Preface to the second edition

Welcome (me) back. It’s been a year or three since I completed the first edition of Will? I Am! However, that version was only a stopgap, and I knew it. Although I was pretty pleased with it at the time, I always knew that I had a lot more to say. I indicated as much then, but was in a hurry to post at least a rough & ready version online in case I was side-tracked or otherwise taken out of circulation.
 

What I wasn’t prepared for, however, was that I would want to rewrite so much of what I’d written. It dismayed me to discover so many pages of useless, uninteresting and repetitious material. My explanations were often unclear, and my linking non-existent. A lot of reorganization was called for, so I steeled myself to kill off an entire tribe of little darlings. Since then, I’ve eliminated a large number but there'll be more to get rid of, no doubt.
 

It would take me forever to do a perfect job. I don't want to wait that long. So here’s the plan: I’ll dive right into that running commentary that I promised you - otherwise I might never get started. I’ll go through section by section and get my work up to scratch. Along the way, I’ll be reminded of points that I’d forgotten to make. I may make them there and then. Or, then I’ll include them in Part Two.
 

No wait . . . that’d make it Part Three.

Rose by another name

As per the fashion of the day, I used a two-parter as the name of my book.  Its working title was originally Will? I Am! But it grew on me and I’ve kept it. The pun on my name also serves to indicate that the notion of time will be important as a theme. The subtitle also flags that the book is a philosophical ToE (so be warned).  

Theory of Everythink alludes, of course, to the famous—and undiscovered—theory Einstein hoped to discover in the later part of his life. He did not, and no one ever has, at least not in the field of Physics. It would have combined or absorbed gravitational equations into the other electromagnetic and quantum stuff that he’d done, as far as I understand (or am interested in finding out). It’s not for me, and it’s not what Will? I Am! is about.
 
You’ll notice that I changed the last letter in the title from a ‘g’ to a ‘k’. I had a couple of reasons for doing that. First, it reflects that the main tool du jour used is thought experimentation. Second, it hints that the tone will be light-hearted; ‘think’ is often how the uneducated pronounce ‘thing’. Finally, I introduced the hyphen in Theo-ry when I remembered that Van Gogh, who features prominently in the book, had a brother by that name.

In a hole in the ground

They say that for years before he started work on LOTR Tolkein carried around the image, or maybe the sentence: In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. In the same vein, I walked about with the first few paragraphs of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Universe in my head. And most uncomfortable it was too! Why was it there? What was I going to do with it?
 

But when I settled down to produce my magnum opus, it slotted right into place and I’ve never looked back. The only thing I’ve since done is to preface it with a few sentences of explanation that would help random readers work out where they’d arrived. I had Internet surfers in mind, you see. It was always my plan to make the thing available online, never dreaming that it would become such a roaring success in the real world of publishing—ha ha!

(I’ve always struggled with the issue of commercialism. In the sentence ‘I promise to make it readily available’ I had originally included the phrase ‘and freely’—and may do so again. I’d love to opt out of the capitalist world, but there aren’t many other options.)
 
And so, yes, I put it out as a blog. And I had a lot of fun finding suitable illustrations. The chapters are very short—as befits the medium. They also made (make) it easier for me to find my way around the body of my work. There was such an awful amount of repetition, detouring, numerous false starts and so forth. It was as if I was stacking a deck of cards.
 
With the subject matter that I intended to cover, I knew that I risked sounding presumptuous—something to be avoided if I could. I wasn’t at all interested in presenting facts, laying out logic, or substantiating claims with quotes and references. I would not plod an academic route.

I felt that the best approach was to leaven my output with a bit of tongue and cheek. No brow-beating. No insidiousness. No arguments. You just put people on the defensive (I’ve been on the receiving end of such treatment more than once). I meant to be up front and on the level. So that bring us up to Adams’s extract, which, all in all, I felt was the right way to go.

