I’m not here to convince or debate. I’m not going to prop up what I say by dragging out a phalanx of previous thinkers—giants on whose shoulders I propose to stand and rant. I am not claiming to have developed—or be developing—a watertight system of thinking, or a way of apprehending reality.
True, that is the direction in which I want to head, but all I wish to do here is document my journey. I don’t see it as my job to make my discoveries fit in with what has gone before and thereby satisfy the conventional view. I won’t take it on because I don’t consider that my brief. I’ve enough on my plate as it is. Others may have a go later. That’s up to them, and they’d be welcome. By all means, if anyone out there is that way inclined, take up the cudgels on my behalf and run with them (it’s supposed to be good exercise).
As for me, I’m grappling at the limits of my strength with ideas that, for me at least, lie at the highest possible heights of comprehension—the Everest of what is humanly possible without oxygen. You take a step then rest five minutes. Lurch forward another pace and rest some more. It may seem as if I have it altogether, but that’s an illusion. I can only only hold a line or two of this text in my head at any one instant (this book is a manual for me to read and learn from just as well). But in saying that, I’ll pretend that I know what I’m talking about—which I do, just not everything at once—and I’ll do my best to present this narrative as best I can.
At birth we’re dealt a hand of cards. You stand to gain the greatest personal satisfaction in life when you play it out with skill (retain a trump or two for the end play is my tip of the day). You do that by playing to your strengths. And naturally, your sphere of activity ought to be determined by your inclinations.
My peculiarity is a compulsion to figure out what life is all about. I’m a man after the metaphysical meat in the sandwich. For me, there’s nothing more enjoyable than to engage in philosophical reflection. I want to experience and explore existential enigmas, and thereafter live in accordance with my conclusions. My particular bunch of aptitudes spurs me to ask: What’s it all about (. . . Alfie?).
Internal forces niggle at me to poke into the innards of existence. I desire to fathom the plumbings of the universe in my veins. I derive great joy from that delving. I love a heavy set of tennis for the brain.
My forte isn’t fancy footwork, and I can’t serve, smash, lob or volley to save my soul. The only string to my racquet is insight; I have a gift for grasping the human condition. And the technique that I employ is a certain kind of thinking.
I must confess that I'm suspicious of rhetoric, scientific method, philosophical rumination, religious dogma, emotional manipulation and the like. In my opinion, they’re largely gimmicks. They don’t impress or convince me. Sure, I use logic as and where it’s appropriate—in the right hands it’s a powerful tool—but not exclusively, or even mainly. I mistrust the way people wield it (to a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail). Even common sense doesn’t do it for me.
No, I’m not a linear rational dimwit. Instead, I suspect that I’m a multivariant and multidimensional thinker, which means that I use both hemispheres of my brain together with the brain stem. This gives you balance. It confers the gift of testing your thoughts for distortion, confusion and dishonesty.
How I’d describe it in real terms is that it makes me heft every hypothesis a hundred times before I’m happy. I need to weigh it, toss it around, taste it, test it and try it on for size. In short, I need to fully grok it (thanks, Heinlein, for that term). This requires heaps of window-gazing time. Decades. This probably explains why it has taken so long for my ideas—and for me as a personality—to Victor Mature.
My way of pondering mirrors Stephen Hawking’s movements. You’ve seen how the world champion of slow pokes painstakingly twitches the cheek muscle under his eye. Letters drip until there are enough of them for his voice synthesizer to drone forth. Me too—it’s as if enlightenment dribbles into me drop by hesitating drop (I must lose a lot through evaporation).
So no, I'm not a quick thinker, but I don't think that it’s possible to act in haste and yet be sure of your conclusions. I suggest, therefore, that you don’t hunt me up for some scintillating face-to-face. I wouldn’t measure up. Rapid-fire debate is not my thing.
Thought experimentation doesn’t seem too dangerous. Nothing is likely to blow up in your face. With thought experiments, you don’t usually expose yourself to the sort of rays that cause cancer. Which is not to say that they are foolproof or that they can’t go wrong; for how long didn’t people believe that heavier object fell faster than lighter ones, or that the world was flat? But are thought experiments a legitimate modus operandi? Can they lead you anywhere?
