Time Travel, Anyone?
[thoughts from ~burning woman~ by Sha’Tara]
For most people, doing “homework” is not a favorite pastime. I guess the concept leaves a bitter taste in the stomach after so much grinding for marks in school that ultimately mean so little. Waste of time, so it seems and so it is.
But since this is about “homework” let’s make sure we do not confuse school style “homework” with the real “homework” that comes from the desire to really know. By that, I don’t mean sitting in front of a TV watching performing actors spewing out disjointed “news” or in front of a computer watching endless streams of disinformation scroll by. That’s entertainment, cheap drugs or addiction. What I mean by homework here is the deliberate choice to sit quietly and think about one’s observations, whatever the source of such.
Lately I’ve come across quite a bit of “information” on time travel and the concept of living eternally. Some came via science fiction reading. Some via movies and some via internet news blogs. Coincidence? Perhaps. Perhaps it could also be the result of “me” – my mind – having traveled towards an attractive and challenging concept and forming a vortex drawing whatever information is available around the concept of both, time travel and eternity.
Leaving eternity aside for now, the possibility of time travel is not a new phenomenon. It has fascinated people for a long time and in recent times has become a serious feature of scientific studies. Time travel, under certain circumstances it would appear, is an actual possibility. So, what does that mean to someone like me; someone without a college education or degree; an eclectic sort of individual who “believes all things, believes in nothing?”
Simply this: it means that life as we are expected to accept it, and expected to believe it is, is not actually that at all. It means that we are not stuck between a rock and a hard place. It means that beyond the social joke earth has become there is a purpose to the universe and beyond: purpose to the whole measureless expanse of the cosmos. It means that we are not only more than what we are programmed to believe, but beyond anything we can imagine.
Pretty wild conclusions to reach based on such paltry evidence, don’t you think? Laughable, right? OK, have your laugh, then read on.
Since even the longest journey must begin with a single step and we have to begin somewhere, I’m going to ask you to think along with me and I promise that it won’t hurt too much. It will be like imagining what it would be like to give up on your favorite doll, transformer or toy tank and discover the world as life in puberty will emote it to be. It’s a grow up sort of thing.
Let’s look at the toys about to be abandoned. Are they really worth staying attached to? The doll is not a real child, and you can now have your very own living baby. The truck cannot be driven but you can now begin to think seriously of the day you can drive a real truck.
What I mean is, you can allow yourself to dare grow up, face the confusion and fear, and still go on exploring. As a time traveler, you will not be experiencing change as if you were leaving childhood to enter puberty: you can actually go back to playing with your toys when this experiment is over – or you can hop the time-cycle and look around at this or that “when” period, even into the far future (with a bit of practice of course). These toys of yours, your religious faith in some heaven after you die; or your belief that your personal reality, life, consciousness, terminates at death: how can you be sure it is so? First of all, how can some of you believe in life after death and some of you believe in death after death and some of you not even know which from what? See the dichotomy? None of you can be right if all of you believe the others are wrong.
Too difficult to comprehend? First of all, nature doesn’t work like that. Only “man” can firmly believe in things that cannot be known or can will himself to believe that he cannot know what, of necessity for his life to make sense, he does know. That is not natural, that’s insanity. Man, as a species, is quite insane but because his insanity is endemic he cannot see it nor comprehend why someone should see him this way. But a time traveler who can see man through his stages of social “evolution” and “devolution” can readily and justly make the statement without equivocation or embarrassment because only the time traveler knows this truth. And only the time traveler understands what it means.
