Thanks Santeri, long time no see
I can also share some ideas in the above spirit. I was planning on writing a more extended essay or even series of essays but with the upcoming 280 bytes restrictions I'll just spew some hyperspace coordinates
Maybe it will prove to be more fruitful after all - it'll be a practical experiment
A little context first:
Mathew 19:24 Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God.
This is usually interpreted quite allegorically but it shines in very
literal light when we approach the pinhole at the threshold. The 'richness' is not only physical wealth (which is obvious that we can't take through the threshold of death) but also holds for spiritual 'wealth'. For example most of our abstract theories don't survive the transition. We can imagine metaphorically a whirlpool in the ocean. A ship can't pass through the center intact. The shear stress tears it apart. Only what can be aligned with the streamlines of vorticity can implode through the center and emerge again on the 'other side'.
Our abstract theories are such 'ships'. While we are operating in intellectual mode we can hold them together but as soon as the intellect implodes, so do all our theories. But this doesn't mean that spiritual activity concealed in thought disappears. It's only that thoughts aligned with the streamlines of vorticity can transduce.
Through the years I've been trying to test scientific ideas and see how they survive the implosion. I've distilled some ideas that remain more or less meaningful even in the higher state. For example, the fractal analogy that we discussed with Ashvin above is one such model that shatters when it faces reality (there are other ways we can use the fractal analogy fruitfully). It should be stressed that these ideas are not to become abstract theories. They can never be anything more than
metaphors for higher forms of cognition.
Here are the ideas in cryptic form. Many more things can be said to relate them together.
Let's imagine a state of being as something akin to a 'frame' of existence. The state represents the totality of perceptions and the corresponding ideas. There's no 'outer' world - just a state of pure spiritual being with all its contents.
Let's imagine that all conceivable such states of being exist
simultaneously overlaid on one another, sharing a common center. Not only 'our' states but the states of all beings - manifest or potential. And not only the states of 'now' but the states belonging to any conceivable time.
We can imagine that
each state is determined by the 'interference' of the whole infinity of
all other states. Clearly, from the point of view of the other states, the first state is part of their interference with it and all other state. This gives us a recursive pattern, like the
infinite reflection between mirrors. It's only that we shouldn't imagine this reflection as a process occurring 'in time'. If it helps we can imagine that these recursive interferences are pre-computed to infinity. This might look very disappointing for the intellect but it's actually a very healthy exercise. Most of the problems of the intellect issue from the fact that we try to take some ideas as ground truths and show how everything else proceeds from them. The above idea shatters this view. All concepts are relative truths. They are defined through every other. This can be seen even in a definitions dictionary - every word leads us to other words, which lead us back to the first. There are no 'ground words' from which all other grow out. This doesn't mean that concepts don't have hierarchical relations - clearly they do. It's only that neither we can produce the concept of 'whole' from the 'parts', nor we can produce the concepts of the isolated 'parts' from the concept of the 'whole'.
If this is the case why don't we experience the whole multiverse interfering in our state? Because most of the interferences 'cancel out'. To put it into a childish example, we can imagine if one state projects into ours as a pull to the left, while another as a pull to the right, both states equalize themselves and as a result we don't recognize any of them. This is not as crazy as it sounds. It's actually what quantum mechanics has reached in its own way. Probably everyone here knows that in Quantum Electrodynamics (QED) it's not a law that light travels in a straight line. Actually in QED all possibilities must be taken into account - every conceivable path of a photon, even if it is the most absurd, like a photon starting from A, circling the universe several times and getting to B. When all paths are integrated (see Feynman path integration) it turns out that most of the paths cancel out and only the paths that connect A and B in more or less straight line remain as probable.
So every our state of being is an interference off all infinite states - some 'add up', some 'cancel out'. Some of these that add up can be thought of as our 'past states' that project into our current as
memory.
The picture of 'states' is only a helper concept for the intellect. As a matter of fact nowhere we can see an isolated 'state' as a thing in itself. What we experience is
eternal transition between states. Here I should refer to my explanation of the arrow of time from the long post before. Just as Santeri said - there is only Now - all states are experienced
simultaneously. Nevertheless, there's a Great Mysteriousness which makes us experience forever the transition between two states. We can imagine that we constantly transition from our current state to all other states at the same time. Yet only those states that interfere constructively with the previous (imprinted as memory) can be experienced as a stream of consciousness. We can imagine that our next state is the one of John Smith on the other side of the world or in a wookie long time ago in a galaxy far far away. But these states will be in harmonic relations with completely different set of states. There's nothing in these states that can tell me that I reached them from my current state. Actually these other states will immediately be felt as proceeding from completely different progression of states.
This gives us natural understanding also for higher states. We can imagine a state of being where great domains of other states interfere constructively. We can even go as far as to hypothesize such states that result in the constructive interference of the whole infinite potential of states. From the point of view of that state it'll be like every other state fits naturally in it, as if every conceivable state is first-person 'memory' for it. This is only for stretching our minds, we can't tell if it's possible to experience such a state as a part of a stream.
From our point of view of states progression we can also experience other states that are also moving in progressions parallel with us. It's as if our current state sounds as a tuning fork and all states that are attuned to ours ring back constructively in resonance. As our state progresses further, the phase of our sound increments and with this also the states that will ring back in resonance. In certain way our state forms a Cosmic Horizon that relates us with other states. That's how we reach the idea of 'now' as a horizon of experience within time. These other states that seem to exhibit certain integration, just as we do, we can call
beings. It should be noted that here we are also in perfect accord with the findings of General Relativity (if interpreted in spiritual sense) - everything is relative to our state of being.
It must be stressed that the above ideas can never be used as some theory of everything. It's only a very general metaphor. In no way we can
derive from this the structure of the Solar system, the structure of man, animals, etc. If we were able to derive all this from abstract principles it would mean that this is the only possible form of experience. Instead, we find ourselves in this specific experience - a state within infinity of states. Yet the way we described things shows that we are not stuck in exploring linearly through the infinity of states (horizontal, linear time). We can also transition towards states that interfere harmonically with more and more other states (vertical, non-linear time). In this way we grow in consciousness and understand how the states of all other beings project and shape our state and how we project in them and shape theirs. There's a very elegant way to use the metaphor we're here building for the description of the three higher stages of consciousness known from Spiritual Science but I'll leave this for another time.
