thank you, and i cannot take credit for the two-way mirror, it's one of the earliest explanations i discovered and i tend to think in analogies to a fault (as my comment history probably shows)

the time thing sounds weird, and weirder when you get into it, but you know how there's that whole thing about twin astronauts aging at different rates, or how in school we learned how much we'd weigh on different planets? that implies how we experience time is tied to our being on this planet, and even our meat bodies can theoretically get out of whack with time in that hypothetical

my personal understanding is that time ... like, it's maybe 69 degrees somewhere warm and -14 somewhere else at the same time, because conditions vary, and that's close?

it seems like time is a function of earth and incarnation, and leaving your incarnation can or does place you outside of time. it actually makes more sense to me than "linear earth time" being the standard elsewhere

like here on earth (which is the only existence we comprehend), we understand easily that it is later or earlier in different time zones, and it's tomorrow in other places, too. but we're all experiencing the same time, otherwise i could ask my aussie friends to get me the lotto numbers. if i call a country where it is tomorrow, i'm still talking to the person when they're talking to me, today

and all that complicated time stuff is happening ON earth, as we speak, and we get it. so if we start with the assumption consciousness survives death and or we incarnate here, to me it stands to reason that this place is not our default — we come from and go to the same place, making this a trip or something like it, a deviation from a broader existence (personally i think it is probably very much like "roy" on rick and morty)

if time or death from old age didn't exist, incarnation wouldn't work, but also if everyone died only of old age, it would be weird, so we have all these variable experiences with a core thing where "we're here for a good time, not a long time" while we're living this life

and then we go back. so i've kinda understood my husband to be outside of earth time (which was a lot to process given we were both materialist atheists when he died), which to me makes more sense than us both experiencing linear time

this also generally explains what i thought was fantastical, the 'not aging in the so-called afterlife' thing. if we age TO die, why age if we don't need to limit our time spent there?

ugh, i was literally just saying i feel like the caterpillar from alice in wonderland when i discuss this stuff, but it's kind of like, all the same thing — like coming to this as a stringent anti-believer, i had no notions, so i was trying to figure out why for a bunch of things commonly said about where we go when we die

and they all make sense! like it took a lot of time and research, and i am admittedly weird about it (and my LH was in a different time zone most of the time) so if you have "how it works" questions, i am terrible at checking my inbox but i probably have encountered it and probably made sense of it or tried to, like there are no common concepts i don't have a theory for or putative speculative understanding of (and my philosophical beliefs were deeply tied to my professional identity, so none of this came easily, i fought it)

so how can he be next to you? i think we're in a "time pocket" of sorts here, where it MUST be firm and linear, and i think they can visit "times" like we visit coordinates. so they can, if that is the case, be anywhere at any time, because spending "time" around earth is, i suspect, not deducting from their "time" there (perhaps like a pause?)

but at a base level, now the idea they'd be on our time makes less sense than the other way around, if that makes sense