Sunday, 26 March 2017

Circles Within Circles


Time doesn’t move in a straight line. Some folks argue that time doesn’t even exist. Others claim that the past, present and future exist all at once. It took me a while to grasp this last concept, but it kind of makes sense if you imagine time moving in a circle. If it does and I’m on the circle’s perimeter, then across its diameter, I might be staring into 10th century history. At the same time, someone in the 10th century is staring across at me—into the future.

A vehicle loosely described as an automobile was recently built from a blueprint of Leonardo da Vinci’s, and the contraption worked. You have to appreciate the theory of reincarnation to get this one, but really, how in the world did a man born in the 1500s know enough about engineering to develop the plan for a vehicle that worked when a gang of 21st century geeks put it together? Was da Vinci ahead of his time? Or had he already been there?

Wild notion, eh? But so very cool when you consider others like him – Tesla and Mozart and Einstein, for instance, men so far advanced in their thinking that they must have lived in a time when their genius may actually have been part of the mainstream.

The one thing I know for sure is that I know nothing for sure. I’m just playing around with this stuff, less to make sense of my own existence than to amuse myself with the magic of universal possibility. If past lives are possible, why not future lives as well? Bend that timeline into an arc and suddenly ancient Egypt is in front of you. If a stint in Thebes is your next stop, who knows what miracles of the present may show up in ancient hieroglyphs four thousand years from now?

I know, I know. Clearly, I have too much time and not enough to do except invent these notions then put ’em out there for public consumption. But really, it is fun to ponder the nature of genius and wonder at its origins. I’m not afraid of being a dust mote in space, subject to the currents and eddies of time and dark matter. I seldom feel small or insignificant when contemplating the magnitude and miracle of creation. I only feel small and insignificant when confronted with the limited vision of ego, that infernal bit of biology hardwired to preserve itself even at the cost of its own existence.

Ter often tells me that I’m scary smart. Might be I’m just scary.

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