THE ETERNAL NOW

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Foretelling the future is one of the trickiest areas of the paranormal. Within known theorizing, there is very little of a concrete nature that can suggest it is possible. Hence, much skepticism is placed on the subject.
For my own research, I’ve looked at the idea that possible future outcomes can be gleaned by unconscious knowledge and intuitions in the present. However, I won’t bore the reader by going over these ‘mechanisms’ again.

I want to look further than that.

For whilst I still accept most cases of precognition and divination can be answered in the present, I also think a hypothesis is possible regarding a real ability to foretell the future.
I don’t offer this as a definite concept that can be understood by science at this time. Rather, I want to explore the possibility philosophically. And it begins with asking: what is ‘now’?

‘Now’ cannot be experienced.

What we think of as ‘now’ is the point in time when information from the universe is synchronously received by our senses. We, as ‘observers’, are passive. And be it sound, light, or any other force in the universe, it takes time to reach us.
Hence, depending on distance, all our observations come from different times in the past. This is most apparent with lightning, which produces sound and light at the same moment, but we receive one before the other. Some stars we only observe after traveling for billions of years.

Entropy holds similar problems.

This is the decay, as time progresses, of everything in the universe. Yet our appreciation of entropy could be faulty, in that we view it in terms of individuality.
For instance, if we think of our genetic code, this continues for much longer than ourselves. We think of decay of the planetary environment, but in the universal scheme of things, this could be no more important than the almost unnoticed decay and replacement of cells in the body. Basically, our appreciation of entropy could be a local event.

We view existence, in the west, in terms of the ‘linear’.

This means there is a beginning and an end, and advancement or decay occurs between the two. However, this appreciation is modern. Previously the world was viewed as ‘cyclic’, where apparent decay is simply the process to the beginning of a new cycle. Entropy and time have an eternal appreciation in such a model.
I have previously put forward the idea that there is more than our existence. There is a ‘law of large numbers’ which argues that greater order arises out of greater numbers of things.
I’ve identified seven ‘clusterings’ of existence, each involving larger numbers than the previous, and therefore offering the possibility of greater order. These are the individual lifeform, the species, the planet, the solar system, the galaxy, the island universe, and the universe itself.
As we can see, ‘man’ is the lowest, and therefore has the least order. Paranormal information talents such as telepathy theoretically involve the next level – the species. Mind over matter could theoretically arise from the next level, the planetary, which involves physicality.
What would happen if human consciousness could descend to even deeper levels of clustering? Could, at some point, our appreciation of time change to something more cyclic – perhaps even appreciating an ‘eternal’ now, where everything that occurs in the universe does so outside time?
Such a hypothesis would require consciousness to exist at the fundamental level of the universe – something that has always been believed my mystics. And ideas in particle physics allow for both this timelessness and consciousness.
Particle interaction occurs spontaneously, regardless of distance, and therefore regardless of time. Similarly, many theorise that it is an act of observation that creates the reality we experience. Or should that be an observation by a lesser level of existence?
Mystics speak of fate as if everything is already ‘written’. Perhaps, at higher levels of existence, it is, but is beyond our understanding and experience. We simply live and experience at the level in which we exist.
But if, at times, we can descend deep enough into consciousness to intuit information from such higher levels, then the eternal now is glimpsed, and our future can be perceived. And perhaps even more than this.
An eternal now would suggest that everything exists in a moment, including the living AND the dead. Does this give a hint of an understanding of not only Afterlife, but Heaven itself?

© Anthony North, November 2008