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!
From a very early age I’ve had a moth-like fascination for this thing called religion. Circling at a distance so as not to singe my wings, I observed my elders. Were they addled? Why would they turn off their brains and believe such fantasies? I pondered such questions at the age of six. Now, with the benefit of hindsight, I can see that that my instincts were truly perceptive.
Religions are damnably dangerous. All of them are cults. I can say this categorically because not one of them, not a single world model addresses a couple of essential existential features, and that shortcoming shows that they are seriously deficient.
First, no religion explains the real nature of the relationship between us and God (and with each other). All that stuff about neighbors, treating each other as brothers and sisters, who is in my family and who is not, this tribe and that tribe, the chosen people, Good Samaritans, turning your cheek seven times seven . . . It may seem as is the matter is being dealt with, but this isn’t not so. There’s a far more intimate involvement between all forms of life that organized religions have no inkling of and can't hint at.
And that would be enough to damn them. However, the second deficiency is even more damning. It is this: No system of belief addresses the nature of time. None of them explains how time operates. That understanding is crucial. Unless you have it, you can’t read any meaningful pattern into the warp and woof of the universe.
See our little spark. Unhindered by geography, it leaps lightly around the world. It skips blithely across time, allowing us to experience ourselves in a multitude of bodies, both simultaneously and overlapping. Behold now that spark flare several orders of magnitude. I’m going to up its power (this spark is going supernova). Fasten your seat-belts. Warp infinity here we come. It’s time to tackle time travel.
To do that, we’ve got to circle around and sneak up on it. Shh . . .
I am here.
You are here.
Every single instant, we are neatly self-contained. The illusion is of a wondrous separateness—individuality, independence, autonomy, free will and choice. Life feels filled to the brim with potential. Well, it should. This is a carnival, you know.
We realize its boundaries: birth and death. We observe them when others pass across them. This knowledge serves to snip us off from one another even more sharply. Everyone occupies his or her (gender is yet a further distinction) quarter-acre patch of reality. We’re fenced off from everyone else, including God.
But dammit, we are God. We’re wrapped up in that containing consciousness. We are one another. We are one. ONE. US. I. Ism.
I wake up from a dream in which I was a butterfly. Or am I really a butterfly dreaming of being a man? I wonder, is the dream state more ‘real’ than wakeful consciousness?
After all, we only dip into wakeful waters for a matter of hours before needing to recharge our batteries. By contrast, you never become exhausted in the sleep state and just have to wake up. It's not as if you run out of oxygen.
Nevertheless, we don’t question that the waking state is higher than mere sleep. Of course it must be. Isn’t our level of consciousness greater when we’re up and about? It seems so, but maybe that’s another ‘obvious’ assertion to test.
Leave consciousness out of it for the moment. Instead, let’s do an assessment of quality of being. Specifically, let’s consider our depth of connectedness to each other, the planet, the universe and our roots. We’ll compare how we do when we’re asleep, as opposed to when we’re awake. In which of the two states are we more ‘at one’?
When you open your eyes, you take on an aura of individuality and otherness. The illusion is of being a separate entity. You’re here behind the rays that shine into your eyes. Things exist ‘out there’. Time feels real, space feels real, and the cinematography of our lives feels as if it's occurring. The reels roll, we’re mesmerized, and we enjoy the drama from the comfort of our seat.
But we slough all of that off when we sleep. At that time we’re centred. We return to our origins where it is natural to be, and we draw nourishment from being there. Don’t we feel freshest in the early part of the day just after we’ve arisen? And conversely, don’t we feel dullest at day’s end?
Since this is so, then I conclude that wakefulness is not our default state. We’re not naturally wakeful beings who sometimes need to sleep. We are the one source that dips regularly into wakefulness to enjoy the experience of those dreams, which makes us not so much a butterfly as a cocoon.
Another thing is that we assume that the adult form is more advanced than the immature version. The pupa grows not only in size but in wisdom, supposedly, as our memories accumulate. But I wonder about that. Just as I’m coming around to think that the wakeful state is inferior to the sleep state, I’m starting to hypothesize that the child is the father to the man.
In one of my dreams I go into a mall with people walking about everywhere. There’re all types, all races, and I’m struck with their variety and beauty. I look into everyone’s eyes (especially if the people are women and if their eyes are brown) and then I suddenly stagger and have to reach out for support.
I’ve just had an epiphany. Now I know what it means to be God! In every pair of eyes I see consciousness swim. This pulsing matrix of humanity is omnipresence all ready to blow. It’s like a fire that just needs a match. Am I the only one who understands? We’re only a spark away from the realization that all is one. We’re just a membrane away from grokking ourselves for what we are, will be and always were: the timeless entirety. Imagine the simultaneous smile when that light dawns!
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.
The sense of self is relative. It relies on the fact that the external environment is not you. You can't be you unless there is something that you aren’t. There has to be that boundary.
The essence of the Rickmansworth meme is that there is only one being who experiences him-, her-, or itself (us-self) through every form of life. It’s all-inclusive. It includes all of those who are, as well as all of those who were or will be. If there are parallel universes then they are also in the mix.
And so, when the god boys say that it’s okay, it really is. Everything’s just fine and dandy with the universe. Whatever happens to you in life—whether you win the lottery, or whether you become confined to to a wheelchair, it doesn’t matter. Not ultimately.
Oh, it may hurt all right. The tooth may pain as it is pulled—I’m sure I’d fume and fuss along with the best of them. But that doesn’t change the fact that, although each of our stories seem so real, and our programming makes us cry, laugh or scream, it’s all but a technicolor dream.
The whole circus has been set up with just one purpose in mind: to provide everyone with entertainment. That’s why we’ve been compartmentalized. At heart we’re all essentially the same; we’re one. But that won’t do—you can’t put on a great performance with just a bunch of clones (witness synchronized swimming).
Some magic wand has conjured up the illusion that we’re all different and separate. We’re portals opening out into one another. We’re here for each other’s entertainment—hey, it's good to meet you! The circle game is how God passes away the time. That’s the grand conspiracy that we’re an unwitting part of. Think of it as a grand twiddling of thumbs.
