“As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain, and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.”
When we begin to take immortality our perception of time changes. This is both a beautiful experience and a slightly disturbing one, as we use time to locate ourselves. On one hand we feel elated and free of the tyranny of time, the relentless marching to old age, decrepitude and death. On the other hand, we feel slightly dislocated as we are used to having time as a clock against which everything is referenced and measured.
Every day we interact with time – being on time, birthdays, being late, going to bed at a certain time and waking up at a certain time. Most interactions are governed by time as well. A movie lasts a certain amount of time. Our movie on this planet (most of us feel) will last 80, or perhaps more years if disease does not claim us first.
What happens when we take Immortality, is that we feel we are travelling back in time to an earlier version of ourselves. A time when we were vital and alive, and a time where aches and pains did not really exist. We watch our skin get softer, our pores get tighter and even our hair begin to grow again, so we cannot deny the process. Once we come to terms with this rather extraordinary state, we begin to accept we are actually growing younger and we begin to grapple with the implications.
Firstly, we might wonder, ‘what to do if we can live for a thousand years’, then we realise that our perception of space is intimately connected to our experience of time. So, we begin to see things differently.
Just the cellular feeling of not ageing and becoming younger puts us in a very different physical space. We realise that with the breaking of times’ hold on us, our ability to move around and relate more intimately to space increases as well.
This is hard to explain from the outside, but once you begin to take Immortality you will see what I am talking about. On the trial, a lot of the people who took Immortality reported a greater wonder at the beauty of nature, and a greater feeling of connectedness to the world and others as they became more vital, and so had a different experience with people.
People often talk of the ‘space time’ continuum and up until now this has just been something to speculate on as we are all bound in time and have not been able to experience it. Now we no longer have to read the 500-page manual on what apples taste like, we can just take a bite of one and comment on it from an insider’s perspective.
Sometimes it even feels like one can walk through to different dimensions now we are not bound by time. As such, we have a different relationship with space, a relationship where we are an active user in the experience and not just the end product of the experience.
If you imagine yourself as a car driving towards the end of your life, what the Immortal Jellyfish does for us is, it causes us to turn the vehicle around and start heading back the other way. The journey still continues but we continue it from an earlier version of our self without losing any of the wisdom of experience lived.
‘Age is no longer wasted on the youth’ to update Oscar Wilde’s credo. And yes, we can have our cake and eat it too – otherwise what is the point of having cake anyway.
This is truly a new beginning, a second chance, and a third chance and a fourth and a fifth, or a hundred if we want to truly turn our life and its expression into a work of grand beauty where we benefit those around us, bring love to the world, and live a happy, creative and productive life for hundreds of years.
The relationship between time and space is still to be explored, but to explore it as insider means we have an insider’s perspective on it. We have the exuberance of youth, plus the wisdom of time to explore it at our own pleasure.
A lot of what drives us is fear of death. Once this is taken away, it allows us to be far more expansive and just relax into the experience as we have many more such experiences to have.
Now we can climb every mountain range in the world if we want, or learn a dozen languages.
This, I believe will make us better people as we do not have to rush to do something here and now, we can take our time. There truly is time and we can plant forests and do thousand-year projects if we want.
We can be sure that if we plant a tree today, we will see it grow up and even grow old. This allows us to step into the custodianship of this earth in more earnest as we will be around to see the results of our actions both good and bad. This makes us more mindful of our actions.
A lot of people have the feeling they are going to die and adapt a jaded view of ‘who cares what they do’ as they won’t be around to see the consequences anyway. This changes all of this.
When we take Immortality there are sometimes moments of ‘where am I’ or ‘what time is it even’ given that time now goes more quickly or slowly with our new relationship with it. These moments are simply refining the new relationship with time as an equal and not as a servant. The sense of spatial dislocation is directly linked to the changing perception of time. Think of how directly related space and time is and you will realise it makes sense to feel a bit ‘spacey’ when time changes.
‘I am in my house, and it is 8 pm at night’ allows us to grasp what needs to happen next. If we delete the time component, it allows us more freedom with space, as after all, it is just space. What we do in it is entirely driven by our mood at that moment without consideration for when things need to happen within that time space continuum.