The Nightshirt Sightings, Portents, Forebodings, Suspicions

Master Minkowski’s Wild Ducks (Zen and the Glass Block Universe)

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Probably because I am thinking about (and trying to finish a book on) precognition and retrocausation and the glass block universe they seem to imply, I keep finding my thoughts returning to a famous Zen koan from 8th-century China. You will have heard it: Master Ma and his student Pai Chang were walking along when they encountered a flock of wild ducks. “What is that?” Ma said. “Wild ducks,” Pai Chang answered. “Where have they gone?” Ma asked? “They’ve flown away,” Pai Chang said … at which point Master Ma grabbed his student’s nose and gave it a painful twist: “When have they ever flown away!

The considerable evidence of precognition and retrocausation points to the reality of something like the glass block, the already-ness of the future and the persistence of the past.

There are many versions of the story, and many translations of the different versions. R.H. Blyth’s version spells out Ma’s meaning a bit, in case we are confused (which we are): “When did they ever fly away?” Ma says, “They have been here from the beginning!” Blyth’s Games Zen Masters Play (where this appears) probably was a strong influence on J.D. Salinger when he was writing The Catcher in the Rye; Holden Caulfield’s constant obsession with where the ducks at the lake in Central Park go in wintertime is an allusion to this koan. (Indeed, the whole novel is sort of about it, and about the young narrator’s gradual coming to a slightly more Zen-like understanding of questions of life and death, permanence and change.)

This “public case” (the original meaning of koan) has many layers, and it is important not to think that Pai Chang, just because he got his nose twisted, was wrong in saying that the ducks were gone. In their play-by-play commentary on these ancient dharma battles, some writers declare Pai-Chang the victor, not Ma. There’s Zen virtue in telling it just like it is. But the significance of this story that is obviously relevant to my obsession with precognition is this notion of permanence that Master Ma’s words imply: “When did they ever fly away?” is like an assertion of Hermann Minkowski’s argument, based on his student Einstein’s theory of relativity, that things in the past are still here, and that things that haven’t happened yet are here already.

ducks2If Pai Chang, with his sore nose, is a bit like Heraclitus, who found that you can’t step in the same river twice, Ma is a bit like his counterpart in these debates, the shaman/mystic Parmenides, and also his later interpreter Zeno, asserting the permanence within apparent impermanence.

I’ve always been a Heraclitus man myself, and a couple years ago on this blog I rebelled against the glass block and the Eternalism it entailed, even going so far as accusing outspoken Eternalist Alan Moore of being a hoarder: Minkowski glass-block-ism, where “every condom, every syringe, every beer can is preserved in Jerusalem’s gutters,” seemed to me like a hoarder’s cosmology. I’ve changed my mind in the intervening time. I think that, like many people when confronting these questions, I allowed my knee-jerk, heavily culture-bound assumption of free will and the open-endedness of things to prevent me from considering the possible reality, realism, and even spiritual satisfactions of Minkowski’s glass block.

The Bird is the Word

Compare “Master Ma’s Wild Ducks” with a painfully beautiful anecdote from Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People about the conversion of the Anglo-Saxons to Christiantiy. In the 6th century, the Northumbrian king Edwin was confronted by pressures to renounce his paganism and embrace the new religion; uncertain what was right, he took counsel with his “ealdormen and thegns” (advisors and nobles) on this question, and one of them stated his own opinion using the metaphor of a sparrow:

This is how the present life of man on earth, King, appears to me in comparison with that time which is unknown to us. You are sitting feasting with your ealdormen and thegns in winter time; the fire is burning on the hearth in the middle of the hall and all inside is warm, while outside the wintry storms of rain and snow are raging; and a sparrow flies swiftly through the hall. It enters in at one door and quickly flies out through the other. For the few moments it is inside, the storm and wintry tempest cannot touch it, but after the briefest moment of calm, it flits from your sight, out of the wintry storm and into it again. So this life of man appears but for a moment; what follows or indeed what went before, we know not at all. If this new doctrine brings us more certain information, it seems right that we should accept it.

