How did that go over? Like a lead balloon? I’m not surprised if I haven't brought on a flash of enlightenment. Sorry about that. I can see that we’ll need some context. I’m going to have to provide some scaffolding.
If it took me half a lifetime to reach this point, then I’ll probably have to lay out my thinking in more than a word, sentence, paragraph or even essay. I think a book is on the cards, boys. And, in the spirit of a 100-minute bible (yes, Virginia, there is such a critter) I plan to write it.
To make a start, I’ll pick up and brush off a couple of oft-aired but poorly understood aphorisms, because this will allow us to begin our rendezvous with the solution of all solutions. First, time and space do not exist. Second, all of us are one.
I can imagine what’s going through your head: What? Is that it then? Is that all that you’ve got?
Yes, I know that those statements seem trite. I agree with you that they’re old hat. Those two ideas have long been floating about in the milieu. People have already taken them on board, albeit with a grain of metaphorical salt.
But that’s just it; the rub lies in that condiment. People may have ingested those aphorisms, but they haven’t properly digested them. The corollaries have not been imported into the fabric of their lives. I’m confident that this is correct, because a world view which fully accommodated the above principles would be mindblowingly different to any previous school of thinking.
The problem is that no one has taken the no-space, no-time, all-of-us-are-one idea to its logical extreme. No one has developed it. No one has followed the idea through to an inarguable conclusion.
Consider, if you will, the first assertion: that time and space do not exist. Of the two words we’ll look at the first.
The notion of time is absolutely pervasive and pivotal. It underpins every known worldview. Change occurs over time, for example growth. Without time there are no causality or karma. Free will disappears as an issue, because you don’t have a ‘before’ and an ‘after’ an act of decision. Heck, it would even be meaningless to speak of birth and death.
What if time as we know it—as we think we know it—is just so much bollocks? If time was the fanciful artifact that quantum mechanics insists that it is then our civilization would surely crumble (which may explain our reluctance to examine it).
All of our philosophical structures rest upon it. Our world revolves around it. I’m reminded of those thingamyjigs called celestial spheres or astrolabes that ancient cosmologists devised to try and ‘prove’ the sun, stars and planets revolved around the Earth.
Those people were deluded. They tinkered with wheels within wheels in a vain attempt to make their construct work. It did not, and they were wrong. And so, therefore, is everyone today. Time ought not to be so central to our ‘thinkering’.
Dear Thom Hartmann,
May I say what a pleasure it was to read a couple of your books: The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight, your account of global energy consumption, and The Greatest Spiritual Secret of the Century. Great titles by the way. Comparing the two, I have to say that I prefer your nonfiction over your fiction (I’m speaking of the style, you realize).
But rarely do I read books purely for their literary value, and I never worry about a book’s condition, age et cetera. For me, those come a distant second to the content, and so when I started to struggle with the structure of your story, I persisted. I just had to find out your ‘secret’.
My patience paid dividends. On page 222, I read: "The Greatest Spiritual Secret of the Century, of every Century, is 'We Are All One.'" And then, a few pages later, you wrote that time and space do not exist. “Right on!” I thought, “Thom rocks!”
But Thom, you failed to take it further. You didn't build upon that theme or follow where it led. I was expecting a conclusion; you were on the verge. You had a hold of the dragon’s tail, but then you let it go. You let the big one get away, my friend. Puff petered out.
Elsewhere in the book you state that there are six billion (and counting) answers. One of those, therefore, is mine. And, if I may say, my answer works better for me than yours does—well, I guess that’s only natural. But look, let me make you a deal. Just as I pressed on with your book, I suggest that you keep a-reading here . . .
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!
We are digital, not analog. Life consists of infinitesimally small quanta of consciousness linked together. Continuity of being is just how it appears, and it works in the same way as vision too, with our eyes darting here and there, leaping from one object to another, assembling an entire picture, even though the area in focus is the size of a thumbnail at arm’s length. The memory of what is perceived lingers in the mind until such time that we reconfirm that, or see that it has disappeared.
