As we peer down the microscope at worlds ever smaller, we encounter weird things.  Counter-intuitive things.  Imagine, now, how that parallels the experience of looking back in time.  Close by, in the recent past, we have lots of familiar hand-holds.  We understand things quite well.  But the further back we look, the less we understand readily.  And detail gets lost.  If we look back far enough, we draw lots of blanks.  So much of the history of humanity is lost to us.  One might say that we ‘see’ those bits with causal relations to our own.  Those that we understand as playing a part in how we are in the moment.  But that’s remarkably like peering down the microscope.  As we peer further, detail is lost as a direct function of  the ability of what we think is there to manifestly affect something in the observable universe.

Add to this these two little bits of philosophical doggerel:

[1]  As we look outward, what we see is ourselves.  The more we understand as we look outward, the more we see ourselves for what we are.  That is a central tenet of the CSP.

and

[2] I had a fevered vision last January of a toroidal time axis for the cosmos.  This seemed beautiful in my vision, as we appeared in there as a thin disk-like membrane of infinetessimal thickness, moving at one second per second around the circular time axis.  We were the live process in the universe that regenerates itself.  The razor edge of the now.

Now the whole thing looks toroidal.  Because what we know of the big architecture of space-time comes from peering down as far as we can.  Thus we find out about things like suns going nova, the mystery of the big bang, etc.  Likewise, we find out about our inner selves by looking outward.  Or vice versa.  Another Buddhist strain, I fear.  And  if peering into time is parallel to peering into space, I really don’t know which way is up any more.  Every polar direction turns out to form a loop.