From your perspective, I’m not worth knowing. So forget me. After all, I may not even exist. What evidence do you have? We’ve never met. You haven’t seen me in a photo. You’ve only these pages printed with words. For you, it’s far more important to establish your own identity.
In The Taboo Against Knowing Who You Really Are, Alan Watts refers to identity as an ego in a bag of skin. David Crosby (from Crosby, Stills and Nash) calls the body a meat suit. Dave Pollard, a blogger, thinks of himself as “the space through which stuff passes”. Don Juan, in the books by Carlos Castaneda, sees a luminous egg with tendrils. Me, I’ve conjured up the jabberwocky.
I acknowledge input from Lewis Carrol, of course, but more especially Robert Heinlein. In Life Line, his first-ever published story, the dean of science-fiction writers describes a four-dimensional body:
‘You are a space-time event having duration four ways. You are not quite six feet tall, you are about twenty inches wide and perhaps ten inches thick. In time, there stretches behind you more of this space-time event reaching to perhaps nineteen-sixteen, of which we see a cross section here at right angles to the time axis, and as thick as the present. At the far end is a baby, smelling of sour milk and drooling its breakfast on its bib. At the other end lies, perhaps, an old man someplace in the nineteen eighties. Imagine this space-time event . . . as a long pink worm, continuous through the years, one end at his mother’s womb, the other at the grave. It stretches past us here, and the cross-section we see appears to be a single discreet body. But that is illusion. There is physical continuity in this concept to the entire race, for these pink worms branch off from other pink worms. In this fashion the race is like a vine whose branches intertwine and send out shoots. Only by taking a cross section of the vine would we fall into the error of believing that the shootlets were discrete individuals.’
Well, Heinlein’s idea lodged in my mind in much the same way (and location?) as Adam’s Rickmansworth meme. I grant that it’s not exactly glamorous to reduce life to a worm, sausage or tube, and you may feel inclined to turn up your nose. Please don’t.
Because consider just what that model accomplishes. By shaking hands with the jabberwocky we’ve taken time out of the equation and elevated our position to that of Czerner’s photon! For us in the now—in the know—time no longer exists. It “stands still, eternally”. We stand, like Dr Who, outside of time.
It is a curious phenomenon, but from any position of the worm’s body we have the ability to look back in one direction only. We are able to ‘see’ along our body in that direction, which we label the past, but we can’t see the other way, upstream, into the future. It’s as though a half of us is buried in mud (out of which we're slowly rising).
We possess theoretical knowledge of our feet underground, but our actual awareness of that part of our body is very limited. Intellectually we grasp that we stretch in that direction, but we have no idea how far. Because we have much less vision ‘upstream’, we declare that it hasn’t happened yet, and we call that the future. But that’s not correct. In reality, there exists just the one continuum. Every point within it is as real as another.
Re-enter the spark. Gentle as a butterfly, it alights along our tube’s length like a finger playing chopsticks. Or, because of the eye-blurring speed with which it performs, it may be imagined as a giant hand playing all eighty-eight keys at once—a chord more powerful than the all the grand pianos at the end of Sergeant Pepper.
Time, then, is nothing more than an illusion. It is the phenomenon that results from our (limited) ability to see or remember along one of the dimensions of our being. It is the equivalent of our ability to look down the length of only one outstretched arm. The other is shrouded in thick mist. Time vision is like a diode that allows electricity to travel one way only.
Suppose that someone is afflicted by not being able to retain memories—neither long-term nor short. For such a person time would have no significance, because you cannot sense the passage of time unless you have the abilty to compare the present with at least one previous imprint. Perhaps it’s like that for animals. Perhaps it’s like that for people with Alzheimer’s. Their lives would be lived entirely in the present. Maybe their perception of life is more accurate than ours.
But we’ve strayed from our brief. Let’s return to the topic thread. We were speaking of the spark that leaped. Very well then, after every such leap our consciousness quantum brings to life its host’s complete store of background memories. It is instantly updated.
However, that moment can occur at any point of the host’s life. Any point is as good as another. There is no objective ‘now’, you see. The present is no more special or real than any point in the host’s past or future. I may have started this book in say 2005, completed the first edition in 2010, be working on the second edition, ‘now’, in 2012, but who knows when you’ll read it? And when you read it for the second time? And when you loan it to a friend?
