Time-loops

Have you ever considered the possibility that you could be in a time loop? One way to think about it is that after you die, you are born again as the same person, and you relive the same events as last time, more or less. Maybe it changes subtly each time. Maybe you have occasional flashes of déjà vu, but not often enough for you to question your reality.

Another way of thinking about the situation is that it functions exactly how you experience it: there is only the present moment, and therefore no iterations. You have memories of the past and apprehensions about the future, but your reality is just an ever present present. Consider for a moment how freaky that is. Reality is a huge ocean of possibilities, and your awareness is just a tiny glass ball bobbing on its surface. You cannot even experience your path across the ocean. You’re forever at a single point somewhere, facing backwards.

In this case, being in a time-loop means being your time-line. It would be a string that undulates, twists, and turns in some hyper-reality. There would be no beginning and no end of its existence. Someone could point at one end of the string, but that would not imply the beginning of anything, only that someone was looking there.

Either way, you would be forever with yourself and all you can do is change your decisions where ever you are presently looking. It has occurred to me that this is the coolest reality I can imagine.

The coolest reality

So, here is the set-up: I am a human, experiencing the acme of Western civilisation. Living conditions for humans have never been better and they are never going to be better; my life has straddled the peak. I have experienced good health and have no debilitating injuries. I have met some nice people. The unnice people have not harmed me in any substantial way. On the scale of human experiences, it is one of the comfiest. And despite that, I have also had moments of lucidity: I have also seen civilisation for what it is — it is a construct of reality, it is not reality. I have realised that I need not be the anxious little cog that civilisation insists I be. This is a peak within the peak: I am one of the few people not totally brain-washed by the system that provides the comforts.

So, here I am, flying through the universe in my time-line spaceship. I am the only person with whom I must substantially deal with, and I have no better business than to constantly renovate my time-line. That is to say, in every iteration, I may make different decisions, which cause my time-line to deviate from its last shape, and which ultimately offers me new circumstances in which to make decisions. I’m either moving toward a nightmare of my own making or toward a heaven of my own making. When I use the word `iteration’ that is in a poetic sense, since there is no time here. Maybe my time-line wriggles in some sequence that is hyper-time, but my bubble of the present is no time at all; it is ever present. The reason that I do not experience time is that it does not exist!

What if my time-line has had many shape-shifts? What if I were a Grecian slave in a far earlier iteration, and have adjusted my decisions, which have incrementally shifted my time-line to the position it has now? That would mean that I, and all who read this, have been doing a pretty good job. We all made it to the acme.

Civilisation is more like a vehicle than a destination.

I can put my attention on this development. I needn’t invest in things that bother me. They are not what got me here. Yes, I know that civilisation is unwinding at the moment, but that is not what I surfed to get where I am. For me, it’s been more like the vehicle than the destination. Maybe, by reminding others of their fortune, I’ll have done my part in retarding its further unwinding: We’re at the peak; we made it; we need only manage our (shakey) success.

We need only make decisions that renovate our time-lines, not the decisions that we think civilisation wants of us. Remember, there must other actors in this game who are influencing civilisation and some are shifting in the other direction. Therefore, the average expectations of civilisation are no reasonable expectations for time-shifters. Ironically, by making decisions that renovate our personal time-lines, we keep civilisation hovering near its peak configuration — or rather, our experience of it.

And now, a word from our sponsor

Principle of Flocks is not about time-loops, but it is about time-lines. The issue of renovating time-lines is the same. Most people feel constrained by their distant past (being a consistent person) and recent past (being responsible) but a psychedelic traveler simply makes choices to improve his experience. We could all, with the very lives we have now, be psychedelic travelers. Who knows? I’ve come to the conclusion that it is best to assume so.