Would The Afterlife Be After Life?

Someone, who knows who they are I think, made a stimulating comment on here which I picked up on this morning and I thought it might be worth responding to, so here it is.

First of all, I should probably point out that when I say “afterlife” it could equally well apply to future reincarnation, and in fact I want to mention what’s on my mind regarding that too. I’ll start with an experience I had shortly after becoming Christian.

The high-control faith organisation I became part of at eighteen was very conventionally evangelically Christian, and people within it set out their own views regarding a Christian’s fate, and at this point a surprise might be in order because it wasn’t like the conventional views of Heaven and Hell. In fact, I’ll start with that. The “demotic” culturally Christian understanding of the fate of human beings is something like, if you have enough good deeds, when you die your soul leaves your body and goes to another realm immediately which we call Heaven, and if you’re bad enough, your soul leaves your body and goes to another realm immediately which we call Hell. Heaven is an eternal place of reward and Hell an eternal place of punishment. Human experience continues after death in this form.

The above is basically never what reflective evangelical Protestants believe. There may be recent converts who do believe that or perhaps people who don’t particularly involve themselves in Bible study, small groups, quiet times and the like, although it seems likely to me that people in their church are likely to pick up on that and encourage them. It’s also possible that since I’m of a more philosophical, and therefore perhaps surmised to be a more theological, bent than my born-again Christian peers at the time, the discussion may have led me in that direction and it’s actually very common for them not to have reconsidered this idea, but it seriously is not found, so far as I know, anywhere in evangelical fundamentalist Protestantism. There’s also the rather silly idea that Heaven is above the sky and Hell below the ground.

It’s more like this, as I understand it. Humans are widely considered to be new creations at conception and to persist until death as a combined living soul and body unit. They are once again new creations if they make a commitment to Christ, i.e. become Christian, and some believe that humans are soul and body before conversion and become soul, spirit and body afterward. On death, there is an interval during which individuals have no experience and are effectively asleep, a period referred to as “soul sleep”. At the Day of Judgement, humans receive a resurrection body which is perfect and incorruptible, which again is accompanied by their soul. They have memories of their life on Earth and proceed to be judged by God. If they have been saved, or would’ve been saved if they’d heard the Good News but didn’t, or had it distorted in some way, God conveys them to a non-Earthly realm where they live forever in bliss. If not, they are conveyed to another realm where they suffer forever. In either case, the soul is a new creation at conception which continues to be conscious, except when asleep, comatose or temporarily dead, experiencing time sequentially with a past, present and future whose quality does not change after death. In other words, they believe in an afterlife.

I can’t guarantee that I’ve got this right and there’s likely to be a fair bit of variation between views within evangelical Biblically literalist Protestant Christians. Some of them probably believe exactly this, others don’t. Another set of beliefs about this is arguably more Biblical, and it’s what the Jehovah’s Witnesses believe. This is that humans are created, possibly from conception, as physical conscious beings who continue in consciousness until death. After death they cease to be conscious until God chooses to resurrect them if they have died before the Day of Judgement, then they are recreated as physical conscious beings in perfected bodies. After being judged, if they are not saved in the JW sense, and I’m not sure what that is incidentally, they simply cease to exist. If they are saved, they inherit the Earth as an earthly paradise and as physical conscious beings. There are some other complications, but that’s basically it as I understand it, and again it involves sequential consciousness. After being resurrected, we will recall our former lives as having happened already and our experience will continue after the gap which began with our deaths, providing we’re saved of course. Jehovah’s Witnesses give the impression of being fundamentalist and conservative nowadays, but back in the day they were, as conservative evangelicals in the late 20th century CE have pointed out, actually liberal Christians, or rather descended from them. They don’t believe in a place of eternal conscious torment, that Jesus was divine or in a different heavenly realm. The Kingdom of God is on Earth for them. This is also reflected in their cosmopolitanism: JW Kingdom Halls are notable for their very representative congregations in ethnic terms, you can expect the same proportionof Blacks, Whites, South and East Asians among them as in the communities they’re in, and they are also truly global rather than being restricted to the English-speaking developed world. They are of course also wrong and a high-control spiritual organisation. Many would call them a cult. They’re sexist and homophobic. In my years-long discussion with JWs, the longer I conversed with them, the more convinced I became that they were wrong, both in terms of how they interpreted the Bible and in more general terms. There is also much to admire in them, for instance their pacifism.

Getting back to my involvement in the high-control religious group when I was eighteen, I found myself encountering recurrent major problems with their beliefs. I may write about this elsewhere, but it’s not important here. In terms of the way justice was served, I had a couple of major problems. One is that I felt, and still feel, that saving souls for Jesus becomes a substitute for actually doing good in the world. Another is that too much emphasis was placed on repentance, to the extent that Hitler could repent and be saved but some paragon of virtue could go to Hell for not being Christian. Consequently, I decided to revive my old belief in reincarnation. I had a model of the spiritual universe like this: space-time extends infinitely, or at least vastly, in all dimensions, in this case meaning the three of space and the one of time. Outside that realm are souls, which for the purposes of the model are points. From these points radiate lines to every incarnation each soul ever experiences, a bit like a spider with a colossal number of legs. From each of these lives, they learn important lessons and their position outside space and time is informed by the sum total of their experiences. That’s how I saw spiritual reality at the start of my adulthood.

There are problems with this model. The most important one I perceived at the time was the problem of why we don’t seem to have experienced previous lives as aliens or remember our future lives. If the enlightened oversoul to whom we are connected in our incarnate lives doesn’t experience time the way we do, and if we live in such a vast Universe the chances of being reincarnated in the immediate future or past as a human on this planet are extremely close to zero, yet we don’t seem to remember lives spent on different worlds. Moreover, since our eternal oversouls are not within time and reincarnation is not consecutive, there doesn’t seem to be anything stopping us from remembering future lives unless we are in general blocked from remembering other lives. Although there are said to be cases of people remembering former lives, I’m not aware of anyone claiming to remember their own future lives, although there do seem to be cases of premonition.

I stopped believing in that model fairly early on. It was mainly an attempt to make sense of life and the world spiritually in a hostile environment, so when I left that I was able to let go of that belief. For a while I was dualist, i.e. I believed in a soul and a body which existed in the same sense, i.e. two concrete, equally real entities which interact. The problem with that view may be that it’s “not even wrong” – it can’t be discussed rigorously because it falls apart under the most cursory examination. I don’t object to the idea of a soul, but I don’t think it’s a ghost in the machine, and it’s worthwhile digressing here into what I find a fascinating set of views held by some Christians.

