Is Time an Illusion? Eternity, Wholeness, and the Holographic Principle

Posted On November 20, 2024 / Written by Dr. Linda Gadbois

In all branches of Spiritual Sciences, time, which is directly associated with space as a dimension or physical reality, is considered an illusion or spatial affect created by the conscious aspect of our higher mind. While time can be understood in the general sense of timekeeping devices and the movement of the Sun around the Earth, in the most basic sense of reality being comprised of a past, present, and future, where time is experienced as a linear movement from a beginning point to an end point, it becomes paradoxical and illusory, largely due to what it implies. If we break this idea down in the most basic sense of examining the different aspects of the trinary mind, and how each part functions in creating a greater whole we perceive as reality, we can begin forming an idea that shows us a very different picture of the underlying nature of reality as a spatial dimension comprised of multiple planes or levels.

I want to start this examination by recounting an experience I had during a past life regression session that caught me totally by surprise, and then go into other details regarding the nature of the components that make up what we perceive as a 4-dimensional reality. In the early stages of my career as a Transpersonal Psychologist, I became fully engaged in doing past life regression sessions because of how powerful they were when done in an effective and skillful manner. One of the first things that really struck me about the experience was how completely harmonious all of what seemed like past lives were to my current one, not in terms of the material circumstances they were taking place in, but in terms of my essential nature, complexes, and patterns or dynamics I was both developing and acting out as an overall life-theme. It was as if reviewing past life experiences explained deep seated feelings that were engrained in me that didn’t seem to originate or have a basis in this lifetime, and why certain ideas were very prominent and significant in terms of my conscience and morality, which came as an inner drive and awareness that formed the basis for making major life decisions. I saw it as the perfect method for what I called soul or spiritual healing (psychological), where you acquired direct insight into what is built into your nature and transpires through what becomes unconscious tendencies as natural patterns. An unconscious pattern or natural tendency means you do it without realizing it plays a part in an even bigger idea-pattern, or for reasons that prevent or divert you from being able to see it in an objective manner. Unconscious patterns and tendencies are motivated by feelings and emotional charges, and come in a natural and automated manner, without thinking or making a decision.

I’m a skeptic at heart, and never take anything at face value, or based on a belief. I like to know how things work in the most practical and fundamental sense, because no matter what aspect of life or reality we’re examining or having as a direct experience, it’s always being created by an aspect of our own mind. By examining direct experiences that don’t seem to have any foundation in the general sense of what we’ve been taught and come to believe, we learn things about ourselves in terms of our true mental abilities, our multidimensional nature and essence, and we touch on the true magic of life and our eternal soul. It’s as if anytime we have a direct experience of what is normally elusive and vague, we penetrate the veil and step fully into a higher awareness and see creation, orchestrated through reality, in a whole new way, and it changes us in the most basic sense. We never look at the same idea the same way again.

Once I realized why I felt the way I did, and why certain issues that involved making moral decisions were so prominent and important to me, where I could see and understand the nature of karma from an entirely different level, I felt it provided me with clarity in regards to what this life was about and what it was I needed, or came here to do. My life purpose became crystal clear, and it resonated deeply within me. I then decided to use the realizations attained from a past life experience to resolve and transform the same issue and tendency in my current life. After I had resolved the tendency in a satisfactory manner, I revisited the same past life to gain deeper insights, only to realize that the pattern as a tendency I had resolved in my current life, was also resolved and transformed in the previous life, or what I perceived as a previous life. The experience as a thematic pattern that had previously shaped my life, had changed in the same way and same proportion as it was in my current life. A bit stunned and perplexed by the realization, I continued to experiment with the same process of transforming unconscious patterns playing out as innate tendencies motivated by feelings, and again, as I transformed each one into a new pattern, it changed the same tendency and unconscious pattern in all previous lives in the same manner.

This made me realize, through a direct experience that was completely unexpected, that what I perceived as “past lives”, were actually concurrent and all happening at the same time, in what appeared to be different ages and points in time, that all followed the same timeline as a root memory. Each lifetime was an expression of the same inner nature, character, and life-theme played out in a different, although similar way, as a dynamic form of interrelated correspondences. What I thought of as a series of previous or past lives were actually intrinsic parts of a greater whole, and each was formed as a possibility for expressing the same internal nature in unique ways through different personalities and cultural settings. Even though I was in a different body, with a different personality and cultural mindset, it was still me. I was the one having the experience, both from within it, as a part of it, and outside of it, watching it from a distance as it played out in whole form. I was both outside and inside at the same time. I had the experience from 2 perspectives simultaneously, one part attached, the other part detached. Each lifetime brought a different type of experience, affecting and contributing to the memory of the whole.

