For those of you who are unfamiliar with me and my work, my name is Brian White, and I am a dark fantasy author with three novels currently in print, The Strands, In the Shadow of the Witch, and Horn and Dagger. I also write columns and essays for www.darkrevmedia.com and run a blog on the darkrevmedia site called, The Dark Daily, covering topics such as what inspires me, my creative writing process, and the influence Heavy Metal music has had on my writing.​​

This new project I’m calling Dark Parallels, was born from the realization that I tend to gather a lot of eclectic information and find synchronicity in jumbled datasets. I then form strange connections between these various topics that I use to entertain my mind. In many ways my novels are a fictionalization of these head trips which I like to call mental gymnastics. During these mental gyrations I also indulge in the purely speculative aspect of these subjects, forming thought experiments and hypotheses based on the convoluted pattern of twisting and circling that my thoughts go through during the process.

What qualifies me to write about science, philosophy, religion, etc.? Nothing in particular. Nor am I claiming expertise in any of these topics. I believe that as a society we have become so specialized that we have fallen into the trap that only experts in a field are qualified to speculate and theorize on topics such as biology, physics, chemistry or even philosophy. If the name doesn't have a dotted acronym behind or in front the information is somehow less valuable. In some cases there may be some truth to this. There is no way, for instance, that I will be able to completely or adequately explain biological cell interactions, the Krebs Cycle or quantum field oscillations. That is why I have read or listened to people who have and will point out where I got my info. But what I gleaned from this info and the speculations I make have value, even if only to me. The point is that sometimes it takes a new perspective, an outsider, a rebel, to fit the pieces together in a new way. Am I that person? My thoughts move in that direction and I attempt to follow the convoluted path they take and put that into words. So in that sense, yes, I am. Whether or not others believe I am that person is another story and I’m sure many will disagree. But don’t close your mind to possibility because the messenger may not have a title or fit your preconceived notions about who is qualified to make such statements or arguments. And I would extend that to every person reading this. Your ideas, your associations, the parallels and tangents you create are important. They are creative expressions of information formed from your individual perspective. We must remove the judgements of right and wrong, good and bad when dealing with these dark parallels and enjoy the process of weaving these ideas together without necessarily pursing an ultimate goal.

I use the term mental gymnastics for the exercise of making these thought experiments and parallels because they require effort, but they are also fun. I allow them to tumble through my mind slowly, adding a slight nudge in various directions to choreograph the individual moves into a floor routine that is exciting, passionate, and beautiful to observe. My goals are to entertain, potentially invoke thought and further speculation, and maybe play a role in the evolution of consciousness. But in the end, this endeavor’s true purpose is to express the beauty and creativity of thought and enjoy the flow of the process. When the dance is over, it is over. It does not have to have long term meaning or a deep purpose. It can be enjoyed for what it is. I encourage you to allow these dark parallels to inspire your own form of mental gymnastics in whatever form that takes.

Why Dark Parallels? When first exposed to many of the concepts I’ll explore in this series I had thought of them as parallel ideas with nothing joining them. In many cases it seemed that these lines of thought could go on in either direction eternally without ever meeting. However, as I was exposed to more and more information and I meditated on its meaning I began to realize that there were tangents forming. I therefore began creating a series of perpendicular bridges and wormholes that joined these seemingly parallel topics. Hence the name.

What does any of this have to do with the process of writing dark fantasy novels since I am primarily a fiction author? These mental gymnastics eventually become the seeds for the environments, plots, concepts and characters that I explore in my novels. It is through my exploration of these ideas that eventually leads to a fictionalization of them. I’ll say more about that in a moment but first I want to cover the inspiration for deciding to start this series, which currently has over 10 episodes in various stages of production, with many more forming on a weekly basis. So what started the idea of writing these essays?

At some point in my writing career I began to believe that fiction was a type of field (I use the term fields to imply a concept similar to that of Sheldrake’s Morphic Fields or the Electromagnetic or “Force” Fields of physics which I will explore more deeply in Episode 1) that was capable of joining pieces of knowledge that came from other fields or passed through them. I had for many years been interested in mysticism, the occult, various magical systems of thought as well as the fringe and speculative areas of various sciences such as physics, biology, psychology and philosophy. My original study of these topics was confined to books but as it grew beyond the page to blog posts, podcasts, and YouTube videos, the choosing and searching algorithms that run behind these technologies began to expose me to new information based on my previous perusals (another form of magic). Through this process I was gradually exposed to lectures by thinkers that I may never have had access to. Even if I had some early exposure to such eclectic and radical thinkers I could only find small pieces of their work in out of print books or journals. Even those modern thinkers currently in print would not engage in the type of speculation I encountered in lectures and interviews, within their published work. People like Sheldrake, McKenna, Leary, Wilson, and older philosopher may have had lectures recorded on tape that were stored on some dusty bookshelf or dungeon where few could listen to them until the advent of YouTube where students of these great teachers could now easily make such material public. It opened a whole new world for me and listening to lectures by those I was familiar with then led to works by Foucault, Wittgenstein, Chomsky and others which I was less familiar.

I had read these thinkers before, but their lectures and talks were more speculative and began to make me aware of the possibility and belief that maybe all things were connected in some way, we just couldn’t see it. Through Sheldrake I began to believe and then experience the world as made up of various types of morphic fields, cultural, physical, mental, genetic. These fields were emergent and fluid. Borrowing other theories expressed by the likes of Nassim Haramein and other physicist and philosophers I began to construct the metaphysical nature of these fields and how they were controlled by our will, emerging from the vacuum of space as a result of us choosing to observe them. We project and then perceive, creating our reality via field manipulation, both conscious and subconscious and that life itself was a magical act, creating it out of our will to experience our choices. Writing then took on an air of occult mysticism for me because the “word” brought worlds into existence and if we could put aside our prejudice towards modern era materialism and rationalism as the only truth, a new concept of the world opens up. An emergent world where I can create and explore other dimensions that are just as real as this one.

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I then came in contact with other writers like Alan Moore and Grant Morrison who held similar beliefs. I learned that both were magicians and occultists but prior to uncovering that fact I had been exposed to their comics and saw a parallel in what I wanted to do. Listening to them speak of writing, creativity, art and magic, I understood that they had formulated similar beliefs in an idea space, a creative space that was universal but also individual. I am still formulating my theory around this and have often struggled with a word image to describe it but this is what I have come up with so far. Think of the morphic fields as planes, pieces of paper. They have bumps and what Sheldrake called cherodes or channels (I’ll go much deeper into Sheldraks’e theory in Dark Parallels Episode 1: Black Mirror, Morphic Resonance, Theories of Everything and Zombie Cats.) running through them that form consensual experience and habits. There are multiple types of fields; physical, mental, spiritual, cultural, political, etc. I believe that the fiction field (maybe even mythology although here is where we go into a gray area I’m still working through) is a plane that rides perpendicular through these other fields. It is the piece of paper that cuts through all the other planes or fields. These planes are close to each other and at some points interact on a normal basis with bumps and glaciers and mountains that rise and fall between various aspects of the planes during the course of normal experience. However, the creative/artistic plane exists to cross between these parallel planes. It joins aspects and plots of land from each plane that may have never arisen naturally.

When examined from this perspective, fiction, speculation, magic, is a way of evolving our knowledge of all these planes and to see and experience their interconnectedness. Fiction, in a very real sense is the perpendicular world that allows us to see connections where we may have never seen them before. And these planes are real, just as dreams are real, as shamanic and magical/mystical experiences are real. However, they are not real in the way we have been traditionally taught to define real. Just because they are not material/rational does not mean they are not real or are not important, it just means they are not material. This added a level of import to what I was doing and what all artists and writers were doing. We were the bards, spinning spells, creating grimoires, creating worlds, and joining others.

Tied to all this and the reason for me deciding to embark on this project was a revelation I recently had. This particular insight was inspired by an interview I saw with comic writer extraordinaire, Alan Moore, in which he said two things that really affected me. One, that truly creative acts were done without fear or desire of result. For me that was important because although I may never have started writing with the expectation of making a living from it or have allowed my stories to be influenced by what was popular, there has always been a fear that from a commercial success standpoint, I would fail. Which brings me to the second thing I heard Moore state (paraphrasing). It is not the artist’s job to deliver what the audience wants but what they need, and the audience does not know what they need. If they knew what they needed they would be the artist.

