time-mind (or more mind fizz)
it’s taken me a few days to get to the point where i feel i can get all this down.
you know i used to often think ‘nobody knows what’s going on’. it’s a conceited idea, i admit, but i do still believe it, in a way.
i suppose what has changed since then is i have a greater idea of the breadth and depth of the world and the variety of people and ideas in it, and that many people have the same sort of ideas as me, but maybe express them differently. So i don’t pretend that these ideas are all unique to me. still it is the exact nature and character of the message that can make all the difference between a universally appealing idea and one that we had best keep to ourselves.
I am going to continue to put down my thoughts in a disorderly fashion and will bring everything together later, so apologies for the tattered fabric of a concept which appears below.
Orpheus
in my last post i talked about the equivalence of time and mind. I said that time is the fourth dimension, and we can ‘time travel’ easily as our mind is actually experiencing the totality of time rather than just moving along it as we do using our bodies in the 3D material world. but i want to discuss it again without resorting to allsci-fi type language.
it is hard to usefully acquire sci-fi language. sometimes it comes into common parlance ‘cyberspace’ for instance, but it still has trouble shaking off the daggy ends of geek fiction, has a sort of unbelievability about it. we are more comfortable borrowing from the greek, or latin, their ancient origins seem more noble and trustworthy.
so i’m going to call the time-mind phenomena Orpheus. Orpheus is a good name as time-mind is of the nature of music or poetry. Saying ‘Orpheus’ rather than ‘the fourth dimension’ or ‘time-mind’ gets across the idea that this is a new way of looking at those things. Understanding the fourth dimension or what mind really is, isn’t easy. Orpheus is a new world, we are like explorers who have just landed on the coast, we can see further inland to strange lands but there are impenetrable thickets of forest blocking our path.
It’s the world of our imagination but it’s real. And this world (the material earth & all that) is intimately related to it. Orpheus contains all this plus all of time – it is the superworld. And we experience it directly as our ‘own’ mind. But it is not our own, really, it is shared by all of us, as it has its own reality just like the material world.
It seems like the craziest idea that all the thoughts in our head are as tangible a reality as this mug of coffee on the table but it isn’t so crazy really. It is not a question of whether the world exists in the mind, or whether the mind exists in the world. Rather that they co-exist.
They say that scientific theories must be falsifiable. I wonder if the theory that the world is real is falsifiable? If so, then the test for the reality of the mind would be the same. But where is the benchtop, where is the laboratory to conduct this test? Each world can propose its own methods, its own benchtop, its own laboratory, to test the reality of the other. And each world would find the other to be unreal, a dream, with all sorts of reasons for the appearance of the strange phenomena within the other. I can’t think of how to reconcile this problem. The fact is that we experience both world and mind, they are different, but they are both part of our experience of our life.
I accept that this explanation might not convince everyone at the outset. But accepting the mind’s reality is a necessary starting point if we are to dedicate any effort into exploring Orpheus. There is much work to be done. We aren’t used to controlling this world, exploring it properly. We need the tools. We can’t use material things – we need to use tools in our head. We are still like the cave man, brutely fashioning a club or a stone axe. It is very difficult but we need to make the first step in commanding the environment of our mind. More on that later.
The dividend that comes from accepting the mind as real is that we can unleash its power. But there are risks. Going insane is a real risk that arises from this sort of exploration. We are safe in the material world – we have turned it into an exquisite home for ourselves. Most humans don’t have to live with fear of death in their ordinary life, unlike animals in the wild. But in Orpheus, we are still animals in the wild. There are powerful forces and huge risks. We are not in a position of command in Orpheus, but are small fry, weak. Luckily we go more or less un-noticed as part of our ordinary life, keeping to the safe fringes. But once you start diving in you can encounter all sorts of dangers.
On the other hand, i think it is fair to say that the longer we go without exploring Orpheus, the greater the risk that we will be discovered by other beings and somehow enslaved or fed upon. This is the craziest idea, i know. But i’ve felt that it’s the case for a long time. Unless we can control our minds we become slaves to all sorts of impulses and thoughts and acutally become very weak people. I don’t want to start on moralising, which is a thicket of tricky concepts, but this is how it manifests to us today. The mind, Orpheus in the mind, is the final frontier.
where are all the aliens?