I’ve always thought about the cold harsh uncertain life of those men in that hall—the same people who sang stories of the monster Grendel lurking in the wild wastes and muscular heroes like Beowulf who could bring temporary peace to their windswept fragile little kingdoms. For Edwin’s counselor (and for centuries of the Venerable Bede’s English readers), Christ was a kind of hero who could save us from the cold uncertainty of what awaited us beyond this mortal life—a solace the poor sparrow could not enjoy.

Christ, with His redeeming retrocausal tachyon blood, offered the exact same solution that Master Ma was offering Pai Chang: a way out of time, yet within time.

I also always think about that sparrow, flying in one door of a fire-warmed Anglo-Saxon hall and out the opposite door back into the cold. It is just like the wild ducks in the Chinese story: Not only has it flown away and gone, but it’s also (at the same time) there permanently, indelibly etched in the mind of every reader of Bede’s passage, frozen in mid-hall. Its flickering transit is eternal; it has always been there and always will be there.

ducks5Having been raised in an atheist household, I for long time had trouble grasping the spiritual appeal of Christianity, with its seeming focus on death and even torture (Christ nailed to the Cross). It helped my understanding greatly to eventually read Bede’s account, and much later to realize that Christ, with His redeeming retrocausal tachyon blood, may have been offering the exact same solution and the same hope to those grim Anglo-Saxons that Master Ma was offering Pai Chang: a way out of time, yet within time. Thanks to Bede, and Master Ma, I get it.

Through a Glass Block, Darkly

The Ming Dynasty Zen master Han-Shan recorded a direct enlightenment experience of the glass block. According to Guo-gu Shi:

Han-shan came across the stories of a Bramacharin who had left home in his youth and returned when he was white-haired. When people saw him, the neighbors asked, “Is that man [whom we know] still living today?” The Bramacharin replied, “I look like that man of the past, but I am not he.” On reading this story “Han-shan suddenly understood that all things do not come and go. When he got up from his seat and walked around, he did not see things in motion. When he opened the window blind, suddenly a wind blew the trees in the yard, and the leaves flew all over the sky. However, he did not see any signs of motion. When he went to urinate, he still did not see signs of flowing. He understood what the text spoke of as, “Streams and rivers run into the ocean and yet there is no flowing.” At this time, Hanshan shattered all doubt and existential concerns about birth and death.

Han-Shan might want to ask his doctor about the “no signs of flowing.” But in my own humble Zen practice, I too have had these brief altered perceptions that “nothing is really happening” even when things are visibly in flux in front of my eyes. I think there’s real truth to what those guys were experiencing back on their misty Chinese mountainsides (and are still experiencing).

There is real liberation in letting go of the weighty idea that we Westerners always carry around with us, that our actions are open-ended and thus that we bear responsibility for the world.

The biggest surprise of pursuing this whole business of precognition is discovering that it was never really about expanded human potential in the sense of developing some superpower. Experiencing precognition invariably brings you face to face with the limitations of mortal life and the futility to change your fate (or wyrd, as King Edwin would have called it). It has thus, unexpectedly, acted for me as a kind of koan, reinforcing again and again these spiritually surprising experiences of stasis-within-flux.

ducks8There is real liberation in letting go of the weighty idea that we Westerners always carry around with us, that our actions are open-ended and thus that we bear responsibility for the world. They aren’t. And we don’t. Again, at least on some deep, hard-to-describe level. Paradoxically, in a Zen way, this realization makes you more free, not less, as well as more responsible for the world around you.

It is an evidence-based Zen realization. The considerable evidence of precognition (and more generally, retrocausation) points to the reality of something like the glass block, the already-ness of the future and the persistence of the past. Whether the block is really sturdy glass or something a bit more viscous, like tree sap, or possesses a variable viscosity, is an open question. For now, we must just say that the mysteries of the glass block passeth understanding and our vision of time really is through a glass, darkly.

No Impossible Futures

To hold firm that it really is a Minkowski universe has implications for parapsychology in addition to spirituality. I think many investigators of precognition who argue that we precognize “possible futures,” on an analogy with the quantum wavefunction, are barking up the wrong tree. If the quantum neuroscience model I’ve been advocating is right, we precognize actual futures, but obliquely, unclearly, and in ways whose non-paradoxical-ness only becomes clear in hindsight.

