why we are here

The question people most frequently ask me is, Why are we here? What’s the point of physical reality? Even the most intelligent leaders of the mind-body-spirit community will often offer a pat answer—we  are here as a training ground for higher spiritual development, as though the Earth plane were a kind of boot camp. Physical reality has gotten a very bad rap from Buddhism, Hinduism, Platonism, and Christianity. My reply to this issue is for now only preliminary. It will be presented in depth in my next book on reincarnation and the oversoul.

The idea of physical life being lower than non-physical life is a vestige of all the above archaic philosophies.  We are not here because we are too dumb to know better, too unevolved to get off the arduous wheel of reincarnation. As I argue forcefully in The Last Frontier, the notion of spiritual evolution is nonsensical in the greater reality of non-spacetime from which we spring. We are a part of that greater self, the oversoul or entity, and we willingly choose to be here, fully aware that we will have to deal with a slew of limitations.  I must add here that the current interpretation of everything in life, in-between lives, or in the afterlife as learning processes is repulsive to me. We are not in a perpetual schoolroom. We are gods. And we create universes while seeking to fulfill ourselves.

Obviously, non-physical dimensions—which the greatest part of us is in now—are far more thought-responsive than the physical ones. In the life of in the body, bringing forth matter, that is materialization, is a very specific kind of creativity, and although also thought responsive, it is far less immediate than that of non-material dimensions. It takes enormous energy and focus, and several steps are needed to achieve a desired goal. In order to maintain this kind of creativity and focus, we must put aside much of our native transcendent awareness.

If we really grasped how we are creating reality, how we, for instance, create each other or the chair you might be sitting in right now, we would be astonished by the task we have cut out for ourselves. We would be proud of the part we play and the sacrifices we make that are necessary to the development of a highly experimental realm, a realm that is exceedingly rare in comparison to the near infinite number of non-physical realms. We are here not because we are dumb or too unevolved. We are here because of our innate drive to create and experience in wholly new ways. We are pioneers, we are curious, restless, we are tough and like to take on big challenges, and most of all, we are courageous.

We have not just invented matter, we have invented time and space. And we use these inventions to good purpose, to further our creativity and exploration and to add contour and texture to an entirely different universe. We also invented the ego to enhance our ability to focus. The sheer creativity of it, nanosecond-to-nanosecond, is breathtaking.

What we are doing here is literally plucking form and substance out of a subatomic stew, a stew that composes our physical bodies as well. And we do this by concentrated intention, which nevertheless seems effortless to us. On consensus, we create a chair, for example, out of this stew, or we create our own bodies. Four people in a room will create four individual chairs, with chair five being the original intent of the chair maker. Each chair is unique as is the perception of it.  If you go to sit down in a chair but miss it, perhaps falling to the floor, it is because you reconstructed the chair in a slightly different place, without realizing it. The existence of an object or a living being flashes in and out of our reality. In every Plank unit (the smallest unit of time) a new chair, or, for that matter, a new physical you is formed. Growth and decay are illusions we also create.

All of this is achieved through mass agreement. Perceptions from different cultures will not allow certain objects or ideas to form while promoting others unknown—No, unthinkable— in some societies. I remember reading about a film made in the West and shown to people in the Congo. What the Congolese saw was chickens in the forefront. Not one of them noticed the machinery in the film. Why? Because they did not recreate the machinery. Machinery was unthinkable. They instead altered the film by eliminating the machinery. It simply was not there.

Most of us have seen evidence of how material creations alter when the consensus or mass agreement changes, although we may not have realized it. Not so long ago, I returned to the house I lived in as a child. The owner allowed me to come in and look around. Nothing was the same. The house seemed smaller, for one thing, and looked as though it were set at an angle. Even the rooms looked slightly slanted and certainly narrower.  It was clear to me that this was not the house I lived in. This phenomenon, experienced by so many of us, is usually attributed to the difference between a small child’s perception and an adult’s. The truth is, however, the house itself has altered according to the repeated changes in consensus. Consensus is built on the expectations of its inhabitants.  Now that’s a big topic, but for later.

So when people ask me what we are doing here, I immediately think of a toddler exploring a table leg with its tongue.  The sharpness of it, the coolness, the taste, the smoothness, the edges all have such deep but inexplicable meaning. The illusion of solidity that we constantly create has an unmatchable brilliance, but it comes at a price. What we do in this experimental and still-developing universe adds considerably to the range of experience in all realms.  We should revel in it, as artists revel in their painting and composers in their music making.

This post was promised in a former post, William Buhlman on Out-of-Body Trips into the Afterlife.