Some Christians are physicalist, and I’d venture to say that some of them don’t realise they are but would if they thought about it. The problem with soul sleep after death followed by resurrection and consciousness with memory of a former life is that there’s apparently nothing connecting the resurrected person to the historical figure they are supposed to be the same as, and therefore that there’s no justice in either rewarding or punishing them, or saving or damning them which is unfortunately not the same thing. God creates someone and they live out their life, alternatively either being a good or bad person or becoming Christian or refusing to do so. Then they die, and eventually nothing physical remains of them. At some point in the future, God recreates a seemingly identical person with a perfected body, the same personality as before and with accurate memories of a former life. But this is, in a way, just God playing a game. This new identical creation has not committed the sins or done the good deeds of the previous person because there’s nothing linking them and they’re not the same person. They don’t deserve either good or bad treatment based on that previous person’s life and no justice is served. Without a soul of some kind, there can be no justice because it means death is the end. Therefore, most Christians would probably say there is such a thing as a soul, and they’d probably tend to think of it as a kind of phantom reflecting the person as they are in life, or perhaps a brilliant point of light or something. To their credit, my main interlocutor in the high-control group would not be drawn on defining the soul despite some suggestions I gave him, and with hindsight that could be the right attitude, although it might also mean he was worried that close examination would disintegrate his ideas. But as I said, Christian physicalism exists. Such Christians argue that Christian anthropology, i.e. its view of the nature of humans, has been inordinately influenced by Plato with his idea of the separation of the soul and body. They further see the Bible itself as supporting the view that we are living souls, i.e. that the references to us being “living souls” in the Bible actually refers to our embodied, living selves rather than something our bodies contain or are in some way connected to while we’re alive. Many would also claim that at no point is a disembodied human soul depicted in the Bible. Demons are of course, and I’d also raise the question of Saul attempting to talk to Samuel’s soul via a medium, that soul being identified as Samuel rather than a deceptive demon pretending to be him. They also see all this as being more aligned with the findings of modern science and medicine. I don’t personally think they’ve succeeded in making any connection between the original body and the resurrection body, which if I were to try that myself I’d probably say is the same person created from something like a Platonic form, so it’s like there’s the number 2, the word “two”, the digit “2” and the Roman numeral “II”, all of which refer to the objectively existing and unique number 2, but it’s not up to me to defend really.

I do not believe in the human experience of sequential time except in waking life. I see our experience of time as one moment following another in order to be confined to the sequence of days we live through awake, starting with our birth or perhaps before and ending with our death or an irreversible loss of any kind of consciousness at the ends of our lives. However, it isn’t that simple and you’ve probably noticed that I’m obliquely referring to other states of consciousness, where matters are entirely different. The anti-theistic philosopher Daniel Dennett, of whom I’m not generally much of a fan, did make an interesting observation regarding sleep, which is that we don’t know that we’re experiencing dreams. It could just be that dreams are messes in our sleeping brains which our waking brains try to make sense of, although I don’t think that can be true because of the existence of lucid dreams and things like people talking in their sleep, sleepwalking and so forth, apparently acting out their dreams as they occur. Nonetheless, I have had an experience which suggested to me that dreams are not as they seem, which is that I dozed off with the radio on, woke up a few minutes later and my dream began with radio sounds when I woke up and ended with sounds from it as I dropped off. The only way I can make sense of this in conventional terms is that my dream consisted of assembled and confused information present in my brain resulting from sleep when I woke up, and that was my brain assembling that in the wrong order.

However, I don’t think it’s either/or, and I’m not the only person to believe this. Dennett’s belief that lucid dreams, i.e. dreams where the dreamer becomes aware they’re dreaming and takes control of it, are not experiences strikes me as the result of his dogma about the nature of consciousness forcing him to absurd conclusions and probably also reflects on how he accounts for all consciousness, i.e. very badly. All that said, I think you can have it both ways, and here’s why: wakefulness has one attitude to reality and dreaming has another. It’s also feasible that all states of consciousness have their own unique attitudes. In particular, time doesn’t operate the same way in dreaming as it does in everyday life. I don’t want to go into too much depth here, but I once had an extremely detailed dream in which I see places and people whom I had no idea existed at the time, and this is a single and particularly notable incident of many such. Dreams, I think, actually do sometimes foretell the future, and the only way I can make sense of this is to understand them as presenting temporal events in a different way to how they occur to the waking mind. This is certainly true in the case of past events, but my more extraordinary claim is that they also present events which haven’t yet occurred. All that said, judging by how our thinking and consciousness as waking people operates, dreams are indeed not temporal events at all but just arbitrary patterns in our minds which we make sense of when we awake, but that presentation and understanding is that of a wakeful, living brain and is not more true or more valid than the experience one has in another state of consciousness such as dreaming. It’s more like a three-dimensional cube being projected onto a flat surface and looking like a square or a hexagon. Our minds when awake simply can’t do anything else with the experience. For that reason, I also think that dreams don’t occur while we’re asleep, which is one reason I narrate them in the present tense. What actually happens is that a conduit opens to experiences which are no less valid or real, in their own terms, at a particular point in our waking lives. There was never a time when the dream someone has at the age of forty wasn’t there: it exists outside sequential time.

J W Dunne took this approach, which went on to influence J B Priestley and Olaf Stapledon among others. In his ‘An Experiment With Time’, published in 1927, Dunne claimed on the basis of prophetic dreams that there are two time dimensions, only one of which governs our lives. Another level of consciousness occupies the other time dimension, and there is an infinite regress into higher and higher time dimensions. This is interesting but not quite how I see things. I think that when we’re both alive and awake, we experience time sequentially, but that only makes sense within that state. Beyond that state, time is different and possibly indescribable and incomprehensible to us as we are now. Dreams are clues to this, but there’s a lot more to reality which they only hint at. Hence the question “what happens after we die?” is based on false assumptions about time. Death only occurs to our waking selves, and in fact it doesn’t even do that because as far as that mode of our consciousness is concerned, we always have a past, present or future. Death is not something we experience. I also find it entertaining, though maybe meaningless, to think of my life as an endless loop, which is however only operating in a general sea of consciousness and not limited to it, so maybe we live through our lives and go on to experience amnesia combined with death and rebirth into the same life repeated infinitely. As well as the other people I’ve mentioned, the author Ian Watson has expressed the idea that the “afterlife” is a dream state in which Hell is the inability to dream lucidly and Heaven is lucid dreaming, which can however be induced in the damned, liberating them from Hell by doing so.