It’s like the universe expanding a thousand-fold. You wouldn’t be aware of it. You wouldn’t know that time was jumping about at random. At any point in your life, whether it’s your twenty-first, the day of your first marriage, or the day that the doctor tells you that you have six months to live, that instant would be perceived as the cutting face of life thus far. Click your heels together, and you could be anywhen.
You and I, we’re not human beings you know. Get over that notion. Why cling to your ethnicity, race, tribe or nationality? Borders don’t exist in the real world. Species are not ring-fenced. There are no aliens to fear. When all is said and done, we’re jabberwockies: four-dimensional worm-like bodies with flukes for arms and legs, a zygote-sized snout and a somewhat shrunken seventy- or eighty-year-old tail that is rudely truncated (sooner and blunter, if you are cut down accidentally in the prime of life).
Our entirety exists outside of time like a statue in a blurred time-lapse photograph. Life, as we know it, at any instant, is simply a cross-section of the jabberwocky. The spark that does the cutting dances up and down its spine from head bone to toe bone. As it plucks here, there and everywhere it defines the present where we find ourselves at that moment.
But actually there is no present. Neither is there a past nor a future. There is only the subjective present, the one which we’re forever unwrapping.
Judge for yourself. Let’s run a little thought experiment. Are you ready? Just sit back and close your eyes. Right then, try to feel time pass. See if you can feel it slip through your fingers. Are you able to?
I certainly can’t. You say that you can follow the second hand of the clock on the wall? That doesn’t count. You opened your eyes. And even if you didn’t, it’s just a physical event. It is an external action that you don’t experience within yourself.
What I’m saying is that everyone experiences the present only as an instant, albeit an instant with duration. And, like the principle behind motion pictures, those separate instances link up to generate an illusion of time passing fluidly. In actual fact, though, it doesn’t. It is made of granules, quanta, or instants. Life jiggles instantaneously.
As a diversion, try that same thought experiment out for the other dimensions. You’ll get a similar result. No dimension is really real. When you travel any distance north, south, east, west, up or down, it doesn't matter how far you go. You’re always 'here'. It feels like the same place as you were before. You remain at the middle of the universe, not its edge. Whether you walk, drive or fly, your consciousness stays put. The scissoring of your legs doesn’t propel you across the landscape. It pulls it towards you.
But that the fourth dimension doesn’t exist at all . . . isn’t that ludicrous? We needn’t go down that route, surely. Without time, what are we left with? Where would we be? When? What chance is there for us to grow? How could we hope for a change in the weather or in our situation? How could evolution occur (if it is still on the curriculum)?
Let me modify what I just said. That’s not how I meant it exactly. It’s not that there’s no time. I’m just saying that it may not be as how we imagine it. No, time is not what we’ve been brought up to believe. It is merely the measure of the distance between two points. You use it to drive from one city to another.
When you do, features that lie along the way do not ‘cause’ others to happen. This forest is not the ‘bad karma’ from having crossed such and such a bridge. This roundabout is the not the effect caused by that field of sheep six miles back, or by that hill up ahead. And this reasoning applies to our lives also.
A bulge in one part of our jabberwocky body does not cause a depression in another—for example a knee causing an elbow. The whole jabberwocky exists all at once. Examined from ‘above’, the creature is always fully formed. You only seem to make time move when you shift your gaze from one part of its body another. Your vehicle may seem to cause the road to move too, but we’re agreed, I hope, that it doesn’t?
I admit that this way of interpreting time turns our whole concept of life topsy-turvy. All of a sudden there is no cause and effect, no free-will, and no chance happenings. There are no choices to be made. There’s no karma going on that we’ve got to watch out for. ‘Right’ and ‘wrong’ are now terms that hold little meaning.
Life, or lifespan, is largely an illusion. It is merely a string of conscious moments that does not exist as a unit in reality. But let’s put one under the microscope.
A life has a certain span, yet it’s only at the moment of death that we know how many years long. At any given moment we have a height, width and length that may be measured (just as any particular size corresponds to a time—or times—in life). Are you with me so far?
