Why Can’t We Go Back?

It started as a way to journal and paint at the same time. It turned into the most natural way I’ve found to show the part and the whole.

Here’s what happens. You carve a sentence into the pastel. The blade leaves a ridge. Then you cover it with a new layer of color, and the sentence disappears. You can’t read it anymore. But the ridge is still there under the new color. The next layer has to go over it. The knife catches on it the next time you carve. The old sentence shapes everything that comes after it, even though you can’t see it.

Everything. You can cover a cut. You can’t uncut it.

That’s the answer to the question in the title of this part of the book. Why can’t we go back? Because expansion can’t become unexpanded. When the Current expands, the whole it’s part of is now more than it was. To go back, you’d have to remove that expansion from everything it has touched since, and everything it touched has changed everything else. And even the removing would become another layer.

The distance shrinks. Not the desire, and not the Current. The distance you feel between them.

In relativity there’s something called length contraction. An object moving very fast is measured shorter along the direction it’s moving, compared with something standing still. Reflect that across the mirror, space to Vibration, and you get Vibrational Contraction. As you come into alignment with the Current, the perceived distance between what you want and it showing up in your life contracts. I’ve wondered whether “compression” is the better word. I keep “contraction” because it’s the reflection of length contraction, and the pairs have to stay pairs. Either way, the thing you wanted doesn’t get smaller. It gets closer.

No, and the reason is lovely.

Nothing with mass can reach the speed of light. The faster you go, the more energy it takes to go faster still. Reaching light speed would take infinite energy.

Reflect it. Nothing gets ahead of the Current, because your expansion is the Current developing. The Current is always the furthest point the whole has reached, and the furthest point includes what you just wanted. You can’t overtake it. You’re already out at its front edge every time you want something new.

One part of the physical story does reverse on this side: the part about resistance itself, something getting harder to change as you go. Physically, the closer you get to light speed, the more each next bit of speed costs. Nonphysically, the closer you get to the Current, the more receptive you become, and the easier the next bit gets. That’s how spurts start turning into streams.

Because the rule, not my taste, decides which way almost every row goes. There’s an old popular-science infographic that lists twelve things to know about Einstein’s theories of relativity; all twelve are below. Look at numbers five, six and eight. Time dilation and length contraction don’t depend on mass in physics, only on how close you are to the speed of light—so there’s no resistance in them to flip, and they keep their shape, reflected as the gap and the shrinking distance. Number eight is about how much energy it costs to speed a mass up as it nears light speed. That one has mass in it, which means resistance is at work. When you flip resistance to receptivity, number eight has to invert: physically, each next bit of speed gets harder; nonphysically, each next bit of alignment gets easier. A word-swap wouldn’t flip number eight and leave five and six alone. The rule from Chapter 2 does, whoever is running it, because it asks one question of every row: does this relationship depend on resistance, or is it an identity or a definition? That’s why number seven, mass and energy as two forms of one thing, keeps its shape, reflected as Movement and conscious energy, two forms of one thing, even though it has mass in it, and number eight inverts. One is an equivalence. The other is a cost that rises with resistance.

It shows that one simple rule, followed honestly, keeps producing relationships that belong to the same whole, even in someone else’s hands. That’s what I wanted to see. The rest you’ll have to check against your own life. The only laboratory for the nonphysical is the one you’re standing in.

Because you just spent sixteen chapters learning what it says. Now it’ll make sense.

Here it is, the way it sits across the middle of the diagram:

That your Movement, the particular piece of the whole that’s you, times the Current, produces conscious energy. In physics, mass times the speed of light squared is the energy a mass has at rest, just by existing. Reflect that, and Movement times the Current squared is the conscious energy a Movement has just by being part of the whole. I call it movement-energy equivalence, the reflection of mass-energy equivalence.

Right. There’s nothing to count on that side, so I don’t call it multiplication. I read the sign as “the product of.” A relationship produces something, and what it produces is its product. That meaning survives the mirror, and it’s the one I mean. A product in that sense doesn’t care which factor comes first, and it can be applied again to what it produced.

It also tells you something a list of words can’t. In a product, neither factor does anything alone. No Movement, no conscious energy. No Current, no conscious energy either. Each one conditions the other. You aren’t a separate thing that the Current flows past. You and the Current together are what produces anything at all.