Take the “A” Train…

Suppose the universe is not something that is happening. Suppose it is something that is.

Imagine an enormous static object in eleven dimensions. Everything is there—not merely every object, but every event, every lifetime, every beginning and ending. Running through this object are billions upon billions of lifetime lines.

Each begins somewhere, passes through a sequence of events and ends somewhere else. From inside one of these lines, it looks perfectly ordinary: you are born, you grow up, things happen, you get older, eventually you die. It seems as though the future doesn’t exist yet, the present is being created right now and the past has disappeared.

But that’s because you’re on the line.

From outside the structure, the childhood is still there. Tuesday afternoon is still there. The old age is already there. The entire lifetime is a complete feature of the larger object.

Think of a road on a map. The road doesn’t appear beneath your automobile as you drive. San Francisco doesn’t vanish after you leave it, and New York doesn’t spring into existence shortly before you arrive. The whole road is there. You simply encounter it in sequence.

There’s a catch. Once you’re on a lifetime line, you can only follow it in one direction. You can remember yesterday, but you can’t drive back into it. You can anticipate tomorrow, but you can’t experience it until you get there.

This one-way movement produces something very convincing: the apparency of time.

So what is traveling? If the lifetime itself is already there, it can’t simply be the lifetime. The road doesn’t travel down itself.

Here’s where we introduce the Essential Self.

Suppose the Essential Self is not confined to the lifetime line. It can insert itself at the top of the cycle, enter a particular lifetime and follow that line in its permitted direction.

In that model, birth is not necessarily the creation of the Essential Self. Birth is an entry point. Death is not necessarily its destruction. Death is where that particular line runs out.

This gives an unexpectedly literal meaning to an old expression: You take a lifetime.

You enter the line and follow it. For the duration of the trip it becomes completely convincing. You acquire a name, a body, parents, friends, enemies, possessions, memories, problems and a surprisingly large collection of things that need to be done on Tuesday.

Pretty soon you’ve forgotten you’re traveling at all.

You think you’re the road.

But suppose there isn’t just one available lifeline. Suppose the larger structure contains billions upon billions of them. Then the Essential Self doesn’t necessarily need to alter the universe, rewrite history or manufacture a new future. It may only need to select a line and enter it.

From inside, that selection looks like an entire world unfolding. From outside, it might be no more mysterious than putting your finger on one thread rather than another.

Maybe the great question isn’t What is going to happen to me? Maybe it’s What am I following? And behind that is the more disturbing question:

Who is following it?

If you can occasionally become aware of the lifetime while you’re living it—aware of the machinery, aware of the line, aware that events are passing while something remains present to experience them—then for a moment you may have stopped confusing the traveler with the road.

Nothing spectacular has to happen. You merely notice:

I’m here.

Perhaps that tiny act of noticing is the Essential Self briefly remembering that it took a lifetime.

It didn’t become one.

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Here’s the Bardo bus now!

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