We tend to think of time as a thread that stretches out behind us, gone forever, and stretching into the future, unseen. Now, many of us are familiar with the understanding that space is curved. It curves because of the masses in space, such as the heavy myriad balls that just hang there rather mysteriously and which we know as planets. Then there's even weightier and weird things, like black holes. Our universe is bizarre.
But it's not just space that's curved. So apparently is time. I have no idea what that ultimately means, but it sounds wild. If time is curved, then is it really the straight line our culture has believed?
Our western culture is now a devolution. Culture as a rich man's big dick. Of course our view of time would be sick. Thinned and narrowed. Far more logical to conclude, with many other cultures who didn't discard all their history and mythology in order to convert us to a spreadsheet, that time is more akin to a spiral.
Maybe time is more flexible than our one-way streetview. Maybe it's more malleable, movable. If so, we could theoretically see the future. Maybe different parts of time can inflence other parts. Maybe somehow we can do things now that influence the past. That sounds wild, but then again our universe seems pretty wild. Who knows what is possible in such a place as this?
Diana Goetsch's coma was possibly a little more involved than she'd likely imagined it would be:
My coma, which didn’t include the knowledge that I was in a coma, was a nonstop barrage of vivid mental events ... It would take hours to narrate even a fraction of what happened in that coma, which included dying three times, two memorial services, and writing one last “Life in Transition” column. I wrote it in my head, figuring I’d somehow manage to get to a computer, type it, and hit send, even though I was dead. It turns out, I revealed in the column, that you can’t write when you’re dead, which is a shame given all that time and perspective. I also realized there would be no more meals and, saddest of all, my transition was over. I’d never get to see how I would have turned out.
Writer and dreamer Robert Moss was a sickly child. Pronounced dead at three, he rallied but remained fragile. When he was nine, his sickliness reached its zenith and he died on the operating table. Except in his perception he wasn't dead. He was now somewhere else. And in this place he befriended people, he grew up, he had children and then grandchildren. He lived minutes, months, years and decades and then he died of old age and then woke up on the operating table as a nine year old boy in Australia.
Who knows what is real and what is imagined? How far do you go? How far your consciousness? Of course, the reality of our universe and our personal experiences may not turn out to be as LSD as our imaginations run to, but why not? These stories may all simply be explainable by neurons and biology and vivid imaginations, but how disappointing that would be. The crazy, excessive beauty that is the world around us, the awe, the sense at times when our monkey minds have settled that we really are all connected, calls for an awesome, beautiful, crazy story.
Perhaps the universe spirals out beyond our immediate body and at the very same time there is a universe spiralling inside us as well. Our perceptions flying both ways, the world inside connecting with the world outside, our inner life important and monumental and unrelatable and as Tardislike as the Milky Way. That way of viewing the world, a malleable, open experience of life flowing through and ever-changing, appears to have been the general view of things in times less distracted than ours and with far greater connection to the earth and its rhythms. Perhaps they knew a few things we've forgotten.
Someone somewhere has said that it's not incomprehensible that the universe was born spewed from a black hole. A most cosmic sized vaginal birth, that one. Therefore, it would be symmetrically wonderful if, at its future death, our universe gets sucked into a black hole only to be born again out through the other side.
We really still don't know so much. That can be scary. Our current culture is addicted to being able to squeeze all the crazy universe shit down into easily manageable and unscary Excel spreadsheet columns. But we are bigger than bureaucratic thinking. And now those who control the columns want to digitise us all inside their big hubris dicks.
We cannot let the big bureaucratic brain take over completely. Yes, it's scary living in a universe we can't control. It's also fucking exciting. Retreating from where we find ourselves right now, which happens to be a gloves-off class war where one side has an especially good PR team, is not responsible. That will lead to an even worse scenario than the current dystopic fuck-off that's sucked our collective strength out through a straw and told us the problem was us.
This universe so wild. And we are a part of it. Everything that now surrounds us tells us we are not. That we're not wild and danceable. That everything inside of us that we can dream and imagine is lies. But that's just the big dicks talking out of their arse. Zoom out further and look at where we live.