a voluntary choice of self-identification as we have explored several times in this blog. Just  as you would patch it up with your friend who zinged you—make it cool between you—and voluntarily self-identify the two of you as “friends” again. Your friend can’t make you be friends again; just as God can’t make you come home and self-identify with Him again (as Jesus did, saying, “the Father and I are one.”) 

God will never force that self-assertion of perfect togetherness on you. To do so would annihilate both of your existences immediately—because you are both love and love never forces.

Really, deeply mediate on the feelings you experience after someone really zings you a good one. It’s a great way to study the instant of perceived separation from God and all the complex feelings it has created within you and still reside deep in your unconscious mind. Never underestimate the power of repressed guilt over wanting to kill God in that primal moment of terror. It runs deep and needs to be healed by the God’s Grace manifest as the Holy Spirit.

That’s how hell began, my sacred brothers and sisters in Christ. And you believe, deep down, you are currently a resident. (No need to change your address, though, because you actually never left Heaven, you just think you did.)

Mental resistance to wholeness creates bubbles of reality

Mental resistance to wholeness is a force of mind that separates our world into bubbles of reality as physicists call them (see Question #25), or spheres of consciousness, as American mystic Edgar Cayce called them.

Let’s see how this force manifests in our world.

Borders, borders everywhere—dividing wholeness into partiality

The United States has 50 states; a whole divided into 50 parts. So what separates say, Minnesota (my home state) from Iowa? A border, right? Well, drive down good old Highway 35, the main north-south artery between Minneapolis and Des Moines and you’ll pass right through that border.

Is there a river forming that border? No. A mountain range? No. Any natural division at all? Nope. Just a sign that says, “Welcome to Iowa” and information about the tourist information center. The border is pure mental fabrication on the part of whoever decided it should go “right here.”

Watch the weather on television some day, or pull up a satellite weather map of the U.S., and you’ll see imaginary white lines delineating the various states. These lines are obviously not actual, naturally occuring borders, but are randomly established by humans over the actual terrain.

The lines are made-up borders. Mental projections laid right on top of the actual reality. Just like constellations in the night sky are a mental projection laid on top of white dots in the sky—one of the oldest inventions on earth, Bradley Schaefer tells us in Scientific American. 

It’s all about mental resistance to wholeness; Minnesota refusing to be one with Iowa

Those lines are none other than mental resistance to wholeness. Someone, somewhere, got it into their head that the land should be mentally divided that way. And so arbitrary lines were drawn as each new state was added to the union. “Our state ends here and yours begins here.”

Now zoom out to the United States as a whole. We have borders that are nothing but mental resistance to our neighbors to the north and south. These borders say, “We want to be separate from you. We want to have our own laws and those laws go into effect right here, at this border. Those laws define our reality and separate it from yours. We don’t want to be one with you, we want to be two.”

That’s the phenomena physicists discovered with these thin branes in the physical world. They contain rules and laws for the physical expression of nature inside the border of the brane. Border laws form projected realities governed by these border laws even if the interior falls quite a distance from that border, just like the U.S. borders contain rules and laws that affect the state of Kansas in the heart of the interior of the country. Those rules are projected across the entire country.

Even gravity has to obey border laws

So we can see that these thin borders contains laws encoded on them that begin at a certain point, and are projected at a distance, affecting behavior within those borders. In physics, we call this type of border a holographic bound, and it contains physical laws encoded on it that determine what the physical universe can and can’t do within that bound.  

For example, the bound might have rules about how hard gravity tugs—a rule a master who wants to walk on water may be interested in. That holographic bound may have rules for the ratio between gravity, which pulls everything together, and dark matter, a mysterious force of the cosmos that seems to push everything apart. This ratio determines how fast that universe expands, and whether or not it can support life of any kind.

So physicists believe these holographic bounds exist out there. And although one hasn’t been discovered that governs our entire universe, in theory, it could be there. (The holographic principle only continues to grow in prominence, physicist and PBS host Brian Greene tells us in Scientific American.) And on these holographic bounds all kinds of physical rules and laws are written to describe our physical universe.