This brought a whole series of realizations regarding the true nature and constitution of the higher soul, as being comprised solely of self-made memory; and the higher or middle soul (we have 3 aspects of the soul that reside on 3 different levels as a hierarchy) being “evolutionary” in nature, evolving itself through endless variations of itself, all of which brought different types of experiences, rather than being personal or singular, and confined to only one possibility. This brought a whole new meaning to the axiom (principle) – the One becomes many, and many become One – and what we now refer to as the Holographic Principle, where each part reflects or contains the whole, and the whole is known through the sum of its parts. While in physical form, we experience ourselves as separate from our higher, eternal soul, and see ourselves as our personality and a product of our environment, which, in the most basic sense are all formed out of “memory”.

Our higher self, which is also what’s called our middle self or medium between the unformed and formed, exists on what’s conceptualized as a higher plane that contains the entire lower plane within it. Our subconscious, which is our primary mind and soul while in a physical body and worldly manifestation, is governed and operates exclusively through memory – whether instinctual or self-created by our conscious mind. Our entire life experience already exists in whole form as a memory before we’re born into the physical world, and plays out in a completely natural and automated fashion without our direct awareness of the fact that we’re the one creating it with our higher mind. This principle is conveyed in the ideas of Divine Providence, karma, a higher will that governs our life and determines our destiny, fate as having to work with the cards we’re dealt, and so on. If we don’t “wake up”, so to speak, within the dream of our own making, it plays out in an automated fashion, seemingly beyond our ability the change or redirect it somehow.

This paradox births the question of whether or not we have a personal will, or whether everything is preordained and beyond our ability to change it. This same idea involves what’s called our “karmic seed of destiny”, which resides within us at birth (our astral blueprint) and determines how our life naturally transpires out of our predisposition and internal nature. Karma isn’t about individual acts, this or that, tit for tat, it’s the memory that makes up our soul’s constitution, where we reenact and play out the same patterns, life theme, and unconscious tendencies in a new way, based on how we’re stimulated by everyone and everything around us. The answer to the inquiry of whether or not we have free will and the ability to shape and determine our own destiny, comes in understanding and being able to actively utilize our higher mind and divine nature in a strategic and intelligent manner. This requires a fundamental understanding of how the dual, polarized aspects of our mind work in-sync with each other in a lawful manner. Each polarized aspect of a single mind exists on parallel planes which are also polarized, and are governed by a particular set of laws, which are also polarities, where one plays a particular role and function in cocreating a greater whole as a reality.

A simple way of understanding this principle can be attained by simply observing how it is our life naturally transpires and fluently evolves out of the same memory, which we form in living. We form our own memories using the higher capacities of our conscious mind, which is self-aware and self-creating in nature. If you self-reflect and think back to some of your first memories, which usually begin around the age of 7 or 8, which is when you also began thinking for yourself, you can understand how you were initially shaped in a completely unconscious and natural manner. At this same point in your life, your unconscious mind was still dominant, and your thoughts about things were governed largely by how you felt and the emotions you were experiencing at the time. As you started forming memories of events that had a strong emotional impact, you gave those events meaning, and out of the meaning you gave them, you started forming a story about yourself, other people, and the way life is in general. This story, which acted to shape how you experienced things in the general sense, had a distinct theme to it that expressed how you felt.

Because negative emotions nearly always have a greater impact on us than positive ones do, your theme took on a mostly negative context and became summarized as not being good enough or bad somehow. It usually comes in the form of – I’m not good enough, smart enough, attractive enough, I’m a bad person, not loved or wanted, not worthy – and so on. Once your theme started taking shape, anytime you were stimulated with the same feeling or emotional charge, you instantly accessed that memory and used it to give your current situation the same meaning, and you used it to form the same type of experience of yourself and the world around you. The same memory was used as a thematic filter or metaphor for shaping more experiences of the same kind, which were then incorporated back into the same feeling, building it up, strengthening and amplifying it. Each time you recall the same memory and adapt it to your current situation and play it out in a different way by thinking about and imagining it, you’re literally programming your own subconscious and lower, material mind to “give me more of this same feeling”, and being fully subservient and automated, it does. As you build this memory up over many years, it becomes the metaphorical template for all your experiences and how you experience life in general. No matter how new or diverse the situation or circumstances, you form the same type of experience out of it.

This is all being done in an automated fashion by your conscious mind, without you being aware of it. While we’re in our physical manifestation, governed by our subconscious, we lack a direct awareness of our higher mind and eternal soul, which is our “true self” in terms of being our creator, in the most basic sense of the idea. We must intentionally start forming an awareness of our higher nature, which usually comes as a spiritual or religious awareness of a higher power that oversees and governs our life, and intentionally establish a direct, internal line of communication. By becoming aware of the fact that we’re creating all of our life experiences using our own self-made memory, we acquire the key for consciously facilitating our own transformation and spiritual regeneration. When we die and leave this plane of existence, it’s only the memory we attain from it as an experience of our self, that remains intact and permanently resides on the plane of its origin, which is whole and singular in nature. We transform and intentionally grow ourselves to a new means, not by working with our material situation and circumstances, but by using the higher capacity of will and imagination to directly change or evolve our memory, which serves as a form of metaphorical program for our subconscious to produce as an outer reality, allowing us to experience ourselves through our own self-generated mental construct.

