Then it happened as the Universe ended
                                                  without Vestabur or the snowy mountaintop
                                                 because it all had come to an end long,  long ago
                                                   before the beginning with no story now to stop

         Unmaking the world. Three words, countless implications. The end of everything we know, yet the beginning of understanding what it was. The old adage that you don't know what you have until it is gone. To create is thought to be good, to destroy is thought to be evil. Yet it is far easier to destroy the Universe than it would be to create one, and humanity will learn to destroy the Universe, the physical Universe, long before it could ever create one. Look at what we have accomplished thus far; the ability to destroy all life on a planet is within reach through nuclear or biological manipulations, not now obtainable but certainly in reach within a few hundred years if we wanted to. A few hundred years more and we might be able to destroy a star.

         In this I will be discussing intellectually deconstructing the Universe, not actually doing it, nor how best to do it, nor whether it could or ought to be done. It is a thought exercise of breaking the Universe down to its component parts starting with the self and working backwards. It has nothing to with blowing up the world or destroying the Universe, though many might think that to be cool, for some perverse reason. Were one to really have a Pandora’s box, or a simple button to push to destroy the Universe, a human would think to push it. Not at first maybe, a strong individual could resist but knowing the variability of the human species if such a button were to be handed down from generation to generation, we know if we admit it to ourselves, sooner or later someone would push it. It is in our nature.

         When the first nuclear bomb was detonated there was debate among the scientists working on the project on whether it might ignite the upper atmosphere. Despite that unknown, but hopefully thought to be extremely slim chance that we would that day relatively immediately and directly be destroying our species and countless others, we did it anyway. Then there is the matter, anti-matter situation. Not content with just being able to reconvert matter into an energy state, and destroying much else in the process, which of course is the whole point of why we do it, we have begun down a different and some speculate, potentially greater bang of matter / anti-matter explosions. We don't currently understand fully the relationship between matter and anti-matter. Some physicists have speculated that if matter and anti-matter were to collide or touch it could start a chain reaction which could not only destroy one, but two universes, yet humanity has tried to do just that. We have been told it has been achieved on a sub-atomic level, and that it is ok because we did not destroy the Universe by wanting to know that it could be done.

         Curiosity may kill more than cats. If humanity survives the near term it will have countless discoveries with fatal eventual ends, and will one day need to show restraint in chasing after every one of them to see where they lead. And it does not help that the greatest amount of human resources is spent on finding new ways of destroying ourselves, others of our species technically, but if you term ourselves to be our species, it is ourselves we seek to destroy. To ancient members of our species, we would seem to have the powers of the gods at our resources, and in the far future, if we even have any, members of our own species would have at their disposal powers over their worlds that to us might seem equally as wondrous, except for the power to destroy. We understand that quite well now for humanity, in a way, longs after nothing else as greatly as this.

         I don't mean that on an individual level we like to surround ourselves with weapons of mass destruction, though certainly there are such individuals. Our world is just structured in a way that such knowledge and powers of destruction have always been the most valuable commodities, and commodity is another thing we understand well. We have prices for everything, even the value of human lives have equations based on age and earnings potential, and these equations are figured into cost-benefit analysis of lives cost versus potential for profit when our corporations which to build, sell, or research something. With any discovery science makes, the first and ultimate test it is subjected to is how can this be used as a weapon, and can it be controlled by anyone. Even cures for diseases can be and are viewed strategically if only one side of a conflict has them, thus the impetus of states to create new diseases for which only they have the cure.

         But enough of our troubled present and tragically flawed social structures and values. This is meant to go beyond our species, chasing the eventual end conceptually which our species and perhaps others might actually be able to achieve in actuality, by accident or design. To unmake the world.

         Why is understanding this a good thing? Not how, I am too smart to wish to want to know literally how one might go about actually unmaking the Universe, nor would I particularly want my species to have such knowledge for all the reasons stated previously. But why is seeing from such a view, from being able to destroy the Universe, at all desirable? Life is the explorations of points of view, a lifetime of exploring a single individual's point of view. And within that lifetime coming into contact with other individuals' points of view, changing and being changed by them. Stripped of any physical reality, this would be the only reality of what we do here. Yet for anyone in any reality in any universe there is always that other point of view, what if it never happened? What if we only imagined it, what if nothing we know is real, what if whatever created us, or our world, or our Universe decided not to or did not happen that way? This goes beyond even its destruction for if it ever existed within that time frame, if one could go back in time conceptually or in fact, it would still exist there and then. But to instead explore conceptually the considerable other dimensions where it didn't and wasn't.

         This point of view is always there. No matter how much one achieves or what one society builds up in any given reality, in any specific timeline in any universe, a simple flicking of a switch of one event or non-event of the past occurring in a different way, and that person or societies achievements never come to pass. Despite my opinion that all possible avenues of change are always played out, contemplating the ones that did not or do not include oneself are especially disconcerting. There is almost a religiousness to the belief that ones own timeline is the only timeline, that ones world exists because it must exist, and that it is fundamentally right and true. To question this, so it is felt, is wrong and intrinsically dangerous. It is to risk to see behind the curtain of life, to know what you ought not to know. To risk unmaking the world somehow. To find out that your branch of reality is not the most real, or that your Universe is a figment of your or someone else’s imagination. Any number of points of view, disturbing points of view, begin with questioning the validity of ones own reality. Yet with enough intellect, experience, and more than a little of wanting to know things better left unknown, all species which get that far (maybe not far in terms of development, maybe far in terms of seeing themselves as separate) will one day seek to prove or disprove their own existences necessity, their own reality’s absolute validity.

         I believe that this questioning is not necessarily productive. As some might say, we are what we were born to be, that that is right and that questioning it is wrong. You can, not easily, question anything of importance, your society, justice, values, but not existence itself. That is the one boat you really don't want to rock. But humanity is far from happy little beavers or monkeys swinging around all day in trees. We have moved into our minds. The conceptual is as real to us as the physical. Our thoughts involve abstractions, words, numbers, events yet to occur which we wish to occur, planning, seeking to ways to avoid occurrences we do not wish to see occur, losing our health or our means of subsistence, jobs, residences, and so forth, and juggling what we think we can do to make the good occurrences occur and / or keep the bad occurrences from happening. We can detach from ourselves and our timelines to look at it from a different perspective of all possible timelines which may spring forth from it, and manipulate or change it. By understanding our potentiality we increase our variability. By understanding five things to do or be, we can add a sixth, seventh, and so on. It is consciousness taking control over the physical and working through time creating ever more paths of change and manipulation of future events from existing or not existing simply by changing our minds.

         For a species this disconnected from current happenings, to be able to conceptually sort through future possible realities for themselves to find the ones they most want to occur or exist in and to contemplate what they must do in the now to make those occurrences occur, they live in a state of constantly anticipating multiple realities, rather than in a single reality. The present is only a means to an end. All species exist that way, but some are far more grounded in the present than others, with far fewer variabilities open to them to need to contemplate.

         Humanity has countless variabilities. All humans through creativity have countless avenues of change or construction to explore, any number of disciplines to study, and can create new ones not yet existing for others to spend or waste their time expanding upon them. A single individual, never mind the multitudes that exist here, a mere single individual represents years of potential occurrences, interactions, conversations, avenues of growth, potential help and potential harm, of possible and sometimes probable occurrences. The sea of possible events we swim through everyday in totality is beyond our comprehension, so deconstructing if you will, what world, universe, which we inhabit is a chance to try to gain perspective on our perspectives. To look at us looking at ourselves, by removing step by step what we are, what we have to look at, until at last we are left with a universe which only might have been. That I see as a worthy goal of a mind turned in on itself and a universe we turn inside out every day we contemplate what events should occur within it. And now it begins.
 

                                                      This is for no one
                                                        who never was nor will ever be
                                                       Robbed of any future,
                                                         it could have been us oh so easily

                                                      He will never hope or dream,
                                                        he will never laugh or cry
                                                       Never to live,  never to die
                                                         and never to understand why

                                                      He will never know of love
                                                        or what it means to be happy
                                                       He will never know of kindness
                                                         or the true value of sincerity

                                                      Fated to be what is not
                                                        above and beyond eternity
                                                       always and never absent
                                                         from what we call reality

                                                      Millions of new opportunities
                                                        come and go within our days
                                                       few realized,  most fade away
                                                         but within the realm of possibility
                                                        far greater than what can be
                                                          exists all past potentialities
                                                         that we never have nor ever will see

                                                      Maybe it is there that he exists
                                                        as an idea long since forgotten
                                                       living a life that never was,
                                                         giving what will never be gotten
                                                        by us in our separate world
                                                          of limited possibilities,
                                                         side by side yet forever apart
                                                           locked in separate realities
 

         Of all the steps to deconstructing the Universe, thinking backwards, none can compare to the difficulty of the first step. It is over 99% of the work. That is to imagine the world absent of oneself. Nothing is easier, yet nothing is harder. The walls that keep us from going there conceptually are there for our own protection. We can coldly, distantly, think of the world we know without ourselves in it but in a sense, we sense that what we believe, what we want, what we fear, establishes or manifests itself potentially to come to be through our envisioning, conceiving, or allowing it. On an emotional level there is so much that we think or hope will not happen because we refuse to think of it as a possibility and need to want not to think of it at all. On some level there may be something to that, yet the world we live in has some inevitabilities about it which we know we must accept and know we cannot deny them indefinitely.

         Beyond a sense of fear, dread, foreboding in a negative way, about ones own absence in the world, there is another factor which prevents us from seeing such possibilities in anything other than a detached way. That is the feeling or sensing that the first requirement of the world in which one inhabits is that it must include oneself. From your own point of view for you to be, it must include you. If it existed and you did not, it would not be real to you. Yes, a world will still go on after our lives end, but it will no longer be our world anymore whether or not we could be thought to still have any essence. A world can still exist, an Earth, people and other species on it, but not your world. Your world began when you were born and only lasts while you last. Again, I am not saying the Universe vanishes when any particular person or consciousness dies, but from their point of view, it may as well have. From one point of view, we leave it. From another point of view, it leaves us.

         Our world is a mutual blending. What we bring to it is as valid, from the individuals point of view, as anything it brings to us. We exist within it, and it in turn exists within us. We can separate ourselves from it, but we are no longer ourselves. Our notions of ourselves are presently defined by our places within it. Remove that means of definition and our notions of ourselves disappear completely. Given such a steep slope to climb, and that we and our world are inseparable without the demise of one, the other, or both, how are we to conceive of this?

         Now I understand I went a bit too far too fast in dismissing that we cannot conceive of such things. We can think about what will happen after we are gone, can plan as best we can for such an eventuality, and understand it to some degree, and that is indeed a step in the direction of moving towards it. Also as I implied we will be moved to it regardless of whether we are ready for it, accepting of it or not. Death, separation, must occur in some way but in another way we may, according to many peoples beliefs, account for its happening in a way that we think we can allow ourselves a means to go on past that end (reincarnation, heaven, etc.). That once the end is reached, all bets are off and we are free to redefine ourselves as existing in another way, another self, or in another world.

         It is best to leave that for then for I am speaking of now, the world in which we commonly for now reside, though this commonality is more of a technicality for each of us does not view it the same or in the same way. Different paths lead to extremely varied viewpoints, outlooks, and mindsets. To be you is to be within your particular mindset. You can see, understand, experience, and get to know another’s mindset or even experience in a fashion another’s viewpoint and mindset, and can copy parts of it to supplement or augment your own but it is always done in a way customized by you in which it becomes your own, though many of the ideas and outlooks from which it is compromised are off-the-shelf parts so to speak.

         To speak or think of the world which includes you now after you are gone, and conceive of this state, it is often done using spin. It is like hitting a tennis ball with a racquet. After the ball leaves the racquet it is really on its own. In any number of ways, if we are conscious of or about what will happen in this world after we are gone, it is like planning for that one moment after the ball hits, after which there is nothing else we can do and can only hope we judged correctly how well we accounted for the spin we put on whatever future events we might have hoped to achieve beyond that point. If one has no goals for any others after oneself is gone, the entire notion of trying to spin the future for others, to have hopes for where the ball might go after that point, this whole concept might be lost on them. If one has others they care deeply about who will presumably live on after they die, most likely they can understand that though they know that after the ball is hit, after the final decisions and preparations are made, after the last doing will be done, they know the feelings of hope and doubt, and need to give that shot their all, and that all the things they did before in a sense were merely to set up that last shot, and to be able to read it as best they can.

         But this is still not a real separation of oneself from ones world. It is putting ones life into events and hoping the events will carry forth in some pre-conceived way. A dissolution of matter or life into events which will continue on, like playing pool in zero gravity, the effects causing other effects endless bouncing off of each other until the end of time. Even that to me is not dead enough. The real death is to never have lived, that great open space beyond ones own timeline where one can never go. It is in all the Universe's plays which never did, would, could, or will include your own existence within it. This is the beginning of understanding the Universe, from the point of view from all who have never existed within it.

         Now you may be beginning to grasp how difficult or impossible this may seem. One who does not have existence cannot have a point of view. Yes, even if someone lived a thousand, a million, or a billion years ago in a far different world than our own, they could if given knowledge of or exposure to, have a point of view about us, our societies, or of chocolate ice cream. The same can be said for anyone yet to be, they can have opinions once they are born into a world somehow, formulate a consciousness, and explore or devise their own personal preferences. Even ones who die relatively young can be thought to have a kind of spin, others or that one him or herself might extrapolate on how they might have developed to see things at a later date based upon the track they seemed to be headed previous to that point.

         But those who might only potentially have existed though they never have nor ever will, if one even allows that there is more than one way the past could have happened or more than one way the future could go, can they even be thought to have any points of view, any mindsets uniquely their own? Ones own outlooks in part are formed by interactions within a given single timeline which lead to specific experiences over potential experiences and lead to specific memories, attitudes, and opinions based on those actual occurrences. Obviously were a potential being never to be present in any single timeline but instead in a multitude of timelines, they would not have a single foundation to create the path to a single outlook since none would be more real than any others since none from an outsiders point of view actually will occur. Yet even this omnipresent fuzzy potential of multiple possible outlooks, could under the right conditions lead to specific realities which they might choose to make real (which is what we define as the formation of a personality, the preference or tendency of wanting particular kinds of events or experiences for themselves or for others to occur).

         But once that last block is pulled out of not even existing in any possible way the world could have unfolded, it would be to be completely and forever outside of existence. To such a being the Universe, any universes, all timelines, all would be completely unreal. If one were not even to exist in any single possible timeline of any of the countless directions the Universe might have otherwise taken until now, if one were to be outside of every possible way the Universe could have went down or will, they could not even be considered potentially existent. Therefore such a being, or non-being, could not exist.

         My own beliefs sidestep this completely by believing that every avenue of chance, which is by definition the potential to occur, must in some reality, in some timeline, of some dimension of some universe, it must occur for such a possibility to even exist as a possibility. If it never occurs in any timeline, then it never could occur and was not a possibility at all. Some could live with the notion of only a single valid timeline of a deterministic world, and even deny that a single "true" timeline cannot co-exist what we perceive as choice. To say that one always had a choice but the past always had to have happened as it did, and though we have choices, that the future will only happen one way, the way that it must or will, that to me is a deterministic world and not the world which I perceive as I choose to perceive it. On some level and on some occasions I am certain choice is there to be exerted, that more than one path springs forth and that both or more are equally capable of becoming real, equally possible, and therefore somehow in some way each is true.

         So though I can aspire towards a point of view of never having existed while never to be in existence either, by any point of view I am capable of formulating, it is not a possibility, and least from my point of view and limited reasoning abilities. Anything beyond even the non-existent to us potential for existence, beyond that there appears to be nothing. But once existing in any single branch of reality, it is to be potentially existent in all. The best that leaves one to be able to achieve in that vein of trying to comprehend non-existence, is carrying forth ones own outlook, personality, points of view, and bringing it to bear on realities that are not to us true, not real, for they did not nor will include us within their timelines, to mentally reduce our real to us reality to a potential reality.

         Which timeline was real if there is more than one, after the end of time, after any or all which could have been long have been played out, which really happened and which did not occur and only were potential, will not have mattered unless memory or consciousness can be thought to live on somehow or to eventually live again. If it was real to you it was real. In a sense it may be perception which solidifies one timeline over any other. False memories can live just as long and seem as real as memories of actual events, and once there is nothing left to be affected by them, which were real and which might only have been will cease to matter. After the Universe is no more, who or what is to say which particular timeline out of all the ones which were possible for any given individual was the real one, or which persons were actually born compared with those who only might have been born in their places a day or a week later or earlier? Is the Universe like going into a multiplex cinema where all the motion pictures end at the same time, where different versions of you or different others that might have been each go into a different theater, yet when the shows are over all leave through the same door, with each picture potentially equally having been seen? Any universe beyond even the potential for existence does not exist unless of course it once might have existed in the past before this Universe existed or might exist in the future after it is gone. But to define a notion of time before or after time as we know it began or will end requires a new understanding or new definition of what time is.
 

                                         Looking back, looking within
                                           looking to some god high in the sky
                                            looking only for some way to compass
                                            where the hell am I
                                             in the midst of swirling events
                                              made not by me yet made mine by me
                                               how it is I came to be here
                                                seeing being and being to see
                                                 and knowing what lies between
                                                  there is only me
                                                   wondering still yet where it all will lead
                                                    where the end if any will be
                                                     as if an end to time or me could be
                                                      when time, my time, begins and ends with me
                                                       as yours with you, the Universe with its,
                                                        only the time between time is time
                                                         as only between life there is life
                                                          and only in that empty space
                                                           where I end and the rest of the world begins
                                                            in between each moment of time
                                                             where nothing could ever be
                                                              is the only me to find

          To redefine the notion of oneself is how we enable ourselves to see beyond our own perceptions and existences. Without a definition of what we are we are nothing. Now, in this existence, that means of definition is our bodies. Many are content with that definition, that we are our bodies, that our bodies are ourselves. Others say no, we are the life-force which animates our bodies, gives it consciousness to perceive itself and its world, that is what we are. Whether that life-force disbands upon death, reforms somewhere or somehow else, contributes to new life, or stays intact, it does not matter. It was redefined to them beyond the physical "grounding" which others only perceive or believe in.

         I have stated in other works that a consciousness is able to redefine itself up to the limits of the Universe it perceives. I do not mean by redefining itself to include everything, that it becomes everything or is everything. I mean only that that is the maximum of what it can redefine itself as, as everything which it can perceive and conceive. And from another point of view that is correct, one is the sum of all that one perceives and conceives, they are inextricably a part of it, even if they exist within their own rights as well. They are part of its means and ability to define itself.

         In reality your body is just another part of your environment, bound to it and cannot exist apart from it. By controlling it, steering it, you create events, experiences which are you in a more real, more personal sense. You, possibly, did not create the means of your own existence, did not choose the sex, race, size, potential, and so on that you were given as a basis upon which to build. You, your life, your consciousness, anything which you could ever hope to achieve, any experiences or states of being that you would like to see come about, they exist as relationships between the you, the body, the that-which-you-control, and your environment, the all-else-that-is-not-you. You exist not just as you, nor as your environment, but as the interplay between the two. That you have control over, that you create, your body is just the primary tool you were given to work with, a loaner to see what you could make of it, part of the complete set that is your environment. To say that what you are is the interplay between the two main parts of your environment, your body and the rest of the physical world, this is just another redefinition of oneself, just one among many possible others, but one worthy of exploration for it shifts the focus beyond oneself to include the environment, yet has independence by not being dependent upon the necessity of either's absolute existence. Whatever the what-you-are may be, and whatever the all-else might be, does not really matter or is important, it is how they mesh up which counts.

         You can redefine yourself as half of a pair-bonding of two people sharing a single consciousness. You can redefine yourself as an extension of the life from which your parents also came traveling through time moving from body to body into the future. You can redefine yourself as a cell in the multi-bodied living organism which is your species, since no individual alone can perpetuate it, therefore there is ample reason to not be able to think of yourself as being completely autonomous from it or its wish to survive. Redefining yourself is simply that. It is how you choose to see yourself. You are not changing the world except conceptually. Everything in existence is there for your mind to play with to build up concepts of yourself or your world with, like giving blocks to a child to play with. What exists, what you perceive, are the blocks to use to guess, to discover, to sort out, or to speculate about what you are. The more creative you are, the more complex or original the structures you will build with them. There is no cheating either. You are free to look about you to what others are building with their blocks and use that information as you wish to expand upon your own creations.

         It may be for some that there is only one true block, themselves. That block they keep dear to them, as indeed we all should, but for them all the other blocks which they might use to redefine their notions of themselves (even purpose which is a notion that one may look to apply to their own lives cannot exist independent of the other blocks which are there to expand ones notion of what one is or can become), are to them are just that, other blocks. They may use the other blocks to build around the one block, but they may never see that the one block which they may see as their everything, that is what they are, cannot by itself make anything and does not without the other blocks even exist as anything. That it is always just a part of what they are.

         Consciousness is based around perception, and our perceptions come to us mainly through our senses which all stem from that first block, our bodies. Other sensations come which we cannot locate by direction. A feeling that something might not be right or of something about to happen, and other such causations for us to act, or perceptions or intuitions which do not come from a pin-pointable direction as does something we see or a direction of something we heard. Yet they are experiences and, like I said, can be causations or impetuses for future events. You might call someone to see if they are alright for no other reason, or make a small or major change in your plans from such un-pin-pointable sources of experience. I don't offer this as proof that our minds exist outside of our bodies or that they can, I mean only that our thought processes are currently processing a barrage of information outside of just what we see, hear, smell, taste, and feel. All of these have their own places and we can use them in tandem or separate them to sense, in the sense of meaning to anticipate. We may be able to by will or other means, to sense in other ways things which may be going on in the present which will affect us somehow in the future. Though ones awareness is primarily centered around themselves, while awake anyway, if someone we care about greatly is traveling in a particularly dangerous place, part of ones awareness, though not necessarily in fact, can be thought to be transferred to be focused on keeping in touch with or keeping safe that person. The common expression for this is “our thoughts were with you, because in fact in a way they were. Worry or concern of this type attempts to maintain a link with them, ideally to keep them from harm as if just by focusing ones attention or consciousness upon being with them one might be of some help to them or aid them somehow.