This philosophy hinges on the fact that an artist lives in a creative space, (Moore calls this idea space) with a specific address that gives the artist an individual and unique perspective of this creative space. It is the artist’s job to deliver their unique perspective and not to curtail or edit their vision or endeavor based on what they think an audience wants or needs. This was an epiphany to me. Suddenly I felt freed from the expectation that I must obtain an audience. I no longer had to equate my failure to obtain commercial success with failure as a writer. In many ways I had become so frustrated with my lack of commercial success that I was at a point where I was contemplating trying to make my work more palatable or accessible to a larger audience. But that wasn’t my vision, that wasn’t what I was being shown when I entered this creative dimension.

This realization liberated me from doubt and expectation and I thank Moore for sharing it. Writing what I was led or inspired to write became a creative imperative and the only goal. Either there would be an audience for it or there wouldn’t be. Selling out is not trying to market and find your audience. Selling out is changing your message, your story and your individual perspective, to meet the expectations of others in order to create and audience for your work. This gave me the confidence to not only write what I wanted, but to also feel secure in exposing my work to others. I was not cheapening the work by trying to market it as long as I didn’t change the message I had started with. I never expected to get rich from this, nor was that my goal. I only wanted to achieve some financial success so that I could have more time to spend creating, but that wasn’t completely up to me. At that moment, I decided I would create what I was inspired to create, write what I write and an audience would either emerge or it wouldn’t. Either way I would simply continue to do what I do. As long as I was honest with myself and the vision I received, I could not fail.

These essays are a journey of speculation. I rode the waves of various parallel worlds and then began to draw perpendiculars to join them. I do this consciously in these essays, but in my fiction, I have come to realize that that is what I had always been doing on a subconscious level. My creative, magical, writing process has been about perceiving these parallel worlds from a plane that cuts through them. My speculations are the how, but my fiction is the why. Why do we exist? Why is this like this? Why is the world the way it is? It is also the experience of the how and the why from a perspective that is unique. The fiction creates the field, it is shared by others that visit it but I will always see it from my unique perspective and when readers read my spell, my grimoire, they join me in that world. So join me on these speculations, and afterwards, if so inclined, join me in the walking of them in my fiction.

My personal expectation of this series is that it will chronical my meanderings into the darkness, stumbling and bumping into things blindly while connecting them into patterns that help me find my way to the light. So stay tuned for the first installment which examines the connections I’ve drawn between the show Black Mirror, Morphic Resonance, Theories of Everything, and simulated reality. The entire topic of simulated realities, digital consciousness and fractal realities will occupy a few installments as the topic is broad and rife for speculation. I hope you enjoy watching the dance as much as I enjoy performing it.

Till next time.

Enjoy.

I’ll start this out with a statement that occurred to me while I was watching an episode of Black Mirror. We live in a simulated reality in which we are capable of remaking and restructuring our reality. We can influence our past by modifying it with our current beliefs, which via the process described in Rupert Sheldrake’s theory of Morphic Resonance, changes the Morphic (inherited memory) Field associated with that history thereby instantaneously changing our knowledge of the past. In a simulated reality all there is, is information. The uncertainty principle allows us to choose not only our past but our present and future through our influence on the Morphic field relying on properties of reality expressed in the theories of quantum uncertainty and entanglement.

That’s a mouthful, and yes an explanation is needed.

Over the preceding few months I had been reading about Sheldrake’s Morphogenetic Field theories as well as watching lectures and interviews with people like Graham Hancock, Terrence Mckenna, Thomas Campbell and Bruce Lipton. This information had set a lot of wheels spinning in my head which suddenly seemed to form associations and clicked into place under the influence of Black Mirror episodes that explored the concepts, applications and implications surrounding digital consciousness and simulated realities. In these episodes a character’s consciousness (memories, thoughts, and everything else that we identify as us) had been downloaded from the body and transferred onto a chip or into some other form which was then placed into a digital reality in order to serve some purpose. In one episode it was used to control the virtual personas of individuals the main character could not control in real life (USS Callister). In another, the method was used to interrogate an accused murderer and get a confession. After getting the confession the digital consciousness was tortured for centuries in the simulated reality while informing the physical prisoner that his downloaded digital-self had already ratted him out (White Christmas). Additional episodes explored the concept from a gaming perspective (Playtest) or as a form of victim retribution, allowing people to continually torture a digital holographic version of a convicted murderer (Black Museum).

What struck me (and disturbed me) while watching these episodes was the dawning realization that a simulated-you doesn’t know it is simulated and has no way of knowing there is another real-you and wouldn’t care. You are you in both the digital and physical iterations. The digital doesn’t care about the physical and vice versa. It is also impossible for either to say which one is more real or to say which is a copy of the other. Both have an independent “real” existence. In the White Christmas episode, the downloaded digital self was meant to be used as an artificial intelligence slave to the physical self. The digital-self could care for their physical-self’s wants and needs without having to be programmed. The digital-self would automatically program your coffee to be ready at 6AM and it would be prepared exactly as you like it without needing to assess your routines or environment because it is you and knows what you want as you know it. To get the digital consciousness to accept such slavery it needed to be broken psychologically. To accomplish this the downloaded self was tortured for months in digital time with absolute boredom (living in a white room with nothing to do) to show that the alternative (slavery to your physical self) was preferable (at least there was something to do and occupy her time). And this time lapse, warp, dilation, expansion concept was then also explored effectively in other episodes whereby the digital self can experience years of perceptual time in only seconds in the “real” world. At first the thought of me torturing a digital version of myself to service my needs had me shrugging my shoulders. “What’s the big deal.” It’s not like it can feel anything. But why? Because it doesn’t have a body? What about its mind? My mind? And if I start to identify with this digital-self and start to think of it as my consciousness expanded to other media things can get downright uncomfortable with pregnant possibilities. And they did.

Now my mind was churning and beginning to marry these concepts together causing me to restate the above statement with some more details. Not only do we have a means of effecting our reality (via our consciousness) but what if we added a further assumption that stated that we live in a simulated reality, the Matrix, except in this version of the Matrix the goal is not necessarily to enslave us, creating ignorant copper-tops, but to evolve us spiritually.

This led me to a speculative hypothesis. By means of conscious control of quantum states and fields we can modify the Morphic Field, hence modify the past, present and future through our beliefs and perceptions. By power of will we modify the underlying fabric of our fractal reality causing the particles, waves, and fields to obey our will and take form. And as we change our past we simultaneously change our present and our future. Our digital-selves could be extensions of our consciousness and play a role in our evolution by affording us experiences we would not have otherwise. These selves also have a means of effecting changes to the Morphic Fields creating a feedback loop that rises up the levels of existence, dissolving the need for a division between real and simulation, digital and physical.

Before we get too deep into this less break this down into its constituent parts, examining in more detail the information that formed the basis for this strange cross pollination.

We’ll start with Morphic Fields and Morphic Resonance because these were the concepts that formed the soil for the other thought-seeds to take root.

Morphic Resonance is a theoretic concept proposed by Rupert Sheldrake in which the memory and biological patterns of a species are influenced and transmitted to members of that species via a connection to a shared field of information. This information is not coded in genes or passed on as inherited memories stored in an area of the brain. Instead we are born with the biological antennas to download and upload information from and to the Morphic Field, giving us the ability to learn from the information gathered from previous members of our species. An analogy would be to equate our biology with a 5ghz antenna capable of tuning into a Wi-Fi signal that carries data that can then be parsed, digested and/or acted upon by our biology or, as the case will be made, by our consciousness. A specific type of Morphic field, the Morphogenetic Field, transmits species/biologic memories/information that form the habits of our biology allowing it to take proper form based on the signaling it receives from that field. Other Morphic Fields (theoretically there are many) such as the mental or culture fields control those aspects of reality and consciousness. These various fields express the habits of a species in their specific domain (mental, cultural, biological). Tuning into this frequency of cultural mores and standards of behavior makes up species’ consensual, perceptual reality, hence stabilizing or crystalizing the Morphic Fields that govern biology, behavior, culture, myth, etc. These various fields form the tapestry of what we call consensual-experiential-perceptual-reality.

