To me, original sin doesn’t make sense. Neither does the notion of a vengeful and jealous god. But it does make sense that everything could be predestined. Those atoms that they told us about at school ought to keep a-rolling in whichever direction they are pushed.
And yet, how was it that I was able to do as I pleased? Though their direction was determined, I seemed to be able to boss my own atoms around. I could only conclude that this was due to some sort of paradox. It probably had to do with ‘levels’. Free will probably existed on one level and not on another—something like that. Whatever, I was happy to bide my time until I could see more of the total picture, so I went away to work on my X-ray vision.
Would you believe that I once called myself a Selective-apathy-active-fatalist-ego-theist? The atoms rolling slash being rolled represented the ‘active-fatalist’ component, which I’ve already outlined.
The ‘selective-apathy part comes from my conviction that you can’t do or be everything. That’s important to who I am and how I live. If you want to do something really well and devote yourself to it, then you won’t have time for much else. Therefore, if you want to make the best use of your life, then it behooves you to choose wisely. You are going to have to practice discrimination—or apathy—so as not to become embroiled in unnecessary and diversionary activity.
You see, the more options you have, the more difficult life is. It is actually easy to live as a fanatic and be devoted to one goal. Contrast that to juggling a balance of interests, activities and pursuits. Perhaps I appear indecisive, but that’s so that I can keep my options open. I drop one thing for another only when the time is ripe.
As for the ‘ego-theist’ component, the idea of being one’s own god was an act-as-if decision. All that I could be sure of was that I existed; I wasn’t sure about anyone else, and as for God . . . well, He certainly hadn’t fronted up when challenged. And when that occurred (or didn’t) then I thought I might as well act as if I was in charge. I’d do the honors and play emcee. If and when a higher power came along, I’d gladly yield my superior the floor. Can’t say fairer than that.
When I close my eyes, I can get into a state that I’m all that there is (I’d been initiated into Transcendental Meditation as a teenager). Everything 'outside' is then a figment of my imagination. Oh sure, I knew full well that at the same time that I was also hopelessly limited as an individual being—the second of that trio of childhood thought experiments. But the bottom line is that I’ve never felt the need to install any god figure at the head of a personal ideology.
Pick any random multi-digit number. 4534644 will do (a previous phone number). Have each of those numerals represent a birthday. Next, let’s flitz through those years.
At a given moment you find that you are four years old. Great. Nothing wrong with that. That’s how old you are now. You are not surprised; after all, you remember 1, 2 and 3. Four is just how old you are at present.
From there, let’s say that your awareness flitzes to age five. Well and good—you’ve aged as expected. You remember being 1, 2, 3 and 4. Five is simply how old you are at present.
But then suddenly you are three. How will that work? Let’s see. You remember being 1 and 2, so you’ve aged as expected. You have no memory of being 4 or 5, so they must be still in your future. Three is how old you are at the present. You have aged as expected from 2. That’s all that you know.
At any age, the previous birthdays are nicely nested. You never have pre-knowledge of years in the ‘future’, so from your vantage point (and from those of your parents) there is nothing unusual going on.
When you hit four for the second time (though it may as well be the 10th or 100th) you don’t do a double take. You don’t even suffer déjà vu. As far as you’re concerned, you’ve just turned four after having been 1, 2 and 3. You haven’t retained anything from when you were four previously.
Jumping from four to six, you don’t perceive any gap, because when you turn six all your memories from 1 through 5 are instantly uploaded. The last birthday party that you can recall is your fifth, ergo you have lived it. Been there, done that.
In this way, every jump in any direction—forwards in time, backward, and even sideways—poses no problem at all for Mr Stick.
A deck of cards is all that you need to make time pass. You don’t even need a thumb flipping through them. Leave it sitting on a shelf if you like. No sleight of hand is needed. It’s active without any help. It’s alive. It whirrs and pulsates and a little light flashes (maybe a virtual electron leaping from one energy state to another). The nested nature of its consciousness moments causes it to happily imagine itself alive and passing time. It hums and purrs contentedly like a screen saver.
Isn’t this nifty? We now have a model for life, or rather one particular lifetime. A creature’s life is simply a set of instants. Each instant contains an awareness of its other (‘past’) instants. It’s hardwired into them. It may be that this set is subset, although it could also be the universal set (how’s your New Math?). Creatures are separate only if their consciousness instants have no awareness of each other’s. If you can't remember it, you can't lay claim to it
Let’s work this model a little harder.
Okay, so a life form has access to a set of memories. We call the whole a life. And we know that memory awareness is like an arrow pointing back in time.
Now, each time moment contains within itself a nested subset, or the memory-awareness of other moments (imagine a Venn diagram with subsets that get smaller and smaller (perhaps an onion (that does not need to be of glass (or contain a walrus)))) then, within the context or paradigm of continuous expansion, growth or progress, this makes it seem that time flies forward. (Within a paradigm of shrinkage or disappearance it ought to result in the opposite: that time is progressing into the past.)
Similarly, you appear to be travelling along with it. The universe too—it seems to explode and then, after aeons, implodes back into its black hole. Whether it does so once, or else loops back on itself like a Moebius strip, or even if it oscillates repeatedly ad infinitum, doesn’t matter, since none of those cosmologies break free from the gravitational pull of the illusion of time.
Those models only seem to be kinetic, whereas from god’s point of view everything is. It is all here, complete, the alpha through to the omega. The alphabet exists as a unit. The letters don’t scroll in real time; they’re carved in stone.
All is as it is.
All particles are linked according to the laws of gravity, electromagnestism and so forth. They relate to one another as if they were separated in space and time, and though they each seem to be discrete, there is in fact no way to tell them apart.
All is indeed one.