         This is all interpretation of how we might wish to feel we are with someone we lost or someone we love who might be in trouble. And it is just one interpretation of something which to me is focusing or attempting to focus ones perception or use beyond oneself. I don't disagree with anyone who might interpret such times or experiences in a completely different way. Some may be of the opinion that one can never actually shift ones mind or perception or sense anyone or anything outside of the information provided by their bodily senses from the day they are born until the day they die, and that any other sensations or experiences are merely the result of imagination. Everyone is entitled to their own interpretation of perception. No one says you have to consider using all of the blocks of perception of all else in your environment. I doubt anyone could figure out how to make them all fit together, so we tend to pick and choose some over others as being more important or crucial to the design, or mindset, we wish to build. But for the purpose of this section, the ability to consider how if at all possible, to shift ones thinking outside or beyond oneself, it deserves mentioning for in such cases as this, it can be a purposeful reallocation or shifting of awareness, if it could be called that, when it is done out of need.

         Simple thought exercises include such things as flying a kite or swimming in a lake. I have said though I do not wish to push it as true, that I believe consciousness is not necessarily confined to any specific place or even any time. Awareness is concentrated around specific times, places, persons, and events. We can perceive by memories in varying degrees of intensity things which are not happening and can perceive them as real, especially in altered mental states such as dreams, hallucinations, or under hypnosis. Awareness can be shifted even if perception, and your physical location, cannot.

         For the kite example, simply go fly a kite. It is considerably more fun than just approaching it as a thought exercise. You and the kite are there together on the beach or in a field, and are bound together by a string with you at one end, and the kite at the other. You are there on the ground staring up at the kite, from your perspective you can see the kite moving around with the wind. Using your imagination, logic, and more than a little reverse math, concentrate your awareness through the string up to the kite, on what the kite would be seeing looking down while it moves, what it would see looking down at you from the other end of the string, how its movements flow down into your own arms movements as you react to it, just as you see your arms movements flowing back up the string to its movements reacting to you. But of course the end goal is to be looking down upon yourself within the world. You and the kite are momentarily two blocks together and neither one is the main block, a point of view from which we see all too rarely when at all.

         For the lake example, go jump in a lake. If you do not have access to a lake, simply take a bath, it is warmer, usually more pleasant, and requires less imagination. Either way, shift your awareness to include the water around you, see it as an extension of yourself or of your body. Feel how any slight movement of the water is translated into a sensation on your skin, how you feel the waters movement as if it were your hair blowing in the wind or being cut by scissors. Though there are not pain sensors or nerves in your hair to feel it being cut except for the pull at the roots and the sound of the scissors in your ears, your awareness is shifted to your hair since you perceive it as a part of you, and surpress any sympathetic pain you might imagine your hair might be feeling. Feel or perceive the water around you as an unfeeling extension of your body through the connection of the water, as you might perceive the hair on the back of your head as an unfeeling, yet still a part of yourself, as it is cut, as if by someone pounding on the water you feel the movement traveling through the water to your skin, then up your nerves, and finally to your brain, all as one sensation as if a part of yourself was being painlessly pounded and moved around by the splashing.

         Each example is simply shifting your awareness to one specific part of your environment which you are directly connected to or in contact with. This is the easiest and most logical place to start. For anyone who might think this is meditative, or part of some quacky religion, understand that in a less direct, less submersive (sorry) way we do this every day. A sudden loud bang compresses air molecules together which we hear through our ears, or if loud enough, we might feel on our skin. For that one brief moment we react as if it was a part of us that was affected, the cause of the bang, the movement of the wave through the air, and our reaction, all are felt in a single sensation and focuses immediately our awareness back upon the cause of the event. A second later we sort it out in our heads, where or what the cause was, what the sound was, and where we were when we heard it.

         Beyond this first step one can choose to try, less easy to explain is how or even why some might seek to shift their awareness to include other living things, such as one spending hours attempting to perceive what a tree or bird perceives, which are goals or exercises in some people's religions. That not only is all else in your environment a source of perceptions in how they affect you, but may also be a source of your perceiving how they might be perceiving their own existence or you. More useful perhaps than wanting to see or know what it is like to be a tree, should some consider that possible, would be to attempt to get a glimpse of someone else's mind, a human, a lot more interesting perhaps, and possibly a lot more complex. I do not think it possible though, if it were to be possible at all, to get much more than a glimpse. Maybe all trees perceive the world in much the same ways, or maybe not, but all people certainly do not. Common ground can be found on this subject or that, this belief or that, and many opinions can be similar, yet there is so much fundamentally different about how each person sees the world and organizes it into what they think to be important, relevant, and in how they go about reaching what can be similar conclusions by very different paths of reasoning.

         But even glimpses can provide an endless bounty of wealth of information since we are given a chance to expand upon that one sole perspective each of us spends our lives creating through experiences, thinking, and through living it, and can jump momentarily ahead, behind, backward or forward, to see momentarily from perspectives we would need otherwise to have lived fully to understand, for others have lived them for us, though what they can impart to us can never compare to all that they know by all that they have lived through. But what little of it we can digest most are eager to, for of all the things we can know, to gain another perspective is not to gain a new thing, but instead is a new way of seeing everything else. That those perspectives may not be complete or necessarily accurate does not deter us from trying. Perspective comes in second only to life in importance, and the two may be inseparable, or even the same.
 

                                      We remember things which have never been
                                        if we live long enough to see life repeat again
                                        thus shattering our illusions of perpetual freshness
                                         in that a limitless number of nows are begun
                                        as we pass from one to another just begun
                                          only to find that both ring out in unison

                                      Infinity is finite and randomness predictable,
                                        for just as the mind finds the unknowable irresistible
                                       we break the facade of the indefinitive world
                                         merely by using the means of our memories
                                        to eventually come to see that spacious duplication is the key
                                          masking the underlying yet undeniable uniformity

                                      Originality is but a hopeless and arrogant dream
                                        as countless lives verbatim repeat the scenes
                                       that we dare to call our own and hold dear
                                         for that which is us is merely a stone
                                        randomly thrown and standing alone
                                          yet existing nowhere to be known

          Before delving into the inevitable your-world-without-you, or you-without-being-defined-
by-your-world contrasts which are required by this work or set of writings, I first wish to go universal on a different track. There is a fundamental thrust to human lives which goes beyond being specific to any individual. On any number of levels we all seem to be going through variations of the same story, thus the appeal of fictitious or others' stories which we can relate to our own, and can easily identify with.

          Granted, not everyone lives the same story. At the extreme high and low levels of status, wealth, and power, though not completely dissimilar to the majority in the middle, they have experiences and outlooks and potentials unique to those positions in society, and can only be fully appreciated by others in those extreme high or low positions in society.

         The majority are in the middle ground for societies lucky enough to have a large section of its population between whoever rules or is in control, and those who have absolutely no say in anything, and may as well be considered as slaves. Between those highs and lows is the group which is thought to have some rights, are entitled to limited opinions or say in what they might do with their lives, yet are not able to do whatever they might wish, as the extremely wealthy or rulers might do often without repercussions. Nor are they, generally speaking, totally beaten down or completely submissive as complete pawns of rulers. They are those who have over time fought to hold the middle ground. They agree to give power to those who would control them completely otherwise, but do so contingently on getting something back for themselves, namely the right to be left alone once those pre-defined requirements or quotas are met.

         This is where most of humanity and possibly most communal species thrive. Those who are powerful enough to destroy you, whether legitimate elected governments or those who rule only by force, they must be appeased from doing so by your making keeping you alive more profitable or worth their while, than simply killing you would gain them. Once you are able to provide that to them, you have a foundation, albeit a precarious one, upon which to seek assurances they will not one day take even more.

         Most will live upon land that is not their own, or land which they must continually pay a fee to those who have said it to be theirs, and can enforce their claims upon it over others that might come along and claim it for their own. Most will be allowed to sell their wares or their labor, or the produce from the lands they control, provided they give a percentage to those who allow them to live or to stay in business. How high that percentage or cut is, and to how many different parties one must pay, this varies over time and in different locations. When that cut always keeps most at a subsistence level, only near the absolute minimum for survival, such societies are stable, but only for lacking the means to change their positions. When new environmental factors emerge or are changed, the weaknesses in such societies are exposed when most are eager to cast their lot for change, for so little have they to lose.

         When the percentage taken leaves more than the bare minimum required for survival, people can begin to acquire wealth and not see those who require a percentage as being unreasonable or harsh, and can view it simply as a fee, or the cost of doing business. By being able to acquire wealth, they can hope for a better future for their children than they can make for themselves, for their children will start with more than they had to begin with. And in such societies, more people have a vested interest in whatever governments or societal structures which allow them to acquire and keep this wealth.

         It does not matter where or when you are born, some aspect of these universal societal structures will affect or frame your life if you occupy the middle ground of having some rights or say in your life, either by personal freedom; free time, choice of occupation, choice of where to live, or by the right to acquire and pass on property. Some slaves in some cultures were not allowed any of what we would term personal freedom or free will, but were allowed to own property, and attempt to amass wealth to purchase their or their own children’s freedom.

         Most cannot envision a culture free from such controls. Any attempts which have been made to even out human society have lain bare this model we cannot fundamentally change. As long as someone, some group, is in control of a society, they will have special perks or allowances for themselves, and will seek to guide their children or others that they care about into similar privileged positions. Without a strong dominate force, a society becomes easy prey for an outside force to dominate them, or falls prey to itself with various warlords forming, each fighting to secure its own sphere of influence. So we pay, whoever is in charge, it really does not matter. If they can kill or imprison us, or take from us our property or livelihoods, we know we must pay. And we hope those who are in power are cutting us the best deal we can get, or will deliver on the security aspect of the arrangement implicit in the exchange of funds, that we will be left alone or safe after it is made.

         But the amount one must pay and to whom varies over time. New criminal or legitimate organizations, new branches of government, new licenses and fees, new rules and regulations regarding the acquisition of wealth and the ability to transfer wealth continually spring up, and sometimes ease up, like the ebb and flow of the tide. When allowed by law, people can vent their frustrations with too many taxes or too little guarantees of getting anything in return for paying them, how much can be taken from or given to those who might already have nothing and if not given some outside sustenance would perish, they can debate such things with words and votes. When such debates are not allowed by law, when people are not allowed to show affiliation with one group or the other and work toward that groups aims politically, armed groups emerge that will take the debates forward on less rational, less cerebral levels, and both sides inevitably become polarized.

         When that happens, when polarization occurs, those in power who currently enforce the laws rely on those who benefit or profit from the current system even more, and give those groups ever increasing influence over their policies. Eventually then, those with influence over power are allowed by governments and rulers to increase their prices, taxes, rents, higher with less and less restrictions, which is always desirable to them, to get the most possible for their goods and services. In such instances, thus more and more in a society are moved closer to a mere subsistence level, dissatisfaction increases and changes in leadership, in direction, if not allowed for by elections, coups, or non-violent means, will tend to eventually be attempted by internal warfare. Both dictators and democracies, when successful, understand this dynamic and allow for it, always attempting to sense how much is too much, then backing off seeming to chastise those who have bought them for having gone to far, or turn on elements within their own institutions for becoming to corrupt, and then trying again later after the fuss has quelled.

         We will always have to pay someone for what we think we own, or what we think we are entitled to. And we hope with that support, they will literally or figuratively fight for us or our rights against those interests we might think are working against our interests. But dissatisfaction also arises when one thinks that those we support are not really working in our own interests. That they only pretend to fight our battles for us, which sides of the issue we are on, and in the end resign or take a dive, whether by incompetence or by being bought off, and in the end sabotage what was purported to be their own interests and goals, or the interest and goals of those that funded or appointed them to speak or fight for them.

         What we call the system, the means of which what, in ones society, is in control of both regulating change and providing for continuity, works from the public’s point of view best when it responds to peoples desires for change without need for it to degenerate to people wanting or supporting armed conflict for it to have to change. From the systems point of view, it works best by mitigating the needs or desires for change. If it isn't broken, don't fix it. And the system, whatever system it may be, warlords, monarchies, dictatorships, or elected democracies, cannot question the nature of their own systems, and rarely change themselves except in the most superficial ways, how they function, nor are they often so inclined.

         But in life, human life, the middle ground is between those who have direct influence over their systems and can get whatever they might wish from it, and between those at the bottom forever to be shut out completely from having a voice or being ever able to even call for change or to have such calls for change ever to be heard. Those in-between who have a voice, who have some influence over their own lives and actions and are forever butting heads with the powers that be to defend their own modest turfs, properties, or civil rights, this is where the action is, the quintessential human story. For those with nothing to lose by change, or those with much to lose, choices are easy and affiliations and opinions are almost pre-ordained. The middle ground sometimes sides with one, sometimes the other, never satisfied and never safe from losing what little they have.

         Go to any society in any age of history and you will hear the same conversations over and over. How the King, Emperor, ruler takes too much and leaves you with nothing, or just enough to keep you from rebelling but plenty enough to keep you in your place. And how you don't have enough rights, why does this authority or that decide who you should marry, what you can own, why can't you run off to another town or county, now country, where the ruler is kinder and more benevolent. From the individuals view, yes, the ruler always takes too much and gives too few rights in return. You will always be the property of the king or state, and always be haggling with him or them trying to cut yourself a fairer deal. But again, from the point of view of whatever state one is under, it is always giving the right amount of rights and taking the right amount to keep the most number of people happy with the least amount of resources available to them. If it were taking too much, it would not have survived or proved stable. There would have been civil war and it would have collapsed. Take too little and too many become too rich, too many diverse and divergent opinions, and each group able to pursue them, a notion not exactly in keeping with limiting change, or even being able to control it. The more power the middle group has, the more rights they demand for themselves, and the more pissed off they get when their leaders deny them those rights or are exempt from such rules themselves.

         Thus whatever level of rights, few, non-existent, or plentiful people have, and however much that society takes from those whom it has the power of life, death, and imprisonment over, whether it allows them the means to acquire wealth, free time, leisure, knowledge, they always are in balance, and from that societal structures point of view, that balance is necessary to its survival. By letting people become too rich or too poor, they either will demand more rights and a more responsive government, or will if it fosters too much poverty and desperation, have growing ranks of people who would seek to change the system completely.

         So as you bitch about your life, your government, your taxes, your lack of freedom to do this or that, remember it is a universal balancing act. We as a collective society put in or agree with those who take power, if we have any say in it at all, because we want to survive and it provides us a structure within which to work to think that our own goals can be reached or have a chance of being met. When we believe that is true, or always will be true, we can become complacent to politics, power-plays, and intrigue. When we do not believe our societies give us enough room to achieve our goals or survival, we as a species become more political, fight to preserve or gain what we think are our rights to which our existence within whatever framework we find ourselves in might entitle us to. And when people think that their words are never heard or their votes will never count, they resort to other methods. With this all beings ever born or will be born, inevitably find themselves struggling to survive within it through their own balancing acts. The only beings that do not know this is going on are those whose positions and privileges are so high and established after many generations, they come to believe they are unchangeable or unassualtable, and also those who are so controlled or so broken by the structures of their societies that they have no aspirations for themselves or expectations, or any concept of human rights.

         Outside of those extremes, all else find themselves trying to survive and achieve, to live and to build their lives or their children’s lives to a higher level while avoiding the wrath of those others which can destroy them. We may live our entire lives without seeing the limitations which may be set before us or may not see them as being limiting. Others will see the limitations and need to pound against them. Why can't I refuse to pay a gangster money to "protect" me? Why can't I march down the street saying my government is wrong about this or that when the most powerful people would disagree or might want to hurt me? Why can't I think what I want about that or say what I want about this?

         Whatever societal forms ever existed, this is what causes them to change, some seeing limitations as unnecessary and punitive, and governments and rulers as fallible. Such interactions with ones society, working for or against changes in the future or in the present does not have any meaning for many peoples lives, but throughout history, they can become defining moments in many peoples lives, and no matter how you wish to see yourself, somehow in some way everyday you are affected by it. And knowingly or unknowingly, often we are dragged into it and used as evidence to support one view or another by not having or voicing any opinion at all. Others won't hesitate to say what those who don't speak would say or think, how they speak for the "silent" majority on this or that, and rarely if they are respected or established enough, would they be easily refuted even by those persons for whom they purport to speak, were they ever to be heard.

         So how does this fit into deconstructing the Universe? On a fundamental level, living is about survival. We survive not only in the context of battling against nature, but to an even greater degree of battling to survive within the context of human society. We are born into a specific place within that context, and must expend a lot of energy and time to maintain, define, or improve that context within which we find ourselves. It, or more accurately how we choose to deal with what context we find ourselves within, is very much a measure of who or what we are, and understanding that means of definition is important before removing it by removing conceptually oneself from everything else.
 

                                        Can the unliving die
                                        or have they any way to know
                                        when it comes or how it is any different
                                        than bidding ones time waiting for its arrival
                                        not out of hope nor longing nor anger at the life
                                        which makes one curious enough to live and recompense enough to die

         The first step in conceptually unmaking the Universe is to remove yourself from it, imagining your world, your timeline, existing without you. But there are problems with that. Without you it would not be your world, you would not have known the people you know and have known, have not cared about them and their lives any more than any others you never knew. In a very real sense your world cannot exist without your having been in it, it would have been a different world, a different universe. But seeing as this is all conceptual, let's go to that different universe.

         Without a foundation, an existence, a history of experiences which define attitudes, outlooks, and opinions, you would not exist, therefore being existent and having outlooks, opinions, likes and dislikes, traits and habits comprising a personality needed to look at anything, we will keep this timeline intact for the moment and imagine another co-existing outside of our own. Everything which has happened to you until now still happens, but happens here, not there.

         Your family without you, your friendships and relationships never having occurred in that other timeline. Earth going past your point in time, your moment of entrance, without stopping to let you on board. A split second's difference and your never happening. The first most obvious thing already mentioned is, why would you care? If you never came into being, you would have no family, would never meet your potential friends and potential lovers. You would have nothing to say or any opinion about it, but as an attempt to gain perspective upon your life and your world, this would be pointless, thus the preserved conceptually alternate timeline in which you did occur. You still exist here and now able to travel to there and then.

         Now attempt to observe that timeline knowing what you know of the people you know. Imagine key events in their lives but without you being there or being part of how they dealt with such times or events. There are no substitutions in this thought exercise either. No other person gets born in your place, no person not existing then would get born then to take up any slack. All events which you did not cause or effect would go on just as they did in the timeline which included you. Everyone would be the same persons they are now, only minus you.

         But you are there, just not in a way where you can help them or contact them in any way. You can only observe, empathize with their troubles, curse their weaknesses or blind spots which will lead them into troubles, yet not being able to help them see them or change anything which might happen to them. Follow the same path as your life now only as a ghost. Obviously soon the roads veer off and become untravelable, so foreign are they to you. Any children you might have had previously no longer exist. Others might exist with any of your potential partners since your relationships with them never occurred. Your friends might have formed different friendships with others, or might have roughly the same friends yet minus one. No harm ever done to anyone by you could have occurred, yet neither any good you might have done, any comfort you might have given, neither could that occur.

         Since you are no longer a player, all variables are removed. Whatever freedom or power others may have to change their lives or their world, that is no longer provided to you. What will happen is predictable one way, or a thousand ways, since you cannot affect it. You can see every error in judgement others make, follow it to every conclusion, or trace every mistake backward in time and pin point exactly where they went wrong but you can never tell them about it or warn them. I am dwelling only on the negative here because going over what good happens to them, since you still exist and care for them, does not greatly affect you except how you may feel about not being there to share in it. You might miss that as well but even in this ghostlike state you can still experience their happiness just as much though they can never know it. Any extra happiness they might feel because of how you might have negatively affected their lives, this I will not dwell on either for though this may be affecting, it is not relevant for such mistakes cannot be undone, even in the parameters of this argument.

         What I am focusing on, the help one could provide, what one needs to provide and share in their happiness, and their miseries, share in their hopes and their dreams, and give them hope or comfort at the right times, and the dreams they might not have pursued without your supporting them, this is the lacking I mean to stress. Though you are not there and cannot be there, hopefully you would still want to be there. Knowing how you could best help them or comfort, advise and support them, this can only make not being there worse, and harder to bear. 

        Yet though some reality like that may exist somewhere, in this reality you were born, and though you may not have done all that you might have wished, that you could not see all the paths as clearly because by existing those paths are constantly shifting under your influences not completely under your control for your variations and variabilities overlap other peoples’ creating new variations and variabilities you alone could never predict. By existing within reality you muddy the waters with every movement and try to help without always knowing when and if your advice or aid should be given or is indeed valuable, yet because you are here, there is the need to try.

         The meaning of this exercise goes beyond simply removing a level needed to being able to deconstruct all else. It is about justifying your own existence. No one ever wants to do that, and most pray they are never required to. It is confronting what it is you hope to achieve by being here, how is this world which includes you any improvement over one identical but for the fact that you would not be in it? Harsh as such questions are, going even mentally in conjectures or dreams to a state where you are powerless to affect anything yet still possess the same drives which drive you now, how better to learn of them? To spend a day or a week, a year or a lifetime, or countless lifetimes just sitting on the sidelines, having opinions, goals, aspirations for yourself or others, yet never being able to do anything or be of any use to anyone. Going to such a state mentally is pure anguish, the anguish of wanting never satiated. Of needing to do yet never being able to do literally anything except sit and watch and wait for that one time world does stop and let you climb aboard. To re-experience your life again after coming from such a state, from endless eternities of waiting, even if rebuilt only from your imagination, is to experience life anew in its endless possibilities as you never had before. To be given a whole new hour, a new day, a new week of endless new possibilities to do something, anything, and to have it count for something for someone else.