Now for reincarnation. There seem to be two views of this. In one, we progress or regress in each life and are reincarnated accordingly. In another, we simply reincarnate without any particular plan or direction. The former is the southern and eastern Asian view on the matter, and it’s possible that their view of reincarnation is more valid because of the Valeriepieris Circle:

This circle represents half the population of the world. More people live inside this circle than outside it. Interestingly, to me anyway, it includes the main area where people take the existence of reincarnation for granted. The reason this is interesting is that this area is also the one where people are most likely to be reincarnated if it is true, so if there’s any evidence that people have lived before, for instance memories of former lives, that’s the area where they could be most easily verified or supported. If reincarnation is true, the most likely places religions or other belief systems which accept that are to arise is within that circle, and that is in fact what’s happened. It doesn’t prove anything of course. People would be less likely to experience it in large areas of tundra, desert or on oceanic islands, and of course the Abrahamic religions did arise in desert areas. It doesn’t mean people wouldn’t believe in it elsewhere but it could be seen as evidence for it.

I’m not going to question the reality of people being able to remember things they “couldn’t” because they appear to have happened in someone else’s life. I’m prepared to accept that as at least a theoretical possibility and I’m more interested in what it might imply. The most common interpretation of this taking place is that someone’s soul lived out a life in one body which then died and they’re now in another body, often that of a small child, who can remember some events which occurred in the previous life. However, that isn’t the only explanation and it depends on the existence of a soul or persistent self which may not be real. David Hume, some other Western philosophers and of course Buddhists have the idea that there is nothing you can point to which is “I”. Instead, there are simply experiences in a stream linked by memories and anticipation. I don’t agree with this for two reasons. One is that I believe that total loss of memory which didn’t otherwise injure a person, or if you like cloning or duplication, would still be followed by a person with a very similar personality. There are cases of identical twins separated at birth who have ended up almost duplicating each other’s lives unwittingly, even to the extent of getting a dog of the same breed and calling him the same name. The other is that you are the person others relate to or see you as, for instance their parent, sibling, boss, mentor or favourite musician. These kinds of identity are real. However, they’re not the same as having a soul, and for that reason I think it makes as much sense to suppose that it isn’t the soul who is reincarnated but their various memories and experiences are reassembled, probably as a collage from many lives, in a new person. However, there is one proviso here: those experiences might only exist as part of someone’s whole life, and if that’s lived with integrity that would lead to a larger chunk of someone being reincarnated, and perhaps ultimately as the whole person undergoing that process. This is odd because it kind of means that the better life one leads, the more likely one is to be reincarnated rather than the other way round.

So to conclude, there have been two themes in this post.  One is the nature of identity and time, and the other is what can be said to happen beyond this life.  In that, I’ve committed myself to discussing only religious views, but it’s also possble that these thoughts can be adapted to more non-religious views. Some of them are inspired by Heidegger and existentialism, after all. Let me know what you think. It really isn’t that deep.

Dream Time

Daniel Dennett is quite annoying. His view of consciousness is completely absurd, for example. I’m not going to defend my position here because this isn’t exactly what this post is about.

In case you don’t know, Daniel Dennett is a major analytical philosopher, the English-speaking tradition of philosophy dating from the late nineteenth century CE with the rejection of Hegelian idealism, continuing today and apparently also including Polish philosophers for some reason. Bertrand Russell is a good example. It was once described in ‘Radical Philosophy’ like this: a Heideggerian says something like “Die Welt weltet”, and analytic philosophy comes along and says “Where is this Welt, and when exactly did it start welting?”. It is actually mainly my own background and I have a lot of respect for it, partly because I think postmodernism is a good way of making excuses for how things are politically and socially without coming up with a solution to them, and that comes out of the continental tradition. I’d also distinguish analytic philosophy from other viable philosophical approaches taken by anglophones such as that of William Blake, who is unsurprisingly an outsider and apparently linked to the Muggletonians, about whom I know very little. Sarada is the expert on Blake, but for what it’s worth I think of him as an English Romantic. I don’t know if that’s fair.

Recently, Dennett was involved in a movement referred to as the “Brights”, whose aim was to further metaphysical naturalism. Metaphysical naturalism is often treated as if it’s synonymous with atheism, but in fact it’s a specialised form of atheism which is radically different, for instance, from Marxist atheism and the South Asian Samkhya and Carvaka. I had a conversation with a White bloke the other day who was atheist because of karma, a view also found in South Asian thought. The basic idea there is that because karma is a universal law governing the working of the Universe, there’s no need to suppose that God exists. Although I’m theist, I do find this interesting on an intellectual level, mainly because it’s so unlike metaphysical naturalism but still strongly atheist. Metaphysical naturalism is the idea that only natural forces and laws operate in the Universe, i.e. there is no supernatural realm and therefore no God or other deities. Obviously I don’t agree with this, but that isn’t why I find Dennett annoying.

The Brights were founded by Dennett and Dawkins, among other people whose names don’t come to mind right now. Other metaphysically naturalistic atheists, such as Christopher Hitchens, have criticised the name as appearing to imply intellectual superiority. It reminds me a bit of the stereotypical Mensa attitude. To be fair, I’m not sure this was the intention so much as an attempt to come up with a positive-sounding name. Brights use the word “super” to describe people such as myself who have supernatural and/or mystical elements as part of our view. This actually makes me sound like Wonder Woman or something, so it’s okay really. Nonetheless, the Brights believe themselves to be right and us to be wrong. It isn’t an unusual position to see oneself as correct by contrast with others whose opinions differ, so that is also fine.

One of Dennett’s more bizarre positions is that lucid dreams are not experiences. This strikes me as a kind of ideological commitment resulting from it being a logical conclusion of his other views about consciousness. However, it’s also an elaboration of another, simpler position of his with which I actually do agree, in a sense: that dreams are not experiences in general. I do differ with this view but also think it captures something significant about the nature of consciousness, particularly wakefulness. Looking at them from a position of being awake, it seems to me that dreaming could well represent the wakeful consciousness attempting to make sense of the “junk” present in one’s mind on waking. There are some reasons why this may not be true, but others which are hard to reconcile with it not being so. For instance, someone I know once dreamt that she, note the tense in this phrase, has to cry three tears to save a toad’s life, and I could hear her trying to do this several minutes before she woke up. On the other hand, I was once dreaming while the radio was on and the sequence of events on the radio is time-reversed in my dream. The dream ends with something happening on the radio which in waking experience happened before something which starts the dream, which can be explained if dreams are false memories created during REM sleep.

