Anthony66 wrote: ↑Wed May 11, 2022 3:48 pm
Cleric, yes I'd already gone through your post to Eugene before I saw your response here. I feel like it is one of your most significant and I'll have to read it through a few times to really grok what you are saying about the absolute state. Of course your focus there was the "final" state. My question pertains to the "initial" state.
I tried to hint at this by saying
Cleric K wrote: ↑Mon May 09, 2022 8:04 pm
If it helps, we can think of the absolute state not simply as the end of evolution but also as that which contains all possible beginnings. Beginnings and ends are simultaneous in the absolute state.
I'll try to approach it with another metaphor. Imagine movie strips where every frame represents the full spectrum experience of a state of being. Imagine you have movie strips which contain the infinitely many possible states of being - rock, plant, animal, human, alien, angelic, divine, in any conceivable evolutionary context. You take the scissors and cut the individual frames and stack them one over the other (let's imagine they are very thin so they don't build infinitely tall tower).
Now these movie frame are somewhat special. They are like holographic plates, they consist of phenomenal wave interferences. Similarly to tuning forks, the waves of one frame ring in partial
resonance with the waves of other frames. This simply means that a given frame contains embedded within itself the patterns of others. The absolute frame is such that it rings in resonance with
all other frames, that is, it has something in common with all frames. Other frames ring only with domains of self-similarly tuned frames.
Seen in this way, the experience of time evolution is the apparent continuous transition of frames such that every next frame rings in resonance with more and more other frames. This build up of resonance is the integration of memory, of our being experiencing more and more states as concentrically embedded in the present.
History tells us that the general consciousness always lags few centuries behind the pioneering beings which are on the forefront of discovery. Similarly, even though it's been more than a century since the ideas behind special and general relativity, we still live with Newtonian world conception. Relativity rests on the idea that we can't speak of a universal clock along which everything ticks. This still seems only as mathematical fancy for most scientists but higher cognition confirms it. Thus we should be very careful when we ask questions such as about the initial frame. Initial from the perspective of which world-line of integrating memory? As we approach the absolute state, all possible states of being are seen to exist as if side by side, similarly to timeless numbers. From such perspective, a given state may feel like being somewhere along a world-line of evolution, for a higher being a segment of that world-line is part of simultaneous now.
So we reach again the point of the previous post, where we realized that most of our metaphysical thinking secretly assumes a universal observer, ticking along a universal clock and having a sense of time thanks to mysterious universal memory. This makes us ask questions like "How did God's consciousness feel like when he decided to create the world?" Such a question presupposes many things, among which the idea of universal linear time to which God is subject too. We imagine that creation began N clock ticks ago and today God and all created beings have all lived through N ticks of time.
We can never make sense of reality with this kind of thinking. It would be more appropriate to start from the moment of our awakening as a conscious being which thinks about the great questions of existence. We find ourselves in a state of being which is in complicated relations with the infinity of other states of being. All these states still exist simultaneously, similarly to the block universe of GR. In the relative perspective of our state, we experience the constructive interference of particular states, while the vast majority of the rest interfere destructively and seemingly are not part of our reality.
Now the tempting question is to ask "How did the world reach this state?". The obvious thing seems to start extrapolating from our current state backwards to what we imagine as past and try to build intellectual picture of what these states might have been. That's how ideas as the Big Bang come about. But we also know that extrapolating in this way is not guaranteed to be correct - see flat Earth for example. Hopefully in the coming century more people will begin to think differently of what the past really is.
Through our Newtonian intuition, we feel like the more time passes, the more past events move
away from us. But for the evolving world-line things look differently. It's like awakening in a certain state, let's represent it with the number 7. From the perspective of eternity this number exists simultaneously with all infinite numbers. Yet from our awakened perspective we feel in very complicated relations to the other numbers. As we explore these relations it seems we have passed through certain transformations and we have reached 7 by going through 1, 2, 3, etc. even though we have been unconscious at that time. Now if we imagine our future we may think that we'll continue towards states 8, 9, 10 and so on and as a result we'll be moving further away from 1. But the integration of memory actually makes it as if we expand as a circle around 7 and as we reach into 8, at the same time we gain also much more intimate experience of 6. Thus with the evolution of the world-line we don't simply move linearly in some direction but we integrate more and more of the palette of states into simultaneous now. In certain sense, the more we move towards the future, the more the mirror past becomes simultaneous. Towards the limit of the absolute state all possible states along any conceivable world-line of integration are seen as simultaneous.