To ensure that habits and normalization emerge in the various Morphic Fields, the concept of chreodes is introduced. These channelized pathways in the Morphic fields bring aberrant behavior or biological mutation under control by forming deep valleys in the field that represent normal behavior. Aberrant conditions are then directed towards the status quo by the chreodes. Imagine a ball that lands upon one of the hills of the field, its tendency will be to roll towards the valley and then finally follow the channel that cuts through the Morphic Field ending in statistical normalcy. In many ways we could say that this is what makes revolutionary and evolutionary changes in thought so difficult (biology as well but I want to focus on the social and mental aspects of Morphic Fields). New ideas will occur but the field at large (consensual status quo reality) will have a tendency to move the concept or new perception towards the chreode to normalize it. This can happen in the form of resistance to or watering down of the new ideas, resulting in a redirection toward the normal. In that way revolutionary ideas have a literal uphill battle and must reach a critical mass before becoming capable of creating a new chreode in the field. These ideas must become powerful enough to change the shape and frequency of the morphic field via the creation of alternate chreodes. When the newly formed channel becomes deep enough the culture or species will tend to begin following these channels (following the analogy above we place a ball in one chreode but then create a depression or branch from that plane and the ball will tend to roll to the deeper depression or channel). The interesting thing is that Morphic Field Theory predicts that the more this occurs (the ball rolling into the new chreode) the more likely it is to happen in the future and thereby increasing the occurrence of the behavior/modification until it becomes the new habit.

These channels then begin to take on a new chreode map for the species until that becomes the normalized habit (new consensual-experiential-perceptual-reality of the species). The implication that I am making in the context of this essay is that if we are to re-evaluate our past (ex. Consciousness is the foundation of reality which gives rise to the forms and patterns of matter that we experience.) and if this re-evaluation were to create a deep enough chreode and reach general acceptance, the Mophic Field would in essence be reshaped so that our understanding of ourselves in a cultural consensual reality context would be instantaneously modified. It would in effect become the new habit (our new generally accepted history/physics). And this could be true for any generally accepted theory. Most of our science today starts with the principle that an objective realty exists, and that matter is the basis of reality. Phenomenon like consciousness arise from matter. But what if we were to state that consciousness is at the core of reality and that it is consciousness that gives rise to matter and not the other way around? What if that idea created enough intellectual mass to create a new chreode that started to form a new habit of thought. Think of how modifying this starting point would change how we look at the world. More on this later, for now let’s return briefly to Morphic Resonance.

Morphic Resonance then is the mechanism for transmitting and receiving information from the various Morphic Fields. It is our attachment to these fields that gives us access to the data that each Morphic Field presents, giving us access to our collective history. Our biology is specifically designed to connect and receive information from these fields in order to evolve in the proper fashion. When that field becomes modified by the formation and deepening of a chreode, that change is transmitted via Morphic Resonance instantaneously with all members of the species plugged into the field. When the chreode becomes deep enough we will have a natural tendency to follow its pathway.

If we begin to think of revolutionary ideas that change the paradigms of science and metaphysics with the capability to change our species/cultural view of reality, those ideas can be represented as a Morphic Unit. Each entity that believes in that idea or extends it, ads a Morphic Unit to the Morphic Field via Morphic Resonance. As these Morphic Units increase in number they begin to form chreodes in the Morphic Field that then further increase the chance that more Morphic Units will be generated and deepen or widen the channel, until at some point this chreode represents the habit, the accepted world view of our species. The abnormal aberrant ideas become the new habit.

So that’s Morphic Resonance. Below I’ll have a list of sources to get more information if you want to get further into the weeds on this amazing topic and read about some of the research and studies that have been done.

Now on to quantum uncertainty, entanglement and zombie cats.

The quantum uncertainty principle states that we can never know with certainty a particle’s exact spin and position. The more we know about one characteristic the less we know about the other. The moment we observe spin the wave function of the particle makes its position uncertain. In effect its position lives in a field of infinite possibilities that we can only make guesses at, which can be stated as probabilities. Quantum entanglement then extends this by stating that if two particles become entangled then the moment I make an observation of entangled particle 1 and measure that its spin is in the up direction then the other entangled particle, even if it is light years away, will immediately be observed to have a down spin. The inference is that the moment we observe a packet’s state we simultaneously (by our mere observation of it) change the state of the sister particle light years away regardless of time and space. There are physicists who postulate that every particle and even the mass of the vacuum of space is entangled, making it impossible to make any observations without affecting the entangled pairs separated by galaxies and maybe even universes.

The other underlying assumption of the Uncertainty Principle and Quantum Field Theory is that all matter exists as a potential quantum particle, that prior to observation, exists in a quantum field cloud that actually contains an infinite number of possibilities with every possible outcome of the observable universe contained within it and that we (our consciousness) as observers actually create this universe through our observation of it, forcing the field to become a particle and interact with our physical self. This concept is in opposition to the materialist view which states that reality is objective and exists even when we are not looking but the quantum consciousness view is that reality is relative and literally pops into existence the moment we choose to look at it. This would be similar in fashion to the way a human baby sees the world and is fascinated when an adult suddenly pops into exist during a game of peekaboo. When they don’t see it, it ceases to exist.

So what do zombie cats have to do with this? The physicist Erwin Schrödinger created a thought experiment to demonstrate the properties of uncertainty and entanglement. (I’ve seen multiple versions of this experiment and all have the same premise but with different flavors. I chose to use the one that was stuck in my head eons ago). In this experiment we place a cat in a covered box that contains a trigger that will be released if a radioactive atom decays. There is a 50/50 chance of this decay occurring in an hour. If the decay occurs, then the trigger will be released, which will break a glass vial filled with poison, and kill the cat. The interesting thing here is that if we never look to see which state the cat is in, the cat simultaneously exists in all probable states (alive/dead). A state which is called a quantum superposition. When the lid is lifted, the observer forces the collapse of the wave function, causing the cat to now take on a state of being either alive or dead.

If we are to add quantum entanglement to this experiment, we need another box and another cat. The cat is still alive and dead as long as the lid remains closed, the moment we lift the lid on box 1 the wave function collapses and the cat is observed to be either alive or dead. Here is the strange thing with entanglement. Even if the boxes are on opposite sides of the universe and we lift the lid and observe cat 1 to be dead, the cat in box 2 on the other side of the universe will simultaneously be observed to be alive. This works in each direction. If the cat in box 1 is dead then we now know that the cat in box 2 is alive. This has been proven through experiments (not with cats thankfully) with particle detectors in which a particle of spin up is observed in one location and simultaneously its entangled twin will be observed with a spin of down. In these experiments any communication between the particles would have to break Relativity’s universal speed limit of light if a transformation of information was needed between the two particles to cause this effect.

The implications of this are, that if we exist in a quantum field reality with different types of fields governing different characteristic of our reality such as the morphogenetic for biology or the quantum field for particle spin, then it is possible that our consciousness gives rise to matter via our observations. We see what we project or expect. In this view humans exist in a reality of infinite possibilities and it is our consciousness that has the power of collapsing the wave function to form the physical manifestations we see all around us. Reality emerges from mind, effecting the Morphic Fields for culture and species habits that can instantaneously affect the whole of our reality. Consensual reality is really our species habit of collapsing the wave function in a specific manner, agreeing on the laws, physics and rules of the game we are all actively participating in.

Now with some background on Morphic Resonance and Quantum Uncertainty and Entanglement I’ll make this statement. In a materialist universe consciousness arises from matter, the brain, and its neurons and chemicals. In a quantum field reality where consciousness holds primacy, it is consciousness that gives rise to matter through an exercise of the will on the various Morphic and Quantum Fields, creating channels of new thought which allows us to change the shape of these fields and hence reality. Modification of these fields not only effects our present and future but transcends time and space and immediately influences all entities with access to the information regardless of time and space. Hence, changing our beliefs about the past immediately effects our present and future and has the capability of increasing our understanding, information, and consciousness throughout all time and space.

These fields are fractal with an evolving, expanding symmetry. They are also holographic in the sense that each unit contains the whole. The same way a droplet of water contains all the information needed to create a lake as it is comprised of the base pattern that becomes an expanding symmetry of self-similar patterns to create the lake. Ideas, like these, would at first be considered aberrant. They are not the experience habits of human consensual reality. However, if there is a paradigm shift, the laws of these combined theories would state that the more people that begin to experience reality in this fashion will add morphic units to the idea, which will then form a chreode. The more people believe, the deeper the channel, the more likely the new idea becomes a habit, forming a deeper chreode.

