Some time ago it occurred to me that time may not be a unidirectional arrow.
Sure, in one respect it always goes forward, but what is it going forward in? If we posit a universe in which space and time bagan with the Big Bang, we can visualize the history of all points in space and time rolled up in a higher dimensional space, much like a reel of movie film is rolled up in its case prior to being loaded in the movie projector. In certain instances, frames that are separated by many feet of film might actually be nestled side-by-side.
When the movie reel is loaded in the projector, the mechanism that advances the frames in front of the lense and the stroboscopic projector light functions much in the way that time functions in our reality, advancing the moments forward frame by frame so that the images and sounds may unwind in sequence and tell the story of the cinematographer.
Thus, to the viewer, the movie appears to be the fluid, changing images and sounds on the projector screen. One constructed reality is projected into our physical reality. It is displayed in a fashion that makes it a simulacrum for our world, by co-opting the rule of sequential, uni-directional time in the mechanism of the projector. In reality, however, the movie exists in entirety, from beginning to end. The initial conditions in the fictional world at the beginning of the film, the explications of plot and character and the domino-effect transformations of cause and effect within this film are already there.
One might imagine our physical reality as the higher dimension in which the film in its entirety resides. From this we might extrapolate by imagining our four-dimensional universe nested inside a higher dimensional space, from beginning to end. Time, cause and effect, karma-- all of these appear to unwind off the spiral as the film of the universe passes through the projector of consciousness. In a higher dimensional reality, everything that has happened or will happened is already there. What chaos theorists call "a sensitive dependence on initial conditions" is the law of consciousness operating within the film-universe. We choose this because of that. We're at this exact point doing these exact activities because of the sum of all past decisions, conditions, inherited genetic traits, and all of these depend on that which transpired before.
We appear to have free will, but is not our will conditioned and informed by all of our past decisions and experiences. In other words: If things were different, they wouldn't be the same.
If this model were true, of time and space as a type of movie coiled together in a higher dimensional space, it might explain unusual phenomena such as deja vu, pre-cognition, clairvoyance and telepathy. It might be that our consciousness turns from the illusions projected on the movie screen of the senses. Perhaps we have other capacities, other modes of being in which we sense the presence of the other "frames" nestled close by us on the tightly wound film reel of reality. Thus it might be that past, present and future moments are closer to us than would first appear. Moments ten years in the past and thirty years could be close enough to touch one another ever so briefly.
In dreams, perhaps our minds are able to see around the corner of Time, freed briefly from the internal logic of the waking dream of reality. A part of us may intuit the presence of these past and future selves, and communicate in an older language of thought and feeling. Haven't we all had the experience of "having been here before"? Perhaps a part of us was.
More on this later.