Names that drop and bounce

Certainly, the first section flowed very smoothly from there (at least it wasn’t difficult to write). I was able to maintain Adams’s light and frothy tone with the help of a few other characters. Einstein gets a mention nice and early, as do Richard Dawkins, Thom Hartmann, Mark Kingwell and others. Their presence hints that more substantial food for thought is to follow.

We’re up to Mission possible now. I’ve mentioned how much fun it was to search the Internet for illustrations for the online version. I was after a set of images reminiscent of Hipgnosis. The same thing pertains to the hundred or so chapter headings that I came up with.  Cultural references, quirkiness, wit, and a whiff of haiku.

Those names that I drop form a coherent whole too. They are people who have taken the trouble to devise and make available their personal world views. I’m impressed by such industry. I respect and salute them. Long may they run.

Serendipity or synchronicity?

Neale Donald Walsch gets a mention very early in the piece (and he is the last to get a look in at the end). He’s one of of those who have developed a take of their own, so it’s appropriate that Neale makes his mark so early in my own M.O.

Early in the millennium I first came across his books. The Conversations With God oeuvre was instrumental in weaning me away from a belief system in which had ‘contained’ me, shall we say, for the previous twenty years. Was I grateful to the man? Is the pope catholic?

In edition one, Neale featured more prominently. As I say, I felt indebted to the man. What he had expressed in his writing was at the time closer to my own philosophical cogitation than that of any other. I spent some time describing the relationship that developed between us.

A side effect of spending time on philosophical musing is that a lot of what you read will naturally have a bearing on what’s on your mind. Thom Hartmann’s Greatest Spiritual Secret of the Century was definitely in that camp. The book meshed in so well that I wrote the author a letter (not sent).

I manage to squeeze in another introductory paragraph or two before quoting Mark Kingwell on the process of writing. What he says is on the money, but it took a while before I was able to heed his advice and remove screeds of unnecessary agonizing from the first edition. So much aggressive-defensive posturing—you wouldn’t believe! Let’s heave a great sigh of relief. Good riddance.

The sentence ‘Don’t be surprised if they crucify you for thought crime,’ provides a clue for my fears. They may be baseless, but they are not groundless. I believe that they stem from that Christmas when I turned six. I’d just been exposed to a book that showed in graphic detail scenes from the crucifixion. Right away I grasped the message: that if you ever give the crowd a reason for regarding you as different—by thinking different thoughts to theirs, for example—then you had better watch out for your life.

Reading for a hobby

Have you ever paused with a pen in the middle of filling in a questionnaire? For me it happens when I come to the space where you fill your hobbies. Can I legitimately include ‘reading’, I always wonder? It makes me sound so dull. Not so many people appreciate a good book, and I guess that it’s that which I have in mind.

In Will? I Am! I only touch on that subject in a couple of places. I refer to the magic of reading, and how it’s a thought experiment in itself to look at a bunch of letters lined up on the page and read meaning into them. But I do go to a good deal of trouble in discussing that non-hobby (perhaps I’m reluctant to call reading a ‘hobby’ because the word sounds so casual and shallow).

I’m reasonably happy with how I handle the exercise. I hope that I don’t belabor the point. However, this is a book after all. Starting from Books as traps through to Raison d’etre—ten short chaplets—I develop a series of thoughts concerning the written word.

First, authors must take care with what they write, lest it provokes a backlash. Next, a book’s ideas should be able to stand on their own and be considered in isolation. A good author may express poor thinking, and a poor author is not necessarily bad. It may save you time and energy to filter your input, but that may lead to your missing out. In fact, it is even possible to learn from ‘dumb’ ideas (apologies to people who can’t speak).

I urge my book’s audience not to be too selective, especially when weighty issues are being addressed, and I suggest that they don’t pay too much attention to an author’s qualifications and moral standing. I close off the passage by providing a tip on how to decide between ideas, and I compare reading to listening to music. We naturally gravitate to those whose work strikes a receptive chord. 

Spiral staircase

In Raison d’etre we returned, essentially, to the idea that kick-started the previous chain of events, namely that ideas can be dangerous. Previously, I looked at the danger from the author’s point of view. Now, I consider it from the point of view of a reader. But really, it’s the same thing. Authors read also. Teachers learn too.

