Time after Time
Originally posted at The Way of the Rose 54-Day Novena Facebook group February 11, 2021
Novena Day 15
The Glorious Mysteries
I’ve been thinking about time this week.
Physics majors, as I was long ago, are surprised to learn that physical laws do not depend on time going in only one direction. There’s only one law that requires time to move in a single direction, the second law of thermodynamics, which states that entropy is always increasing. Energy gets more dispersed, not less.
Some have theorized that time is merely a human construct that helps us to make sense of events, organizing them for the benefit of our consciousness, but in “reality” everything happens all at once.
It’s impossible to know for sure from our limited human perspective if there’s any real truth to this view, but the world has always had those who could see the future and those who could tune into the past. Cassandra, who made famously accurate predictions about the fate of the ancient city of Troy, lived approximately 3,000 years ago and was just one of many well-known seers in ancient times.
How can someone see events that haven’t happened yet or events that have already happened if they aren’t actually happening now?
There are physicists and metaphysical thinkers who believe that the universe is a hologram, a two-dimensional image of a three-dimensional space. It turns out that the math works better that way, and it may be the approach necessary to find the Holy Grail of physics, the Grand Unified Theory that explains how all the different physical laws connect.
Holograms are fascinating. Information is encoded in a hologram such that every piece of the holographic image contains information about the whole object. Thus, if coherent light shines on the hologram, any piece of the original information is accessible. “Coherent light” means electromagnetic waves of a single wavelength. Our brains produce electrical waves just like those that make up the electromagnetic spectrum, and those waves become more coherent with meditation. Most psychics do some form of meditation to get themselves ready to receive information. Perhaps they get their information by “shining” their coherent brain waves on a small piece of the holographic universe, allowing them access to information about any part of the whole in any direction of time.
But what would this mean about free will? Do we really have the ability to affect the course of events? Or is everything predestined? My son believes that if we had enough information we could always reliably predict the future, including everyone’s actions. But physics says that isn’t true. No matter how good your information, there is always some uncertainty that results in probabilities rather than certainties. Particular events may be much more likely than others, but other events are always possible. If those less likely events are chosen, they affect the probabilities of future events.
The Glorious Mysteries get me thinking along these lines. In the Resurrection, our ideas of death as the “end” are obliterated. In the Ascension, Jesus pierces the veil we perceive between life and death from “below.” In the Descent of the Holy Spirit, Jesus’s disciples receive information of the sort that psychics and channelers appear to access from “above.” In the Assumption, Mary merely shifts her consciousness and awakens in Heaven, demonstrating that there really isn’t any separation at all.
Then Mary is crowned Queen of Heaven and Earth implying that her knowledge and power extend everywhere in space, all at once.
I’m very good at linear thinking. This is not that.
Contemplating the Glorious Mysteries puts me right outside my ordinary waking consciousness. But then, studying physics does that too. You learn that light is made of waves, and those waves act like particles sometimes. You discover that atoms, the particles that make up everything we can see or touch, are 99.[many nines]% empty space. You discover that electrons are not localized until you measure them; they are “smeared out” in space. So what is it we actually “touch”? Just moving energy.
Whoa, freaky.
You discover that every single proton and electron can be described as the sum of electromagnetic waves that extend infinitely into space. You learn that everything can be expressed in terms of probabilities, implying that tiny changes could have major long-term impacts.
Isn’t it fun living inside my mind for a while? Thinking about these things for long has to mess with one’s sense of “reality.”
From my perspective as a human being, my life appears to be a healing journey, a reclaiming of wholeness. I’ve spent my life healing from traumas in the past and gradually releasing the holds each of them have had upon my life. But if time isn’t real, what does that mean about trauma and healing?
Is the healing contained within the trauma, or the trauma contained within the healing—like the oak contained within the acorn? Is healing, then, inevitable at some time in the future, even if lifetimes away?
Many healers have noted that the traumas of our ancestors affect the descendants. Huge traumas like the Holocaust or the Irish potato famine have left physical epigenetic imprints on our DNA. It’s clear that the widespread trauma of witch hunts, when people who were more closely attuned to the earth and its wisdom were persecuted and killed in bulk, has left its mark on subsequent generations. What happens when we heal that trauma? If time isn’t real, could we change events in the past as well as the present and future?
Whoa, even freakier.
Are the Joyful, Sorrowful, and Glorious Mysteries all happening at the same time? Is it just where our consciousness is focused that determines where we are in the journey?
When I studied physics, I studied astronomy too. One of the coolest things I learned was that if you focused small radio telescopes from all over the world at the same point in the sky, you could add up the information they received such that it would be functionally the same as having a radio telescope the size of the earth—a Very Large Array indeed.
That makes me wonder what we humans could accomplish if even a small group of us scattered all over the world concentrated on the same ideas. How would that affect the world around us? Could we change history, which would in would turn change the present and the future?
Is this why Our Lady asks us to pray the rosary, to bring many humans into coherence with Her loving heart, to bring about the more beautiful world our hearts know is possible, as Charles Eisenstein expresses it?
What power could this constructive interference have to change the world for the better, to take us “back to the garden”?
