By John Townley, November 2014

In part one, we introduced the idea of the block universe and temporal dimensionality in general and suggested the myriads of mysteries it might explain, particularly in astrological practice...so here's a look...

The most crucial place where termporal dimensionality would be of use in astrology is in progressions, a reliable technique that appears to have no physical basis whatsoever. The idea that the rotation of the earth (a day) should be directly and apparently arbitrarily connected to the revolution around the Sun (a year) seemingly is tenuous, though one could initially be an overtone of the other. They overlap in real time (meaning simultaneously) hardly at all and should have little or no connection to each other. Yet, as any astrologer knows, progressions of planetary positions long past (in the first few months of childhood) regularly depict developments in the present and future through old age right up to a life's end (barely past a century for individual humans, but it also works for longer-lived entities such as nations). It appears to be a very precise form of time-forward resononce that needs a more concrete foundation.

But in a block-universe with mutliple temporal dimensions, everything is connected, just like architecture. The smallest short life sub-cycles are connected to the largest cosmological cycles rather like varying sizes of arches in a cathedral or viaduct, in which the smaller are included in the larger and in fact quantitatevely comprise it ultimately. That's completely logical, and easy to say, but rather hard to envision and wrap your mind around. Perhaps a good image would be something like the fractal illustration above, where earlier spiral cycles (planetary orbits are spiral even in ordinary space/time) are not only self-simular and reapeat each other, they mirror across scale (as from days to years in the day=year progression equivalency) and in fact are connected by a myriad of connected and associated nearby manifestations which lead back and forth to each other. So, you could in your mind's eye "walk" directly from a halfway point of a shorter cycle to the halfway point of the next larger one, like walking across the roofline of a cathedral or bridge. Because in multi-dimensional temporality our shorter cycle of rotation moves inside our larger cycle of revolution, one leads spirally into another and they connectedly overlap, and in an already-there block universe they are connected spatially as well.

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If we looked at space that way, our problem of getting a handle on all of this is scale, since the real meaning of "as above, so below" is not simply that one, larger set of cyclical (or spiral) operations entrains the next one down in physical and temporal size, but that the whole shebang is a self-similar set of shapes that "echo" or imitate each other (if you're stuck on one-dimensional time description) and in fact are simply all one larger structure that can be "touched" along all of its surfaces, which are themselves contiguous...and which we may call serial or parallel depending on where and how we're connecting with it. The image of fractally-evolving universes suggests both the dream of Vishnu in the sea of milk, and the venerable "bubbles in a champagne glass" metaphor now so popular among recent multiverse proponents.

Further, it also goes a long way to letting known quantum phenonmena seem less mysterious. In a temporally 3-D universe, the idea of a wave collapsing into a particle isn't such a mystery, as they are both elements of the same structure. And it becomes perfectly acceptable that two particles far apart in space could be revealed as instantaneously connected because, in fact, they literally are bisymmetrical parts of the same structure. Our greatest struggle is getting our heads around scales that are so beyond the ones we're designed to operate on here in our middle-sized mesocosm.  Our neurochemsitry at this meso-level can't see/experience/process that a glacier isn't a static chunk, but a flowing river, or even see the much-faster (but still too slow) daily dance of flowers following the Sun. The best we can do is time-lapse photography or computer simulation, and those only recently. And at the other end, while we've managed to corral things moving faster than we can see, like the pixels on a TV set, they blend into a larger something that has little to do with what's happening at their closer-to-atomic level. Indeed, what we may think we may be seeing, based on the intermittent rolling snapshots our brain is forced to work with, could be (and often is) an illusion that could either entrance or kill us, without our least expecting it or knowing why.

 Temporally, we suffer from what Flatlanders did spatially, and we're really Linelanders, but sense and use more than that.

Spiral visions

And for one final excursion into the possibilities of scaled planetary cycles, here's a thought: perhaps the information we seem to take isn't inside it at all, but an exterior message we read as we pass, like that rolling circle the Flatlanders saw. A number of astrologers (notably A.T. Mann) and many New Age cosmologers have been noticing the obvious -- that the planetary cycles aren't literally circular but are spiral, since the whole system is proceeding along as a piece -- and that somehow links to the more static but spiral shape of the DNA molecule, where the genetic information is contained in little segments along the spiral. Although this may well be comparing apples and oranges, the Flatland temporal version of the moving planetary paths might look a bit like the cloud chamber photo with its spirals and curlicues, at the microscale. And the cyclical but branching march of evolution through the eons could look a bit similar, too.

But for a  totally different take: A couple of decades ago I had a dream where I saw a great tubelike set of spirals twisting along, with other spirals inside each, but uniquely as the individual components moved forward (left to right) and circled in and out of sight and around each other and within their individual spirals and sub-spirals that comprised the greater whole, they spelled out changing, readable messages on the side, rather like scrolling advertising lights on the Goodyear blimp over a sports stadium. In this case, the message generated within could only be understood from afar, and from a certain angle.  And then who knows what someone on the opposite side might be reading, or the pilot and crew inside...? Obviously, there's more to discover, both real and imagined...

P. S. Like the evocative spiral artwork at the top, which we adapted for an illustration to help visualize 3D time? The artist (AJIL) has a variety of reproductions in different formats available here. For a discount, use the code word: spiral.

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