Space is so vast. Astronomy has placed all of it at such a distance to us that we feel like it concerns us very little. Even if we discover that aliens exist (and of course i argue they must exist) they will be so distant as to pose little threat – presumably. Then it is often conjectured that if aliens existed, they could be in civilisations many millions of years in advance of ours, so why haven’t they invented the technology to colonise the universe or at least pay a visit?
There are a couple of possible explanations – one is that there are no other aliens, or they manage to kill themselves off before getting into interstellar flight. These two seem unlikely – even if aliens are extremely rare and they usually do kill themselves off, let’s just say that the vastness of the universe should ensure there are a few successful alien civilisations out there.
Another possibility is that faster-than-light travel mechanisms consume vast amounts of time (through time dilation at fast speeds) – so by exploring the universe, aliens are pushing themselves into the distant future. This seems quite likely to me. It is interesting that this technique soon puts the brakes on such travel as you hit the wall of entropy causing the extinction of the universe. So the end days of the universe look quite packed in this scenario, everyone having time shifted themselves towards it in order to explore the stars. I have often imagined a scenario where you get split up from a friend and try to find them by jumping ahead into the future but keep missing each other by a century here, a century there. Leaving messages in secret places inscribed in gold (or some other substance that never weathers). Maybe that will be the first sign we have of aliens, finding one of these messages (i’ll let the alien theorists develop that idea further).
But the other possibility is that we are already surrounded by aliens and always have been. After all we are all citizens of the same universe, there should be aliens, common sense tells us there should be and they would be interested in us if they have any curiosity at all. Where are they? I’ll ignore the possibility that there are aliens of some kind hiding on the planet earth or living among us which to me seems slightly far fetched. But they do exist in Orpheus.
Orpheus has the fantastic quality of being timeless. So it isn’t necessary that beings/aliens/angels have to be present ‘now’, they are always present and always have been. The same goes for ourselves – whatever our ‘self’ is. Today we are a man or woman, tomorrow, who knows. But Orpheus remains around us, a familiar terrain. Orpheus is the world. We have become accustomed to this little corner of it, as it is safe, and we rule here, but there is much more to the universe than distant stars and gas seen through a telescope. Turn the telescope around and look inside yourself.
parallels
music and poetry fill my mind, during my waking moments and also during sleep, except during that deep sleep when i approach turiya. but there is no song, no word, no poem or conversation which has never existed before. Sorry, poets, songwriters, nothing is new it is all being recovered. I grant you it is easier to be a new thing on earth, or on the internet. But eternity is a lot bigger than the internet.
this is a fundamental stepping stone to understanding the true nature of Orpheus. we think our thoughts are freshly minted, private, created. But forgetfulness is a wonderful thing. Every sound has been heard before, every horizon line has had an analogue before, on some distant land, and will again. Understand eternity and you know what Orpheus is. It is the sum of everything that has existed and will exist.
Yet it is as familiar as our own voice. What is our own voice? just a wave, a resonance. What is our name but a calling card? It marks our place in the infinite mazes that pattern reality. There is no doubt, given the vastness of the universe, and the endlessness of time, that we are not alone. The closeness of this other sphere to our day to day life is almost unimaginable. Closer than the breath, it has been said.
Why go to bother to cook up a theory this bizarre, this unreal? Science has all the answers. It has been making steady progress against the occult, against religion and ignorance for four centuries or more now. It has tightened our stranglehold on this planet, our mother. It has established almost beyond dispute that we are living on a speck in a far flung arm of the universe, that we are a fluke, inconsequential and meaningless in the scheme of things. We are born and we live and we die. It is best to make the most of our short life, to find comforts, and be nice to people. Appreciate the natural world. Rabbits and bats don’t ask questions, they just live and breathe and shit.
Actually it is not quite so dandy a picture now that climate change threatens our continued civilised existence, but that is another matter.
Readers of these pages will know that i am more naturally a scientist that a poet, but that it irks me how science fumbles about in our inner worlds. Mind is just static electricity. Evolution is all just chance and consequences. Free will is possibly just quantum particles flickering. I know that progress will be made in these areas by using the infallible tool that is the scientific method but i am ready for a revolution.
space travel through mind adventures
we are tied to this world this life, by our constant engagement with it. established at our birth, the world an undeniable fact of every day existence. we are absorbed into its internal consistency, it’s beauty, and our control over it. We are grounded here, but there is another world we inhabit where we are still babies.
