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!
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.
At this stage I’d like to introduce an alternate way for how time operates. I’ll demonstrate that it’s a dynamic phenomenon that can be brought about through a static process. I’m not going to ram it down your throat. I just want to admit that it holds water, that it’s airtight and that it could stand firm.
We’ll begin where we left off: that time is a collection of instants. In other words, time is quantized, discrete, digital or particulate (enough synonyms already). I suggest that consciousness results when a set of memory moments is uploaded into a particular instant. Now then, if this includes the awareness of a set of other 'consciousness-quanta', together with their cqs, nestled and contained . . .
Rats, I've lost you again.
How am I going to do this? How did Einstein keep it simple?
Okay, picture this. Have you ever created your own cartoon? Maybe back at school during an especially dull lesson you might have drawn a little figure down in the corner of your exercise book. On the next page you drew it again, but slightly altered, and again on the following pages. When you reached the end, you had something to show your friends. You told them to look as you flipped through the pages. Your stick figure skipped, walked, ran, jumped and flew (you were inventive). In essence, you brought your little animus to life.
In reality, of course, our little fellow doesn’t move. It’s static. It appears to move when we bring it alive, and maybe that’s what it thinks of itself too. But before you smile indulgently at Mr Stick, consider this. Perhaps on a higher plane the same principle applies to us.
Perhaps ‘upstairs’ some mechanism is operating to flip through a book of our leaves. Perhaps a wind is blowing through the pages of our calendar. There could be a giant thumb progressing us through time. We appear to be alive, but that may only be apparent. To our selves our bodies seem fully fleshed, but on a higher level we may just appear to be transparencies.
And the way that this illusion could be brought about is through memories. They might be the driving force. Memories, as an awareness of a set of other moments of awareness, could be the key. We define that set of memory awarenesses as ‘our past’. We know they have happened. Or, more accurately, we say they have happened because we know about them. It feels as if we have lived through those moments.
To illustrate what I mean let’s look at birthdays. Mine, if you like. Shall we start with my tenth?
At that age, I hold the memories of my ninth, eighth, seventh and-so-on birthdays in my head. The memory of each of them includes the memories of all previous ones (at nine I remember 8, 7, 6 . . . at eight I remember 7, 6, 5 . . .) They come tucked inside one another like Russian nesting dolls.
What that nesting gives rise to is the passage of time. It has the effect of flipping pages without any action needing to occur. Nested memories flip without any external help. You see, whatever age you are, you see that as the latest in a chain of memory instants. This produces the illusion that you just have arrived there, as if having just stepped off bus.
Now, the flipping does not need to happen in a particular order. Imagine that you’d drawn your stick figures on a deck of cards. If then you shuffle them, you’ll witness the most amazing thing. It doesn’t alter the illusion! I’ll say it again because this is important: shuffling the deck doesn’t make a scrap of difference. In every case it will seem that life proceeds in an orderly fashion. How could that be?
Pick any random multi-digit number. 4534644 will do (a previous phone number). Have each of those numerals represent a birthday. Next, let’s flitz through those years.
At a given moment you find that you are four years old. Great. Nothing wrong with that. That’s how old you are now. You are not surprised; after all, you remember 1, 2 and 3. Four is just how old you are at present.
From there, let’s say that your awareness flitzes to age five. Well and good—you’ve aged as expected. You remember being 1, 2, 3 and 4. Five is simply how old you are at present.
But then suddenly you are three. How will that work? Let’s see. You remember being 1 and 2, so you’ve aged as expected. You have no memory of being 4 or 5, so they must be still in your future. Three is how old you are at the present. You have aged as expected from 2. That’s all that you know.
At any age, the previous birthdays are nicely nested. You never have pre-knowledge of years in the ‘future’, so from your vantage point (and from those of your parents) there is nothing unusual going on.
When you hit four for the second time (though it may as well be the 10th or 100th) you don’t do a double take. You don’t even suffer déjà vu. As far as you’re concerned, you’ve just turned four after having been 1, 2 and 3. You haven’t retained anything from when you were four previously.
Jumping from four to six, you don’t perceive any gap, because when you turn six all your memories from 1 through 5 are instantly uploaded. The last birthday party that you can recall is your fifth, ergo you have lived it. Been there, done that.
In this way, every jump in any direction—forwards in time, backward, and even sideways—poses no problem at all for Mr Stick.
A deck of cards is all that you need to make time pass. You don’t even need a thumb flipping through them. Leave it sitting on a shelf if you like. No sleight of hand is needed. It’s active without any help. It’s alive. It whirrs and pulsates and a little light flashes (maybe a virtual electron leaping from one energy state to another). The nested nature of its consciousness moments causes it to happily imagine itself alive and passing time. It hums and purrs contentedly like a screen saver.