         This is the other side of imagining your world without you, it is to imagine you without your world, yet they are the same. Without having another world to replace this one, as with imagining your world without a replacement for you, it is forever wanting to be, needing to be, until the time that you are. It is true that looking at not being from the point of being makes it possibly worse than it might seem from a different perspective. But without existing there is no time as we know it to experience. Perceiving leads to being seemingly instantaneously. There is no waiting, just what is currently occurring. A universe without waiting in line from one point of view, which is convenient because that line would be unimaginably long to have to wait in.

         Now go back to that world that does not include you, only without your grounding in this reality. You never had a family in any reality, you have no city to root for in a sport, no country to root for in an Olympics. You are vaguely human, yet are neither male nor female, nor have you any specific skin color, ethnicity, nor body size. You are neither thin nor fat, neither old nor young, ugly nor beautiful.

         Being what I call generically human, but with a sizable bank account, you are free to travel the world and observe all of its peoples and civilizations without biases, save for being human, and following from that, possessing a natural desire to see other humans succeed. And no one anywhere can see you with any biases. Being generic, you magically fit in wherever you go and no one sees you as an outsider. 

         Traveling thus, though only conceptually, you can begin to leave your mental baggage behind. There is no us and them in the world for you now, everyone is an us now. You are equally the oppressed and the oppressors, the victims and the aggressors of all conflicts and disputes. You are a member of a country which invades another, and you are a member of that which was invaded, free to go from being one to another at will, to experience everyone's point of view first hand and in the flesh, save for the fact that all others must spend a lifetime in their situations, while you remain free to leave theirs at will. Without preferences or prejudices, without being able to side with one or another, you now experience a point of view no others can reach bound to being themselves only, being a part of a nationality, an ethnicity, and a sex. They cannot change this fully and can only vaguely attempt to put themselves in others shoes, and rarely will ever try.

         Being rich, look at the poor. Now being poor, look at the rich. Know there is nothing can you do to others that will not also be done to you, and those others which you can identify with. You not only can see both sides of an issue, you are the people on both sides and will be both the ones to reap the benefits and those who must suffer the costs. In such an indeterminate state, all else boils down to this, which benefits the further existence and development of humanity as a whole, and which policies, though they inevitably will affect some negatively, are justified on balance because the benefits to others is in greater proportion and effects than the costs. Without concerns over who pays and who receives, one can judge values and worth more clearly.

         Such a state of existence or perspective cannot take place in the real world. Other peoples, nations, ethnicities will always seem to count less emotionally than our own. When one of our own strikes out against another, it does not mean as much to us as when a member of an opponent group, an outsider, strikes within our circles. No one will say if it costs two of our groups lives and saves four of another enemy groups lives, it was a just trade. Obviously this is dependent upon how strongly ones ties and emotional attachments to ones group run, in addition to any extenuating circumstances, yet these narrow pre-determined biases taint our perceptions of all events and conflicts, whether here or around the world. First determine the good guys, who can we more identify with, who is in or matches up closest to our primary group identifications. Then when we know who or what we wish to save or preserve, which groups we want to succeed, interpretations of any events affecting them become grounded in those outlooks. The only times this is not done is when we like or dislike the relevant others equally and do not identify with either groups or their leaders.

         To become one with or see the outlooks of one group, ethnicity, or culture is to believe its excuses, justifications, and reasons behind their own biases and prejudices. One cannot judge ones own group from within or by the peers of their group who are like-minded. They are rarely wrong and are always justified in or exonerated for any wrongs which their groups may commit. And one cannot judge a society, group, or nation by their avowed enemies either, for from their perspectives their enemies are never justified for any wrongs they commit and are presumed guilty of any credible sounding claims or charges. So if seeing through the eyes of both sides in a conflict still cannot obtain fault or blame, tell who is wrong or who is right, how are any conflicts ended short of the all out destruction of one side or the other? If one were to be equal to both sides of the dispute, saw themselves belonging in a sense equally to both the potential victor's and the potential victim's groups, right and wrong, victory and defeat become meaningless. There becomes only what paths are the most destructive and which are less destructive, regardless on which side the greater number of repercussions effect.

         Though academic, this point of view is important. So often do we try to see both sides yet never can we become them. If humanity were to be dying and each person were given a choice of a handful to save which those few alone could repopulate the earth, they would most likely reflect their own ethnicity, culture, religion, or image of what they think humanity is, and that face often reflects their own. We are not generic humans, we will never fit in equally in every group or see equally from all points of view, though we are always richer for attempting to do so. And why might you ask is any of this relevant and worth mentioning here? Because now it is time to take humanity itself out of the picture, and I thought it only fair first to get the most accurate and unbiased view possible of what I am about to take away.
 

                                                          Birds in the air
                                                            wings riding the wind
                                                           hearts ever in motion
                                                             beating steadfast within

                                                          Fish in the seas
                                                            knowing not the sky
                                                           destined to the depths
                                                             yet there they can fly

                                                          Through forests, across plains
                                                            we animals ever roam
                                                           from deserts to glaciers
                                                             calling the land our home

                                                          Each one will traverse
                                                            its own particular domain
                                                           in worlds, far apart
                                                             in defining them, the same

         Being human, or if at all possible seeing from the point of view of having once been human, there is a natural tendency to want humanity to continue. Go team. For anything, even this, there are always contrarians. That nothing is an unquestionable good, in its existence, its nature, or in its worth. To a large extent living in a world is to accept its parameters. We are, it is, that is all. Questioning it is fine, judging it is ok, but as with anything you cannot know it but for its own existence. In some way by existing, that alone makes it indisputable. However good or horrible someone may judge something to be, its existence is above that. You are because humanity is, you are because you are, and to say that you or it should not be, it is only about hastening the inevitable, for whoever or whatever you think you are, to whatever species that you may think to which you belong, whatever world or universe you may think to which you or they belong, sooner or later it will not be, regardless of what you or they can do about it, but hastening that end for anything or anyone can never be considered good or worthwhile. Most of the time whoever and whatever else does not exist in the way we existing now understand time on a daily basis, so cherish whatever exists no matter how good or bad you may judge it to be, for in the blink of the Universe's eyes, it will no longer be.

         Once familiar with a story, its settings, characters, how they interact with each other, how their lives intersect and influence each other, knowing their outlooks, having shared their joys and sorrows of past adventures and experiences, to have felt their aspirations for the future once having gotten a real feel or sense of their true characters, it is natural to always want more chapters, new experiences, more problems or bad situations for them to find their ways out of, and more triumphs when they overcome them. And sometimes if the characters become popular enough they outlive their original authors, and however successfully or unsuccessfully others match their original visions, the characters live on in the minds of new authors imaginations taking them, their outlooks, attitudes, and past experiences, and having them grow in new ways through new adventures which their creators, if they could be called that, might never have foreseen, or have imagined they could have a life of their own outside of their own imaginations or could have lived beyond them.

         In a sense Humanity's story, Earth's story, the Universe's story, is our story. We may not have entered until page fifty billion or so, and may not take up more than a sentence or two even were our lives to be remembered for tens of thousands of years or our species to be remembered for millions of years, but we were there, humanity was there, at least in one telling of the story, one persons version of it anyway. For our little parts, we know the setting, Earth. We know the major characters, humans. Greedy and selfless, cruel and kind, thoughtful and savage, and above all, unpredictable and imaginative. We know the themes, trust and betrayal, love, jealousy, envy, hatred, learning, growing, pain and suffering, violence, forgiveness, and redemption, and the struggle of enduring them all while trying to maintain ones sense of honor or self.

         No matter to whom else or when, if they have lived this human reality, we can relate. For what they went through, in however mixed up proportions, is to some degree what we ourselves went through. And in a sense, the more others who go through similar experiences as us, though they in a sense will never understand each others perspectives fully without having lived them in their entireties, the more we know of those others, the more perspectives we gain on our own choices in our lives. We are until we are not, and everyone else, all who have lived a life of a human of Earth, having had parents though they might not have known them, or siblings, or perhaps children, friends or enemies, masters or servants, all can relate in some way to some aspects of anyone else’s life. To whatever degree, and however best we can, for awhile we survived it.

         But there are sub-characters in our, humans, interpretations of Earth's story. Other species of varying intelligences which play supporting roles in humanities story, and sometimes even greater roles in individual human lives, sometimes as pets, sometimes as friends, sometimes as mortal enemies. These species we know are following their own path through the Universe's story, have their own histories and successes, and will fall prey to their own inadequacies when their species are no longer able to adapt to changing conditions and predatory challenges.

         To view the world through their eyes, through their lives, is one of the greatest means of growth available to us as humans, and yet a further means of understanding our place in the Universe apart from our ego-centric species-centric view of the Universe. It is necessary when attempting to deconstruct the Universe, to understand not only how it might operate without you, but also how it might operate without your species, whether imagining before its existence, after, or in the same time frame, it does not matter so long as imagining it completely, absolutely, and forever from that moment on, without.

         From the fact that we are but one species in a myriad of species in our ecosystem, this is not that hard to do. We understand how different species interact and on some levels are interdependent upon each other, and it is not hard to extrapolate life on Earth uninterrupted or uninfluenced by our presence. Some may even have an idyllic view of such an Earth, and think our species is spoiling an otherwise quite attractive and vibrant planet. Such a view somehow allows that the violent life and death struggle all other species are constantly vying to maintain their little niches of existences in, that this is all ok, or right, because it is "natural", but for humans, such the same would be evil. Humanity is not the only species which feeds off of other animals, nor that sometimes kills its own, though granted we are far more methodical and successful at it than any other species we have come across thus far. But it is foolish to think that Earth without humans would be this happy little planet with cute bunnies and singing birds without wolves or tigers or other species evolving to prey off of them and otherwise keep them from living longer than they can run, such is pure fantasy. It is true that without humanity some or many other species might have had a better shot at longer stretches of existence, but never is their existences assured and all are always in a constant battle or race for survival.

         So Earth without humans, but still with animals, birds, fish, insects, bacteria, plants, trees, fungi, algae, all battling against each other and feeding off of each other for millions of years just trying to survive, to live, to grow, and to advance their own species existences. There is no label for me to put on it, though no doubt others could. Boring some would say. Peaceful others might think. Such a world existed here before humans and possibly will go on in some fashion after we have gone, so it is not pure speculation. But seeing it from our ego-centric species-centric point of view, we would be eventually be bored watching and inevitably would be waiting for some species to come along much like ourselves, intelligent, creative, and unpredictable. Once again to have music, art, sculpture, crafts, architecture, space travel, and inter-dimensional exploration. Species living lives vastly complex, endlessly inquisitive, and searching for meaning and excitement, this is what we would be waiting for, this is what captures our interest. We expect more because we know more, have seen more, and have invented more. Going back is not an option, though understanding the lives of other, to us, less sophisticated species, trying to get inside their heads, see from their eyes, to understand what the world may seem like from their points of view, what was millions of years ago also humanity's point of view, is no less informative or valuable. We can take it, understand it, add it to our own, but we will always want more.

         Yet there are other intelligent species on Earth now. We need not wait millions of years for other intelligent species to evolve, nor for some other primate to take our places. Yet we have a certain expectation of what constitutes intelligence based on our own species' history and experiences. Were dolphins to be shown as equal now, or one day in the future equal to us now, if they could be doing trigonomic equations or communicating telepathically, to us it really would be too far removed, at least as yet, to what we conceive intelligent species to be. So what if they could sing or tell stories and pass them down generations, or even possess philosophies about life, to us those are but a few aspects which we can relate intelligence to. And though not the least important aspects of intelligence by far, to some of us it will always seem boring. What good is theorizing or knowing the Universe if you can never explore it in any way but for imagining it?

         However intelligent other varieties of life fundamentally different to us may get which may share some of our own mental states, mental achievements, breakthroughs, paranoias, and philosophical developments, we remain at least up until now, primates through and through. It is not enough for us just to conceive or to know or to think, we get to build! Until some species comes along that can make a pyramid, or a skyscraper, or a space ship, we might be able to identify with this species or that in one way or another but for us, most people anyway, we can see that in potential experiences, if not necessarily in intelligence, our species is rich beyond compare. Who cares if a whale could compose a symphony more complex than Mozart or if a dolphin could come up with a better philosophy for how to live a more meaningful life? We get to run across lands fast, now drive vehicles fast, swim through the oceans, fly through the air, and explore space. We get to build things out of cards, sand, or concrete, and we get to tear them down again and start over.

         Whatever day is humanities last day and the Universe proceeds along until its end without our species in it, and no matter how much damage we do until that point, it will in many ways just not be the same place until or unless here or somewhere else some species gets to live lives similar to our own. Not only to think or know, but to be able to create and destroy, laugh and love, hate and envy, help and hurt, and to define themselves between the extremes they not only know can exist, but are readily available to them and possess the means to achieve much of what they can conceive of as well. Not only to imagine the things one day one species might build or achieve, but also to have a shot at building them or building machines to build them, or somehow someway make such states or achievements become real ourselves. Humanity is a good focal point for conscious species' aspirations all over the Universe for the simple fact that we can do more than just imagine, see, or know. We can for now also build and go. Most of the Universe for us will always be beyond our physical reach, but how much and how varied of it is ours to explore and enjoy simply by getting to go there and experience it first hand, might make more than a few other more intelligent species envious, and may make our last chapter, if self-inflicted, seem all that much more tragic.
 

                                                 Sun so light
                                                   as to drift effortlessly through space
                                                  you teach me
                                                    that size is no measure of grace

                                                 Sun so great
                                                   as to pull nine different worlds near
                                                  you show me
                                                    common attraction is why we are here

                                                 Sun so strong
                                                   as to make countless life-forms thrive
                                                  you give me
                                                    the very means to stay alive

                                                 Sun so intrinsic
                                                   as to make your absence seem unfathomable
                                                  you make me
                                                    find dependence more palatable

         Before removing conceptually all life as we know it from the Universe, those beings or entities physically comprised of the remnants of dead stars, living off of balls comprised of the remnants of dead stars, and directly or indirectly feeding off of the energy of living stars, it would only be fair to try to get the clearest picture possible of what it is being taken away. As mentioned in the previous sentence, what we call life is implicitly tied in one way or another, and pretty much every way, to what we call stars. The complex molecules and higher order of atoms which comprise our bodies, our food, our air, our water, our soil, and all else in our world were forged within the fires at the center of stars. The food chain upon which we feed and from which we arose is plant based, and plants feed directly off of the energy of our sun. When we are eating but not eating plants directly, we eat what eats them, or what eats what eats them. Either way we are directly or indirectly feeding off of what has grown from the energy of a living star. That is possibly not the only definition of life. Life-forms similar to ours could arise feeding off of a food chain based upon geothermal energy instead of sunlight, but we crust dwellers live off of a food chain based upon the sun's energy.

         Energy is a complex term. The dictionary defines energy as the capacity to do work, to affect or change matter somehow. We use energy to move our bodies across a room or lift an object. Energy can be heat radiated through the surface of a planet from its hot molten core. Energy can be in the form of radiation or light given off by a sun's nuclear furnace. Energy can be given off by explosive matter such as dynamite, or reconverting it directly to energy more efficiently by starting an atomic chain reaction, such as fission or fusion. Energy is all around us, energy is within us, and to a certain degree beyond just being within all of the atoms which comprise our bodies, energy is us.

         To get a better feel for energy, I will substitute it for awhile with the examples of water and ice. Think of energy as a star sized warm liquid ball floating in space but possessing its own gravity, that is what keeps it together in a ball shape. The water of every level from all directions is always pressing toward the center. Traveling deeper into this water-as-energy star, the pressure increases almost exponentially as you go deeper, as with going deeper within our oceans. Every level deeper you go down you have all of the other levels above it all pushing down on that one spot, and greater surface areas always concentrated on smaller and smaller inner circles until the inner core area’s one foot of surface areas have millions of square miles of the outer surface areas pushing down directly upon it, all the way down to that one center point to which all of the surface areas all around it and all the levels in between are all focused on that one central point.

         But this example is not of pressure or pounds per square inch. This hypothetical liquid star I made up to illustrate a point about energy is not comprised of water, or atoms at all, it is pure energy pushing toward the center, a mass of energy drawing other energy toward it. The liquid form I gave it is only to make it something one can conceptualize and think about. Think of it as a pre-matter star where pure energy is forming around a central point. With all that pressure or gravitation (again, neither pressure nor gravity as we understand it would apply since there is no mass) of a sort the liquid which is not liquid begins to heat up (also ignore the use of the word heat for the liquid itself here is the energy) and forms a kind of hot ice, a solid which is not a solid, merely very compressed energy which we can think of as a solid, as atoms are to energy, as ice is to water. Not cooled like ice, very very hot but self-contained so it does not give off heat. All this forged energy is still energy, still potential. It can be ripped apart to go boom or be combined with others in a building block-type fashion to make planets, moons, asteroids, or you.

         So what is life besides little building block balls of energy bound together living on a bigger ball made up of countless little balls all bound together, feeding off of other energy coming from outside sources such as a living star in our case, as well as reconverting the energy trapped or inherent here? That we have outside energy pouring in creating new living matter is important as eventually all of the easily convertible energy on this planet would be exhausted by the living things here. The energy of the food we and other living beings eat is consumed while we live to propel us or enable us to do the things we do. Energy is depleted and transformed into our actions and the physical processes side of our consciousness. Our brains require energy to function just as our bodies do. Remove the outside source of energy flowing into our ecosystem and eventually all life as we know it would devour itself, and cease to exist.

         So what does life do with this constant influx of energy pouring into its ecosystem? Basically it renews and perpetuates itself. It grows to the natural limits of its design and when it can grow no further or has a surplus, it attempts to recreate others such as itself. Think of the endless amounts of energy flowing into an ecosystem like endless amounts of free money flowing into a government. Anything becomes possible. Any project which one might wish to build gets immediate funding. Eventually however much the free money is flowing in, the list of projects its components desire will grow to match that amount. Once that point is reached, they need to start to compete against each other to get their pet projects funded. Thus each species is like a component of that government. If it wants go grow further, it needs to reallocate funds earmarked for other projects, eliminate them, and steal their funding, in this case their energy. If we do not take food away from other species, then we consume the species itself, to fund our own pet project, humanity.

         Either way, we are redistributing the energy allotted by the outside source, the free funding. We are of the same type as what we call animals in the sense that we cannot simply and directly convert the energy dollars into perpetuating ourselves, at least not in an amount sufficient enough to sustain ourselves over the long haul. We are like scavengers or parasites. We live off of stealing the energy from that which gets the direct funding and can make use of it, plants. They eat the energy, we eat them, or eat what eats them, again however directly or indirectly. Without their existences, we cannot exist. Our relationship, at least from our side, is symbiotic. Exhaust our food supply and we die off ourselves.

         As long as the free funded energy source keeps rolling in, all is well. The direct beneficiaries would not still exist unless there was a sufficient inflow to make up for what is being lost to other species which feed off of them. And the other species would not have arisen and evolved unless they never grew to the point of exhausting their food sources. Those which do become extinct and do not evolve as long as those species which can find their niche without disrupting the balance which made that niche possible. When the funding of free energy is disrupted or the direct beneficiaries become endangered, species and life begin to disappear. Every species then is fighting for the same diminishing funding and upsetting the balance which made their existences possible in the first place.

         But while the inflow is great enough to sustain the direct energy feeding spark of the food chain and any species that live off of it, what else can they do besides reproduce and sustain themselves? They may feed off of other species both to fuel themselves and to keep their numbers down from becoming a threat to their own food sources. But they do another interesting thing, they live. When they are lucky, they are not spending their entire energy output on mere survival and reproduction. They have an excess of energy to spend however, and however much, they can be said to be able to choose. Once the food is secure for the moment, they can take a nap or bang a flower back and forth with their paws or their hands. The energy is still there sometimes to do something after all that needs doing is, at least for now, done. The better species become at managing but not exhausting their food supplies, not only are they better able to survive, they are more likely to have more time on their hands.

         The energy we consume not only fuels our bodies, it fuels our minds. A human born of normal parents but without the ability to move, will still possess a mind desiring to move, to run, to play, to build, and to destroy. Our minds recognize these things we can be doing, things we are pre-wired to want to do, even if our bodies cannot do them. And conceiving, planning, and envisioning these actions requires and expends energy beyond the level of merely sustaining our bodies. Other successful species do not necessarily spend this surplus in contemplation. Many successful hunter species higher up on the food chain are content to take frequent naps, whether for resting, dreaming, or simple enjoyment only they could say.

         What I have termed in this work as humanity's moving into its mind, contemplating far more possibilities than any actions we would or could do, conceiving of multiple scenarios for any given event or action, then watching to see which ones do occur, this is both a measure of success, of having surplus energy by regulation of our food supply leading to more free time, but it is also self-perpetuating. The better we can anticipate or predict what might occur from any action we may plan, and prepare ourselves not only for the ones which do occur as other species do, but also for what we think might have occurred, and not simply let those ideas go. Not just holding on to what works, but to keep changing the mix, always watching the results and, and this is key, being able to remember and compare the results. One day you might kill an animal with a rock, the next day with a spear. More efficient species keep to what works and stick with it until it doesn't. Humanity sometime fairly recently became very creative.

         We like not only what works best, but like to try to hold onto what worked before and sometimes use it again, to mix it up a little. Once having more than one way to skin a cat, so to speak, we began to mix and match. A little bit of this, a little bit of that. Once having a first tool, I am guessing a rock, humans eventually realized it could be used in more than one way. A blunt edge would be good for pounding, a sharp edge for cutting. And from first seeing different aspects of that first tool reflecting uses for different tasks, came separate tools, one just for pounding, one just for cutting. It is fun to imagine the first specialty rock salesmen in history. The customer might intimate that it is good for cutting but not for pounding and therefore is an inferior tool. But no says the salesman, we have this other rock just for pounding. Yes twice the tools to carry, but look how much better and easier your pounding and cutting will be.

