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’.
I am stimulated by the thoughts that spin the worlds of others, and I benefit from tapping into some of that centrifugal force. A little cross-pollination works wonders. Reading is the best way to put me in touch with another person, as it helps me see the world from their point of view. I become them for a spell—it actually feels like I’m under a spell when I share their experiences. And, because I feel that the acquisition of experience is the reason for living, that can't be a bad thing.
Whether the author lives or is history is immaterial. If you enjoy a book and later discover that the person who wrote it has recently died, then doesn’t make a jot of difference to your enjoyment. I don’t need to relate to anyone in the actual flesh to appreciate what they say. In fact, reading their words is so much better than pow-wowing in real life—that's been my experience. And the corollary of that is that if you’d like to make friends with me, please don't knock on my door. But I wouldn’t ban you from sending me an essay.
Nevertheless, let the buyer—or borrower—of books beware. Don't dwell entirely within anyone's headroom, no matter how comfortable it feels when you first slip between the sheets. Don’t let yourself be completely swept away in the throes of a new love or affair lest you lose your sense of equilibrium and poise. If you are in the habit of reading books then, to act as a counterbalance, I’d strongly suggest that you write one too.
I say, give everyone a chance. Listen—or read—to them all, since we’re all of us monkeys on the same branch of the evolutionary tree. But heed or give more credence to those who speak more closely to your heart. In time, you’ll become more discerning. You’ll get to the point of being able to hear—first-hand, from your own mouth, in your own style—lessons that you already, miraculously, know. As the Chinese proverb goes, listen to what everyone has to tell you, but then decide for yourself.
According to Cato the Elder wise men learn more from fools than fools from the wise. Bruce Lee said that a wise man can learn more from a foolish question than a fool can learn from a wise answer. The flip side of this coin is just as important, however. Richard Feynman, winner of the Nobel Prize for his work on quantum electrodynamics, as a boy was told by his father never to have any respect whatsoever for authority. “Forget who said it and instead look at what he starts with, where he ends up, and ask yourself, ‘Is this reasonable?’”
‘If you ever meet the Buddha on the road, kill him,’ goes the expression. What do you make of it? My guess is that it’s about the danger of exposing yourself to the teachings of would-be well-wishers, do-good gurus and proselytizing pimps. Killing the Buddha is therefore a pre-emptive strike. There’s nothing more dangerous than ideas, so be alert for them popping up on your radar. Echoing Feynman’s father, the Buddha told his followers: “Believe nothing. No matter where you read it, or who said it, even if I have said it, unless it agrees with your own reason and common sense.”
Using another analogy, it works like your taste in music and musicians. In that field an idea could be thought of as a riff or lyric. Now, there’s a set of artists each of us feels comfortable with and close to. For me it’s the Doors, Jimi Hendrix and Jethro Tull. In my book they can do no wrong. Then, there’s a group that I admire but who I can’t listen to all day long: The Beatles, U2 and Oasis. And below that there are other artists that I simply cannot groove to such as Eric Clapton, Bob Dylan and Van Morrison, even though they are highly esteemed. For some reason, they grate in my ears. So, what’s my point, and what’s the answer?
What it means is that everyone has a potential audience (and ipso facto a potential following). Second, everyone has to judge for themselves what sounds right. To ask, ‘Who is right?’ expecting to get a definitive answer, is . . . well . . . wrong. It’s the sort of quandary that you get into when you ask the same question about religions. There isn’t one that stands unarguably higher. It’s best to assume that, at their level, and from their perspective, every one is on track. Whether any set of ideas resonates with you is just a matter of taste.
A person's background, beliefs, world view, philosophical framework, and the stories that they tell themselves all support one another. They form a self-referential whole. A person’s decisions and actions make sense only when we realize that fact. And so, everyone is absolutely correct with respect to the views that they hold and the manner in which they conduct themselves.
Of course, that isn't much help to you. You’ll want want a means of being more discerning when you rake through the embers of other philosophies on the lookout for material to incorporate into your own way of thinking.
It’s probably best, therefore, to examine, not the set of thoughts that people have, but the principles that they are built on—the truths that they hold to be self-evident. Based upon that knowledge—a familiarity with the foundation stones underpinning their philosophical structures—you have a much better rationale for weighing up what they have to say.
In the same way that you pick and choose your friends, you need to be wise when you shop for advice. Though everyone has something valuable to contribute, you gravitate naturally towards certain individuals, and that probably says something about the relationship—or potential relationship—between you both (although I’m not sure exactly what).
This affinity that you or I feel—well, the ideal, I suppose, is that everything that you learn issues forth from within. It should not be spoon fed. People in the self-growth movement say that the answers are latent within us all, and that the most that they do is to help those answers bubble forth.
