Life is often framed in the metaphor of the long journey to a destination. This is a useful simplification, as it allows for many further metaphorical framings. In life, you must choose between paths when you arrive at a fork in the road, you encounter and surmount obstacles and opponents, you may have a variable pace depending upon your motivation or whether you know where you're going, and above all, you must choose a destination and judge whether the paths you have chosen shall lead you there. The metaphor even allows for elaborations upon the content of the destination itself, be it the endless void of feeling and thought predicted by lone science, or the undying torment, elation, or continual rebirth of feeling and thought predicted by other belief systems.
For my purposes I will tailor this metaphor thusly: first, that in our lives we choose paths continuously rather than discreetly at given intervals as a man walking through the woods on a well-trod path might be envisioned to choose. At each moment we may choose to sit down or stand, to be silent or to scream out some irretractable remark, and each decision, a decision that sends us down one of these continuously branching and occasionally yet only ever contingently intersecting time paths, is however imperceptibility distinct from the path beside it that may differ if only by a word left out or a glance ungiven.
As well it must be understood that in my variation upon this metaphor, there is no “turning around to choose another path previously left behind”, as one might reach a dead end on a road and turn back to take the alternate way. It is only ever a question of whether the road you are now on will eventually intersect with one that resembles the one you wish you had taken before, and how soon, for the continuously branching path one travels only truly ends in death, and even then it only ends for you. It is as simple as stating that one may not travel back in time, so may this be taken as an axiom until the feat is accomplished and widely shown to be possible.
As well I might say that paths may not be jumped or exchanged laterally, in the metaphorical sense that teleportation from one path to another is not possible. It has been hypothesized there many be many universes, both in serious physics and in serial fiction, but warping from one timeline to the next I also take as an axiom to be impossible.
My final axiom is one I mentioned briefly before, that the path, for our feelings and thoughts, ends only in death, and that in death it ends certainly. This may be the axiom least popularly or readily accepted today. We may envision death as a gateway to the next portion of the same personal journey we were on in life, but we must consider what refusing to accept that final axiom would entail. What leeway there would be for deceiving ourselves and others, as much or more leeway for deceit as not accepting the other two axioms.
Imagine for a moment that a man comes to you and claims to be from the future (or claims to have seen it), and tells you he is certain that if you do not kill a particular stranger on a given day, the whole Earth will come to ruin. Strictly speaking, there are two possibilities; either he is truly is from the future and telling the truth, or he is lying about either being from the future and/or what will happen if you don’t kill the stranger. How may we distinguish which is the case without at least asking us to prove it by taking us on a trip through time as well? If he can’t do this much, than that first axiom is practically justified in the sense of being useful to our plan-making here, and we should presume he is lying.
Is it anymore absurd, and might the potential consequences be any less disastrous, to refuse to accept the third axiom, prior to having personally experienced a prolonged and vivid life after our death? A person could come and tell us that they received or inherited a message from the creator of the universe, guaranteeing us that if we didn’t submit to their will and name and their will and name only, than torment would await us past the gate of death. This might be accurately identified as blackmail through deceit as the other case was, for we have no way of distinguishing which reality is true until we have passed the gate, if it is a gate, and seen for ourselves.
As for me, it is enough to recognize that if I remember nothing prior to my birth, it is likely I have the same eternal amnesia awaiting me after my death. Accepting this as an axiom rather than one of the possible alternatives is preferable because it is the both the least complicated and the least potentially compromising in terms of plan-making for the future – I may know in advance under what conditions I would reject the axiom (passing the “gate” of death and seeing for myself that thought and feeling remained upon the other side, then responding accordingly), and I may know in advance what to think of any claims in the here and now that life is eternal and that it’s eternal quality might be determined by the finite stretch of time leading up to the alleged gate. The same as I would think of the time-traveler from the future claiming to know how I should tailor my plans, and the same as I would think of the man from an alternate dimension. A sincere wonder as to how they became so convinced, and an equal wonder that such a incredible event might ever happen to me.
These then, are my axioms as they might be summarized:
1. Lives and time may not be retraced or reversed
2. Traveling to parallel universes or timelines isn’t possible
3. Death is not a gate for our feelings and thoughts, but an effective termination
From these axioms I will attempt to construct a tentative ethical framework, which is the inspiration and purpose of this beginning to whatever body of work this message becomes. This framework will be in terms of one’s life-path as I have defined it, a continuously branching line that begins at birth, moves forward at a constant pace by a sidewards motion of our choosing, and ends at death.
(to be elaborated)
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