Now that you’ve had a preliminary fossick around the upstairs of my head, you’ll want to do a more careful inventory. Where to start? Which box do you look into first? There’re so many to choose from. How about this one labelled ‘My First Thought Experiments’? Tentatively, you reach for it, blow away the dust, and open the lid . . .
I’ve mentioned in passing my preoccupation with a certain mental tool. Thought experiments they are called, or maybe mind experiments—I’m never sure what to call them. But I performed them long before I‘d heard of either term.
Permit me to provide the context for what was probably my first. I was very young at the time. The experiment involved, ironically, my own origins. I wanted to know where I came from, so I tried to retrieve my very first memory. How far back could I go? I would have been six, five or possibly four when I flexed my memory muscles in this way to blast myself into the past.
There was one Easter I remember spending at my uncle’s home. We lived there until I was three, so it might have been during that period.The house had a front and a back garden, and I recall scouring them for chocolate eggs. Each would magically replenish itself while I was busy on the other side. How could that be?
I remember a doctor paying a house call once (which proves that this was well in the past). Oh, the indignity of being injected in the buttock!
Once I ate snow that I scooped off the street. That caused me to vomit my cornflakes, which I then couldn’t stomach for the next twenty years. Not something you forget.
Vaguely, I remember being bathed as a baby. ‘Shaving’ the suds of my leg with a finger. Having talcum applied.
There’s the kinaesthetic imprint of having my diapers changed—that topsy-turvy sensation of being lifted by the legs, and worrying about being stabbed in the midriff by a safety pin.
Lying in my crib and examining my mother’s homemade wall hangings. The way that the crib’s head covering draped.
Being breast fed . . .
But try as I might, I could never isolate the instant that I arrived into existence. There was never a time that I was not and then—pop!—suddenly appeared. I was always ‘here’, no matter how young or how small. How could I not be and then suddenly appear. It made no sense. There was always some awareness, no matter how indistinct.
The evidence might seem scanty, but just as a fragment of jawbone can establish a genus, to me it equated to a surety of knowledge. I was convinced of my continuity in the past, and by extension the future. There was never a time that I was not. I had always been, and for that reason, would always be.
Oh my goodness! By that snap of my finger, I grokked that I was immortal. The Rubicon was dry. Not only had I overcome the fear of death, I’d overcome death too! One way or another, I was eternal. Talk about empowerment! What fun it was to have a brain to work with.
Feel it. Savor it. Heft it. Grok it. Sink into the realization. The episode vaccinated me against any germ of organized religion that I might later be exposed to. That was the effect. Henceforth, I would never be able to adopt any belief system unless it took cognizance of my wonderful discovery.
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)?
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.