Take note, all you other gorillas. As you read these words, you’d better take that message to heart. As far as you’re concerned, I fall into that category also. My style of mental gymnastics suits me to a tee. But all you other primates had better use a filter. Get out your sun block and UV sunglasses.
Ideas can induce change. Generally, people avoid change, and with good reason. A change is not always for the better. Mutations are one form of change, and their effect is more often detrimental than beneficial. You don’t often hear of cancer having a positive outcome.
But some of us are addicted to ideas. We keep exposing ourselves to their danger because occasionally, perhaps once in a million, a mutation results in an improvement. That’s the one I’m after. I accept the risk, because I trust myself to evaluate a mutational idea’s worth. I’ll happily sort through an unpromising bunch to come up with a winner.
For me to rate an idea highly, it needs to be something that improves my life. It needs, in other words, to be applicable and practical. I need to be able to utilize or consume it on a daily basis. According to Jung, “Philosophy butters no parsnips,” so I’ll stake out my area of research as Applied Philosophy and see what grows in that garden.
The best ideas lead me to some mental construct that helps to explain, clarify, or tie disparate threads together. I’m on the hunt for anything and everything that assists me in making sense of the world. To me, there’s nothing finer than to come up against—unless that be to come up with—a brand new idea. That's the main reason that I read. That's what I live for.
And by that I don’t mean that I’m after ‘the latest thing’ per se. It’s not about titillation. For me, the novelty of an idea does not lie in its newness. I couldn’t care less it it’s up-to-date and on TV, or if the ancient Greeks were the last ones to fool around with it. My only requirement is that it needs to have impact—that’s how I sift the wheat from the chaff. The sort of idea I value must have the potential to affect how I live in and relate to the world. I’m in the market for ideas that force me to see things in a different light.
But at the same time, you’ve got to beware. Ideas that have the power to infect your world view are dangerous medicine. They bring about transformations that may single you out from the crowd. They awaken you from the consensus trance. They’ll earmark you as being different, and to stand out invites being cut down.
Say that you stumble across a piece of evidence that doesn’t gel with what you know. If it doesn’t sit comfortably within your world view, what do you do? If you want to be honest with yourself, you've got to be prepared to evolve and grow. Don’t ever insist that your current framework it is set in stone. Don’t ever go along with a person or belief system that is similarly inflexible.
If a person is positive that they are right, then they’ll act as though they’re guarding something valuable. Using James Howard Kunstler’s term, the psychology of previous investment makes them feel obliged to defend the status quo. Also, because you’ll never hear unbiased information in an advertisement, you should only listen to humble souls—if that is the way you’ve chosen to go, rather than figuring it out for yourself—who express their uncertainty, or at the very least in other ways demonstrate that they are not attached to their kit-bag of thinking.
Of course it would be the easiest thing in the world for you to accept everything that anyone—me for example—has to say. That would be tempting for both parties. But no, you’ll never hear me claim to have all of the answers (if I ever do, please, challenge me forthwith). Beware of anyone who assures you that they know what’s what, no question. I've been there; I’ve been done to.
Trust me. I’m no fanatic. I am not trying to convince you of anything. I’ve not crawled out from under the woodwork with a hidden agenda. I don’t care to talk anyone into anything—I’m not a con man. I have no stake in trying to convert people. Why would I want to?—I’ve nothing that I’m trying to sell them.This is to be no leader-and-followers act. You won’t find any proselytizing on these pages, scout’s honor. No disappointed and abandoned disciples scattered bleeding along dawn’s highway. Come along for the ride only if you are willing, and on your own terms. Bring your own water bottle and blood plasma.
I don’t hold a theological degree or PhD, but I trust that by now I’ve demonstrated that I have a penchant for philosophical matters. Since first becoming self-aware, I’ve dabbled with the nature of existence until I’ve finally figured it out. If I’m wrong, no matter! I’d be the first to admit that mistake. It wouldn’t worry me in the slightest to go back on my word. In fact I’d be overjoyed, because the only reason for me to revise my opinion would be that I’ve come up with an even better construct.
All the answers? I may not have them. But what I do have, I've worked out for myself. And it works for me. Still, I'd drop it at the drop of a hat if I had to. And I would never impose it upon or try to sell it to another. But hey, you're welcome to take a gander! But just be careful. Don't get burned. Don't become entrapped—in my web of threads or anyone else's. These strings are attached to no promises.
My willingness to drop an outmoded worldview for an improved model constitutes the best guarantee that I’m not trying to pull the wool over anyone’s eyes. I don’t cling—like a wet blanket—to traditions for their own sake. Belief does not glue my eyes shut to a higher heaven should I happen to sniff one out. All I’ll say is: keep watching this space. That way, neither of us misses out.
