A friend who also tries to juggle many levels commented:
Thank you so much for sharing You transtemporal comments regarding your visit to these original sufi/chrisitian places( Hagia Sophia ). It remainds me of the ideia of how intertwining different levels of consciousness may end up making some kind of sense by focusing on certain strains.
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I replied:
Your word "transtemporal" stimulated me to think more about time and space -- starting from
the questions raised by Connie Willis.
But now I see "making some kind of sense" is also an important starting point.
"Making sense" of complex experience is very important to me. Psychologists say that
"intolerance of cognitive dissonance" is a genetic trait, very common in Germans and Russians,
helping to explain their occasional drift into rigid ideologies. Like most genetic traits, it provides a mix of strengths and weaknesses -- or, better, a mix of challenges and opportunities.
This trait is very strong in me and Ludmilla, and in some members of our families.
And so... I am very satisfied... and even proud ... that I have been able to come up with a
kind of unified theory which can reconcile all well-established laboratory physics (including gravity and other forces), the concept of reality, and those psychic phenomena we can be most sure of.
A key part of this theory is that some kind of unifying greater intelligence evolves naturally
within the four-dimensional quantum universe; much of what we experience can be understood as
part of what exists WITHIN such a huge, greater mind. There is a wonderful hard-core realistic science fiction anthology, called "Far Futures," which gives examples of how such things can be.
La Berge's book on Lucid Dreaming hints at a similar possibility.
But is the theory true? Even if it is the only integrated theory which makes full internal sense,
and fits the phenomena... available today... that does not prove that it is true.
So there are two questions of making sense here:
(1) can we reconcile what I experienced in Byzantium, for example, with that unified theory
and a view of human evolution?; (2) what are clues for asking about what might be beyond the theory, as we consider how time really works?
For the first, it is basically easy. The Rosicrucian idea that "the world is a school"
and Teilhard de Chardin's idea of evolution easily fit the Byzantium experience.
Both of THOSE ideas are corollaries of the idea that the collective intelligence we share on earth
is basically an immature or "child" phase of the greater intelligence. The theory does not
say that the entire universe is a school -- but that earth is. (Someday I need to scan
a long paper I wrote for the Roscrucians back around 1980 discussing that fundamental
starting point.) That evolution points towards a higher level of consciousness and self consciousness, which does require some growth of exercises of inner discipline and cultivation,
such as what Rosicriucians, sufis, pythagoreans, yogins, stoic, platonists, shamans and assorted Chinese schools have provided for millennia. Nations do rise and fall, and show backwards
movement in understanding, but on the whole forces beyond the political decisions of kings
and rulers still push us forwards. Teilhard de Chardin and Barbara Hubbard seem to say that the eventual triumph is guaranteed for the inner spiritual forces of evolution... but the more consistent model cannot guarantee that. In nature, every little fish has forces inside it which impel it to
the path of survival and growth, but most of them do die. The human species is facing threats serious enough that we are not justified to have faith that we will survive, either materially or
spiritually. The thoughts I could see in Byzantium were all consistent with the more
optimistic formulation of Barbara Hubbard -- but, if we demand a more complete and consistent
understanding, they are also consistent with the more complete model which implies much doubt.
And in the end, I also ask, from Byzantium: was their confidence really justified even that all
the important written material would be preserved somewhere? That is not so clear to me.
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But what of the bigger transtemporal questions?
In Byzantium, I did not feel that my mind was reaching back in time. I felt I was
reaching out in mental space... and did not even think about time, really....
But later, while reading Willis's book (and remembering some of her previous books)...
I realized that it is not so obvious what one is reaching out TO.
What are the coordinates in space and time, if those are even applicable?
If it is to mental space, doesn't that cut across space and time in a fundamental way?
Willis's book reminded me that the current mathematical model of time
(in my paper in International Journal of Theoretical Physics,
http://arxiv.org/abs/0801.1234) would seem very paradoxical to most people.
It allows communication back to the past, but not changing the past.
If one tries to use the communication back in time to try to change things
we already know about the past, the mathematics generates weird events
which prevent a contradiction. I saw nothing in Byzantium to contradict
that model...
But is the model true?
Are there times when the backwards communication, at a psychic level, could
actually "change the past" somehow? That would imply the existence
of a "current past" and a "new past," which implies more than just the usual four dimensions
of space and time. Many physicists do believe in more than four dimensions, but
I see no evidence at all for that (or telling us about that) from any laboratory physics as yet.
Yet could it be there? How could we even find out?
For myself, I think back to some events in my memory of past experience.
Experience which I rarely talk about, given the narrow and intolerant thinking
in our world, and the legitimate skepticism of people regarding OTHER people's experience.
It involves experiences which even I have reason to wonder about.
The five events are:
1. A Chinese woman I almost married.
2. A Chileal woman I almost married.
3. "Saving Suzie's life."
4. Multiple time tracks.
5. A World War II intervention. (Shades of Willis' new books!
Yet well before they were written.)
Maybe I should not mention these, but I feel some responsibility to get some record
somewhere in digital form before I die of old age or of whatever. I will not be complete even now.