         Once being able to break down problems or situations into their component parts and devise specialized and unique ways and tools for dealing with each one, and being able to remember and mix different solutions, tools, and methods to fit other problems and situations, the sky became the limit. Now unique problems became challenges, even fun. Sure, just give me a second to look through my bag of tools and I am sure we will be able to rig up something for you which should work. And as with the human tendency to fixate upon ideas and certain ways of doing things long after one method might be proven more successful, you have others concurrently and stubbornly sticking with the old ways of doing things, tweaking them, fine tuning them to be more efficient alternatives to the newer better ways of doing things and every now and then, surpassing them.

         Thus humanity became a packrat of ideas, never wanting to throw out anything which might prove useful one day. And different was not only useful, it could even be fun. One day you might wish to eat your meat cooked, another day raw. Some days you might wish to eat berries with your grain, another day you might wish to eat fish with them. All bets were off. We went from being a ritualistic species like others always sticking with what works to trying out all sorts of new ideas and ways of doing things. We became creative and unpredictable. We raced headfirst and headlong down dead ends. Sometimes we prospered by the new ways of doing things, sometimes it was a total disaster. But the genie of creativity was let lose from the bottle and there was no going back. Once different ideas and methods were tolerated, people had a freedom to pursue their own methods and ideas, and see what they could make of them, to see if they might work. One might make shoes from animal skins, another might make shoes from wood, and everyone else would be free to have their preferences. Some might say I will go for the wood shoes, others might opt for the animal skin shoes. Eventually one method might win out but not always. If a society was large enough, there might be demand enough for both kinds of footwear, and the people within those societies could use different footwear, like food, architecture, tools, or clothes to define their personalities and individuality.

         I might opt for the animal skin shoes, cooked food, blue clothes and prefer a clay house on the river. Another might prefer wooden shoes for living up on a hill in a house made of tree branches, and like meat raw. The more options available to have preferences over, the more diverse the personalities could become. Different people have always been unique but now they could put that uniqueness on display, choose one type of clothing or jewelry over another and dress to type. When certain types of dress or jewelry became more popular than others, it might be reserved only for those of higher status. I earned my right to wear a shark's tooth, what have you done, and so forth.

         Whether it is humanity or other creative creatures elsewhere in the Universe getting all weird with multiple different ideas or ways of doing the same things, creating vastly different tools and utilities all for doing the same functions, dividing themselves into different camps matching their differing preferences and ways of doing things, they are spending their excesses of energy in unique, albeit at least from one point of view, completely trivial ways. Such things are not necessary for survival or the perpetuation of the species. Such things are distractions. From the die hard realist point of view, the Earth or whatever planet you may happen to be on, that is real, your food and the work to provide the food and shelter, that is real. The need to have and raise your children, that is real. All else is just made up nonsense or distracts from what is real, what is important. But going with this method or that, liking this thing or that even if it is not the most efficient, and sometimes because it is not the best or most efficient, and eking out and exploring that middle ground between what should be and should not be, what works best and what doesn't, what is creative, beneficial and healthy versus what is destructive or self-destructive, and defining your own mix of some of one and the rest of another, this is how we waste or spend our excesses of energy and how we define what it means to live.

         But is this the only definition or the most accurate of what it means to live? Are animals less alive because they always only stick with what works and sometimes rarely if ever stray from it over the course of many generations, never expanding on or redefining what it means to be a squirrel or a bird or a toad? And what of stars? They consume and expend energy at a magnitude far beyond that which we as little flies living on the backs of planets feeding off of their waste products, could ever hope to understand. Could they be less alive because they cannot paint, sculpt, build a castle in the sand or kick it over? They, stars, are that which build what the atoms of planets are made of, what we call the matter or mass of life is made of, does that not count as much, or more than what we build out of what they leave behind when their "lives" are over? And even all that which we can do, we could not do, those things we could not build, without having another living star present constantly feeding us the excesses of energy which feeds our world, and which we use to build up our species and propel our individual lives.

         Yet we are thought to be conscious of what we can build and stars are thought to create complex matter, solar systems, life, almost by accident. They are just spinning tops set in motion long ago not conscious of either themselves or the worlds or the life-forms their existences will create or enable. Such is the prevailing thought of science at the moment. If they did possess a consciousness created by their expenditure and consummation of energy, it would be a consciousness beyond which we could comprehend. Living billions of years while what we call lives, even the entire lives of species from beginning to end would pass seemingly in an instant. And what, if stars could possess consciousness, might they be conscious of? Could they dream the potential of all that might arise from their lives and their deaths, all that might be feeding off of their fires which are not fires but energy pure and whole emanating outwards to anything which can harness it, make use of it, and build their own lives and worlds in the wake of it, lest it just would radiate out to the edges of the Universe unharnessed and unused, and from our points of view, wasted.

         The energy side of our consciousness is potential. The potential to be this or that, to do this or that, to create this or destroy that. If we live by harnessing and using that potential, we must give credit to what creates that potential for us its due, the sun and previous stars, whether they are conscious of all the countless potential they create by their existences or whether all that we know, see, live in, feed off of, and create are just unintended consequences of their own existences as inanimate and unconscious energy forms.

         The crux of the argument of their worth or responsibility in our own existences equation, is what created them. If stars, conscious or not of what their existences, what their "lives" create or enable to be, were simply set in motion by what created them, we would owe them no more debt of gratitude or appreciation than we owe to what stems from that expenditure of energy, the very food we eat. However, there are many who do appreciate and give thanks daily for the food they eat, though they give that thanks directly to God without realizing sometimes the means or method God, if existent, might have used to deliver that food to them, pure energy delivered as light from a nearby star. So stars alive or not deserve little or no credit if something else made them, but envisioning the Universe with only them, no life as we call it, no planets, is still a universe very much alive indeed, of energy and potential too great to measure whether harnessed, or whether merely drifting away into space never used or actualized, but the potential, the energy, still would be there.
 

                                                         Life is as life does,
                                                           before it nothing ever was,
                                                          then and after just potential
                                                            but only appearing to be sequential

         The only term we have for everything, the Universe, does not go far enough since it pertains commonly to what we perceive or conceive of as the physical Universe, what we call space containing galaxies, stars, planets, life, as so on. That is transitory and far from the complete picture. The real Universe, the larger universe in which what we call the Universe resides in or is a part of, is uniform. It is like an endless quilt stretching on into infinity. It is neither empty like space, which is what we call empty of mass, nor is it full. It is neither here nor there, black nor white, neither hot nor cold. It is quite literally both the sum of everything, and it is zero. It is backwards and forwards at the same time, now, then, and every point in between, for within it there is no time.

  Time as we call it, and the physical Universe which began time, is a disruption within it. Points of it emerge and appear to consume the rest of it. These points are singularities, states not unlike what we might call the rest of the fabric of the Universe. Out of these singularities, black holes, comes empty space. They feed off of the uniformity sucking it away like liquid into a straw or like bubbles of air underwater, pushing the rest of it away and creating space. Once the uniformity is broken, what we call matter can form, as in fact it must form, though not always as what we think of as matter, but something must form to balance what the nothingness takes away. Balance is the driving force of everything else, all combined must always equal zero.

         Once space and matter form, a here and a there are established, and from that, a now and then. At once there are processes, a before and after, and what we call the physical Universe is nothing more than processes, movements, energy, whether of stars spinning around black holes, planets spinning around stars, or electrons spinning around a nucleus, the motions create the mass, or are continuations of the momentum long since begun with the creation of what we call the physical Universe, into our galaxy, into stars, and into the atoms of our bodies, one continuous continuing motion. Stop the motions and the mass disappears. The Universe is a whirlpool of energy feeding off of itself. Once the feeding is done and the whirlpool slows, the physical Universe as we call it disappears. Once again all is in its natural state, there is no whirlpool, no empty state around which all else is revolving or reaching to or created by that whirling motion. All is calmed and uniform again.

         To us in existence and in time, such a state can be described in many ways yet none are relevant and none are true. Our existences are defined by the whirlpool, existing in chaos, a now, a then, a here, a there, a self, and a not self, everything in pieces. To us this is the normal world, and it is our world. It defines our perceptions and frames our ambitions. It is our everything, yet the everything, the uniformity, is to us nothing. In it there is no us and them, no now and then, there is only everything always and never, existing in a state inconceivable to us but alluded to with the word potential. It is always the potential for being, for being anything, anywhere, any when. Far more potential than any mind or consciousness could ever comprehend. And it is forever on the verge of becoming. 

         How can I say it is forever on the verge of becoming? Either it is or it isn't one might think. Either it is everything, or something, or anything in between, but to think in such terms is to use the constructs of time, and time is simply that, a construct. Time forms as it is needed. The time frame beyond time in which time forms is endless and time only begins when space is formed by what I have called whirlpools of energy, others might call black holes sucking in the uniformity and spitting out matter, which is not matter but is frozen energy, like ice to liquid.

         The world or Universe lasts only as long as the consciousness or energy it formed around still exists or which wants it to exist still does. If you want to think God or a god, or something just god-like created the Universe, then you can stick around after your part is over, after your lines are all read, and watch the rest of the show. If not just cut to the end, go back to before and after the Universe formed and wait, though there is no time to wait in, until it forms again. Without time, eternity flies by pretty quickly and before you can say deja vu, it is all starting over again, such is the nature of timelessness. It is a very indescribably weird, to us anyway, state.

         So if the Universe is always happening or always happening while we think it is happening, what is really real? Reality is what you are living in, and however normal or alien it may seem to you, it is what you think it is. Does this mean you can change your reality just by changing your mind? Yes and no. Realities are defined by rules. By existing you agree to limit what you are and enter into a world that is not you. Like the whirlpool, by existing you separate the uniformity into a here and there, a now and then, you apart from everything else. Like the whirlpool, the black holes, the straw sucking up potential and spitting out matter, the air bubble in water pushing all else away to create empty space, your existence pushes away perception of all other times and places and states and beings, defines a you and a not you, creates a here and there, now and then. Just like that which created this Universe does, you break the uniformity and look at the pieces. You are defining a something apart from everything else, a life, yet find a context to place it within the context of everything else. You are literally riding the tail of the comet of that which created this Universe to define itself as separate from all else. For awhile it can do so, for awhile you can do so, but not forever, unless you count forever as happening however often you want it to. What you are capable of now is pretty well defined by your definition of existing as a human being. That is your medium with which to work within. It is what you chose to be or what chose to be chose you. Either way it is what you are until you are not, unless some part of what you think you are, or what thinks it is you, decides to be something else.

         It always sounds weird to put such abstract notions about states of existence so completely foreign to us into everyday speech. Religions put a good face on it, dress it up as holy, ritualize it, remove it above the plains of everyday speech and thought, and tell you right off the bat you will never fully understand it, which is always more true than not. One can hint at it but where we are is here, and where and what this is is what our perceptions define. For some it is a heaven, for many others it is a hell, for most it is neither here nor there, it is what we have made or what has made us, but either way from here on out until we are not, it is what we make out of it.
 

                                                A pulse of potential
                                                 like a voice exclaiming
                                                  I am here, I am here, I am here!
                                                   spreads out into the infinite void
                                                    forever until it reaches some somewhere
                                                     to create someone or something which can hear
                                                      like a wave seeking a beachhead
                                                       to break itself upon
                                                        rising up upon itself and spending itself
                                                         seeking only to change something
                                                          becoming itself only in defining the shore

         Life consumes and expends energy. We, living beings, consume far more energy than can be quantified than merely from the foods we eat, the water we drink, and the air we breathe. Life draws energy to itself. It draws upon it and builds itself up from it. Food, matter, they are required only as a catalyst. Once the process is begun it is almost self-perpetuating. Almost, but definitely as of yet, not quite.

         We expend energy at far greater amplitudes than just moving our bodies around, repairing and renewing them, making and remaking thought patterns, or even consecutive thought patterns of occurrences over time and through probabilities. Life expends energy remaking that energy into whatever it chooses, and can exist in a state apart from what we call physical existence, but it would not matter to anyone else.

         What we call a world, a universe, a reality, is an overlapping of existences at mutual and cross purposes. It is a medium with which to paint or create. To an artist the painting can be real which he or she has not yet painted. A melody can be thought to exist before it has been realized. A mathematical equation can have existence before the first mind in the Universe formed to formulate it. All that you see, all that you know, all things which have happened to you, all that will, and all that only might, all of this can be said to be in a sense, pre-existent. All of these things, events, experiences, are waiting to happen and have existed in that state since the dawn of time. These events and experiences too are just a medium in which to work with, to build and create a life from life.

         A life, a consciousness, a unique energy pattern drawing energy unto itself and expending it from itself can be envisioned as a single star in an empty universe, absorbing whatever it takes to create or sustain itself from wherever that comes from and sending its thoughts, achievements, imaginations, potential, its reformulated energy pattern which it takes in and sends back out in the manner and shape it chooses. But without other things to break those waves of potential emanating outward from itself, as matter can be thought to collapse light waves, that consciousness’s life events, experiences, imaginations, potential, spreads ever and ever outward across an infinite expanse, forever and ever amounting to nothing.

         Add a second conceptual life, consciousness, to the equation, also absorbing potential, energy, reformulating it how it chooses, creating with it its own brand of possibilities, its view of experiences, its own particular way of standing apart from all else, and imagine it as a second star sending out its waves of potential through the infinite void. Place it anywhere else in that infinite void and eventually the two ever expanding waves, oscillations, will overlay each other and collapse each other, into photons in the case of light, into experience in the sense of potential. Now in keeping with the star analogy, no matter how far apart they are, each star would be collapsing the light potential, the waves, into photons each making the others light real by giving it something to hit to collapse its waves of potential particles into real photons.

         Yet another thing happens by this cross making of making or confirming each other’s actual existence. The waves of potential not collapsed intermingle, resonate together, some places stronger, other places weaker. Where dissonance builds they cancel each other out. Where they double up, new existence, where they cancel each other out, some seeming lacking of something, as if something were now missing. There is much more which can be made out of this duality notion or example, and to many it is quite the thing to contemplate but I must move on.

         Add a third conceptual life, consciousness, perspective, to the mix. No longer are each equal. Whether the previous two conceptual stars, points, could be thought to be standing still or endlessly circling each other around a central point at trillions of miles per hour, it would not matter. Being completely motionless or each rotating around a fixed point between them at unimaginable speeds, and every variation between the two extremes, each and all would always apply. The only thing that would define this new existent intermingling of potentials, two consciousnesses points of view, would be the distances relative to each other. Traveling further apart would be meaningless as eventually the light / potential would have to reach the other eventually. Thus traveling towards each other too would be meaningless unless or until they collided and no longer existed as separate. But add a third and another strange state occurs.

         Where there are three, there is an order. There is something else to be acted upon. Something can be moving toward one and away from the other, or moving toward both, or moving away from both. Or viewing it from purpose, sometimes siding with one against the other, or working in tandem with the others, or working against both, against all else. With two the only definition possible, and not very distinctive at that, was moving closer or further apart. In an infinite expanse, close or far apart have no meaning, there is only collision and unification, and separateness. With three there can be conflict.

         The point is that it is the overlapping of potentials coming from and traveling to sources of life, beings, states of existence, consciousness, or what have you. Each by itself is everything, has everything, makes potentially anything, yet to nothing else is it real. Add in something else it is not, anything else, and you have a beginning. Separateness and unity, and not much else. But with three or more though the themes are the same, moving toward or apart, the combinations are multiplied exponentially with each new addition. Toward some, for some, against others. The higher the numbers, the more possible combinations and configurations.

          As these cross purposes, perspectives, attitudes, goals, ambitions, meet a reality forms where they overlap. It is a way to sort it all out. Each new perspective both adds to the conflict and adds to its possible resolution. Each is a new way of defining what it is that is defining what is. Each new perspective, each idea, is an outgrowth of the arguments or preconditions which came before, and are only the necessary proofs or suppositions of the foundations for further conclusions yet to be reached. Before seeming to relegate all existences down to numbers in some giant program trying to reach some conclusion or definitive explanation of which binary supposition of which primary consciousness was right or wrong, I will attempt to return to where I began.

         Whether we are all part of a probability wave extending out of that first energy pattern, life, drawing energy into itself and emanating its potential, its design, outward into infinity, or were created as new subsequent opinions to help settle an age old disagreement, or are or were once that original consciousness, it matters not. We are the same as that first life, that first presence defining itself as something apart from all else. We draw as much potential into ourselves as we can and let it go in the way and into the experiences we build up into a concept of what we are and what we were. Yet we were not the experiences of memories we link together to form a consciousness, nor are we ourselves only existing apart from all else.

         What we are is the same as that first consciousness. All consciousnesses however early or late in the game they might otherwise be thought to come in, are emanating from a single point on an endless plane of existence. Where its potential (waves) crosses another’s, a window is opened, a way out of everything and nothing and into something. We think we can by looking through that window pass through it into a reality but that reality is merely a reflection of what we want to see tempered by what we think others want to see or have be. Yet the perceptions themselves become a reality.

         In this reality where reality is spread thin over many countless consciousnesses, it is about affecting the realities of others, that is what we are creating and the only reality we can create. As mentioned before, to build a life out of life. Along the way and toward that end we will get sucked up into age old conflicts and attitudes of divided camps seemingly greater and more powerful than we are, but should that means of definition prove sound, each of us is an additional perspective formed, a unique interpretation, and we contribute nothing to furthering any meaning we have in regards to that interpretation of existence without developing ourselves that new interpretation which may be all that can be accomplished outside of enjoying life, or in helping others.

          To define an existence apart from everything else, to expand upon it translating potential into actual experiences, moving the paint from jar to canvas in the design we choose, selecting which pre-existing potential experiences we wish to take down off the shelf and play with. That that purpose or purposeful action will always seem to be placed within a greater context may be inevitable, yet in another sense, it is also to a larger degree completely our own to make or not make what we choose. Our light in the darkness or our bodies absorbing the light, we exist only as a contrast, a means of standing out from all else, a shore seeming to move through time by collapsing waves of potential onto itself and only possessing existence, that means to create that shore, where cross potentials meet to define between themselves together something actual. Standing in the center of a cataclysm of potential coming at us from different directions, and in whatever limited means afforded to us, to choose as one member of an unimaginably large jury, which were or will be real, which ones have value to us, and which do not.
 

                                                            Earth travels through bent
                                                            space in a straight line
                                                            always moving in the same
                                                            direction yet seeming to
                                                            repeatedly be coming back
                                                            to the same point in space

                                                            The Universe travels through bent
                                                            time in a straight line
                                                            always moving in the same
                                                            direction yet seeming to
                                                            repeatedly be coming back
                                                            to the same point in time

           If the Universe repeats itself for whatever reason coming back to the same point in time whether it repeats once or countless times it would always happen the same way but for one factor, one wildcard, consciousness. A type of consciousness, if it arises, lies outside of the physical Universe. It becomes capable of stepping outside of the current timeline to remember other run-throughs, other variations of its theme. If it were not able to do so all decisions, all actions, would happen exactly as they did before since nothing had changed. All the same factors, motives, thoughts, feelings, and opinions would doom all to repeat the same events in perpetuity. Only one timeline would ever be real. The Universe from beginning to end would be like breaking the balls at pool (billiards), always hit at the same angle and speed with always the same outcome. Even conscious beings could be and would be exactly the same as the balls, their motions completely unchangeable since they will always confront the same issues in the same ways, having freewill but forever lacking the imagination nor the ability to ever approach anything differently if all their thoughts and all that caused them have no reason to behave any differently.

         Yet as I said before, people are capable of imagining a disconnect from their present timelines. We can think or believe that different outcomes will arise from different actions we have control over. If I decide to go out and get drunk and drive very fast, one set of possible outcomes, many of which being potentially very unpleasant, might arise. If I decide to stay home and read a book, none of these other potentialities will occur, a different set then becomes possible, then probable, then real, actual. This attempting or sensing which timelines we are in is done with imagination, speculation based upon our knowledge and experiences, attitudes about which we prefer or might wish to see happen, our fears about what might or could happen, and so on. But what if it went beyond that?

         Were all of our decisions to be based solely on what had happened to us before, as what happened to those others who affect our lives happened exactly as before, our attitudes would most likely evolve as they had in the past and we would approach every identical situation in the same way. But what if over time endlessly repeating the same situations, we become more than just cogs in the wheel? We begin to sense more of the order behind what may or is about to happen.  That awareness makes more and more variations possible. If we begin to think or become aware that once or many times before when confronted with a situation we know never actually happened before but sense it as though it had, we can wait and watch it with some degree of foresight and pat ourselves on the back that at that instant we knew exactly what was going to happen before and exact as it did. But such an awareness, if at all possible, allows for a new option not existent without that indefinable awareness, the chance to change it. Knowing that in an instant someone walking into a room is about to trip, one is now in the position if given sufficient time, to prevent it from occurring. Such knowledge might seem paradoxical. Were someone to know with certainty and accuracy of something about to happen, though this would enable them to act differently, to alter the flow of would be events, would not this prevent them from having such information about the soon to be occurrence if one prevents it from occurring?

          Were this to be repeated over and over and over again the paradox would resolve itself. Since it happens both ways in the past, one way without intervention based upon prior inexplicable foreknowledge or remembrance, and the new way based upon that new factor becoming a real variation on the theme, both eventually are part of the past, and one senses not the absolute necessity of something happening, though it may if it continues to be a ripple in the timeline still appear as a certainty about to happen, it becomes over time merely a predilection or tendency to happen a certain way. Sometimes you might act on that information of déjà vu and attempt to alter it, sometimes you might decide to sit it out. Sometimes someone else might intervene before you got the chance because they too recognized something was about to happen and were in a position to alter it.

