The Ostrich and the Elephant

A blog on spirituality, science, philosophy, ETs, and mental health

Tag: Future

  • Enlightenment is an Illusion Too

    Eternity is in love with the productions of time

    William Blake

    I had quite a deep realization a few days ago regarding the nature of “enlightenment”. That is, enlightenment never happens in the future.

    I had heard this type of teaching from many teachers in the past, but this time it struck me more deeply.

    Enlightenment is a useful word in one way because it suggests to us that there is a very different way of perceiving the world than the way most humans generally do.

    This is very useful because it’s true. There is a very different way to perceive the world.

    The word becomes a double-edged sword though, because it then suggests to people that enlightenment is an “event” that may happen to “me” in “the future”.

    This is where it becomes problematic, because the future doesn’t actually exist, it is just a collection of thoughts that occur in the present moment.

    We have learned from Einstein’s theories of special and general relativity that the nature of time is very different to how we usually conceive of it. It fluctuates depending on the observer and their particular reference point.

    Time literally slows down as gravity increases. As an object increases its speed, time runs slower relative to objects moving slower. This was exemplified in the movie Interstellar, where, upon returning to Earth, the inhabitants there had aged significantly quicker than those who travelled at high speeds through space.

    Usually this effect is so small we don’t notice it. You need to be travelling very fast for it to become obvious. But it still exists in our world too. Walk from your room to the living room while someone is sitting on the couch watching TV. You have aged less in that time than the stationary person, only so minutely you haven’t noticed it.

    Of course, in our universe, nothing is ever truly “stationary” – the person sitting on the couch is spinning around the axis of the Earth at roughly 1,600 kilometres per hour at the equator, which is rotating around the sun at roughly 107,000 kilometres per hour, and our solar system is moving through our galaxy, which is moving through space itself. This is why Einstein’s theories were called “relativity” and not “absolutivity”. Everything is dependent upon the observer and their particular reference point in space-time.

    Do you live in an apartment block on the second floor? Because of the (very slightly) reduced gravitational field of Earth where you are, the people living below you age slower than you. Again, so minutely you can’t perceive it except with the most accurate clocks available. And don’t worry about trying to get the ground floor – to you it won’t seem as though you’ve aged quicker, time will appear to you as having gone on at the same rate. It will only be in comparison to the person living below that time will have appeared to go slower. A total mind-job I know.

    So, we have learned from Einstein’s equations that time is not a static construct, moving along at a fixed rate, but instead a perspective that changes relative to the person observing.

    At the very least, we have learned that time is not what we usually think it is.

    Many philosophers, and any enlightened person worth their salt, go further. They suggest time is not actually real at all, it is merely a construct created in the mind of the conscious observer in order to, in a sense, categorise our experiences.

    But there is no real evidence for it in our universe. As the scientist Robert Lanza stated, “you can’t put it in a bottle like milk.”

    The only evidence we think we have of it is that we have a memory – in the present moment – of something having been one way, and now being a different way, and we surmise that this supposed change that occurred has occurred in “time”.

    But as the Greek philosopher Parmenides once annoyingly said to a friend of his, “just because my hand was over here and now it’s over here doesn’t mean that anything has changed.”

    This is something that on initial inspection can sound completely ridiculous, but to illustrate this point, I’ll give an example philosophers often use as a model to explain this called the “block universe”. This is the type of universe many philosophers believe we live in (pictured below), where the past and the future both simultaneously exist as set constructs. From this perspective it’s easy to see how someone could claim that “nothing ever changes”.

    The block universe theory, where the past and future are set in stone and each slice of the block constitutes a present moment experience

    In my opinion the block universe is an incorrect model of our universe because quantum mechanics still leaves open every possible future state, and even, mind-bogglingly, past states, from the present moment. But it is a useful model to illustrate how it’s possible that time doesn’t actually exist as an independent entity, it is merely created from a perspective in the present moment.

    Have you ever experienced this thing you call “the future”? Have you even ever experienced this thing called “the past”? Or have you only ever experienced *thoughts* about these things in the present moment? Have you ever been anywhere else but the present? So why believe in something you have never experienced? In other words, why believe in something there is no evidence for?

    This is why enlightenment can never be an event that happens in the future. There is no real future, there is only now. Believing enlightenment may happen in the future will actually prevent you from waking up to the now, which is what enlightenment is.

    Enlightenment happens now or never. Because there is only now. Literally.

    In love and light,

    Will.

    For more stories like this, including mental health, extraterrestrials, and spirituality, please subscribe to my blog, or follow my Facebook page “The Ostrich and the Elephant”, or find me on Twitter @willkenway, Medium @willkenway, or Instagram @will.kenway. Thanks!

  • My Message is Really Just Love

    I write about a lot of things on my blog: mental health, spiritual awakening, the reality of the extraterrestrial phenomenon; but at the end of the day it all really boils down to one thing: Love.

    I believe love is the highest emotion a human can experience, and I believe it is what we are all deeply searching for. All our actions to attain pleasure, success, fame, money – it all comes down to a deep desire to experience love, to experience connection. To love, and to be loved.

    If the content I am posting does not share more love, more freedom, more joy, more truth, then I think what I’m writing is a waste of time. Or, worse than that, it is actually harmful to those reading it.

    I think as humans we are really so much more powerful than we think we are, and we have a much greater influence on the world around us than we think we do.

