Just like having a good sneeze, it's an enjoyable act to entertain a conspiracy. Actually, it’s a form of thought experimentation. Here's a good one to try. Apparently it came from the French mathematician, Poincare. He wondered: what if one night while everyone was asleep the universe became a thousand times greater in size?
No one would be able to tell the difference, he surmised. People would wake up and blindly go about their business as usual. No one would know, because how could they? Their instruments and scales would have increased in size too. Well, that idea disturbed me when I read about it, because got me to conjure up a notion of my own.
What if every day we wake up as different person?
We touched on this earlier in this book where I invited you to step into my shoes. Just as you wouldn’t register a change in size, you wouldn’t know if you’d become another person, not if the procedure involved the complete deletion of your previous memories and the uploading of new ones. You’d wake up with your whole new history in mind, and this would be just another day of the person you now remember being. Oh my! The reason that this idea freaked me out was how could I be sure that it wasn’t already happening?
Consider: we awake into another body. We enter into another life by forgetting the old and assuming the new. We come to consciousness inside another life with its background intact, every episode of all previous seasons. The yesterdays that we recall are its yesterdays, its events and its birthday parties. What a conspiracy that would be, to be forever leaping into new continuums.
I guess you could call it quantum jumping. To all intents and purposes, you become another person with every leap. It stands to reason. That’s more or less how we define selfhood. If a person suddenly occupied another head with exactly the same genes, upbringing, environment, circumstances, knowledge, beliefs and attitudes as that entity—absolutely everything—then they would act and make the very same decisions and choices as he or she.
I’m talking exactly the same here. If you retained any inkling of your former self, would ruin the effect, but without such an inkling—if your brain was well and truly washed—then there’d be no way to tell you had changed hosts, now would there? You wouldn’t know that you were no longer ‘you’. How could you?
Your day would seamlessly ensue from the background of all that had gone before. In every respect you would be who you’d always been. Without the memories and self-awareness of a previous self, you would not miss your earlier existence. It would be like being born again in a sense. We’d be unaware of it having happened because all links would be lost. We’ve reincarnated. Incarcerated. At most there’s just the ghost of déjà vu.
Why could this not be true? It makes such sense that it must be true. This is how things work; that’s how the world is. I’m telling you . . .
No, I shouldn’t be telling you. No-one likes to be told what to think. Okay, please, bear with me. Hear me out. Po statements, remember? These are just fleeting butterflies. Don’t rip their wings off, weasels!
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.
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.
