The Child Within Us Lives! A Synthesis of Science, Religion and Metaphysics

The Elijah Illustration About Light, Time, Space And The Real Identity

There is a verse in The Gospel According to Thomas, “If they say to you: 'From where have you originated?', say to them: 'We have come from the Light, where the Light originated through itself...” The genuine Identity of us “comes from the Light.” That reality seems buried deep within us, as inaccessible to the intellect as the soul is, the very essence of being. But it is not inaccessible; it is within our reach for the asking. Let me use an analogy that will help us understand.

A big brass eagle I call Elijah sits in the middle of my living room coffee table. My son calls it “montrocious,” but the eagle and I don't mind. Rachel likes it, too. Company was here recently, and since the great brass bird on the coffee table can hardly be ignored, it became an illustration about light, space and time.

There are so many wonders concerning light. One of them is the mysterious photon itself, that enigmatic bundle of mystery that does so much in the world. Tiny photon, how can you be nearly everywhere in space at once? It is that particular quality of the photon which I came to explain via the brass eagle—and this illustration also suggest how the Original Nature of us is also everywhere in space and time.

The photons that illumine this page (or appear entrapped as the very paper itself) are bringing more information to us than could have been dreamed a few years ago. Essentially, photons are information. Light is information. When viewed subjectively, information is light.

There sits Elijah, my big brass eagle who must weigh twenty-five pounds, looking for all the world as if he's just come to rest on a brass stump that stands above the water of the glass-topped coffee table. (Son Bill expects him to go crashing through any day.) For the purpose of this illustration, I suggest that Elijah is just leaving his perch, getting ready to fly faster and faster.

Well now, how does the brass bird look to us as he goes faster? Smaller. And still smaller as he gets to the speed of sound and smaller yet as he flies at half the speed of light. At those speeds it takes special equipment to see him at all. Then, when he gets to “light,” which is to say, the speed of light—186,300 miles per second—Elijah becomes a photon to us as we sit in the living room drinking our coffee.

Where would Elijah, the photon, be at any given moment in time? From our perspective, virtually everywhere. That's interesting, isn't it? The nature of light is such that our attempts to locate it in time are impossible because at light, it exists beyond time. Experiments suggest that the photon, the eagle at light, is everywhere in the room simultaneously. Though we can't see him with the eye, the fact that he is everywhere(as light) is the reason we are able to see the things not moving at the speed of light. It is the steady flow of photons that lets us see one another or read these words of print. Who knows, the photons that brighten this page may be cosmic eagles—or “angels of the Light.”

So far, so good. Don't worry if the illustration isn't precisely accurate, scientifically. Now, how does this room look to Elijah as he flies faster and faster? Things seem to be rushing past him more quickly, that's for sure, faster and faster as he passes over our heads. But, for the eagle's view, something else is happening which is important to take into our thinking (or non-thinking) while we make this illustration. The room becomes smaller and smaller to Elijah as he moves faster—not unlike the way the years seem to move more quickly for us as we grow older in time. Not only does the room grow smaller to Elijah, but so does the tangible universe—smaller, smaller, going, going, and at the speed of light, gone! To the photon, there is neither time nor space. Or, to put it obversely, the photon is everywhere in tangibility at once.

Yet, listen, listen. The photon is ordinary worldly light. It is called “limited” light (by the early Christian Gnostics and me) because it seems to have a strange limit built into itself. The speed of light is calculated by present physics to be “the limiting speed” of the (material) universe—a primary, an absolute—and indeed, Einstein proved that light travels at that constant speed no matter what the rest of tangibility does. The speed of sound has the speed of the sound-maker added to or subtracted from its velocity—but not light. Light travels at the same speed whether the observer is stationary or moving a million miles an hour away from it or toward it—or so they say. Einstein's equation has been proven essentially correct, relative to the photon in our tangible universe. Our worldly experience of matter is somehow pegged to a limited light in motion.

“Ah so,” as Han would say. So, what? Why the limit? Philosophy and theology—and maybe even a metaphysician here or there—have calculated that infinity is beyond limit. Such thoughts lead to the conclusion that if God exists (God being Illimitability or Light-spelled-with-a-capital), then there must be a Light BEYOND the photon-light we can measure. The ultimate Light must be omnipresent—at rest, Light that doesn't move at all. There is something in the Bible about Light without shadow, isn't there? Welcome to the club, physicists. The Jews and Gnostics, the Hindus and forest wanderers, the Taoists and many others made that determination thousands of years ago and have gone on to use the greater Light to explain things about the lesser which human sophistication is only now beginning to confirm.

If Elijah, traveling at the speed of light, doesn't see this tangible world, what does he see? Another heaven and earth where light may travel at a higher speed, say the theoretical mathematicians—in strange agreement with various spiritual lights of the world. There is surely insight here. When one leaves the physical body at “death,” who is to say that the Child, the Soul of us, doesn't “return to” or become Light again (if, indeed, it has ever stopped being Light)? If tangibility, as we perceive it, doesn't exist “at light” does that mean it doesn't exist? If it exists anyway, how many other universes my be perceived under different conditions?

At the speed of Light there is no more consciousness of time or space—but a new heaven and earth exist “at light” and “the old heaven and earth have passed away.” Could this have been what the Carpenter and the prophets foresaw when they spoke of this world being rolled up like a scroll?—and the one above it as well? How is it that the Gnostics rightly referred to the works of this world as an unreal creation by the dispossessed angel, Lucifer, whose name means Limited light? Since the material universe does seem to be the creation of photons, from which Awareness can't be separated for very long this side of “death,” what relationship exists between the awareness reading these words and the satanic Lucifer? Could the Zen Buddhist and the absolutist who decry all relationships between human consciousness and Reality be right after all? Is there justification for the metaphysical insight that says human consciousness is the anti-Truth? Wouldn't it be a surprise to the churchman who refuses to examine subjectivism to awaken one day to learn he has been enacting the very anti-Christ himself in his refusal to accept God's totality?

Or, could it be, as it has been shown to me, and as I firmly believe, that there is Something beyond all this matter of correct, incorrect, right, left, liberal, conservative, male, female, objective, subjective and all the other dualisms once can perceive? Yes, there is. And something beyond the concept of single/dual as well—even beyond the concept of “beyond.” There is a legitimate question as to whether Reality will be found by intellectualism at all. But it can be found by the simple and childlike. If I have found a small measure of it, I would think anyone can.

This book is an attempt to go beyond science, philosophy, religion and metaphysics—without leaving them. The mysteries of time and space have intrigued mankind from the beginning. In recent years science has gotten down to real answers in a language most of us can understand. Even more, our technology is putting some of the most esoteric math to the test and the theories indicated quantum are working. The atomic bomb, whose enormous energy appears a threat to all living things, is a verification of theory. Another discovery, in many ways more significant, is holography and all that holography suggests.

Some of the experimental work of mathematicians using their principles of quantum allows us to examine the relative nature of time and perceive the ways we may one day soon be unbound from its limitation.

Excerpt from The Child Within Us Lives! By William Samuel
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www.williamsamuel.com

If you would like further guidance in understanding any of William Samuel's work based on Self discover you are welcome to contact me, Sandy Jones - samuelandfriends@gmail.com - Ojai, California -