“Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you.”
– Jeremiah 1:5
“For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb.”
– Psalm139:13
I explained in a previous post how God could order the universe to produce outcomes He desires by arranging existence from beginning to end from any point in time. It’s a line of reasoning that combines science and logic as a thought portal to eternity to show how it is that the Universe as it moves and expands through space and time, “knows where it’s headed.”
With a similar mix of reasoning, we can arrive at a fact that some might find terrifying and others comforting: Not only does God know each of us intimately well, He knew us long before we were born. Each of our souls is timeless and existed before we lived.
That reality is based on a fundamental pillar of the physics ordering the entire Universe: that space and time are the same thing. One way to appreciate the timelessness of the universal Singularity from which all of existence originated is that, as a point of zero volume, it takes up no space. That which is without space is without time. The Singularity is dimensionless, or, without measurable qualities. It has no length, width and breadth. Absent those things, it is also without time.
Another verifiably dimensionless part of the Universe is human consciousness. The thoughts that we have throughout our lives, even though they arise from physical existence and neurological processes, ultimately make up a reality that is outside of time, and so transcends all of time, including the time during which we’re alive. Our presence is unique in the Universe in that our minds are like conduits between the physical and nonphysical realms of existence. Although our thoughts originate physically, they ultimately assume a nonphysical and dimensionless presence transcendent to time.
Nothing that we think is hidden
Everything that we’ve ever thought is part of the singular unity of existence. Just because other people don’t know what we don’t reveal to them doesn’t mean our thoughts exist only in our heads. On the plane of existence in which the Universe exists as one being, our thoughts are as much part of the Universe as the tiniest spec of matter, the faintest light or the most distant rustle of sound. All our thoughts are part of the Universe.
What makes our thoughts dimensionless and not just brain activity? Think of a circle. We know that circle is real because it is the image that you use when you draw a circle, or when you attempt to. The fact that we can draw a circle proves that the circle in our heads is real even though its image has no physical presence. Neuroscience explains the neural loops with which our brains form and recall memories, but it cannot account for the images themselves. It cannot account for a circle as part of our brain or even derive that specific image from neurological activity. Don’t be tempted to conflate human memory with computer memory. Neuroscience cannot “digitize” our thoughts in a way that could be represented on a screen or any other conceivable way. Yet the image of the circle in our heads is real. It’s just not physical.
Another way to understand how our thoughts are dimensionless is to envision the circle or anything else in your head and try to assign measurements to it. Is that circle just large enough to fit around your index finger, or is it alternatively big enough for a whale to swim through? Its size is whatever you imagine it to be. It doesn’t have a real diameter or circumference, though. The images in our thoughts are “measureless,” or dimensionless. In our heads, measurements are part of our imagination. So while the images in our thoughts are real, they are dimensionless.
Because thoughts are dimensionless, they are timeless
Each thought that passes through our lives, and even consciousness itself, is part of a realm of the Universe that is transcendent to time. Each moment of our lives that we experience is a reality that arises from a time-bound physical existence to a timeless dimension. That brings us to a logical paradox. Because our consciousness becomes timeless, or transcendent to time, our thoughts pass from the time they are generated to a state of “no-time,” “un-timed” or “all-time.” As part of an existence unbound by the constraints of time or chronology, our consciousness can be said to predate our very lives. And they continue to exist after we die.
That’s what it means to have a soul. To us, we’re experiencing everything that happens to us for the first time, and we’ll never live the past again. On a different plane of existence, because our consciousness passes into timeless eternity, we’ve always lived the lives we live. As with the Singularity that holds all of space and time, all states of being have always existed, even before they happen.
The lives of people who will live in the future will pass into timelessness, and so exist already, right now.