Over the next page or so, I circle back to touch on, and further develop, several other sub-themes. The first of these is the danger potential of me as an ideas man. I reflect how often authors inadvertently push the wrong buttons. Their audiences leave in droves . . . and return with books to build a bonfire. I assure my readership that I’m harmless (in Mostly harmless) by giving my word I’m a flexible fellow, but you only have my word for that, if you get my meaning.

In Cerebral ammunition I tease out a little more about how to extract good nutrition from junk food.  And then in Identity check I once more come to the conclusion that I’m going to have to reveal a little of myself to make friends. Finally, this round is ‘rounded off’ when another book, No Ordinary Genius, pops up just when I need it to make my point (two books if you include The Double Helix). You can turn all sorts of raw matter into useful material (after longish periods in the laboratory).

Satisfy yourself first

I’ve just done a check. Altogether I’ve made four pages’ worth of comments on the first fourteen pages of edition one. Not too bad, don’t you agree? Not too verbose?

But the next bit took some work to help it flow. It required a good deal of rearrangement. Time after time I return to previous points, sub-themes and people (Feynman and Einstein). Think of it as a layering operation.  I wonder what it is about Nazi Germany that grabs my focus? Certainly a lot of what happened at that time bears fruitful scrutiny.

In any case, the essence of the section Identity check through to Welcome to my world boils down to an exploration of the term sanity. Am I ‘a lad insane’ or am I not? Either way, I trust I’ve convinced you. Be sure before you continue.

Mixed bag

Pretty clever of me, don’t you think? We’ve moved on from the issue of insanity to a thought experiment—our first?—where I contrive to tell you more about me as a person. By having you imagine yourself as me, I sidle past your watchful dragons. But hey, that’s not the only reason. It isn’t even the main one. Being able to imagine oneself as someone else is crucial to this narrative.

We cruise on by means of a nifty automotive metaphor in Boxes in the attic. We visit another book that has just fortuitously arrived on my door step. Yes, it’s lightweight, but it does the job of setting up the next talking point: authenticity. Again, I add a little more to what the reader needs to know about me. Not my habit of bare feet, but the manner in which I use my brain. The term that I’ve adopted comes from Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land. Grokking is a concept that grows in importance as Will? I Am! proceeds.

Bam, bam, bam!

In trimming next few chapters, I was at my most ruthless. Writing self reflectively, you spin a lot of bum fluff about the process of writing itself, which I decided to spare you. Don’t mention it. Thanks for the applause.

I couldn’t, however, eliminate it all. It was/is important to give my reasons for choosing to write. I already mentioned that it wasn’t for money, and yet it was partly for selfish and fanciful reasons. Mainly though, I couldn’t see my meme spreading on its own. It needed a (reluctant) champion: Muggins.

The writing process segues quite nicely into aberrant thinking, of which, in my opinion, belief is an example. To promote my creed of disbelief, I then utilize the services of an unexpected guest. Stephen King’s Cell is another of that chain of books that linked up with my thinking at the time. (Such serendipity has happened so often that I no longer regard it as extraordinary.)

Einstein pays us another visit; he is getting to be a regular here. I’ve arranged our itinerary so that we pay a brief visit to the attic up in my head. That’s another image that we’ll be returning to. And it also leads us to the so-called past when I zap the reader with three powerful thought experiments. One after the other, they’ll never know what hit them.

Sex, politics and religion

I’ve put it off for almost half of the book, but I can’t do so any longer. What I refer to is the discussion of religion. I can avoid sex and politics easily enough, but the nature of this book means that there’s no way to steer clear of the third big conversational no-no. But I warned you about that at the beginning.

Is it going to be a problem for you? You see, people have a tendency to identify with their beliefs. And beliefs underlie both politics and religion. We align with like-minded others and form a tribe, if you will. And a critical examination of their shared beliefs is perceived as an attack on the group and, by extension, that person’s core identity. He or she can get irrational and go on the offensive.

