HOW DOES THE MENTAL ENVIRONMENT CORRESPOND TO THE CHARACTERISTICS

Mental Environment

HOW DOES THE MENTAL ENVIRONMENT CORRESPOND TO THE CHARACTERISTICS

AND PROPERTIES OF ENERGY?

Energy Is Nondimensional

As we already know, energy doesn't take up space in the physical environment because it doesn't displace anything that does take up space. This "no space" characteristic of energy gives it a nondimen- sional quality. In other words, anything that doesn't take up space also won't have any tangible dimensions of height, length, width, or circumference, at least not in the ways in which we would normally think of these properties. This nondimensional quality is probably the hardest concept to grasp about the nature of energy, because even though energy is nondimensional, it can take some form that is visible to our eyes. And anything that is visible should have dimen-sions that we can measure. It may seem like an obvious contradiction to say that energy can take a visible form and yet still not have dimension, but it is not.

The best example to illustrate this is with holograms or holo-graphic photography. With a holoholo-graphic process you can create a three-dimensional image in light projected into space that can be seen with the eyes, and it will appear to have length, width, and circumference. You could even measure the length or width of the image; however, your hands would pass right through the image if you tried, because there really isn't anything there, at least not in a physical sense. Images in light have no physical substance, so from a physical perspective, they also don't have any dimension. (Relative to physical objects, energy doesn't have dimension.)

Memories or mental images (anything that we can see with our inner eye, like visualizations, daydreams, or night dreams) could operate very much like a hologram of laser light—an image of light that has no physical substance—where space as it relates to distance or dimension is not a consideration. The total area available inside of

92 Building a Framework for Understanding Ourselves our skulls is quite small, especially in relationship to what will fit from a mental perspective. We can create mental images of any size or proportion, with none of the dimensional limitations that exist in the physical environment because these images, as an energy form, have no physical substance and thus exist in a state of form without dimension, taking up "no space."

You can easily demonstrate this concept with a simple mental exercise. Close your eyes and picture the last place where you went on a vacation. Where did you stay? What side trips did you take?

When you imagined where you went, did you get up and move from your present location in the physical environment. Did you imagine yourself getting up out of your chair to make all the prepa-rations that would be necessary for such a trip? Did you get in your car and mentally drive each mile to your destination, as you would if you were actually going? Probably not; the image of your last vacation most likely just popped into your consciousness. It is as if you were instantaneously transported to these locations, without regard to the space or distance that you would need to travel to get there in the physical environment. There was "no space" between your present location and the image of the vacation spot you hold in your memories.

The nature of our dreams also illustrates this nondimensional characteristic. First, there is no known limit to the type of dream landscape we could find ourselves in. Dreams can be as varied and diverse, if not more so, as the physical environment and all much larger than the space available inside of our skull cavity. Further-more, in our dreams we can instantaneously change locations with-out actually traveling any distance. For example, you could dream that you are in the basement of your house and then in the next instant be in your living room, without actually having walked up your basement stairs or through other rooms to get to there.

Speed

The second characteristic the mental environment shares with en-ergy is speed. Enen-ergy travels at an incredibly high rate of speed.

Light, for example, travels at a rate of 186,000 miles per second, fast enough to travel around the Earth approximately eight times in 1 second. This is so fast that to our physical senses, it appears

Understanding the Nature of the Mental Environment

instantaneous or simultaneous. What I mean is, it moves so fast that our physical senses cannot detect the motion. Obviously, we can see the light, but we cannot actually see it moving from any given source to some distant point. For example, when you turn on a light in a dark room, does the room become illuminated in stages as the light travels from its source to the walls? No, to our eyes the room fills with light instantaneously, seeming to be everywhere at once, in a flash. Our eyes are not constructed in a manner where we can make any distinctions in movement, so it seems as if it doesn't move at all.

This instantaneous characteristic of light relates quite well to the mental environment. As I pointed out earlier, dream travel can be and usually is instantaneous. While you're having a dream, in one instant you could be in a house and the next you could be on the other side of the world. There really isn't any travel time between these dream locations. Whatever, mental mechanism prompts the change, it creates a simultaneous transfer, probably taking as much physical (clock) time as it does for light to fill up a dark room.

However, there is another mental characteristic (actually more of a phenomenon) that best illustrates the speed at which the mental environment operates. This is something that is not experienced by very many people, but nevertheless reported by enough people in completely separate, unrelated incidents to confirm its validity.

