The Infinite

[The Sage Nabooru]

This is something that's been popping up in my mind recently, as I ponder what "eternity" is and could be.......

 

One of the biggest reasons I dropped out of the CWG movement was the fact that Walsch promotes the idea that 1. We exist so that God can "experience itself" through us, and 2. Because the universe and experience is finite, upon uniting with God as the final goal, we forget everything we've learned and start out all over again. Lacking, to say the least; such a belief, IMO, totally negates studying spirituality at all. If I'm just going to end up back here again anyway, then why bother?

 

So I decided that I was not going to be Walsch's God's pawn running the cosmic treadmill over and over so it can "experience itself" through me. If it wants to experience it can do it on its own damn time. I'm above it, and I effectively rebelled against that God.

 

But, what happens when I do reach the end of the universe (if there is one)? I think one of the biggest fears among spiritual believers is the thought that we spend the afterlife bored. After all, there's only so much to do and see, right?

 

I disagree. Let's say I achieve nirvana or moksha, and effectively leave this planet's mortal, physical existence forever. Where I go after that is entirely unknown; some traditions assert I go on to a utopic world within the universe, or transcend above it. Now I take the view that there are several universes. I might leave the "mortal" universe, for example, and enter the "next higher" universe. After reaching that universe of bliss, and exploring it over, oh, maybe four million years, I find myself coming to new spiritual conclusions that were not possible to reach on the previous plane. It may eventually come to pass that I transcend all universes. Now, if several universes exist, it makes sense that they must exist within something else - even if there is nothing between one universe and the next, that "nothing" would have to be something; a sort of superuniverse. Having reached that level of development, exploring the territory, perhaps morphing into the kind of being people on earth worship. And so on and so on.

 

Now this isn't some kind of heavenly bureacracy ruled by God, who dictates my movements; rather, my own growth and development and overall my own changing, over time, dictated by no one but myself as I discover new realities. For example, I may discover what is really behind this "natural law", or physics, or exactly why things are what they are - and then reach a point where those laws and physics no longer apply, having moved beyond them, and placing myself in a new level.

 

(I think we are beings of God, and that God develops with us as we develop ourselves; the two ideas are basically the same to me.)

 

The point I'm trying to make is that the "infinite" is, I think, often misdefined as meaning simply Heaven or a linear idea of chronology, which makes the afterlife look bleak and boring indeed. But the fact is, if something is truly infinite, that means it never ends. There is never anything left to explore. It may even be possible that universes can be infinite, each one, yet each lying in a space containing them, simply because beyond our own universe our own physics no longer apply. Cycles exist in our own reality, on a physical level, in the sense of the universe growing and then destroying itself, and planets growing and falling away. Perhaps within this spiritual universe, when the universe ends, those spirits still within really do experience what we call self-creation again; but as for those outside, the story is different. We are not even neccessarily at the bottom; it may be that we serve as a higher level from other states of being.

 

Now when I get to the superuniverse level, I generally start making my head hurt, so I stop there. But ultimately I believe that as long as the infinite exists, boredom or "forgetting" cannot.

[Pantonality]

One of the biggest reasons I dropped out of the CWG movement was the fact that Walsch promotes the idea that 1. We exist so that God can "experience itself" through us, and 2. Because the universe and experience is finite, upon uniting with God as the final goal, we forget everything we've learned and start out all over again. Lacking, to say the least; such a belief, IMO, totally negates studying spirituality at all. If I'm just going to end up back here again anyway, then why bother?

 

So I decided that I was not going to be Walsch's God's pawn running the cosmic treadmill over and over so it can "experience itself" through me. If it wants to experience it can do it on its own damn time. I'm above it, and I effectively rebelled against that God.

Hi Sage,

 

What you've described is a completely different understanding of Walsch's message than what I believe it to be. My understanding of Walsch's message is not that God experiences itself through us, but that we are individuations of the Creator experiencing lives that we create in order to experience all aspects and facets of human experience. At the end of the rainbow (which is VEERRRYYYY long) our souls will eventually choose on their own to start over. I read "Home with God" and this message was very clear. Our souls enjoy the afterlife for as long as we choose and when we get bored (or have fully processed the events of a particular lifetime) we can choose to incarnate again. Nothing happens unless we choose it to because we are the Creator recreating ourselves over and over. There is no overriding intelligence to the universe, there is simply "All that is" and our individual part of it gets final say over how it recreates itself. No entity tells you what to do, you are the master of your existence.

 

I disagree. Let's say I achieve nirvana or moksha, and effectively leave this planet's mortal, physical existence forever. Where I go after that is entirely unknown; some traditions assert I go on to a utopic world within the universe, or transcend above it. Now I take the view that there are several universes. I might leave the "mortal" universe, for example, and enter the "next higher" universe. After reaching that universe of bliss, and exploring it over, oh, maybe four million years, I find myself coming to new spiritual conclusions that were not possible to reach on the previous plane. It may eventually come to pass that I transcend all universes. Now, if several universes exist, it makes sense that they must exist within something else - even if there is nothing between one universe and the next, that "nothing" would have to be something; a sort of superuniverse. Having reached that level of development, exploring the territory, perhaps morphing into the kind of being people on earth worship. And so on and so on.

 

Now this isn't some kind of heavenly bureacracy ruled by God, who dictates my movements; rather, my own growth and development and overall my own changing, over time, dictated by no one but myself as I discover new realities. For example, I may discover what is really behind this "natural law", or physics, or exactly why things are what they are - and then reach a point where those laws and physics no longer apply, having moved beyond them, and placing myself in a new level.

