What does this mean, to say that an idea or a thought is literally alive? And that it seizes on men here and there and makes use of them to actualize itself into the stream of human history? Perhaps the pre-Socratic philosophers were correct; the cosmos is one vast entity that thinks. It may in fact do nothing but think. In that case either what we call the universe is merely a form of disguise that it takes, or it somehow is the universe — some variation on this pantheistic view, my favorite being that it cunningly mimics the world that we experience daily, and we remain none the wiser. This is the view of the oldest religion of India, and to some extent it was the view of Spinoza and Alfred North Whitehead, the concept of an immanent God, God within the universe, not transcendent above it and therefore not part of it. The Sufi saying [by Rumi] “The workman is invisible within the workshop” applies here, with workshop as universe and workman as God. But this still expresses the theistic notion that the universe is something that God created; whereas I am saying, perhaps God created nothing but merely is. And we spend our lives within him or her or it, wondering constantly where he or she or it can be found.
I enjoyed thinking along these lines for several years. God is as near at hand as the trash in the gutter — God is the trash in the gutter, to speak more precisely. But then one day a wicked thought entered my mind — wicked because it undermined my marvelous pantheistic monism of which I was so proud. What if — and here you will see how at least this particular SF writer gets his plots — what if there exists a plurality of universes arranged along a sort of lateral axis, which is to say at right angles to the flow of linear time? I must admit that upon thinking this I found I had conjured up a terrific absurdity: ten thousand bodies of God arranged like so many suits hanging in some enormous closet, with God either wearing them all at once or going selectively back and forth among them, saying to himself, “I think today I’ll wear the one in which Germany and Japan won World War II” and then adding, half to himself, “And tomorrow I’ll wear that nice one in which Napoleon defeated the British; that’s one of my best.”
This does seem absurd, and it certainly seems to reveal the basic idea as nonsense. But suppose we recast this “closet full of different suits of clothes” just a little and say, “What if God tries out a suit of clothes and then, for reasons best known to him, changes his mind?” Decides, using this metaphor, that the suit of clothes that he possesses or wears is not the one he wants. . . in which case the aforementioned closet full of suits of clothes is a sort of progressive sequence of worlds, picked up, used for a time, and then discarded in favor of an improved one? We might ask at this point, “How would the suddenly discarded suit of clothes — the suddenly abandoned universe — feel? What would it experience?” And, for us even more importantly, what change, if any, would the life forms living in that universe experience? Because I have a secret hunch that this exact thing does indeed happen; and I have a keen additional insight that the endless trillions of life forms involved would suppose — incorrectly — that they had experienced nothing, that no change had taken place. They, as elements of the new suit of clothes, would incorrectly imagine that they had always been worn — always been as they now were, with complete memories by which to prove the correctness of their subjective impressions.
We are accustomed to supposing that all change takes place along the linear time axis: from past to present to future. The present is an accrual of the past and is different from it. The future will accrue from the present on and be different yet. That an orthogonal or right-angle time axis could exist, a lateral domain in which change takes place — processes occuring sideways in reality, so to speak — this is almost impossible to imagine. How would we perceive such lateral changes? What would we experience? What clues — if we are trying to test out this bizarre theory — should we be on the alert for? In other words, how can change take place outside of linear time at all, in any sense, to any degree?
Well, let us consider a favorite topic of Christian thinkers: the topic of eternity. This concept, historically speaking, was one great new idea brought by Christianity to the world. We are pretty sure that eternity exists — that the word “eternity” refers to something actual, in contrast, say, to the word “angels.” Eternity is simply a state in which you are free from and somehow out of and above time. There is no past, present, and future; there is just pure ontological being. “Eternity” is not a word denoting merely a very long time; it is essentially timeless. Well, let me ask this: Are there any changes that take place there; i.e., take place outside of time? Because if you say, “Yes, eternity is not static; things happen,” then I at once smile knowingly and point out that you have introduced time once more. The concept “time” simply denotes — or rather posits — a condition or state or stream — whatever — in which change occurs. No time, no change. Eternity is static. But if it is static, it is even less than long-enduring; it is more like a geometric point, an infinitude of which can be determined along any given line. Viewing my theory about orthogonal or lateral change, I defend myself by saying, “At least it is intellectually less nonsensical than the concept of eternity.” And everyone talks about eternity, whether they intend to do anything about it or not.
Let me present you with a metaphor. Let us say that there exists this very rich patron of the arts. Every day on the wall of his living room above his fireplace his servants hang a new picture — each day a different masterpiece, day after day, month after month — each day the “used” one is removed and replaced by a different and new one. I will call this process change along the linear axis. But now let us suppose the servants temporarily running out of new, replacement pictures. What shall they do in the meantime? They can’t just leave the present one hanging; their employer has decreed that perpetual replacement — i.e. changing the pictures — is to take place. So they neither allow the current one to remain nor do they replace it with a new one; instead, they do a very clever thing. When their employer is not looking, the servants cunningly alter the picture already on the wall. They paint out a tree here; they paint in a little girl there; they add this; they obliterate that; they make the same painting different and in a sense new, but as I’m sure you can see, not new in the sense of replacing it. The employer enters his living room after dinner, seats himself facing his fireplace, and contemplates what should be — according to his expectations — a new picture. What does he see? It certainly isn’t what he saw previously. But also it isn’t somehow. . . and here we must become very sympathetic with this perhaps somewhat stupid man, because we can virtually see his brain circuits striving to understand. His brain circuits are saying, “Yes, it is a new picture, it is not the same one as yesterday, but also it is the same one, I think, I feel on a very deep, intuitive basis. . . I feel that somehow I’ve seen it before. I seem to remember a tree, though, and there is no tree.” Now, perhaps, if we extrapolate from this man’s perceptual, mentational confusion to the theoretical point I was making about lateral change, you can get a better idea of what I mean; I mean, perhaps you can, to at least a degree, see that although what I’m talking about may not exist — my concept may be fictional — it could exist. It is not intellectually self-contradictory.
As a science fiction writer I gravitate toward such ideas as this; we in the field, of course, know this idea as the “alternate universe” theme. Some of you, I am sure, know that my novel The Man in the High Castle utilized this theme. There was in it an alternate world in which Germany and Japan and Italy won World War II. At one point in the novel Mr. Tagomi, the protagonist, somehow is carried over to our world, in which the Axis powers lost. He remained in our world only a short time, and scuttled in fright back to his own universe as soon as he glimpsed or understood what had happened — and thought no more of it after that; it had been for him a thoroughly unpleasant experience, since, being Japanese, it was for him a worse universe than his customary one. For a Jew, however, it would have been infinitely better — for obvious reasons.