• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1038 0

we’ve already seen, there’s no picture of a chicken salad or a steak imprinted in your brain—nor any taste or smell of food. When you bring a memory to mind, you are actualizing an event. Synaptic firings produce the memory, replete with visuals, taste, and smell if you want them. Before you actualize it, a memory is not local, meaning it has no location; it is part of a field of potential, or energy, or intelligence. That is, you have the potential for memory, which is infinitely vaster than a single memory but nowhere in sight. This field extends invisibly in all directions; the hidden dimensions we’ve been discussing can all be explained as different fields embedded in one infinite field, which is being itself.

You are the field.

We all make a mistake when we identify with the events that come and go in the field. These are isolated moments—single blips as the field momentarily gets actualized. The underlying reality is pure potential, which is also called the soul. I know how abstract this sounds, and so did the ancient sages of India. Looking at creation, which is filled with objects of the senses, they came up with a special term, Akasha, to fit the soul. The word Akasha literally means “space,” but the larger concept is of soul space, the field of awareness. When you die, you don’t go anywhere because you are already in the dimension of Akasha, which is everywhere. (In quantum physics, the tiniest subatomic particle is everywhere in spacetime before it gets localized as a particle. Its nonlocal existence is just as real but invisible.)

Imagine a house with four walls and a roof. If the house burns down, the walls and roof collapse. But the space inside isn’t affected. You can hire an architect to design a new house, and after you build it, the space inside still hasn’t been affected. By building a house you are only dividing unbounded space into inside and outside. This division is an illusion. The ancient sages said that your body is like that house. It’s built at birth and burns down when you die, yet the Akasha, or soul space, remains unchanged; it remains unbounded.

According to these ancient sages, the cause of all suffering, according to the first klesha, is not knowing who you are. If you are the unbounded field, then death is not at all what we’ve feared.

The purpose of death is to imagine yourself into a new form with a new location in space and time.

In other words, you imagine yourself into this particular lifetime, and after death you will dip back into the unknown to imagine your next form. I don’t consider this a mystical conclusion (in part because I’ve had discussions with physicists who support this possibility, given all they know about the nonlocality of energy and particles), but it’s not my intention to convert you to a belief in reincarnation. We’re just following one reality to its hidden source. Right now you are bringing up new thoughts by actualizing your potential; it seems only reasonable that the same process produced who you are now.

I own a TV set with a remote control, and when I push a button I can change from CNN to MTV to PBS. Until I press the remote, those programs don’t exist on the screen; it’s as if they don’t exist at all. Yet I know that each program, complete and intact, is in the air as electromagnetic vibrations waiting to be selected. In the same way, you exist in Akasha before your body and mind pick up the signal and express it in the three-dimensional world. Your soul is like the multiple channels available on TV; your karma (or actions) picks the program. Without believing in either one, you still can appreciate the astonishing transition from a potential hanging around in space—as TV programs do—to a full-blown event in the three-dimensional world.

What, then, will it be like when you die? It might be like changing channels. Imagination will continue to do what it has always been doing—popping new images up on the screen. Some traditions believe that there’s a complex process of reliving karma when you die so that a person can learn what this lifetime was