Does the Outer Darkness really exist?

[Greg]

7 levels to the afterlife, huh? And if we can't forgive ourselves, we wind up in a cold, smelly, pitch-black place for, potentially, a long time. It almost sounds like my apartment right now, so I really don't see the downside.


Does time exist ?

[BruceAdama]

Does time exist ?

Yes. And what's more, time never goes away. Anyone that tells you that there is no passage of time or any time in the afterlife is full of BS, because the problem is that humans don't see time for what it is. Time is the scientific version of God... it is both ever-present and nonexistent. It is everything, yet it is also nothing. Time is not a force of nature, nor is it adherent to our physical realm. Time cannot be shed off due to death. What time IS, to us, is a simple measurement. Time is nothing more than a descriptive word we assign to describe the flow of events in our lives. You get up. You get dressed and go to work. You come home, eat dinner, and go to bed. That is the flow of your events, and as such, that is the "passage" of time. When you die, you go through the motions of the experience, and eventually arrive in the afterlife, in some form. Whatever you do in the afterlife, you do. And as you do it, you do it. That is the "passage" of time. You can remain in the afterlife for a bajillion eons, and time will still exist, due to the unshakeable and simple fact that whatever you do takes time. That is a fact. If you explore a garden in the Summerland, and then decide to visit a heavenly library, and after that decide to go to your heavenly home, the process of all those events unfolding is time... you do one, then the other, then the other. In that regard, time is and always will be. There is an interval between the time that you die, and the time you reincarnate. There was a time before this universe, and there will be a time after it. Just because we weren't here to see it doesn't mean that WE somehow made up time. People need to understand how to regard the true nature of time, so they can speak about it with some knowledge.

[Roberta Grimes]

7 levels to the afterlife, huh? And if we can't forgive ourselves, we wind up in a cold, smelly, pitch-black place for, potentially, a long time. It almost sounds like my apartment right now, so I really don't see the downside.


Does time exist ?

Heh - you must live in a clime more northern than Texas, dear Greg, if your apartment is chilly in September!

Here comes the BS, dear wonderful Bruce ;-). No, Greg, time does not exist. We have overwhelming evidence from both afterlife communications and quantum physics that matter, energy, time and space are not objectively real. At the core of reality, with everything else stripped away, there is no subatomic clock ticking. At the base of it all is just eternal Mind, of which each of our minds is a part. Mind is the only thing objectively real. And Mind is timeless.

All of which is not to say that time is not one heck of an illusion! As some wag said (I think it was Einstein), "time is what keeps everything from happening at once." And that is surely true. The time illusion allows us to conceive of the notions of "progress" and "growth," which lie at the core of our whole earthly experience. We presently exist within time, and we do that so completely that it is impossible for nearly all of us to conceive of what it would be like to be outside of time. That is all true enough! Nevertheless, a few points must be made. Based upon all the afterlife evidence and the insights that we (but apparently not most physicists, just yet) glean from quantum physics, the following things are true:

1) What we think of as reality is basically a thought. When I was a child, someone taught me to give my address as street, town, county, state, country, earth, solar system, galaxy, universe, and "the mind of God." I don't know where that came from, but it has made my accepting what the evidence tells us a little bit easier. Indeed, that's everyone's address!

2) Mind is eternal. In truth, of course, defining Mind in terms of time really is not possible, since time is created by Mind. But from our perspective, being outside of time would make us eternal. And eternal you are: you never began, and you never will end.

3) Time in the afterlife levels is apparently highly subjective. You see this over and over again when you closely study old channeled communications. The evidence for it comes in random bits, so it is easy to miss; and you likely will have to do a lot of this research before you really can get a sense of it. For example, there is reference to someone sitting on a bench semi-dreamily and not communicating much because she is currently living an earth-lifetime, and the implication is that she will seem to be sitting there just briefly while a whole long lifetime happens here. There are references to our apparently visiting the earth at far-distant historical times. There is a reference to a dead communicator being asked a question and researching the answer, and almost instantly giving it, together with an apology for how long it took because the answer turned out to be hard to find. There is a languid sense of no hurry at all combined with an urgency to do things that is difficult to describe in our terms. One comes away from doing a lot of this research with the sense that time in the afterlife is very different from what it is here - it seems to operate more at the convenience of the experiencer. (And that is good news, incidentally, because apparently people in the outer darkness don't feel the slow passage of a century or two in the same way you or I would feel it.)