But I can appreciate where they’re coming from. Although I may give the appearance of being able to discuss the topic with dispassion, it wasn’t always like that. While my own philosophical framework was still shaky, I felt distinctly uneasy in a religious environment. My emotions ran close to the surface too.

Are we big enough to get over it now? If we can just get over this hump, I guarantee that the rest of the journey is all downhill.

I share three items from my background that could be relevant. They embarrass me now, but they may defuse the situation. By revealing a little more of my nature, it may show that I’m human, and that I’m fallible. (That I’m weird.)

Muddling through

I’m sure I’m not the only agnostic ever to have put god on the spot. ‘Do what I ask or else,’ is without doubt an unoriginal demand. But I’m quite likely the only person who has considered the outcome from a no-time perspective. Whether Dog answers to its name seconds, years or even lifetimes later, is immaterial. It’s all equally good, don’t you know? Now that’s an eye-opener!

The other two blasts from that past consist of my becoming involved with TM, and my first attempt to break away from organized religion by designing my own—good healthy boundary-testing behavior from a teenager.

This passage, which leads us up to the final development of ideas for my magnum opus, is admittedly rather muddled, but that is necessary as it needs to weave together a few disparate threads. I believe that it gels well enough. For one thing—and it’s a biggie—we have come up with a sensible definition of God. It’s neat how the centre-of-the-universe concept is developed into a ranking system that will pop up a totem pole top cat.

The bitterest pill to stomach here is that we can never expect perfection. The god that we end up with may not be as high and mighty as we’d like her to be. Guru figures, systems of thinking, even the concept of enlightenment—none of them are beyond reproach. None can be relied on absolutely.

All in the mind

By removing their props, I leave my readers to their own devices. Nevertheless, I haven’t, and won’t, abandon them. I’m a caring author, I assure you. To start with, I provide a weapon, one which everyone is already familiar with in some form or fashion. What was the list that I gave: Haiku, koan, riddles and SF? All of them are good to go. They’re all the laboratory glassware that you need with which to cook up any thought experiment.

Just don’t trust your senses. Seeing is not believing. I demonstrate that everything which a person thinks that they perceive directly only occurs in his or her mind. Therefore I tell them to use their minds. Turn negatives into positives. By whipping out the carpet, I give them a firm place to stand. Secure footing, hell. Existence is nothing but a thought experiment.

And then it’s your turn.  I hand the bat over and invite you to swing. Take a crack at it. You don’t do so well, but it’s not too bad for your first attempt. You turn to me and grin—it’s not so easy. And so I step up and whisper some advice into your ear. “A sense of grandeur . . . conspiracy . . .”

We utilize those tools and start to focus. You squint coldly at the pitcher as he winds up.

Head shots and body blows

The pace picks up from this point, courtesy of Monsieur Poincare. That is deliberate. I want the reader to stay off-balance—thwacked about the head by a Zen monk with a stick. No time to think. You don’t want to think. You want to side-step that mechanism if enlightenment is to be your goal.

As a result, I expect readers to become disconcerted following on from Everything you know is wrong. Anyone would, as they observe their world being dismantled. Then I advise that one should not trust one’s senses—this on top of an exhortation to rely only on the self and keep one’s distance from god, guru, systems of thinking and the notion of enlightenment. Well, what else can you expect?
 
It’s like boxing or billiards. In a rapid-fire sequence we bounce from one thing to the next. No time to catch our breath or regain our orientation. We’ve got reincarnation on the brain, Theo leaping out of the woodwork, and there’s a 24-hour rebirth thing going on. Isn’t this a doozy of a dilemma? Even Tom Cruise wouldn’t take this mission on in a hurry, I’ll bet.
 
My magnum opus leaps from Poincare’s nightmare to a worse one, and that mutates into a horrible hybrid of movies and TV shows: E.T., The Truman Show, 24, Twilight Zone, Mission Impossible and Groundhog Day. Brrr! But these stories aren’t just cultural references.  They are narratives, and it’s a narrative that we home in on for the remaining couple of dozen pages.

