Note: time and its distortions in Spirit is also covered in chapter 15
Time is an essential element for any entity who lives within the context of our three dimensional universe. Time doesn’t simply imply that it is a particular time of the day, month or year. Time is the element that separates all actions on a microsecond by microsecond basis. Without time, there would be no sequential events. There would be no before or after; no past or future. Every single action, movement or thought would happen simultaneously. In order to have sequential events, they MUST be separated in time or they would have no meaning for those of us who live in the material world.
For us, time also has the property of continuity. Each day follows the day before, and will be followed by another day tomorrow. We all have long term memories of the past as well as short term memories of the things we did during the last twenty four hours or so. We also have a sense of the future so that we can plan what we will do tomorrow or over the course of the next days, weeks, months or years.
Einstein’s laws of relativity define time as a fourth dimension. We perceive a world of three dimensions, and we can move in two directions in each one, up and down, right and left, and forward and backward. You can also stand still and not move at all. But time is an unusual dimension. It has two directions (past and future), but we can only move in one of them; into the future. Nor can we make time stand still.
However, in the spiritual world, time has a very different meaning because the world of Spirit is multidimensional and a spirit can not only move forward in time, but backward as well. In Spirit, time may also speed up, slow down or stop entirely. Time for any given spirit depends on its status within the spiritual hierarchy and also upon its “state of mind”. Furthermore, not every spirit has control of the time it experiences in the world of spirit. It depends very much on the experience, understanding and spiritual evolution of the spirit itself.
This accounts for the much of the difficulty spirits that remain on the transitional plane have in controlling their thoughts and environment. For instance, most spirits trapped on the transitional plane experience only a narrow slice of time, often concerning memories surrounding their time of death, or memories of a particularly emotional or guilt-ridden part of their lives. This narrow band of memories keeps looping over and over again so that any new lessons the soul might learn concern only that short period of their lives. For them, every day is “Groundhog day”.
A spirit might create its own Hell right on the transitional plane. Earthbound souls often become imprisoned in a timeless Hell of their own making, constantly reliving some trauma from their past life, or fretting about something they about which they feel a sense of guilt. In many instances, the guilt is really needless because it concerns some minor transgression against an obsolete religious dogma. These souls remain fixated on one or a few ideas because time stands still for them. When rescued from their self-inflicted bubble, (usually by other souls who were old friends) they find no time has passed at all.
Each spirit that remains on the transitional plane has a different range of memories. Some have a much larger repertoire over a much longer span of time. Some re-experience a slice of memories from much earlier in their lives. Others have nearly no real memories at all and seem more like a bundle of desires and urges than whole personalities.
It also appears that the longer that they remain on the transitional plane, the smaller their reservoir of memory becomes. Hans Holzer, who has spent decades investigating ghosts believes that all ghosts are psychotic. This is especially true of ghosts that have spent hundreds of years haunting old buildings. I believe that this phenomenon is similar to living people who are kept in sensory isolation for long periods of time and who develop serious personality defects as a result.