We often view life through space and time as a journey from there to here, from birth to death, from moment to moment. We seek substance and the space between substance; we waste time and we yearn for more time.
We experience a path that branches out before us, inviting us to make choices, based on past mistakes and future dreams. We believe ourselves to be a product of yesterday; forged by others through our upbringing, education and life-experiences.
However, this is simply a by-product of consciousness… one that has been experienced over generations and contextualised into the way we are taught to survive. And, it is in this survival that the challenges arise.
We need five things to lead a contented life. Air to breathe, water to drink, food to eat, shelter to keep us safe and community for companionship. Beyond these five things, everything else is a story and therefore is not essential for our survival.
Yet the stories we are told are designed to plug into our instinctual need to survive, causing concern about one or more of those five things. Insurers questioning the safety of your home, supermarkets presenting you with bargains on food, the turning of water into wine… because the water was so polluted it would probably kill the drinker, so wine was a much safer alternative to ditchwater.
The stories we are told on a daily basis have become so sophisticated that we believe them to be our reality, even to the detriment of our health and wellbeing. The stories actually stop us from attaining the five things we need, or cause us to question our ability to attain them!
Everything you experience, that is not these five needs, is a story… and beyond those five needs, stories are also essential, inasmuch as they give our life meaning or context. Without a reason to live, we have a tendency to stop seeking the five essential needs and soon falter.
So, once you have the five things to keep your body alive—to survive—you need a story to live by, to strive for, to make your legacy—to keep your mind alive. You can believe the stories you have been told or you can create your own story…
Somewhere out there in the Universe—within what we would call space and time—there exists a future you. This future you has attained everything they could have ever hope or dream for. They have lived a full, rich and joyful life. They have experienced many blissful moments, stepped out on such wonderful adventures and achieved such extraordinary successes with the blink-of-an-eye life they had.
To get to them from where you are is a path. This path is taken one step at a time and one step after the other. It is simple and whilst it may meander now and then, it is a definable and discernible path.
Your future self knows how they got to where they are and could describe it in vivid detail if asked. However, your present self has an infinite array of choices when it comes to the next step and the step after that. How can you possibly know what your future self knows?
It may be possible to reach that reality and make it your own, but surely with so many other choices—such an abundance of alternative stories—that reality is more likely to be lost in all the vastness of space and time.
Except… space and time are stories—a by-product of consciousness. And when you tell yourself a new story, you can make that story the journey from here to there.
For all that separates us is space and time; without those illusions, we are all one. We were one at the big bang and are one at the end of it all. We were not fashioned out of clay, manufactured or made… we grew from oneness and are still oneness… even if most of the stories tell us otherwise.
You are the twig at the end of a branch that grew out of the trunk, not the table that was constructed when the tree was cut down. You are born of one and therefore, you are one.
And remembering one is simply one step away…