    One of my favourite quotes by one of my favourite spiritual teachers is by a guy called Adyashanti (his name is a Sanskrit word meaning “primordial peace”). He once said: “If most human beings truly realized the impact that they have on the whole, they’d be crushed by the realization of it.”

    I experienced this during my spiritual awakening. At a certain point I began to realize just how much fear and sadness and pain I had been causing and was causing to those around me by my actions and by my state of consciousness. This led to me one night alone in a park, lying on the grass with my hands on my heart just repeating “I’m sorry… I’m sorry… I’m sorry…” I’m sorry for all the pain and hurt I have caused by my actions, and I’m sorry for not realizing what I was doing at the time.

    You see, as humans we often think in a very simple, linear way. In mathematical terms, we think we either add more happiness or subtract more happiness, but it is so much more than that. So so much more. Not only is our effect on the whole not just a simple additions or subtractions, it’s not even a multiplication or division: Our effect on the whole is exponential.

    Someone once told me a little fact: If you give a compliment to three people, and each of those three people give a compliment to three more people, etc etc, then by level 15 every single person in Australia has received a compliment. That’s almost 10 million people (although the population of Australia has grown significantly since then). So, in just 15 simple steps, every single person in Australia is happier.

    But it’s not just compliments, it’s our simple, everyday interactions with people. Are we approaching other people from a place of love and openness, or are we approaching other people from a place of fear and contraction?

    You see, thanks to good old mathematics, we really are actually so much more powerful than we think, and simple acts of kindness, or simply being in a positive state of being has a profound impact on those around us, who then pass on that profound impact onto the other people they meet that day.

    Now, I believe there is a great awakening taking place on planet earth. It doesn’t really matter whether you also believe this to be true or not for what I’m saying to be true. But I believe through a range of avenues – technological, social, economic, environmental – we are becoming much more aware of our effect on the world around us, and are beginning to make big changes in these areas. But here’s the greatest thing: the changes we make don’t need to be huge, they just need to be little, as often as we are able. Like the Australian musician Paul Kelly sung, “from little things big things grow.”

    There’s a quote that says: “In an avalanche, no snowflake ever feels responsible.” But the flip side is also true. A whole bunch of snowflakes rolling down a mountain, grows exponentially and can produce a significant impact on anything that gets in its way.

    So, like the late comedian Bill Hicks once said, we have a very small, simple choice to make in each moment whether we are living from love or whether we are living from fear. That may sound cliched and oversimplified, but I think most profound things are simple.

    There are two sides to this awakening thing though. On the one hand, waking up means you finally start to see where all the problems are coming from. You start to see the fear and the anger and the sadness that has always been suppressed and swept under the rug. So it might not always seem like things are going *great* during this waking up period. Just look at American politics right now for a perfect example. But on the other side of the coin, the great thing about this awakening is that it’s happening all over the place, so as more and more people begin to wake up to these things and to their own contributions, it becomes easier and easier for others to do the same. This is why it is so important to “find your tribe”. Find people who have a similar outlook on life as you do, and this connection will amplify the awakening process happening in both of you. As Jesus once famously said, “wherever there are two or more gathered in my name, I am there.”

    The sad thing is, this means you may need to cut ties or keep your distance from people you no longer resonate with, or who have a very pessimistic view of life, because they will only bring you down and slow down your own evolution into who you really want to be.

    This is why I think things on earth are going to transform much quicker than most people realise. It is because of this exponential effect of those with similar visions joining with their little contributions into making in the end massive contributions.

    So while things may seem to be getting even darker and more chaotic at the moment, the opposite effect is also happening, and all we need to do, as Bill Hicks said, is choose love over fear. It really is as simple (and sometimes difficult) as that.

    But for those who find it difficult, remember what Jesus said when he was being crucified on the cross: “Forgive them Father, for they know not what they do.” That I think is the case with every negative action in the world. Every negative action comes from a place of misunderstanding – a misunderstanding of the interconnectedness of all life. If you truly begin to see life as all one, as one web of life, then how could you do something that would harm your neighbour? It would be like cutting off your own hand. It would no longer make sense. It really does start to become as clear as that. Or, as one of my idols, Helen Keller once said, “The highest result of education is tolerance.”

    Scientists have often stated that we live in a kind of “middle world” of the universe. We’re small enough, and move slowly enough, so that the effects of time dilation and space contraction don’t appear obvious to us, and we’re big enough so we don’t experience the quantum weirdness of things, where things appear to not really be things at all. But that doesn’t mean we’re not affected by these things, it’s just not as obviously apparent to us in most cases. The consequence of this is that our brains really only evolved for relatively simple things: find food, shelter, sexual partners – we didn’t evolve to understand concepts like infinity or to truly appreciate the effects of exponential growth. But these things are real whether we are able to conceptualize them effectively or not. I’ve included a picture of infinity below for your perusal.

    A picture of Infinity* (*not to scale)

    So, next time you’re out interacting with people, or even just by yourself in your room, just remember how powerful you are. You are exponentially powerful. You are so fucking powerful that your brain didn’t even evolve to be able to understand how powerful you are.

    How cool is that?

    For more stories like this, including mental health, extraterrestrials, and spirituality, please subscribe to my blog, follow my Facebook page “The Ostrich and the Elephant”, or find me on Twitter @willkenway, Medium @willkenway, or Instagram @will.kenway. Thanks!

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