Shattering Time (originally called as above)
Earth travels through bent
space in a straight line
always moving in the same
direction yet seeming to
repeatedly be coming back
to the same point in space
The Universe travels through bent
time in a straight line
always moving in the same
direction yet seeming to
repeatedly be coming back
to the same point in time
If the Universe repeats itself for whatever reason coming back to the same point in time whether it repeats once or countless times it would always happen the same way but for one factor, one wildcard, consciousness. A type of consciousness, if it arises, lies outside of the physical Universe. It becomes capable of stepping outside of the current timeline to remember other run-throughs, other variations of its theme. If it were not able to do so all decisions, all actions, would happen exactly as they did before since nothing had changed. All the same factors, motives, thoughts, feelings, and opinions would doom all to repeat the same events in perpetuity. Only one timeline would ever be real. The Universe from beginning to end would be like breaking the balls at pool (billiards), always hit at the same angle and speed with always the same outcome. Even conscious beings could be and would be exactly the same as the balls, their motions completely unchangeable since they will always confront the same issues in the same ways, having freewill but forever lacking the imagination or the ability to ever approach anything differently if all their thoughts and all that caused them have no reason to behave any differently.
Yet as I said before, people are capable of imagining a disconnect from their present timelines. We can think or believe that different outcomes will arise from different actions we have control over. If I decide to go out and get drunk and drive very fast, one set of possible outcomes, many of which being potentially very unpleasant, might arise. If I decide to stay home and read a book, none of these other potentialities will occur, a different set then becomes possible, then probable, then real, actual. This attempting or sensing which timelines we are in is done with imagination, speculation based upon our knowledge and experiences, attitudes about which we prefer or might wish to see happen, our fears about what might or could happen, and so on. But what if it went beyond that?
Were all of our decisions to be based solely on what had happened to us before, as what happened to those others who affect our lives happened exactly as before, our attitudes would most likely evolve as they had in the past and we would approach every identical situation in the same way. But what if over time endlessly repeating the same situations, we become more than just cogs in the wheel? We begin to sense more of the order behind what may or is about to happen. That awareness makes more and more variations possible. If we begin to think or become aware that once or many times before when confronted with a situation we know never actually happened before but sense it as though it had, we can wait and watch it with some degree of foresight and pat ourselves on the back that at that instant we knew exactly what was going to happen before and exactly as it did. But such an awareness, if at all possible, allows for a new option not existent without that indefinable awareness: the chance to change it. Knowing that in an instant someone walking into a room is about to trip, one is now in the position if given sufficient time, to prevent it from occurring. Such knowledge might seem paradoxical. Were someone to know with certainty and accuracy of something about to happen, though this would enable them to act differently, to alter the flow of would be events, would not this prevent them from having such information about the soon to be occurrence if one prevents it from occurring?
Were this to be repeated over and over and over again the paradox would resolve itself. Since it happens both ways in the past, one way without intervention based upon prior inexplicable foreknowledge or remembrance, and the new way based upon that new factor becoming a real variation on the theme, both eventually are part of the past, and one senses not the absolute necessity of something happening, though it may if it continues to be a ripple in the timeline still appear as a certainty about to happen, it becomes over time merely a predilection or tendency to happen a certain way. Sometimes you might act on that information of déjà vu and attempt to alter it, sometimes you might decide to sit it out. Sometimes someone else might intervene before you got the chance because they too recognized something was about to happen and were in a position to alter it.
No matter how vast the variability this sort of new consciousness enters into the mix, eventually the number of possible variations must have or reach some kind of end. Eventually all roads would become known, and ultimately boring and tedious. Eventually more and more of the paradox would become clear and more and more predictability would enter into the mix. All that we might think might be, we make real simply by remembering how it happened before, and simply do it that way again. If the past is the future and the future is the past, and we are existent in all, we may eventually be able to conceptually break down those walls to remember the future, and by doing so alter the course of present, it’s past. We begin to create little paradoxes within the big paradox, create bridges in time mentally between the present and the future or the present and the past, like conceptual wormholes, and by doing so create events which can only exist as reality while contained within that paradox or reality loop because of such realizations.
Can consciousness break out of our own paradoxes we may create as a side effect of our existences, creating not only ripples of change into the future but into the past as well, by mere repetition as I mentioned might both smooth out timelines and create alternate timelines? Regardless of anything which we may do or create based upon fore/past knowledge which itself creates the paradox, it must be stated that in such an environment existence itself, regardless of anything which we may say or do, becomes a paradox. It is safe to say for most that we exist in the present because we exist in or were created in the past, a minute ago, an hour, a year, etc. But to go beyond that to say that we exist in the past as we do or did because of something yet to occur in the future, which will create and shape the past is itself the heart of the bigger problem. The future is creating the past as much as the past can be said to create the future, and once inserted anywhere in between, it is to be forever required or existent in both. By becoming more conscious of the paradox through retention of more and more of its variabilities we ourselves create, have created, and are creating in both the past and the future, hopefully we can in a sense move beyond it, but because it is a paradox we will also always have been and always will be within it.
