Welcome back to Gnostic Insights. This week’s episode is an unusual treat for you. It’s not particularly “gnostic” if you only peg gnosticism onto ancient manuscripts. But if you realize that understanding the nature of space and time is itself gnosis, then you will understand why this week’s episode is important. So, put on your thinking cap and open up your mind because we’re going to look at some interesting facets of quantum mechanics and how, exactly, it relates to consciousness and free will. It’s a short episode–you have time to listen to it twice if needed. Here goes… My brother, Bill, and I love to ponder the nature of time, space, and reality. This week we discussed an article printed in The Essential List newsletter put out by the BBC called “ The bizarre quantum paradox of ‘negative time ‘. We recognized that the theory called “block universe” described in the article is exactly what I have been calling the Cherry-Jello-universe. I’ve written about this block universe in two previous articles and one podcast episode. Here’s the original blog post: A Simple Explanation of Consciousness and Time: Our Cherry-Jello Universe It’s been a very long time since I developed any new concepts to add to A Simple Explanation, spending the past couple of years concentrating instead on the Gnostic Gospel . So my longtime readers may be very happy to see this new posting featuring the torus, consciousness, and Jello? Yesterday my brother and I were musing over the nature of time–what is it exactly? It isn’t a thing , it is nowhere to be located. Is it therefore a force ? This was my response. I have long thought of the universe in this fashion, but I had never written it down or even shared it with my brother until after our phone call. He flipped out over it. Let’s see what you think… A Giant Bowl of Jello Here is how I picture time, space, and consciousness — We live in a Jello universe–a gigantic, torus-shaped, bowl of gelatin, studded with an infinite number of cherries. The Jello is the matrix that holds everything that ever was or will be. It is the ground state. The cherries are every thing that ever were or will be–all potential events, all potential objects. An infinite array of cherries already laid out as unrealized potential. Consciousness is each spark of life/consciousness making its free will way through this vast ocean of Jello. Time can only be apprehended through consciousness; time is nowhere to be found if there is no observer. The cherries are the full panoply of choices we could make along the way. Our free will chooses to swim this way and that as it moves toward the next cherry of choice. This free will is swimming from the middle of the torus in the direction of the outside boundary of the giant torus. All of these cherries are being held within the shape of the torus—the doughy part of the donut. Every lifetime is the trace of the worm-like path our consciousness chooses as it travels through the universe of cherries. In a real sense, the entirety of all of our lives is already conceived in potential. It is our self-awareness and free will that plod along at the speed of matter as we live our lives out as a linearity of passing time. My brother, the professor of Philosophy, notes that this way of looking at time and consciousness may have just solved one of the longstanding conundrums of philosophy. That is, how can we reconcile the concept of an all-knowing God if we subjects have free will? The answer presented by this model is that the all-knowing God has pre-placed all possible choices before us, but it is our individual free will that plots the course through these choices. This combination of potential versus choice reflects our free will. That’s it. Of course, the Jello salad pictured above is not to scale. The gelatin donut would be infinitely large, and the cherries very very small–probably zero-point fields. I asked the Copilot AI to illustrate a torus with a tiny center hole studded with small red dots throughout. It couldn’t make the small hole torus, and the dots are outside rather than inside, but it’s a start. Imagine these choice-cherries distributed throughout the interior of the torus. Here are the new thoughts prompted by the article in The Essential List newsletter put out by the BBC called “ The bizarre quantum paradox of ‘negative time ‘. According to the article, Emily Adlam of Chapman University says: “retrocausality is a hypothetical (and philosophically controversial) model of existence, where all moments in time–past, present, and future–exist in a four-dimensional object. “If this block is filled with every event that ever has or will happen, then it’s easier to see how some hypothetical influence could pass between particles within it, says Adlam. To e
