Before I can go any further with my discussion of the relationship between the physical and dream bodies, I will need to provide you with a little more detail concerning the multi-verse in the context of what we can comfortably infer from the infinite regression of abstractions. I mentioned earlier how the body consists of a representation of the entire universe, and how this was a feature of discrete bodies on every scale of existence. I don't think I'm taxing my credibility by suggesting that every particle and body whatever its size may be represents a model of the universe around it. It may be a novel observation of nature but it follows without much controversy that we are surrounded by an infinite number of universes which exist simultaneously here on Earth, and that a local multi-verse has its foundation on this fairly reliable fact.
I also mentioned that a persistent feature of bodies here on Earth is their fundamentally symbolic nature, but what may not have occurred to you is that all these creatures have been deliberately cultivated by the planet in order to ponder and record its thinking and experience. All these creatures, and their respective ecologies, are the instruments of the planet's pensive reflection. It follows that the planet performs a lot of this behaviour, and that it is likely that it entertains a number of potential alternatives as a way of navigating a path through the dangers it encounters. I suspect that an entertainment of such alternatives will require a degree of isolation in order to control any potentially contaminating variables, and that this isolation of scenarios is perhaps the most intriguing feature of the multi-verse because it divides us into sections which can only be bridged by our dreaming.
The unfortunate consequence of modelling an array of prospective alternatives will, however, be the termination of any unsuccessful ecological candidates. There will likely be a lot of conflict involved in this, and a lot of deaths too, no doubt, but the potentially dreamlike nature of our lives could alleviate any suffering which is likely to occur.
The physical bodies of all existence, including all of physical space, time and matter, depict the creation and evolution of bodies, which represent and record the effort and struggles required to sustain the existence of such bodies, when the dream body dissolves them so completely. As it is this particular assessment of existence may be an accurate depiction of bodies, but there is a sense of paradox here. Paradoxically the dream body joins the two ends of time in opposition to the physical body, and in doing so it makes all points in time exist simultaneously.
You may not agree with the way I'm characterising the relationship between the waking and dreaming bodies, so let me add a couple of comments which may be more persuasive. Firstly, there can be no doubt that the physical body can be very defensive. While it may be more acceptable for you to characterise this in terms of a fundamentally protective nature, it nevertheless remains the case that the body will resist the clutches of death for as long as is physically possible. The waking body defies death as if it were a dastardly usurper, when it is no more than a particularly menacing guise of the dream body which it surrenders to on a daily basis.
The body's determination to resist death serves a variety of biological and social purposes so there's no basis on which to doubt its validity, but it nevertheless reflects an irrational fear built upon a fundamental case of confusion and ignorance. This confusion and ignorance is most telling in this context. It characterises the body as a bit of a desperado who refuses to solve this bit of internal conflict when all it requires is a diligent study of the nature of dreaming. So, as far as the existence of time is concerned, you could say that the two bodies are the exact opposite of each other. The physical body creates and separates the two ends of time while the dream body joins and dissolves them, and their symmetry is as complete as is the case for any other unity in nature.
This is not to say that time ceases to exist for the dream body only that it has no beginning as it has no end, and that from the dream body's point of view any sense of duration is therefore undefined. It could be literally anywhere, and no one would know anything about it. I suggest that every bizarre physics found in the universe, of which there are many examples, will be contained within the unity of a body's physical and dream bodies, and that this is an implication which descends fairly directly from the infinite regression of abstractions.
If people of today can have a connection with anywhere in the distant past then that moment can be there for them when they smoke some hallucinogen and get stoned. When they get stoned they disconnect from the reality they share with others, and they become completely alone with that distant past, so that with practice, one skilled in the psychedelic arts can maintain this separation, the term of which is subject only to the courtship of power and purpose.