Emotionally we appear to have more invested in the fourth dimension than in any other. We don’t mourn the fact that our maximum reach is five or six feet from head to toe. So why do we work ourselves up over three score and ten? Death is merely the dead skin that lies at your periphery. It’s just the air that breezes across your scalp. It’s just how far your body reaches in that direction.
At this stage I’d like to introduce an alternate way for how time operates. I’ll demonstrate that it’s a dynamic phenomenon that can be brought about through a static process. I’m not going to ram it down your throat. I just want to admit that it holds water, that it’s airtight and that it could stand firm.
We’ll begin where we left off: that time is a collection of instants. In other words, time is quantized, discrete, digital or particulate (enough synonyms already). I suggest that consciousness results when a set of memory moments is uploaded into a particular instant. Now then, if this includes the awareness of a set of other 'consciousness-quanta', together with their cqs, nestled and contained . . .
Rats, I've lost you again.
How am I going to do this? How did Einstein keep it simple?
Okay, picture this. Have you ever created your own cartoon? Maybe back at school during an especially dull lesson you might have drawn a little figure down in the corner of your exercise book. On the next page you drew it again, but slightly altered, and again on the following pages. When you reached the end, you had something to show your friends. You told them to look as you flipped through the pages. Your stick figure skipped, walked, ran, jumped and flew (you were inventive). In essence, you brought your little animus to life.
In reality, of course, our little fellow doesn’t move. It’s static. It appears to move when we bring it alive, and maybe that’s what it thinks of itself too. But before you smile indulgently at Mr Stick, consider this. Perhaps on a higher plane the same principle applies to us.
Perhaps ‘upstairs’ some mechanism is operating to flip through a book of our leaves. Perhaps a wind is blowing through the pages of our calendar. There could be a giant thumb progressing us through time. We appear to be alive, but that may only be apparent. To our selves our bodies seem fully fleshed, but on a higher level we may just appear to be transparencies.
And the way that this illusion could be brought about is through memories. They might be the driving force. Memories, as an awareness of a set of other moments of awareness, could be the key. We define that set of memory awarenesses as ‘our past’. We know they have happened. Or, more accurately, we say they have happened because we know about them. It feels as if we have lived through those moments.
To illustrate what I mean let’s look at birthdays. Mine, if you like. Shall we start with my tenth?
At that age, I hold the memories of my ninth, eighth, seventh and-so-on birthdays in my head. The memory of each of them includes the memories of all previous ones (at nine I remember 8, 7, 6 . . . at eight I remember 7, 6, 5 . . .) They come tucked inside one another like Russian nesting dolls.
What that nesting gives rise to is the passage of time. It has the effect of flipping pages without any action needing to occur. Nested memories flip without any external help. You see, whatever age you are, you see that as the latest in a chain of memory instants. This produces the illusion that you just have arrived there, as if having just stepped off bus.
Now, the flipping does not need to happen in a particular order. Imagine that you’d drawn your stick figures on a deck of cards. If then you shuffle them, you’ll witness the most amazing thing. It doesn’t alter the illusion! I’ll say it again because this is important: shuffling the deck doesn’t make a scrap of difference. In every case it will seem that life proceeds in an orderly fashion. How could that be?
We’re not just fooling around. You and I are having a serious discussion about eternity and total unity. It’s not an idle dreamer’s toy, this notion of a jabberwocky stretching out in four dimensions. Neither is it a means whereby we snuggle up to the important, the famous, or the well-known.
There’s just the one of us, you see. You and I are one, the one-and-only. Of course, by “you and I” you’ll understand that it’s not just the two of us, right? This is not a private conversation. ‘You and I’ includes the thousands of millions sitting on the other side of the monitor (well, maybe a dozen). Everyone in the world is connected. There is just the single spark alighting randomly along every moment of the superwocky rat king of intertwined lives that every creature ever and to come is a part of.
There’s no ‘I’ that one can isolate. There’s no ‘you’ that one can extract. There’s no ‘he’, ‘she’ or any other. Forget about six degrees of separation; we’ve all got our hands in each other’s pockets. Alive, dead, or as yet unborn, we’re all inextricably linked, wrapped up and pounded upon by that same, single spark.