What I am referring to is the phenomenon of having one's life flash before one's consciousness in the form of a continuous mental im-age, from birth to the present. Something like this usually only happens in extreme life-threatening situations where the person believes that he is only moments from death. In those few moments before the expected death, the sights, sounds, tastes, smells, feelings, and emotions of one's entire life are reexperienced.

Personally whenever I've read of or heard someone's recounting of such an experience, it baffled me. I didn't understand how a person's whole life could scroll before his consciousness in a matter of mo-ments, when it took years to experience. However, after a great deal of contemplation, it occurred to me that the energy in which our experiences are stored moves at speeds that are so incredibly fast that it would make our lives seem quite short in comparison, thus making it possible for all our experiences to scroll by in moments, regardless of how long it took actually to have the experiences.

94 Building a Framework for Understanding Ourselves Understanding the Nature of the Mental Environment 95 All this might be a little easier to understand if you imagine, as I

did, experiences stored in a stream of light very much like what you would see when you look at a distant star. There is a very good correlation here. For example, scientists tell us that many of the closest stars to the Earth, other than our sun, are so far away, that even at the incredible speed of 186,000 miles per second, it still takes the light emanating from these stars hundreds of years to reach the Earth. This distance between the stars and Earth is so vast that it creates a steady beam of light, billions of trillions of miles long. So, when we look at any star other than our sun, what we are actually seeing is the light that left it hundreds or even thousands of years ago, thus what we are seeing is light from the star's distant past. Now, if we could travel along this beam of light back to its source, what we would be seeing is light from the star's more recent past (or future from the perspective of traveling toward the star) the closer that we got to it, until we arrived at the star's present. Light from the past, future (depending on one's perspective), and present would exist simultaneously within that beam.

Now, imagine the sights, sounds, tastes, smells, feelings, and emo-tions of our experiences stored in energy as a stream of memories that we can travel along very much like this beam of light, where we can use our consciousness to roam between the distant past to the more recent past up to the present moment or project these memo-ries out into the future. If the energy in which our experiences are stored can move at speeds that are equal to or approach the speed of light, then it would offer a credible explanation as to how it is possible for one's whole life to scroll before one's consciousness in a matter of moments. To illustrate this for yourself further, imagine all your experiences stretched out like a beam of light that you could travel along at the speed of light. At that speed, at even a couple of seconds of travel time, you could get through a great deal of informa-tion. For example, if we just arbitrarily decided that it took 10,000 miles of mental energy stretched out to hold 1 year's worth of experience, then, at the speed of light, you could get through almost 19 years of memories in 1 second.

Recognition of this phenomenon helps us to grasp one of the most difficult concepts about the nature of the mental environ- ment—that it exists outside of time, as we know it. That is, our physical senses lock us into perceiving an environment bounded by

the limitations of time and three-dimensional space. We have to experience each moment in a linear sequence. We can't go backward and experience the past as it existed in the physical environment;

once it passes, it's gone forever. Nor can we move ahead into the future. The past doesn't exist anymore, and the future doesn't exist yet. What does exist are these seemingly endless sequences of "now moments" in which we experience our lives. However, the mental energy our inner components consist of operates outside of our normal concept of time and space as it is experienced in the physical environment. In the mental environment there are no spatial boundaries or time constraints; we can think in any direction we please: past, present, or future. And, theoretically, there would be no limits or boundaries as to how much information could be stored.

Simply stated, time is a function of our perception of movement over distance or three-dimensional space. In other words, to per-ceive time, you need two key components: space that has dimen-sions, and movement. Both these properties obviously exist in the physical environment. It has characteristics of three-dimensional space consisting of length, height, width or thickness, and circum-ference. Also the physical environment is in constant motion. The sun, other stars, the planets, and their moons are all in motion. And even though we can't directly perceive it, everything physical is in motion at the atomic and molecular level. Everything is spinning around something larger from the tiniest atoms and molecules to the largest stars and solar systems, including the atoms and molecules in our own bodies.

This spinning motion of the Earth and its orbit around the sun acts as a force on the environment, changing day to night and night to day, creating the weather and the seasons as well as an endless number of other environmental cycles. All these cycles of environ- mental changes (including our own bodily cycles of growth, age, respiration, digestion, and so on, resulting from the movement of the atoms and molecules of our cells) act as a force on our physical senses, causing us to experience a constantly changing environment, one cycle after another, in straight linear fashion, thus giving us our perception of time that is always moving forward. If we couldn't perceive motion or some sort of movement over three-dimensional space to act as reference points to measure this movement, then we wouldn't be able to perceive the passing of time. For example, if we

96 Building a Framework for Understanding Ourselves were conscious but somehow fixed in a state of suspended animation where we had no sensory input, no perception of movement of any kind, not even a heartbeat, it would be impossible to tell the differ-ence between a few seconds or a few days. To measure time, you need a point to start from and a point to get to; these points can be measured off in distance or time, but you need three-dimensional space to get your points.