The brain seems to be a tesseract, a tunnel from birth to death, bringing us oblique information about our already-exising future and dressing up that information in sometimes realistic but often quite oblique or deceptive costumes.

For example, you are never going to have a completely accurate and clear precognitive dream about an outcome you would or could intercede to prevent. It’s not that the causality police will swoop in in their flying saucers to stop you; it’s just that, from a future vantage point farther along your world-line in the block universe, it didn’t happen. No amount of searching in hindsight will find spent causal arrows for an impossible event. Things that couldn’t happen, never did.

According to this view, premonitions of dangers averted don’t necessarily represent those dangers per se, but the troubled thoughts and emotions experienced in their aftermath. For instance, in a case recorded by Louisa Rhine, a woman had a vivid dream in which her baby was crushed to death by a chandelier that had been hanging over the crib. Defying her husband’s urge to just ignore the dream and go back to sleep, she went and got their baby and brought her into their bed to sleep. Two hours later, they heard a crash in the nursery.

It was not that the woman’s premonition accurately showed her an event in a possible future, “a timeline not taken.” Rather, it accurately showed her her own horrified imagining of a terrible possibility, a “what if” (what if she’d ignored her dream); and because of her action, this premonition became part of a “time loop” formation in the glass block universe. Thankfully, because her mental image refluxed in time and caught her awareness two hours earlier, and she acted on it, her baby was with her and not in the nursery when the chandelier crashed onto the crib. But I really doubt there’s an other, parallel universe where the baby was in the crib when it happened.

ducks6We should not confuse our imagination, our ability to picture many nonexistent worlds, or our ability to picture the universe from an imagined vantage point outside history, with real perception. It’s all a brain-generated hologram, a creation of Zen’s biggest frenemy, Solaris Mind.

We can imagine “many worlds” all we want—it makes for fun thought experiments—but if I am right, the interpretation of quantum mechanics that leads to the many worlds idea is an effect of denying the future’s influence on the past. Once retrocausation is fully embraced, many worlds may look less appealing or realistic. Black holes might really create new universes; but I suspect our choices from moment to moment, or the seemingly random “choices” of every particle at every instant, do not. (Talk about a hoarder’s cosmology!)

Remembering Past Life

As I’ve argued many times in these posts, the brain seems to be a tesseract, a tunnel from birth to death, bringing us oblique information about our already-existing future and dressing up that information in sometimes realistic but often quite deceptive and obscure costumes. More generally, all living organisms, and systems within living organisms, seem to metabolize time, utilizing quantum biological processes to converge on optimal and efficient courses of action more than chance would predict.

The looping formations of chemistry and cause that are tantamount to life take on increasingly subtle and beautiful forms as you scroll forward through the glass block.

The emergence of complex forms has variously been attributed to some extra feature of matter, such as “morphic fields” or “syntropy.” The latter is probably pretty close to the reality, although it is not a cosmic liking of order per se, so much as a molecular and cellular tendency to organize by post-selecting on efficient outcomes, creating an overall illusion of a kind of cosmic Platonism (seen from our now-bound point of view).

I find the possibilities of Minkowski-ism increasingly inspiring and exciting. The future doesn’t look like the past, for one thing. The looping formations of chemistry and cause that are tantamount to life (and possibly, consciousness) take on increasingly subtle and beautiful forms as you scroll forward through the glass block. This is what the second law of thermodynamics and even the theory of complex systems cannot quite predict or describe.

ducks3The fate of the universe does seem to be toward a kind of super-intelligence, perhaps a super organism, that can actually reach back and remember itself and even remember “past life,” its pre-superconscious formations. Intelligent life in our epoch could be an early adumbration of what intelligence will become and the kinds of increasingly fractal causal loops it will manifest.

Thus if there is a higher consciousness, and a collective (un)conscious, it is in the future. What we call our consciousness may be memory of our lives from a distant future viewpoint.* I suppose it is all along what Christians back in the day meant. The afterlife really was something “after” all our lives—a resurrection occurring in the Not Yet, at the end of days.

