Party People at the End of Time

As a perceptual organism embedded in 4 dimensions, I record existence. My recording range is only limited by the range of the senses. Whether memory is total or fragmentary I continuously receive and categorize data, tagging memories with associative relationships to smells, emotions, feelings, etc... and logging them into the holographic library of experience. Yet there is some evidence to suggest that the brain records everything that's perceived, filling huge volumes of memory with even the most minute details. Who knows what the storage capacity of the holographic brain might be but it surely dwarfs even the greatest giga-terabit computers. It may even be infinite.

The material world exists in 3 dimensions: XYZ. Each succesive dimension is coplanar with the prior dimension. They are coexistent in the same space. In other words, dimensions are additive and coincident - you can't experience one without all of those that precede it. Tipped on its side and rolled into motion, the 3-dimensional structure of matter is given a 4th dimension: Time. Again, all 4 dimensions exist simultaneously and isotropically. Time is meaningless without form.

The 5th dimension exists, no doubt. String theory suggests there are 11 dimensions - 7 more intepenetrating our own 4. Our senses are simply limited and don't perceive these other layers or modes of reality. As all higher dimensions are simply extensions of the previous levels, the 5th dimension would be additive to our currently perceived world. It might be the ability to move effortlessly through time. Or perhaps the capacity to manifest imagination directly into being. But it would not negate our current frame of reference. It would merely expand it.

And as the dutiful recording devices we are, as our senses expand to perceive higher dimensions, we'll record them, witnessing the evolution of creation and archiving the data into the universal mind. We, and all conscious beings, are literally the eyes of the world. We are the witnesses of creation. The astounding miracle of life unfolds before us as we give it context, meaning, and mythology.

The argument of reincarnation lends a certain persistence to the vast catalog of data comprising the collective experience of creation by conscious beings. Postulating reincarnation invokes a degree of immortality, or at least a sort of read-write access to the Akashic Record. Our recorded experiences would surely include our identities and selfhoods down to our deepest, darkest fears and desires. Although such demons might be shadowy and amorphous, nothing escapes the psyche. And yet it would seem foolish (or at least extraordinarily liberal for a thermodynamically conservative universe) to exterminate the data of history with the entropic decay of the corporeal body. Either the camera moves from one incarnation to another, or the records lie somewhere more fundamental and eternal than simply within our ephemeral minds. Perhaps in the deep recesses of our internal holographic memory banks lies the quantum plenum, singular and infinite like a universal film being slowly exposed over vast amounts of time. Perhaps witnessing the complete exposure from beginning to end is the experience of the 5h dimension.

As 2012 approaches (only 7 more years), the framerate of our cameras and the resolution of our lenses will continue asymptotically up the curve towards singularity, as finer and finer degrees of perception narrow our focus to the point of unity, simultaneous with the widening aperture relentlessly converging on the infinite. As above, so below, all things renewed by fire. Through it all resides the singular witness, I, watching and recording the great congress of Shiva and Kali manifest into spacetime.

Terence McKenna occasionally imagined the singularity as a vast disco ball at the end of time, casting reflections of itself back through history like spinning lights on a dancefloor. If that's the case, then the apocalypse is really just a great big graduation party, fittingly drunk and emotional, nostalgic and fearful, idealistic and hopeful.

Shall we dance one more time?