To Infinity and Beyond!

So I’ve gone on a little mental adventure recently thinking about the question of how to help materialists and hard skeptics connect with the “woo” on the UFO topic. I know. I know. Prudence and friends are smart to not interact with that side of the community. And to be honest, I haven’t done much more than lurk on those forums in Reddit myself. However, the question still led me down a really interesting thought-path, starting with a materialist universe and ending up with a very non-materialist universe… almost by design. If you’re intrigued, please join me on this journey and let me know your own thoughts!

So here we are with a materialist universe — that’s the one where there is no god, or heaven, or hell, where everything is explainable by physical mechanisms, even our thoughts and feelings and desires. So there’s no free will. It is one I find depressing, but is it even stable?

In this clockwork universe, let’s travel to a planet inhabited by an intelligent species. Let’s say that this planet has had sentient life for much longer than Earth. Earth, by the way, is about 4.5 billion years old, but has had early humans only for around 200,000 years (according to materialists). The universe, my friends, is 13.8 billion years old. Some of the oldest planets that we know of are 12.7 billion years old. So Earth is quite young, and we are just babies on the cosmic time scale. 

Let’s assume this planet in this materialist universe is much older and has had sentient life on it for longer than earth has even existed. Crazy right! How is that even possible! We’re only 200,000 years old and have almost wiped ourselves out multiple times in the last century. But for arguments sake, let’s say they’ve figured out how to do it (I have an entire theory about how altruism, love, and reincarnation play a role in that; but, sticking with materialism we can just do the "there are lots of planets and lots of time for at least one intelligent species to succeed" argument.)

Now this really technologically advanced species would be working to find ways to preserve itself (according to our Darwinian materialist [I actually love Darwin’s theory and his mechanism is seriously misunderstood]). Maybe they’ve learned how to integrate technology and biology to live really long lives. Or, maybe it’s like Altered Carbon and they found a way to transfer their minds from one body to another (Hey look, they just invented an early form of reincarnation!). So, my argument would be that reincarnation, albeit by a different mechanism than many might think about, could come about technologically (remember friends, spirituality ands science don’t have to be enemies). Regardless of the mechanism, they’ve learned to be really long lived and probably have been working to unravel the mechanism of the universe, just as we do.

Now, one way of unraveling said mechanism is to go into smaller and smaller details of how the basic building blocks of reality form and interact. One can imagine that as knowledge of those mechanisms increase, so can control over them. By evolutionary standards, the more predictability/control over one’s reality one has, the more likely one is to survive (so I think this is an idea that materialists could get behind). It might even get to a point where these beings might find ways to engineer reality itself. 

What does that mean?

In my mind, if I were one of these entities, I’d want to jump to the next dimension. This would literally create more degrees of freedom (it could even create one form of freewill, as it becomes possible as you change the closed system to an open one) and more places of contact with one’s own timeline (to a materialist I could argue survivability; to all of you, wouldn’t that just be amazing!). And, yes, the grandfather paradox is quite solvable but would take an entire post to explain on it's own.

To help visualize the traversing next dimension, squish our lovely 3D+time(4D) world into 2D(1D+time) so it all exist on a sheet of paper. Let’s assume the short ends of the paper are “the beginning of time” and “the end of time” (of course ignoring the temptation to tape the ends together you clever 4D-creator-you). Now, look down at the paper and put your finger somewhere on it and assume that is “now”. As this advanced species, if you escape the paper, you are “above it” and so you can just pick up your finger and place it anywhere on the paper, jumping in both space (y-axis) and time (x-axis). Fabulous! 

You just became God. 

Wait what!? When did that happen?

Ah, yea. Ahem. Let me back up. God, by some definitions (though not my own), is an omnipresent (is everywhere/exists throughout all time), omniscient (all knowing/precognitive), omnipotent (all powerful/reality engineer). So an advanced species that can learn to engineer reality and escape into just one dimension higher (and remember, for materialist, string theorist surmise way more dimensions than that), fits all of these definitions. 

The real mind bender is realizing that once you beak this barrier that’s always been the case!

Because, once you can traverse space-time it will be as if you were always there, at the beginning of your species existence even when they didn’t believe it. So in essence, this species was always guiding itself to “ascend”. This species has broken linear time and can now engineer experience (sounds a lot like simulation theory, yes?).

What could this species then do?

1. Master this new dimension.

   1. Engineer reincarnation (find a way for the experiencer to dip in and out of the paper all over space and time) to put themselves into crafted worlds (or even their “original” one) for desired experiences.

   2. Engineer/ensure free will (generate creative forces that respond to internal will/desires).

   3. Engineer what we think of heaven (rest space for in-between lower-dimension incarnations).

2. Help other species "ascend" to that level of experience.

3. Continue to go to the next level of experience, because what in the heck generated all of this to begin with? Are there already even more “ascended” members of the advanced species in the next layer of dimension/time? What’s capturing moment by moment experience at this 5D layer of time? How high does it all go? (Enter mysterious music.)

They could also do a lot of “negative” stuff as well, but you have to remember that this species found a way to live in a materialist paradigm and not kill themselves over many millennia and so has some reverence for life (though that could look like a lot of different things). It is possible, maybe even more likely, that “negative” entities could manifest from other species who “rise too fast” so to speak, who gain reality altering abilities without the eons of mature connectedness and preservation of each other (oops).

I know this leaves so much out and is a vast oversimplification. But I found it to be a helpful framework that I think most people can grasp, even with materialist and linear thinking that most of us grew up with. The last few paragraphs might feel like a stretch to some, but our “modern science” is only about 400 years old. 400 years! That’s it! And we’ve already are starting to get to the limits of 4D reality (quantum for the small, relativity for the big). We’re already trying engineer reality (see Aharonov–Bohm effect) to break free. 

And you might have already grasped that those who are helping from the other side may even include an advanced "future" form of us. Could you already somehow be connected to or be a part of one of these advanced beings?

I digress. And hope to digress onto other fun topics, like time and free will :) . Much love friends. Thanks for taking this adventure with me. 

P.S. The tile is a bit of a joke about reaching the next dimension (as it is found at our “infinities”).