Flow and the Now

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pgnkjab1pP4

This past week I've been reading an amazing 1992 science fiction novel by Greg Egan called Quarantine. It relates in a very interesting way to the above new video, which accompanies a blog entry I published in January of this year called Flow. I really don't want to say too much and spoil Mr. Egan's story for you, but consider this: in "Flow", we talk about how there are many things that we do better when we stop "narrating" our actions and find a way to just "be". Driving a car, hitting a golf ball, improvising music, and so on are all activities we perform better when we stop thinking about all the individual actions, and find a way to just flow.

In my book, and in several blog entries including the above vlog, I've talked about Julian Jaynes and his book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Is it really possible that human beings have developed this separation, this narrator voice, only within the last few thousand years? Could it be that prior to that time civilization was advanced by humans who only heard their narrator voice within their minds as the voice of gods or ancestors? It's a fascinating thought.

Greg Egan's wonderful book appears to tie in to all this from the quantum viewpoint. Is it possible that our "observer function" is a recent development, and that prior to that time we lived more fully within our fifth-dimensional probability space?

In my book, and in entries like Being More Fifth-Dimensional, The Fifth-Dimensional Camera Project, and The Fifth Dimension is Spooky we've suggested that the "now" of our reality is and has always been a continually evolving point within the fifth dimension. The suggestion here, then, is that when we live in the moment, when we live in the now, it is not that we should be like brain-damaged patients with no memory and no engagement with our future or past selves: rather, we should be fully engaged with the possibilities of both the past and the future, and all the fifth-dimensional connections which manifest themselves within this structure as part of one magnificent flow.

Enjoy the journey!

Rob

Next: You are a Point at the Center of Spacetime