We touch Orpheus with the mind in our dreams.. it has its own rules, resembling this world but different. We can flit from place to place, be silent witness or key player, mingle with others or explore alone. There is speech, touch, smell, like in this world, but also telekenisis, and time travel. We can visit the past of our memory, or other distant pasts through the eyes of others, or investigate the spiraling possibilities of the future. There is enough room in Orpheus for every possibility, as everything is played out eventually.
Ever meet some of your alternate selves in Orpheus? Perhaps they lived in this world, perhaps they are different versions of the you that chose to stay home one day and didn’t meet that person.. perhaps they are analogues of your current self living in far flung galaxies strangely similar to this one. You are all sharing the same reality after all, it only requires the slightest nudge to jump between selves. The further you travel the less you are ‘you’ .. but we are all part of the one phenomena that is consciousness after all.
We may have become the dominant species on Earth, but the great game of evolution is still alive and well in Orpheus. One false step.. death happens all the time in Orpheus, propelling us back into our earth bound body. Not that ‘death’ has the same meaning when you don’t have a body. But one day we will leave this earth-body and find that Orpheus is the only reality left.. so better get familiar with it while you still have the luxury of an earthbound space suit.
The intelligences in the galaxy are myriad and beautiful. We all share in the same experience of consciousness.. there are patterns that repeat through all time for all beings that have thoughts. We think our thoughts are any different to all those other countless beings out there? They are all the same thoughts. We have all felt love, fear. There are dualities running through all things, causing wars and countless arguments. We have all laid down our lives for another, raised children, felt water running through our fingers. These are the building blocks of Orpheus, the very foundations of thought. It is these congruences that bind Orpheus together – time and space are inconsequential – it is our shared experience which enables us to leap across the galaxy and into the mind of another. This is what consciousness is. It is all here, right now, you are experiencing it this very second.
club and axe
We are on the cusp of a huge adventure into this world.. but we need to equip ourselves with some basic mental tools beginning with meditation. It is necessary to calm the pitter patter of random thoughts in order to get anywhere in Orpheus. There are various techniques. I think that different people find their own methods. My preference is to focus on the sensation of ‘I’ as per Sri Ramana Maharshi teaching. This brings us back to the ‘heart’. I am in fact no master of these techniques and my experience is limited. It is no use grasping our favourite textbook to our chest or fishing for any particular experience, this will end in failure and is dangerous anyway, a slippery slope to mental instability. You need to start with no expectations at all.
This really is a mystical adventure, and I suspect that monks or nuns in cells would be familiar with the benefits of silence and meditation. In fact, the cell is a powerful reverse metaphor, in that it is the mechanism for possible release in the dimension of the mind, in to Orpheus. It might seem strange to return to these ancient methods, but there is a difference now – we can proceed completely uninhibited by dogma and preconception. I am proposing that this exploration is in fact done in a scientific way. This is no place to make absurd claims about the nature of Orpheus. I have called it Orpheus for convenience, i have some ideas about what it is, and i assert that it is real – but the field is open for others to make their contesting claims and discoveries. This is the proper method for investigating such an important place.
In fact why i write all this up is not so that everyone can go off interstellar travelling through meditation, but just so that a different perspective can be obtained on our place in the cosmos, through deeper understanding of what ‘mind’ is. The rest will come later.. when we see where the seams are that hold our fragile reality together.
To stop the mind, concentrate on breath. Yoga may be helpful. I find that poetry comes easily when i am in this state, it is like a flow of sensation is transmuted magically into language.. that is what poetry is for me. Exploring the gaps in reality, like a lightning bolt explores the night sky – hence ‘ForkWord’.
Update: I have been reading about modal realism (a philosophy stating that all ‘possible’ worlds are as real as the ‘actual’ world) and it seems that this theory closely follows what i have been describing here, although one difference is that i believe we do ‘inhabit’ other worlds as well as this one (insofar as we experience them as ‘orpheus’). As described elsewhere the key tests will be predicting future events and interacting with others. I do note that psychedelic experiences lend themselves to this kind of multiverse theory as well.
