We were living in a tiny, run-down shack of a house with a leaky roof, bad plumbing and big cracks in the walls through which you could see outside, but I was very happy there. The main reason for this was because I had already learned how to change my experiential frame of reference. Even though it was a true, run-down shack of a house, I thought every day about how we were still living in greater security and comfort than probably 99% of the historical and current population of the world. We did not go to bed hungry. We had hot and cold running water and two indoor toilets, a bath and a shower, refrigerator and a stove. We did not fear for our lives on a daily basis. Compared to most families that had ever lived, we lived like royalty.
Now, I had lived for a while in my car, and spent some time living in a tent, so I did have some real-life basis for comparison, but even those experiences were far short of what billions have had to endure. The point is that the perspective I deliberately used to frame my experience through at the time actually changed it from being miserable to being very enjoyable.
Over the course of my life I have used this technique to give myself a way to more fully enjoy my life regardless of what is going on at the time around me. Experiences have no value whatsoever unless you have a contextual framework that gives an experience value and meaning. What most people may not realize is that we can deliberately pick and change the contextual framework that is setting the value and meaning of an experience. We can look at things from a different perspective, such as an imagined one or one we have previously been through.
After Irene died, I automatically reacted from the frame of reference of "my one true love is gone forever." It was a despairing abyss of pain and suffering. My frame of reference was screaming at me that I would never touch her, never see her, never hear her voice again. Over time, I changed that perspective, that frame of reference, into one were we are together even now, having a wonderful adventure, headed towards an eternal paradise of a future together.
What has also changed is the frame of reference through which I see our lives here in this world. I understand that a big part of our purpose in coming here was to give us the perspective of living in this world and the difficulties we experience here. There was a perspective of our love for each other, and our eternal life together in the afterlife, that simply could not be imagined. It has to be experienced, in full, to fully appreciate the value and meaning it supplies for how we can experience each other, and how we can enjoy and value our lives in our eternal paradise together.
Our lives here, including our lives as we live the in this "transdimensional" phase, are providing us a deep and broad, invaluable, emotional, physical, psychological contextual frame of reference. It's not just a joyous reunion that awaits us, but an eternity of appreciation and hard-earned understanding of the value of what we truly mean to each other and what is to come.