Wow! Talk about existence being an illusion. This is the mother of all illusions! And just like Poincare’s idea about the universe expanding a thousand-fold overnight, you can’t prove that it’s so.
Flaming Nora! But that means . . .
Yep. You’re right. There ain’t enough room in this town for the two of us. According to the above mechanism, it’s meaningless to speak of separate entities, or even separate living threads. To think of a separate ‘me’ and ‘you’ is nonsense, when we’re combined that utterly. Van Gogh and Einstein are not doing any form of do-si-do.
Let me spell it out in plain English. Life consists of ONE spark or entity that flitzes around as instantaneously as makes no difference into every skull (I’m anthropomorphizing). One whirling dervish (the Eingo?) is all that there is. What did you think that the expression ‘We’re all one’ meant? But it gets even better.
You’ve heard, no doubt, of time being described as the fourth dimension. It’s a well-embedded item of popular culture. And just as it is possible to move physically in the other three, you’d expect a being with god-like powers to be able to roam at will in that one too. Let’s pretend that it can, and then see where that idea leads.
If it’s possible to flitz up and down the time line—the fourth dimension—then there’s no limit how many Who’s Whos from history you or I might have been. Limited beings might worry about mucking up the past and preventing their own birth, but a higher power should not be so inhibited. Go for it, Dog!
Here’s your final challenge of the day. Realize that flitzing can operate backwards in time as well as forwards. In simplistic terms, what this means is that you are not restricted to reincarnating at a later date only.
There’s a lot of traction that we’d gain from understanding that. For instance, the future and the past in such a scenario would be equally real. Just as we never worry about what ‘will happen’ in the past (oh heavens, I hope that Hannibal and his elephants win) we needn’t get uptight about the future. Que sera, sera.
What I mean to do next is to demolish time itself (Einstein, cheer me on!). What I suggest is that our spark doesn’t have to follow a particular sequence or order before returning to the here-and-now. I’m proposing that any point in time is as good as another. Every instant is real for the consciousness quantum spark. It may leap distances within the present or make temporal leaps (and in combination). It only needs to do so randomly. Eventually it will ‘hit’ that instant of consciousness next to where it was, and the two will feel linked. And believe it or not, that idea is not unfounded. It has some support.
Thomas B. Czerner, the author of What Makes You Tick? writes:
‘As they travel, photons have a mysteriously unified view of things. If they had taken a clock and an odometer with them on their trip from a distant star, the time and the distance travelled would have measured zero. At light speed, time stands still, distances collapse, and everything is in the here and now. From the perspective of the photon, everything along its path – the start from which it came and you – exist at one point, simultaneously, and since time stands still, eternally. As you travel at your leisurely pace you are oblivious of that extraordinary state of affairs. Eternity and total unity are physical entities that lie outside of your direct awareness.’
Additionally, the physicist Feynman (and his thesis advisor John Wheeler) came up with the equally astounding idea that the universe may actually be a single electron/positron leaping about all over the place both backwards and forwards in time so quickly that it ‘fills out’ the entire thing.
Quantum physics, quantum mechanics, quantum electrodynamics—who could possibly keep abreast of that field? Would anyone want to? What do photons, electrons, positrons, quarks, quirks and sparks matter?
One thing, though—they say that matter and energy are fundamentally the same. That’s very interesting. Might there be a third aspect of stuff’? Maybe consciousness is an integral part of the equation. I’m curious about whatever sub-particle it is that carries consciousness on its back.
So let’s invent another science. We’ll add Quantum Consciousness to the curriculum, the science that studies consciousness by examining its quantum-sized units. If you start with a single centre of consciousness (no, I’m not volunteering to step into the cyclotron) you could smash it up into a helter-skelter of apparently discrete centres. They’d be particle-wavelet whatevers that can be assigned attributes of mass, energy and now consciousness.
