“What’s happening to my life?” When people ask this, they usually wonder why they got a horrible illness or their dog died the day their girlfriend / boyfriend broke up with them, stuff like that. Not that some weird guy beloved by a UFO cult plagiarized their revelations years before they were even born. Is this the power of God or a devil?

Back to the friendly but suspicious person called Boris Mouravieff. While reading his book, I come to a point where I seriously wonder if he may have gone off the deep end, when he starts calculating the lifespans of the astral and mental bodies. And then right after that, I see this:

For the moment, it will be sufficient to say that Time possesses not one but three dimensions, and that these dimensions are strictly analogous to those of Space.

This statement may, to the casual reader, seem even crazier than the 2.4 million year lifespan of the astral body. However, what gave me the creeps was that I wrote roughly the same thing on June 6, 2010: 3 time dimensions of the mind. I went out of my way to explain that these were indeed mental rather than physical, although I seem to remember some further discussion with Llama on that topic. I don’t blame him for being skeptical. What bothers me is not that people don’t know this. What bothers me is that I do.

Mouravieff has been mentioned a few times on the One Cosmos blog, cautiously, but only a couple of his most famous statements. This is not one of them. The only online source that quotes him with any regularity, as far as I can see, is some kind of UFO cult. It is impossible that I could have come upon him long enough ago to have completely forgotten it, I think. I have a healthy respect for cryptomnesia, but in this case I vaguely remember how I made that post, and it was inspired by certain experiences (mine and others’) in meditation and such, rather than anything I had read from the outside. I probably thought in all honesty that I was the first person to come up with that particular way of expressing it.

It does not stop there. Further down the same page, Mouravieff explicitly refers to the name of the fifth dimension as “Eternity”. I know I have written a couple entries – although I am fairly sure I refrained from uploading them (this happens more often than I tell you) – entries in which I explicitly refer to the fifth dimension as “eternity” or “timelessness”. One reason not to upload it was the confusion of using these words which are saturated with a different meaning (especially the first) for common people.

You see, when we use a word like “eternity” in public (and Christianity has gone from being a mystery religion to being very public indeed), then 4-dimensional people, whose understanding of life is completely contained within the four dimensions of time and space, still think they are supposed to understand the word. Usually this happens during childhood, at which point only a very few specially chosen souls could possibly have any idea of the world beyond the fourth dimension. So they don’t think to themselves “this is a strange word and I should not have an opinion on it until I have at least some months of spiritual practice, preferably years”. They think to themselves “I know this from context”. Or, more commonly, they are children and don’t understand this from context, but instead they ask someone who is as ignorant as themselves but much older, and get told that “eternity means a time that never ends” or words to that effect.

I suppose “time that never ends” is one meaning of it, in a certain context. But it is actually more like the sky that is always above us. The four-dimensional world in which we live our mortal lives is like the horizontal world, the ground on which we travel. But at right angles to it is another dimension, and if we for the first time in our life lift our head and look upward, we see the sky. And there is something strange about the sky: It is always above us. Whether we travel to the east or the west, the sky is still there. Whether we walk across plains, climb across mountains or sail across seas, the sky is still there. It is above us the day we start our voyage, and it is still there, the same sky, when we end it, even if we are now on the opposite side of the world. Fog and clouds may obscure it, extensions of the horizontal world, but we know that the sky is still there above the clouds.

Well, that is how I see it, but who knows. What I mean is that there is something beyond time, and this eternity can touch time and infuse it so that it becomes sacred time. This is something I actually picked up from One Cosmos, which again quotes a seeming very sane Rabbi. The part about sacred time, I mean. The purpose of the Sabbath and all that. But this is not really something I should preach, I don’t keep the Sabbath. I have meditated some, though, and that is where I have what I think is direct experience of the pinhole in the roof of time, that lets us peek out in a completely new dimension in the mind.

I am not really sure I should write about such things. It bothers me to see Mouravieff write about something I thought was just my own approximation to something that cannot really be explained unless you have been there. Who am I to talk about such things? Am I immune – or at least resistant – enough to deceit, that I can talk about things that may influence people’s choices of Eternity?

When the Web was new, I wrote one of the early plain and simple introductions to meditation. And one thing I stressed toward the end was that if your meditation practice leads you to realize that you are a Very Important Person in the cosmic hierarchy, you better take a break. I fear that discovering the esoteric science of Mouravieff independently from him may be very close to such an experience. Knowledge inflates, as the Bible says, but that deserves its own entry. Which, incidentally, runs the risk of inflating me even more. As if the pasta is not giving me enough gas.