We think in an environment that is more like a stream where our consciousness can roam freely between the past, present, and future without regard to time or space. Furthermore, the actual sequences of moments that exist in the physical environment have no effect on the energy our memories are stored in. Sequences of time only have an effect on the mental environment relative to the impact the environment is having on our senses in energy terms. You can easily demonstrate this to yourself by trying to reconstruct from your memory the last 24 hours, moment for moment. Difficult, isn't it.

Now try to do it for a week ago today. The only things we remember are the significant events, the experiences that had the most impact on our senses, the ones with the most energy connected with them.

That's because experiences are not recorded in our memories as moments of time; they are stored as charges of energy. And as such they have no relationship to the passing of physical clock time.

Remember, energy doesn't exist as atoms and molecules and therefore relative to our perception of the passing of time, it is not subjected to this nonstop spinning of everything that is physical.

Energy can remain static or be active. For example, someone or something could remind you of an experience that happened 20 years ago, an experience that you haven't thought of since it hap-pened. When you tap into the energy of those memories, you will reexperience the sights, sounds, tastes, smells, and most important, the emotions of that time, as if nothing had changed. In your mind nothing has changed. The energy remained dormant for 20 years. It becomes active either when we choose to think or reflect about what is inside of us or when we are inadvertently reminded of what is inside of us.

Significantly positive (pleasurable: happy, joyful, etc.) or negative (painful: terrorizing, angry, hateful) experiences are easily recalled because of the amount or intensity of the energy involved with the

Understanding the Nature of the Mental Environment

event. These types of experiences will pop into our conscious recol-lection, at will. But, try to remember every time in your life that you brushed your teeth, took a drink of water, opened your refrigerator door, or put your shoes and socks on and it's not so easy. These events are difficult to recall because there is very little energy con-nected with each of these types of experiences.

Our memories are like pockets of energy that we may organize chronologically by date and time, as in the stream-of-light example.

However, all the uneventful moments between the eventful mo-ments seem to disappear without a trace or get compressed as if they never happened, even though we know that they did. We must have put on our shoes and socks a month ago today because we probably would remember walking around without them; that might be sig-nificant enough to remember.

What we read, as an example, is usually quickly forgotten because there is very little impact the environment is having on our senses.

Printed words on a page have very little visual impact in relationship to activities of a more experiential nature. For example, actually participating in a biology experiment will have a much greater im-pact from an energy perspective than will reading about one. The energy required to remember something that we read has to be generated from within in the form of concentration.

So, the way in which we experience clock time is in relationship to what we are feeling (either physical or emotional impact) in any given moment. If, for example, you were experiencing terror, each second of clock time could easily seem like an hour or day. Each moment of a terrorizing experience seems to last forever because the environment is assaulting our senses. The impact is so painful that we can't wait for the experience to end to be out of that situation.

We would therefore focus our attention on how long the event is lasting, while we were waiting for it to end, thus slowing down our sense of time.

Pleasurable experiences seem to fly by (we have no concept of time passing) because we are in a state of joy and happiness, and nothing takes us out of these moments to feel something less than the joy. We come out of that state of mind when the experience starts to diminish in its degree of happiness causing us to focus more on the unpleasantness of what we are experiencing (some degree less

98 Building a Framework for Understanding Ourselves than joy, even if it is boredom) compared to the happiness we were feeling. When our focus shifts from joy (no concept of time passing) to "I can't wait for this to end," our sense of time slows down in proportion to the unpleasantness of the experience.

In the physical environment, experiences take place in moments of time that pass one after another, in linear fashion. What we experience in moments of time (through our physical senses) is transformed into electrical energy and stored as a memory relative to the degree of impact of the experience. Memories don't have any restrictions imposed on them by time because energy isn't physical.

Time is one directional, whereas in our mental environment we are free to think about our memories at will or by just wanting to. We can experience them as a mental image, mental sounds, mental tastes, and so on. Each of our memories makes up a part of our identity, and because they exist as an energy form, they have the potential to act as a force on our behavior. Regardless of whether we

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