Here's how to conduct an evaluation. Begin by supposing that there is a grain of sense in every wrong-sounding statement. After all, according to a person’s framework, every action they perform, every opinion that they hold, makes perfect sense. It reflects back their worldview. There’s integrity there, an internal consistency.
Allow yourself to ‘receive’ every thought or idea as if it was what Edward de Bono calls a ‘po’ statement (the term didn’t take off the way that ‘lateral thinking’ did). You don’t say ‘yes’; you don’t say ‘no’. Just keep your mind open. Suspend judgment, because it’s only through entertaining an uncomfortable thought that you learn something new.
For example, someone claims that no Jews died in the holocaust. 'Preposterous' is the right-thinking person’s immediate and automatic response. You want to put as much distance between yourself and such a blasphemer in the shortest space of time. But hold onto your horses. Don't rush away. Refrain from screwing up your face.
No one died? In what way could that be true? What could be an alternative meaning? Such a question may lead you to consider what you normally wouldn’t—for example what it really means to die. Could it be that there’s no such thing as death, or that death not what we imagine it to be? Use such levers to pry yourself further.
Life and death are just different sides of the same coin. Therefore, the holocaust merely hastened the inevitable. After all, everyone dies. That is a given. Everyone who is born is destined to die. As soon as you’re born, you’re dead. It's not that by killing someone you are doing something which would not otherwise happen.
When you are told that radioactive fall out killed 250,000, and you learn thereafter that it shortened those people's lives by several weeks—but fifty years in the future—what does that imply? How do you record that in the acturial tables?
See? What at first you react to as nonsense can be smelted into cerebral ammunition. The point is not to be too hasty. Don’t be in too much of a hurry to shoot a non-truth down in flames. Develop the habit of keeping your mind open and flexible. Jack be nimble; Jack be quick.
When you encounter something new, you can barely lay a finger upon it. You barely catch a whiff of it at first. Ideas are elusive. They are inchoate and they flit about like butterflies. They’re flighty, and you’ll never catch them without a net.
Okay then, let's tally. First, we touched on the concept of God, where I’ll admit that I might have employed a certain sleight of hand (in the spirit of the means justifying the end). We established that there is one of some form or other, and we fondly nicknamed it Dog (what, you don’t name your pets?).
We established that fact quickly to erect a platform upon which to build (and then launch off from), not just for the sake of argument, mental exercise, or fun. I trust that you are satisfied that there’s some sort of power, even if that role devolves as yours. No way should you fear it—neither that Being, nor of having that mantle bestowed.
We chose to accept reincarnation as a possibility. We tossed around that concept so as to snap off a few sticks with which to build. Men at work: mental Meccano construction. Assuming that it operates, and that it is administered by man’s best friend, Dog (who better?) we’re not going to place limits on what can and can’t be done.
Reincarnation may occur as many times as it likes, without the essential DNA ever wearing out. It occurs as a series, and to everyone—not only to a select few. It doesn’t see bestiality as an issue—no, not that. You know what I mean. At death—physical death—the soul leaps merrily across time and space to take up residence in another body, geographical location not being an issue, and time not being of much concern either.
We were happy for reincarnation to suspend time for as long as it likes, and to leap periods of time ‘at a single bound’, if need be faster than light. Ah, but can it do the superman thing and spin itself backwards along the fourth dimension?
That’s a new one for you, isn’t it? Take a minute or two. Don’t snap back at me with an answer; I want you to give it some serious thought. Is it possible for someone to be reborn at an earlier hour, date, or year than that person’s death?
Tilt your head one way then the other, but hold onto your hat. We’re preparing to topple old Father Time from his throne, just as soon as we’re done with our recap. We’re going to turn the hourglass on its head and chop it into smithereens!
But to continue with my story—time’s a-ticking on that 24-hour dial—you have a problem when you want to be both Van Gogh and Einstein, namely that Einstein was born whilst Van Gogh was still living. Their lives overlap. Hm, bummer.
Not only that, Einstein was still alive when I was already a toddler (not really, but we’ll imagine that this is the case). Damn! Somehow there’s got to be a way. But how could a soul wangle it so as to be alive in two places simultaneously, which is the only way that I can see it working?
I see no obvious solution, but that’s no reason to give up. There has got to be a way—remember that Dog ought not to be restricted by time (or by anything). How might that mighty beast crack this particular bone?
What I’ll do is to recycle our conspiracy notion of being reborn into another body every day—that one awakes as someone new and comes to consciousness with all the memories, attributes and inclinations of an entirely different person.
