'You're right, Xendo. Sorry. Stupid question. I'm sorry; I interrupted you!'
'Not at all, Jordan! We are honoured to be able to discuss these matters with you and would be most willing and happy to learn from you and your people as well. For Solari and me, this is the first time we have ever spoken to somebody from your continent. We learn about you and your world, of course, and we even interact with you, but only in holograms.'
'Really? What do you mean?'
'We'll tell you all about it later!' interjected Solari. 'Look!'
We were now so high up in the sky that I could see the curvature of the Earth! I had seen the photos and the videos of this view like everyone else, but I had never imagined it was so movingly beautiful. How did we get here so fast? And in such a frail little vehicle!
'Don't worry, Jordan! It's not that frail!' laughed Solari, as we gradually began to descend.
'Thanks to the bravery and perseverance of our pilots, ' continued Xendo, 'we have now charted the Earth and indeed, much of the Solar System, based on its acoustic and electromagnetic vibrational frequency.'
'Oh, and we also travel by astral projection, but it's not quite the same!' Solari chimed in.
'But can you actually travel backwards and forwards through time?'
'Ah, time. When you say time, what do you understand by it?' she asked, mischievously.
'Good question! I know that time isn't what it used to be! Or isn't that what they say about the future? Ha-ha. Seriously, though, just over a century ago, scientists would have laughed if anybody mentioned the term space-time continuum. But now it's mainstream.We now know that time is linked to the speed of light. Speed slows time down. Though even that very thought makes my head spin. Anyway, time, our medium of measurement based on the rotation and the orbit of the Earth, is flexible, but if you ask me, well, time is pretty much indefinable!'
'What if I told you that time doesn't exist at all?'
'I must remember to tell my wife next time I'm home late from the office!'
'The past and the future do not exist. Otherwise we wouldn't be able to travel through time. What you call the Grandfather Paradox cannot happen, it cannot happen if there is no time,' she said.
Xendo picked up quickly on my struggling attempt to remember what the Grandfather Paradox was all about.
'The Grandfather Paradox is an idea your scientists came up with, that if you go back in time and kill your grandfather, you don't exist any more.'
'Ah yes, now I remember!'
'So you wouldn't even have been born.'
'What a horrible thought!' remarked Solari.
'Never being born?' laughed Xendo. 'Surely not!'
'Killing your grandfather!' she affirmed.
'It wasn't my idea!' he laughed. 'So there's no paradox, Jordan, if there's no time.'
'But... we get old....we die...don't we?' I queried, like a six-year-old.
'Everything, except consciousness, my dear,' she explained, 'is subject to entropy. Everything declines gradually from order to disorder. Almost everything - but that's too complex to go into right now. There is no passage of time. Everything happens in the present moment, like still frames in a celluloid movie.'
'But the frames move. They move through time. No?'
'Because you believe in time,' continued Xendo, 'you think there is a flux, a passage of time. You see the frames of the film rolling at speed, unnoticeably, one after the other. But when it comes to time, you are the ones that move, not the frames.'
I couldn't get my head around this at all until he began to speak about parallel lives, a conversation killer in the pubs at home because there was no way you could either prove or refute it. I used to think of parallel universes like soap bubbles, trillions of them, suspended in the vacuum of space, crowding together, extending cheek to cheek into infinity.
'No, Jordan, it's not like that,' responded Xendo.
Of course, I'd forgotten to edit my thoughts again!
'The infinite number of parallel universes exist within this universe. The parallel realities are right here, right in front of our noses.'
'And I can only live in one of those realities at any single moment.'
'If, say, there are twenty-four frames per second in a celluloid film, each frame is projected onto the screen for one twenty-fourth of a second. Right?'
'Right.'
'Well, that one-twenty fourth of a second is you in a parallel reality.'
'So I keep shifting into a new reality.'
'Yes, every time you make a choice, conscious or unconscious. It's like your radio stations or TV channels. You can only tune into one station or one channel at a time. The movement from one reality to another at every frame is the illusion of the passage of time.'
'So that's what people mean when they say we choose our own reality. We select the world we want to live in, every frame?'
'Yes,' he answered. 'You choose.'
'And that world can be a world of fear or a world of love,' added Solari. 'It's always your choice.'
'Why would anybody choose a world of fear?' 'Consciously, nobody would choose fear. The choice is made unconsciously. Even the choice itself is based on fear, the fear of making the wrong choice. Or the fear of leaving a comfort zone, the fear of change. What else do you fear? Well, you fear you may not get what you want. Or you fear you may get what you don't want. Fear draws its energy from a state of anticipation of what might happen. Fear can't live in the present. And vibrationally, fear attracts fear. So you live in a world of fear.'
'You must assume responsibility for your own happiness, Jordan,' Xendo added. 'In your society, most people seem to think that life is something that just happens to them. They believe that their present is the result of their past. If you believe that, your present can become the outcome of your past, but only by your choice, your thoughts and beliefs relating to your past!'
'And that would be wrong because your past is a series of parallel lives!' I added, as it was all beginning to dawn on me. 'You are not your past!'