          No matter how vast the variability this sort of new consciousness enters into the mix, eventually the number of possible variations must have or reach some kind of end. Eventually all roads would become known, and ultimately boring and tedious. Eventually more and more of the paradox would become clear and more and more predictability would enter into the mix. All that we might think might be, we make real simply by remembering how it happened before, and simply do it that way again. If the past is the future and the future is the past, and we are existent in all, we may eventually be able to conceptually break down those walls to remember the future, and by doing so alter the course of present, it’s past. We begin to create little paradoxes within the big paradox, create bridges in time mentally between the present and the future or the present and the past, like conceptual wormholes, and by doing so create events which can only exist as reality while contained within that paradox or reality loop because of such realizations.

          Can consciousness break out of our own paradoxes we may create as a side effect of our existences, creating not only ripples of change into the future but into the past as well, by mere repetition as I mentioned might both smooth out timelines and create alternate timelines? Regardless of anything which we may do or create based upon fore/past knowledge which itself creates the paradox, it must be stated that in such an environment existence itself, regardless of anything which we may say or do, becomes a paradox. It is safe to say for most that we exist in the present because we exist in or were created in the past, a minute ago, an hour, a year, etc. But to go beyond that to say that we exist in the past as we do or did because of something yet to occur in the future, which will create and shape the past is itself the heart of the bigger problem. The future is creating the past as much as the past can be said to create the future, and once inserted anywhere in between, it is to be forever required or existent in both. By becoming more conscious of the paradox through retention of more and more of its variabilities we ourselves create, have created, and are creating in both the past and the future, hopefully we can in a sense move beyond it, but because it is a paradox we will also always have been and always will be within it.

          We may never retain a full realization of previous run-throughs while within it. Momentary glimpses may break through now and then into our consciousnesses but retaining more than a general sense of things is hard. The details get in the way. The details get changed around, lost, found, forgotten and remembered, altered. We may not even always retain much of the current run through. The past is always in a way just as unreal and as changeable as the future. It never lasts more than a moment and does not moving forward back into it always happen the same.

          All mathematical attempts at understanding the Universe will ultimately fail without taking into account the perceiver by interaction within the paradox is changing not only the future but also the past. You must account for the accounting for. Without doing that you are persisting in the assumption that reality is forever out there, as if you or consciousness were a ghost not a part of it or what creates or sustains it. Notions of mass in quantum mechanics have gotten far smaller than even atoms yet we still believe that somewhere mass must exist, that something must be a “thing” and not just an energy pattern. The Universe, atoms, life, responds to our perceptions of it, it is a living, changing thing which is not a thing which includes ourselves as a part of itself and itself as a part of ourselves. Which defines which, which sustains which is not important. Each conforms in a way to the expectations of the other affecting not only its future but its past, as in the end, both are really the same.
 

                                           One light can cast a single shadow on the wall
                                              with many lights one hardly sees any shadow at all
                                                but ever more lights breed ever more shadows to see
                                                  more shapes, more perspectives fleshing out what can be

         Using the star analogy to potential, one can perceive of existence as taking place on another level. As the star spreads its light ever outwards into space until it hits something which absorbs that light into itself, it also creates an absence of that light in the direction beyond itself, a shadow. If one substitutes light for potential, or energy, or life spreading out into the Universe in all directions beyond three dimensions and time, but like light creating breaks or stoppages as it hits “things” which catch some of that potential or energy into itself causing interruptions in the design or pattern which would otherwise occur, a shadow of events in time. One could speculate such a disruption’s effect could be envisioned as a world, a universe, or an entity. For this example I will choose a particular entity or single being.

         If one follows the analogy of life emanating from a single source such as energy or light emanates from a star, and that life or potential of events can take a myriad of forms, just being potential, none more definite or definitive than any other, such as light containing all colors. When we think of this world as being where life hits something or is actualized from potential into existence, striking some “thing” to break down the multiple potential colored “light” or energy into individual existences, one is looking at the effects and not necessarily the cause. If you in turn step beyond that to conceptualize that just as life flows into us and our Universe from an undistinguishable unchartable point from our current existences points of view, the actual diffusing of potential into actual, from all that can be into what is, is taking place between us, our world, and the light / life source, whatever it is that creates or sustains what it is that we are and use to build up some concepts of ourselves. Imagine your body or your world as a three-dimensional shadow created by the interruption of infinite time and infinite space emanating outwards from some central point. Though that point would not be in actuality, from our points of view, in any one place and time, using a star as an analogy one can conceive of it as such.

         So using that limited analogy of life or potential coming from a definitive pin-pointable place in space and time such as a star, though this whole analogy is not accurate limiting it in space and time, imagine you or consciousness as something in-between the source of  existence and the physical Universe able to absorb some of that essence of potential into itself, causing a disruption, a shadow of what could occur, and from that shadow creates what will occur, at least from that line of sight (timeline) between the source, and the effect, existence. Moving your hand in front of a light, if there is another source for the light to hit beyond your hand, and the light source sufficiently bright or all other sources of light are sufficiently dim, you will see a shadow of your hand upon another surface. You can see how the rest of the light would hit and the disruption you can move or control, and how this reacts with that area. If life emanates into ourselves from an outside source and we are capable of capturing or transmuting that energy, life, or potential into ourselves creating effects or events across time which we choose, it is possible to imagine that we stand in-between the source of this potential, and the effects which play out upon the background, in our case not a two-dimensional wall, merely a three-dimensional universe plus time.

         Since I have stressed this analogy is flawed, to imagine the source of all life or potential as existing in one single point of space and time, I will try to expand upon it a little. Even if one does believe in one god as the source of all life, it is still quite a stretch to envision it as existing in a single point in space and time. This is just an analogy to illustrate a point, a lens, an obstruction in potential and time, and the effects that would appear across a static world, a shadow of events with that potential, from a single viewpoint or line of sight.

         As difficult as this can be to imagine, I will now make it even more so. Imagine not a single source of life or potential emanating from a single direction but instead a multitude of different lights or potential sources around the inside of a giant ball and the obstruction or refractor absorbing that energy into itself casting many shadows simultaneously upon many surfaces at the same time. It shows one shape on one surface, a different one upon another surface from a different angle. Likewise any movement or intended effects upon one surface shows as different, backward, or opposite on another surface. This example is at the heart of understanding both multidimensionalism and different realities of time. For time, imagine all the lights around the inside of the ball firing in a particular order, one at a time. What creates the shadow or effect would control to some degree its shape or movements but so too would the differing lights firing create a movement to and across differing backgrounds opposite that source. 

         To imagine multidimensionalism, imagine all the lights on at once, all shadows would always be present all at the same time, though not visible since each would be obscuring its visibility coming from so many different light sources, but each shadow would still be there. Each movement, each action taking place against one background is simultaneously taking place, having a seemingly different effect as it is being seen from a different angle or plane upon all other lines of sight. Use the ball to represent time and imagine one light seemingly stronger at one point in time, at each moment in time. Though there would be visual or conceptual movement through time, a shadow appearing to be moving across different frames, yet at that same moment differing versions of other shadows not as bright would be telling different perspectives upon other lines of sight. And since as I said for this example, each line of sight represents a different time, not a different dimension per se, each event or moment happening at any time would also be casting a different shadow back upon itself at every other time.

         Now change the inside of the ball casting shadows of potential, not to represent time, but instead three-dimensional space. Each breakage or disruption within the potential can be occurring or disrupting multiple points in space at the same time, appearing as one form from one perspective, having one type of intended effect upon one reality, and having a quite different impression by that motion or disruptive patterns simultaneously occurring in other points in space at the same time.

         Now imagine the inside of the ball to represent consciousness. Each idea, each thought, each notion would be occurring in a different way, affecting multiple shadow consciousnesses simultaneously. The intended effect upon one thinking that one at that moment is the current or real one, as if one moment was more real in the time analogy because one light seemed brighter or the others appeared dimmer, that same idea, notion, or abstraction can appear quite differently to another consciousness simultaneously as a direct consequence of that intended action upon another line of sight, with each thought being seen by all shadow consciousnesses differently all at once all the time.

         Now imagine the inside of the ball to represent all of these, time, consciousness, and three-dimensional space, all lights on all the time, every action or intention affecting every other event, time, and place, in every consciousness's potential perception in every possible dimension and timeline. Everything done at every time by anyone ever anywhere any when casting a faint shadow upon everything else also always occurring. The key to understanding it may not be in the source from where or how existence originates but in-between that primal primordial cause and every possible effect, every shadow, every stoppage of all possibilities into single occurrences of single realities. Most think time is this fulcrum, that something in time, in each moments present, regulates each occurrence from what did not occur but time is not thought to be a consciousness, merely a regulator of what appears as actuality to one given perspective, one line of sight, one given timeline. And if from a different perspective time itself can be thought to be multiply occurring in different ways at once, what may exist in the center appearing simultaneously yet differently across every moment in time to every possible consciousness in every possible reality may be even more elusive to understanding time or life itself.
 

                                                  No one is ahead of anyone and
                                                  no one is behind. No one is leading and
                                                  no one is following. We are all pulling
                                                  each other along. What's behind, beneath,
                                                  or coming up supports us. What is ahead,
                                                  above, or past us is a way to go forward.
                                                  Beyond those and that around us, the
                                                  Universe might not as well exist at all.

          I have written on this before but still find need to further clarify the concept. Our capacity to exist or to have existed always exists even if we do not, nor never have, nor necessarily in any one given timeline, ever will. The potential for ones existence or creation must be present in every single moment prior to ones actual existence for it to occur. In that sense, all that has yet to be has a reality or state I refer to as pre-existent. Likewise any given reality beyond and during your actual existence must include your having existed if they spring from or run concurrent with that given timeline or reality in which you did occur or exist within.

         What is actually occurring at any given time in any given reality is but a small plane of existence. To attempt to further define this plane I will liken it to corks floating on the ocean. The ocean, so large in relation to a small cork, though finite in size appears to reach infinity to our little cork both in breath and in depth.

         Out of this ocean of potentiality our corks form and attempt to rise to the surface. (multiple surfaces?). (This is limited in seemingly stating that corks know or care about what we believe to be THE surface.) Most corks never do. Some get nearer to the surface than others and sink back down. Compared to the surfaces order, beneath the surface there are corks everywhere with the added dimension of depth, at least, in this case, one dimension more than appears on the surface where our given corks of actuality at any one moment in time float. Beneath the surface there are corks everywhere. Pick any line of sight, 360 degrees times 360 degrees and any one cork is just one in a possible chain with others beneath it and above it in no particular order. Beside it from one view might be another that won't reach the surface for millions of years, or had millions of years ago, or never will. No one definitive line of sight or organizational factor is more true or definite than any other.  NOTE 3

         At the surface it is quite a different story. Less dimensions, not more. At least with one less dimension, the surface shows an order, a reality. With the added dimension of depth, compared to the surface, corks can occupy the same space, one directly below or above each other in relation to the surface plane. This added depth is unfamiliar to the surface plane. With the addition of the surface plane and that empty space above it, so necessary for defining that plane of existence, the empty space, one cork floating cannot share its place with another. The act of floating on the surface means that point in space and time is occupied by that one cork. It now has actual existence which precludes other existences in that spot, at least at that given time while it is floating on the surface.

         Across the surface there are now many patterns to be found. This new dimension, actually as I said, a lacking of dimension, breeds a new way of seeing the ocean across one common plane between the sea and the sky, between seemingly infinite potential of existence and between non-existence of potential, that thin line or crust or crest between the two where the water touches the air. For the corks floating on the surface, this limited lack of dimension creates a new reality, or a new way of seeing things. Other corks exist around you floating too. They define with you this new plane or way of seeing things with you concurrently. Some around you will sink back down. Others will pop up around you, coming and going from the surface, from what the surface defines as actuality. I don't mean by this analogy to imply that the cork is still the same beneath the surface as above, only that it has the same capacity or potential when it is in actual existence, as it had before or can be thought to have had after it sinks below again. The surface corks as I said because of the more limited dimensions of the surface, have a dimension of actuality, taking up that one given space at that surface at a time elbowing out itself a place at the table so to speak which other corks for the moments of its existence cannot share without pushing it aside, save for existing beside it.

         Though all the corks currently bobbing along the surface of the ocean exist in a sense side by side, each defining and confirming its little place upon its surface, they share a common top down perspective, if you will. Though their actual vision is limited to the other corks and miscellaneous floating debris around them, they are capable of imagining a common top down perspective (from within or from the point of view or perspective of the potential of non-existence), how silly or beautiful they must all look floating beside each other on the ocean where seemingly infinite potential (the water) meets seemingly infinite non-existence (the air). Along with this imagined or deduced perspective they watch the patterns where these two meet, of corks and other things reaching the surface, touching the definition plane where existence or potential brushes against non- existence or a severe limiting of potential down to narrower surface actualities. (You need that negative space perspective of what is not anything or cannot happen, or what is not happening to define something to be actual or actually happening.) The non-existence plane where no corks can go nonetheless makes the corks, in this case, be corks. It provides a definition standing out beside or in relation to non-existence, or between infinite potential and total non-existence, and each cork occupies for its time on the surface, at least at one point, the defining line between the two. Without that added definition or lack of dimension we call non-existence, or all that is not, you cannot envision that view or plane so dear to us surface corks, that of where the two meet, infinite existence and infinite non-existence into that view or experience we call limited existence.

         All of the corks which happen to be floating together at any one given moment in time share a limited reality in a very intimate way. They are what is that reality at that given point in time, defining and sustaining it together as one. They are also sharing in its history, both the past and the future. They have one common history or timeline of the entire Universe up to that point which they share between them all, such a small room of a seemingly infinite sized mansion of what could be or could have been to co-exist within. They also have the ability to interact with each other with a level of reality more real, in a sense, than any other within that reality and at that point in time, at least to them at that time. What they choose to do with that potential to make these interactions, these shared experiences, to become more real than any others that might have been at that time, that is the question each must and will decide for themselves. When you know and understand it, you can't help but want these experiences to be positive, pleasurable, and fun. If not for others, the highest ideal or goal, then at least for yourself. When you can achieve both, any other reality you might envision, call it Heaven, Nirvana, or whatever, cannot compare as being better than this unless there too you are making the experiences, the lives, the realities, better for others as well as for yourself. That is the power we have in this reality, to shape it not only for ourselves but for others however we choose, to cause them pleasure or give them joy, or to cause pain, to experience these for ourselves too, and to decide which should be inflicted and which withheld, savage justice or higher compassion, and which makes the most sense for whom and to which others.

         But the worst possible timelines potential by any given individual's point of view occurs I believe as often as the best regardless of what occurs in any given timeline. You can't change or eliminate one over the other and neither becomes more real simply because it was experienced again, or if possible, more often. Indeed the worst possible outcomes need to be and will be experienced, and everything else in-between, equally necessary to have been lived through. As pointless indulgences go, existence is merely the most elaborate, not the most true. Truth is best read between the lines, or in existence's case, between the timelines, not your own, everyone's. The patterns between them endlessly repeat but even they are not truth, just more and more convoluted interpretations hidden to be found by beings with every more complex and complicated intelligences capable of seeing what isn't necessarily there and creating ever more complex situations and problems to solve. The desire to be lurks behind every turn, in every shadow. To be what, to be when, to be how, that is all. To understand it is to add yet another layer away from knowing it. To experience it fully is to know it and know it for the only truth it possesses, the experience or effect of the desire to be in yet another of endless variations it will manifest itself as, and yet another of endless ways to superimpose that upon whatever else, in any and all manners and contexts, through any and all possible circumstances and realities. One is always equally the master of this circus of frivolity and the slave of its never-ending wish to set everything in motion to see how they collide.

         Get a view of it all from every possible angle, every possible perspective, and still you are left with nothing. Be what you have to be as often as you have to be it and take from it as much joy as you can while you can. It may be pointless, never-ending, and never any more real at any one time or life or way more than any other, but it need not be dull, for that if anything, is pretty much the driving point above all else.

         Grab the moment, any moment, and hold onto it forever and you will see in that moment is every other and everyone. Pick the best circumstances that will make you the most happy or contented or at peace the most times if you can but know that you will only know them as such for and by the sense of having experienced and known the worst. Everything cannot help but be judged by and in relation to everything else. Everything else is the only true measure of what it means to be anything. Without either there is no set scale to measure anything by, never mind a true one. What everything else is though, is as indefinite and as changeable as what you are, and any change in one is reflected instantaneously in the other.
 

                                                  What is can only be seen, known, and
                                                  understood in relation to how much
                                                  and how often it is not.

         There are two ways to believe that probability is irrelevant or does not exist. One way is to believe only one future can or will exist as real, and all others will not. Though as I said before, some do not believe that this necessarily invalidates the notion of probability; that just because something will happen only one way, the way that it does or will, it still might have occurred some other way though that can never be proven because by that viewpoint, no alternate endings or versions exist anywhere else in the Universe to prove that they might have occurred any other way. Such an outlook, though not requiring it, that only one definite future will be real, compliments the idea of predeterminism. If only one future will be real, if there is in the future only one way things will go, then one only needs enough info on the variables to determine how it would go. Probability depends only on having inadequate information for accurate prediction, for with enough information, though some would still cling to the fact it could happen some other way, if those who believe in one single future universal reality were correct, if enough information existed about that future reality by knowledge of all potential variables, it is conceivable it could be deduced.

         Many leaders of nations as well as individuals use the idea that the future is preordained to justify doing something in the present they know otherwise they ought not to be doing, that such a future state of being is inevitable and they are merely doing what they must to make that state occur. Believing that only one outcome will occur makes every decision become that much more critical as if the world will exist or not exist, become a utopia or a hellish slave state, depending on the outcome of every action those in a position to make or prevent such states of being occur by how they act or fail to act when it becomes required of them. Even if multiple realities exist, it does not necessarily diminish the responsibility to get it right this time, for in a sense this time may be all we see or get, by our own individual points of view existing in or shaped by this somewhat unique run through or common reality. But those who dare entertain the notion that only one reality or version exists in the future can think themselves to be guided by a state of being or planned existence no more real or definite than any other, and the sacrifices for that one future, not being the only possible future, might outweigh those required by an alternate alternative future they would never consider as possible.

         This limiting to thinking some versions of the future or future events to be inevitable or more probable limits one in acting other than in accordance to the realities built from and required within those very expectations. The more one believes one knows or understands the future, the more one limits oneself to acting within a way that would make or create such an intended state. When this is done consciously, it is called planning and acting in accordance with such plans. When it is done subconsciously or in accordance with religious or paranormal beliefs that one future or possible state is inevitable, it is to become a pawn or slave to those ideas. For thinking one can know or experience the one, and the only one, future is to absolve one from fearing the consequences of what they must do in order to make that one future, and indeed any one future over any other, to have to occur for they think it can happen no other way. Nothing is written in stone if there is more than one way the future can go, not even the present or the past.

         The other of the two ways for thinking probability is irrelevant or non-existent is to go completely in the other direction and say that if any possible future event or reality or outcome can occur because it does occur in some or any possible realities, it must have always either a probability of one (or 100%) in those realities in which it did actually occur and a zero percent chance in those realities in which it did not occur. Because it both does and does not occur, its probability exists in an indeterminate state because it itself is in an indeterminate or multiple states. This can be adjusted by saying that because it can or would happen more in one way than others, or in some realities more than others, probability can be preserved by saying in one in six possible realities after a roll of the dice, only one reality exists for each possible outcome, and if one intended or required a particular number, in five of those realities one would be disappointed and in only one would one be satisfied. Yet if there are six realities in which you made that one choice at that one moment, there would be countless others where you never were in the position to roll that dice at that one moment. Any different decision anywhere along the line would have opened up a whole new reality where you were anywhere else doing anything else than making that one choice at that one time.

         If there is no limit to how many times a given reality could occur, how could one ascribe probability to any one event? Existence or non-existence from the individual's point of view either occurred or did not occur. If it does occur in any reality there would then be countless subsequent realities where one lives and no longer lives, where one took one path and another version of oneself took another path, and if the present run through is not the only one, potentially many infinitely more probable realities which did not or will not even lead to ones existence at all. In the face of such innumerable alternate realities, the chance of anything happening in any way at any one time becomes impossible to measure without knowing how often such a set of circumstances can or will occur which would make such subsequent chances even possible. If one were to repeat something of random chance an infinite number of times, it would happen an infinite number of ways. If the odds of a dice coming up a certain number are always one in six, there is nothing to say that after a billion rolls, there might not be periods where it came up the same number or never came up one number after thousands of tries. The larger the number of potential run throughs, the more skewed any observable results can be, even over thousands of observations when the number of attempts is without limit or uncountable, no odds are provable or concrete.

         In this reality what draws our attention is what stands out from or apart from anything else. We seem to be different or apart from our environments, with some autonomy in our movements and in our choices. Our planet seems to stand out from or apart from the empty space surrounding it. We define things in opposition to or apart from that which we think they are not. Once in existence we have no relation to that time or state of existence in which we are not. (Once past occurring it must seemingly always occur that way or it becomes what is not, a dead branch with no life which is ultimately unreal. Once admitting any other possible alternate reality or outcome diminishes the realness of the currently experienced one). Without knowing how many times or ways we can occur, we cannot affix any probability to it. We simply and suddenly are. It seems given the age of the Universe, and the countless ways we or Humanity or Earth might happened differently, any one of us most likely as an individual might never had existed. Your parents or theirs might never have met, and so on. You can think this reality you are living in was meant to be and predetermined because it is the only one you know and in no small measure, the only one YOU as you exist now, could ever know, or you can see it as an infinitely small branch of a branch of a branch of trillions time trillions nearing infinity of other ways the Universe not only could have gone but does go in the overwhelming majority of other instances where you never exist within it, ever.

         Yet it is this very improbability, or if you prefer, fragility of existence which makes it seem to us in the way that it does. Countless mistakes we might make today could lead to our ruin tomorrow. We run the gauntlet of chance just by existing and if you believe that multiple versions of reality exist, we are far from always successful or even always still alive at this point in time. Yet the more predictable our lives become, whether through sensing of other more common potential futures over others from endless run throughs of similar realities or by our choices and methods of choosing becoming more narrow and predefined, we often instead of following those same known paths endlessly through infinite time, we seek out the new and completely unknown ones, if at all possible that any can stay unknown indefinitely since time itself can almost be infinitely occurring in any of an almost infinite number of ways, even if its birth date and end date were to be predetermined or prescribed.