No, dear Greg, objectively time does not exist. But the illusion of time in which we are so thoroughly stuck is quite real indeed!

[Roberta Grimes]

Yes. And what's more, time never goes away. Anyone that tells you that there is no passage of time or any time in the afterlife is full of BS, because the problem is that humans don't see time for what it is. Time is the scientific version of God... it is both ever-present and nonexistent. It is everything, yet it is also nothing. Time is not a force of nature, nor is it adherent to our physical realm. Time cannot be shed off due to death. What time IS, to us, is a simple measurement. Time is nothing more than a descriptive word we assign to describe the flow of events in our lives. You get up. You get dressed and go to work. You come home, eat dinner, and go to bed. That is the flow of your events, and as such, that is the "passage" of time. When you die, you go through the motions of the experience, and eventually arrive in the afterlife, in some form. Whatever you do in the afterlife, you do. And as you do it, you do it. That is the "passage" of time. You can remain in the afterlife for a bajillion eons, and time will still exist, due to the unshakeable and simple fact that whatever you do takes time. That is a fact. If you explore a garden in the Summerland, and then decide to visit a heavenly library, and after that decide to go to your heavenly home, the process of all those events unfolding is time... you do one, then the other, then the other. In that regard, time is and always will be. There is an interval between the time that you die, and the time you reincarnate. There was a time before this universe, and there will be a time after it. Just because we weren't here to see it doesn't mean that WE somehow made up time. People need to understand how to regard the true nature of time, so they can speak about it with some knowledge.

Dear Bruce, when I first read this post my thought was, "Oh dear - how can I disagree without offending someone so dear and so earnest as our wonderful Bruce?" But then I read it again, and I realized that you and I are saying pretty much the same thing: time is not objectively real, but yet insofar as we are able to determine we always are going to experience time. Time is "both ever-present and nonexistent." So true! Perhaps the only quibble I would have is with your saying that there was time before the universe began, and there will be time after it (this is akin to a stumper of a question that Mac was asking in another thread). Dear Bruce, we cannot be certain about this, either way; but there is evidence that time, matter, its correlate energy, and space all were created at the dawn of the universe - and if that is what happened, then the end of the universe likely also will see the end of what you and I think of as time. But that won't matter, since we are part of Mind. And as part of Mind, we can create a convenient illusion of time whenever we like!

In my post to Greg above I forgot to mention the biggest time-related head-scratcher that we find when we research the afterlife, which is our life-reviews. Each of us has one not long after death, and we are told repeatedly that we get to experience every event of the life just completed from the perspective of each of the participants in each event. But yet doing that seems not to take much time - certainly not nearly as much time as it took to live the earth-life itself, or else how could we ever communicate with our dead loved ones? If they experienced time in the same way that we do, for the whole rest of our earth-lives following their deaths they would be busy re-living their earth-lives! This seems to be the most dramatic bit of evidence that time in the afterlife is subjective. Clearly, our loved ones speed right through what feels to them like a reliving of their entire lives in what to us is hardly any time at all, since witness the fact that some of them are in touch with us almost immediately after their deaths.

Time is a puzzler, all right! But that doesn't matter when it is Mind (including our minds) which creates it, and Mind can apparently manipulate it at will.