Isn’t this nifty? We now have a model for life, or rather one particular lifetime. A creature’s life is simply a set of instants. Each instant contains an awareness of its other (‘past’) instants. It’s hardwired into them. It may be that this set is subset, although it could also be the universal set (how’s your New Math?). Creatures are separate only if their consciousness instants have no awareness of each other’s. If you can't remember it, you can't lay claim to it
Let’s work this model a little harder.
Okay, so a life form has access to a set of memories. We call the whole a life. And we know that memory awareness is like an arrow pointing back in time.
Now, each time moment contains within itself a nested subset, or the memory-awareness of other moments (imagine a Venn diagram with subsets that get smaller and smaller (perhaps an onion (that does not need to be of glass (or contain a walrus)))) then, within the context or paradigm of continuous expansion, growth or progress, this makes it seem that time flies forward. (Within a paradigm of shrinkage or disappearance it ought to result in the opposite: that time is progressing into the past.)
Similarly, you appear to be travelling along with it. The universe too—it seems to explode and then, after aeons, implodes back into its black hole. Whether it does so once, or else loops back on itself like a Moebius strip, or even if it oscillates repeatedly ad infinitum, doesn’t matter, since none of those cosmologies break free from the gravitational pull of the illusion of time.
Those models only seem to be kinetic, whereas from god’s point of view everything is. It is all here, complete, the alpha through to the omega. The alphabet exists as a unit. The letters don’t scroll in real time; they’re carved in stone.
All is as it is.
All particles are linked according to the laws of gravity, electromagnestism and so forth. They relate to one another as if they were separated in space and time, and though they each seem to be discrete, there is in fact no way to tell them apart.
All is indeed one.
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.
Your head is spinning (I can feel the breeze from here). What’s the point of my scrambling your brain with these crazy notions? No one ought to be left dangling like that.
Yes, you’re absolutely right. I’m one hundred per cent in agreement, so let me do something about it. What say I ease you down to earth as I wrap things up?
I’ll ask you to turn to the looking glass. For a final time, look into the eyes of the jabberwocky. What do you see?
Do you sense a superbeing? You sense a presence that is greater than just yourself, right? It returns your gaze. It looks through those windows onto the world and finds it pleasing. It is borrowing your eyes, as it borrows them all. It enjoys its own creation through its creatures. Yours is a mansion of a thousand eyes.
A mansion is one thing.
However, a block of flats would be quite another.
As regards your quality of life, the second option is infinitely better. Think about it. If you have a thousand eyes—the compound eye of a fly, say—that doesn’t really expand your universe of experiences and interactions. You’re just knocking about in a huge drafty building. But subdivide it into apartments, and then the Joneses move in. You’ve suddenly got company. A whole neighborhood.
Practically speaking, the whole on its own is not much more than nothing. Getting a relationship going when you’re the only player in the room is rather tricky. Perhaps your only option is to dice and slice yourself into bits and pieces. Then fire each animalcule up with a wee quota of self awareness. Instil into each critter the sense of apartheid, set them loose and watch them go.
Flitting here and there, sampling a little of this and that—this is how the universal set enjoys the show. How passionately everyone plays their part! The ebb and flow occur in deadly earnest. Every creature sees its life for real. It’s really a matter of life and death for everyone while the game is on.
But behind the scenes it’s only cowboys and Indians, cops and robbers.
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.
Time is merely part of the mechanism that serves to separate. It allows us to view the multiplicity of the instants of our ‘being set’ as separate moments. They may be compared. “See me then, see me now,” we exclaim, “I must be changing, evolving and growing!” That is how it seems, although in reality we are part of a tableau.
Count yourself lucky if your portals are clear enough to grok what is what. Such a perspective is impermanent. I too catch only glimpses. But from where I stand now I can tell you that nothing is worth worrying about. Nothing is worth crying over. Nothing is a matter of do-or-die (though that is certainly how it feels).
Experience is the issue. Experience is the coin of this realm. The grand conspiracy makes it possible for God to experience life from the widest variety of angles. Variety has been hard-wired into our very being. We are ‘different’ so as to be able to experience our self from multitudinous points of reference. Right now, as I say, I can see that (and right now you may be able to understand). The glass in the windows of the vehicle of this particular model and brand allows me to see it. And I have this lifetime, day or instant to convey that meme.
My aim in enlightening you is purely selfish. It’s not done out of the goodness of my heart. No, I have an ulterior motive for this exercise in intellectual grooming. To be brutally honest, I dread the thought of waking up next morning trapped behind your eyes, together with the memory of all those years lived as you under whatever paradigm you follow. Ugh! The thought makes me shudder. I couldn’t stand to be you.
The whole point of my spending today—these twenty-four hours—to create this magnum opus is to make available to me (when I flitz into you) the wherewithal to escape—consider this as liberation literature. And, just as I only have this day of opportunity, so do you. You’ve discovered this text online? Download it right away and start digesting this baby: Virginia from Rickmansworth’s 100-minute bible.
