The MSC Basel (photography copyright Pictures From Earth

It looks like we might have our cargo ship back after all — Hamish emailed this morning to say he could get us on the MSC Basel on the 31st July, Singapore to Melbourne. Yes, that’s the same ship he originally had us on, so we’ve either bumped the other passengers OR will be travelling with them! (In a separate room, I hope.)

It got me thinking about chance and happenstance (a great word, by the way, but one that Chrome doesn’t know how to spell) , and how everything that ever happens is all equally — and massively — unlikely.  (It’s funny that I should stumble across that particular article while thinking about such things, huh? I mean, what are the chances? )

So yeah, things seem to be unfolding as they should — but is that actually meaningful, or just a creation/product of our self-aware minds? I tend to think both: ‘meaning’ is only meaningful to a sentient creature, after all, but that fact doesn’t in any way lessen the, er, significance (meaning) of it all.  I guess the point is: we’ve got a second unlikely opportunity to get home without flying and we’re taking it!

It just went downhill from there.

Like last night: I was trying to avoid watching The X-Factor (a ridiculous talent show, if you don’t know, and if you don’t know then hello from the future!). At one point I dropped my guard and found myself watching a brother and sister act who wanted to use music to spread the word of God.

They were crap, in case you were on the edge of your seat wondering, crap and borderline-creepy (they sang “Time Of My Life” aka the Dirty Dancing song). My comment was, “Somewhere there’s a guy with a big beard and white robes shaking his head and asking why he always gets the losers, whilst nearby a red-faced, be-horned gent in a dapper three-piece is pissing himself laughing.”

Seriously, people, you think someone would let them get arrested, let alone nailed up to a bit of four-be-two, for that??  Iesus loves you, but everyone else thinks you’re a f*ckwit.

Apparently the DS has developed to respond quickly to “instant” (or “instance”) decisions. Like when someone brings snacks in, and you happen to walk past thinking you could do with a snack. Studies show that if you offer someone a snack of fruit or chocolate, 70%+ will go for chocolate.

The CS on the other hand takes longer to make decisions, but is able to plan ahead.  (Actually, I think it takes responsibility for long-term decisions, but delegates quick-win stuff to the DS.  But that’s just my internal observations.)  So if you offer to bring a snack to someone next week, 70%+ go for the fruit.

CS prefers the healthy fruit option; DS likes the quick win of chocolate.  Same goes for addiction: the CS knows something might be bad in the long run, but the DS is designed to make the decision about whether to have this thing right now.  That’s why it’s a struggle — the DS and CS are trying to override each other.

My next steps are to determine strategies I can use to optimise my operational- or run-plan, utilising the CS and DS in the best way.

e.g. strategies to make me go to the gym:

• (CS) wants to be fit, so make a generalised plan for when to go to the gym; not too detailed because the DS is a tricky b*stard.
• (DS) wants immediate gratification, so when leaving work focus on getting a snack before the gym. Make sure to get the snack as quickly as possible.
• (DS) When approaching the gym, start thinking of the enjoyable experiences of stretching, and the adrenaline-rush when cycling/rowing/running.

i.e. I need to short-circuit the DS from deciding it doesn’t want to go (at the last second) by focusing on how great it is.

However, I can move through space and time (although I seem to be hurtling out of control through time, oh well). Maybe I can move through the “possible” dimension(s) too? Because they are just another “direction”, like spacetime, and I’m occupying some “space” in that dimension, I should be able to move around. And moving around in the “possible” dimension means altering my reality.

How do we move around in the 5th+ dimensions? Well, how do we move in the three regular ones? Our mind sends signals (via the brain, if you think there is a separation of brain and mind) to our limbs; our limbs convey us in the chosen direction. But there’s a difference between willing your arm to move, and actually moving it. Try it – think “wiggle your finger” for a while, then just do it. What was the difference? The thoughts were the same, but there is definitely a different kind of flavour to it.

Call it “command mode”, or intention, whatever. It’s the “something” that turns thoughts into activity, and it should work for all the dimensions (once we figure out the “landscape” of the dimension, anyway). So maybe this is how the so-called “law of attraction” or “law of intention” works – you trick yourself into command mode, then shift around in dimensional probability-space to a position where what you intend is more likely. It would explain why it takes a while to kick in – you’re moving, and that isn’t instantaneous.

In fact, you can probably only travel at the speed of light through all dimensions in which you exist, and we’re already travelling at near the speed of light through time. The speed through each dimension (vector components, if you will) has to add up to the speed of light – this is why when you get faster, time slows down (check Einstein’s theories). So if we’re moving so quickly through spacetime, we haven’t got much speed left to move through the other dimensions, right?