The use of cannabis shows us how thin the walls between worlds within the multi-verse can be, although few cannabis smokers will be likely to characterise it in this way. I doubt that many smokers think much about the significance of what they do, but there is an interval of about five or ten minutes after the smoker's first puff when something deeply cosmic is occurring. A door to the smoker's earliest dreaming opens up and the feeling of a simultaneity between disparate segments of time challenges the senses in a dramatic and disturbing way. It feels like everything and everyone is suddenly asleep and dreaming when an ancient dreamer enters a state of intoxication such as this.
This could be a fairly serious predicament for a smoker and it's the reason why I'm only too happy to avoid smoking cannabis; there's only fear left there for me now. Getting stoned is a time I spend sitting there shivering in fear, staring into the gaping maw of time. It's a time when I realise an implication of the proposition which begins this chapter, namely that the planet consists of a vast simultaneous multi-verse; it is the possibility that history is not as ever flowing as it appears to be. Time is not only flowing but standing still, only to be reanimated when an objective presents itself for fulfilment, in which case everything emerges from its dreaming and gets going again.
A grain of sand coincidentally in flight just centimetres above a sandy beach and surrounded by countless others of its kind, can stop the world in a quantum of time if it has the power and purpose to achieve some cosmic goal, and all of us will be in a state of unwitting suspension for its duration.
I saw lots of crazy stuff like this many years ago when I was in my twenties. I had just discovered the host model of Earth, I was deeply immersed in a cloudy vision of the infinite regression of abstractions, and smoking a little cannabis exposed me to the devastating depth of time and space which most people are happy to ignore.
Back in the early 80s when I first began to encounter the things I've been telling you about here I was young, inspired and very enthusiastic, but my intellectual faculties were woefully underdeveloped. I wasn't a particularly rational thinker in those days. A lot of my encounters and perceptual experiences were beyond my control, but I was nevertheless a receptive vessel and I was able to encode most of what was happening to me. But my encoding of these things was largely in terms of a representation which you would call irrational, by which I mean that I was remembering feelings, deep and strong feelings, but largely intangible ones.
A lot of it was visual which was very serene, and there was also a lot of music which was even more so. I went to art school when I left high school so I was very sensitive to visual and aural stimulation, but such things don't lend themselves to much rational thinking, so it was a very long time before I could begin to encode these things in the sort of text I've been producing recently.
Over the course of many years I thought a lot about how I could rationalise the significance of what were no more than visual and aural hallucinations, but on every occasion I failed miserably. The unintended side effect of all this was that I repeatedly muddied the remnants of what were very subtle perceptions, so that in the end my memory of these things was completely obliterated. I can't even remember any of the things which were once so important to me, and which encoded some of the most significant features of my experience. Yet on each occasion I was able to capture a meagre glimpse of the story I was trying to tell. These traces were fleeting, and perhaps the most remarkable thing about them has been my ability to assemble the logical identities in a sensible way on the basis of such minimal data inputs. I presume this is because my feelings have not changed in spite of them being rendered in a completely unfamiliar format, and together they are a tribute to the reliability of feelings.
There was a substantially beneficial consequence of having to reformat much of my earlier perceptual experiences. Indeed, all that's left of them now are the logic and inferences which follow the discovery of evidence. Without the vocabulary of evidence I don't actually have much left to say, to be honest. And if all I had were the lyrics of visual and aural impressions then it would be an easy thing for those who choose to be critical of my thinking to dismiss these things as the machinations of a poetic sophistry. But it is a very reasonable thing for me to draw the conclusions I've been pointing out to you on the basis of evidence which is demonstratively physical, in spite of how confronting these conclusions may seem to be to you.
In my case the lyric hallucinations of so many years ago were transformed into this literal text by the application of hard work. I was able to sustain the image of those bygone visions in my feelings so that the essence of them was not lost. For better or for worse we will always be surrounded by an ocean of time which resonates with our feelings, and which can never be forgotten. Our dreams are not the inconsequential trivialities which so many are content to regard them, but are the very substance of all creation, and the battleground on which our future will be decided.
