Unconditioned Conditions

     The real problem arises when we try to explain precognition. There is no way in which we can possibly grasp the notion that it is possible to see into the future. Our senses and our common sense tell us it is impossible. Yet hundreds of recorded cases of precognition assure us that our senses must be mistaken.
     John Bennett believed he had found the solution in the theory of a fifth dimension. In his autobiography Witness, he describes how he was fascinated by Einstein's hypothesis that the ether must be some kind of material substance with the apparently impossible property of travelling in all directions at once at the speed of light. He goes on:
     "The following evening at dusk, I was walking back to my office to finish some reports...when the solution struck me like an electric shock. In a moment of time, I saw a whole new world. The train of thought was too rapid for words, but it was something like this: 'If there is a fifth dimension not like space but like time, and if it is orthogonal [at right angles] to the space-time we knew, then it would have the required property. Any matter existing in that direction would appear from our standpoint to be travelling at the speed of light. And moreover it would travel in all directions at once. This must be the solution of Einstein's riddle. If so, the fifth dimention must be as real as the space and time we know. But the extra degree of freedom given by the fifth dimension opens all kinds of possibilities. It means that time is not unique, and that if there is more than one time, there is more than one future. If there are many times, there would be the possibility of choosing between them. In each line of time, there can be a strict causality, but by changing from one line to another we can be free. It is like a railway passenger; so long as he remains on one train his destination is decided in advance. But he can change the train at a junction and so decide his destination.
     With these notions flashing through my mind, I saw that my own free will and determination could be solved by the addition of a fifth dimension."
     Thhe reasoning here may seem obscure, but the conclusion is plain enough. As living creatures, we find ourselves confined in a world that appears to have four dimensions, three of space and one of time. Our science concerns itself with this world. But this 'real world', as grasped by reason, leaves no room for life, let alone freedom. We ought to be totally trapped in cause and effect. Yet I can reach up and scratch my nose or decide not to scratch it; I can decide whether to think about philosophy, sex or my dinner. There is no room for freedom in the real world, yet it exists. Stare at your face in a mirror until you have lost all sense of identity; suddenly, you are seized with horror at this strange face looking at you. You were living in your own innwer world of being and freedom and, suddenly, you are stranded in a world of objects in which freedom is an impossibility.
     This odd idea suggests another interesting conclusion. Einstein said that time must be the fourth dimension because you needed it to 'define' an event. I can say 'I'll meet you on the fifth floor of the building at the corner of Tenth Avenue and Twenty-Second Street'. and I have defined the place in terms of three dimensions; but if I forget to mention the time of the meeting, it may well never take place. If we think of the fifth dimension as our inner freedom, we might say: 'No event can be entirely defined in terms of four dimensions. For I may decide not to go to the meeting — exercising my freedom — in which case, it will still not take place, even though you have specified the other four co-ordinates.' And from your point of view, this element cannot be defined or fixed, for I might make any of a thousand different decisions. Think of a worm crawling across a cabbage leaf; it is virtually a creature of two dimensions; what lies over the next bump on the leaf does not yet exist. Yet as you look down on the leaf from above, you can say with confidence that the worm is shortly going to encounter a large caterpillar hole. Because the hole is already there, a definite place which can be defined in terms of certain co-ordinates.
     If we can imagine a being that is able to look down on our freedom from above — from some sixth dimension, so to speak — we can see that whatever we choose to do is also 'fixed'; like a hole, it is already there.
     But surely that destroys the whole idea of feedom? Not quite. Think again of the worm on the leaf. It it continues in a straight line, it will encounter the hole. But it may change its direction. It may decide to sit still. The only thing you can say with certainty is that it will not fly into the air, because it has no wings. So you  can easily outline all the possibilities that are open to it. And if it is moving in a straight line, you can choose one of them as by far the likeliest. Yet the worm remains 'free'.
— Colin Wilson, Mysteries, pp. 604-606.

     Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts. You need to start somewhere. Start by getting something — anything — down on paper. A friend of mine says that the first draft is the down draft — you just get it down. The second draft is the up draft — you fix it up. You try to say what you have to say more accurately. And the third draft is the dental draft, where you check every tooth, to see if it's loose or cramped or decayed, or even, God help us, healthy.
     What I've learned to do when I sit down to work on a shitty first draft is to quiet the voices in my head. First there's the vinegar-lipped Reader Lady, who says primly, "Well, that's not very interesting, is it?" And there's the emaciated German male who writes these Orwellian memos detailing your thought crimes. And there are your parents, agonizing over your lack of loyalty and discretion; and there's William Burroughs, dozing off or shooting up because he finds you as bold and articulate as a houseplant; and so on. And there are also the dogs: let's not forget the dogs, the dogs in their pen who will surely hurtle and snarl their way out if you ever stop writing, because writing is, for some of us, the latch that keeps the door of the pen closed, keeps those crazy ravenous dogs contained....
— Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird, pp. 25-26.

Once you have given up the ghost, everything follows with dead certainty, even in the midst of chaos. From the beginning it was never anything but chaos: it was a fluid which enveloped me, which I breathed in through the gills. In the substrata, where the moon shone steady and opaque, it was smooth and fecundating; above it was a jangle and discord. In everything I quickly saw the opposite, the contradiction, and between the real and the unreal the irony, the paradox. I was my own worst enemy.
— Henry Miller, Tropic of Capricorn, Opening lines, in Great Beginnings, Georgianne Ensign, p. 164.

Some years ago a book was published under the title of The Pilgrim's Scrip. It consisted of a selection of original aphorisms by an anonymous gentleman, who in this bashful manner gave a bruised heart to the world.
     He made no pretention to novelty. "Our new thoughts have thrilled dead bosoms," he wrote; by which avowal it may seem that youth had manifestly gone from him, since he had ceased to be jealous of the ancients. There was a half-sigh floating through his pages for those days of intellectual coxcombry, when ideas come to us affecting the embrace of virgins, and swear to us they are ours alone, and no one else have they ever visited: and we believe them.
— George Meredith, The Ordeal of Richard Feverel, Opening lines, in Ibid., p. 173.