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.
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.
Okay, okay, just give me a minute. Is this where you’re going? Einstein and Van Gogh are a dual identity. Their personalities dither. Each is filled to the bursting point with self-awareness. Each believes himself unique and separate. Yet, for the eighteen or so years that their lives overlap, they are joined more tightly than any pair of Siamese twins. Nevertheless, they remain utterly unaware of the connection.
We could suppose that Van Gogh and Einstein (and me too, yes) comprise some sort of living strand. Should we co-opt the term ‘string theory’? Is that what we’ve got—chains of people hooked up? Am I building up to a collection of of these reincarnation threads?
No, not exactly. You haven’t quite got the cat by the tail. This isn’t a question of who gets to ‘bag’ which being – I grabbed Van Gogh and Einstein, so you get to nab Da Vinci and Tom Cruise. No, no, no! Think larger and grander. Think of the bigger picture.
Here’s what I suggest that you do. Imagine that the rate of reincarnation were increased. Turn that dial. Increase our speed up to a rate that makes it ridiculous to hang onto the term reincarnation—it’s too much of a mouthful to work properly at this velocity. From now on I’ll refer to what we’re doing as flitzing. Think of it as reincarnation on broadband.
‘But why?’ you ask, ‘For what the reason? Don’t you know that you’re giving me a headache?’
Yes, I appreciate that this isn’t easy. Think of this as a particularly tough lesson in quantum consciousness. Though it’s tough to get your brain around these concepts, a thorough understanding of the underlying principles will set you free. It will confer upon you unbelievable power.
Just as matter and energy can be broken down into the smallest of particles, wavelets, bits of string or what have you, let’s say that consciousness is also quantifiable. Fine, roll your eyes at me. I told you that I read science fiction. What possible reason could I have to take us into La-la-land territory? Hold your horses, I say. Po statements, remember?
I’m talking not just billionths of a second, but billionths of billionths. Nanos, picos and further. And at every miniscule point in time, a flitz occurs. Yes, you read me rightly. At every conceivable instant one is another person—no, I’ll expand the field—another being.
I propose that one’s soul is one spark of consciousness that leaps about the universe in quantum-sized instants—shall we call them quarks, quirks, snips or snarks? I’m open to suggestions. I want your spark of consciousness to have time to flitz a circuit of every centre of consciousness, into every creature, plant or life form, so that it seemed it had never gone missing. This arrangement would permit the illusion, in all of the life forms that it touches, that he, she or it is continuously, uniquely and separately alive.
