OTHER SELVES
The DMRI has discovered several ways for people to make contact with other selves. The first involves treating one's life story as a text and reading it from different narrative perspectives in order to experience different selves (an alternate self is experienced when observing one's life story from a second-person narrative perspective; a higher self is experienced from a third-person perspective; and the complete dissolution of the ego is experienced in the extremely rare instances of a zero- or fourth-person narrative being achieved).
Stephen Moles has explored the idea of making contact with an alternate self in his book Paul is Dead (published by CCLaP), which proposes that a life story composed of binary terms (on/off, real/fake, alive/dead) becomes different simply through repetition if the number of digits is odd (ie. if a cycle of on/off/on is repeated, the first on will become the offbeat the second time around). This switching between parallel perspectives is made possible by a helical or circular model of time (both of which make more sense than a linear one). Whenever a human being looks at a slice of the Tree of Meaning in an attempt to see their life story in it, they also see the rings of nature's calendar and the spiral timeline which connects the annual circles, rather than the straight lines or boxes found on man-made calendars. If we assume that time moves in a spiral, then moments in the distant past or distant future (located a whole turn of the spiral away from the present) are actually closer than the near past or near future... |
If A represents fifty years, then five years in the future (point B), is actually further away than ten years in the future (represented by C, the sixty-year point) because A and C are temporal neighbours. Once the "syntax of selves" and the spatial relations of temporal points are understood, they can be utilised in various creative experiments, one of which is the opening up of a bookwormhole... |