Eternity, Time, the Soul, and Doctor Who

      When it comes to things that happen within the spiritual realm, we tend to place events which occur in order as though on a timeline. There is cause and there is effect. This should come as no surprise, because this is how the human brain is designed to work. It is designed to process everything within the context of four temporal spatial dimensions, one of which is a one dimensional vector of time. This is how we as human beings experience this world, and experience reality as a whole. We think, we must think in terms of past, present, and future because this is how our physical brains work within the four dimensions of our reality with which we constantly interact. Thus, judgment day is in the future in reference to our current “present.” The creation event or events are in the distant past in reference to where we are now. And there tends to be an assumption that those who came to be in the Lord’s presence 2000 years ago, have literally spent two thousand years in His presence.
     Here’s where this assumption gets wonky. Time, cause and effect, and the motion of time don’t exist in an eternal state. One of the most interesting things about light and the speed of light, is that the closer you get to the speed of light, the more time slows down for the object traveling. And for an object traveling at the speed of light, time stops altogether. Another really interesting observation is that spatial distance becomes meaningless for the object traveling at the speed of light. One could say that such an object, let’s say a photon, traveling at the speed of light is literally everywhere and "everywhen" all at once. This is true from the perspective of the photon even if it is not true for the observer of the photon.
     The Greek word in the New Testament for “eternal” is “aionios.” It doesn’t mean “forever” in its strictest sense. Rather, it carries more the meaning of “into the ages,” “ageless,” or “timeless.” That is, the thing which is “aionios” cannot be affected by the motion of time. Thus, no time can have passed in eternity because time itself is not in motion in eternity. A soul or consciousness which is in eternity doesn’t experience the passage of time, because there is no time to pass. Furthermore, all motion of time which we might experience might be seen in eternity as a line or a path which can be entered and engaged with at any point no matter where a soul or a consciousness might have left it.
     Consider the implications this might have for my previous thoughts on reincarnation. There is literally no reason that the consciousness of a person born in the 1900s could not reincarnate into a human being born say in the 1200s. There are already documented cases of children born in the late 1900s or 2000s claiming to be a person having been born in the 1800s. This seems more tenable as it is presumed the soul or consciousness just waits for that long to be reborn. But perhaps it didn’t wait at all, but was immediately reborn from eternity at a different future point along the timeline.
     While inherently flawed, one useful analogy in order to get the gist of this might be the concept of a personal time stream such as from Doctor Who. That is, each soul has their own chain of cause and effect local to them, and so experiences the events of the motion of time global to the creation much like a time traveler such as Doctor Who might. Thus each soul would experience each lifetime in a personal sequence out of sequence with the global order of events, and potentially carrying the baggage, emotional pain or spiritual growth, from each one to the next. There would be little risk of timeline contamination because the default for each new birth appears to be intentional amnesia for the conscious memory, with a relatively few exceptions, though of course the subconscious may be aware of the previous experiences. Another potential consequence might be the same soul at two different points along its local time stream inhabiting human beings that are contemporaneous within the global timeline. This would be something akin to the Tenth Doctor and the Eleventh Doctor running into each other at the same point in the global timeline.
     This could also fall in line with the experimentally verified observations from quantum physics that events in the present can affect events in the past in what is now termed by physicists, “retrocausality.” I’d be lying if I said I fully understood everything about this, but the experiments had to do with “present” observations affecting “past” outcomes.
     What this also implies, whatever one’s theology might be, is that from an eternal perspective, every frame, every snapshot of time’s motion is happening at once. I am both sitting at my desk on a farm in Kentucky as a 47 year old man, and I am a 4 year old boy having escaped preschool and walking two miles across a bridge over a deep gorge to get home, and I am both of these all at once from eternity’s perspective. Likewise from eternity’s perspective, both the raising of the pyramids and the general resurrection of the dead are also happening simultaneously.
     These are just my thoughts over the last couple of days. For me, it offers a greater perspective on my life and existence as a whole. Can I prove it? I could go through and do the research paper defending the concepts with more evidence and data, but I don’t think it’s necessary. Those who can accept it will, and those who can’t won’t. If it is reality, then it will continue to be reality whether someone believes it or not. If it isn’t, then it won’t.