 

I don't think anything you've said is in disagreement with what I wrote. I think the structure you describe is a little "old school" in that you perceive yourself as possibly evolving into a being that people on earth would worship. In the Walschian universe you are already that, but have chosen to accept the limitations of this mortal existence. I believe the end you seek is as close as your own demise from this life, but that further evolution on the spiritual side is still possible. Consider it a divine dichotomy, when we pass from this life we reconnect with "All that is" and have full access and knowledge of all that is contained within this infinite intelligence and yet our own personalities can continue to evolve there as we process our lives and how we impacted others. One of the features common to many published death experiences (aka Near Death Experiences) is the life review in which the deceased relives their life with the addition of an understanding of how their actions impacted and were perceived by everyone else whose life they touched. So it would seem there is a body of experience that supports this notion.

 

Of course all this is simply speculation based on the reported experiences of others and writings of mere mortals such as Neale Walsch. There is no knowing. Even the avid atheists on this forum don't know their beliefs to be true. They are simply choosing not to believe that which cannot be proven based on our current science. This same science has no idea what 95% of the universe is. Our current science seems to indicate that 95% of the universe consists of what it calls dark matter and dark energy. That same science speculates that some of this dark stuff is WIMPs (weakly interacting massive particles), but has never successfully shown such a thing to exist and has no further explanation nor even speculation beyond that. In other words the role of skeptic is valuable only in deflating bronze age speculations (the Bible, Koran and all other sacred writings) that have been codified as sacred. Yours and my beliefs are based on more current information (reported NDEs, current science, other spiritual writings), but nobody knows. Any opinions offered here or anywhere else that purport to definitively define what the universe really is, is just hot air.

 

What's important is to remove the judgment and condemnation that was usually part of old school spiritual belief. If we can rationally process the information available to us in order to seek resolutions to conflicts that serve the highest interests of all we would go a long way toward creating a just and peaceful world. I believe the first step toward doing that is acknowledging that no one of us has all the answers.

 

It seems humans want to know the unknowable and we create grand speculations based on what we can observe. Your and my belief systems will differ because we've had different experiences, have studied different things, etc. I'd like to think that my own belief system is internally consistent (something that appealed to me in Walsch's writings) and agrees with the published experiences of others and current science. It seems to me that's about as much as any human could ask. If science comes up with something significant that blows my beliefs out of the water, it'll be time to punt. Though I'll probably just adapt current thought to the new information just as I did when confronted with the evidence that the expansion of the universe is accelerating.

 

Now when I get to the superuniverse level, I generally start making my head hurt, so I stop there. But ultimately I believe that as long as the infinite exists, boredom or "forgetting" cannot.

There is so much we don't know that it may seem infinite from our perspective, thus it seems boredom and forgetting are far in the future. We are not a highly evolved society so we have the experience of that ahead of us, unless we exterminate ourselves first because we choose not to seek resolutions to our conflicts that serve the highest interest of all.

[Evolution_beyond]

I don't think your views are necessarily in variance with CWG at all.

 

One of the things about that view of the afterlife is that it never ends - but just keeps getting bigger and bigger.

 

If there is an 'all' of things then it is certainly a long way off. At that point, the soul may want to return to start off all over again. Because by that time the soul may want to.

 

However if it is truly infinite then it could conceivably go on and on forever. And that would be very exciting I think.

 

Obviously experiencing the same thing over and over again would be boring (one of the BIG problems with the Christian heaven) - but experiencing new and different things and this never coming to an end - very exciting!

 

Erm... I don't really believe any of this anymore. I've settled for a material reality only (because the Universe is quite fascinating and mysterious enough for my devotional energy - and there is no real evidence of anything else)

 

But the CWG material is definitely the closest to a worthwhile spirituality IF there turns out to be something more

[Skankboy]

In my experience, neither the "infinite" nor the "eternal" exist in reality. Even the universe is finite (if you listen to Dr. Hawking), so why would anything else be different? Outside of abstract mathematics, that is...

[The Sage Nabooru]

Well, if the universe is finite, then I think it must exist within something. To me, there cannot just be "universe" and that is the edge of existence, nothing more beyond that. Our numbers extend infinitely; there is no number so small you cannot halve it further. There is no number so large you cannot double it further.

 

I don't understand why we would choose to return to square one. Like I said before, it suggests that there is only so much to experience, which bothers me - Walsch said in Q&A that there is only a finite number of souls, for example, so we had to start sharing them! - and that we must start out again to keep things interesting. We would be "bored", otherwise.

 

But to suggest that is to make, IMO, the same mistake as one makes with worries over the Christian heaven concept: that heaven/existence, while eternal, is finite in activity and/or development. I don't see why I would choose to forget everything when I simply could continue expanding.

 

What is there to be bored with? What is there to be trapped within? Why are we limited so? To suggest that forgetfulness is a neccessary evil to really enjoy experience (because otherwise we would be "bored"), would be the same as to say, IMO, that there is no existence outside that of planet Earth, and once we have fully explored our planet, we have no choice but to blow it to bits with nuclear bombs so we can start civilization all over again.

[HuaiDan]

Blowing smoke here, but it could be the universe recurves on itself beyond a certain point. You can't even refer to the time before the singularity, because time wasn't existent. The only thing I can imagine is that you could never reach the boundary of the universe, only curve back to another place.