==Introduction==
A Book of Days is a book which lists a different version of the same activity for each day. This creates both variety and sameness of practice in your life which brings you a deeper connection and stronger practice to your religious experience. This Book of Days draws upon the SolSeed symbolic year and the SolSeed practice of daily meditation to give a practitioner a deeper understanding of the SolSeed religion. Feel free to use it book for whatever period you find useful, pick a day here and there to follow or follow it for multiple years. This is a wiki so feel free to add new options to existing days and to make additions to existing meditations. Each day will include a quote from a text that SolSeed members have found meaningful and then a discussion of that quote. Following this there will be a suggestion for a meditative practice. The calendar will start just after the Winter Solstice which is the beginning of the SolSeed symbolic year.
=== December 23rd ===
==== Quote of the Day ====
--Nothing ... Nothing ... <gasp> ... Something
-From the opening words of the SolSeed Service
==== Thoughts for the Day ====
Our symbolic year begins on the first day after the winter Solstice. This day symbolizes the beginning of time as do the first words of our service. So let us begin the year by considering one of the Big Questions of metaphysics. What came before the Big Bang? What caused the Big Bang? How did time start?
The first words of our service are somewhat misleading. It is believed by some leading physicists that the Big Bang was the beginning of time. If this is true, then before that moment, there was no time. While there are other possible hypotheses, let us accept this one for a moment as a chance to expand our minds by meditating on a strange geometry.
Just as the phrase, 1 Kelvin less than absolute zero, has no meaning because you cannot have less heat than no heat, and just as the phrase, one lumen less than absolute darkness, has no meaning because you cannot have less light than no light, the phrase, one second before the Big Bang, may have no meaning because you cannot have time before the beginning of time. A mathematically more accurate metaphor is that just as you cannot go one meter South of the South Pole because the direction South ends at the South Pole, it is meaningless to talk about the time one second into the past from the Big Bang because the 'direction' past ends at the Big Bang.
So the big question of the temporal origin of the universe may be answered in the most unexpected way. What came before the Big Bang? The answer is that the question is meaningless. Our words seem to indicate that there was nothing before the Big Bang but in actual fact there was no 'before the Big Bang'. Time itself is part of the geometry of the universe. There was no moment of creation or coming into being of the universe. Time is a direction within the universe and the universe is finite in that direction. Nothing exists beyond the first moment of time.
==== Meditation for the Day ====
If you can, perform this mediation outdoors. Otherwise, choose a room where you can stand and walk a couple of paces in different directions.
Every point on the surface of a sphere is the same and to the degree that the Earth is a sphere this is true for the Earth also. Only when you take the daily rotation of the Earth into account does the South Pole in any way become special. Unless you carefully watch the sky for several hours you won't notice the rotation of the Earth. If you want to do a very long version of this meditation by all means you may want to actually travel to the South Pole to do it. Otherwise simply pretend you are at the South Pole.
Pick an exact spot on the ground which is to be the South Pole. Stand facing it about one pace away from it. Imagine the snow swirling about you. The southern Aurora is dancing in a dark sky filled with stars above your head. The South Pole is directly in front of you so obviously you are facing south. Now take a step forward and stand on the spot you chose to be the South Pole. Now you are standing on the South Pole. You are at the furthest point South on the whole Earth. You are facing north. Staying on the South Pole spin slowly around. As you turn you continue to face north. Every direction is north from here. Is that true? Look down at your feet. That direction is still down. It is not south or north. Just as with any place on Earth, if you look down toward the centre of the Earth you are looking down not east or West or North or South. Look up. Imagine the bright stars and swirling aurora above you. That is still up. It is not south or north or east or west.
Now imagine that this place is not the South Pole but instead the Big Bang and that the surface of the Earth is actually time. Instead of cold, snow, stars and aurora, you are surrounded by some kind of plasma which is almost infinitely dense and hot. This is the beginning of time. Slowly turn around keeping your eyes on the horizon. You are looking into the future no matter what direction you face. Take a step away from the Big Bang and then turn back to face it. Imagine that the step you took represented a thousand years. You are now standing in a very young universe, only one millennium old. Although it is much less dense and hot here it is still much hotter and denser than you could survive if this were real rather than mediation. You are facing the past. You can time travel. Take a step back in time to return to the moment of the Big Bang. You have just travelled back in time to the beginning of time. Take another step. You have gone past the beginning of time and are travelling forward into the future again. Turn and walk right through the Big Bang. You began by travelling back in time but as you crossed the Big Bang, without turning you changed direction and began going forward in time again.
No matter how many 'times' you walk back and forth through the Big Bang you always end up in its future. The direction past ends at the Big Bang.
Quietly meditate on this idea for a while. Open your mind to unintuitive geometries.