The idea that lucid dreams are not experiences is kind of arse-about-face. It’s a conclusion Dennett is forced into due to his expressed view of consciousness which is counter-intuitive to me, and I’d think to most other people. There is an odd phenomenon in consciousness where immediately prior events are “re-written” by memory. For instance, MP3 files when played back often have periods of silence in them before loud notes which the listener doesn’t notice because they’re eclipsed by the slightly later event. Dennett uses a similar illusion called the “phi phenomenon” where lights of two colours flashed in succession leads to the perception that a single light is moving back and forth and changing colour. He offers two explanations for this, which he calls “Orwellian” and “Stalinesque”. In the Orwellian hypothesis, like Winston’s experience with the fingers (or Picard’s experience with the lights in ‘Star Trek’, which is a direct steal), perception is revised after the fact of being experienced. Stalinesquely, the forthcoming experience is revised before reaching consciousness like a show trial whose verdict is pre-decided. These two versions of what happens don’t require any difference in the model of what’s going on in the brain. The only difference is in when the perception becomes an object of consciousness. The claim is then that the reason there is no difference between the two is that this account of consciousness as emerging at a certain point is an error based on the legacy of misunderstanding consciousness as Cartesian – that is, that living humans consist of two substances, the soul and the body, whereof the former is conscious and dimensionless and the latter occupies space and is not conscious, with the two interacting, according to Descartes within the pineal gland. Dennett believes that we are still too attached to this kind of account, although we don’t literally believe it any more, and that consciousness is not a special, circumscribed state, has no subject of experience (I have sympathy with this bit) and is actually the flow of information from place to place.

Applying this to non-lucid dreaming, information flow would occur on waking. With lucid dreaming, we only have illusory choice and experiencing in the moment according to this account, which also applies as far as Dennett is concerned to waking life. Dreaming and lucid dreaming are primarily useful illustrations of his general theory here rather than objects of study themselves.

Obviously I think he’s wrong. He also casts doubt on the existence of qualia, which are the essential qualities of experience whose existence cannot rationally be doubted. Qualia, put another way, are what people refer to when they say things like “your red might be my blue”, which captures the notion well but doesn’t actually work in detail because of the network of experiences and how they relate to one another. It’s important to decide what are and aren’t qualia, because once one declares something as a quale it’s placed beyond question and that restricts possible arguments. For instance, Nkechi Amare Diallo could claim that her Black identity is a quale, at which point White people identifying as Black suddenly becomes sanctified in some realm beyond criticism. I actually do think the mental perception of the possibility of becoming pregnant is a good example of a quale which is not intuitively so, because it sometimes leads to radical departures of opinion regarding the ethics of reproductive choice, and that does in fact correspond to “no uterus, no opinion” as the position is sometimes rather crudely expressed. However, the existence of quale cannot be doubted, and if someone is led into the position where they can make such a claim, it comes across to me as a weird ideological commitment to an untenable position rather than something which can be attached to an account of consciousness.

From wakeful experience, we tend to perceive dreaming as something which occurs while we’re asleep, and individual dreams as prospects which occur in the future of our wakefulness before we fall asleep and in the past of our wakefulness when we have woken up. With closer examination, we might conclude that dreams are not experiences but attempts by a wakeful mind to make sense of the clutter present in our minds when we awake. Although I think this is incorrect, it does work well as an illustration that the chronology of dreams is not what we might assume. Lucid dreaming is said to be encouraged by always recounting dreams in the present tense. This is somewhat confused by the fact that not all languages have a present tense, and this raises a further question: are there languages which have a way of expressing dream time?

Before I answer this question, I want to outline my understanding of states of consciousness. I believe it makes sense to say there are six states of consciousness: wakefulness, dreaming, dreamless sleep, hypnosis, meditation and Ganzfeld. There’s also a very strong tendency to prioritise wakefulness above the others, to the extent that it’s seen as the only realistic state of consciousness and the state which dictates the nature of time. Dream logic is not seen as proper logic. A friend of mine recently observed, interestingly, that although I had recently dreamt about the King, that didn’t mean there wouldn’t still be Queen dreams. My own attitude towards states of consciousness is rather different. I believe that several or all of those states are of equal, or perhaps incommensurate, status. The list I’ve just made was from a wakeful state. It’s equally possible to dream of a completely different list. I’m not convinced that hypnosis is a valid state of consciousness but I do believe it’s neither dreaming nor dreamless sleep. There are “state” and “non-state” views on hypnosis. The state view is that a hypnotised subject has entered an altered, more suggestible state of consciousness, which is supported by their alleged inability, in some cases, to recall the events which took place during it. The non-state version is that hypnosis is a form of role-play in a kind of theatrical setting, which doesn’t just apply to stage hypnotism but also the likes of hypnotherapy. That idea is not supposed to contradict its efficacy as a therapy, incidentally. Ganzfeld is the other state which could do with a bit of explanation. This can be introduced by relaxation and sensory deprivation although it also occurs at one’s bidding, perhaps with a bit of practice. It may not may not be a healthy state.

Insofar as each of these is a valid state of consciousness, none has priority over any others. Each has unique features. As I’m mainly contrasting dreaming and wakefulness here, taking them equally seriously, the wakeful mind can have a view of dreaming that is either the detritus of dormancy or a sequence of experiences which occur between successive experiences of wakefulness, but this is only the view of the waking mind and is no more valid than that of dreaming. There is still a relationship between dreaming experiences and the senses, for instance because a cold night might be associated with dreaming of the Arctic or because some experience one had the previous day influences the dream. From the perspective of dreaming, wakeful consciousness influences one’s experience but there are oddities about its temporality because with dreams of any length, it can often be difficult to locate a moment when the dream begins and, as I’ve said before, some of my dreams involve things like “having always sat on the roof”, i.e. my dream is of climbing out of a bedroom window onto the roof just like I always have for years. From a dreaming perspective, whatever waking life makes of them, dreaming consciousness is very different in terms of the passage of time and even if it turns out that dreams are squished-up false memories of stuff happening immediately before waking from a daytime perspective, this has no more or less validity than whatever the dreaming mind thinks of wakefulness.

Given all that, this is the question I am mainly interested in answering here: how do we refer to dream time? English uses the present tense to refer to “tenseless” things, such as saying that “one plus one is/equals two”. We don’t usually say “one plus one used to equal two” or “one plus one will be two next Thursday” unless we’re trying to make some kind of rhetorical point about eternal verities. I have said in the past, from a waking perspective anyway, that the events of dreams should be referred to in the aorist. This is in fact a somewhat inaccurate way of describing what I’m doing when I seem to use the present tense.

