Rhyming Dialog Seven
Key: OP=Other Person, ME=Me
OP: Hi.
ME: Hi.
OP: How was your week?
Was it bleak or unique?
ME: More like oblique...
It was a challenging workweek.
How was yours?
OP: Same as yours,
filled with challenging underscores.
ME: I'm glad the weekend is here
and I can essentially disappear
from the outside world for a while.
It makes me smile.
OP: Do I count as an outsider in your world?
ME: Maybe... but you feel more like a voice unfurled
from somewhere inside my own sensory vat -
like a part of me wearing a different hat.
OP: Why do I feel like you're kind of implying
that I'm a figment of your imagination solidifying?
ME: Ha! Maybe you are!
Which would be interesting and bizarre!
Imagine me talking to myself in rhyme
this whole time...
OP: Uhhh... let's not go there.
I might disappear
and get trapped forever in a glitch
of lowered frequency pitch...
ME: Dum, dum, dum...
OP: Anyway... speaking of imagination
what's with that formation?
ME: Do you mean why or how do we have the ability
to ideate, concoct, or fabricate novelties with versatility?
OP: Yes, that's what I mean.
It's one of those things that seem
to set us apart from most other animals on the scene.
ME: Maybe... but animals do seem to dream,
and dreaming does seem to be linked to imagining,
like a kind of possibility refashioning.
Whether animals can do it or can't
imagination does seem to be a kind of subsequent implant
along the evolutionary chain
which allows for a technical or artistic or inventive gain
of comparative function
at our stratum of junction.
OP: Right. From a very young age, we begin to imagine and play.
We start utilizing and exercising our imagination right away.
ME: Yeah... as if we have this innate ability to conceive
potential realities beyond the one that we perceive.
Maybe imagination is what we call our ability to sense
hyperdimensional realities that give pretense
to that which exists but cannot be apprehended
by our limited senses that are physically suspended
in three dimensions
not unlimited extensions?
OP: What? You lost me on that one.
ME: Sorry. Let me try to have some fun
by dragging it out and trying to schlep
what I meant step-by-step.
First, let's discuss dimensions
for a few seconds.
OP: Okay, but don't get too thorough.
ME: I won't. Let's start with zero.
A point has zero dimensions
because it has no extensions.
A line has one dimension
because it extends in one direction.
A square is two dimensional
because it is extendable
both side-to-side and up-to-down.
The same for a circle that is round.
Cubes and spheres extend three dimensionally
because they extend three ways spatially.
They have more breadth:
heighth, width, and depth.
OP: Okay. So, what would four dimensions look like?
ME: Well... In 3D, shadow- or ghost-like.
If you project a cube's or a sphere's shadow onto a flat wall
the shadow projection will be two dimensional.
If a fourth dimensional object was projected into three dimensional space
we would only be able to perceive three of its dimensions in this place.
The same way a cube's shadow displays less information and depth,
a four dimensional hypercube would lose information in this limited breadth.
OP: A hypercube is a four dimensional cube?
ME: Yes. If we had some kind of four dimensional CubeTube
that allowed us to perceive how four dimensions in three would seem
the way we use 3D glasses to see three dimensions on a 2D screen
we'd be able to see all sides at once -
we'd no longer be a blindspot dunce.
4D glasses and a 3D screen
would project a scene
where we'd see the top, bottom, sides, front, back, and inside
all at once, at the same time, all in the same stride.
OP: So, kind of like X-ray vision?
ME: Even more than that, more like supervision.
You'd see upside-down, inside-out, all-sideways, and backwards
in addition to downside-up, outside-in, all-sideways, and forwards.
Imagine any three-D object spinning on three axes simultaneously
while peeling and unpeeling insides-out and outsides-in punctiliously.
OP: Right... I'm not sure if I can
except set into motion and through a time span.
ME: Yes, yes, yes!
That's how we process
any dimensional leap through our mind's eye:
additional time and space must apply.
If we draw a point out straight through time and space
we've just created a one dimensional space.
If we shmear a line sideways through time and space
we've just created a two dimensional space.
If we pull a square up and out through time and space,
we've just created a three dimensional space.
To visualize any thing through and through
is to conceptualize a four dimensional debut.
OP: Okay, okay. I get the whole dimensional thing.
Remember, we were going to talk about imagining...
ME: Oh yes...
I was trying to suggest
that just as we use our physical sensation
to perceive and gather information
in physical 3D
reality,
maybe we use imagination
to perceive and gather information
about the 4D construct
into which 3D reality may erupt.
OP: Do you mean like a sort of virtual layer
for which imagination is the surveyor?