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.
Given that chimpanzees share about 99 per cent of their genetic makeup with humans, I'm someone not that different from you. Choose two people at random, and they’ll be closer—much closer—than they imagine. Did you ever ask yourself exactly who you are? Well, there you go then! That's another thing that we have in common.
Try this on for size: Think of me as if I’m you. Imagine that you'd been beamed into my body or been poured into my pair of shoes (a bit tricky, since I don’t wear ’em). What would you do if you were me? No really, do that right now—our first thought experiment together.
Suppose that you were me. Crawl inside my head. Imagine that you’ve somehow inherited my cerebral estate, the only catch being that you can’t bring any baggage with you—no knowledge of the former you, no memories et cetera. You can only bring your own ‘essence’, whatever that might be. What would you do as me, and how would you act?
If that were really the situation, then to all intents and purposes I suggest that since you are me (or I am you), you wouldn’t—couldn’t—act any differently than I had been, have been, are or will be acting in the future. You’d be ‘locked in’. You would have to make—have made—the same decisions as me. You would have fallen—will fall—into exactly the same traps. This is so because you would possess (or be possessed by) my background, environment, genetic makeup and everything else that pertains. It would be impossible for you to relate to the world in any other way but mine.
Let me make sure that I understand. Assuredly, your worldview is and easy to grasp, and yet it is such a difficult one to absorb—I don’t know that I even wish to. Heavens, what changes in my thinking is it going to require? To say that this has come out of left field would be missing the mark. It has come from another planet!
First, I’m required to give up the worldview that billions and billions of us—both the living and the dead (and those to come)—are individual entities living separate lives. And that each of us has a unique relationship with a higher power. Instead, you ask me to accept that there is only one super-being: all of us—including god, no less—wrapped up and lumped together. Please, give this poor sod a handle on that.
Well, I’ll certainly try, but I may not be the best person for the job; I know my strengths and limitations. Visualizing and conceptualizing are what I do best, but I struggle to spin my thinking into words.
You might care to sample a more user-friendly version. Andy Weir’s short story The Egg is doing the rounds on the Internet as I write. It gets across quite nicely the idea that we’re all one (with nary a mention of Dog). You might also find it useful to peruse Neale Donald Walsch’s Conversations With God.
It’s a struggle for us all—all one of us—to conceptualize that which has emerged from the woodwork, and I definitely include myself. Just now it looks like a house of cards. One good breath . . .
But please remember. These philosophical gymnastics are not simply to indulge myself. I don’t have any delusions of grandeur. It’s not about self-gratification or self-promotion. I’m not trying to cozy up to a famous figure, or become one. No, I have a grander aim, which is to use these hypotheses and postulates to explain all the unanswered mysteries of the universe.
I know it sounds far-fetched, but we’re almost done. There are only about a dozen pages to go. I’ve a few cards left to balance, and then the whole structure will solidify into bedrock. It’ll be like a jigsaw puzzle that you throw in the air . . . and, like a coin that lands on its edge multiplied by a thousand, every piece bounces into place! That isn’t something you could mistake for anything else. You wouldn't need any extra proof to know that something extraordinary had happened.
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.
I believe that it’s time for some light entertainment. My treat—let’s go to the movies.
When I was young, I strongly identified with the hero—Charlton Heston, Marvin Lee or Kirk Douglas. As the story wore on, I became convinced that I resembled them, and that everyone would stare at me when I exited the theatre. I fancied that I even walked the same way, so I became too self-conscious to cross the foyer. I expected people to gasp at the uncanny resemblance.
A psychologist might say that suggests either a poor sense of self or a strong sense of empathy, but I disagree. I think that movies (and novels, songs, works of art) have the potential to disengage us from the illusion of our separateness or boundedness. That is why we pay such homage to the stars when they do their job well. They perform a form of magic on us by altering our consciousness and taking us out of ourselves. They remind us of the greater reality of unity.
God gets to enjoy himself when he shares our lives. At that time we’re the actors. We’re the ones receiving homage. Think of watching a video (in the genre of The Matrix it would seem). God, always in the starring role, takes his seat to immerse herself in the best virtual reality of all: a tri-D sensaround, panasound, supersensual bio-pic.
Each movie runs for seventy or eighty years from the insider’s point of view (when the featured wildlife is human). And of course, God sees it from that point of view too. While he watches, he’s compressed within a skull.
But the overview, the bigger superpicture’s, is that there is no time. Any 'time' is as good as another; it all exists at once. Life as we know it in the present tense is but a cross section of the jabberwocky Beast. God actually watches every monitor at once, and is intimately involved with every bit of the videotape in the vault.