The word “aorist” originates from the Ancient Greek “ἀόριστος”, which breaks down as “ἀ-” – not – and “όριστος” – definite. In other words, “indefinite”, “undefined” and also simple – the unadorned, plain form of the verb. In English, we might identify this with the simple present indicative except that in English this usually puts an S, an “-eth” or “-est” on the end, so it isn’t usually unadorned. As an ahistorical, perhaps an aorist, word, it seems to work quite well as a way of describing events which do not occur in the waking passage of time, but in fact the Ancient Greek usage is to refer to the past. It’s used as a narrative tense, so it does make sense if dreams are retold as stories to use the aorist, but in certain circumstances can also refer to the present or future. It’s also worth mentioning that there is aspect as well as tense involved here. Aspect is how the action described by a verb occurs over time, i.e. whether it’s a one-time short term event, a repeated action or a continuous one. For instance, “I rowed” and “I sowed” might involve grabbing the oars just once and sculling briefly and putting a single seed in the ground, or they might refer to rowing across a river or walking across a field broadcasting a full bowl of seed. English seems to have lost the ability to distinguish easily between these, but many other languages actually focus more on that element of time than on tense. Hence aspect is still relevant to dreaming as experience, or perceived experience but tense may be misleading.

Sanskrit also has an aorist, which is relevant because it happens to be used to discuss consciousness a lot. In fact I almost used the word “samadhi” to describe what I called “meditation” just now. There are two aorists in Sanskrit, one which is simply preterite indicative, like our own simple past, and an injunctive mood, which is also found in Homeric Greek, which could be used as an imperative or subjunctive, usually for prohibitions in later Sanskrit.

Hence the problem is that although there is something out there called the aorist, which is not in any case present in English, it actually tends to express the past although it technically needn’t and the literal meaning of the word “aorist” is not perfectly reflected in the actual meaning of the word. From the perspective of wakefulness, I would want to express dreaming experience as occurring in a kind of abstract time. Imagine a three-dimensional line graph. The space within that graph could be said to be located in a particular place in the sense that it might be on the page of a book or a computer display, but there need be no region of the Universe consisting of a graph, which can in principle be visited. Time and space in dreaming are virtual. Events can be located relative to each other temporally only within the dream, but need to be referred to outside of it, but referring to them in the past tense doesn’t do them justice.

Calling this post “Dream Time” makes it sound like a reference to the idea Australian Aboriginals are said by Western anthropologists to have about the primordial state of the world, but as usual it’s important to examine this critically. If it turns out that the kind of wakeful consciousness we have today in the West is highly contingent, maybe our lives are surrounded temporally by a sleep, not in the sense of absence of consciousness but as a different kind of consciousness. I know very little about this and feel it would be culturally insensitive to say too much about it, as well as inappropriate for the cultural and environmental milieu I live in, but the term itself suggests to me an entirely valid concept of a kind of timeless eternity out of which our wakefulness condenses. I have no idea whether this is what anthropologists mean by it or whether it even exists in any Australian Aboriginal culture, but it does make sense although it might give dreaming unwarranted priority. At this point I could of course read what Wikipedia says about it and pretend I know what I’m talking about, but that doesn’t do it justice.

Behind all this while I’ve been writing is awareness of a particular form of dementia called Lewy Body. This is associated with Parkinsonism, and involves the mixing of dreaming and wakefulness. Although it would seem insensitive to regard this as anything other than a pathological state, it is interesting that this occurs towards the end of waking life. We tend to think of dreaming and wakefulness as sharply differentiated, although when I had B12 deficiency early signs of my psychosis there was some such mixture. Prisoner’s cinema, Charles Bonnet Syndrome, phantosmia and possibly some forms of tinnitus and hearing voices also seem to have things in common with this. Prisoner’s cinema is more like Ganzfeld, and in fact it leads me to wonder whether states of consciousness are to each other like different gears on a car, with Ganzfeld intermediate between dreaming and wakefulness.

People have been known to enter a state of meditation as a prelude to their death. More often, the state of mind immediately before death as monitored by instruments resembles dreamless sleep and this continues immediately after death, with a sudden flash of activity a few minutes later. Once again, it may be inappropriate to refer to these phenomena temporally, as any subjectivity may not experience them in this manner.

This post, I hope, will make a good companion to tomorrow’s, written on International Yoga Day.

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By Jonathunder – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=6931320

Rosh Ha-Shanah is imminent, so Happy New Year to anyone who celebrates that! I was first aware of the Jewish New Year in 5742, and I remember waiting for sunset to “ring it in”. I also remember saying to my French teacher, “Miss! It’s the Jewish New Year!”, a statement which she was rather non-plussed about. But it was, and one of the notable things about the Jewish calendar is how high the year numbering is. Our Christian Gregorian calendar has reached 2021, the Roman version of the Julian calendar is at MMDCCLXXIII (there is no Year Zero in our calendar but 1 BCE was immediately followed by 1 CE, or BC by AD) and the Islamic calendar is currently at ١٤٤٣, or 1443, AH. There are a few other calendars, some with even higher year numbers than the Jewish one, such as the Julian Date, which has been running since 4713 BCE, though not consciously since that time, uses days rather than years and is currently 2459463.03148, and the Holocene calendar, which is exactly 12 000 years ahead of the Christian Gregorian calendar.

The reason the Jewish year number is so high is that it was originally supposed to be the age of the world, hence its abbreviation AM – Anno Mundi. Rabbis had added up the ages in Genesis and reached the conclusion that the world had been created on the date Christians now refer to as 6th October 3761 BC. Now I could turn this into a post about Rosh Ha-Shanah, but I’ve chosen not to. It isn’t my culture and it isn’t up to me, although I do like the idea of treating a new year as a time for forgiveness and a clean slate between everyone. In any case, another matter of interest has captured my imagination.

Apparently, the Byzantine Empire used a similar system but by its reckoning the date of creation was much earlier, in 5509 BC, being a Christian culture. This seems to have been because they relied on the Septuagint, a Greek translation of the Tanakh which seems to have given greater ages for some of the patriarchs. The most famous date, however, is 23rd October 4004 BC, famously arrived at by Bishop Ussher, which among other things attempted to align the date of the birth of Jesus, 4 BC, with the creation of the world exactly four thousand years earlier. Oddly, I was actually conceived on 23rd October, so for me the world was indeed created on that date. Everything which happened before, from the Big Bang and Brontosauri to the Beatles’ first LP and the Aberfan Disaster, was therefore a given to me, and may as well always have existed. I sometimes wonder if one’s Geworfenheit may be in some way linked to such dates, but that’s a slippery slope to solipsism. It would mean that anyone not conceived on 23rd October was a sort of shadow person, which is almost certainly not so.

Although those rabbis, the Septuagint and Bishop Ussher were all out by æons, the idea of a year number which simply reflects the age of this planet or the Universe is a very appealing one. It’s like the metric system in a way, being based on an immutable fact about time and space, just as the original idea of the Système Internationale was to define a metre as a ten millionth of the distance between the North Pole and Equator on a line passing through Calais. The problem is of course, that at least so far it’s proven impossible to measure the exact age of the planet or the Universe, and there are additional issues with the latter which I may or may not talk about in a bit.