=== December 24th ===
==== Quote of the Day ====
"... one second per second is one second divided by one second, and one second divided by one second is the number one. But the number one is not a rate, so it is certainly not the rate at which anything (the flow of time included) happens."
-Bradford Skow, “One Second Per Second” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research (2012).
==== Thoughts for the Day ====
Yesterday, we meditated on the unintuitive geometry of direction on a sphere and how this might apply to the 'beginning' of our universe. We pretended to move back and forth around the place where the direction, past, ends. We used this thought-experiment to think about how time started, one of the Big Questions of metaphysics. Today we will consider another such Big Question. 'What is time and what makes it flow?' Let us begin by thinking about how we could actually achieve the movements, in reality, that we pretended yesterday. If we could move in such a fashion, back and forth through time, how would we measure the rate of our movement? As Bradford Skow points out in the quote of the day, one second per second is not a rate.
Of course, relativity talks a great deal about time dilation. In relativity an event is 'place' in space-time so you might say that "yesterday noon local time at Cape Canaveral" was Event A or "tomorrow 9AM local time in Death Valley California" is event B. A path through space-time is defined both by the places it visits along the way and the times it gets to each place. In time dilation, two alternate paths can lead from event A to event B and yet take different amounts of time to get there. We would say that the time between events A and B is 48 hours but that is only because we spend a great deal of time traveling through very flat space-time. If we went by more adventurous paths the time between those two events might be 4 hours or 800 hours or any other amount of time. This means that, in relativity, one might say that along one path time passes at 2 seconds per second of time that passes on another path.
In order for us to actually travel back and forth around the beginning of the universe, we would need to use some very adventurous paths indeed, something akin to worm holes in space-time or warp drives would be needed. But what about the normal 'traveling' through time that we do every day. We start our day in the morning and by evening its ... well its evening. We seem to flow through time from morning to evening every day and then from evening to morning every night. What is powering this flow? Does everything in the universe have some kind of temporal inertia that keeps it gliding evenly forward through time at one second per second?
Bradford Skow's answer is that the flow of time is an illusion. In fact, many physicists believe that objects do not flow through time but are present at all times between their creation and their destruction and that they form a kind of 4 dimensional worm that stretches from their creation event to their destruction event. This agrees with all our imaginings of time travel. If all objects were gliding forward through time at a constant rate, and if you managed to send a DeLorean back in time from 1985 to 1955 then you would find an empty universe. Everything would have already moved through 1955 and on past 1985. You would find an inky black cold universe. If it is possible to go back in time and find Doc Brown recovering from a fall in his bathroom, then Doc Brown, his bathroom and the Earth all must still be in that event in space-time 'when' another 'temporal part' of Doc Brown is oiling his new DeLorean at an event in space-time we would call 30 years later.
Relativity does predict that time-travel is theoretically possible. All you have to do is warp space-time is some very exotic ways in order to form a worm hole through to another part of space-time that is in your past. Warping space-time is easy enough; every mass warps space-time; you warp space-time every time you walk over to the fridge to get a glass of milk. But warping it in the exotic ways necessary to create a worm hole is beyond us. It's not just that we don't have powerful enough machines to do it; we don't even know what a machine capable of doing it would look like. Still every prediction that relativity has made that we have been able to test has been right to many decimal places, so we might assume that it's predictions about time travel are also correct. Relativity also predicts that the objects that were there at any time in the past (even 1955) would still be there if you travelled through a worm hole to the past so the objects must actually be present at all times between their creation and their destruction just like the 4 dimensional worm image we discussed a few paragraphs ago.
==== Meditation for the Day ====
If you can, perform this mediation in a room or corridor where you can stand and walk several paces in a straight line. You can also do this outdoors, if you have no place indoors that you can do it.
Our minds are poor when it comes to imagining 4 dimensional objects. The best we can usually do is to ignore one dimension and picture the 'extra' dimension as the one we are ignoring, a sort of mental dimensional swap. So let's imagine for a moment that up is the future and down is the past.
Start in the corner of your room facing the middle or at one end of your corridor facing the other and take a single slow smooth step forward. Now look behind you. You don't see yourself! But if the 4 dimensional worm theory of objects in time is true then another temporal part of yourself is still there but a second or so in the past. If we are performing our mental dimensional swap such that down is the past then that other temporal part of yourself is under the floor somewhere.
But your step forward was not a matter of you disappearing from one place and appearing at another place a few seconds later. You moved forward smoothly occupying all the places between your starting point and where you are standing now as the second passed. So all the 'places' in space time between the temporal part of you now who is looking back and the temporal part of you who began to step forward would also be occupied by temporal parts of yourself. It was a smooth movement so, at least at the macroscopic scale, all these parts would be connected together in a diagonal that emerges from the 'floor' and smoothly rises up to connect to the temporal part of you who is looking backward. Of course all the spatial parts of the floor would also have temporal parts sloping downward behind you but, in the hope of being gentle on our minds, which have enough trouble with 3 dimensions, let's not try to imagine that.