Postscript: Me Go Zen™ in Your Coke Forever

As I imagine Han-Shan trying to empty his bladder in(to) Minkowski’s glass-block universe “with no signs of flowing,” my inner 2nd-grader can’t not think of a really racist schoolyard rhyme that was “going around” the playground one week at Kendrick Lakes Elementary School, circa 1974. Maybe you know the one. It was somehow the punchline of a really hilarious (to a Watergate-era 2nd-grader in racially homogeneous Lakewood, CO) story that I can no longer recall. But I’ll never forget the rhyme: “Me Chinese man, me play joke, me go pee-pee in your Coke.

This image provoked, in addition to mirth, no small amount of reflection on human malice, as I tried to wrap my 7-year-old head around the horror of a monstrous Asian urinating in a person’s beverage, and the horror of drinking said beverage. I didn’t have that many friends, so I probably didn’t serve as a vector of this rhyme, merely an appreciative audience. But now I wonder: Was Han-Shan that Chinese Man?

Is Han-Shan still and forever pee-peeing in my Coke? When did he ever stop!

Whether or not he was Han-Shan or somebody else, that Chinese man is real … especially now that he is in your mind. Zen would ask you to take the Chinese man’s pee-Coke as a koan and see where it gets you.

NOTE

* In one of my early “glass block” moments, in the mortality-dread haze not long after 9/11, I was meditating on the DC Metro on my way to work, on the elevated tracks somewhere between Vienna and West Falls Church, and I suddenly realized that “this” was all being remembered, and thus that death—at least in the near future—was impossible. “I” (or something remembering me) was clearly “still alive” at some future time point from which I was remembering that moment on the train.

I didn’t know how far ahead the memory’s vantage point was—it may have been seconds or minutes or years.** But I have found since then that it makes a nice Zen exercise to repeat “this is a memory” and overlay that perception like a projection onto your experience, and see what happens after a little while.

FRACTAL NOTE-WITHIN-NOTE

** Perhaps right now, writing this, was the vantage point from which, on the train 16 years ago, I was still alive. That would make the ‘time to afterlife’ roughly 16 years … if it is a constant, and the afterlife is merely lived memory.

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About

I am a science writer and armchair Fortean based in Washington, DC. Write to me at eric.wargo [at] gmail.com.

17 Responses to “Master Minkowski’s Wild Ducks (Zen and the Glass Block Universe)”

  • Nice pictures of ducks.

    To really do this post justice, I think I should go back and refresh my memory of some of the earlier posts you link to. However, it’s interesting to know that you have “tacked back” towards Minkowski.

    I highly recommend Gordon White’s recent interview with Leslie Keen about her new book on post-death communication. The thought-stream you have been working on is referenced several times throughout the interview, but it feels to me like Keen — based on her personal observations of high-quality mediumship — is leaning towards the “there are actual discarnate spirits who are actual continuations of deceased human individuals” explanation of things. I definitely want to read that book.

    …as I have pondered the nature of dreams and dreaming over the last 2-3 years, I have sometimes thought of this thing that happens to me with some regularlity, something I don’t think I’ve ever seen you mention nor do I believe we’ve discussed: Going about one’s business in “wake”, having something (usually quite small), that triggers the memory of a dream that hasn’t been recalled until the “trigger” brings it to mind. (This is separate from the kind of “deja-vu” thing that happens when someone feels like “I’ve dreamed about this before,” but can’t remember the actual dream, and hasn’t written it down). It’s “I remember I dreamed about something like this.”

    I have brought this up in front of classes, and enough of my generally traditionally-aged undergrads have confirmed that they have experienced it for me to guess that I am far from the only one to experience it.

    On April 29, I got up and began my usual “browse through the internet” morning routine. Somehow or another I found the Colin Dickey’s April 26 review, in *The New Republic,* of Annie Jacobson’s recent *Phenomena: The Secret History of the U.S. Government’s Secret Investigations into Extrasensory Perception and and Psychokinesis*.