         Recently on the beach I noticed a tiny beach plant growing far from any others. It was this standing out from its surroundings which made it noticeable. Were it to have been among others like itself, it would have been indistinguishable and barely seen, yet because it stood so far apart from where one might have expected it to be, it suddenly appeared or registered as interesting. That it had the misfortune to be on a frequented path made its existence even more unlikely. For awhile it withstood these great odds but then suddenly but predictably was simply gone. Given the number of things that are required for life, existence at all is far more unlikely than even the most isolated or unlikely individual lifeform. For any species to continue living over time, it is beating the odds and one day will vanish without a trace, just like that tiny beach plant in the sand. It is this seeming ability to be beating the odds or overcoming obstacles which makes living interesting. Were every potential run through equally real and experienced at whim, there would be no death, no failure not desired, and no odds to be beaten. We cannot get that feeling of triumph without having those all too frequent failures or the entire experience of living becomes a farce. Without the real possibility of failure or death, success becomes reduced to merely the continuation of monotonous existence.

         Life is like water through indoor plumbing. It flows through something unseen and into something which appears as useful to us. The tap may be turned on and off but that is just one instance. It is not any more there than it is potentially anywhere else the pipes run. Turn off one and it just increases the potential for coming out somewhere else. No matter how you judge it, if you can conceive of the length of time or of eternity, you know that the faucet will not be open for long for anyone or any one species. Yet how far one makes it relative to how many or how great the odds appear against it is all that make its existence the least bit interesting over any others which only might have been. Take away improbability and impermanence, and you lose the most important defining aspects of what it means to exist. One simply cannot always win or one tires of the need and the desire to play the game. We ask the Universe two things by existing, to always surprise us and to never let our existence or success be assured. If we think we have the need or potential to do, be, have, or create something which its existence or state of being is far from assured, we can experience that movement, dance, or flow we call living.
 

                                               If one is a part of everyone and everything else,
                                               and everyone and everything else is a part of oneself,
                                               and if every possible timeline or possibility is somewhere
                                               realized, what am I or more precisely what is it that
                                               thinks it is me? Even as far as all the potential of every
                                               which way my life went or could have gone, I am not the
                                               sum of them, merely a branch, one history, one interpretation
                                               of what it means to be me. If perception leads to being instead
                                               of vice versa, am I because I perceive myself to be or because
                                               the rest of the Universe perceives me to be? Am I more bound
                                               by what I believe I am, my concept of myself, or by others
                                               opinions of what I must be? Are the limitations of what I am
                                               and the limits of reality imposed on me because of what I
                                               think I am or what God or the rest of the Universe thinks I am,
                                               or is my existence limited to only those areas where both
                                               are in agreement?

         A person can redefine their notions of themselves in any number of ways in relation to, as, or in conjunction with anything in which they can conceive of existing anywhere at any time in the Universe, be it an idea, concept, intended state of being or other entity, be it individual or group. Now, in physical existence that definition should include, no matter the degree of importance stressed, ones own actual physical identity, form, and body. Diminish it how much or however you may, it needs to be included somehow as an integral part at the very least, of what you are.

         To view it in its absolute basest terms, that would be a domesticated ape-like creature grown under the auspices of a group or society to further the aims, goals, or existence of that group or society in which it was raised. Whether you view the group ethnically, politically, philosophically, or religiously, the intent is getting back one which will adhere to a given point of view and further the propagation of the group in general. One could argue that because no one is commanded yet to reproduce such actions are voluntary and societies or groups merely aid as best they can this after-the-fact development through aid and the provision of help. Yet almost every society and group will dispense such aid and allow such offspring to be raised only to and by those who adopt its main cultural and behavioral precepts. Should any individual or couple disregard in any major way any of its culture's or society's rules for correct behavior or correct thinking, they are subject to losing influence or contact with their children directly to the society at large which can institute through hired workers or others a higher degree of control over such instruction and influence.

         When permitted or encouraged by law, individuals can perceive themselves as members of groups with existences, aims, and goals beyond that of the primary focus group around which a society is ruled. These secondary identifications and affiliations allow one to pursue interests not always solely for the purpose of furthering the main group's interests, provided they are not in conflict or may even become in conflict with it. Such differing notions of identity and purpose and interest are considered healthy if they do not detract from or run in opposition to the primary group in charge of a particular group or society to which they belong.

         Yet all of these secondary group identities and non-primary means of identification of oneself beyond the most ideal or extreme measures preferred by ones society always carries with it the risk or potential to upsurp the primary means of identification and control of the primary controlling group of an individual, be it ones society at large or a sub-culture of that society. To begin to see oneself as a part of another group or in a new way beyond just the ideal distinction those around oneself might prefer, is to become an individual. Though groups and societies claim to encourage this, it is a process they seek forever to control, what kind of an individual one can become, and by trying to forever limit and control individualism to only that which they currently allow or would tolerate, such a process is neither encouraged or welcomed but instead suppressed as much as possible given the circumstances of that group or society.

         Religious identification can go beyond the mere present groups and constitute a different kind of threat to the primary group, if the primary group itself is not religious in nature. Religious identification can define one in terms of existing with groups across time or other non-physical dimensions. They may work to progress goals or achieve states of being incrementally which have timeframes which are far larger than their own individual lives and give them a seemingly expanded purpose or reach by committing to something larger than that which they could do on their own.

         Such larger more long term redefinitions of identity and purpose beyond ones own reality and time need not be religious in nature, but do require taking a lot on faith. They assume others will come along to further those aims or goals after one is gone to possibly one day come to fruition. Without such confidence or faith that factors which one cannot control but can only hope for will one day give their works meaning in a larger context, such longer term planning would rarely be attempted as most would concentrate on efforts closer to realization within or nearer to their own times. Similar to religious groups, non-religious group identities can go back hundreds of years and work for goals far from achievable within a given individual member's lifetime.

         Beyond the ability to form identifications with this officially sanctioned group or that officially sanctioned group, or even those non-officially sanctioned groups a society would discourage or imprison one for belonging to, what other means exist for a given person to become an individual of their own construction? Religions, though possessing some of the most rigorous rules for behavior and demanding some of the highest degrees of conformation, often do give individuals the notion of possessing a soul, unrulable and uncontrollable beyond ones own willingness to decide for oneself how to align itself, and its choice ultimately constitutes the last word on what it should do. Such belief systems would threaten the current political systems to such a degree that they would be prohibited but for the fact that such notions predate within their borders most current political machines. There is at least a modest acknowledgement of the rights of individuals to work towards their own definitions, achievements, and goals not specifically defined by or required by their given primary group or society (primary group or society used repeatedly here can mean either the ruling government or a smaller group within a society which has the greater influence or control over the thoughts and actions of a given individual) providing they do not oppose them, at least for those groups or societies which accept that individuals can have such rights inherently which cannot be taken away other than unjustly. Such is a religious and philosophical view not all groups or cultures share in theory, and certainly not respect equally in practice.

         Another limiting factor beyond just ones environment seeking to limit ones development of what it means to be an individual to a narrow prescribed range acceptable to ones present culture, group, or society, is the fact that most thoughts and instruction one receives is geared toward nothing else but to make one the labeled, canned, and processed product of the civilization, group, culture, or sub-culture in which one was raised. To ever think beyond this to how others not you would view the world or how you would view the world if raised by others or in another culture, civilization, or time, this is to go beyond the perspective allotted to you. It is to attempt to become a more full person by being able to see and know the world from points of view not just your own, and to learn from them. It breaks the monopoly or stranglehold each culture, sub-culture, or society seeks to limit its members toward only those areas, facts, or opinions which show the present states of order in a favorable light. And because such wider perspectives tend to produce unwanted calls for reform or change, dominant groups within a given society, group, culture, or sub-culture to which one belongs attempt to control or repackage everything in accordance with how they wish it to be seen, rewriting history by omission, and so forth, so that everything cannot help but be seen and interpreted by how they wish it to be seen and interpreted.

         And it is not just ones society and culture which is limiting. By existing in an actual state there are prescribed limitations to what you can do or be, and by which thoughts you are capable of realizing and understanding, limits to what you desire to be or grow into. To exist as something definite you are limited for the most part by and to that definition, and are not free to be anything else provided you accept that definition. To what degree you can modify and amend that definition of what you exist as depends on ones degree of creativity and individual circumstance.

         What one is is shaped, molded, contrived, and created from what those and that in ones environment wish it to be. One is also what one brings to the equation, the unique combination of potential and possibilities and the many ways of feigning compliance with what one is demanded to be. To see that these seemingly divergent forces, one's environment shaping one to suit its needs, and the aims of the individual to rise above just being a mere product of one's environment and chart a new and radically different plan for oneself, that these are both the same thing, both different aspects of oneself played out against oneself. This is to see beyond the self to a more dynamic view of existence.
 

                                                  Each thing in the Universe is what it wants to be
                                                  What you want it to be is relevant only to you
                                                  and whether you succeed in changing it
                                                  is irrelevant for it will have succeeded
                                                  by its existence and your desire
                                                  to have changed you.

         Of all of the contradictions about existence, none is more fundamental than that of having as you exist within the Universe, the Universe exists within you. We think by means of our intellect and experience that something must be contained by, or larger or smaller than something else. If one thing is a part of a subset of another, the larger set must be just that, larger and more inclusive. To see each enfolding and enveloping the other each moment to create or sustain existence or experience is not something we have been trained to comprehend nor is it something readily visible from outward experience, yet it is the means by which experience itself is formed. Each is at various points absorbed by and absorbing the other.

         The way to imagine this inner to outer dimension as I call it would be to imagine something outside of the Universe. Imagine the Universe as we experience it as a black hole, self-contained and impenetrable by the infinite time of an event horizon. Now imagine anything else forming or existing outside of what we call the Universe seeking to enter it. This example is limited to and by the physical dimensions we perceive, so it is only meant to be a sketchy illustration, not an actual description, explanation, or model, merely a way to get a hint of the idea through concepts we can understand.

         Imagine the Universe as a ball-shaped black hole and the outside point seeking to penetrate into its dimensions of existence. Since nothing can pass through its infinite time event horizon, as it nears it imagine the ball itself changing its shape warping around the point seeking to enter into it. Without penetrating the outer rim, existence itself contorts so that what was once outside the ball is now within it. Inside the ball is infinite space as well. From inside the ball there is seemingly no outer edge for within it space seems to stretch to infinity. What was outside becomes inside and the Universe becomes inside out.

         This is hardly descriptive, merely an illustration of how to begin to understand how something can both be contained by something and contain it as well, or be both outside of something and within it at the same time.

         The act of perception is to cause a feedback loop. What is perceiving something must go to that which it perceives somehow, must expand itself through some hazy sort of redefinition by experience to include the perception and the reality of that which it is not, or exists outside of oneself. This act of perception or experience becomes a part of oneself and changes itself by the redefinition in relation to the existence of that other which it experiences. Consciousness must reach out to the rest of the Universe, take a snapshot of it and digest that back into itself to build up its concept of itself. What it is experiencing outside of itself is in turn created or being additionally defined by the act of being perceived. It is as though each is being continually absorbed and digested by the other, each defining what the other is or exists as.

         Yet there is a hindrance or guidance of this mutual redefinition of existence. There is interpretation. However it is formed, we have notions of what we want to experience, what we want to have be. We bring this interpretation to bear on what we experience making it conform in a way to what we wish to have be. This changes the mix and changes the feedback we get from the all or whatever else we wish to experience. It either conforms to this added expectation or requirement of it, or it does not. If one had no expectations, whatever feedback one gets from experience would be pleasurable for one is getting feedback, and that means one does have existence. The more we require of the feedback we receive back from what we project that we require of the Universe to conform to our wills of what should be, the more disappointed we are apt to become with it or with ourselves by our lack of being able to control it.

         Yet to exist for many is not merely wanting to take in whatever the Universe has to offer us. We want to shape it to our experiences in a way that is constructive and pleasurable. We need to be doing, not just content with just being. Doing does have its place. Yet when what one wishes to do overlaps what others wish to do or be, conflict inevitably occurs. I do not wish to imply that conflict is not or ever is inevitable, but that to do anything one will affect others whether they like it or not. Those that do not like it would wish for their own wills and desires for what they wish to have be prevail. States of being you wish to have be which require or is contingent upon the behavior of others inevitably or indubitably becomes a request upon others to conform with your expectations of what should be.

         For much in our existence, we know this is too much to ask. One cannot tell a mountain to not be a mountain because we don't like to see it, or tell the moon to go away because we wish to see the stars clearer. One can get frustrated for a dog or a bear to be acting like a dog or a bear yet we accept that it is a failure in our expectations for wanting them to be or behave like they are something they are not.

         It is other people we have the most expectations for, yet ironically many believe it is they who also ought to have the most rights to their own wills and expectations. If one blasts a hole through a mountain, no one is going to ask or apologize to the mountain for doing or having done so. To many, most of what exists in our environment is simply there to be used and understood by us. We may not be able to expect it to be what it is not, nor should we need to ask or apologize to such things for our wish to make them into something else should we find a means to recreate them into something more useful to ourselves, such as creating a tunnel through a mountain or turning a tree into a chair.

         Yet as I said before, most of our expectations involve the behaviors of others. These interactions between beings in our environments far more complex, unpredictable, changing, and changeable give us both the highest degrees of pleasure and satisfaction, and well as frustration and sorrow, than any interactions with any less animate parts of our Universe. Though philosophically we may believe we have not the rights to wish others to always conform to our expectations, that is exactly what we do, whether we enforce it or not is beside the point. When I meet another person, I wish them not to harm me, nor say or do anything which would make me feel badly. To the best I am able to control this by not doing anything threatening or intimidating towards them, I do either consciously or unconsciously because I wish the interaction to be uneventful in the degree that it not be marred by unpleasantness. To a further degree one might not wish to be in a place where one might need to confront or be confronted by disagreeable people. To desire this, and hopefully most do, is to wish to severely limit the possible responses and actions of others. When this is done via mutual agreement out of mutual aims or goals it is less invasive or oppressive than simply intimidating, overpowering, beating, or killing anyone I meet before they have the chance to do anything to me I might find displeasurable or disagreeable.

         The point is though we have the greatest degree of expectations for other people's behavior, to varying degrees each of us acknowledges they should occupy a greater degree of respect for, and relevance to their opinions than other things in our environment are due. To the extent we try to control them or mold them or have them always conform only to what our ideas of what or how they should be, we know it is a lacking or negative aspect of ourselves which should be addressed or looked at as well.

         It is easy to dominate others if one has enough power. Strip them of their aspirations for themselves, limit their definitions of freedom, mold their entire consciousnesses to only think and believe what one wishes them to think and believe. Because it is easy and tempting if you wish to have complete predictability that others will always react to or treat you as you wish, it will always be sought after by those who miss the whole point of existence, to see what there is to be seen instead of what you only wish to see or have be. To dominate others is as foolish as wishing dominate the Universe and only have or let exist what one wishes to have or let exist. They are different manifestations of the same aspiration, to control all else and to remove control from all else.

         I cannot even say such aspirations are wrong if that is what one believes one really needs to want to try to do or how to be. I can say it is to retreat fully into ones own ego to the extent of making the world a reflection of oneself such that one cannot help but see the flaws and folly of oneself to the degree that no one, no matter how self-absorbed, will like or enjoy what they see or create, and will likely in the end be repulsed by it and by themselves.

         It is a fine line to walk between having desires for what you want to have be, even if you view it as good and positive and in the best interest of everyone, and having this become destructive to yourself and everyone else by wishing to implement or effect this intended state if it affects others against their wishes. To the point of trying to get everyone to agree and reach consensus, such desires can be positive. To try to make others agree by trickery of arguments, coercion, or force of will, the end is lost by the means.

        Our perspectives, or egos of what we believe others should be, how they should behave, what they should believe, are not always entirely our own. Our beliefs have been shaped to fit our environments and cultures, and are as much a product of them as of ourselves. But by being we have a responsibility to make our views wholly our own for in the end, nothing and no one else in the Universe deserves any responsibility for our own actions or inactions but ourselves. Everything you see, hear, or experience, is to guide you to your own interpretation of what you are, what life is, and what you should do with them. To buy into any one notion wholly and without reservation is to lose to it your soul, if you can be thought to have one.

         To see from the widest perspective possible, leave everything, even what comprises your very existence in doubt. Until if ever you can know the source and purpose of all you experience, and know it completely without doubt, know that whatever you find to latch onto that says what you are is merely a reflection of what you find around you, like the cork drifting on the ocean. What you or it may be, or where they are drifting to, should forever be left open-ended conceptually.

         To lose oneself in observation or being is to put aside how you would interpret something and drink it in fully. It may be being seen or experienced by you but without bringing your personality, outlook or opinions always to the fore, it may as well be happening to (and understood by) anyone equally anywhere any when.
 

                                                            To share time, to co-exist
                                                              to walk the same path
                                                                for awhile side by side

         Without wanting to control the world, to make it give you the experiences and objects of your desire, what is there to do? Is not wanting control a good thing or a bad thing? Too little of our lives are under our control as is, with the room for maneuvering to achieve the things you want limited to a few hours a day for those lucky enough to have claim over even those few hours to do or attempt to achieve what they wish in even that limited allotment of time to themselves to break out or up from the lives they have been prescribed by fate, economics, and circumstance, to seemingly be destined to lead, regardless of choice.

         People have the right to want all the things they do not have. No one can take that right away from them but they themselves. Wanting is not a bad thing. Wanting what you will never have nor ever could is not even a bad thing, though it can be painful. Wanting is simply a part of being and leads to the desire to do something with or in the course of your life. But one can let go of one's wants from time to time to see how one might stand without them. Are all wants and desires equal or necessary for us to be happy or fulfilled, or do they drive us places where we otherwise would not want to go? There is a difference between being aimless with ones life and content with whatever good comes ones way, between that and to simply let go of the steering momentarily and rethink, is this really where I want to go, is this really where I should go or am I fighting the wind, the tide, and myself and everything else just to get there? Is the cost of what you want in life really what you are willing for you and perhaps others to have to pay?

         It is said the ways of the world are mysterious but they are so just because we prefer to see things the ways in which we wish to see them. Nature is not mysterious. What exists in this world has an order to it regardless of our expectations for or about it. It is there whenever we wish to look at it with eyes wide open, and put aside momentarily what we wish for it to be. What we wish the world and the Universe to be has its value in terms of aspirations and goals, wants and desires, but it is fiction, just fiction compared to what the world really is and the way things really are. Without fully understanding the way things are and the value within them, one ought to be hesitant toward changing things. The exception being of course, when what is is clearly not working toward the benefit of most or all others.

         For oneself one has the right to wish for that which makes one happy or content, providing it is not making others unhappy in the process of achieving it. For others, one has no right to wish for anything except that they might get what they wish for themselves, with the same limitations that it not adversely affect others, and possibly that they ought not to be suffering (in their own eyes). One cannot wish others to achieve what they might not wish for themselves, or to be or become something they have no wish or desire to be or become. Nor can one think that giving others greater means of help to achieve their own goals for themselves to always be a good thing when such help may not be needed, wanted, or be keeping them from succeeding or failing on their own merits or terms.

         Interfering with others lives is an inevitable aspect of living. There are no rules one must adhere to. One can exploit others circumstances and weaknesses to ones own benefit all that one wishes in accordance with what is legal and socially acceptable to ones group or peers. These rules of how one might wish to check oneself for affecting others in ways others might not wish, or be disadvantageous to their own aspirations and goals, when they come from an internal belief and not an external custom or law, are entirely ones own choosing and up to each individual to decide the merits of them. And it is how one exercises this choice which defines the character of who one is. Each and every group is always compromising their beliefs in regards to some others they value less or desire to control more than others. Sometimes it is done because we want to help some more than others, and often it is done because we want to help ourselves more than others.

         This singling out certain persons or groups you know whom you might care more to succeed than others, is another fact of life. Some people through shared histories with them, or shared outlooks or goals will count more than others in their hearts. This is a fact of living, but it is far from ideal. Our sons and daughters may mean more to us as individuals than some one else's sons and daughters but at some point we must rationalize each person has equal rights to live, to grow strong, and work for their own goals. The advantages we seek to bestow on some over others, though honest and typical, in the end are selfish and not selfless when they divide up all others into the favored and the forgotten. This fact of human nature will not change soon but recognize it for what it is, valuing some lives more than others, cherishing some people's goals and aspirations for themselves more than others', and the willingness to act out of such mixed values.

         Few people can venture into another civilization, culture, or sub-culture and not bring their own culture's point of view to bear on it. Since we have begun to diminish the rights of different nations to have different values and beliefs contrary to the norms of our own individual nations, imagine going to another planet. Few among us, only the most self-righteous, would dare say in advance that our laws, customs, norms, governments, and societal structures were to be superior and another planet's if different were to be or could be immoral, backward, corrupt, or any of the numerous other value systems we place on things. Even after such exposure to another outside civilization's norms and customs, and understanding them we would inevitably make such comparisons and come to such conclusions, that those ways in which they differ from our own values would be inherently wrong.

         Philosophically people may have a vague belief that what is right or works for some is not necessarily right for others but that is never the belief which gets acted upon, perhaps because that belief requires no action. The belief that does get acted upon is the belief that our (whomever the "we" might be, be it individuals or groups) ways of living and values are right and others must adhere to them or their people are unduly suffering and we are morally justified, if not obligated, to make them behave in accordance with our own beliefs, customs, or laws. To let any other beliefs stand long as an alternative is to undermine the unquestionable rightness of one's own model, and dare invite others to make negative comparisons by one's own views, in regards to that others. One way of looking at things must dominate, or continually have to justify why it is better than another's. It is far easier to simply eradicate all others conceptually or physically than to always triumph simply on terms of merit. Without allowing, or moreover inviting, such possible alternatives or possible changes or revisions, one is forced into ridiculing or attempting to eliminate any or all other opposing ideas or beliefs.