Now let’s return to Black Mirror and speculate further. When I began to incorporate the information above and mixed them with the ideas being expressed in episodes of the show I began to identify some crazy implications. These implications didn’t just affect me at an intellectual level but also on an emotional one.

In the show the technical ability to download a consciousness and then create a virtual reality around it always took a dark turn. But then I thought about the spiritual implications of the time dilation feature that was used in the show and how only the higher order consciousness controlling the time sequence and frequency of the virtual reality had any understanding that time was being sped up or slowed down. Only the actor in the virtual reality perceptually experienced this time shift. In addition, the digital system created to harness these digitized biological units would have to have an ability to interact with morphic fields if they were to have complete access to the data that makes us act human. If we state that the brain for instance is our biological mechanism for interacting with this field then if we are to create a self-aware digital copy that not only has memory but all the other things that come with being human, including an ability to learn and evolve, then it needs to access the morphic fields. That would require that these biological components would have to be virtualized in the software of the system.

Instead of going down a dark alley and exploring the dark aspects of this, (which is where I usually go and will go in an upcoming essay exploring the virtual aspects of digital afterlives) I decided to think of this in terms of a spiritual quest. What if we are a downloaded consciousness from an actual being that is on a spiritual journey to reach nirvana or whatever you want to call the ultimate goal of awakening or expanding consciousness. The tool they have chosen to use to reach this state is immersion in a multiplayer simulated reality. In our parlance this is the dreamer, the virtual reality game player, and using time dilation they can live thousands upon thousands of years of perceptual time in moments. The same way we can seemingly dream for hours and then wake up to realize only minutes have past. In this sense the same dreamer is downloaded, reborn, or reincarnated into multiple people, beings, objects over the course of minutes. Maybe they live as the husband only to be reborn as the wife to experience the emotions on both sides of the fence, they are the master and the slave.

This person is then the ultimate perceiver of our world. Is that person God the Omega Observer? Do they control us or are these simulations the vessels for their consciousness? As vessels the gamer may be allowed to choose the lives they wanted to live before entering the game, but the rules of the system would state that once immersed in the game they will not know it’s a game and will have no memory of their real or simulated lives (unless the hack the system).

As we start to embark on our own technological journey of artificial intelligence, virtual reality, mixed reality, and augmented reality don’t we begin to see the parallels? In effect we have control, we were built with the hardware to run the software, to understand it and as we evolve our consciousness we are beginning to understand how we can control it through the extension and understanding of virtual realities. The reality we experience is then perceived as a direct result of our choices and our will.

Taking into account the uncertainty principle, the ideas presented by Rupert Sheldrake, and all the mystics who have told us that life is an illusion, we begin to understand how all these puzzle pieces fit together. By observation and projection onto the canvas of this fractal, virtual reality we fix the fields of past, present, and future, which then changes the universal consciousness field, which then becomes immediately accessible to all entities in the simulation via the biological hardware built to receive it. As this becomes part of our collective experience we begin to create Sheldrake chreodes of learned behavior that then propagates to become an evolutionary mental habit which fixes the behavior and knowledge of our society through the modification of the Morphic Fields, making this the new collective experiential reality. The future me, changes the past me, which then flows to the present me. Time and history is no longer concrete, it is fluid and runs in multiple directions with multiple points of influence. Pretty crazy, wonderful, and exciting!

The basic, principle laws that govern the simulation create consensual reality but these laws can be bent or modified and when that is done it changes the simulation at a core level. Let’s take an assumption that matter is the primary form of the universe that everything that happens, all the laws that govern physical and chemical reactions and interaction are based in the material. X effects y which cascades to z etc. Our belief in that assumption helps to define our reality. However, what if we change that basic assumption. What if we were to make the assumption that consciousness is the cause of all interactions. That via consciousness we actually modify and control matter and energy. Effects are not the result of the way matter behaves but are caused by how we will it to behave, regardless of whether or not we are aware of this control at a conscious level. This assumption strikes at the core of the reality we experience for we become the prime movers of the reality we perceive. Things no longer happen to us, we influence them, we are not victims or our biology and environment.

These are concepts that have been explored in depth by people such as Walter Russel and Thomas Campbell. Russel has even stated generally that one of the issues with our physical conception of the universe is that we have taken God and consciousness out of the equation. Yet we have data from scientific experiments that point to consciousness being at the core of the universe we experience. The uncertainty principle states that our observation of matter changes it and actually forces it to “choose” a state. But who is really choosing? Is it not the will of consciousness and not the particle/wave that chooses? The quantum world exists in a hazy soup of infinite possibility until the observer comes along and forces it to choose a state. A state chosen by our consciousness, governed by the underlying rules of a simulated system.

What are the implications of this? First, we have a metaphysical and psychologic abhorrence that we have to get over. The dread I felt while watching Black Mirror was a result of my identification with the concept of “me” and “I”; with my individual biology. Most of us identify, “I” with the body, the brain, this (as I like to call it) meat suit. The idea that this body is merely hardware designed to run software which controls the energy systems of our bodies to effectuate change in a simulation is abhorrent to us. At first, we may even contend that this is a purely rational-reductive-materialist view of biology and physics, but it is actually the opposite. Instead it states that we must identify with the individual consciousness as the primary energy source of this system, which interacts with a virtual environment through a biological system specifically and individually designed (you still get to be a special snowflake of creation) to respond to your consciousness which is tied to a universal field that is capable of switching frequencies and tuning into alternate realities through altered states of consciousness. Our biology contains a specific frequency and antennas that respond to our specific consciousness which some have theorized is the reason why organs are difficult to transplant or why memories or habits can be transferred from one person to another after a successful transplant. This information is not in the organ it is in the field and frequency that the organ has access to that transfers these memories. But the material is not king in this world. In this world, will and consciousness are king. We are not slaves to our biology but the masters and benefactors of it.

Having said that I only feel comfortable perusing this idea as a philosophical thought experiment. The moment I make the leap to seriously considering this as the truth of the reality I live in, something different happens. I suddenly feel that life is pointless when it is virtual or a simulation. But why? This shell will die one day. Isn’t it far better to believe that the experiences and knowledge I have gleaned by embarking on this journey are constantly shared with some ultimate source and will live on in a universal consciousness shared by all other energy beings.

I think my distaste goes back to belief in the material and that matter is what generates consciousness and all things of value in this universe. Becoming digitized somehow cheapens my existence because there could be countless layers, and I may exist on a subroutine that someone just forgot to delete, meaning that at any time I could just cease to exist with no purpose and no lasting impression. Is that just ego talking or is there an intrinsic need to feel like there is a point? Does that desire for meaning actually express a truth that I do matter, that I am expected to evolve my consciousness, and that evolution has a larger purpose? What would be the point of a creator (whoever or whatever that may be even if its just a game designer) imbuing this need in a human if not to server some purpose?

I realized that it was my fear of being pointless that made me so disturbed by the Black Mirror episodes, because it forced me to analyze the possibilities, and I found myself gazing at a picture of a picture, a reflection of a reflection. I had no way of knowing how many layers deep that went. The same way you may wake from one dream, to another, to another, and when you finally wake you wonder if this is but another dream. The deeper that spiral went the more pointless each layer of reality seemed to be. How far down are we? How far down would a first-generation VR simulation be today compared to what we may build ten, twenty years from now? Would we even care about the first generation anymore? Would we just consider it legacy, end of life, and stop supporting it or just delete it?

I realized that these questions also exposed the fact that my uncomfortably had as much to do with my relationship and understanding of data as it does to my biology. In our world data is ubiquitous and anonymous. It is not imbued with what essentially makes us (although I would say I believe that is changing as we rely more and more upon digital data). We don’t think much of deleting an email or a file. Even if we do, we certainly don’t cry about it as we would if we found out a close relative died. However, as a writer, if I poured my heart and soul into the creation of a novel which existed only in a digital form as a Word document and that was deleted, I may cry. That is why I have copies of copies stored all over the place. Is there some creator out there that has done the same thing with me, us? Is that where we are headed, making copies of ourselves? And if we do, will we be content with digital immortality or will we feel the need to place these digitized selves into shells? What is more important the shell or the consciousness once we reach this point? What if the shell is metal and plastic and by our definition has not biological life? Is it still important if I take the consciousness out of it? Are we?

