A thought experiment

Monday, October 17, 2022

8:30 a.m. Gentlemen, it may have been you who put the idea in my head, or maybe I snagged it off a non-3D bush – there is no ownership of ideas, I realize – but what can you tell me about this thought? It occurred to me, it would explain a lot about alternate lives, karma, justice, free will, chaos within pattern and pattern within chaos – and other thing – if we look at all life as mind-stuff and any given circumstance as mind-stuff’s thought-experiment.

A serviceable metaphor, at least.

Yes, but – say something about it.

Most of the wrong turnings that philosophy takes, and science, and often enough religion and occult investigation, stem from consciously or unconsciously assuming that the 3D is real, rather than somewhat real. Often enough, 3D is taken as primary and non-3D attributes are taken as problematic or non-existent. Beyond that, many people treat energy as if it were (or ever could be) separate from matter, when they are, of course, the same thing in different manifestations, like water and ice, or water and steam. But when you realize that matter is mind-stuff, then necessarily anything else is mind-stuff.

In that matter is the densest, hence the farthest away from whatever mind-stuff comes from.

That could use some clarification, but not now. And you could – good, you focused even as we thought of it. Presence always makes it easier.

If you will look at life in various ways, concentrating on the enigmas and contradictions inherent in each explanations, you will see that most “common sense,” “down to earth” explanations are unreasonable.

Bullets?

Spelling out the various worldviews and objections to them is not needed here. Those who have the type of mind that responds to closely reasoned logic will find it all in Paul Brunton’s two books.

The Hidden Teaching Beyond Yoga and The Wisdom of the Overself.

They did for you; they will do for many others. However, we prefer striking sparks to laying bricks. Let us stick to your latest, accurate, insight.

If the world actually split with every decision anyone made, who is moving all the rock and water? Yes, we’re putting it whimsically, but there’s a reason for it: Behind the conscious mind, one tends to imagine the many-worlds theory manifesting as splitting physical matter into clones. But you can see that this would be impossible even if time were what it seems. How many quadrillion Niagara Falls in an infinity of alternate worlds? How many erupting volcanoes, drifting clouds, herds of antelope, clusters of housing? How many reproductions of specific animals and people?

I get the point. Got it quite a while ago, in fact. If the physical world were what it seems to be – including the ever-moving present moment – it couldn’t possibly work that way. Its one of those ideas that seem plausible until you really think about what they would entail.

But then why do quantum theorists postulate the many-worlds theory?

I think because the mathematics says X And Such must be so, and the theorists try to figure out what  X And Such would mean in real terms.

That is, they create epicycles.

Yep. And when I spot an epicycle, I always think that’s a strong hint that something is rotten in the state of quantum physics.

A strength of your recent insight is that it bypasses many an epicycle.

Yes, but if people can’t buy the idea that everything is mind-stuff projected as the reality we know – the somewhat real reality we live in 3D – they can’t follow any of it. They’ll have to dismiss it as fantasy.

People follow what they can follow. It isn’t a popularity contest.

I did turn the idea over in my mind, and it seems the clearest expression of our situation I have come to. But I realize, I’m trying to judge something I have no way of judging. Story of my life, in a way, but not less of a problem for all that.

You cannot judge it using 3D measurements, nor 3D logic, but fortunately, you have non-3D knowings and you have intuition. If you didn’t have these, you’d never be able to transcend appearances, any of you.

I can see that this is one more deleterious effect of eating the apple, too: Judging things as good or bad would pretty much make it impossible to look at alternate lives as thought-experiments. If everything has to be good or bad (which is a way of saying if it is essential that part of life be defined as evil), thought experiments would have to be labeled good or evil, rather than just life.

You have come a long way in all these years. You could not have written that, 30 years ago.

Well, it has been a long seduction, and a pretty successful one.

To round out your idea, you need to remember that all paths exist and are explored. All “alternate lives” are lived. All roads are taken, and no one road is realer or more important or even more probable except in reference to itself.

That is, the reality – the world – All-That-Is at this level – is created. Inherent in its creation is every possible variation and combination of variations, a mind-numbingly-high number, beyond anyone’s counting.  From the point of view of All That Is, these possibilities manifest not sequentially but immediately. The world winks out (so to speak); another set of possibilities manifests. The world winks out. Rinse, repeat. You may consider each iteration a thought-experiment.

But doesn’t that conflate two things?

It does.

• Each world that winks into existence and winks out again, as the Buddhists and Hindus know.
• Each variation within each of these worlds.

It should be obvious that we and the world-soul, so to speak, are not tremendously worried about elections in the United States or on Alpha Centauri. We don’t get too worried about everything going to hell with or without handbaskets. We don’t sit here tallying people’s sins, follies, crimes, madnesses.

And yet with all that you do care about us individually. It can be hard to square that circle intellectually.

Indeed it can. But that’s because you are measuring incompatibles, in doing that.

I’ll focus again. I didn’t quite get that.

If you look at reality from the point of view of the whole, it looks one way.

If you look at it from any one individual perspective, it looks another way.

If you remember that ultimately individuals are part of one inseparable thing, you get a third view.

But mostly, remember, it is your decisions that affect not only you and all who are connected to you, but, indirectly, the shared subjectivity as well. In other words, your individual decisions shape you and they shape the world around you. (In both cases, somewhat, not entirely, but that should be obvious.)

Then what difference does it make, what we do? If all paths are taken –

You asked this long ago, and we were unable to explain it in the absence of scaffolding. We can answer it now by saying, simply, it is your experience; it shapes the only version of you that you know. It makes a difference to you. And, you being different, it makes a difference to the world, but that is secondary. It is your development that is important.

That certainly turns things around. Says who?

All religions concentrate on the individual soul, however they express it, whatever they see its nature or duties or perils or opportunities. This is why. You are realer than the world, in the way that any object is realer than any abstraction.

From a certain point of view, maybe.

Of course. But that’s our point. Just as a Frenchman is realer than a “France,” if you look at a body v. an abstraction, so a soul is realer than the shared subjectivity – the world weighed in the same scale.

I trust you’ll say more about this, another time.

As it emerges. Call this one, “A thought experiment,” perhaps.

Yes, I think so. Our thanks as always.