Now, would you like to become a time traveler? It’s incredibly simple, as simple as it is difficult. A question of mind over matter. Your body has nothing to do with this, so forget the time machine and what you should pack to go watch Genghis Khan’s hordes thunder over Asia or the Romans invading the British Isles. You won’t be moving, you’ll be going inside, deeper than you have ever gone before and you will teach yourself to listen. Time expresses like music and you learn to let your emotions ride these notes; the thunder of earthquakes and the bombs that obliterated Hiroshima and Nagasaki; the soft sighs of wavelets on a lakeshore and lovers in each others’ arms. You can hear the lonely primordial wind in the tall grasses of the Mesozoic and the reverberating whoosh of an Andromedan cruiser reaching space-folding acceleration. You can hear your mother’s voice when you were two years old and the laughter of your own child far from the confines of a vanished planet that was called Earth.
You can dream. You can day dream. You can look into a night sky and even if the pollution allows you to see only a few stars, you can open your mind to them and wander out there. Some of those stars are long, long gone which means that what you are “seeing” is a distant past. You can read fictitious stories of people who travel time and join them on their adventures. You can, once freed of Matrix shackles, begin to explore your own past and future lives and you can use those remembrances to set a course for yourself right here, right now that leads you on an eternal path. This is not an exercise in semantics, this is another reality.
I must remind you, once more, that whatever you believe now about death and beyond has even less “proof” than what I propose. Furthermore, in case you want to argue the point, let me say this: unlike the collective aspect of your doll and toy world my proposal is unique in that it does not involve any one else. No one can follow you or even guide you. No one can promise you anything good or bad, or threaten you with dire consequences should you not heed them. This is the freedom path. You’re entirely on your own. You make all the calls and you play the game according to your own rules. And... you will certainly suffer many consequences for the choices you make on this path, but you will know that you will never die, just go along from change to change; from the curious to the curiouser.
Ok, if you insist that you need a time vehicle and you want to give it a name, it’s imagination.
If I Ever Wanted Time Travel I Go Back Meet My Intellectual Girl
Friend,Peggy -Hug Her Tell How Much I Cared About Her- Give Her My
Business Card E Mail And Address,Call Me In Future!
WHY!? Simply The Man (God) He'd Find Way To F--k It Up And
I'd Lose Her Peggy Anyways!
Other Than I'd Buy Lot Of Car Parts $ Bring Them Back With Me
To Fix My Cars!
ITS YOUR FATE AS MINE IS DESTINED TO BE!
You May Be Think You're Different Than Me -BUT:
In End You Get Meet Man (God) You Either Go Up Or
You Go Down--Take Your Pick!!
I Didn't Have To Die 4 Times To Come Back
Tell It Like Is-I Am REALIST Not An IDEALIST!
You All Have To Drop Dead -Die To Find Out
What It Is That Really Awaits Your Sorry Asses!
Do Not FEAR (Your) DEATH! FEAR Where You Are Going!
TRASK...
For example, after thinking about the concept for over 20 years, I finally wrote down what I thought it would be like to be visited by extraterrestrial beings. I had heard about the discovery of the Ice Man of the Alps with all of his daily survival equipment intact, and, giving him the proper accolade of high intelligence to have lived so long (47 years at approximately 3500 BC), I envisioned the advent of the matrix, already started in the Middle East, to introduce a decline in overall human intelligence.
While I got the Ice Man wrong in depicting his death as old age freezing to death, later discovery determined that he had an arrowhead in his back. On a revision of the book, I corrected his demise to match archaeological fact. Following the extraterrestrial "saviors" of the earth, was a much more difficult task. I steered widely away from the soap opera-ish versions of space travel I so often read in science fantasy for something that was described by readers as "frightening," although it was as benign, nonviolent, and nonthreatening as possible. And, I was chastised for not providing more "detail." How could I, a mere earthling, imagine great detail of a spaceship (the metallic spaceships of most science-fiction are totally improbable however artistically depicted). So I did not dwell on detail except to describe the cohesiveness of the travelers and the concepts required for the ship to travel great distances gathering fuel as it proceeded and repairing itself like a living entity as it encountered occasional debris at very high rates of speed.
Like my mother told me after reading my second novel. "Ron, I certainly hope some of those things you wrote about come true." So do I.
Ron
Love ya!
Jane