time-travel ponderings

[Jonathan Barlow Gee]

How many times have you said, "if I'd known then what I know now?" I'm sure it's enough to recognize that there's got to be a better way. Have you ever wanted to know the future? Read on...

1. How To: communicate with your future self.

Pre-plan an event and then attend it as its host; that is: create a window of time at a target destination in the future by planning what you will be doing at that time, then, when the beginning "event horizon" is reached, perform the preordained activity at the predetermined time. This simple act of "scheduling" one's life may seem trivial and mundane to us today, but consider our own species has been around some 200,000 years, and for the majority of this we lived as "savages" with little or no need to contemplate the concept of "time" as a thing in itself; our idea of "time" and keeping "scheduled events" throughout our lives is a VERY modern concept.

Establishing a connection and control over your "future self" in terms of where you will be when, at what place at what time, etc. is easier in 1-direction (present --> future), but it is not impossible to also establish a 2-directional (present <--> future) relationship with one's future-self as well. To accomplish this one must create a feedback-loop between a "present plan" for a "future memory" that becomes a "present memory" of a "past plan," wherein the "plan" and the "memory" are defined by the same variable, as in: "present A" for "future A" becomes "past A" for "present A." To establish such a feedback loop, you must practice scheduled contemplation of your plan to schedule the event of contemplating your plan to schedule contemplating your plan, and etc.

2. How To: communicate with your past self.

Leave yourself buried treasures, hidden clues and a secret map to rediscover them. This may seem like your present self, now, communicating to your future self, later, by planting such "time-capsules" for your later-self to find and to remember your present-self, in your future-self's past, as you are now, then. However, this establishes a communication point between your "past-self" and your "future-self" for which you are effectively only a "messenger" between them.

By "saving something for later," by "setting some aside" and by "hoarding," "stock-piling," and "silo-ing" we accumulate to ourselves "personal properties" as material affectations, unique to our character, and therefore of extremely personal sentimental value to us, even though no two people's "constellation" of belongings will be exactly identical.

Again, while this simple act of "collecting valuables" for oneself may seem extremely commonplace today, prior to 6,000 years ago and the start of our current form of civilization, such considerations over such a character trait as this did not exist for humankind. Although a naturally possible option for any living creature, from an amoeba or flat-worm to a human fetus or even you or I, the practice of "hoarding property" is only developed in certain species.

This practice of "self-modification" is, as mentioned, a method for establishing communication between your "future-self" and your "past-self."

I am from the future, like my past-self before me.

I - the inescapable ego as ineffably-shrouded "god complex."

I AM - the almighty name of the one who is most high.

FROM THE FUTURE - the location of origin, the town of birth.

LIKE MY PAST-SELF BEFORE ME - that which built up what is now.

Therefore, "I am" (a first name) "from the future" (last name), "like my past-self" (family name) "before me." Therefore, "Iam Fromthefuture, like Mypastself before me" means, literally, "Eheieh" (Hebrew for "I am") "Bar" (meaning "from") the Future, and "Ben" (meaning "son of") the Past. So it goes: "Who was here before me? It was my past-self. Where am I now compared to where my past-self was then? I am in my past-self's future. I therefore am looking back at my past-self from the past's future, now, and already it is the future again."

and so I am "Now-Me", the product of who I was then, and the materia primum for what I will be later as well. "Now Me" is "I Am" as "Then-Me" was my "Past-Self," and as "Later-Me" will be my "Future-Self." I am torn down the middle, with one half traveling from future-to-past, backwards through the time-line, and the other traveling normally, from past-to-future, forwards in chronological cause-and-effects' entropy. I am both "from the future" and "of the past." I am from the future in my mind, led along by inspirations from a better world ahead of me, but I am also of the past, and bogged down by my body like an anchor dragging ever behind me, holding me back. The "rip in time" is within me. The "rift between realms" exists so long as I am it. I am the doorway between worlds being held open, the spirits passing back and forth between through me. I am "from the future," like "my past-self." My past-self was "from the future," just as I am now. I am "from the future," I have always been, am now, and will always be 'from the future." I have no business being here and now.

How does one who has found one's way from the future into the past, then turn around and find their way from the past back into the future? The clues one follows are those one left for oneself before the past became the present, but this was after the present became the future. Time becomes more and more a tightly circling knot the more one follows these "clues" left for oneself in the present to find, placed there by themselves in the future, at some later time.

the more time comes to resemble a loop, and the more events appear to repeat the same way again and again in a continuous cycle, leading nowhere, the more one desires to escape the shackles of time itself and break free from routine and escape into a new environment and mental terrain. The first step toward acquiring freedom is desiring it; however this is also the last step; freedom from time cannot be acquired. Freedom from all things may be desired; nevertheless, freedom is long sought after, much fought for, but seldom enjoyed. If you have no "free time" then you do not have the time it takes to learn how to become "free from time" itself, as a whole construct, an artificial model that is, yet, built into the very fabric of the cosmic continuum.