Tale in the telling

Van Gogh’s appearance is readily explained. The man has been on my mind for much of my life. But I can’t as easily explain how I came up with the grand narrative in which he stars. It grew organically, holistically, from the jigsaw’s bit and pieces.  It’s a thought experiment that grew in the experimentation, I suppose.

I did not start it deliberately. Admiration for my hero would have led to some idle speculation. What if I was once he? Others also have claimed kinship with historical figures. That would have led me to explore the concept of reincarnation. And that fifty year gap between Mijnheer Van Gogh and me would have got me to wonder what might have gone on in the interim.

And so you have this pattern starting to repeat: What if A? How could that work? But that would necessitate B. How could that work? But that would require C . . . You get my drift?

But that drift drifted off on a side track. And that track led, once again, to the overlap between what I’m looking at here and conventional thinking: God and Religion. It’s time to clear the desks of them both, once and for all.

New tricks for old dogs

Up to this point (Healthy blasphemy) no one would be able to accuse me of being unfair.  I’ve done my best not to insult anyone. Rather, I’ve bent over backwards to accommodate divergent thinking. But now I’m going to have to take a firmer line. No more Mr Nice Guy for a while. I have a job for God to do, and he’ll need to suck in his abdomen and demonstrate a little backbone!

We now return you to your regularly scheduled programming . . .

As we plow through the latter half of this book, I find that its style sometimes irks. Don’t get me wrong—the structure is fine, and I like how the pace has sped up. It’s quite exciting, really.  But at the same time, I have to tone down another element. A certain over-the-top-ivity has crept in. I know what that is, of course. As I touch upon matters dear and near to my heart, I anticipate a negative reaction.  I grow defensive, and that increases my tendency to act clever. I’m working on that, I assure you.

Chain reaction

I feel that everything is coming together nicely, like a classical piece of music—a concert or symphony or whatever term is the proper one. You know—the one that has Movements. I’m enjoying how earlier themes are returning to combine and develop. The whole is starting to appear and make sense. It’s like watching a video of scrambled eggs in reverse.

Einstein refused to have anything to do with developing the atomic bomb, but here he sets off a veritable chain reaction. His appearance triggers a closer examination of the phenomenon of, not relativity, but reincarnation. And that soon mutates into a super-charged version of that mechanism.

The one reincarnation event quickly goes ballistic. Every being is enveloped by its blast, and that explosion is not a one-off but a continuous roar. It is not confined to the one location but occurs globally. In terms of time, there can be a lag, but it can also occur in an instant. It is not restricted to humans, but extends to the natural world.

I hint at backward-in-time travel, but first I establish a pattern of regularly summing up where we’re at, an important touch-base exercise in such a tumultuous part of the narrative. Yes, it’s all happening at once . . .

And then I deliberately slow down.

In the limelight

Einstein steps under the spotlight and the audience goes quiet. Is it really him? ‘Who are you expecting?’ I ask back. We assume that he is him. As if the man is a catalyst, the degree of our thought experimentation now goes through the roof.

We surge from the question of identity, past knowledge gained through a photo through Einstein’s age, and thence to age in general. There’s no halting our momentum. Finally, we bump up against the ceiling of overlapping lives. And we dust off a previous construct: that every day we might wake up as a different individual.

A great deal of deconstruction occurs within these pages. We tread on a minefield of ice floes. I’ve tried to smooth these waters by rewriting almost every word. I split paragraphs, extract sentences and weed words (the odd spelling mistake too).

Just consider what I’m asking my readers to contemplate: That they don’t possess a discrete personality; that the ‘little death’ of sleep is rather bigger; that at any instant they can expect to be replaced/uploaded elsewhere; and that they won’t have the luxury of a childhood during which time they may come to terms with their new identity.

It’s the speed of the chase that’s going to pose the toughest hurdle. I’ve tried to make the idea more palatable by comparing flitzing to cinematography, but consciousness segmentation at the sub-atomic level is going to be impossible to some people to accept. This is reincarnation with a vengeance.

