You see where I’m headed, don’t you? I’m about to string together these nothing moments into an unbroken, unbreaking wave. Our perception of the present, our most intimate experience of being, is itself the greatest testament of, argument for and proof of quantum-mechanical-reincarnation. Ism is hidden clockwork that jerks life along by the bootstraps.
We insist on regarding ourselves as individuals with separate souls living independent lives. We act as though we are discrete—fenced off from one another by date and location. We see our lifespans as a linear progression of personally relevant events.
But I put it to you that we’re finger puppets, and that together we make up one enormous hand. Can your self-awareness stretch that ultimate octave? We’re alone, and yet we’re totally together, like tube feet on a starfish, or the cilia on a single-celled organism. We’ve got to get it all together if we want to work in concert. The question is how.
So . . . let me get this straight. What you’re saying, I think, is that there’s just us—WE—plus God, right? Us and Him—a kind of duality. But that doesn't help me understand what God wants. What is it that he wants us—ME—to do? What is my—OUR—purpose?
Ah, you still imagine yourself separate.
Whoa now! You’re not going to . . . I mean, you can’t mean . . . Are you telling me . . .?
Just what the hell is this—some unholy text? Is the writer the devil in disguise? Is that what’s going on here? Is he (or I) fooling with your mind? Or am I the Antichrist come for your soul? Danger, Will Robertson!
Who knows? It could be—I mean I could be. It depends what the people who thought up that term had in mind. Could they have seen any of this coming? Certainly the ideas contained herein could change a person’s thinking. They could make you see the world very differently. You might decide that everything you thought you knew is way off the mark. And if what I say causes you to discard your religious convictions, then I suppose that I lay myself open to the charge.
But would that be such a bad thing? Aren’t you halfway there already? Western society has already largely weaned itself away from the idea of a vengeful and jealous Dog. Come on now, really. Is there anyone who still seriously believes in hell, damnation and original sin, and a red-skinned devil with horns on his head pointing a pitchfork? The sooner we escape the clutches of such crackpot witchery the better, it seems to me.
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
