On any given day, a small handful of people find their way to the eye of paradox. Some of them probably just glance at an article to see if it’s relevant to the search that brought them here. One or two might actually read something.

Once in a blue moon, someone leaves a short comment.

Taken all together, I do not see anything to indicate that my words mean much. Is that frustrating?

A little.

I think it only bothers me because I have so much on my mind all the time, and there seems to be little or nothing I can do with it. I have to ask myself, what am I really accomplishing here?

I’ve said it before, I tend to write in the hope of provoking a little thought, usually because the inspiration to write is interesting in itself. I do not expect anyone else to find the result as interesting; partly because it is hard to capture a thought perfectly in words.

I am not a thousand-word-a-minute typist and yet I seem to think a million miles a minute. I am not a linear thinker. My thoughts are more like a library in a hurricane.

I have never really been able to explain it, but it’s what I mean when I talk about higher-dimensions of thought. The problem with that terminology is that we would all probably assign the dimensions differently, based on the way we think.

I suspect that a lot of us think things out in words as a general rule, that good old internal dialogue. I have one, but it’s only one part of how I process information.

I think that most of what I think cannot really be put into words.

Seriously, I find it easier to think in worlds.

Every instant my brain is processing sensory data to assemble an endless stream of consciousness that ties what I perceive in the moment with things I have perceived in the past, things I imagine, things I have conceptualized, things I have analyzed, things I have articulated, things I intuit and things I have only imagined.

I have this notion that I ought to be an author because stories come to me in bursts of instantaneous thought.

The problem is that it takes so long to fully articulate one I will have conceived of a thousand variations in the time it takes to block out the basics of the one I started with. The sheer number of options and variations overwhelms me.

I don’t find it surprising, however.

This is what our brains evolve to do; in life we only get one chance to get anything right, and there are a lot of times when a mistake will cost you your life. When faced with a challenge, we automatically engage the imagination and run through as many simulations as our intelligence and attention allow.

A good view of the future requires at least seven dimensions of thought. Our base line of reference is four dimensional (working in three spatial dimensions and one temporal dimension) and we have to be able to project that image forward to assess the consequences of our actions through to positive, neutral and negative outcomes.

The future is not on a straight line.

Neither is the past, really.

An individual has no problem seeing history as a line running back through events, but there is such a line for every person and every object involved in every interaction.

The past that we perceive is not the only past.

For any given instant, there is a conceivable alternate path leading up to it, though usually the only people who are aware of this are people involved in reconstructing events.

To a lesser degree, anyone who mulls over the days of their lives will notice the variable paths within the repeating cycle. You can stop, while walking down the street and suddenly put yourself on the other side of the street in some memory.

It is one of the reasons we like routine. The more times we go through a sphere of activity, the better we understand the possibilities of acting in that sphere.

We use it to maintain a hypersphere of potential activity.

We use something similar in the mastery of our own bodies. At any given moment, there is only one position we can be in, but we are aware of all the positions we can move to just in the limits of our own bodies.

In a sense, you could say that this is the real difference between the physical nature of something and the spiritual nature. We can only ever see one instance of an object, but that one instance contains the potential of every instance of that object.

When you can look at an old man and see the little boy he once was, that is a very spiritual perception.

The funny thing is that we have run into this same thing in quantum physics, the notion that things have potential that exceeds what can be manifested at any given point.

In the mind, we can hold onto everything at once, seeing nothing but aware of it all, and pull whatever we want into focus in an instant.

I really don’t find it surprising that reality is pretty much the same way. We work constantly to bring the world into focus, we are in a constant process of realization, learning about changes in the world and updating our own internal representation accordingly.

This is how we maintain our grip on the universe, and also how the universe maintains its grip on us. Or, this is how we maintain our grip on ourselves. T

his is a good spot to focus on if you take the question “who am I?” seriously enough.

This is where I ended up after years of asking that question in an attempt to determine if it was who I am or what I am that makes me “me”.

I came to the same conclusion the characters in the Matrix did, the body cannot live without the mind. Perhaps that is an indication of gestalt consciousness, an indication that the mind is more than the sum of the body’s parts?

I am still thinking on that.

In the meantime, while I find myself in the universe’s grip, there is an omniverse of information in my grip. I am holding the universe in a firm mental grip, but at the same time I am holding on to many, many more in my thoughts.

Of course, I might just be apprehending the possibilities of the universe that would be found in higher dimensions.

What kind of sense organ would be able to perceive higher dimensions? I do it in my mind constantly, so I would be inclined to say the brain is that sense organ, as I rush along in the wake of intuition, chased by thoughts of perception being our key to acting in our environment.

I grasp all of the implications of movement in higher dimensions of space and time and cannot keep up with the possibilities that seem to open themselves up.

I am riding on an epiphany, a realization of a universe that contains infinite potential. What kind of words could begin to describe it?

I struggle to find them, even now.

I struggle to find the time to think things through enough to achieve a less dizzying perspective. This is my true field of study, and all I can do is stand at the threshold and stare into it longingly.

The irony is, we’re all at this threshold.

It’s kind of like the best kept secret, because it’s hidden in plain sight. I think the only reason I noticed it is because I am too.