Showing posts with label cosmology. Show all posts
Showing posts with label cosmology. Show all posts

Sunday, May 8, 2011

Fairy tale


Disconnect.

Where am I?

I had everything clear in my head just now—wonderful lines that swept and swooped and slid across the page, but they’ve emerged chopped and broken. They clatter upon the page, clunkenly. 


This damned conspiracy doesn’t want me to succeed. It resists and hinders me. It swivels my head towards the window and glazes my eyes over. Window-gazing. Windows glazing. I’m turning into a zombie. No, foul spot, no! I need to finish my story during the day before the clock strikes midnight and I turn into a vampire. Forgive me if I sound a little rushed (or stoned) but if you’ve accompanied me this far you’ll understand.

I scramble back to our original point of departure.




“This is not her story,” wrote Douglas Adams, alluding to the Rickmansworth girl. I’ve since revealed that her story is mine—and yours too if you want a slice of the action.

But if time and opportunity are so limited, why do I bother with stories at all? Why not tell it to you straight—do an article, write a thesis, or take out a full-page advertisement in the New York Times? Isn’t a narrative just a work of fiction? Why spend all that time, you ask, on something that isn’t even factual? A good read is all a work of fiction can aspire to, surely.

Not so. According to John Michael Greer, stories are extremely powerful. He claims that they’re the tools we use to understand the world. Not only do they contain lessons and morals, but as myths they shape the way that we relate to our environment and to life itself. 




So don’t worry. This isn’t a narrative in the conventional sense. By attacking the larger philosophical questions, I’ll break down—seven with a single blow—the straw, stick and brick huts of our cosmology. And then, never fear, I’ll go on reconstruct the wreckage into a giant beanstalk that will win us the golden goose. How’s that for a Grimm day’s work? 

Wednesday, April 13, 2011

Alpha omega

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.