Seen in this way, all world-lines (evolving perspectives of being) awaken from the darkness of unconsciousness (states which interfere destructively with other states) towards the state of universal resonance. I repeat that this is not some God created law of existence, it's simply the only way temporal development can ever be experienced in non-simultaneous manner. The logic is analogous to the anthropic principle. We can experience the eternal and simultaneous potential only through a progression of states that gradually integrate it into a whole. Of course the difficulty is that all those metaphors seem to already presuppose linear time as universal law, we're tempted to imagine this from the outside, as universal observer which sees how a given being's state moves through the potential. But such a perspective is nowhere to be found (except as imagination of the intellect). All perspectives are relative and experienced from
within the states of being.
So the solution is to always think of
concrete world-lines of being and not of some third-person perspective which tries to project everything on its own arrow of time. As said, Relativity should already have taught us to do that. Actually what we describe here doesn't demand anything new. Instead it requires letting go of persistent beliefs and embracing the given. Probably the most stubborn of them is the belief of universal time. Here's an example. We accept it as a certain fact that time continues to tick for everyone in the same way even at night when we're in unconscious sleep. But from the perspective of our world-line it seems as if our integration of memory continues in the morning. We would never know that we fell to sleep last night, neither that we had dreams, nor that we had spent time in dreamless sleep, unless we find ourselves in the morning state which embeds within itself all these previous states. We should train our intellect to feel complete tranquility at the prospect that it would be all the same if the universe didn't exist and somehow it came to be and we began experiencing our world-line integration immediately from our morning state. Our current state is completely defined by the constructive of destructive interference of other simultaneous states, just like the number 7 doesn't need to come into being by someone inventing it by starting counting from 1. Instead, from 7s perspective it seems that it is in certain specific relations with all other numbers. It's a great cognitive revolution when we begin to grasp the past not so much as something that has happened in time and is receding away from us but rather as integration of our current state which finds resonant relations with more and more timeless states of being.
Seen in this way, we'll reckon that there's no such perspective which stands near the absolute state and decides to create the world with the human being from there by starting to move in time together with the humans. In certain sense that perspective truly sees the potential world-lines of a possible world scenario but they are felt as simultaneous, as we see the numbers for example. On the other hand, from the perspective of the evolving world lines themselves, when they reach the state of development where they can understand things as the ones we're now discussing, it will look like a divine being has focused on a specific domain of the phase space of possible states and thus created our particular evolutionary scenario. For this reason it's still completely justified to speak from the perspective of our evolving world-line, of divine beings shaping our evolutionary domain. This may seem insane to suggest but when we experience in Intuition the resonance with the perspective of a divine being, it is as if this being looks and experiences through our point along the world line. That's why this being understands our evolutionary position. On the other hand, if we imagine the consciousness of that being at its own level it will seem as if, let's say, the human states of the the world-lines of a whole year time are simultaneous.
I know, these things are brain racking and they are simply painful if they remain in the abstract intellect but if we turn them into living experience, they lead to reality. And this is the big difference with the scientific theories which are bound to remain abstract. In GR we speak of block universe where we have a tensor energy field which at the same time determines the curvature of spacetime. These things are bound to remain as thoughts in the intellect. But what we speak of here are pointers to experiences. When we say 'energy tensor' we have intellectual construct which is supposed to map to some aspects of reality-in-itself on the opaque side of our subjective experience. But when we say here "state of being" this points us not away and on the opaque side of existence but directly to out most intimate experience. The words are only symbols, handles for those experiences. For this reason, all that we speak of here has the potential to be followed into living reality when taken with meditative effort. We shouldn't imagine that we can build some self-consistent intellectual TOE from the above. In this sense even the concept of 'state' is an idealization. We don't experience our flow of existence as made of discrete states but as more or less smooth metamorphosis. Concepts like 'state' and 'frame' are only like climber's hand holds. They are not reality itself but they give us
grip on reality. It's inevitable that in the beginning they sound abstract and floating in the air but the more we get used to the topology of reality, the more these hand hold concepts will be felt to be only expressions, symbols for something which we live and breathe, which can never be captured in its fullness by few concepts.