I strengthen the movie metaphor to make the idea more accessible. For instance, the idea that strings of individuals could exist is little like imagining Harrison Ford in his series of roles. It’s a pity, therefore, that the real universe is more like Being John Malkovich. It isn’t only Santa Claus who has the chops to get around the whole world in just one night (though he needs the next 364 to recover). It’s the Eingo.

21st century schizoid man

I‘m not an expert, and wouldn’t want to be, but I’ve heard that brainwashing consists of a phase of deconstruction followed by one of construction. In a sense that’s what is going one here as I take apart one world view and set up another in its stead. But I trust that you’ll trust me. I’ve only got your good in mind. This hurts you more than it hurts me—just kidding!

Seriously, though I appreciate the discomfort that this barrage of new ideas is most likely to cause. It probably makes no difference if I take you through it quick or slow, but I have taken care to break up the journey with examples, external evidence, discussions and reviews. I hope that this suffices.

Now, the previous metaphor involved film. The next point that I make is that flitzing does not need to be sequential in any way (in contrast with moving pictures, where the order of photographic images is most important). Flitzing can—and does—occur randomly, like the make-up of an electron cloud. If there’s no time then, by extension, there’s no order to follow either.

These ideas are getting way out there now, so I bring in a team of demolition men—Czerner, Feynman and Wheeler—to back me up. I slip in an essay on photons that I don’t need to edit. It’s lovely to quote stuff verbatim! I’m pleased to reveal that the single-electron universe is not just my idea. I don’t believe that it’s been taken to the hypothesis stage, but it lives on Wikipedia Street at least. 
Similarly, Matter, Energy and Consciousness coexist on approximately twenty million sites, though how reputable most of these are is up for debate. I’m surprised to see that even quantum consciousness is mentioned in a quarter of a million locations. I must take a closer look one of these days.

I’m pretty sure, though, that the idea of using a ‘metaphysical cyclotron’ to smash up a godlike super-consciousness source into smithereens is mine alone. It’s not anywhere on the world-wide web (unless, of course, they gave it another name). Still, the idea of annihilation does not exactly inspire peace of mind, and I felt that it was best to bring in another group of men—constructionists?—to calm the waters. Tolle and Alpert both refer to living in the present, which leads us to examine the interface between the past and the future. What is it?

Attempting to quantify the present leads us to an interesting idea: the possibility that its thickness is exactly the duration of the smallest quantum of consciousness. I do a lot of that sort of thing, you know. I imagine how something might work and then try it on for size. If it groks, which is to say that if it jumps into focus like those 3-D pictures that you stare at for several minutes before a solid image suddenly stands up out of the page, then I run with it.

I do something else in this last part of Will? I Am!  I mix up the ‘person’ in which I write. I keep switching from the author’s point of view to that of the reader. This leads to conversations in which it isn’t clear who is who at any one time. I merge our identities, in part so as to personify feelings of doubt, angst, frustration, suspicion and incomprehension. I empathize, in other words.

Killing fields

Devil in this guise finds me stomping through a minefield. There are risks in voicing huge and blasphemous thoughts. Ask Salman Rushdie. It is difficult enough to get someone to entertain seriously the idea that we are all one, but you drastically worsen your odds when you include in that unity God Itself. You bite on that bullet at peril.

And so I’ve kept things low key by referring to other texts and enlisting other authors: The Egg by Andy Weir and Conversations With God. I try to build up my construct methodically and logically. I argue that my ideas, although they lie well off the radar, aren’t dangerous (ha, not much!). I demonstrate that they hang together, and because of that deserve to be considered despite the fact that they may defy the consensus ‘wisdom’.

I offer up a paradox as an example. Two things seem to fly in the face of one another: We feel ourselves separate, yet we know that we are One.

There follows a spate of thought experimentation that skirts past rich fields of sleep, dreaming and growth. We never question certain things about them, so it could be interesting to look at them with a fresh brain. As our story approaches its end, all of its points coalesce. I find myself straining not to follow up such leads.