Rita — understanding simultaneous and sequential time

Friday, May 27, 2016

F: 5 a.m. So, Rita, your daughter asks a question that I hope will lead us far. Part of the question I think it rooted in language, but not all. I’ll be very interested to see where this discussion goes.

[Uri’s question: “You could also ask Mom/Rita if she hasn’t already addressed this how if all time is simultaneous we are learning, growing  and evolving through our lifetimes…”]

R: It is indeed rooted in language, but that is only a way of saying it is rooted in 3D experience of time, which experience shaped and shapes the language. Language is not and can not be designed to express reality except in the way reality is experienced. Differences between specific languages may give clues as to differences in how different groups have perceived reality. This is not new territory for us to this point.

F: No, we’ve been down this road.

R: But her point brings us farther, as you expected when you saw it, because it expresses what seems to be a logical conundrum, akin to those posed by people saying “on the other side, there is no time.”

F: Can we untwist the knot? Mixed metaphor, but you know what I mean to ask.

R: We can approach it, anyway. But it needs context.

“All time is simultaneous” is misleading. It is closer to say that reality is an infinity of theaters in a multiplex theater, each showing its own movie independently of all the others, all of them in operation at the same time. Only, instead of showing films – that is, finished products delivered to consumers – they are more like virtual reality games in which each participant shapes the progress of the game by his or her reaction to what happens. And, besides that, advanced players or players in certain circumstances may interact with other reality-simulations in other theaters, thus changing themselves and therefore changing their reaction to the game they are playing and thus changing the course of the game itself.

F: That’s a pretty neat analogy.

R: It is, isn’t it? It describes the ordinary reality you all experience and the extraordinary aspects of reality that some of you sometimes experience.

F: Like me fixing Joseph’s back in 1994 / 1863, and that fixing me.

R: Or like something as “simple” as you reading a war memorial marked simply “July 1, 1916” and being flooded with the emotions that filled David, even though he himself was with you in time rather than being there at the time.

F: Or like being able to communicate with so many historical (I mean, non-imaginary, not-possibly-imagined) figures, and they being as aware of my time as I was of theirs.

R: Like people receiving premonitions (including ones that “don’t come true” because the recipient moves to a different time-line).

F: Or like people being able to return to their past to console their earlier self, as we did in Timeline, say.

R: Many conundrums become clear, when you pull on the right thread.

F: Of course, this doesn’t quite explain things.

R: No illustration explains everything. For all the greater insight it may offer in one direction, it may obscure other aspects in other directions, too. But – proceed.

F: Well, as I think about it, maybe your multiplex cinema analogy explains the problem behind my question, but let’s see. I tell people, “you can’t tear down the pyramids before they’re built.” In other words, things have sequence. “Time is simultaneous” seemed to contradict that, logically, which is why I knew things couldn’t be as simple as that suggested.

R: But now you think the paradox is resolved.

F: I never thought it was a paradox. I thought it had to be a misunderstanding, and I think so even more now. I think maybe time has a fixed past-to-future sequence within any given cinema, just as we experience it. But any given reality-game may be interacted with at any point from any point in any other game. So, laterally, all time is simultaneous, but within one stream, one cinema-space, it is linear.

R: That isn’t so wrong, provided that you more explicitly remember that even within the given cinema, nothing goes away. That is, the past doesn’t disappear, and the future doesn’t wait to be created. The game being played in any given theater contained its “past, present and future” ab initio.

F: Yes, I’ve assumed that since the guys explained to us that from outside of space / time, all moments of time are equally accessible. But I agree, it should be spelled out every so often. So now what do we have?

R: You have what you live, plus a model attempting to replicate it. Always remember that no model exactly captures any situation, but every situation changes with your understanding of it, which changes with better models (or worse, come to think of it).

For the purpose of understanding the situation, and remembering that a model is only an approximation of certain features of that which is to be modeled, think of the 3D situation this way:

All of 3D existence takes place

No, we’re going to have to start at the individual level.

Every individual experiences the 3D world as an unrolling drama which is background to his or her own personal drama. The “external” world reflects and clarifies the unknown “inner” world. Thus, a virtual-reality game, designed to allow a being that is largely in non-3D to experience 3D as if it were the reality. Within this game, time is experienced only sequentially, and reality is experienced only through the senses.

Except of course, as you know, those conditions are porous. People “fall through the cracks,” so to speak, knowing things they should be unable to know, doing things they should be unable to do, having experiences that cannot be explained by the rules of the game. This is not shoddy workmanship! This is the sort of heavy hint designed to pique curiosity.

F: And it works.

R: Certainly it does, but only now and then.

Now, multiply this reality-game-theater by the number of players at any given time, and you have your interactive games being played simultaneously, some of them bleeding into others by inadvertence or intent.

And, by the way, “the number of players at any given time” means not “those playing while you are active” but “all those playing in the course of that over-arching experience.”

F: Do you mean, all of time?

R: The 3D reality has been reset many times and will be again, more or less as the Hindus say. Within any given iteration, all players are active “at the same time,” though obviously the overwhelming majority of them are not easily inter-communicating. Not even in non-3D, I might point out, the non-3D being a part of All-D, hence of 3D, as I have mentioned.

F: I always had a problem with the idea of the 3D being repeatedly created and destroyed. Kalpas, I think they are called? It certainly made the world seem futile.

R: A more productive way to look at it might be to see 3D as training, and the “you” that emerges as the point of it. (That is only egotistical until you remember that the whole 3D world exists only for everybody else, too!)

F: Well, Rita, with one simple analogy, you did manage to give me a way to tie together loose ends that had been bothering me for years. It’s always a little amazing.

R: But maybe tomorrow I’ll say something that will take it all away again.

F: Yeah, but in the meantime I’ll have had a moment of clarity, like Rick Blaine saying “we’ll always have Paris.”

R: You will always have early mornings at your desk, being aware of the sun rising and day coming.

F: Yes, I will, and they are among my most treasured memories. Thanks, and until next time.