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death
February 2009 
Your sixth dimensional self
Posted on Jun 13th, 2007
by 
tenthdimension
tenthdimension
Thank you to everyone for your thoughts and prayers about my mom, who gave us quite a scare for the last couple of weeks but is more stabilized now. That's the good news, but with inoperable lung cancer this is all just a matter of time, and trying to make her comfortable as possible now for her last few months.
I was talking with my friend Gevin Giorbran, author of Learning to See Timelessness, about how the wide perspective of the multiverse and the "infinities upon infinities" concept that he and I have independently come up with ways to describe gives one a calmness in the face of death. Yes, I am sad that my mom's time with us is ending here, but she believes and I believe that the spirit carries on to whatever degree that it is interested in doing so after death. My particular belief system goes into aspects of this in much more depth than hers, but on that basic point we are in agreement and she and I take much comfort in that knowledge.
One of the more extraordinary claims I make in my book is that what we think of as the "soul" is more akin to Marvin Minsky's "Society of Mind" concept, and that we spend our lives integrating and rejecting various meme-systems floating out there in the dimensions, and the particular subset we have taken on at any one moment defines who we are... but this is a system that changes somewhat over our lives. This gives us an easy way to answer the old conundrum, where do all the new souls come from? There were less than ten million of us on the planet in 10,000 BC, 2.5 billion of us in 1950, now we're around 6.5 billion! Statistically, the chances of any one of us being the reincarnated soul of a person who lived on this planet in the last two thousand years are becoming vanishingly small, down into lottery ticket territory. Unless...
By the time we have imagined that timelessness is a real description of our place in the cosmos, and that what we think of as a soul is a specific collection of memes, then there is no reason to assume that there is a limit to the perceived number of souls, or the locations in time of those souls. In fact, there is no reason to assume that you couldn't walk up to someone on the street right now and realize that you have met another incarnation of yourself! But it gets even stranger than that.
According to my way of imagining the dimensions, in our physical bodies we are each on the equivalent of a mobius strip, travelling down a specific "line of time" in the fourth dimension, unaware of the twists and turns that we are making in the dimensions above. I have written much about what this means in the fifth dimension, including the fact that Theodor Kaluza proved and Einstein eventually agreed that the field equations of gravity and light can be combined if they are defined in the fifth dimension, not the fourth-dimensional space-time that seems to have become stuck in the general public's mind more easily. Most people are unaware that the basic aspects of our physical reality are being defined in the fifth dimension.
Imagining my fourth dimensional body as an undulating snake, with my conceived self at one end and my deceased self at the other, is one of the starting points of my visual way of imagining the dimensions. Imagining the fifth dimensional branches of choice and possibility that extend out from this moment shows how a hard determinist could look back in time and see the proof that there is only one reality, because after the fact that is all we can see; while a person believing in free will can look forward into the fifth dimension and see that their future is not written in stone after all. However: going through that exercise artificially diminishes the the size and import of what has come before, since the undulating snake leading back to the beginning of my physical body seems to be much smaller than the exploding dandelion seed of the possible branches set before me from this moment forward.
So now, let's think of our bodies in the sixth dimension. Where is my sixth dimensional self the largest? If you think about it for a moment, you will see it is at the moment of conception. From there, the branching possibilities that will get me to some version of my adult self are exponentially larger than any time thereafter. This seems to relate to Terrence McKenna's "timewave zero" concept, which suggests that novelty increases as the end of the universe approaches, but it is the mirror image of his idea: the possible cusps of change that an embryo or even a smal child have before them are absolutely immense compared to the more limited subset that we have left to choose from by the time we are adults. Here is one of the more often-quoted paragraphs from my book:
"The beautiful blossoming potential we see in a newborn child is an immensely attractive thing. The angels of possibility that swirl around a toddler’s head can be breathtaking if we catch even a fleeting glimpse. And there is nothing as sad as the tragedy of a child who has been mistreated or abused, and whose life may never be the same because of it. Even from our limited window in the lower dimensions, it is easy for us to intuitively understand what is magical and wonderful about the promise of a child, a promise that is held within the sixth dimension."
Religious teachings which say we should approach the Lord as a little child resonate with this idea as well. That reverence, that sense of wonder, that appreciation of the novelty and the vast potential that are held in every instant of time, in every quark and neutrino, and in the spirit energy all around us is part of an awakening that all of us as adults yearn for. On the other hand, whether we are talking about the death of a spirit or the death of a physical body, what we are really talking about is what happens when those processes cease to be interested in "what happens next".
What does timelessness mean for me and my mom? Even right now there are parts of me and all her loved ones that are waiting to greet her on the other side, outside of the limited realm of spacetime. And because time is an illusion, it means that once any of us breaks out of our physical reality, there we will find all the other branches of our sixth dimensional selves, waiting to greet us and compare notes on the journey.