         To openly try to change another's views, viewpoints, customs, systems, and so on, is honest. When it is done openly, however good or bad you may value such changes to be, however much you believe in one side's rightness or moral superiority over the other's, it is far more justifiable than when it is done secretly behind closed doors with the submissive side never realizing or understanding such control or self-determination was lost.

         The need to agree on many things is the requisite for peaceful co-existence. How such agreements will be, can be, if even if ever they could be realized is anyone's guess. If force is used what may be considered the most right and true, should humans ever be able to agree upon such things, becomes largely irrelevant. Debate and force are at opposite ends of the spectrum of persuasion. Debate is the search for truth. Force makes its own truths, not necessarily deep philosophically but while enforced, somewhat on a surface level, indisputable. And the desired depth is the key. Simply getting a person or people to ape the behavior and pay lip service to the beliefs one expects can be done by force from only one side. To have further deeper roots of conviction, one must be willing to put ones own beliefs on the line and be open to change and revision as well, through compromise and debate. Without provable give and take, the other quickly learns he is being spoken at and neither conversed with nor listened to.

        To seek real mutual co-existence means putting aside as many expectations for others beliefs and behavior as conceivably possible. Not to judge or bring ones own standards to bear on another. As far as one cannot conceive or admit such relaxing of expectations or judgments is possible, continued conflict is inevitable with some or with many others. To the extent that they think they are right and just, and can afford to live in or with such continual conflict, or if they know of no other way to live, that is fine for them, their choice, and will remain their choice for as long as these factors do not change.

         For those who have not the power or the will to control others, the choices are easier. One can be forever upset with others behavior or nature they cannot change, or they can accept it for what it is. One path leads through only sorrow, the other eventually to peace. If you cannot have expectations for others, nor always be able to help them save for when they request such help, how can you be of any use to any others if that is what you desire to do with your wants and wishes on how to make use of your own time? You can be there. You can be an example of what you believe is best to be. You can be willing to share your time and walk part of your separate paths together. That is all you have to give and all that can ever truly be given to another. Even hope cannot be given, merely communicated, and must be grown from within.
 

These are some terms I thought I would add at the end to make use of the extra pages (I messed up the original order and number of pages leaving some extra at the end and decided to keep them and make use of the extra length). Only two of these terms were used in the text, but the other concepts were key to the construction of the later additions and are present in other ways throughout the text without being specifically mentioned or used as terms. An idea can be integral to others without being mentioned nor separated from them, or even seeing them as separate, yet if you pick apart what constitutes what you believe and why, you will find the underpinnings of some ideas as being essential in the makeup of others either you never thought about or take for granted.

 Multidimensionalism – Multidimensionalism simply defined is that things or energy can exist in multiple dimensions at the same time. This is not a new idea. The pen I am writing with exists in at least three physical dimensions plus time, so everyone can conceive of the same object existing concurrently in more than one dimension. But this seems like cheating. We readily understand these four dimensions and commonly use the term dimensions in the science-fiction sense of alternate realities, or in the same realities or dimensions we perceive plus some we cannot yet understand. Indeed science has reduced mathematically and conjecturally the four dimensions we perceive to a single dimension, space-time. So rather than expanding on the dimensions we can perceive or conceive of, we are in a period of compacting what we know  in terms of how the dimensions we perceive relate to each other, yet also speculate about other dimensions we can as yet only deal with hypothetically or hint at vaguely.

         As used here, multidimensionalism represents the notion that one can conceive of more than three or four dimensions using ideas of how they may overlap or line up to the dimensions we can perceive. The three-dimensional shadow description is one idea of how to conceive of such a complex idea. We know how three-dimensional forms create two-dimensional shadows, so using similar concepts can force ones mind to think what could cause a three-dimensional shadow. Also how things seem to line up in more than one dimension yet appear different from another can push one to think in terms of seeing separate things as united from a different angle or dimension we cannot perceive. From a different dimension or perspective we cannot imagine, perhaps multiple states of an object in different possible timelines seem the same or seem to line up, or that all life actually comes from the same source. That there may be dimensions of existence which, as adding depth or width to something which seemed something else from only one or two dimensions changes the fundamental interpretation of its existence, is something we ought to consider as a possibility if we are ever to recognize them using logical, geometric, or mathematical models as a way to grasp or explain them. With imagination, we need nothing to start, merely the willingness to begin again in wonder.

 Fuzzy Time – If all points in your life are simultaneously occurring at once, it should be possible to blur your focus on the present and, not remembering nor anticipating, but simultaneously exist in more than one time frame at once and experience a combined state of consciousness with multiple time versions of oneself.

 Fuzzy Consciousness – similar to Fuzzy Time but with another or other consciousnesses other than oneself. Since all experiences ultimately are indiscriminate as to what happened to whom, one is not necessarily limited to ones own experiences or self in dealing with fuzzy time and can move beyond it to mix in or with other points of view or perspectives beyond ones own timeline, and beyond oneself. Beyond you and your current timeline, other persons can be more similar to you than alternate versions of yourself, both potentially equal in distance and proximity. Both are the you which is currently the not you, both slightly further off the mark of direct experience as the now and currently you.

 Reformation – Single-celled organisms can combine to form a new kind of life. It may be very rare but they can become stuck in each other or together like conjoined twins, share nutrients, and share existence. This new type of life is stronger and better able to survive. If this bonding is not fatal and happens early enough before reproduction, the offspring can possess a tendency or ability to make such a connection with another single-celled organism or even divide into a two-celled organism itself.

         This mutation or different kinds of life separate combining to form new kinds of life is an undercurrent or driving force behind all biological life, and on a different level, consciousness works the same way. Everything living is mutating into something else and those mutations or changes constantly get updated and repackaged into its offspring.

         When the new and larger multi-cellular organisms get large enough, they can do something just as amazing as the first conjoining to create a new type of life. The combined multi-cellular lifeform becomes able to replace or reproduce individual cells and remain intact and alive. This too extends the time or the lifespan of the entity. The longer it lives, the more mutations and growth or changes can be imparted or impressed upon each successive generation. Once the more complex multi-cellular organisms are able to timely replace their individual single-celled members into another generation within the same lifetime of the organism, they can become able to reproduce damaged ones ahead of schedule or at will when some become damaged or lost due to an accident.

         Like all of these organized cells working for a common purpose of continuing the life of a multi-generational larger organism, consciousness is a combination of individual sources or building blocks working for a common purpose or life. It can be thought to arise from or with these combined in purpose multi-cellular living machines, or it can be thought of as a new lifeform in and of itself, growing out of its combination or growth just as the first two single-celled counterparts produced a new type of life when they first combined into one.

         Consciousness to a single biological lifeform can guide it and keep it alive through helping it adapt to changes in its environment and find new food sources or new ways to remain alive and intact as the combined mutating group entity which comprises a multi-cellular individual lifeform. And consciousness can begin to form its own goals beyond just the individual lifeforms they inhabit or form around. They can have aspirations for other lifeforms beyond their own, goals or intentions for them they wish to impose upon them. These goals or intended states can spread to other individual lifeforms aspirations and be thought to be a new form of life or consciousness which can survive the deaths of individual members as a multi-cellular being can survive the loss of individual cells.

         These higher forms of consciousness depend upon individual lifeforms as multi-cellular lifeforms depend upon individual cells, yet they can and do advance themselves by reproducing their aims and intents in others or seek to eliminate others which do not ascribe to or accept them. It may seem strange to speak of goals, aspirations, or intended states of being as living things or consciousnesses but they fulfill the same requirements; they are a combination of individual biological entities or components and seek the advancement of a continuation of a particular design or life of something, in this case an idea or state of being for a group rather than for an individual existence.

         Everything in existence, on an individual level, a group level, or a conceptual level, must build itself up from components of its environment. It must take the energy or potential it finds from what is around it and reformulate it into something in its design or intended state. Whether consciousness arises out of cells living for a common aim of perpetuating itself, or of a group or species perpetuating its existence, beliefs and culture, each requires something else to take it to make or remake itself into its design or build itself out of.

         The life of anything individual or conceptual must draw life or potential to itself to further its design, intended state, or further its own existence. That potential comes from a variety of sources of all which came before freed up when it is no longer used recycling itself again and again in perpetuity. To see it clearly one must go beyond time, that there never was a before state when it was what it is not now, nor an after state when it will be more than it is now. It is like a circle of potential in a donut shape with everything moving out of and away from itself, and back into itself in the center, or the act of kneeding (as in bread) something into something else out of a variety of different sources into something new. It is not the ingredients or the product which is important or real, but the act of transference or transformation from one state to the other which is in essence the only reality and the (after) bread and the (before) ingredients are only for the process of something to be acted upon or made into something else. 

 Evolution and Mutation – What is funny about science-fiction movies about the future is the idea of mutants. Everything about life, you, your species, is constantly mutating into something else. In the long run we call this growth or evolution, but it is mutation. Travel back a few hundred years for some or a few thousand for others and see yourself for the mutant that you are. Others can gawk at your bizarre height or enlarged head size, and traveling further back, your lack of body hair or fur in certain places. Everything alive is a work in progress.

         Some tend to see humanity as the end product of our evolution. In many ways they are right. Any species always so close to annihilating itself is also just as close to being the most definitive and advanced end model of all it could have been.

         Go back several million years and what would eventually become humans you might see as something more like chimpanzees or other large monkeys. Go back a hundred million more and they might seem nothing more than rats or chipmunks. If the dinosaurs did not die off they might never have gotten much further beyond that, were they even to progress that far.

         In those realities, if any, where humanity does not oft itself, a few million years from now (right, a hundred would be too much to expect now, and every decade requires ever more luck to make it through) were humanity to survive that much longer, what would have become of humans would appreciate being compared to us no more than we would appreciate being likened to monkeys or rats. But we don't have to worry about that because; one, we would long be dead anyway, and two, we would most of the time or most likely never advance significantly beyond where we are at now without destroying ourselves completely long before we could ever look that bad comparatively speaking.

         Whether humanity or another species evolves far enough for what we are now to look like mere rats or monkeys in comparison to what they can see, know, or become is unimportant. That there is time enough and life enough left for a species to get to that point is what is important. What every species is now is merely a single point on the road, and not any place in particular. Should we go the way of the dinosaurs, depending on how we do it, not far down the line there will be new intelligent species somewhere, possibly right here on Earth, that will put us to shame in how far they will make it beyond where we quit or petered out. Today's hamsters could evolve into explorers of the galaxy millions of years from now, the future is that wide open and changeable. If that sounds bizarre to you, find what would become humanity, 10, 20, or 30 million years ago and see if you would ever have thought it would invent air conditioning or go to the moon.

         The only end result of evolution is an evolutionary dead end. Anything that is living is on its way to becoming something else, individuals included. If you only are what you were yesterday you are either trapped in time or dead. People in comas can come close but even they too are changing, though probably not for the better. And neither necessarily are we. No one says the road to the future runs only to shinier and brighter versions of what we are now. People can on the aggregate become less intelligent, more arrogant, hostile, close-minded, and bigoted or xenophobic or nationalistic than a generation or two before. If you don't believe me just turn on the television and watch everything that is on.

         If those individuals and species that see their ability to mutate into something else in a positive light, as an opportunity to become more intelligent, compassionate, evolved, they can while time allows get pretty far. The future is full of possibilities and potential which can be tapped into by anyone who dares to try. Growth and change is inevitable. Nothing is what it was even a moment ago. People have the ability to direct that change to where they want it to go. As I said before, anyone who does not know they are more or different than what they were yesterday is not accepting or realizing time for what it is. They are holding on to something which no longer exists. The harder you try to cling to a past notion of what you were, the more you cease to live and you slide faster to death because then, like it or not, you will be changed. To try to keep yourself unchanged from now until then is simply to make all the points in-between irrelevant. You may as well just grease the tracks.

         Living is changing, you and your world both interacting and redefining. Death is just wiping the chalkboard clean and starting again. The potential is still there, if not used by you, then by something or someone else. What won't be done by you perhaps will get done by someone else. Something not discovered or invented by humanity, well there's always the potential space hamsters of 50 million years from now. But if the potential is not you, you might say, why should I care? If more potential is created for someone or something else yet to be when you die, why should you care if it is not you? You don't have to. If you are so wrapped up in your own ego thinking what you are now should continue the same unchanging until the end of time, that is really your own problem.

         And it is to fundamentally misunderstand time, to cling to thinking you are only what you were before. You are not the same as what you were yesterday, and time is not repeating itself exactly over and over again. It is different, you are different, whether or not you wish to recognize it as such. Some people think that everyday they are one step further towards death. If you understand that everyday you are one step further, death is really meaningless. Everyday, every moment you are changed. Everyday and every moment you exist you are reborn and every day or moment after you die. The big final death is not who you are now, who you are now is dying now. Who or what you will be when what may be the final you dies, is for you now only what you can hope and dream might come from or spring out of who you "were" now. And what you are now is dying every moment to create that which you will become five minutes, five hours, or five years from now, but that "you" will also be living and dying every moment to every moment. You cannot pick any one of those moments and say that is you because each will be different in many ways. It is just like you cannot say humanity is what it is now in other times. Millions of years apart what we call humanity resembled bacteria or amoebas, fish, amphibians, rodents, monkeys, what we call humanity today, and whatever stages it might appear as could it continue to exist millions of years from now.

         Which of these was really humanity? As much as scientists think they can draw lines in the sand and come up with new names and dates for this sapien and that era, they are all the same line of the same species, just different points on the same road. You can see each seemingly different stage as something new but it is also really more a continuation of the same direct lineage or line. Yet as much as they are on the same line from the past into the future, everyone can also see each point is unique along the way. So too is each and every moment's version of yourself completely new and completely different along the same line of a slower, yet faster for you, evolutionary journey of your own. What you are is always evolving or changing into something new whether or not you choose to recognize it as such. When you do recognize it, it gives you the chance to take hold over it and direct it as you will. None of those new and improved versions of yourself will be you either, but you can experience the sliding to or through them, the transition or leaping from one version to the next. That is experience, that is you. It is not reality, it lies in-between different or successive realities, but it is what you choose to make successive realities seem to become, so it is you, somewhere between one moment and the next.

 The Uncarved Block – The Uncarved Block is an idea in the oldest Taoist literature, the Tao Te Ching. To be like the Uncarved Block, in its simplest meaning is to shift ones attention or focus to a potential state rather than the actual. What you want to be becomes a process of removing that which you wish not to be from yourself, or the filtering down. It really can be thought to be far more reaching than that. For anything to be, you, your world or anything which also exists which is not you, for it to be thought to exist at all, one must start with taking away from it conceptually what they think it is not. The potential for anything in existence, for everything in what it exists as now if at all it can be thought of as separate from anything else, to be or be interpreted as anything else, the literal potential for everything, is omnipresent and without limits. Everything's existence begins with removing from it what you think it is not. Without that, it could be or be interpreted as anything else one currently thinks it is not.

 Experience and Meaning – The best way to think of what life gives you to experience, your own life, body, others, and so on, is to think of it like taking a book out of a library. You can have use of it for a limited time, but you know it is not yours outside of that time, and it is allotted to you for making the passage of time to enrich you by gaining the experience of having read or experienced it. You can waste the time it is allotted to you just rereading some of the pages over and over again until time runs out, but there is a progression implied. You may not be able to renew it, and you definitely at some point will have to return it. We try to hold on to certain times and people and want to experience their company or similar times over and over but the story must change, evolve, grow, or the meaning or purpose, if you choose to ascribe any meaning or purpose to it, will be lost completely. Meaning is ascribed or assessed in looking back over and summing up the differences and discrepancies in where you came from. Where you may be headed, its meaning, if any, has not been decided yet. As long as life continues, everything and their meanings are open to revision and reinterpretation. Characters will come and go, the settings will shift, and even the protagonist will change or be changed. Savor them as much as you wish, the parts you like, but do not deny the rest their due place in-between, and see the progression from one time, stage, or era to another not as a loss, but as a necessity of the first and the only requirement, change. 

 Perspective – Humans are different than most else in their everyday environments by two factors; language and imagination. Imagination is able to keep ones past alive and redefine whatever one is now in relation to what one believes or "remembers" what one was, or how one was, or how one saw things before. We cannot be certain that how we remember the past is exactly how it occurred but we believe mostly that our general sensing of our own pasts to be honest and that what and how we think we were, and most of what we believe we experienced, we actually did experience or did occur. By imagination of a past to define or redefine what one is now with what or how one was or saw things before, whether based on fairly accurate re-creatable or retained records of them we call memories, or less accurate more imaginatively based records of what we believe we were or how things happened, we are able to create two distinct perspectives; the state of how things are now, how they operate, what general rules apply to the order of things, what or how we believe things to be or should be; and how we saw things at a time when we existed as and saw things differently than how we currently perceive such things. Perspective itself exists as a reflection of what it is against what it is not, or against what it believes itself no longer to be. Language provides a tool to communicate perspectives to others, and to ourselves over longer periods of time when our own memories begin to fade or become less accurate.

         Our physical existences, our bodies, keep records of their own apart from our memories or ideas of what we were or what we believe occurred. Our bodies reprogram themselves to defend against illnesses, diseases, or germs which we have encountered in the past, and provides us greater resistance to them should we encounter them again. Our skin and bones carry scars or reminders of when they were broken and were not able to heal or reproduce themselves perfectly. Some people intentionally scar themselves with tattoos to better remember persons, places, times, or events in their lives by writing it or marking it upon their bodies. In a sense, time will write its own record upon our physical selves, first by growth then by physical degradation, the lacking of being able to reproduce and heal itself correctly over time leading to what we call advanced aging ending eventually in death, when one is not killed earlier due to a specific accident or illness. Reproduction is a means to cheat death, to repackage and rebundle what one is in a new form without a physical past, something completely new yet also a continuation of something very old written in a language all its own we are only at the earliest and most primitive stages of beginning to decipher. This form of passing on information and identity to other similar new beings, yet which will become something that is a continuation of the same "life" of a species or type of being on a grander scale, is older than our written and spoken languages and cultures we now also pass on, but is more universal to other species and, barring our future physical interference with its structures, is a more accurate reconstitution or recording of the past repackaged for the future.

         Whether biological history, biological based "memories" it uses to reconstruct something altogether new from a previously written template of another or other parents, which will look and function as a continuation of that same species standing apart from all other lifeforms in ones environment even though it is also in a sense something altogether new and different than anything which ever existed before, or whether it is consciousness based memories, memories of events and previous notions of ones own lifeform's physical past, both of these contribute to ones perspective by providing a backdrop or history of existence to measure oneself against as it is evolving into something altogether new, but which also must stand as a continuation of something else, something to use to bring up to enable such intended states of existence or occurrences to become actualized. Biological history or biological memories started that ball rolling and it is still rolling. Along the way we have started other balls rolling as well, cultural identities, political, occupational, experiential, all templates to guide or impose upon each new successive lifeforms a sense of history in where and how to fit in, and where to place themselves in relation to all which has come before. As I have said, perspective must rely on a history, a what-it-was to define itself in relation to what it is, and if possible what it hopes to become. Biological life provides that, and now the life of other institutions and representations of what the past was and can be again, also guide our perspectives on what we think we were, and frame our ambitions on what we think we can become.

         To get a handle on how perspective forms, let's go back slightly to an isolated farming community which could exist anywhere a few hundred, a thousand or more years ago, or today. Imagine they have no ability to read or write, know nothing of the outside world, nor of any people beyond those few around them. Lets also imagine or assume humans do not have any other means to sense or know of others without coming into direct contact with them physically. To these isolated people, their perspectives would largely be comprised of their parents (and others nearby) perspectives. They would see the world, know life, and share the beliefs of those few around them they do have direct contact with. Except for each new generation adding slightly new perspectives, a process of change often slowly defined over many generations, their beliefs would be based otherwise wholly on the outlooks of those few others surrounding them and their oral stories of who and what came before. Yet even without a written language or contact with other communities or societies, it is through language that perspective is formed, a history given, and evolution or change given its framework to grow within. Without language, the biological history is still being accumulated and passed on, behavior mimicked and imitated, but the ability to imagine and recreate mentally generations before those few whom one directly experiences is severely limited. The present becomes more real and the past becomes lessened or less significant. Without a language, ones perspective is limited only to what one remembers how one was before. Other generations one never met become irrelevant or non-existent to that consciousness's perspective.

         With oral stories via language, perspective is widened beyond the present. A mental history comes alive. A life of a people is told, accumulated, and passed on. Each individual is now placed within that context and measured against the ghosts of all who came before who are remembered. A history real or imagined forms, and usually not solely real or imagined but with some degree of each. One not only has the genetic predispositions to imitate those which have come before, the genetic modifications to better be able to survive physically, they are given exposure to notions of previous others existences in a "before" time, stories about those others, and from those stories, their perspectives. With ones own ability of imagination to recreate and re-experience or remember ones own past, however accurately or inaccurately, stories of others gives one the ability to expand that past. When one is told of a long ago king, one can imagine or deduce what it might have been like to be that king, how others would act around you and how you might treat others.

         Thus ones possible perspective no longer becomes limited by what one is or those whom one knows. One is given past identities of others to speculate over, learn from, and adopt as their own. Stories of great deeds done in the past, giants or dragons slain, gods fooled or burglarized, become aspirations of new generations to equal or surpass, and one day have their own great deeds be told alongside those presently told. And often the new generations are not free to adopt these expectations or aspirations, it can be thrust upon them. Being born to a great leader, one can be expected to become a great leader. Being born to a worker or slave, one can be expected only to be a worker or slave. If one bore a great physical similarity to one who lived shortly before, they can be told or convinced they are a recreation of that person, a new incarnation of them, and the stories and perspective of that other person's history can become of greater relevance to them because of that supposed bond. Often just sharing a name with another of a previous time gave one a form of kinship or bond with others also called by that name. Once others of times past became known through their deeds, from those deeds one could speculate on the kind of person they were, how they might view this issue or that moral dilemma, their presumed perspectives could be kept alive and passed on and used to educate others. Without a written language though, that "personality" or perspective was far more fluid and more easily adapted to changing times, changing mores, and more easily completely revised and amended by powerful rulers or chiefs since stories are in essence only what those currently living believe them to be, and communicated perspectives long after those beings ceased to exist have only the limited and changeable natures of folk tales, myths, and fables.