I may be wrong about this, but Earth’s age seems to be more precisely dated nowadays than it was when I was a child. Back then, the figure of 4 600 million years was bandied about and was definitely rounded off, but nowadays it´s said to be 4 543 million years within a range of about fifty million years either way. Now fifty million years is not a useful confidence interval for basing a calendar on, but the question also arises of whether it’s even possible in principle to put a date on the formation of a planet. The Jovian year is 11.86 of ours. The reason it isn’t exactly a dozen is that as débris orbited the Sun, if it did so exactly that many times it would’ve been pulled out of its orbit towards Jupiter every cycle, forming a belt of more densely orbiting fragments which gradually collided and coalesced, and of course the question is, at what point, if any, did the nascent Earth go from being a cluster of fusing rocks and ice chunks to a planet pounded by comets and asteroids? This is of course the Sorites Paradox – when does a collection of grains of sand become a heap? Consequently there doesn’t seem to be a definite date on which it can be said definitively that our planet was born. It might, though, be worthwhile seeking out a specific event after which Earth could be said to be the same place as our home world, and a possible candidate for that might be Theia’s impact on our planet which proceeded to chip off the outer layers and cause them to orbit the rest for a while before falling together into our natural satellite Cynthia, onto whose surface Neil Armstrong would make a small step. However, that incident doesn’t seem to be more precisely datable than the formation of Earth in its initial stages. It does, though, work as a candidate for the first event which did occur over a short enough period of time to be considered a potentially datable event in the sense that it did happen on a certain day. Days, however, were shorter at this time because it was tidal forces which slowed the rotation of the planet, and this continues today.

This brings to mind the question of what the first datable event was. So far as I can imagine right now, it would have to have happened a mere few thousand years ago. The answer to this seems to be human events associated with solar eclipses, which are timed so precisely that the lengthening of the day can be measured with them. To put that in perspective, the day was only twenty minutes longer when the Chicxulub Impact wiped out the non-avian dinosaurs and that was around sixty-six million years ago. Assuming days lengthen in a linear fashion, so for example that the day will be twenty minutes longer in sixty-six million years time than it is now, this means that six million years ago, around the time of the first Australopithecines, there would’ve been 366 days in a year. This can be determined using growth rings in corals as well, but I don’t want to get ahead of myself.

The earliest dated event in human history seems to have taken place in Ireland on 30th November 3340 BCE, which was a solar eclipse. I don’t understand how this is possible because it was before the use of writing in Western Europe. The dating of other events than eclipses or other astronomical phenomena or associated historical happenings is much more difficult, because during the Bronze Age calendars of people with writing were recorded as in the year of particular rulers, so it would be necessary to be able to line up all the kings lists, and of course they were usually kings, until a more definitely datable event intervenes. Ironically, the earliest datable non-astronomical event may be Armageddon! That is, the Battle of Mount Megiddo, which was on 16th April 1457 BCE, also known as  the 21st day of the first month of the third season, of Year 23 of the reign of Thutmose III. However, this isn’t certain. It’s also more than twenty centuries into written history, which seems amazingly late.

Much older than this is 𒉆𒈗. This is a list of Sumerian kings written to justify claims to power in various territories and therefore probably highly selective with its version of the truth. It also does the same thing as the Old English poem Ƿidsiþ in resorting to myth in its earlier names. We are supposed to be able to trace our own Royals back to Woden, and likewise 𒉆𒈗 refers to kings who ruled before the Flood. The document itself is 32nd century BCE. Adding them up yields a figure of around 242 000 years, which seems a little far-fetched, and it also mentions 𒌉𒍣𒉺𒇻 as a king when he is generally understood to be a deity, but that doesn’t rule him out from being a human being, because it seems to me there’s a tendency for people to turn their ancestors into heroes, particularly if they engage in ancestor worship, and then into deities, and of course pharaohs were supposed to be gods anyway. There are wild discrepancies between different versions, some having for example seven years for a reign and others 427 for the same individual.

In Ancient Egyptian chronology, lists of pharaohs are central. The Egyptian year had exactly 365 days, with the result that it cycles through the seasons every 1460 sidereal years. An important annual event was the flooding of the Nile, said to coincide with the appearance of Sirius. This took place on 19th July in our calendar. Hence the dates on which these occur give an indication of how long ago they happened. It’s also possible to match events with Babylon, the Hittites, the Ancient Greeks and the Assyrians. The eruption of Thera left a major mark on the world, found in tree rings, ice cores and records of influence on the climate, and of course possibly also in the story of Atlantis, and provides a specific point relative to which many events in the Bronze Age can be dated. This happened around 1600 BCE, very roughly.

Radiocarbon dating matched with dendrochronology – tree-ring examination – is also fruitful. This enables certain events in exact years to be dated back to 11 891 BCE, or back to the start of the Holocene. It can be used on ancient wooden artifacts and also ancient trees, particularly the bristlecone pine, which lives for almost five thousand years but also tends to be preserved after it dies. Radiocarbon extends back to fifty thousand years ago but is much less accurate because of fluctuations of carbon-14 in the atmosphere caused by astronomical events such as supernovæ. Ice core samples use levels of oxygen-18 and 16 in a similar way, and another is amino acid racemisation, which is the tendency of amino acid molecules to become more evenly left- and right-handed, though this depends a lot on temperature and therefore is only useful for samples which have been taken from a particularly stable environment such as a cave. This works for about two hundred millennia.

Fluorine dating was what put paid to Piltdown Man. Fluorine in water gradually replaces the hydroxyl groups in dental and bone apatite, enabling the length of time since their formation to be determined, and can also be applied to ivory and bone artifacts. Potassium-argon is another decay method like radiocarbon and oxygen isotopes. Argon is an inert gas and doesn’t leach out of samples unless they melt. This technique is able to date how long it is since something was last heated, so for example it would work on food or fired pottery, and would also be able to date destructive building fires such as those which preserved clay cuneiform tablets by accidentally hardening them.

