Advent 2010: The Trans-Dimensional Life

As we enter the season where we anticipate Christ's birth, it is natural for us to contemplate the spiritual dimension of life. As you think about what it means to stand between the physical and spiritual, you won't understand it. That's okay; I don't either.

Up through my thirties, I devoured Science Fiction literature. One of my favorite areas was in theoretical physics, particularly the concepts related to time travel and dimensions. The popular stuff in movies and TV shows is pretty lame by comparison to what appears in literature, but the real deal of science is mostly incomprehensible.

All those years I never understood I was already a trans-dimensional being.

Our biggest barrier to understanding God and His revelation is thinking about it. That is, we assume our minds can handle it on some level. My very first attempt to preach at age 17 was on the subject of how Heaven and Hell are in another dimension. Technically correct, I suppose, but not the way I described it. We end up with thinking it's more or better compared to what we have here. It's not. It is so utterly different we lack the ability to find it, even with the most advanced scientific explorations. We'll never get there from here. We can't even think about it at all.

Over the past few years I've been doing my best to explain why we've been so wrong about this in Western Christianity. We have come dangerously close to blaspheming the Holy Spirit by reducing His Realm down to our level. All my blather about Aristotelian versus Mystical logic and such is simply an attempt to help people to reverse course and go back to what the First Century Christians thought of such things. Or rather, what they didn't think, but knew in their spirits.

If I die and this whole business of my teaching fades into the ether, I'm not worried about it. This is God's business and He doesn't need my pitiful contributions. I'm hoping something I say or do will at least empower someone else, regardless of how much they remember of what I've written. If I can just help one other person break the barrier the way I have, it's more than I deserve.

Sometimes I simply run out of things to write. How am I supposed to present something which only nibbles at the edge of my intellectual consciousness? Something so big, so vast, so inexplicable, so… yeah. The Land Without Words. The Fourth Dimension. Realm of the Spirit.

The Garden of Eden was not a place, but a state of existence which straddled the dimensional boundaries. Somehow we chose to close the door and stay here below. Every day I witness more and more words and images showing my fellow believers still tend to want to stay on this side of things. Only God can fix that problem. He's been working on it since Eden, so I'm just a single twinkle in the time line, a blink of the eye and gone. The importance is in what I can just touch from here, that other dimension. I belong there, and it calls my name.

Anybody else interested in going?

Ed Hurst is Associate Editor of Open for Business.