So: we can change our reality by moving around in another dimension (or more), but it will take a while to go from your current reality to a wholly new one. I also think the geometry of the higher dimensions has something to do with the versions of reality you move through – perhaps they are all curled up (like string theory suggests?), and we travel “down” and “up” in spiral fashion. Some people who experiment with intentional reality say that some time after you first form an intention you get a “little” result, followed by the major result. Perhaps the “little result” reality and the “major result” reality are on top of each other, like layers of a spring?

It could also explain why two different intentions (from different people) don’t cancel each other out – the two “intenders” move to different realities. e.g. We both want the same job. We both intend it equally. I move to the reality where I get the job, you move to the one where you did. In my reality, you lost out; in yours, I did.

Of course, that would mean we have to exist in all realities, even though we are only conscious of a single one at any point.

So the question is: are you a directly positive influence on the evolution of the wholly-regenerative Universe, or is the positive effect you have on the Universe just a side-effect of your unknowingly correct, inevitably positive actions? A violent criminal can be a positive influence if he (or she!) causes someone else to invent ways to lessen violence; the age old “reason” for evil – that we may rise above it. Does your life just serve as a bad example?

Actually, the “reason for evil” argument is flawed, because there is no proof that “evil” (things happening to individuals and groups that hurt and/or upset the people) is the only way to promote “good” (people lessening, stopping or providing comfort against hurtful things). It is altogether possible that a loving community would spontaneously arise in the midst of a happy existence, and be “stronger” than the community that bonds together against a common enemy/evil. Depending on your definition of “stronger”, of course.

Anyway, the point is you can either be a positive influence in spite of your actions, or because of them – and “because of them” is both more efficient for the “system” (an eternally regenerative Universe) and likely to lead to greater personal happiness, as you have truly found your “purpose”. And when you do that, or move towards it, things seem to just gel (it may be a purely mental state, with your pattern-recognition engine noticing anything and everything that moves you closer to your stated purpose).

I’m trying to move towards my own chosen purpose now, and finding exactly as stated above: things just work when I actively pursue it (even if it’s just trying to discover what to pursue), and I notice things every day which can help me. To quote Bucky one last time:

“The Things to do are: the things that need doing, that you see need to be done, and that no one else seems to see need to be done. Then you will conceive your own way of doing that which needs to be done — that no one else has told you to do or how to do it. This will bring out the real you that often gets buried inside a character that has acquired a superficial array of behaviors induced or imposed by others on the individual.”

What’s true of the very small (or very fast) is true of the very large, and everything in between. We observe the universe as it is now; this “collapses” the probability waves of every possible past into the most likely one; ergo, by existing, we created (selected) our own beginning.

Except it’s stupid. What makes us so special that we can “collapse” quantum reality into actual, observed reality? Are we each working on our own “copy” of reality? Am I the god of my realm?

Maybe, but again it’s beside the point. Rather than collapsing anything, consider this: if there is a fifth dimension containing all possible realities, then collapsing probability waveforms is exactly like moving in the fifth dimension. So when we observe an electron, or a universe, we are moving to the point in the fifth dimension where that reality is expressed.

And because it’s a movement, we can’t just go from one state of reality to another without moving through the intermediate states. And moving through any dimension isn’t instantaneous, so there are a limited number of points we can go to, and one will be more likely than the others. (Actually, with the addition of a single “possible reality” dimension, there should really be two which are equally likely. Do we see this in quantum mechanics?)

Okay, so it’s actually the same thing as collapsing probability waves, but the representation sounds more sensible to me.

I think I should read up on quantum mechanics a bit.

Now after reading Flatland: A Romance Of Many Dimensions and watching Rob Bryanton’s animation Imagining The Tenth Dimension, one can’t help draw parallels between the description of the boy’s “transition” and what it must be like to “teleport” through the nth dimension (or the first n dimensions) by bending it/them through the (n+1)th. The analogy given in Imagining The Tenth Dimension goes like this:

Imagine an ant walking on a sheet of newspaper. To the ant, the world is (practically) 2-dimensional — he can walk forward, backwards, left and right but not up or down. He is the closest thing to a flatlander we can have (well, maybe an amoeba or something would be a closer analogy). His universe (the newspaper) has boundaries but now look! If we curl the newspaper (2-dimensional universe) through the third dimension and join the two edges together in a loop, we’ve just eliminated two of the boundaries. Our little ant/amoeba/flatlander can now walk in a particular direction forever — he just ends up back where he started. Thing is, if the newspaper is big enough — or the flatlander small enough — he wont be able to detect the curvature and his 2-dimensional universe will look the same to him whether it is flat, looped, curved, shaped like a saddle …

It’s a bit more of a stretch, but now imagine that our flatlander moves from one place in the 2-dimensional universe to another — perhaps falling from the “top” of the loop to the curve below. What would that look like to the other flatlanders? So long as we imagine that they can’t “look up” (they don’t even know there is an “up”), they would see their fellow flatlander disappear from one place and teleport to another.