1. The Doors is/are my favorite group
2. Eggplant is my favorite vegetable
3. I resumed stamp collecting after a hiatus of four decades
4. I find public speaking easy
5. I fall asleep within minutes
6. I score highly on I.Q. tests (whatever that implies)
7. I've completed several walks of over 1000 km . . . barefoot
8. I’ve trekked in the Himalayas
9. I didn’t speak English until I started school
10. I’ve travelled by ship through both the Panama and Suez canals
11. My first child is 23 years older than the youngest
12. I have a B.Sc. in Biochemistry
13. I can’t use urinals
14. I spent more than 8 years on a book that was never published
15. I’ve written over 5000 haiku over a ten-year span
16. I’ve lived and worked in India and Japan
17. I was vegetarian for 25 years
18. I learned to meditate at age 15
19. I took piano lessons for 5 years, passing every exam, but one, with honors
20. I suspect that I’ve high-level functioning Asperger’s syndrome
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| Not me |
21. I can almost ride a unicycle
22. I’ve lost track of the number of marathons I’ve run
23. I’m happily married for the second time
24. I've cycled comfortably on snow and ice
25. I don’t watch TV
26. I rarely drink, and have never been drunk
27. I’ve never done any drug
28. My gall bladder, along with 14 stones, was removed
29. I have read aloud the entire The Lord of the Rings
30. I was born at midnight but don’t know the date of my birth or zodiac sign
31. I once walked 150 kilometres in 35 hours
32. I only got my car driver’s license at the age of 28
33. I have appeared on two TV game shows
34. I relate to Kwai Chang Caine more than I do David Carradine
35. As a teenager I was really into Surrealism, Op Art and Dada
36. I have memories from when I was a baby (cribs, nappies, bath-time)
37. One of my great-grandmothers lived to be 100
38. My first favorite movies were Papillion and 2001: A Space Odyssey
39. I use the bathroom several times during the night
40. I use earplugs whenever it’s too noisy
41. I can read whilst walking
42. The first cuisine I ever mastered was Indian
43. I spent a week travelling across the USA by bus
44. In my fifties, I weigh what I did when I was 17
45. I remember when The Beatles broke up
46. I remember Robert Kennedy being shot, but not his brother
47. I can’t abide gardening
48. I hated how my face changed when I turned 16
49. Heinlein’s The Door into Summer was the first book I stayed up all night to read
50. Our family first got television to see the moon landing
51. I am 16 years older than my wife, but we feel the same age
52. I still hope to set a personal best for the marathon
53. I tend to wear the same comfortable clothes
54. When I began cycle-touring, traffic wasn’t yet a problem
55. I could walk at the age of 10 months
56. I’m still in the process of figuring myself out
57. I have never bought bottled water
58. I am most content in my own company
59. My fingernails are thin, round and flat
60. I have the hairiest legs of anyone I know
61. I don’t put salt on my meal
62. Too much sugar makes me sneeze
63. I hate to lose at chess . . . but also to win
64. I’m not attracted to Western women
65. I can’t imagine being homosexual (though am not homophobic)
66. After Muhammad Ali retired, so did I (from watching boxing)
67. I own thousands of books
68. I knew it was true the instant that I learned about Peak Oil
69. I feel at home in Japan
70. I could eat bibimbap every night
71. I'm the only one in my family never to have smoked
72. I never use an alarm clock
73. I have gone for more than a year without toilet paper
74. I’m allergic to nothing that I know of
75. I get second hand clothes and wear them into the ground
76. I like using computers, but they frustrate me
77. I’ve entertained the ex-Prime Minister of my country at my home
78. I started listening to rock after watching a Jimi Hendrix documentary
79. I always read on the toilet (I must)
80. I use the smallest dab of toothpaste when I brush
81. I hardly use soap or shampoo
82. I’m an excellent teacher, but it leaves me exhausted
83. I’ve never owned a dishwasher
84. I’m not averse to foraging
85. I attempted to set a world record in 2008, 2009 and 2010
86. I own perfectly good tape cassettes over 30 years old
87. I’ve never been in trouble with the law
88. When I stroke the left corner of my mouth, the inside of my left ear itches
89. I grew a beard for 16 years
90. In my teens, I read nothing but science fiction
91. Every year my wisdom grows exponentially, yet I feel I’m just a neophyte
92. I could do anything that I set my mind to; I just don’t want to
93. At school I was second in my year, but the top guy was literally a genius
94. In a face-to-face situation, I can’t speak to save myself
95. I’ve never had a broken bone
96. I haven't any tattoos or body piercing
97. I'm named after both grandfathers
98. I feel most at ease in other countries
99. I’ve spent as much on a photo-editing workstation as on a house
100. I’ve solved the mystery of being to my own satisfaction
