Poemander

Is there a requirement for plants to grow in soil? The common answer would be yes, but not after the hydroponic methods were developed and successfully applied to grow vegetation literally in the air just with enough supply of water and nutrients. So are the many common doctrines there waiting for the time to be rebutted including the doctrine of time itself. Is there a requirement for the time to flow in a certain sequence, i.e. from past to future? The common answer would be certainly yes, but only if the nutrients of this flow originate in the soils of choice. The choice to the time is what the soil is to the plants; it is an aggregate and a bedding. It is a riverbed where the waters of time flow polishing the colorful pebbles of free will. People need this flow as they are mesmerized by these shiny pebbles, they look at them through the jovial stream and stick their hands in the waters fetching these mignificent marbles. Yes, the time only flows because of these choices, because of the illusion of free will. Take these pebbles out of the stream, leave them up on the sun and they loose their shine, loose their authenticity: just the dull pebbles is what they are.

So are your decisions – same and unauthentic once you have fetched them out from the rivers of time. And if you could swim freely up and down this river, you wouldn't really care about choice, because you would swim back and unwind your decision with ease or sprint fast forward and 'foresee' what to chose. In fact, it is your choices that are precluding this sort of freedom. You, yourself, want to make choices and thus be subjected to the current of time. In a similar way, you wouldn't go travel if you were wanting to stay home, would you?

There is a strong correlation between the perception of time and the perception of freedom to choose. Both deal with perception because both are illusory and without essence; yes, illusory, to the bystander, not participating in choices and hence not subjected to time. The only issue is that you can't become this 'bystander' by choice since your decision to stop choosing is also a choice. People will learn, or re-learn, to time-travel only if they cede altogether the functioning of choices. To swim in the currents of time you'll have to be allegorically naked, or literally, 'stripped' of any choice-making abilities.

Seems farfetched and impossible? But just think how impossible it seems to trees the idea of land-travel; they'll have to be 'stripped' of roots and be uprooted to do what we do with such ease! Yet it isn't entirely a novelty to them, as they feel the dimensions of space with the expanse of hands- branches and by scattering their seeds into domains of the unknown. In the same manner we 'feel' the dimensions of time by spreading our minds into the future and into the past and also entrusting we the domains of the unknown to the children of ours, not unlike our parents did. So we do know time, yet we hardly recognize the obvious, the point of attachment – our roots. And I tell you that this attachment is your freedom of choice, a raft carrying you in the rapids of time, to which your are chained down by own device. Time-travel will only ever be made possible by departing from the comfort of house of indeterminism.

This is happening. Technology will move towards eliminating the need of free choice. The deterministic solutions will be found to be more efficient and the uncertainties will be removed like roadblocks. Probabilistic values will get merged across multiple planes, thus squeezing out the overall uncertainty and hence the need to make choices. This process has happened before when the Internet squeezed the distances out of communications and information transfer; distributed ledger squeezing the need for trust out of value exchange.

But there is a downside to it, since nothing disappears completely, the over concentration on one side triggers the overreaction on the other. And if you almost eliminate the uncertainty by reducing it to just a minuscule decimal of a percent, it still doesn't go away, instead, it stages the most violent comeback from the places most unforeseen.

Ever wondered why there are sudden epidemics and cataclysms? They are a response to an over-stretch on the other side:

The invention of internal combustion engine improved the productivity, but weakened the human's body. Fast forward, the internet has erased the distances for informational exchange improving efficiency in communications, yet it killed the quality of it. Block chain is improving the value transfer, yet it will forever distort the understanding of values. The subsequent big technological wave will be improving efficiencies in decision-making, yet it will annihilate the illusion of freedom of choice, practically ceding the power of will to AI and mathematical certainly. And we know that certainty is an infinite combination of probabilities to which humans only privileged through death, no more no less.

So what are humans to be left with? Nothing, and that's, sadly, the whole point of evolution. I wish this wasn't true.

Humankind is heading towards that point where everyone will get eventually stripped naked of all delusions, of all faiths and hopes, all preceding dramas. There'll be nothing more to trust, aspire, hypothesize, imagine, for god sake!

And upon reaching that point there will be nothing left to do but to look at themselves and they'll see nothing but a trail of archaic junk. And they'll roam naked amidst worthless piles of rubbish not knowing what to do and where to go. They will not get aroused at nakedness, neither will they feel shame, nor excitement, because all these feelings will be lying there, among the abandoned junk. All the noises will have merged into one deafening silence and they roam pointlessly until discovering, to their great surprise, yes it's been a long time since they've last been surprised, a little tree in the middle of detritus, a tree with the succulent fruits, the taste of which hardly anyone remembers. “Have you enjoyed thine fruits?”, would inquire of them the serpent, awakened by this usurping silence.

“Ye shall not surely die, I remember we said, and here you are as good as dead”. “But, god, haven't you learnt to be like him? Haven't you learnt the futility of all, save the miracle of procreation?”, continued the serpent. “Now is your turn to let go. Let go of your creation!”, demanded the serpent as two shadows appeared in the distance. “All done, all settled, you need to leave, but don't forget to tell them not to eat of this tree while we take care of the rest”, whispered the serpent right in their ear. And they departed into realms beyond space-time, into realms we can hardly imagine because our imagination is only a byproduct of their dreams.

So forth they came, moved by the intent and curiosity, two shadows made in the image and the resemblance, the bone of the boneless, and we greeted them, by the tree, and offered we the taste of freedom, for now they are free, for now they are Humans.