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Thank you so much for sharing your visualization of God's "now" dear brother in Christ!

Oh, while I am thinking about it, I think at some point we will exceed the speed of light.

Some Jewish mystics believe the firmament is not geometric, i.e. here/earth versus there/heaven. Rather, they believe the firmament is a boundary such as the speed of light, that the "here" is "there" and vice versa.

Sound and light - like our very existence in Wesson's article linked above - are waves. And according to Wesson's article, the oscillating wave (our existence) continues after death, which is to say we merely experience a phase shift when we physically die.

Indeed, space/time and wave fluctuation are like hand-in-glove. From a previous post of mine:

Mathematically, the dimension of a space is the minimum number of coordinates (axes) necessary to identify a point within the space. A space of zero dimensions is a point; one dimension, a line, two dimensions, a plane; three, a cube, etc. That is the geometry of it. In zero dimensions, the mathematical point is indivisible.

It is not nothing. It is a spatial point. A singularity is not nothing.

In ex nihilo Creation (beginning of space/time) - the dimensions are not merely zero, they are null, dimensions do not exist at all. There is no space and no time. Period.

There is no mathematical point, no volume, no content, no scalar quantities. Ex nihilo doesn’t exist in relationship to anything else; there is no thing.

In an existing physical space, each point (e.g. particle) can be parameterized by a quantity such as mass. The parameter (e.g. a specific quantity within the range of possible quantities) is in effect another descriptor or quasi-dimension that uniquely identifies the point within the space.

Moreover, if the quantity of the parameter changes for a point, then a time dimension is invoked. For example, at one moment the point value is “0” and the next it is “1”.

Wave propagation (e.g. big bang, inflation) cannot occur in null dimensions nor can it occur in zero spatial dimensions, a mathematical point; a dimension of time is required for any fluctuation in a parameter value at a point.

Moreover, wave propagation must also have a spatial/temporal relation from cause point to effect point, i.e. physical causation.

For instance “0” at point n^t causes “1” at point n+1^t+1 which causes "0" at point n+1^t+2 etc..

Obviously, physical wave propagation (e.g. big bang/inflationary model) cannot precede space/time and physical causality. Again,

In the absence of space, things cannot exist.

In the absence of time, events cannot occur.

Both space and time are required for physical causation.

Likewise, some Jewish mystics offer an insight that I find helpful in expressing that God is the Creator of "all that there is" including space, time and causation. More specifically, they use the term Ayn Sof to refer to Him as the Creator. The term literally means "no thing" and conveys the points that He is not subject to His own Creation and moreover, that any word we mere mortals would use to describe Him (e.g. time, space, causation) limits our ability to know Who He IS to the term that we used.

I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the ending, saith the Lord, which is, and which was, and which is to come, the Almighty. - Revelation 1:8

To God be the glory!.

It's interesting how such ancient ideas seem to be topical nowadays in the natural sciences. (Or one is to suppose so, waiting for the scientists to get seriously engaged with such problems.)

Nowadays it is generally accepted in the community of physical scientists that the Universe (considered under the aspect of a single, integrated, total system) is at once finite, yet unbounded. Which seems at first approach to be illogical: For if something is finite, how can it be "unbounded?" The very idea of finitude seems to imply the existence of a boundary somewhere.

This paradox can be resolved (it seems to me) according to the categories of Platonic reasoning. The boundary cannot be detected from within 4D spacetime reality by means of human sense perception. Human sense perception was "designed" to function in the 4D world. Perceptions of higher dimensions do not arise in sense; they arrive in mind, in human imagination.

Plato reasoned that the God of the Cosmos (of the entire created order) was the "Unknown God," BEYOND the Cosmos. He despised the "known gods" of his day — the Olympians — as perpetrators of bad moral example for humankind. All the Olympians seemed to want to do was fight among themselves, for vainglory, pre-eminence, dominance, using human beings as tools, or pawns, or sacrifices as need be, in their quarrels with each other. Nothing makes this more clear than Homer's Iliad, possibly the single most unremittently blood-thirsty work of world literary art to this day.

We know from The Republic that Plato did not hold the great Greek poets in high regard [e.g., Hesoid, Homer], because they transmitted such stories about inept, unprincipled, dissolute gods to man. Simply put, Plato did not regard such "gods" as decent role models for man.

The God that Plato encountered in his contemplation was an Unknown (and Unknowable, given the limitations of the human mind) God utterly "Beyond" the Cosmos of His making.

In saying that such a God was utterly "Beyond," Plato indicated that this "Beyond" was not contained within the 4D block of normal human awareness and experience. It seems to me he strongly suggests that this God is "Beyond" in the sense that the human mind has no categories by which such a "Beyond" can be imagined, let alone understood, on the basis of purely physical observational experience.

But not to worry! Plato seems also to reject the idea of death as an "endpoint." For he writes that death is merely "the separation of the body and the soul. Nothing more." Elsewhere he had already indicated his belief in the immortality of the soul. Only the physical body perishes at death, nothing more. At the point of physical death (which for Plato is decidedly not an "end-point"), the essential man — the soul — undergoes a "phase change." So does the physical body: It falls into the clutches of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, thus falling into a corresponding "phase change."

But it seems to me the point Plato is making is that the Second Law does not, and cannot, reach to, or affect, the immortal soul, which goes on eternally in some fashion both during its incarnate existence and after it has shed the mortal "bodily coil."

All this, some four hundred years before the Incarnation of Christ, the fulfillment of Plato's own vision long after his own time.

Justin Martyr noticed this; as evidently, so did Augustine....

Likewise, the idea of the Eternal Now corresponds to Plato's God of the Beyond — in the sense that there is no way for the human mind, cultivated and schooled in 4D experience, to contact let alone verify conditions appertaining to dimensions beyond the three of space and one of time.

This is a human limitation. God is not subject to it. Certainly it seems to me that Socrates' last words in The Apology testify to this understanding.

Socrates had been charged with the crime of contributing to the delinquency of Athenian youth by disparaging the state gods. The charge was a capital crime, if proven by a jury of 500 of his peers — fellow Athenians. With a 27-vote plurality, this jury convicted Socrates as charged. But they gave Socrates an out: He could accept permanent exile from his beloved Athens; or subject himself to state execution by taking the poison, Hemlock.

Socrates chose the latter. His last words to the jury that convicted him of death remain to this day as a great inspiration to me:

The hour of departure has arrived, and we go our ways — I to die, and you to live. Which is better God only knows. — B. Jowett, tr.

Have run on for so long by now, must close for now.

Thank you so very much, dearest sister in Christ, for your absolutely superlative essay-post! Just wonderful....