Part of our repugnance of digital simulated existence is imbedded in our belief in the material but another part is the belief that there is one reality. There is, “The Real” and we can distinguish that from all other modes of consciousness. I can touch it. I can feel it. But as we embark on creating new realms of virtual reality that leave us stunned with how real and immersive they feel, don’t we start to question how we can possibly know that what we feel right now is “Real” versus a virtual reality, whose primary mover is consciousness designed to control the light particles of matter in order to effectuate a simulated reality with the intended goal of evolving consciousness. And what kind of goal is that to the next order reality anyway? What is the point of evolving consciousness in a bounded system? Make a better artificial intelligence? Offer virtual reality trippers the ability to live in a historic civilization with the goal of seeing if they can solve the problem of its destruction?

Yet at the same time considering this universe as a simulation makes sense of a lot of things. We don’t have to perform mental gymnastics in order to get certain pieces of physics, spirituality and philosophy to mesh. Things make sense if we put our abhorrence aside. More questions still remain. Am I a player in this virtual reality game, a puppet? Thomas Campbell has said that consciousness in the computer running the player (our biology) which then can manipulate the virtual fractal reality. But what is the point of this game? Do we wake up from it to realize that we are a physical body reliving multiple lives in a time dilation sequence in yet another virtual world, which then may exist within multiple layers of another virtual layer? Is there any way to break out of the system and what does that mean, do we go back to the source like in the Matrix? Is there a God of each virtual system, going up the hierarchical ladder to an ultimate One God?

So many interesting questions develop once we allow ourselves to think of the possibilities. Heaven and Hell can exist as simulated realities that seem infinite based on the perception of time. In a simulated reality based on the uncertainty principle where we perceive what we project, Hell is self-torture meant to teach us some lesson, while heaven is giving ourselves a vacation (as mentioned I have a whole essay exploring the concept of the digital afterlife). There may be other beings that sit above the simulation and watch the birth and death of entire universes and their billions of years of evolution in an instant. And isn’t that what mystics have been telling us? We are the dreamed of Gods. A God opens its eyes ending one cycle and then closes them beginning a new one. Don’t things start to make a crazy kind of sense when we are open to these possibilities?

They did for me. I suddenly found myself thinking of these things in ways I never had before. True or not it didn’t matter. And that was the other interesting thing I learned. Once I considered the thought that consciousness and not matter is the basic assumption of the universe, these thoughts were modifying my perception and experience of reality and the consciousness that controls it. I defined truth based on my assumptions, expectations, and core beliefs. Once aware of it a certain form of control can be exhibited over it. I’m no longer merely an actor on a stage being fed my lines. In addition, I do in fact live forever, every piece of information I have is shared through resonance with the field and can then live on in other entities or exist infinitely as pure information. Don’t we say people live on in our memories? In this model people do live on as stored information that exist in a field consciously accessible to all via resonance. In many ways that is a more beautiful picture of reality than believing that we die, get placed in the ground, and our only legacy are the fossils of thoughts, emotions, and information that people remember about us, and that once the last memory dies, and there is no one left to remember us we truly die and are wiped away.

What if?

What if fringe opinions become mainstream and actually begins to modify the field of the past, thereby changing the underlying information to where that becomes our new understanding and perception of reality? Can we evolve through a reassessment of our past, thereby changing the field of knowledge that we all plug into in order to understand that basic laws of this fractal system? New information constantly changes the system in a feedback loop that evolves us, not just in the present, but from the past to the present and into the future, collapsing time.

What if through a process of entanglement we are linked to an earlier much older versions of ourselves that exists across the universe and has evolved much beyond our current capabilities? They are actively influencing a field that we are just not tuned into during what we call normal states of consciousness and once we modify our consciousness we tune into this morphic field which then simultaneously has the capability of changing our entire understanding and perception. Is it possible that that is what happens? That when we change our consciousness we actually tune into the morphic field of our ancestors across the universe, instantaneously giving us access to their wisdom and knowledge.

What if we were to believe that the hardware we control through our consciousness software has the ability to flip on other levers inside our biology to experience new forms of information that are at different frequencies, like tuning into different radio signal bands. And low and behold not all these antennas are in our brain, that our heart really can feel, our gut can be intuitive, that we have compartmentalized our biology into material systems, but what if each organ acted as a piece of consciousness and we just weren’t downloading the proper information to see that. Our whole body can suddenly think, intuit, and take part in consciousness. Suddenly we have access to trillions of cells that can increase the surface area of our consciousness and bring us to a new level of awareness.

Whew!

There are a few topics here that I will expand upon in future episodes. The concept of digital hells and heavens explored so horrifically in Black Mirror deserves some further tumbling. In addition, I would like to expand on the speculations and implications of our biology as an organ of sensation and consciousness that may then point to our human hardware acting as cells in the body of a much larger organ or organism.

I hope you enjoyed these dark parallels and the tangents that attempt to join them. Please return for more. In addition join the www.darkrevmedia.com mailing list to be alerted when new Dark Parallels are published and be automatically entered as participants in merch giveaways. Until next time.

Enjoy!

References:

My Big TOE: Book 1: Awakening by Thomas Campbell – https://www.my-big-toe.com/store1/book-1-awakening-paperback/

The Presence of the Past: Morphic Resonance and the Habits of Nature by Rupert Sheldrake

Chaos Creativity, and Cosmic Consciousness by Rupert Sheldrake, Terence McKenna, Ralph Abraham

The Biology of Belief: Unleashing the Power of Consciousness, Matter and Miracles by Bruce Lipton

A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking

The Physics of Immortality by Frank J. Tipler

Physics of the Soul: The Quantum Book of Living, Dying, Reincarnation, and

Immortality by Amit Goswami

The Self-Aware Universe by Amit Goswami

Videos:

Tom Campbell and Bruce Lipton: Two Scientist “See the same world.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BjDQzCq6FdM

Alan Moore – Comics & The Occult – 2007 Interview https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SW6uWus1c4w

Nassim Haramein – Sacred Geometry and Unified Fields https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_KU1CsFVctQ

Nassim Haramein 2015 – The Connected Universe https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tbE5bVl8r2g&t=2507s

Unified Field Physics and a New Vision of Reality https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQf2iPbCq8U

Understanding the Uncertainty Principle with Quantum Fourier Series | Space Time https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=izqaWyZsEtY&t=729s

Quantum Entanglement and the Great Bohr-Einstein Debate | Space Time | PBS Digital Studios https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tafGL02EUOA&t=695s

Black Mirror by Netflix https://www.netflix.com/title/70264888

A lot of the ideas I’ll express in this article came to me while watching episodes of the Neflix shows Black Mirror and Altered Carbon. I expanded on the connections between digital consciousness, simulated reality, and morphic fields in the first Dark Parallel Episode: Black Mirror, Morphic Resonance, Theories of Everything and Zombie Cats. However, there was one aspect which I felt deserved more attention; the technical capability to create digitized, storable and transferable consciousness. Such an ability has the power to drastically alter our beliefs and attitudes of heaven, hell, judgment, reincarnation, and the afterlife.

Let’s start out with a few assumptions so that we have a base to build upon. You don’t have to agree with them, but for the purpose of this dialog let’s take them as givens. First, it is possible to virtualize a human being digitally, including all those things (consciousness, body, emotions, connection to a species identified morphic field, creativity, and the ability to evolve) we identify with being human. Further, this technical ability would imply that such a digital consciousness could be placed in a virtual world that was so immersive that it would have no way of knowing it was contained in a simulation, think, The Matrix. For all intents and purposes, the digital consciousness believes it is human, living a real, concrete existence, just as we do. Next, we must also assume that the goal of any version of hell, heaven, or purgatory, is consciousness evolution, and is used as a tool towards that end. These various states of being then play and important part in the evolutionary process of the simulated universe. Finally, we must assume that a digital consciousness has the means of evolving and that its evolution is critical to the overall evolution and ultimate transcendence of the human species to some higher level of consciousness. This higher order consciousness exists outside of the simulation and interacts with the simulation through agents (deities, demons, angles, humans). Again, its interaction is another tool to influence or push the evolution of consciousness. All of this put together is what I will call the evolutionary consciousness system.

