Notes on discovering old photos. Note: This turned out to be really, really long. Get some coffee and toast! Third note: The title is a link to the Yahoo article. Sad that I can no longer marry Bill Nye. Sniff.
A twelve-year-old photograph that I took in San Francisco (Monterrey, technically) could have been taken yesterday; it is such a capturing of my current taste and aesthetic, not to mention the current fad for industrial chic and post-modern framing/composition that it seems new. In the early-to-mid nineties, when pretty-pretty bistros and fluffy hair reigned supreme, before post-modernism, when I was 13, what could have possibly driven me to take a picture of the side of a building?
The only explanation is: at that time, twelve years ago, the woman that I would become showed in my mind for a brief second, dropped in just like a time traveler from the future, saw the photograph opportunity, and directed my eyes and hands, having in her own mind TODAY'S aesthetic of chic and seeing the industrial beauty in the composition.
Now, would this theory point or not point to the idea of time happening all at once?
If time happens all at once, when did the woman I am have time, so to speak, to dip into a young girl's head and control her eye, even if (or ESPECIALLY if) that young girl was really that woman, only twelve years before? If time happens vertically, all at once, then it must have been in a dream, because I don't remember an out-of-body experience.
Really long discussion: this idea of vertical time is the current theory as to why time travel is impossible. You can't travel back to a certain place in time because technically time happens all at once, in one moment; the Crusades are being fought at the same time that I am typing this. You are fixed in time because you can only exist in one plane (or really, 4-D integral) at once. In English: Time is a dimension like length, height, or depth. In the same way that you can't exist in more than one place at a time, you can't exist in more than one time at a time. (Ha!)
Now, technically, in the same way that you can move from place to place, you should be able to move from time period to time period, but it doesn't happen that way because Time is EVERYWHERE, all at once. It's the same as the concept of a point: technically, it has no dimensions, so it's both everywhere and nowhere. If you could condense physical dimensions into a point, and you could survive, you'd be everywhere and nowhere. There'd be no place to go because you would already BE everywhere you could be. In the same way, Time is ALWAYS a point--every new moment, which can be broken down into infintestimal moments, which are points--they are both all times and no times. Put another way, time doesn't really exist. You already are in all the time periods you'll ever be in--all time periods at once. You can't travel to another one--there's no time to go to!
Does that make sense?
So, is reincarnation bunk? In my opinion, yes, because it's not as if past versions of you exist--time doesn't work like that. Your soul, your consciousness, is ALREADY everytime. (Like everywhere, only everytime.) Again: if all space was a point, you couldn't travel from place to place because there would be nowhere to go, and since time really is a point, (at least for now--see the next paragraph for more explanation) your soul CAN'T TRAVEL FROM ONE TIME TO ANOTHER, EVEN FORWARDS IN THE FORM OF REINCARNATION, BECAUSE THERE ARE NO OTHER TIMES. (For music lovers: instead of a conductor conducting in 4/4 time, as in 1, 2, 3, 4, think of it as Now, Now, Now, Now, Now, Now, etc, on into infinity. Time is an infinite series of Nows.)
So: Why are time and space different? Why is space spread out and time not spread out--as in, why is time always a point with no actual dimensions and space is spread out into three dimensions, allowing us to physically move from place to place? For you non-fundamentalists, space WAS like time before the big bang. That's the concept of the big bang--that we came from nothing, and everything. Life is condensed from the point that it was--we used to be everywhere and nowhere at once, and now we are tied, physically, to one spot--at least in the three dimensions that we can see. Remember how I said that if you could condense space into a point, and you could survive? That'd be the big bang backwards--and you'd lose your body, but keep your soul. Souls don't have physical dimensions and can exist in a point.
How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?
For anyone who ever heard of the Bible, yes, there are some very strong parallels here between this concept--life condensing from being omnipresent--and The Fall from The Garden of Eden. Instead of being supernatural beings that could be everywhere--walking with God on the astral plane, you might say, not tied to any sort of dimension whatsoever but instead a random flow of dots streaming through the universe, or more like members of a hive mind, in which the Mind is God--we Fell from the astral plane and are now tied to one spot. God created the world--in three dimensions--so that we might have solid ground to stand upon, because we had become solid, tied physically to the universe. The Bible paints this picture backwards--that God created the world first, with us in it, and THEN we fell. Who knows why? But the myth of a garden of good and evil and humanity purposely choosing knowledge over security goes back thousands and thousands of years in mythology--way before the Bible was written. The old Levites who wrote it had to use parallels that their audience would understand.
Almost done, I promise!
One more thought: so, if time exists everywhere, all at once, how can the woman I am today have stepped "back" in time? Obviously, she couldn't have. But remember, time is a POINT, not dimensional. Our brains are NOT tied to time. (Well, our brains are physical, so they are, but our souls aren't--no dimensions, remember?) Our souls are already everytime at once. This is the difference, The Big Hole, The Big Separation, between our physical bodies and our souls. We as collective beings know that we used to be astral, and now we're physical. It's this separation that drives people to drink, find religion, go crazy and murder children, sadistically torture others, etc. It's a way to block the Huge Gaping Hole between the freedom our souls could have and the physical prison in which our bodies are trapped. Religious people refer to this as the God-shaped vacuum.
The soul part of yourself is really omnipresent and omniscient; it exists at all time AND places. Because it is tied to your physical body--in a way that I still don't understand--it can't leave at will. It wants to, but it can't. But occasionally--once in a great while, when the stars are aligned--it steps forward from your sub-conscious to your conscious, recognizes true beauty, and overrides your physical leaning, and makes you take a photograph that will stand through the ages.