No wonder that each one of us feels special. No wonder we feel we’re at the centre of the universe. It’s hardly surprising that deep down none of us really believes that we’ll ever die.
The grand truth of the matter is that Theo is our shared name. Instead of, "I think, therefore I am," try, "I are, therefore we am”? I’ve told you before that ‘I’, the guy nominally responsible for these words, does not exist. Not for you now as you’re reading these words (and especially if you are reading them fifty years hence). In terms of what’s going on in your head right now, there is only you. You’re the man, dude (or duchess). You’re the (wo)man with the wand.
Think of me as you (you’d already been invited). Imagine that you had somehow jumped into another environment, zipped yourself into other garments, experienced what was there to be experienced, and then returned to your own body. Did you get myour postcard?
“Hey, I’m having a wonderful holiday. It’s good to get away from myself (no offense). I’ll be back by the time that you read this.” Can you grok that? Astral travel or what!
No one is telling you that they are God. Don’t let them. Don’t allow anyone else to set you up for that pratfall. Just tell them from me that you are. You are, in actual fact, God. I’ll give you a few pointers how to cope, but how you deal with that knowledge is entirely up to you.
Your head is spinning (I can feel the breeze from here). What’s the point of my scrambling your brain with these crazy notions? No one ought to be left dangling like that.
Yes, you’re absolutely right. I’m one hundred per cent in agreement, so let me do something about it. What say I ease you down to earth as I wrap things up?
I’ll ask you to turn to the looking glass. For a final time, look into the eyes of the jabberwocky. What do you see?
Do you sense a superbeing? You sense a presence that is greater than just yourself, right? It returns your gaze. It looks through those windows onto the world and finds it pleasing. It is borrowing your eyes, as it borrows them all. It enjoys its own creation through its creatures. Yours is a mansion of a thousand eyes.
A mansion is one thing.
However, a block of flats would be quite another.
As regards your quality of life, the second option is infinitely better. Think about it. If you have a thousand eyes—the compound eye of a fly, say—that doesn’t really expand your universe of experiences and interactions. You’re just knocking about in a huge drafty building. But subdivide it into apartments, and then the Joneses move in. You’ve suddenly got company. A whole neighborhood.
Practically speaking, the whole on its own is not much more than nothing. Getting a relationship going when you’re the only player in the room is rather tricky. Perhaps your only option is to dice and slice yourself into bits and pieces. Then fire each animalcule up with a wee quota of self awareness. Instil into each critter the sense of apartheid, set them loose and watch them go.
Flitting here and there, sampling a little of this and that—this is how the universal set enjoys the show. How passionately everyone plays their part! The ebb and flow occur in deadly earnest. Every creature sees its life for real. It’s really a matter of life and death for everyone while the game is on.
But behind the scenes it’s only cowboys and Indians, cops and robbers.
“What are you going to do when your home is invaded, and they start torturing your son?” someone is bound to challenge me. “Are you going to turn around and say, Oh, but you’re not really hurting anyone here; we’re all the same person et cetera?”
My answer would be, “No, of course not. This tableau feels as real to me as it does to you. It wounds me just as deeply.” But that doesn’t prove that I’m wrong, only that I’m subject to the same rules as everyone else. Being able to see a higher plane doesn’t mean that I get to reside there.
On the plus side, by accepting the Rickmansworth meme one banishes death. Now, that’s a biggie in anyone’s book. No death, for heaven’s sake! As jabberwocky, we’re immortal. Woowee! That’s better than a slap in the face with a wet fish, or even a cooked one.
Just a quick reminder about how that works. Our jabberwocky body has a span in every dimension, including time. It attains those dimensions and no further. It is static, remember? We’re not going to budge them no matter how we stretch and strain.
So why grieve just because you can't reach the honey jar on the upper shelf? Why mourn for the airy emptiness just beyond your fingertips? No one bemoans not having lived before they were born; if you’re not bothered how far that wing extends, then why would you worry about the other?
God is continuously tapping into and out of our jabberwocky's range of experience. Think of the keys of a piano. The notes are struck in chords and rhythms, scales and arpeggios, legato, staccato, fortissimo, pianissimo, ritardando (yep, I had lessons as a kid).