It has been said, "the only way out is through." This presents time as a "reality-tunnel," implying an individual's "tunnel-vision" perception delimits their definitions of what constitutes "real." However, this is an ancient concept, and like most ancient concepts, fatally flawed: "the tunnel the sun sets into and flies through by night to emerge from the other end at dawn" is a myth, however is, also, the basis for our concept of time as like a "tube" or "tunnel" we travel through alike a birth-canal. Time, in that sense, is like a series of red-curtained rooms we pass through, entering the next as we leave the last; but we are able to "run and return" or to "come and go" throughout this whole "hall of mirrors," and we can just as easily go back to a room we had been in before as go ahead into a room we have not yet.

the mind is like a looking glass and memories are like small shards of stained glass. Watch them as they dance, turned about as the whole model becomes by time. Memories in a kaleidoscope, and these are only the shadows on the wall of the cave. We have not even begun to turn around and find the light that casts these shadows on this wall. We have not even begun to ask ourselves if the shadows we see on the wall are cast by real people or merely clay replicas. We have not even wakened up yet. We are still asleep in our minds, plugged into mechanical meanings in a higher-plane than we can dream, in a coma, inside the brain of a fetus, inside the womb of the cosmos. We are dreaming of running through an open plain. We are, in reality, being tortured by invisible aliens - probing our minds, extracting our memories, storing these stories as data in their hard drives. You think I'm joking? Ask the NSA to describe their modern job duties.

Our fates belong not in the hands of strangers, into whose arms we cast ourselves - the "unknown" of the "abyss" is everyone's favorite personal nemesis. Our fates belong not in the form of our birth-certificates, traded on the open market like stocks and bonds, we are not chattel, our bodies are nobody else's property, nor our time, nor our energy. Our fates belong not in the cold, sweaty grip of the "gods," that alien pantheon, divided from us by a widening expanse of time, nor in the crucified palms of their "savior" the "son-god." Our fates are not governed by forces alien and strange to us. They are governed by us, ourselves: our own Will Determines Our Fate. Laughing, Crying, Drunken or Dying we are held only in the arms of our own fate, our own karma, our own choices; our own consequences are the only chains that bind us. We have woven this web, and into it we have now become entwined.

I can see through the kaleidoscope of my memories of the past, into the world beyond the looking glass, outside of my mind's eye's narrow lens, into a future where I am dead. And I see myself there, as a ghost sees themselves at such an event, and I listen to the mourners who speak over my body. And they say this and they say that, some miss this about me, others say I had a nice something or other. But NO ONE says I am a "great writer." And this was all I have ever wanted to be remembered as. I will be forever decorated in the annals of history with the dung of my contemporary's criticisms, and forever shunned to have no peers besides those in waiting rooms, prison cells and insane asylums. I see my fortune in the afterlife: I am bent to squat and eat dust, to lick the Sumerian sands, to taste the silt for salt, to search, ever blinded, eyeless, to lick and taste, to seek out the source of the salty brine, to find what Erishkegal commands us all to find: that which gives meaning back to our lives: the long buried clay pots with the ashes of the titans cooked into them, containing the papyrus scrolls around iron cylinder seals, that functioned as ancient batteries, and that have decomposed here for centuries, and which taste of ionization.

Once upon a time, I died. I did die. I crossed the path from light into darkness, and I returned across the path from darkness back into the light. I have crossed this path often. I have lived many times. I have died so many times I have stopped counting. But did I really die? I am still alive, and so my body is proof my mind would be lying to itself alone if it believed itself alive in the remains of my corpse. But this may all yet merely be my memories - my whole life playing out around me in "real time" - as I lie dying at some unknown future place. I cannot trust that I am not already dead, or that I might not only be reliving all this while I lie, sometime up ahead in the future, dying.

the transition between life and death, between the realm of the biological body experiencing material stimuli and the realm where this biological body is no longer present for the mind to experience material stimuli through, is not always easy for everyone; quite the opposite: it is usually difficult for most people. Very few slip through unscathed to cross between these worlds; to walk back and forth between the voids between moments like a grass-hopper leaping between puddles of shadow by moonlight. Yet to step outside the body is also to step outside of time itself. To stand inside an abyss of utter darkness and examine each moment in time like a drop of rain that has been slowed down to a stop in mid-air. See how the light of your eye shines a spectral refraction across these, connecting them across the void of time that separates them? One moment over here may be connected to another moment, over there, in a non-physical way, through this "void of time" between temporal-events. A rippling pulse-rate can be broadcast in this way, across the span of a single frozen moment, via tachyons in hyperspace; these smaller than electron and faster than photon quanta simply traverse over, under, around and through all the larger quanta they encounter. The wave that carries the force of this elemental energy is a tide that bears the burden of all of us on its back.