    This triggered a memory of having seen the cover of that book, alongside a fair certainty that I hadn’t seen it/heard about it. I posted about this to a Facebook discussion group I belong to that’s about dreams and dreaming.

    I had not actually looked for an image of the book or its cover, but a friend of mine in the group did link to the Amazon page, and when I saw the cover, I noted that it looked very much like my “memory” of the cover, with differences. In my “memory,” the background of the book cover was white, with something black and horizontal in the middle, and the title “Phenomena” in black (?) on the white background.

    The actual cover has a black background, with white light shining through and around the outline of a barely-opened door (which is black). The title was in the same spot in relation to the horizontal feature in my “memory,” but in silver.

    So, no documentation from *before* the trigger of the “memory”, but interesting correspondence of the (I think from a dream) memory and a real thing in the waking world.

    I did have one possible place where I thought *maybe* I had seen mention of this book, but when I checked it out — no.

    Hope the book is going well.

  • Addendum: As I was reading your post, it brought to mind the death-bed quote from Roger Ebert, which I was reminded up this week listening to a different Gordon White interview: “This is all an elaborate hoax.” I wonder just what Ebert was responding to?

  • Thanks, Ahck. It’s really interesting you mention those spontaneous dream-memories. I know exactly what you mean, and in fact I’ve started recording and paying attention to them. I too am trying to figure out what they are. I think they are possibly very significant, and you’re right, I’ve never seen ANYONE write about them. It might make sense that they are evidence of associative dream-precognition, but I haven’t found any evidence of that yet. Also, some vague/dim dream memories — really more a dream-setting and mood — recur periodically in my life, so somehow something about what I’m doing or thinking just then must be associating with that distant dream memory or whatever it was encoding, precognitively or not.

    One thing about dreams is that since they lack biographical context, they seem timeless, like they could be from childhood or much more recent. Recently I had a memory of dream that felt “ancient” in my life, and when I attended to it I realized it was from the night before, but just seemed so rooted in my history.

    Also great to notice the book cover. In my own precognitive dreaming, the first most common category is “Twitter,” but the second most common is “book covers.” It’s a good book, by the way — I’m reading it now. It’s not a comprehensive history of the subject, and sort of leaves a few people out and overemphasizes others, but there are some very interesting parts.

    Interested to hear Gordon White’s interview with Leslie Kean. I’ve read part of her new book. At least in the book, she really only considers the old “super psi” (or “living agent psi”) hypothesis as an alternative for mediumship and children who remember past lives. But super psi is basically a straw man set up to fail (focused on telepathy and clairvoyance), and nobody (including Kean) really considers the narrowly focused personal precognition “memory for our future” model. I haven’t finished the book though. Definitely have a lot of respect for her work.

    Cheers,
    Eric

  • Yeah I would love to know more about Ebert’s experience. The only place Chaz Ebert talks about this is the Esquire interview. My wife (who produces a religion radio show) tried to connect with her regarding this but to no avail.

  • I like Feynman’s description of the glass block universe.
    A living aperiodic crystal with 360 decallion facets.

    Of course, that would just be life in an event horizon.

    Or a shimmering donut, as it were.

  • Thanks, Vortex. Yes, it’s a good interview. The “distant” part is my main quibble with May and Marwaha’s model, obviously — I don’t see how that is simpler than an all-in-the-brain approach, especially since, as they themselves point out, remote viewers (for instance) are homing in on the “answer book” in the future. Why not assume they physically read the answer book? It is precisely the differences between feedback and reality that enabled J.W. Dunne to discern he was engaging in precognition and not clairvoyance, and it would be easy to design remote viewing studies that manipulated feedback in such a way as to ascertain the real signal channel: Assign 10 expert remote viewers to view a nearby target such as a city square, after which they are taken in a bus to the target; in between the session and the target visit, though, a confederate plants a very distinctive sculpture smack in the middle of the square. If their drawings include the sculpture, then they are viewing the feedback, if not, they are more likely viewing the square in real time. I’m not aware that such studies have ever been conducted, though.

  • The new season of twin peaks seems relevant to this post.