Growth rings and layers of rock are other sources of relatively datable activity. Radioactive and other dating techniques are unable to pin events down precisely, but events could take place in an organism’s life or climatic conditions could fluctuate in such a way as to reveal histories of lives and places over long periods of time. Corals and teeth, for example, both have growth rings, and the teeth of animals whose body temperatures remain close to ambient will have the similar processes influencing them as trees, with cold seasons slowing growth and signs of malnutrition or physical injury leaving a record. Even human bones have lines reflecting hard conditions during childhood, and nails carry similar information although they aren’t very useful for most fossil remains except perhaps for mummies and bog bodies. As far as sediment’s concerned, paper-thin layers of dried mud or silt can harden and become sheets of shale, as happened in the Eocene Messel Pit 47 million years ago, each layer representing a fluctuating wet and dry season. Further back, the first mammals show rings in their teeth, strongly suggesting that their bodies didn’t make much of their own heat and recording year to year details about their lives.

Petrified forests have been used dendrochronologically. Such a forest in present-day Oregon dated using argon isotopes to the end of the Langhian Stage of the Middle Miocene, 13 790 million years ago give or take ninety millennia, have been found to correlate with each other, i.e. wider rings occur the same number of rings in from the bark in the various stumps. These are oak trees. There doesn’t seem to have been any successful cross-referencing of entirely contemporary sources of information of this kind, but of course the fossil record generally is very sparse, as could be expected of a planet which currently has life on it because much of that material is still in use now in our own bodies and those of other living things.

Getting back to silt, there are annual, monthly and daily deposits which have become sedimentary rocks. These show that 620 million years ago, for example, the day lasted twenty-one hours.

I feel pressure to get this out there by sunset because of Rosh Ha-Shanah, so I’ll conclude with this thought. Human history becomes harder to date precisely the further back you go because the mindsets of the cultures involved are different, and for them history and legend are mixed. This is perhaps because they were more frank about the purpose and significance of history than we are today, using it as a way of propping up identity and origin in a much more obvious way than we do. However, this doesn’t mean we don’t still do the same, so the dissolution of dates into reigns of monarchs and then the appearance of deities, and the use of numbers as a form of hyperbole isn’t as foreign to us as all that. Going back further into deep time brings home the sheer vastness of what we’re dealing with here, with events as long as the whole of recorded history vanishing into the chronology as more than a dozen times smaller than even very precise margins of dating error. As I get older, time seems to have more meaning to me as the fraction of history I’ve lived through expands, but in a way that makes the vastness of time harder to deal with because it has more meaning to me now than it had as a child, when it was just a series of numbers. Nowadays, I’m confronted much more with mortality and generations, and that makes it much more personally involving.

The Anti-Universe

A prominent mythological theme is that of time being cyclical. For instance, in Hinduism there is a detailed chronology which repeats endlessly. Bearing in mind that the numbers used in mythological contexts are often mainly there to indicate enormity or tininess, there is the kalpa, which lasts 4 320 million years and is equivalent to a day in Brahma’s life. There are three hundred and sixty of these days in a Brahman year, and a hundred Brahman years in a Brahman lifetime, after which the cycle repeats. Within a Brahman Day, human history also repeats a cycle known as the Yuga Cycle, which consists of four ages, Satya, Treta, Dvapara and Kali. The names refer to the proportion of virtue and vice characterising each age, so Satya is perfect, life is long, everyone is kind to each other, wise, healthy and so on, satya meaning “truth” or “sincerity”, Treta is “third” in the sense of being three quarters virtue and one quarter vice, Dvapara is two quarters of each and Kali, unsurprisingly the current age, is the age of evil and destruction. Humans start off as giants and end as dwarfs. Then the cycle repeats. Thus there are cycles within cycles in Hindu cosmology.

The Maya also have a cyclical chronology, including the Long Count, in a cycle lasting 63 million years. Probably the most important cycle in Mesoamerican calendars is the fifty-two year one, during which the two different calendars cycle in and out of sync with each other. The Aztecs used to give away all their possessions at the end of that period in the expectation that the world might come to an end.

The Jewish tradition has a few similar features as well. Firstly, it appears to use the ages of people to indicate their health and the decline of virtue. The patriarchs named in the Book of Genesis tend to have shorter and shorter lives leading up to the Flood, which ends the lives of the last few generations before it, including the 969-year old Methuselah. Giants are also mentioned in the form of the Nephilim, although they are seen as evil. I wonder if this reflects the inversion of good and evil which took place when Zoroastrianism began, where previously lauded deities were demonised. There is also a cycle in the practice of the Jubilee, consisting of a forty-nine year Golden Jubilee and a shorter seven year Jubilee, and obviously there are the seven-day weeks, which we still have in the West.

The Hindu series of Yugas also reflects the Greek tradition of Golden, Silver, Bronze and Iron Ages, which was ultimately adopted into modern archæology in modified form as the Three-Age System of Stone, Bronze and Iron. The crucial difference between the Hindu and Greek age system and our own ideas of history is that they both believed in steady decline whereas we tend to be more mixed. We tend to believe in progress, although our ideas of what constitutes that do vary quite a lot. In a way, it makes more sense to suppose that everything will get worse, although since history is meant to be cyclical it can also be expected to get better, because of the operation of entropy. Things age, wear out, run down, burn out and so on, and this is the regular experience for everyone, no matter when they’re living in history, and it makes sense that the world might be going in the same direction. On the longest timescale of course it is, because the Sun will burn out, followed by all other stars and so on.

Twentieth century cosmology included a similar theory, that of the oscillating Universe. It was considered possible that the quantity of mass in the Universe was sufficient that once it got past a certain age, gravity acting between all the masses in existence would start to pull everything back together again until it collapsed into the same hot, dense state which started the Universe in the first place. There then emerge a couple of issues. Would the Universe then bounce back and be reborn, only to do it again in an endless cycle? If each cycle is an exact repetition, does it even mean anything to say it’s a different Universe, or is it just the same Universe with time passing in a loop?

This is not currently a popular idea because it turns out that there isn’t enough mass in the Universe to cause it to collapse against the Dark Energy which is pushing everything apart, so ultimately the objects in the Universe are expected to become increasingly isolated until there is only one galaxy visible in each region of the Universe where space is expanding relatively more slowly than the speed of light. This has a significant consequence. A species living in a galaxy at that time would be unaware that things had ever been different. There would be no evidence available to suggest that it was because we can currently see the galaxies receding, and therefore we can know that things will be like that one day, but they would have no way to discover that they hadn’t always been like this. This raises the question of what we might have lost. We reconstruct the history of the Universe based on the data available to us, and we’re aware that we’re surrounded by galaxies which, on the very large scale, are receding from each other, so we can imagine the film rewinding and all the stars and galaxies, or what will become them, starting off in the same place. But at that time, how do we know there wasn’t evidence of something we can no longer recover which is crucial to our own understanding of the Universe?

