20.1 More On Man

— You are not what you see in the mirror —

A Little Experiment

Let's do a little experiment. Take something heavy. Now drop it on your foot. The pain you feel is in your foot, but the rest of your body (and mind) suffers along with it. Your foot is connected to the rest of your body in such a way that its experiences cannot be contained by it, and travel up to all your other parts.

Now, imagine - or if you are unfortunate: recall - a traumatic experience in your past. Maybe someone you loved hurt you, or maybe someone died, or somebody did something to you, whatever.

The point is that just like the pain in your foot cannot be contained by your foot because it is connected to the rest of you, so can that horrible experience you once endured not be contained by that moment.

It travels 'upward' through time and bothers you in the here and now. It's easy to identify yourself with that handsome figure you see in the mirror, but not so easy but still very true, to identify yourself with the space-time entity that you are. Just like your body stretches forth in space, so are you stretching forth through time and all your moments are stitched together to form a four-dimensional 'body'.

You are not what you see in the mirror

What you see in the mirror is just a slice of a much larger space-time worm. Your past is pretty much a straight line, just like the past of a quantum particle that has left its traces in a bubble vessel. Your future however is just like the quantum particle's future; a path integral of all possibilities.

Your past is one of many symmetry breaches. You began to exist as a single cellular life-form floating about one of your mother's Fallopian tubes. And even though your existence as just another single cellular life-form seems far remote from you now, it is you. Just like your foot may seem far away at times, it's still you.

(Herewith solving the age-old problem 'which came first, the chicken or the egg?' The question implies a disparity that does not exist. The chicken is the egg. There is no duo of which one may surface ahead of the other. The question is invalid.)