Poemander

I'm sorry, but this might get awkward. We are here on a slippery slope and there is no rail or anything of that sort to stop us from tumbling further and further down the hill of featureless reasoning. A dog has a greater chance of catching its own tail than us, preventing this fall. Your only grasp is yourself, but the more you try to brace yourself, the more awkward and unpleasant the fall gets. So, why not just enjoy the ride? Not in some freakish, a “not give a damn” way, but in a way that the laughter is still a laughter and the owe is still an owe.

There are two ways you can look at it yielding the same result: having it here and now or having it anywhere and anytime – predilection is yours. Fundamentally, the difference is minuscule, so negligible that by simply not selecting 'somewhere' and 'sometime' one necessarily lands in 'here and now' and 'anywhere and anytime' simultaneously – the best of both worlds, so to say. Strangely enough, 'any' and 'every' are not very far either; where the former may sound probabilistic, the later is certainly deterministic, but who cares? If one is capable of scoring 'every', then picking 'any' of those is a piece of cake. Likewise, an open access to 'any' is just another way of having 'every' without bothering to actually having them. Pretty simple and self-explanatory, the only tricky bit here is not to go selecting 'some', because by going that route you suddenly rupture the uniformity of reality and start bumping into protruding edges of seemingly finite objects. Well, this doesn't stop the tumbling except you could have enjoyed a smoother ride, so down we go.

The reality is here and now, shall we say. But to be 'here and now' is a long forgotten skill, it used to be a natural state – you didn't have to learn this in the distant past, it was our nature, it was an allegorical Golden Age of humanity, of the universe and of the state of mind. Does it represent a particular historical epoch? The same era coinciding in the same time period with the various phenomena or rather a concept of periodicity inherent in the cycles of nature? I don't know, but this is quite irrelevant to our discussion, and I'd like to concentrate on the allegory as a reference to a state of 'on-time': in the mind, in the fabric of the universe and in the reference to reality as such.

We learn from mythology about the Golden Age as an epoch of bliss with little to no concern about the trivialities of life or any concern for death as such.

It transpired into a Silver Age, then Bronze and then Iron Age proceeding in a downward spiral towards some point where mounting constraints seemingly preclude any possibility of a god-given blissful existence and the experience of reality in its fullness and totally.

If 'no-time' is the essence of real, than what is the experience of time and everything that flows out of it?

Shall we draw some insight here from the creation myths? Perhaps a story covered in weirdness and ambiguity if we are to take a heed from the horse's mouth of the Hellenic myths. A story where Cronus was persuaded to castrate his father, Uranus, thus striking the beginning of time as we know it. Just for a moment, imagine that these myths are not basless fables as we tend to believe. What if they are the allegories based on retold stories from the times far immemorial then Hellenes themselves? What if these stories contain a deeper dimension of ancient wisdom providing us with a philosophical insight into understanding of the world within and around us?

I find the above allegory to be quite significant: Cronus(Saturn) is the son of Uranus(the Sky) and the father of Zeus(Jupiter), Cronus is commonly associated with Time and Uranus with Sky (planet Uranus is named after him and not the other way round) or the space as such. But the deepest meaning of this story contains in an almost absurd proposition that the 'space' could have somehow existed without the 'time' in the age of Uranus.

Binding it with the Golden Age we can see why it was natural to be in a “now” state. Gaia, the Earth and mother of Cronus, has persuaded him to depose his father. The allegory of castration means the potency has been taken away. The dimension of space has lost its potency to the dimension of time. The reign of Time had began, but it doesn't mean that the Space had ceased to exist, it continued to be, but latent, nonproductive. What does it all mean? Does this story give us any clue about the fabric of the universe and the reality we find ourselves in?

With the Time ego was born. Ego only exists in the future or in the past, it cannot be in the “now”. Ego needs a dimension of time. Without the ego there is no time. Thus the story also signifies the birth of ego.

Still, what's the significance of this wierd myth, detached from any meaningful sense, one may rightfully ask? And so, I would agree if not for the stark resemblance to the descriptions of the early universe from the view of astrophysics. From them we learn about almost instantaneous inflation of space past the big bang. The universe 'unfolded' into billions of lightyears of in a matter of Planck seconds, so to say, then it curved producing a time vector upon which the expansion proceeded albeit at a slower rate. It appears to me that the myth alludes to an idea that the initial state of inflation, at least as far as we can see, was indeed the 'golden age', the age of space but 'no time'. And was the mention of gold hinted to the immense heat of the universe at its 'early' stages or simply to the notion of warmth as a state of bliss we don't know, but I see no difficulty fitting the eternity of 'golden age' into a diminutive Planck era of big bang – there was no time to be concerned about after all, yet this still wasn't the beginning.

