Where is your Life ladder taking you up to??
By emptychair
@innertalks (23744)
Australia
October 8, 2017 6:39pm CST
Old Alf was getting towards the end of his long life. He was seventy-four years old now.
One night Alf had a dream that he was walking down a deserted street. At the end of this street was a large house. There was a ladder, with different coloured steps on it. This intrigued Alf. He went over to it. He climbed up the steps onto the roof of the house, which was a flat roof.
On the roof, Alf sat down at an oval-shaped plastic table on a plastic chair, and then he took a drink from the large yellow jug of yellow/gold coloured nectar juice there. He used one of the many different coloured glasses there.
Alf was enjoying his drink slowly when then a helicopter landed on top of the roof, and a man and a woman got out of it, and come over to the table.
They both sat down and they each had a drink each too.
The man then asked Alf:
“Do you want to come with us now, or stay here and see how it all ends naturally so here?”
Alf hesitates, just for a second, before he is about then, to answer them.
But they abruptly then left, saying to him as they went off again,
“That's your decision to stay here then. If you were sure of the change, you would know this right away, and would have come right away, without your pondering it, from your fear, for even a second.”
“Don't worry over any of this though,” my young friend, added the lady.
“Of course, though, life goes in circles most of the time, because an action goes around a circle, and then it comes back to you again.”
"Even if you try to escape your present life, you cannot ever do so, because the present is your life in the present right now, and everything occurs right now, so this current life must be lived for itself, for what it is."
"Nothing can be escaped from, because all is forever just as it forever is."
Alf woke up then, pondering upon his dream, and its possible meanings for him, in his life.
3 people like this
4 responses
@innertalks (23744)
• Australia
9 Oct 17
Yes, a lot of New Age philosophies take about this eternal now, or the present, that they claim we all live in. Given that we seem to age through time, it can be a bit hard to completely swallow their ideas, but they seem to be pretty right, as far as they go.
These ideas do raise a lot of other questions, however.
What is this present? Can we change it?
Are there different presents? Are they relative to a particular person, is God's present our present too, for example?
What is time? Was it created when creation was created?
Time is merely "timing" an actionable action in the present, and this illusion of activity seems to be a passing one, passing one through a material we call time, and yet time doesn't exist, but is merely a continuing ray of snapshots of eternity, acting in these differing ways.
How does any of this relate to love?
Love is a perfect constant energy supply of God's truth coming to us, which we feel through its action upon us, and which builds or grows in us over time, which means as we grow through activity, seemingly spent in this time.
The thing is though all of this just happens, and time is relative and superfluous to the task of growing, which is relative for every part of creation, which grows in a different way to every other part, depending on its own gifts, and what it does with them, as love's energy provides it with the energy to grow their own gift, or to sit idle, so to speak, and ignore it.
Time is "timing" through the present, but it is also an actionable item in the sense that action through love is untimed, but action without love seems to be a timed one. Love lives untimed in all, and this is why in God the eternity of his perfect love goes untimed at all times, in the present.
God is here now. He always has been.
@peavey (16936)
• United States
11 Oct 17
@innertalks I meant to get back to this sooner!
God created time (Genesis chapter 1) and He lives outside it; it doesn't affect Him the way it does us. A thousand years is as one day and one day as a thousand years (2 Peter 3:8). Time does not constrain Him. My today and yours are His, too, but His forever while for us, it's gone and no longer our present. It's hard to explain, but let me try to put it this way.
I don't know whether it's the Greek or the Hebrew, but the verbs when translated at times don't mean what they come across as. Matthew 18:18 says "Verily I say unto you, Whatsoever ye shall bind on earth shall be bound in heaven: and whatsoever ye shall loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven." I have read that this does not mean that we should bind something on earth and it is then bound in heaven, but that it is already bound in heaven when we bind it here.
The verbs was, is, to be, etc., have been confused in translation. However this may be, I don't know, but I know, again from experience, that Jesus works in the past, present and future all at the same time.
How does this relate to love? I have a simpler (well, shorter) answer. Love is God. Since God created time, He controls it rather than being controlled by it. The love that IS, is shown to us in our passage through time.
There is no time anywhere else except on earth, where the coming up and the going down of the sun rules it.
1 person likes this
@innertalks (23744)
• Australia
11 Oct 17
@peavey Of course, for us timed based beings to posit something living outside of time is almost impossible for our minds to grasp.