  • Yes, the new Twin Peaks, like all of Lynch’s work, is relevant to all of my obsessions on this blog. I think David Lynch has a deeper grasp of the paranormal and psychic phenomena than probably any other artist. It’s uncanny. Yet he will not talk about this stuff; he presents himself as a totally intuitive “pure artist” who just pulls images from his unconscious. I cannot believe, though, that he is not reading and engaging with these subjects in a conscious, intellectual way as well.

  • Hi Vortex,
    Thanks, yes, this is a good collection of interesting papers!
    Eric

  • Thanks, Manjit! I really predict that retrocausation is going to move from a “fringe interpretation” of QM to a very mainstream one, very quickly.

  • Retrocasuality only seems obtuse to creatures locked in linear time. It provides a simple explaination for entanglement & the dual slit conundrum. But more importantly to people like me who believe in the powers of PSI, it provides PHYSICAL AVENUES OF CAUSATION that pragmatically explain PSI, healing, OBEs, ESP, Remote Influence and much MUCH more!
    ….Respectfully,
    ….buddy “AP”

  • This is something i was pondering back in 2016:

    Munchhausens watchstrap: Inverse Entropy and Reversible Temporality in quantum cause and effect.

    By PD Radford-Hancock

    “We exist in three and a half dimensions, whilst observing four dimensions.”

    There is a famous philosophical debate that suggests that there may or may not be “turtles all the way down”.
    This is often posited as being exampled by what is known as: Munchhausens Trilemma. The debate that has gone on around this appropriation of choices to represent the full measure of possibility is often shown to be a scientific exegesis of why everything must have a cause and effect. There cannot be a God, they say, for Who created God? The Munchhausen Trilemma refers to the anecdote of Baron Von Munchhausen who is said to have pulled himself and the horse he was riding out of the mud by pulling on his own hair. But what if Munchhasuen was wearing a special watch, that allowed time to pass in the opposite direction? perhaps then the trilemma becomes rather quaternary.

    My proposition is that what we observe as cause and effect is actually inverted. The cause is the effect, and what we percieve as an effect is in fact the cause. This happens because our conciousness is confined to one line of time. We are able to see things in the past affect the present which invites us to speculate about the future. The further we go into the past, the more we require causes that produce present effects. But what if the future contains the causes and the past is the repository of all effects. This would resolve as it were the problems of prescience, and prophetic action, it would clarify omniscience (in as much as we are any judges of it). It would invite us to reconsider dark matter and entanglement. It would explain the copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics not as wavefronts collapsing, but as waveforms becoming. It leads us to an endlessly creative source that we have yet to meet.

    Current observations of quantum mechanical effects are deeply impacted still by the formalities of classical physics. The apple falls from the tree therefore there is gravity says classical physics. Momentum is the prodigy of gravity, gravity the exemplar of mass, and mass the construction of matter, while matter is the continuing evolution of energy. But what if instead energy is creating matter that produces gravity that gives momentum which moves the apple? We can attest to this being true to some extent. But it is not often thought that the energy which is causing this is in fact flowing from the future into the past. Rather it is seen as the dying embers of a (Big Bang)
    But what this interpretation, IE energy being the formal cause, does not explain, is “THE DIRECTION OF THE APPLE”. The same process could be applied to the apple either falling down or FALLING UP. Let us follow the falling up model. In this model time is seen as something that is simultaneously running in both directions but in such a diffuse way as to allow an entropic balancing act between the entropy levels of the past and the future. The subjective experience of effects is based on their formal direction, cause and effect. But in the dark economy of data led statistical inferences about what might be a total “peak gain” of universal materiel and its reactions and compositions, we find there is plenty of space for unitary data about the past present and future to be being shared faster than the speed of light, and to a degree that they agree at all times down to the Planck level and perhaps beyond. This diffusion of past into future and future into past is perhaps the prime interference pattern from which we derive all static and raw stochastic flow. As transformative to our perspective these things may be, yet they would have been able to pass next to unnoticed for a long time because of the division of our subjective consciouness’s into effect seeking and cause producing modes of being. Perhaps there are other modes of being, such as: cause seeking and effect producing? This diffuse nature of past to future and future to past particle behaviour streams may mean that timetravel would be impossible without calculating the billions of precise coordinates and vectors of the target future/past as it sleeted through the cosmos in particles smaller than planck length. An unenviable task, and one that would tire a mortal, in the sense that our twenty first century mind can accomodate.