Most creation myths mention 'darkness' as the primordial and eternal source of everything. The significance of this lays in the fact that light will require the dimension of time and space for its manifestation. Once manifested, light, one may say, rules these dimensions, bracing them with cosmological constant – impenetrable speed of light which tightly binds causes to their corresponding effects. Outside of these dimensions, light may only exist as potential. Darkness, however, being the absence of light, doesn't seem to require time to exist and may as well dwell in realms not connected to space. In those realms all causes and effects remain dormant in their entirety.

Whether darkness itself is a representation of chaos or the source of thereof is debatable, yet it is a state of equilibrium of all powers and potentials – what else is chaos if not the order of a different magnitude?

Next, if any consequential logic ever makes sense in the state of no-time, creation myths proceed with the birth of the goddess who, in turn, will have to create her consort for bring all else to life. To understand this we need to delve into conceptualization of space as an intelligent construct. This is precarious, and I promptly dismiss and dogmatic interpretation while attempting to look into most mysterious subject of all.

There was an era, an epoch when a single point would equate to infinity while still remaining a point. And I should abrogate the word 'was', as completely inappropriate in the context of primordial eternity if not for the lack a better alternative. So, this was the era when one was indistinguishable from zero and 'nothing' would contain 'everything' in the state of an absolute certainty of all the dormant possibilities. A dimensionless state yet containing all of the nine dimensions, dormant within it. This was the era of Tiamat, the era of an ordered chaos, not concerned with space, not ruptured by the time. Within it exists the intent, an intelligent intention of an immaculate sharpness and immense strength. There's no limit to its powers since infinity knows no limits, however, in relative terms, it doesn't have to be enormous: it may be as little as a byte of information, just a word would be enough to set the whole thing in motion. We don't know how this 'intent' came about, but this may be the case that we, ourselves, could have planted it and have simply forgotten where and how. And when the seed came to germination, it popped out as a dot, beginning to unfold, like petals, one by one the curled up dimensions of space-time and with them the dormant possibilities of a self-probing existence.

The goddess danced. But there was no observer and thus it was impossible to distinguish a dance from no dance and a motion from no motion. The beginning is always feminine and this makes sense if we see it as a principle of initiation, an opening and a birthplace for the world of possibilities.

A bottomless dot, a void of no dimension and no space begins to spin, invisibly, intrinsically, and from an absolute certainty comes the array of probabilities. Uncertainty of place, but not yet of the future. The position blurred and in a moment, one became the two, because one is none without the corresponding point of reference. One became the matter and another the antimatter. They didn't cancel each other out, they coexisted because time wasn't born yet to give them this opportunity and the one-dimensional space existed without the time.

The sych of Cronus is the time itself which is similarly curved in the scale of coordinates. From the depth of big bang it slashes the latent eternity of space sprawling in both directions: south and the north, matter and antimatter.

Time, overtaking the dimensions of space, blooms like a flower, its petals unfold wrapping around the spaceless primordial darkness and setting in action the mechanisms of cause and effect. For the observer within this flower, space appears as disappearing into nowhere as it wraps around the time curve, creating the phenomena of a cosmological horizon at the mouth of the flower. As time unfolds further, it starts curving onto itself and the petals of a 'south' or 'matter' gravitate towards the petals of a 'north' or 'antimatter'. From the initial hourglass shape, space-time is becoming to resemble a toroid, and when the petals eventually meet, all matter and antimatter gets annihilated in a spectacular fashion.

A tremendous energy released as the result with no “external” space or time available to accommodating its burst; instead it bursts outside-in and thus gets trapped in the form of an unrealised, enormous potential. And it doesn't matter whether it gets too small or too big, whether it will restart itself again or not: scale and probabilities do not matter in this state of reality. What matters is that there, somewhere outside of space-time exists potential, a cosmological seed containing yourself, myself and the whole wholeness of our imaginable and unimaginable reality. Hence, the tumble continues.