Thursday, July 14, 2022

A Way of Thinking About Time, Consciousness, and Free Will

Yesterday my brother and I were musing over the nature of time--what is it exactly? It isn't a thing; it is nowhere to be located. Is it therefore a force? This was my response. I have long thought of the universe in this fashion, but I've never written it down or even shared it with my brother until yesterday. He flipped out over it. Let's see what you think...

A Giant Bowl of Jello

Here is how I picture time, space, and consciousness —

  • We live in a Jello universe--a gigantic, torus-shaped, bowl of gelatin, studded with an infinite number of cherries.
  • The Jello is the matrix that holds everything that ever was or will be.
  • The cherries are every thing that ever were or will be--all potential events, all potential objects. An infinite array of cherries already laid out as potential.
  • Consciousness is each spark of life making its way through this vast ocean of Jello.
  • Time can only be apprehended through consciousness; time is nowhere to be found if there is no observer.
  • The cherries are the full panoply of choices we could make along the way.
  • Our free will chooses to swim this way and that as it moves toward the next cherry of choice. This free will is swimming from the middle of the torus in the direction of the outside boundary of the giant torus. All of these cherries are being held within the shape of the torus—the doughy part of the donut.
  • Every lifetime is the trace of the worm-like path our consciousness chooses as it travels through the universe of cherries.

My brother, the professor of Philosophy, notes that this way of looking at time and consciousness may have just solved one of the longstanding conundrums of philosophy.  That is, how can we reconcile the concept of an all-knowing God if we subjects have free will? The answer presented by this model is that the all-knowing God has pre-placed all possible choices before us, but it is our individual free will that plots the course through these choices. This combination of potential versus choice reflects our free will.

In a real sense, the entirety of all of our lives is already conceived in potential. It is our self-awareness and free will that plod along at the speed of matter as we live our lives out as a linearity of passing time.

That's it.

In Gnostic terms, remember that the pattern of this universe mirrors a version of the hierarchy of the Aeons in the Fullness. The only way this infinite collection of Aeons can be fairly represented is if the space within the universal Boundary can accommodate all of their representations. But we are only able to tap into the representations that are relevant to our life’s path as we pass through the awareness of time. In a real sense, the entirety of all of our lives is already conceived in the Fullness. It is our Self-awareness and free will that plod along at the speed of matter as we live our lives out as a linearity of passing time.

At the universal level, the infinity of the Fullness of God is represented by the potential of all possible choices a person could make as their life passes from one decision to the next. The Fullness of all possible futures are represented within the universe; free will is driving our consciousness through those potentialities, and leaving behind the collapsed potential of its history.

Of course, the Jello salad pictured above is not to scale. The gelatin donut would be infinitely large, and the cherries relatively small.

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Dr. Ropp is always happy to communicate with sincere truth-seekers.