As I’ve pointed out, there’d be no way to tell you’d changed hosts. You wouldn’t know that you were no longer ‘you’. Your day would seamlessly stream forth from the background of all that had gone before. To all intents and purposes, you would ‘be’ who you had always been. Without the memories and self-awareness of a previous self, you would not miss your earlier existence one little bit.
Now, that may sound depressing. It wouldn’t surprise me if it did. Most people clutch fast to individual identity—see how they cling to life at death—and they strongly resist the idea of a collective consciousness like the plague. Therefore, I can understand how the idea of giving up one’s ghost on a daily basis would be repellant.
But not so fast. Give that po statement a little time. Try to realize—you’re not losing a daughter, you’re gaining a son. Don’t worry, you’ll soon get to be ‘you’ again, and much sooner than you imagine.
See our little spark. Unhindered by geography, it leaps lightly around the world. It skips blithely across time, allowing us to experience ourselves in a multitude of bodies, both simultaneously and overlapping. Behold now that spark flare several orders of magnitude. I’m going to up its power (this spark is going supernova). Fasten your seat-belts. Warp infinity here we come. It’s time to tackle time travel.
To do that, we’ve got to circle around and sneak up on it. Shh . . .
I am here.
You are here.
Every single instant, we are neatly self-contained. The illusion is of a wondrous separateness—individuality, independence, autonomy, free will and choice. Life feels filled to the brim with potential. Well, it should. This is a carnival, you know.
We realize its boundaries: birth and death. We observe them when others pass across them. This knowledge serves to snip us off from one another even more sharply. Everyone occupies his or her (gender is yet a further distinction) quarter-acre patch of reality. We’re fenced off from everyone else, including God.
But dammit, we are God. We’re wrapped up in that containing consciousness. We are one another. We are one. ONE. US. I. Ism.
I wake up from a dream in which I was a butterfly. Or am I really a butterfly dreaming of being a man? I wonder, is the dream state more ‘real’ than wakeful consciousness?
After all, we only dip into wakeful waters for a matter of hours before needing to recharge our batteries. By contrast, you never become exhausted in the sleep state and just have to wake up. It's not as if you run out of oxygen.
Nevertheless, we don’t question that the waking state is higher than mere sleep. Of course it must be. Isn’t our level of consciousness greater when we’re up and about? It seems so, but maybe that’s another ‘obvious’ assertion to test.
Leave consciousness out of it for the moment. Instead, let’s do an assessment of quality of being. Specifically, let’s consider our depth of connectedness to each other, the planet, the universe and our roots. We’ll compare how we do when we’re asleep, as opposed to when we’re awake. In which of the two states are we more ‘at one’?
When you open your eyes, you take on an aura of individuality and otherness. The illusion is of being a separate entity. You’re here behind the rays that shine into your eyes. Things exist ‘out there’. Time feels real, space feels real, and the cinematography of our lives feels as if it's occurring. The reels roll, we’re mesmerized, and we enjoy the drama from the comfort of our seat.
But we slough all of that off when we sleep. At that time we’re centred. We return to our origins where it is natural to be, and we draw nourishment from being there. Don’t we feel freshest in the early part of the day just after we’ve arisen? And conversely, don’t we feel dullest at day’s end?
Since this is so, then I conclude that wakefulness is not our default state. We’re not naturally wakeful beings who sometimes need to sleep. We are the one source that dips regularly into wakefulness to enjoy the experience of those dreams, which makes us not so much a butterfly as a cocoon.
Another thing is that we assume that the adult form is more advanced than the immature version. The pupa grows not only in size but in wisdom, supposedly, as our memories accumulate. But I wonder about that. Just as I’m coming around to think that the wakeful state is inferior to the sleep state, I’m starting to hypothesize that the child is the father to the man.
In one of my dreams I go into a mall with people walking about everywhere. There’re all types, all races, and I’m struck with their variety and beauty. I look into everyone’s eyes (especially if the people are women and if their eyes are brown) and then I suddenly stagger and have to reach out for support.
I’ve just had an epiphany. Now I know what it means to be God! In every pair of eyes I see consciousness swim. This pulsing matrix of humanity is omnipresence all ready to blow. It’s like a fire that just needs a match. Am I the only one who understands? We’re only a spark away from the realization that all is one. We’re just a membrane away from grokking ourselves for what we are, will be and always were: the timeless entirety. Imagine the simultaneous smile when that light dawns!
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.
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?
