Diagram 138

Re Talk: 306

       Everyone here should be at the point of trying to produce your own "fresh data" by finding new views of ordinary subjects.  I'm not necessarily talking about The View, whatever the heck that might be, but simply a new view.  Here's one approach which I will call "running along the shoulders of the road."  If we imagine a regular well established roadway in Life, there is a way to run along the shoulders of the road without being captive of the road itself.

     Using ordinary descriptions, you could look at certain kinds of knowledge as being possible only in the future.  Plus you can look at the future as an established fact in the Cartesian world of the City.  That is, you can look at the future as time, but you can also look at it as space:  a place further up the road; a place which you have not yet reached; an internal place you have not reached.  There are things you need to know, experiences you need to have, information you believe you are beginning to formulate and suspect but obviously it's all going to happen in the future.  It's further on up the road.  What if this idea of the future being different from the present is in error?  There are already stories in the City that have to do with parallel times; that there is a currently extant future if you could only find it.  Ordinary consciousness can, borrowing science fiction terminology, accept the future as existing in a black hole or in some parallel universe.  What it cannot accept is that the future is not necessarily different nor separate from anything else.  What if the future is simply up the road and up the road already exists?  You're just not there and you can't see it.  If you stay on the established roadway and operate at the established speed you can't really get there.  Get off the road -- learn to run along the shoulder then veer off and take shortcuts through the bends in the road -- then what appears to be up the "road in the future," speaking time wise or space wise, becomes available to you.  When you travel the standard roadway, moving at established speeds you'll never get there because there's always something else further on up the road, awaiting you in the future.JC talk 306