         In the isolated farming community where I began, chances are unlikely it would have a powerful enough leader to completely revise oral stories to suit his own wishes or justify his own actions or beliefs. In smaller communities power is more evenly shared, more opinions have equal weight, as each individual is more needed or crucial to the success of the whole. In such societies, oral history is more commonly agreed upon and democratic. Often individuals took on the roles of historians or oral history keepers but often it was due to a level of trust in the integrity of that individual to stay true to the spirit of the past, though it is possible a lot were just those who could tell stories better and more imaginatively than others.

         Once we give our isolated farming community the written word, power shifts. The past becomes a physical thing, not just a shared imagination. It can be stored, cherished as an artifact or heirloom, and it can be burned, destroyed, or without proper transfer from one generation to the next, reduced to meaningless graffiti and scribbling. Those who can read the markings to the satisfaction of those who cannot become elevated in stature, position, and wealth. They control the interpretation of the past because now it is something they can point to beside themselves and say "here is the past, this is the truth of what those who came before did, thought, and said about these issues, beliefs, or of their own lives, laws, and customs". Such readers or interpreters of the past now had a power to challenge current leaders interpretations. They became co-leaders, religious leaders, academics, or scholars. Their power came from their ability to interpret the past as being relevant to those living in the present. Keepers of the word, guardians of the faith, those who can bring alive the words of the dead and let them speak and live in the hearts and minds of new generations throughout time, a good but dangerous job if one was confronted with kings or rulers who had their own opinions about what the past should say or wished it to confer credibility upon their current power, ideas, or give them even greater influence over others.

         Thus the ability to read, write, and interpret writings spread beyond whoever or whatever groups came up with it. Like language is commonly defined by mutual agreement upon the meanings of words, so writing too became, in those limited circles of those who were literate, commonly defined by those of differing occupations or roles beyond just historians, and less likely it became for one small group or segment of a society to completely reinterpret or "divine" what these mysterious symbols meant to a largely ignorant bulk of the population. The political leaderships or rulers wanted their own "readers" of the words to ensure that they did not mean one thing one day and something else the next. The past had begun to exert a power over them and their desire to have it interpreted as they might wish, but they began to make sure such keepers of the written words or records were not revising and reinterpreting them themselves for their own purposes and powers. Thus the ruling powers and keepers or interpreters of the past, when not one and the same, provided some degree of checks and balances on each others aspirations to redefine the past for their own wishes and aims, and the past became, if not more real, at least kept more honestly.

         The more groups or segments of a society learned to read, the less mysterious reading became and became an extension of their spoken language with one exception, it lived outside of a human mind. This made it less likely to change from one telling to the next. It remained static and unchanging from one day to the next. If more people agreed upon and understood a written language within a given society it became more likely to survive from one generation to the next, and though it might evolve slowly as ones spoken language evolved, if it required broader agreement across a society, it became less likely to evolve apart from the most common form or representation of what it meant to most others. Therefore not only did it carry its meaning from one day to the next, but you now had a physical object which could carry thoughts, ideas, and perspectives from one person to another without one of the parties needing to actually be present, or have need to rely on the honestly or accuracy of a messenger. Though often it was and still is misinterpreted (one cannot ask a book or a letter to better explain some aspect you are not clear about), by and large it came to mean the same thing to each person who possessed it, and communication directly with the past, and with those elsewhere in the present, became possible.

         Just as verbal language is an integral component of perspective being able to communicate ideas of others existences prior to ones own to use as templates to define what you are or giving it a context of where to place your identity in regards to others based upon how others in the past defined or lived themselves, written language was able to cut out the middleman. Without needing a storyteller or interpreter of the past, people began to "hear" the words of people who lived hundreds or thousands of years ago, depending on accurate and faithful transcriptions and sometimes translations, to experience them as if those persons were alive and speaking to them directly. Yet again the past became more alive with more to say about where one is standing in relation to where others stood before.

         All these added possible perspectives, all these new voices, now these lives of people no longer living existing on to give one added perspective on what it means to be themselves and still, though what is written here is thought to apply to larger cultures, one needs not to even travel beyond the original small farming community I started with. Though the kings or leaders would have been more human-sized and less dramatic, it is possible for a small group of humans to develop a language and a written language to record their own histories. Even larger groups are still made up of mere, and just as human, individual members. Larger groups are more likely to come up with such ideas because they have a broader base of communication but nothing here mentioned is beyond a given community of humans to achieve on their own.

         So with the widened possible perspectives of generations' views and opinions of long ago multiplying so long as they have room to store all of these added perspectives of those no longer living, the possible perspective of any individual coming later grows and grows. Granted using one small farming community compared to what most humans know of the world today, that perspective would still seem limited in comparison to our own, but it is there for a contrast. Even within what would be for most today a severely limited and insular culture, one remote farming community cut off from the rest of the world, having no experience or knowledge of other cultures, their possible perspective on how to view and interpret their lives and existences would grow exponentially just with the mere addition of written language (there are limits to what even a great oral record keeper could remember) and a large enough library to record the lives, beliefs, opinions, and points of view of all those who came before, the addition of that to the natural abilities of imagination and identification and juxtaposition of seeing oneself in similarity or in contrast to another who came before. Though within that narrow definition of the experiences or potential history and perspectives on what it means to be a member of that small farming community, if records of their lives and experiences were kept for hundreds of generations, the potential growth of individuals minds and perspectives even within what we would consider a narrow range of possible experiences, that potential for growth and perspective would be vast indeed.

         But our world and our perspectives are based on a much larger scale. Our histories are not just of one village or area or community of people in isolation from all others. Even in some of the most remote areas of the world people have heard of, and have notions or misconceptions about what it is like or would be like to live in some of the larger cities of our world. We know of kings and dictators of long ago who ruled empires many or all of our ancestors never lived under. We know of cultures beyond our own, and the supposed or imagined perspectives of individuals within those cultures in how they might perceive their lives or our lives. We know of various stages of history different groups of humans went through in different parts of the world going back thousands of years. We have ideas on how these civilizations might have been structured and what life might have been like for different classes, groups, or occupations of its members. All of these imagined or deduced perspectives on what it means to be human or how to view our own lives in accordance, in relevance, or in contrast to how these countless others also living around our world now, or around our world in days gone by, how they saw themselves, what they believed they were, how they believe they or the Universe came to be or the purpose why either was created or what purpose it currently serves or currently exists as, all of these perspectives written down somewhere nearby to read and to know or imagine, and to add to or use to define our own ideas about what we are, why we are, where we came from, or what we might choose to do with our own lives. By knowing or thinking we know about who they are or were and what they might have done gives us some perspective or greater perspective upon what it means to be ourselves.

         And this has only mentioned written and oral history thus far. Though many laude the written words ability to spark ones imagination, we have recently begun recording history through other (until very recently) less subjective forms of archiving with possibly just as profound and far reaching implications as to what the written word has added to our development of possible perspectives. Photographs, films, and other means are now as important as writings for our archiving and remembering what it means to be ourselves, and though these can be manipulated for having peoples memories of their past or their culture's past skewed or misinterpreted, when kept complete and unedited by not dropping what may be considered irrelevant, provide a much greater insight or glimpse into our species' past than words on paper or computer screens ever could. We need not look at an artists representation of great leaders, we can stare them in the face ourselves. Though our information about others lives will always be skewed by what they or the governments or the media wish us to know or believe about them, we can nonetheless get greater glimpses into the lives of others we never met, never will meet, and may not even exist anymore, and see, imagine or know, or have some idea of what it might have been like to be or have been them. And every one of these perspectives of existence is a possible source of better understanding our own, or what it means or what it is like to be ourselves, and how that is similar or different than what it means or is like to be anyone else or any particular other person.

         Even this speculation leaves off at the present and most accepted notions of how we record history, how we communicate ideas to others, and how we define or redefine what it means to be ourselves in reference or relevance to those others we are given to perceive or know of as well. In the future one might be able to make and play three-dimensional records of events, pause them, and view them from any angle. To view a speech by a great future world leader before the United Nations might enable you literally to stand beside him or her as they gave that speech, to see the room exactly as they saw it as it was happening. People may one day become telepathic and pass on ideas or notions, or even their entire perspectives directly to others without need for words or electronics. And even the wall of time might one day fall. We may be able to know what others knew or thought as they did those events which shaped our world's pasts. Which leaders were lying to their peoples, and which were even lying to themselves. Without computers, to be in that room when that world leader gave that speech and not just to see it or hear it, but to experience what it felt like to be that person giving the speech at that moment and/or how it might have felt to have been anyone in the audience. How then would this ability to see, know, and experience others perspectives augment or enhance their own ideas of what it means to be themselves or for them to better understand their own potentials? If they were not human or descended from what we call humanity it might seem just another perspective on what it means to exist. But if they came from us, from out of our own timeline, our present would give them added perspective on their own just as others' pasts in our timeline define and shape our own and our expectations and dreams for what our futures might hold.

         Our lives our not just our own. Our present to those futures, if any, are not just our own. Our perspectives, how we view ourselves, our lives, others lives, how we view ourselves in relation to all else in our perceptual worlds, they are not just our own, nor can we keep them only to ourselves for eternity. They are a record, whether mapped by words, by DNA, by consciousness engrams, by videotape, or by holographic recordings. By being and having been experienced, they have a concrete reality just as tangible as the first words written on paper or carved in stone. They form the possible perspectives of all who have yet to be, who might use them to define and know, or think about, sort out and discover, who they are by giving them a past to seem to have grown out of, a history even if not actually their own, for they will always be new and the time will never in actuality be any other moment than now.

Note: This was a shortened version of the original Perspective Essay. To see the whole version click here.

Appendix
      2
A Few Key Ideas by Topic

Context -

What is can only be seen, known, and understood in relation to how much and how often it is not.

Everything's existence begins with removing from it what you think it is not. Without that, it could be or be interpreted as anything else one currently thinks it is not.

Everything cannot help but be judged by and in relation to everything else. Everything else is the only true measure of what it means to be anything.

What everything else is though, is as indefinite and as changeable as what you are, and any change in one is reflected instantaneously in the other.

The Universe, atoms, life, responds to our perceptions of it. It is a living, changing thing which is not a thing which includes ourselves as a part of itself and itself as a part of ourselves. Which defines which, which sustains which is not important. Each conforms in a way to the expectations of the other affecting not only its future but its past, as in the end, both are really the same.

Everything in existence arises together out of everything that is not and all which could be, and only have existence by defining each by each other, or by being real in conjunction to anything or everything else, also for the moment to be currently real.

They are what is that reality at that given point in time, defining and sustaining it together as one.

Everything done at every time by anyone ever anywhere any when casting a faint shadow upon everything else also always occurring.

Grab the moment, any moment, and hold onto it forever and you will see in that moment is every other and everyone.

But once existing in any single branch of reality, it is to be potentially existent in all.

The potential for ones existence or creation must be present in every single moment prior to ones actual existence for it to occur. In that sense, all that has yet to be has a reality or state I refer to as pre-existent.

What exists, what you perceive, are the blocks to use to guess, to discover, to sort out, or to speculate about what you are.

whatever you find to latch onto that says what you are is merely a reflection of what you find around you, both of these contribute to ones perspective by providing a backdrop or history of existence to measure oneself against as it is evolving into something altogether new, but which also must stand as a continuation of something else, something to use to bring up to enable such intended states of existence or occurrences to become actualized.

One needs to know everything about everyone else and everything else to put what they are in context. One can think one is anything but that next new perspective not considered can shift that to anything else. Only by seeing or putting one up against everything else can one say definitively what one is or was.

Feeding -

The Universe is a whirlpool of energy feeding off of itself.

Each is at various points absorbed by and absorbing the other.

Points of it emerge and appear to consume the rest of it.

Once the feeding is done and the whirlpool slows, the physical Universe as we call it disappears.

Either way we are directly or indirectly feeding off of what has grown from the energy of a living star.

Consciousness must reach out to the rest of the Universe, take a snapshot of it and digest that back into itself to build up its concept of itself. What it is experiencing outside of itself is in turn created or being additionally defined by the act of being perceived.

Remove the outside source of energy flowing into our ecosystem and eventually all life as we know it would devour itself, and cease to exist.

Life expends energy remaking that energy into whatever it chooses...

We draw as much potential into ourselves as we can and let it go in the way and into the experiences we build up into a concept of what we are and what we were.

absorbing whatever it takes to create or sustain itself from wherever that comes from...

must build itself up from components of its environment. It must take the energy or potential it finds from what is around it and reformulate it into something in its design or intended state.

the act of transference or transformation from one state to the other which is in essence the only reality and the (after) bread and the (before) ingredients are only for the process of something to be acted upon or made into something else.

Consciousness itself is in turn created or being additionally defined by the act of being perceived. It is as though each is being continually absorbed and digested by the other, each defining what the other is or exists as.

That potential comes from a variety of sources of all which came before freed up when it is no longer used recycling itself again and again in perpetuity.

It is like a circle of potential in a donut shape with everything moving out of and away from itself, and back into itself in the center, or the act of kneeding (as in bread) something into something else out of a variety of different sources into something new.

Redefintion -

The more complex the perceptions, the more expansive the mind must become to try to explain, understand, or make sense of those perceptions.

Imagination is able to keep ones past alive and redefine whatever one is now in relation to what one believes or "remembers" what one was, or how one was, or how one saw things before.

Perspective itself exists as a reflection of what it is against what it is not, or against what it believes itself no longer to be.

To redefine the notion of oneself is how we enable ourselves to see beyond our own perceptions and existences. Without a definition of what we are we are nothing.

The potential for anything in existence, for everything in what it exists as now if at all it can be thought of as separate from anything else, to be or be interpreted as anything else, the literal potential for everything, is omnipresent and without limits. Everything's existence begins with removing from it what you think it is not. Without that, it could be or be interpreted as anything else one currently thinks it is not.

every one of these perspectives of existence is a possible source of better understanding our own, or what it means or what it is like to be ourselves, and how that is similar or different than what it means or is like to be anyone else or any particular other person.

to gain another perspective is not to gain a new thing, but instead is a new way of seeing everything else.

You can see, understand, experience, and get to know another's mindset or even experience in a fashion another's viewpoint and mindset, and can copy parts of it to supplement or augment your own...

You can redefine yourself as half of a pair-bonding of two people sharing a single consciousness. You can redefine yourself as an extension of the life from which your parents also came traveling through time moving from body to body into the future. You can redefine yourself as a cell in the multi-bodied living organism which is your species...

Everything in existence is there for your mind to play with to build up concepts of yourself or your world with, like giving blocks to a child to play with. What exists, what you perceive, are the blocks to use to guess, to discover, to sort out, or to speculate about what you are.

as with anything you cannot know it but for its own existence. In some way by existing, that alone makes it indisputable. However good or horrible someone may judge something to be, its existence is above that.

not only is all else in your environment a source of perceptions in how they affect you, but may also be a source of your perceiving how they might be perceiving their own existence or you.

We are not generic humans, we will never fit in equally in every group or see equally from all points of view, though we are always richer for attempting to do so.

A person can redefine their notions of themselves in any number of ways in relation to, as, or in conjunction with anything in which they can conceive of existing anywhere at any time in the Universe, be it an idea, concept, intended state of being or other entity, be it individual or group.

To exist as something definite you are limited for the most part by and to that definition, and are not free to be anything else provided you accept that definition. To what degree you can modify and amend that definition of what you exist as depends on ones degree of creativity and individual circumstance.

To see from the widest perspective possible, leave everything, even what comprises your very existence in doubt. Until if ever you can know the source and purpose of all you experience, and know it completely without doubt, know that whatever you find to latch onto that says what you are is merely a reflection of what you find around you, like the cork drifting on the ocean. What you or it may be, or where they are drifting to, should forever be left open-ended conceptually.

Biological history or biological memories started that ball rolling and it is still rolling. Along the way we have started other balls rolling as well, cultural identities, political, occupational, experiential, all templates to guide or impose upon each new successive lifeforms a sense of history in where and how to fit in, and where to place themselves in relation to all which has come before.

Our perspectives, or egos of what we believe others should be, how they should behave, what they should believe, are not always entirely our own. Our beliefs have been shaped to fit our environments and cultures, and are as much a product of them as of ourselves.

To see that these seemingly divergent forces, one's environment shaping one to suit its needs, and the aims of the individual to rise above just being a mere product of one's environment and chart a new and radically different plan for oneself, that these are both the same thing, both different aspects of oneself played out against oneself. This is to see beyond the self to a more dynamic view of existence.

To lose oneself in observation or being is to put aside how you would interpret something and drink it in fully. It may be being seen or experienced by you but without bringing your personality, outlook or opinions always to the fore, it may as well be happening to (and understood by) anyone equally anywhere any when.

the potential of yourself passing through the perspective or perception of others and returning back into yourself changed.
 

January 2005

           I am not going to revisit or try to reinterpret any of the material here now. I still believe it to be definitively done and complete. However, looking back at it after finishing the Notes, Part II, and rereading this off and on as I went along through my life's journey these last 2 years since it was first done and released (the appended 1.8 version was finished 8 months later), there are a few things I thought best to add now. The Notes "pages" are actually written in the margins of the original "Deconstructing the Universe" notebook and that is a good way to view them, filling in the margins. It is not that they do not go beyond it, or that I cannot, but that all else I do is more or less in-between the margins of this work in a sense. All moments in time wrap back around, and all that I did before and do after this work are somewhere within it in some way. In the Pre-Notes I wrote, "Saw Timeroads in DeconU, see scary in Timeroads". I can see some parts of what I will do later inherent in some form in this work and how they spring in someway from it, even if seemingly unrelated.

         Though I may add more mathematical underpinnings to my ideas, more logical reasonings and sensible deductions though philosophically neither I nor this work are about that, I look back to this, not as perfect by any means, but as perfectly inspired. Use the word perfect in any sense and people rightly begin to get a little worried. Lets just say I was running on air, and nothing to gain and nothing to prove by writing it. No ego, no financial incentive, no expectation of any sort other than to show myself how deep the rabbit hole went. As someone who was gifted at math in the UK said, he saw math as a very deep well he could get lost  in. Dimensions, consciousness, and experience are for  me that well, and lead to far weirder things than numbers, thus the rabbit hole analogy I think is more descriptive of where it leads me.

       My life really began again at the time of  "Measure All Things Together" and it is to that chapter 2 years back now I look to compass where I have come from and how I got here. Though my memories run back much further and around many corners, as I said at the end of the notes, "2 years in the twilight zone," in a sense I see myself in how I am now as 2 years old, and rapidly growing. I hate the term born again, but much of the lyrics of "Rocky Mountain High" by John Denver I can relate to, as well as near death experiences. I don't see that time, 2 years ago, as any more crucial than any other, and don't believe in making any breaks with the past, but my perceptions and identity continue to evolve, and some points seem to have lead to newer tracks or jumps of greater distance more than others.

         Why add on now to this? I found a note made in the margins of "Measure All Things Together" I thought was worth adding, since like I said, everything all goes back to that point in time to me somehow anyway, and the Notes Part II also ended with a reference to that chapter. The note was made on 4/24/04 at the end of the paragraph which ended with "No definitive line of sight or organizational factor is any more true or definite than any other." 

NOTE 3 It added, "Every cork ALWAYS at some surface from some point of view. Spinning frame of reference around."

         Also I thought I would add something which I think is nearly as good as the Introduction in defining how the 1.8 (In Wonder) version began to grow alongside the original, and what sets it apart. The following was written immediately after "Measure All Things Together", and that Introduction and is about maintaining that same sense of wonder.

         "It is foolish to think that we know significantly more about the world or ourselves at 30 or 60 or 90 than we did at 3 or 6 or 9 for what we are and what it is, is always changed and always new. Socrates claimed wisdom only for the fact that he knew how little he knew. Most of what we learn as we age is far more misconceptions than universal truths."

         "To think that we are or become more as we age or evolve by having greater influence over or greater power to destroy, break, subjegate, and oppress others, than those who have not nor care not for such "power" shows the limitations of our current cultures' (most all peoples' cultures) "wisdom". To believe you know absolutely nothing for sure, to wonder at the wonder of it all, is to begin to cast the potential for anything, understanding, happiness, contentment, peace, wide open again for the concrete worlds in which we build and concrete mindsets depend upon believing this has already been done to satisfaction and further input or inquiry is neither necessary nor tolerated. It keeps the future pre-determined, as nothing more than a continuation of the past set in stone."

         "Such questioning may not be necessary for existence but it is necessary to live. Remember in comparison to the age of the rest of the Universe and any potentially older species, everyone you meet is but a babe in the woods, kind and aware of that fact or self-righteous and eager to have everyone else think and do as they say, namely a brat (brat  means a spoiled, mean, or obstinate child)."

      That about winds up this retro. Back in 2005 now, things seem pretty undefined and pretty bleak when looking at them only from the present. Yet hope springs eternal and travels out from behind and beyond whatever you can see or know. I think I said it best in the notes after the Introduction, the last time I ended it, so I will repeat that here.

      "To see simultaneously and equally both with and without expectations at once is the only way to experience the Universe beyond your expectations or limits of just being yourself, or outside that bubble of reality you create around yourself to move into and inhabit. More simply put, never give up the wonder for what you will soon enough find you only thought you knew or understood. It is never a wise trade."

"Live long in/and wonder."
January 2005

Note:
That means...

both at the same time...

Live long in wonder

and...

Live long and wonder

(OK, so most could figure that out but at least I found use for the extra space down here....  :-)