The first is relatively easy to describe. At graduate school, I had had recurring future dreams
of many kinds, including one of being married to a unique and recognizable Chinese woman.
In the dream it did not work out so well. I especially remember an image of us living in
a now-so-great townhouse, and her showing me our baby, and of neither of us being happy at all...
about anything. A few years later, in the summer, I often ate at the Harvard freshman
dining hall, which was mainly used by people in Harvard summer programs and a few in graduate school like me. I met a Chinese woman from Wellesley, named Jeanie Lu, and we became closer and closer. We really did seem on course to be married. But one day, suddenly, she made a complete change in hair style... and suddenly with shock I recognized her from the dream. It
was really scary. And the whole future course was visible. This did not eliminate the real feelings of love... but... there was a way to put a slight bend on the course... and gently change the outcome.
I later discussed this all with a Taoist professor Engineering form MIT, at the Cosmos Club in
Washinton D.C. He said, "Yes.. of course.. we understand this kind of thing. There is the future which is now, and then the new future which emerges later." Like "the state of the future,"
as Rusong Wang has sometimes said.
One way to explain this is to say there are still only four dimensions. One can say my dreams were
a link, not to the objective future, but to a very detailed picture or plan for the future existing in our collective consciousness, subject to change right up until the objective time is reached.
Many, maybe not. Maybe that model is correct, or maybe the additional dimensions have
some greater degree of reality.
The Chilean example was similar. But there the most emphatic feedback came from my father,
who had strong precognitive abilities, and who sometimes said his entire business corporate success was really based on the use of those abilities. And from a novel, The Stochastic Man,
by Silverberg, which I still fel was an accurate description of a possible future which MIGHT have happened. (If you read that novel, you get some idea of part of why I was attracted to
this woman... but she was more than that. My brother John maybe once encountered a future
possibility with some similarities to that one.) I did not pull away until I did some
other kind of checking myself to verify... and yet I do still wonder whether it was so bad.
Sometimes, when we receive impressions from the future, it is difficult to make proper evaluation.
What seems bad at the time may not really be so bad. For example, one may receive impression
of great distress... that the caviar was not quite so perfect this time...
(I have had many impressions from future which do not directly raise the issue of multiple possible
futures or of truly changing the future or the past.)
The weirdest experiences involve saving Suzie and World War II, but maybe not now.
This is a long email, and weird enough as is.
The multiple time track ones are easier to describe.
Long ago in graduate school and as an assistant professor at Maryland, I had time and a schedule
ands motivation to explore "out of body experience" in a fairly systematic way.
One strand of that was to make an effort to explore the future, to try to get past simple
veridical experiments to things of real importance. (McMoneagle's book on time
is an important work on that general kind of effort.) I was warned a lot by Edgar Cayce's
great success in nearby visits coupled with failure in trying to see ahead by just a decade or two...
but there are levels of reality versus thought... and I am less chained than most to the local thought-spheres.
But looking ahead... it seemed really clear... in experience... that there was not ONE real future
but several. (I could say it is all in the collective mind, but it did not realy feel like that.
It seemed I could actually visit and even act... many times... with some later veridical content
even for things a few thousand years ahead.)
The most impressive "visit to the future"... warned of a great struggle they had barely survived,
with some details. But on another track, the same struggle ended in human extinction.
With my own eyes I witnessed billions upon billions of dead faces, most dumb-struck and deeply surprised that it was THEM that were suddenly dying... they somehow had assumed,
in their social and political and business activities, that all this survival stuff was a separate track,
that THEY were somehow winning...
Real or not? I wonder.
There are also themes about "gates" and "wormsholes" which don't look so real in TODAY'S physics... but today's physics is manifestly incomplete...
and just a few new impressions ...
Who knows?
I still often think about several books by Dan Simmons, another insightful science fiction writer.
Including his recent "Muse of Fire." We have so many powerful scripts in our collective mind...
the book of revelations... Atlas Shrugged... the Wizard of Oz and even Beowulf (I am so sad
that McCain chose to shift the US from the former to the latter during the 2008 primaries)..
again posing the question of which is real. Yet Muse of Fire has disturbing resonance
with some of my own journeys, and with some work of Orson Scott Card, who has also
"been there" from time to time....
Warm regards,
Paul
Again, my default position is to assume that all of these things are just demonstrations of how amazing the capabilities are of a level of collective intelligence beyond what we see in individual human brains – which include capabilities which can make it seem that the 4D space-time continuum is bieng changed, when it is not. But I wonder. I did not really describe all the related things which bear on this. And I said nothing about the role of computers, which is certainly an important issue for the future.
It is so easy for people to overestimate or exaggerate how much they know, when first they begin to see what they imagine is a unique new vista! And to reduce the probability that any of us humans survive, on any level of existence at all. That our survival is at risk, and that we need to change or die, is one of the areas which is most definite, given the cluster of forces and tendencies unavoidably at work here. The energies being unleashed by fundamentalism (Islamic or Christian, which are essentially the same) and by oil and drug money, put us all at risk, including of course themselves.