Your piano has eighty-eight keys corresponding—if you are moderately lucky—to that number of (nested) years. You are forever being played upon, that music savored by a god who would otherwise be at a loss for entertainment. Give yourself a pat on the back; you’re performing a commendable service.
And so is everyone: friends and family, strangers and enemies, figures from the past, present and future. We’re all in the same boat on a grand adventure at least is as good a read as Philip Jose Farmer’s Riverworld series. To meet our cronies, there’s no need to wait until we go to heaven. We’re all on the same riverbank. Indeed, we're a veritable mangrove swamp of intertwined jabberwockies slithering in the . . . what was it . . . tulgey woods?
I must tell you about another science fiction story. Naturally, an alien race was involved, humanoid (writers should always keep in mind the possibility of a film adaptation). In fact, the aliens were virtually identical to human beings—two sexes and all. The major difference was that they were about a thousand times larger, and their inclination was to swat us like midges.
Before colonizing the earth, the giants sent out an exploration party. Some sort of fracas resulted from which the aliens came off second best. One or two survived, but they were brain-dead and no use for interrogation.
As an aside, consider the concept of ‘alien’. According to Ism ideology, there is no such thing of course. We’re all just appendages on the same tree. We’re simply differently shaped limbs on the one jabberwocky. Aliens, plants, or whatever—we’re all just talons, tentacles, trunks and wings. How daft it would be, for instance, if your legs stood in mortal fear of your arms. Still, in such a situation what are you going to do when an alien appears? Philosophize? No way, you pull out your blaster.
Getting back to the story, these aliens were so gigantic that after their prefrontal lobes were removed—their head injuries required major surgery—there was enough space for a lunar module-style office to be built inside the giant’s head. Living quarters were duly installed, along with a contraption that an astronaut-operator used to control the hulk of the giant’s body. Wired up to the remnants of the giant’s brain, he monitored the environment through the giant’s own eyes.
After about six months of training the operator learned the alien’s language and so forth. I don’t know how that went. Maybe it was possible to access the alien’s memory banks. And eventually the human-operated alien was sent back to its home planet in the original spaceship on another fact-gathering mission, this time for 'our' side.
I’m not sure how things turned out after that. For me, the best part of the story was how it portrayed consciousness. The idea that it is the controlling force that sits behind your eyes. Seen in that light, every life form is just a vehicle. Inside every head there sits an operator (begging the question of what homunculus sits behind the operator’s eyes).
Time is merely part of the mechanism that serves to separate. It allows us to view the multiplicity of the instants of our ‘being set’ as separate moments. They may be compared. “See me then, see me now,” we exclaim, “I must be changing, evolving and growing!” That is how it seems, although in reality we are part of a tableau.
Count yourself lucky if your portals are clear enough to grok what is what. Such a perspective is impermanent. I too catch only glimpses. But from where I stand now I can tell you that nothing is worth worrying about. Nothing is worth crying over. Nothing is a matter of do-or-die (though that is certainly how it feels).
Experience is the issue. Experience is the coin of this realm. The grand conspiracy makes it possible for God to experience life from the widest variety of angles. Variety has been hard-wired into our very being. We are ‘different’ so as to be able to experience our self from multitudinous points of reference. Right now, as I say, I can see that (and right now you may be able to understand). The glass in the windows of the vehicle of this particular model and brand allows me to see it. And I have this lifetime, day or instant to convey that meme.
My aim in enlightening you is purely selfish. It’s not done out of the goodness of my heart. No, I have an ulterior motive for this exercise in intellectual grooming. To be brutally honest, I dread the thought of waking up next morning trapped behind your eyes, together with the memory of all those years lived as you under whatever paradigm you follow. Ugh! The thought makes me shudder. I couldn’t stand to be you.
The whole point of my spending today—these twenty-four hours—to create this magnum opus is to make available to me (when I flitz into you) the wherewithal to escape—consider this as liberation literature. And, just as I only have this day of opportunity, so do you. You’ve discovered this text online? Download it right away and start digesting this baby: Virginia from Rickmansworth’s 100-minute bible.