Many descriptions of the same phenomena

So, my future masters of spacetime, this holographic bound thing is an important concept to grasp. It means that all kinds of mentally separated “bubbles of reality” or “spheres of consciosuness” as Edgar Cayce called them, exist out there at every level of size and scope imaginable. Again, these bubbles of reality are separated by thin membranes called holographic bounds that have rules written on them affecting behavior within those boundaries.

In world law we call them international borders. In physics we call them holographic bounds. In weather maps we call them a topographic projection. In a Course of Miracles we call them “frames that determine the pictures within.”

For example, the “frame” that is the U.S. border has laws written on it that determine the “picture” within it we call “life in America.” It determines what we can and cannot do from day-to-day. Can’t print our own money. Can’t form our own country called The United States of (your name here). Can’t yell “fire” in a movie theatre. Can’t take away the Constitutional rights of our neighbors. On and on and on this holographic border determines our lives.

This frame doesn’t have to be there; it is obviously mental resistance to wholeness. The European Union decided that their borders were getting in the way of their growth and prosperity, so they dropped a lot of their mental resistance to each other and came together as one Union.

You day is one holographically bounded experience after another

Whether it’s a political border, or a brane in spacetime with physical laws separating one universe from another, forming massive bubbles of reality, it’s all about mental resistance to wholeness.

Throughout your day, you go through one after another of these borders without thinking twice about it, each border containing more rules and regulations that affect your behavior in ways both conscious and unconscious.

Take a tally of all the bubbles of reality you’re living in right now

Right where you’re sitting now,try to count all the different sets of laws, rules and regulations governing your behavior. These laws nest within each other; the bubbles of reality they form nesting within each other, each with their own level of authority.

Right now, where I sit I’m governed by laws including U.S. federal law. Minnesota state law, Hennepin county law, City of Crystal law, family law, the writer’s law we call grammar and syntax, Internet laws, biological laws governing my body, physical laws of nature like gravity holding me to my chair, the laws of earth governed by the thin brane we call the atmosphere and its screening capabilities which determine what kind of life can arise on earth.

Branes, borders, laws, restricted activity. Becoming aware of all of this regulation—and how much of it is simply voluntarily obeying resistance to wholeness—is an important step in learning how to walk on water. Obviously Jesus was able to break some of the laws of nature, written on a distant holographic boundary, including the law of gravity.

Using the Einstein-Harris Assumption (see Question#20), I assert that the secret to overcoming these nature branes and their law of gravity, is losing the sense of self we regard as “I”—tied to our human body, which is obviously tied to gravity.  

To overcome the affects of a bubble of reality, lose your self-identification with it

In order to lose the laws that govern my behavior as a citizen of Minnesota, I can move to Wisconsin. But I have to lose my self-identification as a Minnesotan to do so, which I may be unwilling to do. I could do the same thing with my U.S. citizenship—losing the effects on my behavior caused by the laws at the border— by becoming a citizen of Canada. I would have to lose my self-identification with the reality called “Life as a U.S. Citizen” by declaring “I am a Canadian.”

I could stop writing and take up gambling for a living, and then the laws of grammar and syntax would not affect my behavior so greatly from day-to-day. I would have to lose my self-identification with the reality formed by the statement “I am a writer” and would have to adopt the rules and effects of a reality created by the statement of self-identification “I am a gambler.”

Jesus simply took this realization one step further and saw absolutely no difference between a mentally created border and its rules—a political border for example—and a physical border, or holographic bound (aka a brane).

Great masters realize that everything they see around them is created in our minds. (The Buddha taught all of space was coming out of our minds, the Dalai Lama says in The Universe in a Single Atom.) It’s all mental projection. That some of it feels more physical and real and solid, and some of it is feels made-up and random (like state borders) is of no concern. It’s all the same concept. A master knows this.

Mental resistance to wholeness is mental resistance to wholeness. Dress it up a thousands ways and it’s still the exact same thing (the scientific principle of Occam’s Razor, or “unnecessary pluralities” applies to our discussion here).

This phenomena began from the very first moment of separation from God—resistance as the Kabbalah states—and now it immerses us in bubble after bubble of reality, impacting our behavior, our perceptions and our relationships with others from moment-to-moment.

Even our ability to walk on water.