    There exists a matrix of energy, coalesced into matter. Matter has various forms according to how much energy it can or does contain. In classical cause and effect mechanics, entropy is subtracted leaving the composition of that energy depleted by the particular amount of matter moving a particular amount of distance. When all the classical laws of momentum function as they are described, we can predict the finish point of the apple (roughly) when we know its starting position and topology and weight and local gravitational constants. But what if The apple is not moving from creation to annihilation according to classical physics, but in fact entropy is being used to create the apple and order its movement and package it neatly within the tree it fell from which shrinks until it is merely the seed of an earlier parent apple which repeats the procedure Ad Infinitum, or at least Ad Tempus Positum? In this scenario, we have yet to encounter the first ever apple. We have instead seen successive generations of its ancestors starting with the last and moving towards a future time in which the apple is finally created.

    Gravity would in fact be the force which moves apples from a state of “decay” (in which it contains the possibility of rebirth) up into a relationship with a parralel process,”the apple tree” into which it is consumed and loses mass and energy until it becomes in a nonlinear way what it first was, an apple. Note that in this scenario, it is not assumed that the apple does not fall; it is instead implied that the apple falls down for some subjective reference points, and falls up for other, diffusion enmeshed reference points. Here we have inverted entropy, the greater and more prevalent entropy that truly strips what is created away and neatly packs away everything that it was once composed of. In the case of these kind of biological systems, we can see that instead of multiplication and fruitfulness in the “time forward” order of things, if we reverse the temporality of the apple tree we see it as a classical non linear system which has periodicity and recursiveness. And as with all such systems, they arise spontaneously from a given function, a particular equation or pattern of spacing and series enumeration. In “reversible temporality and inverse entropy”, we have yet to meet the ultimate genesis of the apple. It lays somewhere along the axis of our “future”. The past contains the very final apple, which we, given our three and a half dimensional mindset and habituation, would call “the first” apple. predated by a theorised Big Bang. The “first” apple, may in fact be the very last according to that view, and we may be yet arrive at the level of entropy that is reversed to “Create” the apple.

    “The last shall be first and the first last” -Yeshua Ha’Massiach.

    Is it more logical to say: “The electron somehow went through both slits to create an interference pattern on the screen” or “The interference pattern on the screen emitted an electron that found its way “back” to its most coherant terminus”?

    Going back to our apple on the ground, where was it a week ago? hanging on the tree. Where was it a month before that? much smaller! (Entropy?) and a year before that? Part of a smaller tree! (entropy) and a decade before that? A mere sapling. (entropy!) And 3.5 billion years ago? basic elements burning into near extinction. (the expenditure of all energy, resulting in total entropy.)

    Perhaps we need a “Big Band” theory. The universe is like a big band or orchestra that rehearses its song (backwards) and then plays it perfectly (forwards).

    Perhaps this seems counter intuitive because it is “Counter” intuitive.
    Maybe this is why Humans (and other animals) need a Parietal interface to engage with reality. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parietal_lobe)
    As it is, it can be effectively argued that the best kind of forward thinking is reversed; with the finishing touch being the first thought. Our temporal direction allows us to utilise energy in order to achieve things, but the logistics of that utilisation have to be concieved of first, or the plan cannot but fail. Thus we can say that any great endeavour is concieved backwards. This “planning for purpose” is an essential strata in our temporal affairs and given the dictates of our journey and direction through four dimensional longitude, it requires us to think conceptually and to think about the intended effect before offering possible causes for it. The human mind has proved itself to be sublimely inventive in this capacity, and has produced much technology that utilises reversed thinking to produce effects far in advance of previous generations.

    I believe that this conceptual level of “reversible temporality” is what is missing from the interpretation of quantum datasets and experimental results, and invites us to wonder anew at the future, while observing the past with greater understanding of its function and composition.