Whether your current life story is war, medical drama, horror or romance doesn't matter. That’s not you. It’s just the current book you’re reading. You shouldn’t worry how it’s going to end. There's nothing that can go 'wrong' with it, and there's nothing that will harm you in a permanent sense.
Really, from an overarching perspective, it is ludicrous to think along the lines of: "What kind of god could allow such things happen?" The twin towers collapsing, online beheadings, Fukushima—they seem truly horrific, callous and evil to we spectators, and a thousand times more so for the people involved, but that’s only because of the quality of the special effects. For Dog it is only a show, a game to enjoy, or an experience to relish.
I didn’t used to, but now have a soft spot (spots?) for the like of T Lobang Rampa, Paramahansa Yogananda, Swami Prabhupada, Ramtha, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, Madame Blavatsky, Don Juan and their ilk. It bothered me whenever so-called yogis, mystics and holy rollers would state, vacant grins painted across their faces, that everything in the world was is perfect the way it was.
What utter rubbish! Didn’t they watch the news and read the papers? By a very long chalk, everything obviously was not all right. How could they say so? Now, however, I’ve changed my mind. I see that they are right. You see, the universe is set up like a fair. It has rides, amusements, stalls and shows. Good or bad, they all feel incredibly real. They are designed to make us feel involved.
One approach to life is to give it the works. Inside whatever giant alien you discover yourself housed, you floor its pedal. ‘The devil take the hindmost’ is your motto. You give it heaps and go all-out. You barrel hell-for-leather down life’s highway. Finally, you burst across the finish line not necessarily with your vehicle in the best nick, or with the most possessions—he who dies with the most toys wins—but as if you'd tumbled down a roller-coaster of a mountain. You broadside to a stop in a cloud of dust, bruised, bleeding, exhausted and out of breath but with a smile on your face. "What a hell of a ride that was!" you grin.
And look at all the models and styles of vehicle that we get to enjoy! We have before us a fantastic and limitless variety of DVDs or computer game modules that we get to live through, not vicariously, but for real (as real as anything can be said to be).
We come in different sizes, shapes, ages, colours and sexes. There are different cultures, customs, languages, time periods and geographical locations. There are different states of health to experience, and different physical bags of attributes to master or waste at our pleasure. We live at both ends of the spectrum and every conceivable position in between. And that’s just as humans! Truly, the mind boggles.
All of us, every human, animal and plant, are God to the extent that Dog’s consciousness can shine, squeeze or express itself through our being. In most cases, that being's opening is very small. You don’t see much evidence of divine inspiration in most of us.
But it needs to be that way. Unless the openings are small, it would be impossible to maintain the necessary illusion of separateness. God wants to be having these relationships, you see. However, it’s only possible to have a relationship with someone other than yourself. If the two parties suspected that they were actually one, then that would take away some of the fun.
Generally speaking, of course.
Present company excepted.
And that, I believe, is basically that. We’ve come to the end of the story. It ended with a twist; did you notice? In case you did not, here, in the preamble to the ramblings that preview the following volume, I’ll lay out what you might have missed in all the excitement.
The premise that I used to kick things off did a little shimmy right where things reached their peak. You’ll remember that I began with the supposition that it was I who had the mission to locate and make contact with Theo the Other, the brother-at-a-distance to my Vincent Van Gogh. I spoke of Vee and me. I portrayed him as a version of me, and I merged the two of us into one.
But not so fast.
From your perspective, I have it all wrong. From where you sit, you’ll see the situation quite differently. What you’re going to do as the reader is to bring it all back to your vantage point. I’ve told you that you are quite entitled to rub me out. You would be absolutely correct to remove me from the picture. And you wouldn’t even have to do it by killing me. You just need to ignore me.
When all is said and done (and by now most of it has been), how do you know that you haven’t conjured me up out out of thin air? You assume that I exist(ed) based on nothing more substantial than inky marks across the page (or text on your screen). But you don’t know for sure that I exist. In fact, it’s better for you that I don’t.
This isn’t a trick of the light. There is no me here in your room, in the transit lounge where you sit waiting, or on your bench in the sun this lunch hour. There’s only you. You’re the One. You’re the God, the top Dog, the only player on the block.
What happened was this: you flitzed out of your head into mine. You uploaded (or were uploaded into) the set of attributes and skills and insights of another biology. It allowed you—as me—to postulate the Rickmansworth meme, hypothesize the Theory of Everythink, and then construct the philosophical worldview of Ism. And you’ve brought all that back home. You’ve fetched that bone and placed it at your feet. The question that remains is: Can you grok it?