This isn’t quite enough to explain reincarnation, however — rather it describes how we might one day create teleporters and time machines by bending spacetime through a higher dimension.

For reincarnation, there must be some physical part of us which exists outside of spacetime i.e. in one or more of the other dimensions. Hindus might call it the “atma“, deists the “soul” or “ka”, but I think the important thing is that it needs to be physical — just not in one of the 4-dimensions we can observe, which we call spacetime. (I say “might” because the Hindu and Buddhist sense of “self” is much more complex than what Christians call their soul. Look it up, it’s interesting!)

So when the spacetime-part of our body succumbs to entropic decay in whichever form (choose your poison), perhaps the non-spacetime component “falls through” one (or more) of the other dimensions, eventually associating with another spacetime form — our child-self. Note that because we’re falling through dimensions outside of spacetime, there is no requirement that our lives be temporally linear (you can be reborn in the past or future) or spatially proximate (you can be reborn anywhere).

And if what is posited in Imagining The Tenth Dimension is anything like the truth, you needn’t even be reborn in the same reality/universe — dropping through other dimensions could let us “slide” into all possible realities. This works because we think our universe has a 4-dimensional, 4-coordinate system — any point can be specified by [x, y, z, t]. If there are higher dimensions, a point is actually specified by [x, y, z, t, a, b, ... n] and this means we can “move” without changing our position in x, y, z!

Here’s the thing: if consciousness (or if you like our souls, ka, atta, the ghost in the shell) exists outside of space-time then there is no reason it can’t, through the physical media of the brain and body, interact with itself.

Perhaps what we call “reincarnation” is actually just a particular form of “preincarnation”, where the “you” now recognises or remembers a “you” that just happened to be in the temporal past? “You”, or your consciousness, could perhaps inhabit/associate with any number of bodies throughout time — and here’s the kicker — it needn’t be in a temporally linear fashion. So you die today, perhaps you incarnate fifty or 100 or 1000 years ago. Your consciousness keeps changing, evolving, growing, whatever, but there’s no reason it needs to happen from body to body down through the ages. If you see what I mean.

And if that’s possible, then why not incarnate within your previous lifetime? If the consciousness is outside of space-time, there’s no “exclusion” rule that says you can’t come back as your own brother, sister, mother, best friend, priest or milkman. You might wonder about some really, really good advice someone gave you at a pivotal time in your life — perhaps it was the reincarnation of you, making sure things went well? Or maybe the reason you seem to connect with some people is because they are you, and you are them, within fairly close “steps” of each other?

Taking this to the logical, albeit mind-boggling, extremes — perhaps all creatures are different “stages” in the evolution of the same consciousness. You are everyone, or will be. A singleton consciousness that can appear to exist simultaneously in many different forms/bodies, but only because “simultaneous” just means “same time”, and the consciousness exists outside of space-time.

What does this mean, if true (and prove it’s not!)? Well, probably the age-old maxims which religion and philosophy both espouse — respect everyone (there’s a good chance they are you, but with more experience); help everyone (they may be an earlier you, so you want them to do well); play nice, because whether you get upset or the other person does … “you” get/got/will get upset/hurt/maimed/blown-up/tickled!

I don’t know, it’s just a thought.

What if our consciousness exists outside of spacetime, “mapping” onto our living, physical brains to allow us to control our bodies and receive physical input? This isn’t too far out an idea — why else do you forget your dreams when you move in bed, but can regain some of the memory if you move back to precisely the same position? The dream-state may exist in a spatial location separate from the brain. (Actually, it could also be that more than just the brain is required for thought — perhaps the whole nervous system is involved in the creation of consciousness. More on that later, I think.)

Okay, so accept for a second that it is at least possible that consciousness exists separately from our physical brain, outside of time and space altogether. Religious people would say that it at least occupies the same space as, if not being the “holy” part of, a timeless, formless Elohim (although isn’t that plural?), the Brahma-ocean, or Omega-point consciousness. Wow, deep. Basically I’m just hypothesising that what we call our consciousness exists in one or more different dimension(s) to those we identify as “space-time”. Therefore, what limits it to a temporally-linear evolution?

An example: last night I tried writing, but got very little done. I’m trying to write a novel or three, but find that when I’m inspired, I’m not at my desk, and vice-versa. So today I’m browsing the web because, by some chance, I have little to do at work until 1pm, and I find an article describing a simple technique for avoiding writer’s block — writing as an email! This is brilliant, and simple, and obvious, and self-evident … and I never would have thought of it on my own.

(On the other hand, perhaps I already had. It’s altogether possible that this existence, this samsara, is just a dream, a reflection, flawed because I am flawed, the world seen through the unique lens of the distorting ego I call “self”.)