As published in Frankly Speaking: A Collection of Essays, Writings & Rants. Excerpted from Cherotic Magic Revised by Frank Moore, 1993.
Seeing time as a dynamic pattern of relationships, instead of as a linear progression of events, fundamentally reshapes reality and how you react to reality. It makes guilt, remorse, and anger outmoded. When it is realized that what is done in the present automatically changes what has been done by you and what was done to you, such feeling actions as guilt, remorse, and blame are just continuing the past event into the future by way of the present. This is why looking to the past for the causes of the present seemingly difficult situation is only and ultimately prolonging and compounding the difficult situation.
For example, in childhood, you may have felt you were victimized by your parents. This is often translated into meaning you are a victim. Then this being a victim, as well as the original event, is usually repressed, hidden. But life becomes a long, and fruitless, attempt to not be a victim anymore. This attempt makes you a victim to life, reinforcing the original event, creating a negative myth around this one event, which gives the event more and more weight and importance, which curves reality more and more around this event.
Then within the present, the event is brought from hiding and is wrongly analyzed in a cause and effect way. Guilt and blame are dished out either on yourself or on the other (your parents, the rapist, the bully, the deformity, the situation). This stores up the energy of importance, thereby “distorting” reality, shifting this one event to the center of the reality frame. This distorting process is a self-feeding cycle. The more energy of importance that is invested in the event, the more energy is attracted to the event.
Avoiding or denying events, situations, people, fears, or doubts are other ways to invest the energy of importance. This is why exploring and analyzing these inner and outer events will release some of the pent-up energy…but just up to a certain point. After this point is reached, analyzing and focusing on a single event will just add to the pent-up energy of importance, adding to the downward spiral of self-indulgence. This spiral is linear.
To move away from this linear world of limitations, our self-awareness has to be admitted to. We exist in a nonlinear reality. Within this reality, there is space-time. Space-time is not the larger reality which we are calling the web of ultimate reality: space-time is just one possibility in the web.
We have seen time is not linear, but is a nonlinear ball. Science tells us time and space are aspects of the same web. Time-space is a nonlinear ball. Each of us sits in the center of this web ball. In the center, the person affects everything and is affected by everything. His every act and word affects everything fundamentally because it comes out of everything. In this reality, every act is important, as important as Jesus dying on the cross for our sins, as important as Adam and Eve eating the apple, or a nuclear war. These are just symbols for the every act, every word, every thought each of us makes always. Each act either saves and uplifts everyone, or condemns and degrades everyone. Each of us lives and dies for everyone.
Within this nonlinear dynamic interplay context of reality, everything takes on a high but equal level of importance. Casualness appears to be an avoidance of power and responsibility. By knowing everything you do, say, and think matters has a profound and direct effect on literally everyone, you are less likely to be sloppy in your life.
In this nonlinear reality, guilt and regret are the continuations of the acts, events, or attitudes on which the guilt or the regret feelings are focused. Guilt and regrets pump energy into the past situation. This strengthens the reality of the situation in the past, and continues the situation into the present and on into the future. This prevents you from focusing on doing what is needed and right in the present, thereby increasing rather than decreasing the effects of the regrettable situation. You become frozen within the situation.
Some people use these facts about guilt to attempt to avoid personal responsibility by retreating into an ethical casualness. Since the punishment of guilt and regret is not hanging over them, they do what is socially acceptable, what is personally comfortable and/or profitable instead of what they sense is the right thing to do. By doing this, they deny their role at the center of all reality.
To correct past mistakes, it is not necessary to go back into the past, or to the people in the past situation to make amends, to analyze, to judge yourself, or to seek punishment or forgiveness. This takes you away from the point of action which is always now, away from the situation you are in now, away from the people you are with now. If you do the right thing now within the situation you are in now, the past will automatically change for the right.
When we talk about “now,” we are talking about the ball of nonlinear time which includes in it the past, the present, the future. This removes the finality of importance of all mistakes. Doing right now changes the past. Not doing right now also changes the past.
People say they are not now ready to do what is right. They are not strong enough, skilled enough, brave enough. The right thing is too uncomfortable, costs too much right now. They will do the right thing sometime in the future when conditions change, are more favorable. This is the trap which can be called “waiting for Godot.” This trap is what gets most people, traps them in shallowness. The future does not come because it is happening now, just as the past does not go away because it is happening now. If they do not stop waiting, they will wait for eternity. They can only stop waiting now, because now is the point of action.
When we talk about the past, the present, the future happening within one another, dynamically interacting with one another, causing and affecting one another, we have started using the principle of inter-penetration. Inter-penetration is the scientific and mystical theory of reality which states that everything is contained within everything. The inter-penetration of time does away with the cosmic questions of “the chicken or the egg” beginning creation, as well as the moralistic debate over free will versus fatalistic determinism. Within the web of ultimate reality, there is no ultimate beginning or cause. Moreover, every action of the individual rises out of a sum-wave of actions meeting at the individual; but the directions the wave takes depends on what happens within the individual.
Inter-penetration is what art works through. To start to understand inter-penetration, it is important to remember science has said time and space are aspects of the same thing, as are matter and energy. As we have seen, time has a nonlinear dimension. This is also true of space, energy, and matter. But we will start on the purely one-way linear level. What we see and hear through our eyes and ears is from the past. This is usually only a small fraction of a second out of the past. When we shift our focus to the sky, what we are seeing and feeling comes directly to us out from the past, anywhere from a few minutes (our sun) to many thousands of years (the stars). The wave of this past-present is regular, governed by the speed of light, which is the speed limit within the linear dimension according to science. Our past is also affecting the present of the stars right now. If we magnify, amplify, and tune into this wave of the past, we would get more details from that past and be more affected by that past.
Science says each of us has particles in our body that have been in the body of every living thing that ever existed on Earth. Through breathing, eating, and the processes of elimination, this circulation of particles takes place. The melting decay of death, decaying back into the inorganic ground field, and the build-up of new life forms in birth, is the powerful tool of this circulation of particles. Add to this the backward material cord to the material Big Bang of the universe which links everything together in this universe, and the rain of cosmic stuff that bombards Earth, we begin to see a universal exchange of particles, a universal body, a universal life.
These particles are not material, although they make up what we call materiality. Science tells us these particles are patterns of possibilities. Science also tells us these particles go back and forth in time by going out of the linear dimension with its speed limit.
By what we do, we each change these patterns of possibilities. Then these patterns travel nonlinearly out of space-time, effecting change nonlocally.