Note: an end was here as the color of ink changes. This was added later.
We may never retain a full realization of previous run-throughs while within it. Momentary glimpses may break through now and then into our consciousnesses but retaining more than a general sense of things is hard. The details get in the way. The details get changed around, lost, found, forgotten and remembered, altered. We may not even always retain much of the current run through. The past is always in a way just as unreal and as changeable as the future. It never lasts more than a moment and does not moving forward back into it always happen the same.
Note: another end was here as the color of ink changes again. These may have been written the same day or at a later date.
All mathematical attempts at understanding the Universe will ultimately fail without taking into account the perceiver by interaction within the paradox is changing not only the future but also the past. You must account for the accounting for. Without doing that you are persisting in the assumption that reality is forever out there, as if you or consciousness were a ghost not a part of it or what creates or sustains it. Notions of mass in quantum mechanics have gotten far smaller than even atoms yet we still believe that somewhere mass must exist, that something must be a “thing” and not just an energy pattern. The Universe, atoms, life, responds to our perceptions of it, it is a living, changing thing which is not a thing which includes ourselves as a part of itself and itself as a part of ourselves. Which defines which, which sustains which is not important. Each conforms in a way to the expectations of the other affecting not only its future but its past, as in the end, both are really the same.
(Note: This was the second 'revising addition' to Deconstructing the Universe and finished off the way it originally appeared in my programs. The first was the previously posted, "Breaking Probability Waves." Both of the additional parts were written, as were the other parts of it, in 2002. Next to come is what became later called 'Tying the books together' written on Christmas day 2002. That will be the next post. And the third appendage, the one where things first started to get really weird, "Multidimensionalism: Lenses, Interruptions and Shadows", which came about a dozen days after that one in January of 2003. The following paragraphs below it here were tacked on to the end of Shattering Time, and at least one of these foreshadows the "Multidimensionalism" essay. These additional paragraphs were not as good as the above parts but were not intended to be part of it. That ended, and was meant to end, where it ends above. These were just extra ideas and notes tacked on related to ideas about it or from it. They may not be as good as above, and not as fully formed, but is part of the attempt at always trying to go a little further, often into things I had little experience with or other things to refer it to, on shakier ground if you will.)
The Universe is a paradox and existence itself creates the paradox. By existing both in the future and past and conscious of both, consciousness creates an untenable situation of arising in and of itself, out of events of time, and living itself or perceiving itself as a ripple of events of time. This ripple consciousness grows out of ordinary consciousness when ordinary consciousness becomes conscious of itself and of the ripples (in time) it can create.
Dimension wrapping perspective, inside the super-monkey ball. Inside and outside at the same time.
In the story, Vestabur is always moving toward something, some realization (which) in the end he is hesitant about reaching. He is also attempting to move away from something. In the end he finds that both are in the end the same thing and by realizing this paradox (he) unmakes the Universe, at least his universe. This one still appears to be here. Maybe there are enough universes to go round for everyone.
(Note: the end of the Vestabur poem actually started off the Deconstructing the Universe project or collection of essays. Unlike other poem quotes which were written or added later, the first part, "Man Becoming Death, Destroyer of Worlds", was intended before written to have had the line below at the top of the page to start it out...)
Then it happened as the Universe ended
without Vestabur or the snowy mountaintop
because it all had come to an end long, long ago
before the beginning with no story now to stop
(Note: which was the second to last stanza of the poem. It concluded with...)
Wanting for everyone to live in joy,
knowing what it truly is like to live free
was to him then and is to us in our time now
forever to be more of a dream than reality
as it can never be that for any who are free
not to be able and therefore not to do, us misery
The thing about futures is that everyday there are fewer and fewer of them. More chances, more roads reach their ends, you, your life, your species, your world. Whatever by definition can die, is mortal, in some way at some time has died and is dying each moment to make real that possibility. Fewer and fewer roads leading into the future, and eventually there will be none. The further you make it seeing the same life, holding fast to the most or longest lasting memories, the luckier you are though it may not always seem so. Each day always one step further than another version of yourself not so lucky. A chance to glimpse or achieve a little more perspective from the rarer further reaches of that landscape of your life or your potential lives spread over time. The rarer they become, the greater value they have. Though they may be fewer and harder to reach and often harder to bear, they possess more of what all hope or aspire towards, one step closer to being able to pull the rest into perspective. They may be fewer but they are the less which is truly, and every moment, more.
(Note: The above paragraph I liked so much that I put it before everything else in Deconstructing the Universe, at least in the revised final version.)
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