Physics has been in a bit of a strange state in recent decades. Because the levels of energy required cannot be achieved using current technology, the likes of the Large Hadron Collider are not powerful enough to provide more than a glimpse of the fundamental nature of physical reality. Consequently, physicists are having to engage in guesswork without much feedback, and this applies also to their conception of the entire Universe. I’ve long been very suspicious about the very existence of non-baryonic dark matter. Dark matter was originally proposed as a way to explain why galaxies rotate as if they have much more gravity than their visible matter, i.e. stars, is exerting. In fact, if gravity operates over a long range in the same way as it does over short distances, such as within this solar system or between binary stars, something like nine-tenths of the mass is invisible. To some extent this can be explained by ordinary matter such as dust, planets or very dim stars, and there are also known subatomic particles such as the neutrinos which are very common but virtually undetectable. The issue I have with non-baryonic dark matter, and I’ve been into this before on here, is that it seems to be a specially invented kind of matter to fill the gap in the model which, however, is practically undetectable. There’s another possible solution. What makes this worse is that dark matter is now being used to argue for flaws in the general theory of relativity, when it seems very clear that the problem is actually that physicists have proposed the existence of a kind of substance which is basically magic.

If you go back to the first moment of the Universe, there is a similar issue. Just after the grand unification epoch, a sextillionth (long scale) of a second after the Big Bang, an event is supposed to have taken place which increased each of the three extensive dimensions of the Universe by a factor of the order of one hundred quintillion in a millionth of a yoctosecond. If you don’t recognise these words, the reason is that these are unusually large and small quantities, so their values aren’t that important. Some physicists think this is fishy, because again something seems to have been simply invented to account for what happened in those circumstances without there being other reasons for supposing it to be so. They therefore decided to see what would happen if they used established principles to recreate the early Universe, and in particular they focussed on CPT symmetry

CPT symmetry is Charge, Parity and Temporal symmetry, and can be explained thus, starting with time. Imagine a video of two billiard balls hitting and bouncing off each other out of context. It would be difficult to tell whether that video was being played forwards or backwards. This works well on a small scale, perhaps with two neutrons colliding at about the speed of sound at an angle to each other, or a laser beam reflecting off a mirror. Charge symmetry means that if you observe two equally positively and negatively charged objects interacting, you could swap the charges and still observe the same thing, or for that matter two objects with the same charge could have the opposite charges and still do the same thing. Finally, parity symmetry is the fact that you can’t tell whether what you’re seeing is the right way up or upside down, or reflected. All of these things don’t work in the complicated situations we tend to observe because of pesky things like gravity and accidentally burning things out by sticking batteries in the wrong way round or miswiring plugs, but in sufficiently simple situations all of these things are symmetrical.

But there is a problem. The Universe as a whole doesn’t seem to obey these laws of symmetry. For instance, almost everything we come across seems to be made of matter even though there doesn’t seem to be any reason why there should be more matter than antimatter or the other way round, and time tends to go forwards rather than backwards on the whole. One attempt to explain why matter seems to dominate the Universe is that for some reason in the early Universe more matter was created than antimatter, and since matter meeting antimatter annihilates both, matter is all that’s left. Of course antimatter does crop up from time to time, for instance in bananas and thunderstorms, but it doesn’t last long because it pretty soon comes across an antiparticle in the form of, say, an electron, and the two wipe each other off the map in a burst of energy.

These physicists proposed a solution which does respect this symmetry and allows time to move both forwards and backwards. They propose that the Big Bang created not one but two universes, one where time runs forwards and mainly made of matter and the other where time goes backwards and is mainly made of antimatter, and also either of these universes is geometrically speaking a reflection of the other, such as all the left-handed people in one being right-handed in the other. This explains away the supposèd excess of matter. There’s actually just as much antimatter as matter, but it swapped over at the Big Bang. Before the Big Bang, time was running backwards and the Universe was collapsing.

In a manner rather similar to the thought that an oscillating Universe could be practically the same as time running in a circle because each cycle might be identical and there’s no outside to see it from, the reversed, mirror image antimatter Universe is simply this one running backwards with, again, nothing on the outside to observe it with, and therefore for all intents and purposes there just is this one Universe running forwards after the Big Bang, because it’s indistinguishable from the antimatter one running backwards. On the other hand, the time dimension involved is the same as this one, and therefore it could just be seen as the distant past, which answers the question of what there was before the Big Bang: there was another universe, or rather there was this universe. It also means everything has already happened.

But a further question arises in my head too, and this is by no means what these physicists are claiming. As mentioned above, one model of the Universe is that it repeats itself in a cycle. What we may have here is theoretical support for the idea of a Universe collapsing in on itself before expanding again. That’s the bit we can see or deduce given currently available evidence. However, in the future, certain evidence will be lost because there will only be one visible galaxy observable, and the idea of space expanding will be impossible to support even though it is. What if one of the bits of evidence we’ve already lost is of time looping? Or, what if time just does loop anyway? What if time runs forwards until the Universe reaches a maximum size and then runs backwards again as it contracts? There is an issue with this. There isn’t enough mass in the Universe for it to collapse given the strength of dark energy pushing it apart, but of course elsewhere in the Multiverse there could be looping universes due to different physical constants such as the strength of dark energy or the increased quantity of matter in them, because in fact as has been mentioned before there are possible worlds where this does take place. Another question then arises: how does time work between universes? Are these looping universes doing so now in endless cycles, or are they repeating the same stretch of time? Does time even work that way in the Multiverse, or is it like in Narnia, where time runs at different speeds relative to our world?

It may seem like I’ve become highly speculative. In my defence, I’d say this. I have taken pains to ignore my intuition in the past because I believed it was misleading. However, there appears to be an intuition among many cultures that time does run in a cycle, and the numbers these cultures produce are oddly similar. The Mayan calendar’s longest time period is the Alautun, which lasts 63 081 429 years, close to the number of years it’s been since the Chicxulub Impact, which coincidentally was nearby and wiped out the non-avian dinosaurs. The Indian kalpa is 4 320 million years in length, which is again quite close to the age of this planet. Earth is 4 543 million years old and the Cretaceous ended 66 million years ago, so these figures are 4.6% out in the case of the Maya and 5% for the kalpa. Of course it may be coincidence, and the idea of time being cyclical may simply be based on something like the cycle of the day and night or the seasons through the year, but since I believe intuitive truths are available in Torah and the rest of the Tanakh, I don’t necessarily have a problem with other sources. Parallels have of course been made between ancient philosophies and today’s physics before, for example by Fritjof Capra in his ‘The Tao [sic] Of Physics’. Although much of what he says has been rubbished by physicists since, there is a statue of Dancing Shiva in the lobby at CERN and one quote from Capra is widely accepted:

“Science does not need mysticism and mysticism does not need science. But man needs both.”