Actually, if you want to make dramatic progress, they are your only option. Application of the scientific method has never resulted in any great leap forward. Every stride has only ever been achieved through imagination, creativity and lucid dreaming. Thought experiments are extremely powerful. Einstein is said to have arrived at his Theory of Relativity after he imagined himself riding on a beam of light. Other examples include Kekule’s benzine ring, the discovery of Velcro, television, the microwave oven, alternating current, coordinate geometry, chemical transmission of nerve impulses—eureka moments all.
You’re bound to have come across thought experiments too, but maybe in another guise—perhaps as koan, haiku, riddles, puzzles and even jokes. To some degree, these are all thought experiments. If you think about it, the act of reading is itself a thought experiment. Consider how amazing it is that the inky squiggles that your eye perceives translate into a shared experience with their author. And it's all happening right inside your head! Reach up with your hand and grasp the back of it where the entire universe fits ever so snugly.
Science fiction provides a particularly good portal in terms of thought experimentation. Riverworld, Ringworld, Foundation and Chung Kuo—every tale starts off with, and flows on from, one or more ‘suppose ifs’: po statements that we accept for the duration in order to enjoy the story. We don’t worry about how likely or believable they are. This is great training. For example, take that premise that underlies the Matrix movies. Say that everything we perceived as real by our senses is not, and that the universe as we know it an elaborately constructed virtual reality world that we’re all hooked into. If that was so, you wouldn’t know the difference. No one can prove that anything is really out there.
Yeah, but hey, you say, it's real. I can smell it. Nope, that’s just molecules tickling some nerve ends and scooting upward from there into your grey matter. But I can touch it, you protest. Again, that’s just another set of electrical impulses traveling up, this time, from your fingertips. Et cetera and so on. Stick with me, as I pick away at the warp and woof of that insight.
Everything that you think you’ve experienced first hand is only virtual. Consider. You enjoy a good meal. Wow! That was the best bibimbap you’ve ever eaten. Well, I’m happy for you. And I wouldn’t want to take anything away from you. But just take a look at what went on.
You experienced that meal through your senses: taste, smell, sight, touch, hearing and so forth. And what are they? They’re generated by receptors of one kind or another that transmit nerve impulses up to your brain, right? Those impulses get decoded. The brain decides what kind of en experience it was. You’re left with a satisfied—satiated?—state of mind. What you’ve paid for, unless you prepared the meal at home, is an interpretation of data. Dollars for a state of mind.
This is what any experience boils down to. You fork out big bucks to attend a concert. Wonderful music booms. Great sounds echo. It’s mostly hearing that’s going on (mixed in these days with all sorts of visuals). Electrical impulses zapping along to the brain. Synapses sparking. The brain reacting. Wasn’t that a great gig? Again, you’ve paid for state of mind.
Poetry will do it. A run along the beach. Arranging photographs in your album. Witnessing the birth of your children. Your dreams, your thoughts, your wishes, your goals. Everything that you experience, even the process of conducting a real-world, honest-to-goodness objective chemistry experiment with test-tubes and Bunsen burners, boils down to impulses shunting around in your brain.
Everything out there reduces down to subjective experience. Everything that we sense equates to neural activity. That must be so by definition—that’s why they’re called ‘senses’. They are our means of perceiving the outside world. And so, seeing, hearing, touching, tasting and smelling are in a sense delusional, or at least illusional.
Everything else also: all the other ways I experience life. Everyone that I relate to. The stuff that I own. Every activity that I engage in. How do I really know that I’m walking, cycling or swimming? It could just be what I imagine myself doing; it could be—no, it is—just electrical impulses traveling to and from the muscles concerned. Even my own body may just be a figment of my imagination. Really, all I’ve got to go on is the mirrors and smoke of my eyes.
This brings to mind the old question: If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it does it make a sound? Really, who's to say that it isn't all just happening inside your head? Draw a ray diagram, inverted and reduced. You visualize the conifer upside down on the screen at the back of your eyeball, upended. But in the real world, is there a tree, a forest? Is there even a real world?
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.
