12/22/21: IT’S A WONDERFUL SIMULATED LIFE W/ JASON QUITT
MONOLOGUE WRITTEN CLYDE LEWIS
Christmas is days away and while many people are waiting to see what they are getting for Christmas, many people are wondering what happened to it. This year more so than last, we are seeing that there are many Grinches that have again flexed their muscles of power to try an extinguish the holiday.
Sure, you will be able to take a few days off, but Christmas falls on a weekend and so it doesn’t count unless you can take weekdays off at work. Same thing will happen on New Year’s Day.
It will be a weekend of more odd weather, lockdowns and as President Biden has said “sickness and death.”
Oh, how cheerful this all sounds — hopefully, we can all escape this dark and foreboding winter by enjoying Holiday movies. I have already watched two of the most anticipated films of the holiday, and both of them deal with the idea that we live in a simulated world that is connected to a multiverse of possibilities.
Last night, Liam and I stayed up late so that we could watch the Matrix Resurrections movie. It was a surreal film that may have been a bit heavy for a late-night view and you can bet that I will watch it again to try and pick up on all of the nuances.
However, it is clear that the film has upgraded a number of ideas that again reinforce the idea that we live in a simulation that can easily be analyzed, and when we learn the truth about our existence in a monolithic sim game we can bend the universe to our desires.
The Matrix argues that what we need is to accept that reality is an illusion manufactured for us by powerful interests who are invested in keeping us from seeing how they don’t want anybody else to free their mind and realize that this is the secret to the conspiracy.
We see that it is important to learn from your dreams and stop thinking that you are crazy, if the world you live in appears to be different than the world others believe they are living in.
The Matrix Resurrections,” like every “Matrix” movie, is full of layers. Many of those layers are explained via dialogue, including a lot of lines that mean more than first meets the eye … or, well, ear. The trick is finding them.
As Neo again wishes to free the minds of those who are enslaved by the Machines, one of the characters says “people today don’t want to be free because they want certainty to be guaranteed.”
I am paraphrasing here but that rings true –which again makes this Matrix movie just as relevant as the others.
I am beginning to believe that the Revelation of the Method is that we will know for sure that there is a multiverse, that our lives do not end upon death and that we seem to have a choice in how we play the game.
Our choices create branches in time — and that everyone has many different experiences within a base existence in the timeline.
In fact, and hopefully no one sees this as a spoiler — there is a character that says “nothing comforts anxiety like a little nostalgia,” but it also has another say, “Hope and despair are almost identical in code.”
This hit me as I have been saying for some time that the key to destroying the divides in this country is to reach back into some agreed upon nostalgia where we all felt comfortable with each other– something that we can agree was a breakthrough that made us a strong country that reached for the stars.
I also agree that there is a fragile barrier between hope and despair and perhaps it takes a bit of open mindedness to realize that our lives are important and that we should fight to save what little humanity we have left.
It seems that in these times of despair there is a running theme in our entertainment and that is we all live in a simulation that can easily be changed – with the right programming.
Spider-Man: No Way Home embraces the concept of a Multiverse. Dr. Strange botches the spell intended to help Peter, and he inadvertently opens an interdimensional pathway, through which different universes can contact and interact with one another.
It was rather synchronistic that this was the plot of the film—because the night before I curled up with the cat and watched “It’s a Wonderful Life” a movie that kind of deals with the same idea — inviting the protagonist to see what life would be like if no one knew he existed.
They get to see the universe without them — and how they affect other people’s lives.
It’s a Wonderful Life as with many Christmas movies like, A Christmas Carol, have already shown us that a multiverse is a possibility and that there are many outcomes in many timelines where you the main character plays an integral part, while others can remain acausal beings that make no real impact on anyone or anything.
In the end, however, we learn that everything you do matters, and that what little you think you do has a major impact on the outcome of what is in the present.
It’s a Wonderful Life has certain resonances with A Christmas Carol. George is, like Scrooge, shown the impact he has on his friends, family, and neighbors through supernatural means.
But Scrooge is taken to a past and present where he exists (and then, of course, a future in which he doesn’t. He witnesses things of which he was already aware or could have been had he sought the knowledge. George is offered the chance to see what the world would entail had he never existed at all.
It seems that Spiderman No way Home, It’s a Wonderful Life and a Christmas carol explore the notions of the limits of divine involvement, the denial of free will, existential crisis, and the depths of evil as they appear within the story and how they affect not only one universe but many universes and many branches of the timeline.