Who knows?—their study might lead to an explanation of the whole shebang, and maybe rip the veil off Old Mother Maya herself. It might explain how life as we know it has resulted from the explosion of a single, original, concentrated centre of consciousness-essence. For the sake of convenience, let’s refer to that whole before-and-after conglomeration—that it/them/us assembly—as God.
So how do we get a grip on all of that? What are we then as individuals? How are we to regard ourselves? What does each of our lives consist of, and how do we fit into the overall picture? I ask, because most of us feel that we’re helplessly adrift. We’re passengers in a ship in the midst of an absolutely perfect storm. We really need a lifeboat here. Save Our Souls.
Fear not. Help is at hand. As Douglas Adams wrote (in large friendly letters), DON’T PANIC. (Arthur C. Clarke thought that this was perhaps the best advice that could be given to humanity, so it can’t hurt for me to repeat it.) I’ll follow that up with Be Here Now, a phrase that Baba Ram Das used for his book. EckhartTolle advised, “All you really need to do is accept this moment fully. You are then at ease in the here and now and at peace with yourself.” To achieve that, he imagined himself sitting at his shoulder watching himself with detached objectivity.
Now that we’ve calmed a little, we’ll sink further into Czerner’s concepts of ‘eternity’ and ‘total unity’. He claims they lie outside our direct awareness, but let’s examine them anyway.
Tolle, Richard Alpert and others state that the present is all that there is. It is the only time that we have, they say. I would like you to notice something else about it.
Don’t you sense that the present is at one and the same time nothing? It has no substance or duration. The present is gone as soon as it arrives. It lasts not an instant. It lies between the future and the past, thinner than the thinnest skin.
We might easily overlook the meniscus of the present and split time into only the past and the future, if it weren't for the fact that we skate or glide eternally across its surface. Let’s give the present moment a measure of credibility. Let us think of it as having a certain substance. We’ll give it the thickness of one quantum of consciousness.
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.
From your perspective, I’m not worth knowing. So forget me. After all, I may not even exist. What evidence do you have? We’ve never met. You haven’t seen me in a photo. You’ve only these pages printed with words. For you, it’s far more important to establish your own identity.
In The Taboo Against Knowing Who You Really Are, Alan Watts refers to identity as an ego in a bag of skin. David Crosby (from Crosby, Stills and Nash) calls the body a meat suit. Dave Pollard, a blogger, thinks of himself as “the space through which stuff passes”. Don Juan, in the books by Carlos Castaneda, sees a luminous egg with tendrils. Me, I’ve conjured up the jabberwocky.
I acknowledge input from Lewis Carrol, of course, but more especially Robert Heinlein. In Life Line, his first-ever published story, the dean of science-fiction writers describes a four-dimensional body:
‘You are a space-time event having duration four ways. You are not quite six feet tall, you are about twenty inches wide and perhaps ten inches thick. In time, there stretches behind you more of this space-time event reaching to perhaps nineteen-sixteen, of which we see a cross section here at right angles to the time axis, and as thick as the present. At the far end is a baby, smelling of sour milk and drooling its breakfast on its bib. At the other end lies, perhaps, an old man someplace in the nineteen eighties. Imagine this space-time event . . . as a long pink worm, continuous through the years, one end at his mother’s womb, the other at the grave. It stretches past us here, and the cross-section we see appears to be a single discreet body. But that is illusion. There is physical continuity in this concept to the entire race, for these pink worms branch off from other pink worms. In this fashion the race is like a vine whose branches intertwine and send out shoots. Only by taking a cross section of the vine would we fall into the error of believing that the shootlets were discrete individuals.’
Well, Heinlein’s idea lodged in my mind in much the same way (and location?) as Adam’s Rickmansworth meme. I grant that it’s not exactly glamorous to reduce life to a worm, sausage or tube, and you may feel inclined to turn up your nose. Please don’t.
Because consider just what that model accomplishes. By shaking hands with the jabberwocky we’ve taken time out of the equation and elevated our position to that of Czerner’s photon! For us in the now—in the know—time no longer exists. It “stands still, eternally”. We stand, like Dr Who, outside of time.
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)?
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.
“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?
