We're all one

From reading Ouspensky's "Tertium Organum", I've been thinking about how everything is all one being and, in particular, all human beings and animals are like branches of the same tree.

To begin understanding this, we must consider time. Actually, all future and past events may exist simultaneously. The reason we see ourselves travelling at a constant rate in time is because our sensory apparatus is peculiar. The past is foggy and the future is even foggier. We only pay attention to the present moment. (And we don't even do that well.)

Just like a flat plane is a slice of a solid 3 dimensional object, our 3 dimensional world is a slice of a 4 dimensional one. A plane being can only see 2D, his 3rd dimension appearing as time. Things on one side, say below him, are the past, and things on the other side are the future. In a similar way, 3D "slices" in front of us are the future and 3D slices behind us are the past.

If you dip 4 fingers pointing downward into a bowl of water, ovals appear on the surface where your fingers go through it. To a plane being living on and seeing only things on the water's surface, the ovals appear to be separate objects.

Assume again that above the surface means the future and below means the past. Say your fingers are spread out. As you dip down further (and create the illusion of time passing by for the plane being), the ovals move closer together. Some time later, they suddenly merge into a single long oval, which is in fact your palm. This is pretty bewildering for our flat friend who not only

• sees an illusion, which he calls motion (you were not wiggling your fingers, just dipping your hand) but also...
• sees separate objects merging into one (your fingers were never separate to begin with).

What if what we see as motion in our 3D world is really our senses, being limited to perceiving only 3D sections of a 4D world, fooling us into imagining separate entities dancing around in x, y, and z coordinates? What if those separate entities are just fingers of a 4D hand that is still as a rock, but we're only perceiving it slice by slice? You and your brother are one being if you trace your past (3D sections "behind" the present) back to the same mother.

Mitosis is a branch coming off of 4D tree. All of life is one being. Motionless. Timeless. When you attack another person physically or with harsh thoughts, you are denying your absolutely solid connection with that person in the 4th dimension of time. Also when you do something regrettable, you bet against the possibility that action is a fixed connection between the present moment and future consequences.

Who knows, our conscious intention may be the only thing existing outside of time and space able to direct our limited senses around the maze of 4 or more dimensional metageometry. We attribute to randomness things that seem out of our control much like the past generations attributed things out of their control to capricious gods. Finally we are coming back to the ancient view, except this time, we find our own consciousness to be the capricious god steering the ship of our experience through intention and attention.