Unbeknownst to even many film fans today, Frank Capra, the man who directed It’s a Wonderful ife was not only a pre-eminent cultural warrior who took every opportunity to expose fascist movements during the 1930’s and 1940’s but also fought to provide a positive principled understanding of the divinity mankind’s higher nature in all his works. When asked to put into words what motivated him to create movies he said:
“My films must let every man, woman, and child know that God loves them, that I love them, and that peace and salvation will become a reality only when they all learn to love each other”
During World War II, Capra’s, Why We Fight series was one of the most important educational tools used to shape the hearts and minds of the American population towards the strategic nature and purpose of the war against the fascist machine.
It is ironic that Capra had been a target of the House on Un-American Activities due to his friendship with many blacklisted film makers, and watched as Hollywood was purged of those key individuals who acted as it’s conscience when Hollywood’s role as a tool of patriotism or fascism was still undetermined.
Capra’s documentary, The Strange Case of Cosmic Rays illustrated his powerful technique that sought to unite science and art through a reverence for God’s creation which is in many ways as cutting edge today as it was 60 years ago.
It is obvious that Capra had an interest in science and scientific theorem in literature as in the film there are puppets that represent the thinkers that he most admired.
One of them was Charles Dickens.
When you stop to think what Charles Dickens was really illustrating in his story of Scrooge you would stop and ask if that maybe at least once a year you can go through the transition from feeling persecuted to opening your heart to the possibilities before you in the future.
It appears that in our time, the future is weakening us and our past and present are confusing us. Scrooge’s transformation was legendary, because he gave up his selfish attitudes when he realized that all of the knowledge, he thought he had was misguided.
Initially, Scrooge is a miser who shows a decided lack of concern for the rest of mankind. However, after a night of horrifying ghost appearances, Scrooge sees life in a whole new way.
In December of 1843 Dickens wrote:
“I have endeavored in this Ghostly little book, to raise the Ghost of an Idea, which shall not put my readers out of humor with themselves, with each other, with the season, or with me. May it haunt their houses pleasantly, and no one wish to lay it.”
A Christmas Carol is one of those scary ghost stories that was ahead of its time. Who would have thought that a Christmas story would include both ghosts and time travel in order to make a point about having to change in order to see progress.
Scrooge was shown his past, his present and a foreboding future where he would lie cold and unloved in a pauper’s grave.
I was thinking about Charles Dickens as I was reading about a new time travel theory that could explain why we experience magical moments in our lives.
It is called the ‘Many-Interacting Worlds Theory’ and it talks about stuff that science fiction movies are made of. Authored by Professor Howard Wiseman from Griffith University’s Centre for Quantum Dynamics, Dr. Michael Hall also from Griffith University’s Centre for Quantum Dynamics, and Dr. Dirk-Andre Deckert from the University of California, the theory claims that our universe is only one among many universes that exist.
Interestingly, these multiverses exist on the same space, on the same timeline, and occasionally interact when they bump into each other. Moreover, these other universes are also supposed to be governed by the same laws of physics that our universe follows. If this theory, presented through a paper published in the Physical Review X journal is correct, it means what we know about space and time is inaccurate, and that travelling through time is in fact, possible.
And so the concept of going back in time or going forward in time to change the present will no longer be just a movie plot but a very real scenario. And the world we know can easily become an altered version where dinosaurs still exist (because the historic giant asteroid missed our planet and struck some other universe) and the lost city of Atlantis is not a myth but a real city that still stands because the gigantic tsunami that was supposed to have buried it deep under water hit some other city.
The parallel universes can best be imagined as ‘ghost universes.’ The ‘ghost’ part is the fact that they exist, but they can’t be seen because they interact with our universe under conditions that we can only speculate about. Supposedly, the interaction happens through a force that acts on similar particles that exist within the different universes. However, the interaction is almost negligible that it can’t be noticed but is enough to explain how quantum mechanics work.
The psychological insights expressed in A Christmas Carol correspond to the insights into personal growth provided by quantum psychology, which is a combination of Eastern philosophy and Western science. Perhaps the most revolutionary insight is that talking about problems does not bring about transformation but hinders it. Dreams are produced solely by the unconscious mind and just as we dream in pictures, fundamental change emerges from communicating with the unconscious mind in the language it prefers – pictures. When we do, the brain responds immediately.
Another shared insight is the connection between personal growth and higher consciousness. Scrooge’s first ghost, Jacob Marley, who is Scrooge’s deceased business partner, introduces the subject of higher consciousness. He warns Scrooge that success in business is not enough: “Man was my business, charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence, were all my business.”
So also the changes that emerge with the practice of quantum techniques both improve our ordinary lives and bring about higher consciousness. For example, we become courageous, enjoy life and have satisfying relationships; we also become compassionate, spiritual beings, which are characteristics of higher consciousness.