And that is what enjoying the journey should always be about.
Rob
I was talking with my friend Gevin Giorbran, author of Learning to See Timelessness, about how the wide perspective of the multiverse and the "infinities upon infinities" concept that he and I have independently come up with ways to describe gives one a calmness in the face of death. Yes, I am sad that my mom's time with us is ending here, but she believes and I believe that the spirit carries on to whatever degree that it is interested in doing so after death. My particular belief system goes into aspects of this in much more depth than hers, but on that basic point we are in agreement and she and I take much comfort in that knowledge.
One of the more extraordinary claims I make in my book is that what we think of as the "soul" is more akin to Marvin Minsky's "Society of Mind" concept, and that we spend our lives integrating and rejecting various meme-systems floating out there in the dimensions, and the particular subset we have taken on at any one moment defines who we are... but this is a system that changes somewhat over our lives. This gives us an easy way to answer the old conundrum, where do all the new souls come from? There were less than ten million of us on the planet in 10,000 BC, 2.5 billion of us in 1950, now we're around 6.5 billion! Statistically, the chances of any one of us being the reincarnated soul of a person who lived on this planet in the last two thousand years are becoming vanishingly small, down into lottery ticket territory. Unless...
By the time we have imagined that timelessness is a real description of our place in the cosmos, and that what we think of as a soul is a specific collection of memes, then there is no reason to assume that there is a limit to the perceived number of souls, or the locations in time of those souls. In fact, there is no reason to assume that you couldn't walk up to someone on the street right now and realize that you have met another incarnation of yourself! But it gets even stranger than that.
According to my way of imagining the dimensions, in our physical bodies we are each on the equivalent of a mobius strip, travelling down a specific "line of time" in the fourth dimension, unaware of the twists and turns that we are making in the dimensions above. I have written much about what this means in the fifth dimension, including the fact that Theodor Kaluza proved and Einstein eventually agreed that the field equations of gravity and light can be combined if they are defined in the fifth dimension, not the fourth-dimensional space-time that seems to have become stuck in the general public's mind more easily. Most people are unaware that the basic aspects of our physical reality are being defined in the fifth dimension.
Imagining my fourth dimensional body as an undulating snake, with my conceived self at one end and my deceased self at the other, is one of the starting points of my visual way of imagining the dimensions. Imagining the fifth dimensional branches of choice and possibility that extend out from this moment shows how a hard determinist could look back in time and see the proof that there is only one reality, because after the fact that is all we can see; while a person believing in free will can look forward into the fifth dimension and see that their future is not written in stone after all. However: going through that exercise artificially diminishes the the size and import of what has come before, since the undulating snake leading back to the beginning of my physical body seems to be much smaller than the exploding dandelion seed of the possible branches set before me from this moment forward.
So now, let's think of our bodies in the sixth dimension. Where is my sixth dimensional self the largest? If you think about it for a moment, you will see it is at the moment of conception. From there, the branching possibilities that will get me to some version of my adult self are exponentially larger than any time thereafter. This seems to relate to Terrence McKenna's "timewave zero" concept, which suggests that novelty increases as the end of the universe approaches, but it is the mirror image of his idea: the possible cusps of change that an embryo or even a smal child have before them are absolutely immense compared to the more limited subset that we have left to choose from by the time we are adults. Here is one of the more often-quoted paragraphs from my book:
"The beautiful blossoming potential we see in a newborn child is an immensely attractive thing. The angels of possibility that swirl around a toddler’s head can be breathtaking if we catch even a fleeting glimpse. And there is nothing as sad as the tragedy of a child who has been mistreated or abused, and whose life may never be the same because of it. Even from our limited window in the lower dimensions, it is easy for us to intuitively understand what is magical and wonderful about the promise of a child, a promise that is held within the sixth dimension."
Religious teachings which say we should approach the Lord as a little child resonate with this idea as well. That reverence, that sense of wonder, that appreciation of the novelty and the vast potential that are held in every instant of time, in every quark and neutrino, and in the spirit energy all around us is part of an awakening that all of us as adults yearn for. On the other hand, whether we are talking about the death of a spirit or the death of a physical body, what we are really talking about is what happens when those processes cease to be interested in "what happens next".
What does timelessness mean for me and my mom? Even right now there are parts of me and all her loved ones that are waiting to greet her on the other side, outside of the limited realm of spacetime. And because time is an illusion, it means that once any of us breaks out of our physical reality, there we will find all the other branches of our sixth dimensional selves, waiting to greet us and compare notes on the journey.
And that is what enjoying the journey should always be about.
Rob
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