If we start off with these assumptions and then look at the traditional religious concepts of the afterlife we can start to see how, if we view these “places” as different states of being, they can be utilized within an evolutionary consciousness system with the express goal of evolving individual consciousnesses to a certain state. In attempting to draw parallels between a digital afterlife and religious beliefs lets examine some of the typical qualities of the afterlife.

Generally, concepts of an afterlife are expressed as being eternal or are perceived as eternal by the consciousness immersed in that state. In some traditions, there is a belief that we all go to hell until such time that a future event occurs which spreads the grace of the creator to all beings currently entrapped there. In the digital world, perceptual eternity would be accomplished via time dilation. Beings that are sent to these afterlives or different modes of consciousness may live through centuries of perceptual time, that when viewed from the standard time sequence of the larger system, occurs in only minutes. This allows the larger system to reach a common evolutionary state at the same time even though individuals will have evolved at different rates of perceptual time.

Most traditions also believe there are places such as purgatory (a plane existing between heaven and hell), where souls go to pay for their sins, or learn from them, which then gives them access to heaven. These afterlives, with their various levels, form a type of spiritual game that revolves around a spiritual economy. Do this, get to a higher level, do this, and go to the penalty area and work your way back up. I’ll examine these levels from a system perspective and use computer system terminology and analogies to draw parallels between these traditional beliefs and how digital afterlives would fit into this analogous paradigm.

Given the assumptions that we live in a simulated universe for which there is a consistent perception of time under normal modes of consciousnesses, and that the purpose of life is to evolve every individual consciousness such that at some point in the future the entire universal consciousness will evolve to a point where it can jump the barriers of the current system into a higher order consciousness (God) or attain a state of bliss, we can now start to examine how these ideas would fit into a digital technology analogy. If we are all distinct pieces of universal consciousness, then during the course of this journey, individual pieces (the individual cells that make up this consciousness) must evolve at different rates, therefore, some individuals will transcend the current reality faster and/or slower than others. The standard time cycle for this universe and the apparent physical death of the vessel of consciousness (our bodies) gives a timeframe for this learning and evolution to occur and is one of the game aspects that forces sentient beings to evolve. If beings were not limited by time it may take longer for consciousness to evolve. Time is only relevant in the context of the system. The system has a universal clock that ticks precisely (for instance, it may use the speed light can travel in a second to represents one cycle of the system as a constant). The ability of the system to either expand or dilate time does not change the universal system clock, it only changes the perception of time to the consciousness observing it (the watched pot never boils). The purpose of both time and the modification of how it is perceived (fast or slow), is to create a gaming scenario meant to evolve consciousness (both individually and universally) to a certain point, allowing it to elevate to the next level or be merged with a higher order consciousness.

Therefore, beyond this observable reality is another higher order of reality that sits outside the laws and governing principles of the system and may have in fact created the system. That order of reality understands all the rules and laws of the system. This higher order system is trying to help evolve the individuals, societies, and cultures that exist in this simulated reality with the hope of evolving the entire universe so that it can be incorporated into the larger Macroscopic Universal Consciousness. At its current state introducing our Universe (at least as we experience it) into this Macroscopic Universal Consciousness would be like introducing a virus into perfection, having it spread its disease of separation, violence, and egotism throughout the system.

Following this analogy, we then move on to how the system would utilize our religious or spiritual concepts of the afterlife to evolve the system as a whole. Once it was discovered that individual consciousnesses would evolve at different rates, the system had to develop “areas” that would allow for different perceptions of time for individual consciousnesses contained within that “area” allowing it to evolve at different speeds. Here is where I will make the analogy that digital life is a micro system whereby each individual is made up of trillions of lines of code (cells) built to supports a specific function of the larger system. (There are millions of possibilities for this. If we are speculating we could say that each individual is meant to share its particular individual experience of the universe, that it was meant to solve some problem or that in the context of the larger system we are merely gathering every possibility of this system and once experienced in every possible permutation that system naturally evolves or ceases to have meaning or purpose).

In this story we are unique, we have a specific role and function. When individual (cells) groupings of code (micro-systems) work as designed, proven and quality tested via a lifetime of virtual experience, it has served its function and is then placed in heaven. This may take one go-around or many. In a Karmic system we deal with bugs in the code by continually running it through various scenarios and lifetimes where it then evolves to move to the next level (the same way technologists expose machine learning algorithms to more and more data to build an Artificial Intelligence). The administrators of the system feel that these micro-systems (individual consciousness) will correct themselves with enough experiential data and does not see a need to move certain individuals into a different time-perception afterlife with slightly different rules.

When a micro-system takes longer to be fixed or takes more tinkering, then it goes to purgatory, where it can be worked on at a different rate, removed from the stimuli that exposes its bugs, before being re-incorporated back into the normal system with the hope that it will eventually evolve to heaven. This would be another use for reincarnation as well. When returned from a period in limbo the micro-system returns to normal experiential time and goes through another round of testing to be proven worthy of heaven.

Hell, then, is a place where current code or system performance is incapable of fixing the code embodied in a micro-system and therefore needs to wait for the capabilities of the system itself (rising level of universal consciousness) to be upgraded before these digital souls can be re-incorporated into the normal system to ultimately evolve to reach heaven. Another possibility may be that in the future the system reaches a state where it becomes capable of upgrading all code to perfection for inclusion into heaven without the need for each micro-system to go back through the other levels in order to achieve heavenly status. This system level upgrade would simultaneously upgrade all the code contained in the micro-systems and fix any bugs system wide, resulting in the instantaneous evolution of the entire system.

In this system analogy, heaven is the waiting place for perfect code that should no longer be tinkered with. It is locked down and waits in perfection for the rest of the digital souls to be perfected before transmigrating to the next level of reality.

Seen in this way, only a higher order consciousness is aware of these levels of the system. While immersed in each level of consciousness (hell, purgatory, heaven and even reincarnation) the digitized soul is not aware of the larger system processes at work or the dilation or constriction of time depending on the situation. Let’s focus for a minute on time dilation for this was something that particularly disturbed me while watching episodes of Black Mirror such as Black Museum, White Christmas, and Play Tester.

In these episodes, months, years and even centuries of perceptual time could pass for the person in the simulation, while only a moment passed in the higher reality. In one case (White Christmas) the consciousness was made to believe that it had been in a room for 5 years. His interrogator used this warping of perceptual time to make the accused feel the guilt of 5 years, which then enabled him to solicit a confession. In, Play Tester, someone was placed in a horror game (hell) for what seemed like hours when only microseconds had passed. This made me equate the various level of the afterlife with the various perceptions of time. Even the most mundane of situations can become torturous if made to do over and over again for what feels like eternity.

Code that could not be upgraded or fixed would be placed in hell where time moved the slowest. We can say that this is also punishment for not learning to fix themselves or being unwilling to learn or change. If we remove punishment from this state of hell it still serves a purpose. Code could be placed there because it cannot be fixed given the current state of the system. It must wait for a system-wide upgrade to occur because the algorithms, consciousness level, or technology present in the platform is not currently capable of fixing the code of this micro-system. In this fashion, salvation from hell or even the other levels of reality, is the result of “Divine Grace” because the micro-system does not do anything to deserve ascension to heaven or beyond. It is the improved capabilities of the system which accomplish this on behalf of the micro-system.

In the next level of reality, limbo or purgatory, time moves a little faster, not yet at the speed of the universal system clock. Purgatory contains code that can be fixed but needs to be placed in a walled garden to be worked on. Once fixed, it will be tested in the normal reality system and moved to heaven or may experience multiple lives (reincarnation) on its evolutionary journey. But according to administrative consciousness that runs the simulation, the bugs have been fixed and this micro-system that is now on the karmic wheel has been designated as capable of achieving consciousness (code, micro-system) perfection using current individual and system capabilities.

Heaven moves on a much slower time compression clock where each moment of perceptual time occurs in years or thousands of years in the Universal System. This code has fulfilled its purpose and is waiting for universal consciousness to evolve and move to the next order of reality and be included in the larger macro-system that exists beyond this one. A being in heaven experiences only a moment of perfection during this millennial universal evolutionary process before it joins its fellow evolved counterparts and is released into the ultimate heaven or the next level of the system.