ME: Yes. Just as we have screens
through which we can portray and absorb vicarious things
and virtual reality through which we can have experiences
of non-physically derived vicarious sensory variances,
doesn't imagination tap into a plane
where existence isn't under constrain
of being trapped in a physical domain
with limitation, resistance, and strain?
OP: Please try to spell this out for me
more simply.
ME: If I imagine what it's like to feel sad,
that's not the same as actually feeling sad.
If I imagine what it's like to pet a dog,
that's not the same as actually petting a dog.
If I imagine what it's like to get burned,
that's not the same as actually getting burned.
If I imagine what it would be like to see a ghost,
that's not the same as actually seeing a ghost.
The imagination plane isn't contained or constrained
within the physics with which matter is sustained.
Remember when the serpent tempted Adam and Eve's will
to eat from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil?
OP: No, I don't remember the event,
but I remember the story to some extent.
ME: God warned if they ate from the tree, they would surely die.
The serpent said, if they did, they surely would not die;
rather, they would know wrong from right and become like gods.
Who, in their right mind, could possibly pass up those odds?
OP: We were talking about being imaginative
and now you're talking about a biblical narrative...
ME: I know. Try to bear with my explanation
for a bit longer of a duration.
In an anything-goes, anything-is-possible kind of virtual reality
there is no good or evil, wrong or right because that jamboree
has no physical basis
or hypostasis
to feel, sense, and endure
any kind of pain or pleasure.
OP: Are you trying to say that if an awareness
existed solely in an imaginary plane, it couldn't harness,
or possess, or reach physicality
thus it would have no morality?
ME: Yes, without a physical body that is expiring
there would be no sinning, hurting, lying, or crying.
To be able to see every simultaneous characteristic
and property of everything materialistic
from outside-of and above
is to get rid of
being trapped inside-of and within
the viewpoint and potential for mortal sin.
We don't mind killing or torturing in a video game,
as long as those characters can't feel the same
as we would if we were getting killed or crushed,
zapped or blown-up, tortured, maimed or flushed.
OP: Yes, but imagine if creating such a world and playing such a game
generated a real version in another dimension or on another plane?
To us, it's just for fun, just a simulation,
but to them, it's an actual incarnation...
ME: Right. So, what I was trying to get at
with the Garden of Eden habitat was that...
Just as our imagination seems to have the less-limited propensity
to move through time and space and operate on a whole different density
than our thick, heavy, hungry, slow, sensing, thinking, feeling bodies of flesh
stuck and entrapped within this physicality mesh;
perhaps that imagination plane is the shadow that we see
projected onto ours from the next dimension or density.
OP: The Fall?
ME: Yes, a Fall
from 4D
into 3D.
We recreate and simulate the Fall all the time.
We replay it, not just in reality, but in mind.
We trap and memorialize 3D reality scenes
into 2D photographs and movie screens.
When too many of us push and move towards the same limited goal,
we slow down further and funnel into lines, displaying further control.
When we attempt to indoctrinate, rehabilitate, or punish, we restrict and condition
by locking into singular relative points of space known as church, school, and prison.
OP: It's useful though, to experience friction.
We learn a lot through constraint and restriction.
ME: I agree.
Perhaps it's even necessary.
When kids are growing up, the more freedom they gain,
the more responsibility they have to maintain.
They have to learn to play by the rules of the game
if they want to keep leveling-up to each new plane.
OP: Try to tie it all together please.
Don't leave me balancing on this trapeze.
ME: Well... if it's possible that this 3D plane is a Fall or a trap,
then perhaps there is some way to get out, get back, or tap
existence on the next level up, or advance
through this game in this physical expanse.
OP: If there was a cheat code, would you want to use it anyway?
Isn't that what the serpent offered to enable this fated gateway?
ME: Yes, right. After man became like gods, knowing good from evil,
they blocked him from eating of the tree of life and living-forever retrieval.
So, I guess the point is that we must live, learn, and then die,
while cursedly earning and extrapolating all the rules that apply.
We advance like children advancing into adulthood
only catching glimpses and imagining of what we would
or could or should be like at the next level, the next stage
hoping all the while that we don't get cursed back into a stone age.
OP: Yeah, I don't want to be a caveman. Do you?
ME: No. No thank you...
OP: Then let's not forget just how far we've come,
how much spacetime has been distorted to arrive at this outcome.
We've come from a Fall
knowing practically nothing at all,
to a time like now
where we know how
to effectively and artificially
clone a serpent and a fruit tree.
ME: Yes, indeed.
Now let me go so I can weed
and erect cherubim and a flashing, flaming sword
around my garden gate to deflect the curious hoard.
OP: That's good! You're doing your chores -
probably racking up really high scores...
ME: Ha! We'll save the faith versus deeds problem
for a future entry in this column.
OP: Okay... bye!
ME: Bye!