Consciousness and Time: Our Cherry-Jello Universe and Free Will

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 explain the spooky actions of entangled particles, information would not need to travel backward on some alternative retrocausal timeline. ‘There’s no temporal flow,’ she says. ‘Time is just another dimension within the block, rather than being a material thing that moves.’

“If that is the case, we have arrived at what may be the most troubling implication of all about quantum mechanics and its weird temporal behaviour.”

What is this most troubling implication? The article comes to the conclusion that the block universe implies that we have no free will because, while we experience time as linear, all possible decisions have already been recorded in the block universe.

Well, yours truly here and brother Bill disagree with that conclusion because it leaps to an unwarranted conclusion that the decisions within the block have already been written and we have no free will. In my Jello universe hypothesis, while the block may be studded with all potential occurrences, the path traced between collapsed potential is not written until conscious observance passes through it.

You see, in the quantum universe, everything exists as potential until it is observed. It is the observation that collapses its state of existence from limitless potential to a singularity. Hence the ever-popular quantum fable of Schrodinger’s cat. The fable instructs us to imagine that there is a cat inside of a box. The cat may be either dead or alive and we cannot determine whether or not it is dead or alive until we lift the lid and peek inside the box. Until we peek inside, the cat is both dead and alive, but once it is observed as one or the other it will never revert back to the undetermined state of both dead and alive–it will only be dead or alive.

We hypothesize that until consciousness traces a path through the block of Jello, all potential choices remain uncollapsed. But, once we have made a choice to go this way or that, our consciousness collapses those chosen potentials and leaves a trace of our passing. We could liken it to driving across a country where there are many roads to choose from but we choose this highway or that back road as our route. The unchosen roads remain, but we have taken one particular route to reach our destination. Through free will we chose that route. There is no logical reason to assume that our choice of route proves determinism rather than free will.

Yes, you may say, but it can only be God that mapped the potential roads, God that made the Jello and studded it with cherries, therefore God has determined the route you will take. No, that is not the case. The God Above All Gods (as we affectionately call it in Gnostic philosophy) is illimitable and infinite. Therefore it has plenty of “room” to imagine the block of all possibilities–all possible worlds. That does not at all imply that the route from here to there through those possibilities is predetermined by God.

Nor does it imply that we construct reality from nothing. We don’t make up reality because it was always there in potential within the block universe of God’s imagination. What we do, is make our way through this universe of choices, one choice at a time, collapsing potential into history as we pass by.

In Gnostic theology, the Tripartite Tractate states that the Father wanted all of his emanations to be self-aware and to exhibit free will. It was free will that caused the Fall. How would the Fall have occurred if Logos did not have free will?

“For this aeon was one of those who had been given wisdom, with ideas first existing independently in his mind so as to be brought forth when he wanted it. Because of that, he had received a natural wisdom enabling him to inquire into the hidden order, being a fruit of wisdom. Thus, the free will with which the members of the All had been born caused this one to do what he wanted, with no one holding him back.” (Tripartite Tractate, verses 75-76)

And as far as quantum entanglement goes, and spooky action at a distance, there is no distance at all because all potential exists in state within the consciousness of the Father. The block is completely entangled because it exists within the mind of God. The spooky action at a distance is only an appearance of distance but is actually held continually within the block as potential awaiting our observation to collapse it.

Now, here is the Gnostic Gospel explanation of this jello universe, reprinted from a 9-23-2023 Gnostic Insights episode called “Free will, what is it? Do you have it?” :

There’s a famous and long-standing conundrum in philosophy that says, how can we reconcile the concept of an all knowing God, if we subjects have free will? How is it that our actions aren’t controlled by destiny if God already knows what’s going to happen? Well, the way I answer that is that the All- knowing God Above All Gods has pre placed all possible choices in front of us. It’s like that multiverse theory in quantum mechanics. He has placed all possible choices before us, but it’s our individual free will that navigates the course between all of these choices.

I’ve made the analogy that it’s like a gigantic bowl of jello. This universe of ours with all possibilities in that bowl of jello and that bowl of jello is studded with an infinite number of cherries, and in our lifetime we swim from cherry to cherry to cherry. Those cherries represent choices.

I think that time is an illusion. The universe is static, but infinitely large, studded with all of these cherries. Time is our awareness of swimming from one choice using our own free will to the next choice, using our own free will. So in a real sense, the entirety of our lives is already conceived in the Fullness of God. It’s our self-awareness and free will that plod along at the speed of matter as we live our lives out as a linearity, a line of passing time. That’s my theory.

At the universal level, the infinity of the Fullness of God is represented by the potential of all possible choices a person could make as their life passes from one decision to the next. The fullness of all possible futures are represented within the universe. Free will is driving our consciousness through these potentialities and leaving behind the collapsed potential of history. So it’s open in front of us, but behind us it’s collapsed because we made those choices. So the line from one cherry to the next was already drawn. But in front of us, all that infinity of choices is available to us. 

(In my brother’s past life therapy, the client actually goes backward down the history trail and chooses a different cherry then turns around and goes forward from there.)

Of course, where we have found ourselves in the bowl of jello determines what our possible choices are in the next choice. We can’t jump from this cherry all the way across the universe to another cherry. We are pretty well confined to the here and now of our immediate surroundings, which we have come to through our free will. But you always have the choice to repent from that line you’ve been drawing and deviate your course to go upward and onward in the direction of the glory of the God Above All Gods. And that is what we call redemption. Repentance and redemption. It’s the Christ’s job to strew those glorifying cherries all in front of us and make sure we always have a choice to choose a righteous cherry.

Please leave a review on amazon.com for A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel. Don’t think you have to understand it all first–if that were the case, I’d never get any reviews!! It’s common to understand this gnosis in small drips and drabs. Thanks!