I invite you consider a new idea: that we are – you and I – just memories. We don’t have memories. We are memories.

It’s a radical concept, I know. But what if the universe has already been born and died in the instant of the Big Bang, and what we experience all around us are just echoes, reverberations from that violent universal instant? The universe has already been born and died, and it just seems like it’s taking time to play itself out. This my riff from an idea in A Course in Miracles, that everything that seems to be happening has already occurred.

According to this idea, we are alive, but we’ve never left paradise. The phenomenal universe of space and time, matter and energy which seems to expand from the moment of the Big Bang, is nothing more than a dream that lasted an instant, in which we perceived ourselves separated from the totality of existence. Yet this dream only lasted a fraction of an instant.

In some dream theories, dreams don’t take place over the amount of time which the dream seems to take, although this is disputed and recent research may indicate that dreams occur in ‘real time.’ I think that dreams are kind of like a split-second mélange. We try to make sense of them upon waking, in retrospect. In so doing, we impose a time order upon them and string out the events into logical sequences. This makes our sleeping dreams seem to take place in real time, when in reality they’re like condensed seeds that only grow into dream sequences in retrospect, when we review them from our rational, waking states.

What if the cosmos itself was our attempt to make sense out of an instantaneous explosion that’s already wrapped itself up? What if the universe happened all at once? And it’s already over.

There are several implications. The first is that since what’s playing out has already occurred, what we experience is the past. There’s a scientific analogue to this. When we see stars in the night sky, we see the star’s past light, as it appeared millions or billions of years ago. It’s a recording of an ancient sky, and echo, if you will.

A second consequence is that what we seem to be living through is but the recollection of a dream. As such, it is a fantasy wrapped within a fantasy. A dream is a fantasy, and a memory is also a fantasy.

The Past as Fantasy

Was the past ever real? Whether the past ever existed is not wholly provable. Without the aid of technological devices, the past is primarily a function of memory. The organ of the past is memory.

Until relatively recently in human history, memory was the main human vehicle into past experience, whether that experience is recalled individually or collectively.

Memory only serves to model past events in the way of a recording. The brain creates an inward projection of past sights, sounds, sensations, smells and tastes. Our memories of the past serve as evidence that it once existed, but they can’t prove that it still exists. In fact, logic informs us that the past is no longer real. You can’t go back to your life at age 5, or to your first sexual experience. Mark one

Recollections are often inaccurate. A memory is recreated on a molecular level each time it is recalled within the brain. Like technological records, memories tend to destabilize over time. They’re attenuated and degraded by time itself. The ability of the brain to perceive and to remember accurately is compromised by age, trauma, disease, drug effects, and other organic factors, as well as causes external to the brain.

Memories can become conflated with one another. They can become distorted by excitement at the time of their initial recording, by the human tendency to utilize selective attention in accord which might prioritize certain aspects of a remembered experience based on survival priorities, on human agendas and intentions. Selective attention in the initial perception of an event while it’s occurring may also be influenced by highly idiosyncratic traits having to do with beliefs, attitudes, and the cognitive capacity to be aware of and to track simultaneous stimuli. A woman and a man witness a grisly rape in which the victim is also stabbed. Years ago, the man watched as his father was killed with a knife. The woman was herself sexually assaulted. Which parts of the current experience will each of their perceptions emphasize?

These same influences may also be involved in the retrieval of the initial memory. Humans tend through confirmation bias to ignore data inconsistent with previously formed opinions, attitudes and beliefs. Besides that, present sense impressions must accurately perceive present events, place them in working memory where they must be retained without corruption, transfer these recollections as reliable representations of past events into short term memory, which must then faithfully store and then transmit the data of past experience to long term memory. Long term memory within the brain must successfully store this data without degradation. When we require the information, our brains have to accurately retrieve and model it.

All of these factors make memory itself at least somewhat suspect as a reliable recounter of past events. With these biases and inaccuracies inherent in the initial recording, storage, retrieval and transmission of data within the brain, we should at least realize that, from psychological and cognitive reference points, there is no objective past. There are, rather, a series of subjective pasts which differ from individual to individual, and which even differ within the individual herself each time a certain past event is recollected. There are, therefore, a multiplicity of pasts.

Each past can be likened to a separate dimension. We exist in a multiverse with innumerable pasts. In a reality where human memory must serve as a corroborating link to verify past events, can we claim the existence of a single, objective past?

