9/7/15

essay0194

During my life I have had several experiences that might be classified as "religious experiences" or "out-of-body" experiences, but it might also be a stretch to classify all of them as such. There were several times when I lost consciousness, in particular from blows on the head, neck, and back, and from nitrous oxide in the dentist's chair. I also used to deliberately pass out from hyperventilating as a stunt when I was a kid.

In all those cases, I was struck by a couple features of the experience, the reality of which I have questioned ever since the first one.

One of the features was the sensation upon regaining consciousness that "I" had been somewhere else and "I" was just returning to our universe. In all cases, I tried to hold on to memories of the place where I had just been and was frustrated in not being able to do so. In most respects, it was not much different from the ordinary experience of trying to remember a dream

Another impression that remained was that that place did not participate in time as our universe does. Not that there wasn't time there, but that it was vastly different from the sequential inexorable time that we experience.

All of these incidents affected my life by convincing me that reality was not necessarily what it seems to be, and that there might be a lot more going on than we think there is.

The experience in the dentist's chair, though, was more revealing than the others. In that experience, I was taken up through the "levels" of reality. Each successive level opened up an unimaginably more beautiful and complex reality, but on the way back the memories of it were all lost. It was as if my mental capabilities were being drawn through a huge but severely restrictive funnel. The funnel became successively more limiting as I began coming around, to the point where I remembered virtually nothing of my experience as I awakened. I was left only with the vague notion that the place was vastly more complex, interesting, and loving than ordinary "reality".

I saw all the levels or dimensions of reality all the way to the top and I saw the "Cosmic Joke". The joke is that God is neither perfect nor almighty but instead a sort of Wizard of Oz. I laughed so hard on seeing this that my knees came up and knocked the entire tray of dental tools all over the floor. The dentist was still picking them up and putting them back when I started coming around.

It was pretty clear that there was some sort of guide accompanying me and communicating with me telepathically. I have no recollection of seeing any image of the guide or learning anything about him/her/it.

I think it was because I had an interest that my guide took me "all the way to the top". At some point I questioned my guide as to whether or not he, or other inhabitants of this other world, were interested in questions about the origins and structure of reality. The answer seemed to be sort of indifferent and that some might be interested but typically not.

I also asked my guide whether or not it would be possible for humans to figure out the origin and structure of reality, and the answer was something like, "Yes, it would be possible, but it will take a lot of work and advanced mathematics." I got the impression that if it was to happen, it would have to be done by humans and not by higher-level beings.

When I reached the top level, it seemed as if I were on some sort of viewing platform, or scaffolding-type structure and could see down onto a string of "bits", emanating from under where I was, and flowing out into the void away from me.

What I remember distinctly was a sequence of sensations that made up that string of "bits". It started with a pair of 'tick' sounds (these were the result of the dentist hitting my tooth with a hammer and chisel or some such action). This was followed by two bursts of the whine of the drill. These were followed in turn by two more 'ticks' and two more whines. Then I saw the dentist's face with his mask and glasses peering at me and saying "Feeling better now?" This was followed in turn by the entire sequence of two 'ticks' two whines and one "Feeling better now?" It was a lilting rhythm and it suddenly became apparent to me in a flash exactly how all of reality was constructed. That is what precipitated my destructive laughter.

What seemed very clear to me was that in the beginning, nothing existed but God in a single dimension of time. He was able to impose single bits of information onto that time dimension. These were the 'ticks' and they were imposed in pairs. These pairs were then repeated in pairs, and then in pairs of pairs and so on.

The pattern was exactly the same as the numbers in the Cantor Set which I had studied some years before. (The Cantor Set is a very strange set of numbers that is the residue of the numbers in a line segment after you discard those in the middle third of the segment, then discard those in the middle thirds of each of the two remaining segments, then discard those in the middle thirds of each of the four remaining segments, then those of each of the eight, ...and so on.) The difference is that the Cantor Set is built up from the top down, whereas reality is built from the bottom up.

As the picture gets bigger, the patterns of those bits gets so complicated that fractal structures (I didn't know about fractals at the time) are formed which become the spatial and additional temporal dimensions. What we see as ubiquitous rhythms in the universe, from the vibrations of subatomic strings, to orbiting electrons, to vibrating atoms and molecules, to vibrations of dental drills, to beating hearts, to Beethoven symphonies, to repeated questioning by the dentist of whether I am feeling better now, to sidereal and seasonal cycles, to repeated visits to the dentist, to cycles of life and death, to the cycles of big bangs and crunches (if any), are all natural and in principle, computable outgrowths of that growing complex of fundamental 'ticks' in God's cosmic time.

What I vaguely recall seeing is that entire spectacle laid out in front of me in a way that I could see all details of the entire picture at once, including as a tiny subset my entire life from birth to death with all its detail (my entire life flashed before my eyes, along with the entire history of reality).

The memory of those details, of course, was completely erased as my mind had to squeeze back through the funnel on the way out. All I was left with was the vague memory that someone was trying to help me remember what I had seen.

As I dropped down through the successive levels or dimensions, a voice was telling me "The key is levels. Remember the levels." Of course that stuck with me. I was unable to remember how many levels there were, but I am sure there were more than 5 and fewer than 20.

Later as I studied Differential Geometry and began to understand the mathematical nature of spaces, manifolds, and dimensions, I immediately related it to what I remembered from the dentist experience. After cogitating on the mysteries of the universe ever since then, I think you can see why my ideas have been influenced by my dentist chair experience.

Is it truth? or close to it? I have no idea. It just happens to suggest some interesting ideas to explore when trying to figure out what is going on in reality.