As we work mentally to transform our memory-base to a new life-theme and type of experience, we change our timeline at the eternal level, and it synchronistically changes how we experience ourselves across time, in every manifestation, all of which are parts in forming a greater whole. It’s only the conscious, self-creating mind that’s eternal and exists fundamentally as a whole or single being on the higher plane of memory. The other twist to this process is we can only change our memory of ourselves while manifest in the physical realm, because all change only comes by making new combinations, where we produce (generate) and then acquire (assimilate) new properties (qualities) through an interaction of internal components. Once we leave our body and life situation, no longer combined or bonded to the physical world, we reside fully within the ”state of mind” (and type of reality) we consistently cultivated while manifest. All transformation occurs through manifestation, where we combine with the subconscious of the Earths mind and soul, and produce experiences of ourselves that are translated into memory that serves to either evolve or devolve our current memory-base and timeline.

Time is only relevant or meaningful while manifest in physical form, because form is a dimension, which is a spatial construct formed as a field of highly organized light (hologram). Space and time are intimately connected, because one sets the basis for the other. Time doesn’t exist when we’re not manifest in a holographic, 3-D form, where we move from point A to point B within a holographic sphere of light. Memory, which is purely mental in nature, while serving as the precursor or etheric blueprint (frequency) for manifestation, isn’t subject to time and resides in what’s called the present, or eternal now. Here, past, present and future exists as a whole, without a beginning or end, and is cyclical (spherical) in nature. Memory forms a timeline that spawns multiple manifestations of the same nature, at the same time, each of which follows its own timeline, formed as a life-theme. A timeline isn’t a one-way street that continues on forever, it’s a circuit that expands outward, and then curves back on itself (switches polarity), returning to the center it originated from. We can view these different timelines, each of which branch off a central root axis or trunk, as the fruit of that root memory formed as parallel dimensions, because each appears to be located at different points in time and have an entirely different age, culture, or version of reality as their basis, and even though they appear to be manifest in parallel dimensions, they continue to function as a single unit and entity. Any change in one, instantly produces an equivalent change in all others. Not changes in conditions or outer circumstances, but a true change in character and memory, which is the root substance that spawns, animates, and sustains each one. The root stock is moral in nature and not personality oriented. While quantum physics now refers to this as energetic entanglement, where a system formed out of the same energetic substance (born together) as a frequency continues to function as a single unit across space and time, it can be more accurately understood as the basic function of vibration and polarity, which operate through a cause-and-effect relationship.

This realization brings a whole new meaning to moral purification, redemption, and atoning for mistakes or errors in judgment that led to immoral decisions and actions that rendered unfavorable consequences. Any corrections and modifications to our morality in our current life, makes the same moral adjustments in all lives. In every moment, through every realization and decision that produces a truly new and unique experience of ourselves, and serves to express who we are in terms of what we stand for and represent as a person, changes our entire history, because memory is singular and eternal and is what forms the root stock or moral basis for all manifestations at the same time. This is what eternity means. The eternal nature of memory is referred to metaphorically as the soul’s Akashic Records, which are a form of permanent record of all our actions, and is what forms the basis for judgment (evaluation) as the deciding factor in moving into a higher or lower dimension that’s parallel to this one. Time doesn’t exist because there’s no manifestation, there’s only the memory seed, root, or singular nature out of which all manifestations have their substance and being.

You can also work to change memory in an indirect, or perhaps more direct manner, by evolving the memory willfully in the faculty of your creative imagination. You can do this by reshaping the experience that formed the basis for the memory out of a mature, rational mindset, rather than the immature, emotional mindset you initially formed it out of. If you recall a memory that served to set your life story as a feeling in motion, and using the rational aspect of your mind you step momentarily out of your personal attachment or part in it, residing in a witnessing perspective, and you ask yourself what resources the other person or group of people needed in that situation that they didn’t have, and you give them those resources and then play the event out accordingly, it’ll change how you experience it. You retell your memory as a full body sensory experience, so to speak, and how it transpired and what resulted from it in terms of how it made you feel. You replay it until it naturally creates the feeling you want. As you play it out with each person having the resources they lacked in the past, a whole different type of experience emerges. Once you get it where you want it, you replay it in your mind several times, seating the experience until you can recall it instantly in its new form. This will overwrite, so to speak, the old memory, and will literally loosen and begin transforming the issues you formed because of it, and how you use that memory as a metaphor for creating more of the same type of experiences.

Dr. Linda Gadbois    

Transpersonal Psychologist, Personal Transformation Coach, and Spiritual Teacher