'Indeed,' affirmed Xendo, 'you might remember images of yourself as a young man or as a teenager or as a child. But that's as far as the relationship goes. The child, that teenager, that young man, each of those moments in the life of the young man, the teenager, the child, they're all gone, they all live in separate realities, they are not you any more. They live in different realities.'
'You can say that again!'
'They live in different realities!'
'Haha, no, it's just an expression. I wasn't asking you to repeat it.'
'I know!' laughed Xendo. 'I was just kidding too!'
'And are they still alive, all those Jordans in their separate realities?'
'Maybe.'
'I'm trying to get a grip on this, Xendo: at a certain point in time as a young man, say, one of an infinite number of Jordans took a certain path and went off to live in a different reality and assuming he's still alive, he is still living that different reality, one of billions of different lives, different paths, different realities, experienced in a sequence of moments that are all in the present, like the frames in a reel of film. Is that it?'
'One thing to bear in mind, however, is that even though one may die in a parallel life, having taken a certain path, the overall pattern is recognisably you and your life. What is different, what is extra, is that the experience of life on Earth, of interfacing with the created universe, is not just confined to a single linear life of, say, a hundred years or less, but to an uncountable number of lives during that single lifetime. So in terms of experiential awareness, the number of encounters is uncountable. Welcome to your co-creation, Jordan!'
'But people's memories, their actions in the past, of what they did, surely that's all part of who they are, isn't it? I mean, we'd panic if we didn't have a past! Wouldn't we? Who would I be if I didn't have a past? '
'We seem to be the only species in the Galaxy who asks that question. Certainly the only species on Earth. All the other sentient beings around us don't lose a night's sleep over such a silly question, do they? Our sense of identity here on Earth, based on a past, based on collected or selected memories, is actually part of the problem.'
'Why do you call it a problem?'
'Because those fragments of your past in your memory are like the jigsaw pieces in the puzzle that make up your artificial sense of self, your so-called identity. You may carry a burden of knowledge, expanding your sense of self, but it is not you. If anything, the burden gets in your way, dulls your sense of innocence, of spontaneity, of playfulness, of wonder, of discovery, of the present moment.'
'The past,' Solari added, 'is part of what you were as an individual, living in that chosen reality at that moment. It's a separate universe, a different reality, an uncountable number of different realities you stepped into as your body changed from moment to moment. Even physically, as you know, we are never the same person from moment to moment. Your body is never the same body. Even before I finish making this comment, you and I will have lost and replaced at least fifty million cells.'
'But what about responsibility? People have to be responsible for their actions in the past, don't they?'
'Of course. But it's not their past. It's not the past. It's that particular point in the unchanging present. The criminal who commits the crime is never the same person who committed the crime. Similar, of course, but not the same. He couldn't be the same; 98% of all the atoms in his body will have been replaced within a single year.'
'So the person we punish is not the same person who caused the offence? That's a bit of a conundrum for the judge, isn't it?'
'No. The judge punishes the crime. One forgives the criminal, not the crime. There is no criminal; there is only the crime. There is no evil, only evil deeds.'
'And what about repentance? There can't be forgiveness without repentance, can there?'
'True atonement, at-one-ment, is understanding, not repentance. It is not to say: I'm sorry; but rather, I understand. Or better still: It is understood. What is understood? That the offence was done in a state of unconsciousness, and that as much harm was done to the offender as to the offended, because both are part of the same source energy, part of the same web of life.'
'Phew! This is very difficult, Solari. I think I'd be locked up if I went around preaching that at home. So do you think reality itself is an illusion?'
'Of course. But that doesn't make it any less real! Ha-ha! For example, how do you think your five senses function? Your senses interpret what you perceive. How? Inside your brain and in your body, of course. Light itself is perceived inside, deep within the darkness of your brain and your inner body. What do you think is really out there? As we mentioned earlier, everything you believe to be out there is just a vibration of energy and information which your body decodes as being real. Reality for us humans here on Earth sharing the same organs, bodily functions and senses, is reality by human consensus. That reality may look similar, but certainly not the same, to our bluebottle! '
'We decode it, like the radio station.'
'The music leaves its source at the studio encoded in waves, drifts through the air, through the walls of your home, and reaches your radio in the form of wave frequencies. Then the radio decodes it back into music. That is exactly how you perceive the world. You are the radio. Reality is vibration until you decode it into what you perceive and agree to be reality. That is why we say reality is an illusion. It is pure vibration.'
'OK.
So I choose my station, moment by moment. How do I know how to make the best choice?'
'Joy. Always choose joy!' beamed Solari.'Joy,' I echoed, joylessly, a bit bemused at this stage, trying to take it all in.
'I think you understand what we mean by joy, Jordan,' ventured Xendo. 'Not gratification, not comfort, not even physical, mental or emotional pleasure, but joy. Inner peace. Not happiness. Happiness is unrealistic. How can you be happy in an unhappy world? Joy doesn't have to be happy, you know. It can be outside of your comfort zone. It doesn't even have to have the appearance of joy. Indeed, sometimes it even looks quite sad. Sometimes it peers out at the world through a flood of tears. Do you understand what I mean?'
'Choose joy and joy will choose you,' said Solari. 'Joy is our natural state. Before we were born. After we retUrn. There is only joy.'
'How do you know when it's joy? How do you know you're experiencing joy? Or is that a stupid question? '
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