The scientists think that time is an element of our Universe, like mass, and energy, and perhaps space are too. They seem to think that it is the speed of light that controls it.
Einstein linked mass, energy and time together then in his famous equation: E= mc2.
Time, Einstein claimed, is relative depending on how fast you are moving in space through it.
All of this was created at the "big bang". Space, time, mass, all of it coalesced somehow from the enormous energy created by this explosion.
The timing of this explosion, the laws behind it that allowed it to happen, what exists outside of this big bang, or whether any other big bangs are possible while this one is running its course, or whether they might have happened at one at the same time in some other part of infinite space, or not, remain speculation.
There was a start to creation. God picked a time for it to be created. God inserted his son into our World at a certain time too.
All of this implies planning. A plan is carried out over time.
God must be running in some type of a time too then.
What being in the present really means to me then is not that time does not exist, it more means that we are really only totally alive right now as us in this body, right now. The past is gone, the future still to be.
Eternity must be like a forever now in some ways, but in other ways, even God must somehow allow for things to happen in sequence as planned, and we could call this "time" for him too.
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@Shiva49 (28394)
• Singapore
10 Oct 17
The present moment is the greatest present but we tend to overlook it mostly regretting the past and worrying over the future. So we lose the most precious time we are given on a platter.
So the best way is to live in the present, being ever conscious of it, and our thoughts and actions should reflect our gratitude for the opportunity given us. Then fulfillment will follow - siva
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@innertalks (23744)
• Australia
10 Oct 17
A lot of being present is about listening to what is happening there too.
When we are lost, caught up in our own minds all of the time, we miss what is happening, or connecting to us from the present. We are lost somewhere in the past, or in the future, or in our own manufactured version of the present.
We live too much in our dream rather than in reality then.
2 people like this
@innertalks (23744)
• Australia
11 Oct 17
@Shiva49 We have to stay awake both outwardly and inwardly to be in the present moment.
Being awake in only one state misses part of the present moment, because we then are overbalanced in one direction or the other.
This is why living in a cave doesn't work, nor immersing our self solely in our work, and outer life.
The true middle path is the balanced path then.
1 person likes this
@Shiva49 (28394)
• Singapore
11 Oct 17
@innertalks Yeah our minds are preoccupied most times, then we dream walk through the precious present moment.
Mindful living, feeling the joy in the pure, simple moment, gives us fulfillment which is lacking in our forgetful and hurried life of going through the motions - siva
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@1hopefulman (45111)
• Canada
15 Oct 17
What is the origin of this story? Did you make it up?
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@1hopefulman (45111)
• Canada
16 Oct 17
@innertalks So, it was a partly a dream and partly embellished to make a point? If you don't mind, in a few words, what is main point of the story?
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@innertalks (23744)
• Australia
16 Oct 17
@1hopefulman Well, coming from a dream, the point is up to some interpretation I guess, but here is the point that I was trying to make here.
The point is that we can sometimes get so caught up in our worldly lives that we forget to live from our spiritual self too, but then when we find our spiritual self, we often want to step away from our worldly self too then also.
We need to allow ourselves to be fully ourselves, in our bodies, mind and soul, and love God with all parts of ourselves, not favouring any one part over the other.
The Gospel of Mark chapter 12, verse 30, backs this up.
"Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength."
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@innertalks (23744)
• Australia
16 Oct 17
Yes and no, it is really from a dream that I had myself. Sometimes, I am just more comfortable writing up a personal experience as a short story like this.
So I made it up as a short story, but in another sense, it was from a real dream that I had too.
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@Hannihar (130150)
• Israel
3 Apr 18
@innertalks
Steve, what a dream he had. Are these short stories you wrote or read? The two I have read so far are very good. So, what did Alf think about his dream?
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@innertalks (23744)
• Australia
3 Apr 18
Thanks. They are usually based around dreams I have had myself, or my own life experiences.
Becuase I am a fairly truthful person though, and could never remember accurately all of the exact details if I wrote it up as me, I prefer to write these up as a short story like this.
I have been trying to escape from life for a long time, because I have never been happy here living it without all of the answers already.
These dreams are, I believe, trying to give me some type of a lesson, to help me understand how life works, generally, and specifically for me too.
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@innertalks (23744)
• Australia
3 Apr 18
@Hannihar Even if I don't find what I want, the dreams do make the journey interesting. I like to dream.
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@Hannihar (130150)
• Israel
3 Apr 18
@innertalks
Steve, you have very interesting dreams. I hope you can find what you want.
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