[Greg]

Smelly apartment bit not posted by me

On about time existing,I didnt mean to sound sarcastic or anything by the way,its just that i've read so many different views on the subject

Thanks for the replies by the way too

[BruceAdama]

Dear Bruce, when I first read this post my thought was, "Oh dear - how can I disagree without offending someone so dear and so earnest as our wonderful Bruce?" But then I read it again, and I realized that you and I are saying pretty much the same thing: time is not objectively real, but yet insofar as we are able to determine we always are going to experience time. Time is "both ever-present and nonexistent." So true! Perhaps the only quibble I would have is with your saying that there was time before the universe began, and there will be time after it (this is akin to a stumper of a question that Mac was asking in another thread). Dear Bruce, we cannot be certain about this, either way; but there is evidence that time, matter, its correlate energy, and space all were created at the dawn of the universe - and if that is what happened, then the end of the universe likely also will see the end of what you and I think of as time. But that won't matter, since we are part of Mind. And as part of Mind, we can create a convenient illusion of time whenever we like!

In my post to Greg above I forgot to mention the biggest time-related head-scratcher that we find when we research the afterlife, which is our life-reviews. Each of us has one not long after death, and we are told repeatedly that we get to experience every event of the life just completed from the perspective of each of the participants in each event. But yet doing that seems not to take much time - certainly not nearly as much time as it took to live the earth-life itself, or else how could we ever communicate with our dead loved ones? If they experienced time in the same way that we do, for the whole rest of our earth-lives following their deaths they would be busy re-living their earth-lives! This seems to be the most dramatic bit of evidence that time in the afterlife is subjective. Clearly, our loved ones speed right through what feels to them like a reliving of their entire lives in what to us is hardly any time at all, since witness the fact that some of them are in touch with us almost immediately after their deaths.

Time is a puzzler, all right! But that doesn't matter when it is Mind (including our minds) which creates it, and Mind can apparently manipulate it at will.

Well, I agree with you for the most part, Roberta, but I think to better articulate my point using your own terms, what I was trying to say is that time IS what you call Mind... that's what I meant by saying that time is the scientific equivalent of God... it is both everything and nothing. This is why there was time before and will be time after the universe. God is, was, and always shall be. So is time. Like God, it simply "is". You are true that we cannot be certain of time before or after the universe, however, to be fair, to answer such a question would mean we much then ask the question of "is the universe eternal?". If it is, it will not end. But since I've read from various NDE accounts that ours is but one of many universes that God has created, and that universes get born and die all the time, I choose to believe that yes, there was time before, and there will be after. To put it simply, time cannot be stuck to our physical universe because time itself is not physical. Time is the all... it was, is, and always shall be.

[Roberta Grimes]

Well, I agree with you for the most part, Roberta, but I think to better articulate my point using your own terms, what I was trying to say is that time IS what you call Mind... that's what I meant by saying that time is the scientific equivalent of God... it is both everything and nothing. This is why there was time before and will be time after the universe. God is, was, and always shall be. So is time. Like God, it simply "is". You are true that we cannot be certain of time before or after the universe, however, to be fair, to answer such a question would mean we much then ask the question of "is the universe eternal?". If it is, it will not end. But since I've read from various NDE accounts that ours is but one of many universes that God has created, and that universes get born and die all the time, I choose to believe that yes, there was time before, and there will be after. To put it simply, time cannot be stuck to our physical universe because time itself is not physical. Time is the all... it was, is, and always shall be.

This is neat, dear friend - we disagree a little bit! As I see it, dear Bruce, time is derivative - it is not primary. Mind is the thinker, while time is a thought. Mind exists outside of time altogether! So Mind is eternal by definition, because it is not bound by time - it has no beginning and no end. Time is not God, dear wonderful Bruce. And it will not always "be." I am especially struck by how subjective time is in the afterlife levels, how elastic, how slippery and non-primary! This may seem to some like a kind of meaningless how-many-angels-can-dance-on-the-head-of-a-pin sort of argument, but it really is not: the nature of time is a central (and stubborn) issue in any deeper study of the afterlife. And from where we sit, it seems to be nearly impossible to completely understand!

[Flatliner4]

Is there time to answer the original question ? yes
In my opinion , when you see the darkness you will believe its there . You cannot have light without darkness . It is a balance an neither would exist without the other .