You may argue that our technology serves as an independent corroborator of our memories, but the dream argument – that since we believe while we’re dreaming that our dreams are real when in fact they’re not – means we can’t be suer that even our tech is but an illusion within a dream state.

Propagandists exploit this malleable, subjective nature of memory to give us new versions of the collective past, histories either slightly or grossly altered from the experienced past, so that the experienced past becomes the imagined past. A memory may only be slightly altered, yet if enough memories from the past are modified in small ways, the cumulative effect in the individual and his remembrance of his history can be profound. The same is true of a group of memories linked by common factual basis – the causes of a war, for instance – which are recalled collectively by an aggregation of people. When these memories are slightly modified by polemicists, the group can be manipulated. This is history, on either a personal or collective level. It’s how history is written. It’s how history is influenced. When it’s intentionally manipulated, we call it propaganda. When the modifications are unintentional, they’re simply the perceptual and recording errors committed by historians, whether those historians record the histories of nations, or of individuals.

The Hindus speak of maya, the illusion of sensate experience. It may be that since the past is only an inward model of a remembered experience, it’s no long real.

A third implication of the idea that we’re living within a memory is this: If what we’re experiencing has already past, outcomes can’t be changed. Choice is illusory, and predestination is real. This observation may invite despair. It may trigger frustration or denial. But it also radically alters the concept of forgiveness, and moves it from the religious realm onto a psychological level. As such, it changes its definition: We forgive when we stop trying to rewrite the past.

Religious and mythological truths are often precursors to psychological ones. This is an implicit theme that runs through A Course in Miracles. It can be found in Eastern thought, which weds religion with philosophy, and is most evident ion the West in the writings of C.G. Jung and mythologists like Joseph Campbell.

Since what we experience is really the past, the act of forgiveness is another way of relinquishing any attempts to control the narrative of the present, since we’re not really here in the present. It’s usually assumed that the past determines all possible states of the future by moving them from possibilities into probabilities, and then into actualities. Yet if we live in a memory that seems to us the present but which is really just a version of the past, we’re not able to function in the present. We can’t really choose.

This isn’t to say that we don’t make choices. It’s not to conclude that we can’t take action. But the implication is that are choices and the actions which stem from our decisions are foreordained. We need to surrender and admit the futility of trying to change the fundamental nature of reality or the outcomes of cosmic history. Fate is fate. It can’t be altered by us. And, according to the hypothesis advanced in this essay, it’s hubris to think that we can change natural or human history.

The most powerful implication of this hypothesis is that nothing happens by accident. Everything that occurs – however miraculous or tragic – is meant to be.

Implications for Avatars

Above, I asked you to consider that we’re just memories. As memories, we’re really just dreams. In A Course in Miracles, we’re likened to dream figures.

If you see someone walking down the street begging for change, smelling of alcohol, maybe his operator is just having a bad dream. In Sanskrit, avatara refers to descent, the physical manifestation of a god on the material plane.

The current metaphor most popularly employed is that we inhabit a simulation projected by a vast and powerful data processor. An older metaphor suggests that we never in fact know whether we are dreaming.  This is called the dream argument, and it’s been advanced by philosophers in many civilizations, both East and West.

If we’re dreaming, if we’re simulations, then there must be a dreamer somewhere; someone or something which originated the dream itself. In this monograph, I posit the hypothesis that we and the cosmos which unfolds us are dreams, simulations, which have already occurred. This would mean that our dreamt selves – whether tragic or comic, whether are scripts are happy narratives or sad ones – have already reached their endpoints. The dénouement of our stories has already been written, and has already happened.

Only in retrospect as try to make sense of the natural history of the universe, the human history of the world, and the personal history of our individual selves, does it seem to us that we are living this history as if it were in the present. Time is our attempt to impose sequence on something which happened in an instant. Yet in so doing, we’re trying to make sense of nonsense. We’re trying to take a highly abstract painting and interpret it as though it were a representational work of art.

On a grand scale, the final battles of human history have already been waged, the winners determined. Even the penultimate fate of the cosmos itself has already occurred. There is some despair attendant to predestination. Yet it just may be, as A Course in Miracles concludes, that although the outcome is assured and has already occurred, that outcome is a unity of being some have likened to paradise. To awake from the final dream is to awake into the Now.

© 2023 by Michael C. Just