    Perhaps the temporal direction, the flow of intention on a physical and universal scale, is something that has polarity and switches back and forth according to a stabilised chaotic function. This would explain the “Big Crunch” cosmology as a heartbeat of the universe being a poleshift in temporal direction. in the centre of eternity is a fulcrum of directive power, sending backwards logistics toward the “big bang” and forward logistics toward the “big crunch” or the dissolute expansion into the background of nothing-ness. This chaotic diffusion of energy , radiating from a central or fluctuating point on the axis of time rather than from one of the ends of the axis, can exert some remedial and stabilising effect on either end of the axis to prevent energy being lost or becoming static. This would make it even more likely to be a feature of the wavelength background of the universe.

    The munchhasuen trilemma similarly relates to the Big Bang and what might of created it. By allowing for the possibilty of reversible temporality we are able to suggest that entropy can become inverted within the fourth dimension and this then releases us from and resolves the trilemma. Everything makes a lot more sense once it is regarded that we may be heading into the past, and not as we suspected, into the future, and that we have reversed the terms past and future for the practical reasons of our own temporal logistics and natural direction of thought and action within our observations of the four-dimensional space.

    Certainly our observations of quantum effects have left us with nagging questions concerning the temporal flow of energy. Entanglement, for example, when viewed through the classical filter of physical mechanics seems to be as Albert Einstien put it, “spooky action at a distance” But if we can theorise that the temporal flow is reversed in the case of energy, then we can allow our past to be the terminus of their existence and the future to be their point of encoding and creation. Perhaps it is exactly when we observe them being destroyed that they are in fact being created with tandem chirality and polarised characteristics? we are used to the fireworks of OUR direction of entropy. we have found from watching film backwards what some effects look like in reverse. There is always entropy, always limitation and conservation of means. If they are in fact dancing backwards to one day meet and unify then we have, as it were, a manifest picture of mythological destiny in action, further inviting us to consider a numinous hand at work in their existence.

    It is also the case that Heisenburgs uncertainty principle allows us to reflect on the temporal signiture of the times. Perhaps the reason that we cannot identify both the spin and direction of particles can be linked to our attempts to utilise modified and forward facing energy to detect these things. The particle itself is recieving the greater balance of its momentum from the future,kinetically, and we are trying to measure its past performance and predict its outcome. while this may work some of the time for comglomerations of matter, when an electron is isolated it has no option but to operate on default energy logistics. It is not so much being propelled as it is being attracted by a future event. Until that event happens, it cannot be predicted with certainty as it may recive further and differing attraction from the future event that alters its characteristics. Thus our attempt to penetrate its mysterious agenda is occluded by its inate isolation and utter dependence on future events and cannot be known fully because it is traveling toward the future much quicker than our senses are, being less inhibited by mass and conglomerations of matter which become quorate about their behaviour to local conditions. This is a further example of how our abilities to penetrate the secrets of matter and energy are limited by our own configuration of matter and energy which is currently causing us to be aware,and yet ignorant of so many strata of things. What is needed is to liberate ourselves from a monological attitude towards the temporal flow of fundamental energy systems and embrace a conceptual model that supposes that our future is also affecting them, and even perhaps, deciding what we have been able to observe thus far.

    So it is that although we observe gravity to be an emanation of mass, because we are used to observing it through the inverse square law, we are unwilling to see it as an emanation of mass and instead consider it as a property of space. It occurs to me that God doesnt just ride the motorcycle of creation, but that at times he does stunts, wheelies and even rides it backwards sometimes! In other words, gravity could flow in BOTH directions, on the sub-Plank level in a diffuse interference with our half of the fourth dimension. This interference could also extend from our half (Past and Present) into its opposite entropy balance (The Near present and the future.)

  • Hi Paul,

    This is wonderful, and very much in line with my thinking, as well as the Syntropy theory of Ulisse di Corpo and Antonella Vaninni. My book Time Loops covers recent ideas about retrocausation in physics. I think we are approaching a turning point in scientific and societal acceptance of the bidirectionality of causation, and as you say, the implications will be enormous, for our understanding of many natural and cultural phenomena as well as technology.

    Cheers,

    Eric