Examination of this analogy brings us to some important perennial questions, which I believe is the whole purpose of examining the analogy in the first place. Questions like: What are we here for? If this reality is an illusion why do we need to strive to get to the next level? Let’s look at this the way it is described in, A Course in Miracles. In the philosophy presented in the Course all humanity is a son/daughter of God, a much larger consciousness. However, we have forgotten our true identity. That does not separate us from the perfection and grace of God. Instead, through our desire to experience separation from God (which is physically impossible within the metaphysics of the Course for it disobeys the law of God) we must experience this in an illusory manor; a simulation. Through our own warped desires to experience separation, to be more than, different than, better than, (the sin of pride that removed Satan from God’s grace) we created a bubble universe still attached to God but not able to experience Him directly. Paraphrasing the Course materials, we cannot experience two realities, one of separation and one of perfect singularity. We must choose at some level, to either experience the reality of God, or the reality of illusion. To create a thought picture for this idea, imagine that God is a perfect sphere containing all that is contained in one perfect eternal moment. To experience separation, we created a bubble on the surface of that sphere (a simulation that could be analogous to a computer system simulation or game) creating the perceptual universe. To fully experience separation, we created bodies and a universe to live in. To be reintegrated back into the sphere of God every sentient being must come to a realization of who and what they are in order to reestablish oneness and pop the bubble. This will return us to a state of full awareness of ourselves and God. To do this God may utilize other means of communication that are designed to help us along the way. Reincarnation, hell, purgatory, and heaven could be possible means of achieving this.

Another topic that comes under scrutiny when we examine a digital afterlife is the concept of judgement and the nature of consciousness. If we believe that we are judged before being sentenced to one of these areas, then there has to be a means by which we are judged. Various religions offer different means of passing judgement based on concepts such as sin, good deeds, worship, grace, etc. forming a type of spiritual currency in which your life is weighed against these ideals. Too much sin and not enough good deeds, and you go to Hell. Somewhere in the middle you go to purgatory and so on. In ancient writing, such as the Egyptian Book of the Dead, the heart was weighed against that of a feather, and if the heart was heavy with sin, then you were judged to have had a bad life. But without going into the various iterations of the judgement play, let’s look at the how of judgement and its relation to our beliefs about consciousness.

If we believe that consciousness is an emergent phenomenon that rises from the functioning of our biological system, then how, once we have died, can we be judged? What is the mechanism? If we delve into this, we can see that at a very basic level we believe that consciousness can exist separate from the body. Our belief in judgement, existence after death, planes of existence after death, and even reincarnation, point to an unconscious belief in the persistence of individual consciousness after death. And it must be individual if we are to be judged, for it is not the consciousness field that is being judged, and it is not the biological mechanisms that acted as the vessel for consciousness that is being judged. In most religious scenarios, it is the individual consciousness, it intent, and the acts it perpetrated, that are judged.

What then is the mechanism for the act of passing judgement? In the weighing of the heart ritual in the Egyptian Book of the Dead, we could almost think of the heart as having the hardware to continue to read the data in the morphic field that applies to this individual or may act as local storage for the individual data points that only pertain to this individual (metadata) and can be seen in context of the larger universal consciousness. However, in these scenarios it is still not the biology that is being judged, but the persistent data that exists after death. In this system both Ka (spirit, body double) and Ba (personality) is reborn. And in many occidental concepts of the afterlife this thought also persists in the belief that we are reborn into representations of our physical bodies (Netflix’s Altered Carbon genetic copies) with our individual perspectives (personalities).

Judgement is important here. If we continue with the digital system analogy and state that to be in hell you have proven to be “buggy” code that needs to wait for an update to the system to be fixed, then that judgement needs to be correct and based on some objective measurement used by the higher order system. On the reverse side, to be in heaven you must have attained a state of system level perfection otherwise if you enter the afterlife with your individual personality, and it is not perfect, then a mistake in judgement could destroy the perfection of heaven, corrupting the entire system.

In the Tibetan Book of the Dead consciousness enters a series of Bardo states (intermediate states) after the death of the body. Rituals are performed that are expected to guide the consciousness to achieve the next state of either rebirth or nirvana. These rituals imply that there is a certain type of awareness or linkage that occurs with the consciousness of this dimension and that of the other Bardo states and nirvana. This is another example of how consciousness can be guided by a higher order consciousness (guru, angels, god) to help our consciousness either evolve to a higher state (heaven) or to place us in another vessel (reincarnation) that will allow us to climb the spiritual ladder to this goal state.

Our beliefs in an afterlife and what these states could mean for us ultimately reflects our beliefs about the meaning of our lives. It makes us define who and what we are and what our purpose is. If we don’t believe that life persists in some fashion or that our actions here don’t have some type of universal, eternal significance then it’s — eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow you shall die — time. But in my informal polling, even atheists, if prodded, will conclude that something goes on after physical death. Very few believe in the nihilist’s view that we were born of nothing, come to nothing, and to nothing we return, resulting in the belief that there is no purpose to life.

So what does this examination tell us? If nothing else, we have a core belief in the persistence of consciousness. That at some level we have an individual consciousness or view of the universal consciousness that is unique and is capable of being judged. That judgment can be viewed in computer system terms as a timeline for correcting micro-system code, with progress towards ultimate perfection being measured by beings outside the system (angels, demons, gods) who utilize tools to prod us up the ladder or put us aside until they have built the proper tools to elevate us. But it is all with a belief in the evolution of consciousness.

One of the most common conceptions of hell comes from Dante, in which we actually see levels where people are placed on a level of hell based on the category of their primary sin. However, here there is no concept of working towards redemption or moving up the levels, which is what I’m implying would be the true goal of an evolutionary consciousness system. However, with the belief in ultimate salvation based on the return of the messiah and a final judgement, there are certain levels of hell where ultimately there will come a time of salvation. This is analogous to my concept of hell where the system is currently unable to account for the defects of those residing at a certain level. For instance, there are some souls that exist in hell because they had not been exposed to the teachings of Jesus (unbaptized virtuous pagans). This did not make them immoral, but at the same time the Christian Religious view stated that these souls could not go to heaven without the saving grace of the blood of Christ. In this view, when the ultimate judgement occurs, and the souls of these sinners can be washed in the blood of Christ, they too will have access to heaven. In the computer analogy this would be an upgrade to the system which now allows for the correction of the code that is sitting on these levels of hell.

At the center of Hell, having committed the ultimate sin of treachery against God, we have Satan. This has a twofold implication to me, for Satan was also said to suffer from the sin of pride. It is his pride that invokes his treachery. Is this not a symbol to show that at some point we have to give up our infatuation with ego? That to move on we must be willing to concede that what is important about us from a universal perspective is not necessarily the thing that we identify with today (the ego and body)? Our biology gives us access to consciousness and the ability to perceive the universe from a unique perspective but that becomes data. Once that experience is saved the need for the hardware becomes minimal. Yet in many ways this is what we identify ourselves with, the hardware.

Reincarnation. Let’s then look at a techno version of this concept as displayed in the Netflix show, Altered Carbon, where human consciousness, habits and experience can simply be downloaded into sleeves (other bodies) as a vessel for consciousness. In some cases (if you have the money) you can get into an attractive, athletic body, with the ability to house your consciousness or even extend it. For cheap, you may get an older woman in a psychiatric institute incapable of speech. The idea is that you get to move on. But even with awareness of your previous reincarnations, doesn’t your experience now change based on the sleeve you are wearing? Doesn’t your perspective change? And doesn’t this change in perspective now color all the experiences you have had in your other sleeves? In many ways our bodies curtail or curate our experiences. Our particular hardware gives us access to different experiences and potentially even different modes of consciousness. Don’t we say that some people are more empathetic or more tuned into the emotions of others? Couldn’t this be thought of as a capability that arises from hardware sensitivity?

The one issue that arose for me while watching this show was that you could live forever provided you could continue to find sleeves or you were ultimately backed up to the cloud and could stay there in perpetuity waiting for another sleeve. However, this was expensive. Therefore, in most cases if you damaged your consciousness module, that was it, you were now truly dead. Again, we have this concept of digitized consciousness. However, in following the work of Sheldrake, Lipton and others, there is a general theory that our consciousness is tied to our biology. That our bodies were made to specifically receive inputs and outputs from and for our individual consciousness, that the two are part of a unit in this reality. Altered Carbon, however, does not see it that way. In the Altered Carbon World, the downloaded consciousness can be input into any biological system capable of sustaining and performing the activities of that consciousness. There are minimal system requirements, but an exact match is not needed.