Opening the mind up to magic and miracles at Christmas can raise our consciousness.
The magic spoken of during the Christmas season can now be interchangeable with quantum philosophy. That is of course if you are afraid that your character will be judged harshly for engaging in magical thinking.
As adults, we are certainly aware of the flaws in the conventional Santa Claus theory, but young children seem to accept it quite readily. The older children get the less gullible they are and require a more rigorous proof of his existence.
The answer to this problem lies in quantum theory and concepts that can only be explained using the theory that we live in a simulation and that there are many simulations happening all at once.
.The Multiverse is a collection of scientific theories, positing that there are multiple universes beyond the observable one. This theory has different explanations and underlying justifications, but the one we hear most about, at least in popular culture, is the “many worlds” interpretation. It’s based on quantum mechanics—the study of how things work on an atomic and subatomic level, and thus constitute reality.
The “many worlds” theory posits that for every cause, every possible effect occurs simultaneously. We can only observe one of those outcomes, but each of the other outcomes also occurs and splits into its own universe.
In one Universe, there is a George Bailey, Clarence the angel shows him a universe without George Bailey. In one Universe there is an Ebeneezer Scrooge — in a past timeline we see what effects Scrooge had on those around him, in the present we see what effects he has on those around him and eventually we see the outcome of one future where he dies alone –without friends. The moral is that you can change your timeline and your journey can lead you to a brighter and more prosperous future.
Even Spiderman has to learn that there is redemption in the multiverse but it comes with some sacrifice and many hard decisions.
Because contemporary psychology has no name for these experiences, we call them for lack of a better word, paranormal. However, many can see that it is quantum quickening that can allow these stories of fantasy to become reality outside of the classical physics model.
Unlike Scrooge seeing quantum shadows in time, George Bailey finds himself abruptly in a world in which he never existed, in a world in which the things he did were never done because he was not there to do them.
George Bailey, saved his brother from drowning, prevented the local pharmacist Mr. Gower from making a deadly error in filling a prescription, and marries his sweetheart Mary, saves the savings and loan association so the evil banker Mr. Potter won’t destroy the town, and in general makes sacrifices himself for the benefit of others.
It leads to a moment when that evil banker manages surreptitiously steal money needed to keep the savings and loan solvent, and George despairs of life. He would have committed suicide had the angel not intervened; throwing himself in the river so George would rescue him.
Then when George is blaming himself for the present crisis, Clarence changes the past such that George Bailey never lived. History has been changed; it was changed based on George’s wish, although George did not travel to the past to change it. Clarence changed the past; he did not travel to the past to do it, but he did reach back into the past and cause the change, based on information in the present.
It thus might be argued this is a grandfather paradox. George has not exactly killed his own grandfather, but he has undone his own existence, and now he does not exist to make the wish that does this. We ought to be trapped in an infinity loop, since undoing George’s existence undoes the reason for undoing it, and so undoes the undoing. In fact, if George was never born, he should not be able to know what the world would have been like without him.
It might be resolved by adopting a parallel dimension explanation: George has moved sideways into a universe in which he never existed, and then returns to his own universe after an hour or so of studying that world. It means that the bleak dreadful world without George Bailey also exists and he was able to be an acausal entity in a paralleled dimension seeing a world without him in it. Acausality is defined as the ability to exist outside of causality, or the natural flow of manipulating cause and effect. It has now been theorized that if you go back in time and kill an acausal being in the past or prevent the being from being born created, it will still exist in the present and other timelines. Often, even if an acausal being is killed in the present it can still survive by appearing from another timeline.
There are a few points in the story that might be challenged. Most of them concern the notion that the absence of George Bailey would not have been filled by someone else. Mr. Gower probably would have hired a different assistant, and that assistant might have recognized the mistake as easily as George.
Granted that Harry drowned, the air force would have had some other pilot in his place who might have been that Medal of Honor winner who rescued the men Harry was not there to save. Someone else might have saved the savings and loan. Mary might have married someone else. Still, it is not certain that anyone would have stepped into these roles, and the alternate history is at least credible.
Quantum philosophy and quantum change can open our minds to the idea that what little we do, can contribute a lot in the quantum picture.
The solution lies in Scrooge’s question: is this what will be, or what may be? Well the answer is that he is seeing a retro causal future which is the most probable future based on the present at the moment he leaves it. The information he receives alters the probabilities after that moment, and so the future is altered without changing the fact that at that moment in the past a different future was predicted.
Time, like a pretzel, will twist and turn and leave us with our mouths open at the quantum entanglements and synchronicities.