some have compared the transition between being alive and not being alive anymore to that between being a fetus in the womb and being born into the air, slapped to induce breathing, and then introduced to the elements of this world. Most ancient metaphysics about metempsychosis was based on this belief. The idea of the "Am Duat," the Egyptian "Death Canal," became the Greek "River Styx" and the Aztec "Avenue of the Dead." This "river" of "passage" was adapted as the royal game of Ur and as the ancient Egyptian game called "Senet." This game is so old, we have literally forgotten the original rules, and anyone who tells you they've rediscovered these is only offering their own modernized adaptation. There is no "royal road," no "taro rota," that does not lead to and end in Death. As it was said upon completion of the Via Apia, "now all roads lead to Rome." So it is with death. And as well as in Rome, at that momentary passage of death, there lurk 7 powerful passions, innate within all humanity's nature, subdued by 7 strong meta-programmers; and these 7 above and 7 below are the 5 fingers and twin thumbs on each of the two hands that hold the strings attached to our fates. And there sits the grim reaper, ever grinning his hideous rictus, his gaping eye-holes a reminder of long ago forgotten griefs. And in one hand he holds the sickle, and in the other hand the gnomon. And from both his boney, 7 fingered hands, descend the strings that attach us to him: those strange series of coincidences and clues that lead us along, that seem to infuse our lives with meaning and purpose, but only for a moment, for then our lives are done. Ever onward leads this string of beads, ever flowing from one event to the next, and never ending though time may be, I have an ending.

but death is as much alike birth as is the soul alike an embryo that rewinds its developmental phases and, in reverse, breaks apart into a separate sperm and ovum. There is as much basis for comparison in this regard as there is between a desert asp and an electric eel. Both slither, though one is in water and the other on sand. Likewise, in this event, we may like to prepare for our own mortality by undergoing ceremonial rituals; we may even undergo such rituals without willingly agreeing to do so, without liking them, and without even being informed about them being done to us by our "tribe" - the living generations of our global community. It really doesn't matter what we, as individuals, want; the "tribe" hazes its new members, this is meant as a "coming of age" ritual. Death, if alike anything else within the scope and sphere of what constitutes "living," is more alike this "coming of age" ritual than it is alike the act of "birth." This is only true because it is more often the case than not that peoples' lives end "too soon," and we all agree this is everyone or our own faults. When the "good die young" then, by default, the "evil" among mankind come to rule among the living. These are the "powers that be" that conspire against the neophytes, that seek to humiliate them, to make them feel exposed and then to ask them "how does this make you feel?"

Death is the devil, creeping up behind you in the form of ten million demons, each with ten thousand hands, each hand with a thousand fingers, and all these reaching out of the shadows between then and now to grab at and to poke at you, to needle you, to bend your spine, to grind your teeth, to electrocute you at a low voltage for the entire duration of your life. And so death comes wearing the mask of many faces: a conspiracy. All the enemies you've made throughout the years, their faces all come out of thin air to haunt you, to mock and curse and laugh at you, to deride you, to chastise you, to berate you, to dress you down. And they come from over the shoulders and behind the backs of your friends, until even they can no longer be trusted. In their last moment, these shadows strangle the victim, and suck the last choked breath from their chugging lungs into the gasping bellows inside the ribcage of death. In the end, all those moments align against us; and those we enjoyed most seem to become those which hurt us most, because they are those that shaped who and what we became.

friends love unconditionally. critics hate unconditionally. when oh when lord is it going to be time for my works to be judged based on the merit of their validity and their potential for usefulness to society and not merely on spelling errors from an era before auto-correct?

11:11

"transhumanism" and "posthumanism" are words that have various meanings among various different types of people - some are in favor of the concepts (utopian OR dystopian) and others oppose them (whether they are presented as being utopian or not). As I understand "transhumanism" it has to do with the "singularity" - a point at which non-human mechanical sentience will occur. Lots of monkeys believe this could happen any day now; and that the Higgs Boson is a "big deal;" and that I, personally, am full of shit. People believe a lot of weird things, IMO. My own opinion on the "technological singularity" - if defined as such in such a context - and the "transhuman" or "posthuman" world to follow it, is simple enough (I hope): when synthetic nano-bots, as small as atoms, running "quantum computing" scale programs, using the "uncertainty principle" as a "trinary" language - a triple-directional circuit-breaker (ala the "flux capacitor" in "Back to the Future") - then these will be small enough to permeate our biological bodies and to reprogram our neurochemistry at a sub-molecular level, at such a small scale they could even re-write our DNA coding sequences, and once the technology has "micro-miniaturized" to this small a size scale, and can do all these things, then there will no longer be any difference between "biological" / "organic" living matter and "mechanical" / "silicone" programmed nanites, no difference any longer between "people" and "machines," because there will no longer be any boundaries or barriers to our control over reality such as we know them now. This would constitute the "evolutionary leap" I think is implied (at least) by the definition of the "technological singularity" and the achievement of "sentient artificial intelligence." Once a machine and a person are indistinguishable from one another on a quantum, atomic, molecular, genetic, cellular, tissue and organs type of being, then there will cease being any difference between them. Our mind over matter will destroy this cosmos by thinking our powers over it unlimited in a "virtual reality" simulation, but we will also have lost our humanity, our sense of values and "soul." That, to me, is "transhumanism," in a nutshell. Perhaps this is not what you meant though, so if you'd care to clarify, please feel free to do so. Peace!