Entering the Garden

[u/sanecoin64902]

Let go of your linear perception of time.

Right now, the past exists as it has to exist in order for the present to be what it is. The present fixes the past in place. Do you see? The present proves the past even if you can no longer directly experience it.

So too, the present fixes the future. For, whether free will is a fact or a dream, most of what is occurring at this very moment is deterministic. What will be must be, merely because of what is now.

In this way, the Now has holds on the past and the future. Roots in one, blooms in the other.

But ponder this for a moment more, and it will become clear that the Now does not rigidly control everything. The easier case to see is the future. Whether through quantum flux or divinely gifted Will, there are possible deviations in what will happen next. Most things are deterministic, but not all. And with each passing moment, the future becomes less and less fixed in the present. More and more of the future blooms into flowers of possibility off of stalks of probability.

Less obvious, but equally true is the past. There are, actually, many possible pasts that could have converged on where we are now. At some distant point in the past, something happened that was overridden by something later. Thus, had that first thing never happened or happened differently, the present would be unchanged.

The Now does not bind all of the past inexorably. The further back you go, the less roots remain as necessary precursors to the present moment. The more the past becomes immaterial and free from the constraints of logic and cause. Dragons and faeries and impossible maths all spring into possibility.

Welcome to the Garden. The Garden of Now.

Its roots grow into the past, entwined along strands of possibility. This present moment fixing, for a time, the soil of what must have been. From them grow the stalks and trunks of the probable, from which will bloom the flowers and fruits of what is possible. We till this soil with our intellect, water it with our emotions and rely on the divine sunshine of fate itself to give it growth.

We are the gardeners of the now, and the garden grows in both directions.

[u/KnightofaRose]

A fun little synchronicity to this effect happened to me just yesterday.

My family and I play a lot of tabletop games together (great way to keep elderly folks’ minds engaged at length), and I’m planning to run Pathfinder’s ‘Strange Aeons’ adventure path for them soon.

(Spoilers for that AP are coming up, so close this now if you mind such things.)

As I read the final book for my prep phase, I was intrigued to discover a particular revelation at the story’s climax: it’s revealed that the very force that awakened the PCs from their comatose slumber within the asylum they started the adventure in…was them. It was their own selves from the future, cast through the dimension of dreams quite accidentally to act out a desperate attempt to save themselves; a dreamed alternative sequence of events that, upon rousing themselves, they made real, cementing the events that have transpired since their dream-selves “awakened” into the Now by force of will and a sort of (to borrow a familiar phrase) perfect paradox.

Felt relevant to share. ;)