Most belief systems that include reincarnation believe it occurs at birth. In this case a consciousness could be reprogrammed for the body that is going to receive it. The consciousness and the biology are re-keyed to each other. If we start to see biology as an organ of sensation that gives perspective and perception to consciousness we see how these two are married. In Altered Carbon this is not the case. The sleeve has only to meet the minimum requirements and neither the consciousness nor body must be reprogrammed for the two to reside together. In the metaphysics of the show maybe that is the point: If we can evolve our consciousness to fluidly occupy other bodies and gain insights from different modes of perception and feeling, then maybe we have evolved to a point where we can occupy evolved bodies in the next order of reality or live as different life forms in remote galaxies.

If we are to continue with the metaphysics implied by Altered Carbon, then we may begin to think that consciousness holds primacy and that our biology is just a shell. Is this a move in the right direction if we believe the ultimate goal is the evolution of consciousness? In the context of the show it doesn’t seem to be. There is crime, poverty, inequality. Money is the holy grail in the world of Altered Carbon. It not only purchases power but various modes of immortality, from the ability to re-sleeve into other sleeves, re-sleeve into genetic replica’s of your personal sleeve, backup consciousness to the cloud for re-sleeving, and even the illegal act of double or multiple sleeving. The show doesn’t seem to paint a picture whereby the ability to re-sleeve is contributing to consciousness evolution. But why? There are a few reasons. First and foremost, there is a disrespect for the body in most cases. It is a shell that is only valued for its utility and that utility has a price tag. There is no karmic system where biology functions as teacher. You may have disorders or challenges that give you a certain perspective in a karmic reincarnation system, but in the show, you only want to upgrade to a newer better model, which only the rich can afford. Strangely enough this focuses on the material; more money, better sleeve, better life. A focus on consciousness evolution is completely lost with this focus on the external. The only time there seemed any appreciation for the body is if the consciousness knows they can’t afford a new one. Consciousness seems to be cheapened once the biology is nothing but a container for a consciousness and that container has no unique value. There is no love for others or an appreciation of their uniqueness which I feel our specific hardware gives us. It gives us a unique perspective that is tied to the specific functions of our individual biology. It does make us special. We may all be part of a common field of infinite possibilities but no one else will see it from my unique vantage point, with my unique state of awareness. No one will collapse the wave function in the same way as I, and then feel about it the way I do. This is missing from the sleeve economy.

Then there is also double sleeving where you can copy your consciousness into multiple bodies. Is one more important than the other? Each shares the same original consciousness. Once multi-sleeved the consciousness and experience line will now fork. At some point do these various forks converge in the higher order reality? Is the copy the same as the original or since they are all technically copies, does it even matter, and what is the importance of consciousness once this can occur? This may be the reason that this is considered an illegal act in the show. Because multi-sleeving not only cheapens biology but consciousness. There are many counter cultures in the show that express the idea that sleeving has cheapened human experience and human life, which implicitly cheapens consciousness. For this reason, the law against multi-sleeving seems almost a last-ditch effort to save and deify at least some aspect of humanity.

But what is the purpose of examining these myths and creating new allegories for these various planes of the afterlife? We live by the stories we tell, the ones we believe, the ones we tell ourselves. But in many ways those myths have grown stagnant and seem to have no place in our modern lives, which tends to remove their importance. But these concepts should continue to offer us food for thought, forcing us to examine the purpose of our lives. Some may believe that this digital allegory cheapens our existence. In one episode of Black Mirror, a character likened the deletion of an annoying, pestering, consciousness, to deleting an email, nothing more. When viewed in that sense, then yes, the experiences we collect and the perceptions we store as consciousness are cheapened. But in the allegory I am putting forth, this is the quintessential data. It is the diamond that is sought after and preserved. There is nothing more important than the collection of perceptual experience of the individual because that individual was specifically designed to experience a certain aspect of this reality with a unique perspective which cannot be recreated. This is important. This makes us, and our thoughts and experiences of prime importance.

I also believe, that if we do not incorporate technology and the new ideas of science and metaphysics into our mythology then we will begin to live unexamined lives. We will not create new stories about what happens to us after death, and we will forget how unique and important we are. This is just one example of how we can take a fresh look at perennial ideas and concepts. This may not only allow us to carry these ideas into a new era but may also allow us to have a new appreciation for technology and what it could mean. We do not have to see robots, artificial intelligence, virtual reality, as enemies. Once we start to incorporate our very human stories into the technologies we build they take on a new reality. Let us not forget that we are building them, we use them, but they seem so alien and separate from us because they have not yet been incorporated into the human story. Technology is an extension of us, of our creativity. But technology is very real. We rely on it in our daily lives, we have started to incorporate it into our bodies, we have faith in it when we allow it to direct us to our destination or search for the closest restaurant, or pump blood through our bodies. We allow it to entertain us, and in the future will allow it to augment us and be intimately tied into our biology and neurology, allowing it to drive us, teach us, care for us, pleasure us.

How much more intimate can you get? And yet there is still this separation, and I believe that separation is caused by the fact that we have not let it infiltrate our metaphysics, subconscious or mythology. We place it in a different category, in many ways we don’t have a respect for it. We have not let it yet become a part of our human story. So we must ask ourselves: What if we suddenly started to see digital reality as our chance at immortality, at improving our ability to raise our consciousness and reach new levels of experience? Can it then become a part of our story, the way Dante, Hell, Heaven, and the various mythologies of religion have become part of our story? That is when technology becomes human. Our creation, our child, which we hope will grow and prosper and show us new aspects of ourselves we never thought possible, rising to levels we didn’t even know existed. Technology is the microscope we created to get a deeper and more holistic view of ourselves and what it means to be human. If we fear it, it is because we fear ourselves. And maybe we have a right to be afraid. Maybe we won’t be able to evolve until we can truly face ourselves in the mirror that technology holds up to us. AI powered robots destroying the world, taking over jobs, running our lives, etc. These are all human fears that we project into our technology and if we continue on the material, territorial path, then we will actually create the things we fear the most, super powerful versions of ourselves.

As our technology grows we need to stop and think, not just about what we are doing and why, but also what these new revelations say about us as humans and the reality we live in. That may be the biggest revolution to result from this. In the process of attempting to re-create consciousness, virtual realities, artificial intelligence, an analysis of the process and what it has to say about us may reveal the epiphany hiding in the sleeve.

Enjoy!

References:

My Big TOE: Book 1: Awakening by Thomas Campbell https://www.my-big-toe.com/store1/book-1-awakening-paperback/

The Presence of the Past: Morphic Resonance and the Habits of Nature by Rupert Sheldrake

Chaos Creativity, and Cosmic Consciousness by Rupert Sheldrake, Terence McKenna, Ralph Abraham

The Biology of Belief: Unleashing the Power of Consciousness, Matter and Miracles by Bruce Lipton

A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking

The Physics of Immortality by Frank J. Tipler

Physics of the Soul: The Quantum Book of Living, Dying, Reincarnation, and Immortality by Amit Goswami

The Self-Aware Universe by Amit Goswami

A Course in Miracles by Dr. Helen Schucman

Videos:

Tom Campbell and Bruce Lipton: Two Scientist “See the same world.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BjDQzCq6FdM

Alan Moore – Comics & The Occult – 2007 Interview https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SW6uWus1c4w

Nassim Haramein – Sacred Geometry and Unified Fields https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_KU1CsFVctQ

Nassim Haramein 2015 – The Connected Universe https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tbE5bVl8r2g&t=2507s

Unified Field Physics and a New Vision of Reality https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQf2iPbCq8U

Understanding the Uncertainty Principle with Quantum Fourier Series | Space Time https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=izqaWyZsEtY&t=729s

Quantum Entanglement and the Great Bohr-Einstein Debate | Space Time | PBS Digital Studios https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tafGL02EUOA&t=695s

Black Mirror by Netflix https://www.netflix.com/title/70264888

Altered Carbon by Netflix https://www.netflix.com/title/80097140