All these temporal parts of yourself each have all of your physical parts; your arms and legs, brain and heart, eyes and ears. Each physical part flows smoothly through all of your temporal parts. Your right eye in one temporal part is always connected to your right eye in the next temporal part. Your right eye never suddenly becomes your left kidney. Your heart in one temporal part of you connects directly to your heart in the next temporal part of you despite the fact that both temporal parts of your heart are completely surrounded by different temporal parts of your torso. These two hearts are connected without having to exit your chest at any 'time in-between'. This is hard to picture because it happens in four dimensions and we are only good at picturing 3 dimensions. The best you can do is to kind of blur your image of yourself so that you become a kind of ghostly cloud of a person stretched forward and diagonally upward. What we are doing now is actually transposing two dimensions on top of each other; your head is physically above your feet and your future self is above your past self. By transposing the two dimensions so that we can see both your head and your feet and future and your past, we also create the ghostly blurring of yourself. The alternative would be to picture a thin slice of yourself, perhaps a thin horizontal slice of your belly moving through time but that wouldn't be very pleasant.
Now look forward again. Imagine that in the near future you will be continuing your journey across the room or along the corridor. The temporal parts of yourself who will be making that journey will be 'already' there but climbing into the ceiling of the future forming a diagonal that stretches perhaps several stories upward into the future before you reach the far end of the corridor or side of the room. All these temporal parts of you are connected together into a single stretched out segment of 4 dimensional human-worm.
It isn't too taxing to imagine this short section of your life as a sloping stretched out human being. But how can you imagine your whole life, as you wander around the world back and forth to work and on trips to visit your relatives, as you eat food and breath out carbon dioxide and as atoms join your body and leave it, as you have children and their bodies leave yours and start their own journeys and as you emerge from your parents and they from your grandparents.
It all gets messy and complicated. Simplify the picture so that your mind can hold it. Focus on your own body shrinking as you mentally 'follow' it back through time into your childhood. Picture your body as the blurred together chain of temporal parts tapering as you go back through your childhood to your infancy. Forget about the crazy twists and turns that your body makes as each day you go back and forth to school or daycare. Simplify and focus on the change in your bodies size tapering down from many feet tall to perhaps just a single foot, still human shaped but narrower than the temporal section of you that we call your adulthood. As we move back through the moment of your birth, you reach the narrow section of you where you were called a fetus. Now akin to how we described your heart, each temporal part of you is directly connected to the next while at the same time entirely surrounded by separate temporal parts of your mother's womb. There is no separation between you the infant and you the fetus. You are a single connected 4 dimentional worm.
Follow the four dimensional blur of the temporal part of yourself that is you as a fetus backward in time as it tapers down to a single cell and merges with your mothers ovary. You are still there, a single cell line within your mother's four-dimensional space-time body but blurred beyond recognition. Again there is no separation between you the zygote and you the cell in your mother's ovary. From your adult self all the way back to that cell is a single four-dimensional object. You are literally a branch of your mother; the same object as your mother in four dimensions. You seem like two objects now because you only see the temporal parts of your mother and you that intersect with the time we call now. But if you both stretch back through time as four dimensional worms to the point where you were part of her body then you are just connected parts of the same object in space-time.
Follow your mother back as she shrinks down into infancy and becomes a single cell line in your grandmother. That cell line isn't just your mother. It is also you. If you have siblings it is also them. That cell doesn't somehow become all these separate people. It is them. They are all a single connected four-dimensional object that stretches through space-time. Each child emerges from its parent like a branch emerging from a trunk. Somewhere back in each child's past, it is still connected to the four dimensional blur that is its parent.
Now imagine this line stretching back through a dozen ancestors to perhaps the 17th century. Dozens of branches come off this temporal worm and most of those branches themselves becoming more and more worms until they account for a large portion of our present day population. Now imagine the line going back further, many millennia, now the branchings and subbranchings become more numerous until they do account at the present day 'end' for our whole human population. This isn't a family tree. It is a single four dimensional object. Humanity is not just a group of related people. It is a single four dimensional object. We are not just all brothers and sisters and cousins as we are taught by geneticists. We are all one object as we are taught by temporal physicists.
Now imagine the stretching of this branching line further into the past to the common ancestor with all the other mammals. We are not just related to the other mammals. Mammalia is a single four dimensional object. And on further into the past to the common ancestor with all other animals. We are not just related to all other animals. Animalia is a single four-dimensional object. And on further into the past to the common ancestor with bacteria. All life is not just related. All life on Earth is a single four dimensional object of which we are each but a part.
Quietly meditate on this idea for a while. Open your mind to being one object with the body of all life.