A Best Guess on Life's Biggest Question...

What follows is an excerpt from the "Wanderings" writings, my free writes while listening to PBS's most excellent musical program Hearts of Space.  These words are what fell off my fingers onto a keyboard, they were not written by deliberate thought, but rather were freed by a deliberate lack of deliberate thought.  They are about a decade old at this point, and are offered just as the title says... a best guess.

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You only live twice.  How appropriate, to say that a man has two lives to his credit.  Strangely, only one life is ever seen,  the life of the waking hours.  The other life, the one which by far does greater justice to defining the man, that life is hidden and secret, often even from the first life.  To sleep, to dream, to journey in the inner life and landscapes, these are solitary journeys into an entire second universe created by the mixings and minglings of the man and the outer reality.

          Many are the times I have meditated on the nature of heaven, and of hell, and I oft come to wonder if these two planes are similar, or perhaps even identical, to the second life of mans mortal run.  The Almighty says "judge not, lest ye be judged", and it seems a fine piece of advice.  And what of the cosmos if the Almighty follows his own advice?  If he judges not, then in what manner is justice served, or not? 

          And what is the manner of justice?  The revenge of the social can hardly amend the transgressions of the individual.  The wound remains inscribed on the running scroll of linear time, and all about it are bathed in the injustice.  So in what manner might there be a justice visited upon the creator of this figurative wound? If the Almighty judges not then the sentencing of the wicked is an open question.  Perhaps the judgment is not of the Almighty, but is derived from that which is judged, in the form of a new scroll of linear time, a new writing upon the pages of a blank new universe wherein the only creature to leap the running streams and immigrate one universe to the other is the mortal ascending into the realms of the immortal.

          It is a chilling thought, that the universe we will inhabit after this one will be a universe totally of our own creation,  a universe foretasted and foreshadowed in the sleeping world which is each mans private reality.  But such a thought does not demand the Almighty ignore his own advice to those who live in the universe of his creation.  He has not judged, he has but allowed each mortal segment of himself to re-ascend into the realms of immortality bringing his own immortal universe with him. 

          Karma, the concept of the multiple lifetimes sum value of mortal accountability, fits within this concept very nicely.  For those who might return to relearn and repent false starts of one life, there is always the hope of achieving a universe image which would be an acceptable dwelling. 

          The righteous, those whose inner strength allows balance and compassion and wisdom, the universes they might create, folded and intermingled as they would be in the infinitely fine textures of interwoven times, those might come to overlap each other as constructions of such commonality seek a common level in the energies, which frozen across the tiniest of differences in the flow of time make up the physical reality we now perceive as the totality, the only reality our limited scope allows us to grant full credibility. The name paradise is applied here,  the place where an individual may realize in full reality all the dreams and desires of the soul.  For each individual to access such a state of existence, without any single tiniest of desires conflicting with the equally deserved desires of another, this demands that no two such creatures inhabit a common universe. 

Envision these universes as the infinite layers of paired mirrors, each reflection a universe complete.  Sink into the reflections, and note that only the individual whose universe it is will be revealed in full detail, while all the other elements seen are but reflections of greater or lesser detail and not the original.  The reflection of one universe may serve the needs of the second, and yet have no cause for distress.  It is but the reflection of one paradise which the other paradise consumes, and not the original.  The original in its turn consumes the reflections of the second, but not the substance.  They are separate in that each layer, each reflection, is the unique and totally separate creation of the entity which first inhabited it.   

          The assumption above is that these interleaved realities are the creations of the righteous, those whose souls have striven to the greatest degree to achieve the inner balance and inner strength requisite to create a universe fit to inhabit.  But what would become of those whose inner structure is not by will set onto a path of perpetual growth and refinement?  What of those who would fall into such structures with their inner selves, that repository of the universe to be, in the contradictory conditions of the wicked, or the evil?  If in mortal life we foreshadow our universe to come in the creations of our dreaming second life, then what of those whose dreams are constructed of the contradictions and the irrational?

          It is a terrible and a fearful universe such would create.  Again, these would be true universes, physical in that the structures would be created of the time shifted energies which become matter.  And again, the illusions of the mirror would hold, but to what terrible consequence.  The overlapping points, the sections of common reality, would be those sections of the common contradiction.  In these realities the exchanges would be governed by the irrational, the blind, the wicked, for those would be the common threads between the creations.

          The deeds of such souls are horrific enough, in this one plane where they are restricted and limited by the countering deeds of the others, and the whole of reality is not the construct of but one.  Justice, indeed, that the monsters of our history must live not in a prison of another's construction, where there is the contrast of the self as one unique thing as apposed to the prison, which is another thing, but in a place where there is only the self, with each and every one of its contradictions empowered not into the simulated reality of the second life but into a physical reality which defines all of perception.  There has been no judgment, and yet in such a structure Hell is indeed at hand.

          From these two extremes we derive down to the condition of the vast majority, the blending of these two states.  In each man is to greater or lesser degree the righteous and the wicked,  struggling one against the other while confined for his own protection as any infant is confined to this common reality where the outer shell of the Almighty maintains control of the physical reality, and only in the second life of the dreaming state of sleep are we allowed, with carefully limited abilities, to experiment with that which might be the sum total of our universe when the Almighty removes his outer shell and allows us, ready or not, to attempt to live in a universe similar to the one where he, the only true adult entity of our histories and myths and legends, maintains his abode.