Stop and think about the fact that our life is organized in cycles. The moon has a lunar cycle which is reflected in things as disparate as the tides of the ocean, patterns of "lunacy," and a woman's monthly period. The earth revolves every twenty-four hours making the sun appear to cycle; the planets have their own circular schedules around the sun; we exhale carbon dioxide which vegetation recycles to us as fresh oxygen; water falls as rain, evaporates, condenses and falls again; human bodies are made of the minerals of the earth which return to the earth at death; the generations cycle through the stages from birth to adolescence to maturity, at which point the process begins again; we measure our time by the cycles of hours, days, months and years. We could go on, but you understand the pattern.

We know that in the spirit world there is no time. There is only the eternal "Now." So what we call time on earth is merely an elaborate illusion. We normally think of time as a linear phenomenon, stretching in a straight line from Sunday through Monday to Tuesday and so on until at the end of Saturday on the line of our life a new Sunday appears.

But what if time were in fact a spiral, a coil, something like a spring. We could then visualize ourselves moving in a circular fashion through a series of cycles. Each circuit would bring us back to the same approximate place, and yet each time around we would find ourselves on a slightly higher level. Perhaps all the Sundays would be stacked one atop the other, so that every time we encountered a new Sunday, we would always be on the north side of the spiral, but one revolution higher.

This opens a fascinating possibility. If we are convinced that time is linear, we will adopt the habit of looking straight ahead. But seeing time as a spiral suddenly adds three dimensions to our experience of time. Instead of only looking ahead, we now have the ability to look upward at the circuits overhead, which amounts to gazing into the future. And by looking downward, we can see the loops through which we have already passed. So perhaps seers are not so different from ourselves. Maybe they have simply learned to look at time from a different perspective.

Of course, speaking of life in terms of cycles leads us to consider reincarnation, the cycles through which our spirit goes as it progresses from one lifetime to the next. How can we think, when the universe is organized in cycles, that our conscious existence is not also part of some grand cycle? Perhaps the coil that represents our current lifetime is merely one Sunday on a much larger spiral, and that each lifetime represents an additional day on the upward spiral of our spiritual evolution. It would be no wonder that, from time to time, we could look downward and see glimpses of the lives we have already lived.

So, when you complain that you seem to be just "going around in circles," you might be more accurate than you think.

Posted 8-1-04

Copyright: John W. Sloat 2004