In this chapter he eloquently takes the Hebrew letters of Zayn and Ayn and describes how the eye of Ayn takes the possibility of Zayn and connects the dots with the ” out there” universe with the ” in here mind”. So what he is talking about here is how we create the realities we want to observe and experience. And that all of this happens in a time loop . He says a time stream flows from the beginning and reflects from the end of the story back to its beginning. He uses the example that it is like a snake swallowing its tail. So what we really have is a complete history with a beginning, middle and an end that forms in the mind.
So what we have is the creation of the ” in here ” mind becomes the ” out there” reality
He made a point that really stuck with me . He said ” the mind of God is prodigious ” and what the definition of that means is something that is remarkable ,or impressively great in extent ,size or degree. What he is saying here is that in this Mind of God or the All that is , or in other words the field of all possibilities, countless imaginings and events continue to appear . But what happen is we don’t recognize this . What we tend to do is look at the past for answers to the present and what we really are trying to do here is minimize our risk based on the survival mechanism. So we create illusions, we make up stories to fit the sequences of our experiences and if we remember some of what we read in chapter 3 with memory and the Trickster we see that this can be misleading. Instead in each instance we are making choices each option as he says carries a risk. He also states that each choice must follow quantum rules. So how I understand this is coming from the observer effect. Each thought then becomes its manifestation.
He identifies two concepts Feedback from the Future and feedforward from the past. Feedback from the future appears as intuition and thought and feedforward from the past appears as feelings and perceptions of senses. Now what is important about this is that without this loop of time he says there would not be a sense of the “I” no memory, feeling ,thought or sensation. In a nut shell how this happens is you have an event that is identified as the Now then possibility flows to a future event which he describes as yet to come and from here he says it flows backward though the time stream creating a disturbance. The interaction between the two streams the Now and Yet to Come give rise to the observer and observed and now we have a story and a teller of the story.
Now the other point that he make here that is really fascinating is that what we usually define as the identity or the “I’ is usually defined by past events, that we search our memories of these past events to help us to decide what to do next. But what he is proposing is that the memory that we are scanning is actually existing in the Now. We aren’t really going back into the past for answers he is saying we are actually looking toward the future . In other words the yet to come is our memory in the future.
So in a nutshell what he is telling us is that the future and the present “handshake” across time. so what we are looking at here is the future decides the present. Not the other way around.
Maria Jacques