Good, smart science fiction provokes conversations about the nature of reality, the nature of us, and/or our potential future. Good sci fi lubricates the wheels of imagination, gets them spinning, and inspires more of itself within the receptive audience. It may make us feel like we’re on the cusp of something. Something great. A discovery to shatter our reality tunnel. A discovery that changes everything.
And then we invent. And invent. And carry forward. With momentum, we think. And that’s human evolution—no longer slaves to the whims of physics and nature, but masters of them.
The thing is… it’s wrong. Sci fi has it wrong. We are not characters separate and apart from environment. We are also environment. Not in environment, though that is the easiest way to perceive ourselves, but we are it, in the fabric of us. These discoveries, this pushing forward, is a means to maintaining the illusion that we are separate and above and going somewhere, steering our own vessel. But the reason we never get to where the inner compass of inspiration appears to be guiding us is because we are not in time—not truly. We are time. There is nowhere to get to. That inspirational feeling is telling us this, but we mistranslate it and then we act on that translation. We invent. More and more, we invent, but the climax never comes. The great promise of satiation never comes.
In its place? Addiction.
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We tend to talk about ourselves as if we’re in time and then fantasize about physically stepping out of it, but we are not separate beings who can move in and out of time. Time is a thread in the fabric of us. Dimensions of space/time don’t exist “out there,” they are us. We are the dimensions. But are we not also the projector of dimensions?
Since time is a measurement involving objects, we might suppose that timeless space is space without objects. But space without objects is nothing and nothing is a thing—a concept, albeit one without a thinking being imagining it. Nothingness is the formless awareness in which all forms are forming.
To measure something requires a being doing the measuring. Measurement comes from the living; time comes from you. You radiate time in simply existing. We could say that timelessness is projecting the body, which is an object made up of smaller and smaller objects, all projecting time. In dreaming, our lives become the inverse of this: We are, in dreams, like bodiless, timeless beings projecting forms that are extensions of us. However, even while the conscious perceiver of time is occupied with his/her own sensation of timelessness, the body is still clocking in. Time may lie dormant in conscious perception, but not in the body.
One wonders if there are beings whose wake-state lives are like our dreams—dreamers untethered to bodies and therefore time. Formless awarenesses inextricably linked to their surroundings not through clunky physical mechanics, but through direct perception, which is its own creating. Beings who, we would assume, are creating realities. But since they and the “realities” they are creating are inextricably linked, they have nothing to gain or lose by creating them. It’s simply what they do in being, much like Ultimate Consciousness.
One wonders. One wonders.
One wonders: Do we become them when we understand that we are them right now?