Three-dimensional things exist in time. For example, consider the monitor you are looking at. It was there a minute ago, and it will be there a minute from now. Some day you won’t have it anymore. Time marches on.

My understanding is that objects like that monitor, or you, or I, existing over time, are swooshing through yet another dimension. Physicists call it space-time. Einstein demonstrated mathematically how that dimension could explain gravity.

I’m neither a mathematician nor a physicist. I’m just a ruminating doinkus. Here’s something I’ve been mulling over.

Back to your monitor: it’s a thing, yes? A three-dimensional thing. And it exists in time. It’s a thing in time. It’s a thing traveling through time—not in the sense of a time traveler going back and forth, cum Jules Verne, but in the sense that the monitor is traveling along the road of time as seconds pass.

Let’s call that thing-traveling-through-time a thing itself; that is, not just the monitor, but the monitor traveling through time—in fact, we’ll call it a ‘ting’.

Now visualize that ting traveling through some other dimension (it’s already in space and time, so the whole space and time is moving along now).

If three-dimensional things swoosh through time, then tings swoosh through this next dimension.

What could that dimension be?

What comes to mind for me is the big bang theory. Presumably, from nothing—boom—there is a unidirectional outpouring of reality, creation, expansion. It’s still flowing. All the dimensions flowed from that.

Personally I think there is a value inherent in this outflow. In fact, I think value IS the dimension through which tings flow. For example, evolution isn’t just change over time for the sake of change; it’s improvement. People don’t just crave sex, they make babies, and it’s a good thing they do. Cuts don’t just stop in time; they heal. People get wiser, they don’t just get older. Things head towards more order, more creation, more goodness, more value.

But, you might argue, don’t things break down? What about entropy, the thermodynamic law that, over time, systems break down. People go crazy, for heaven’s sake. Businesses go bankrupt. Marriages break down. Water seeks its own level; it doesn’t go up hill! The world is killing itself, not “healing”!

Okay, but here’s the thing. I argue that as things move forward through this dimension, and they appear to break down, some larger equilibrium is created, at a “higher” level. When the steam engine runs out of fire or water, it stops, but in so doing some new, higher level value is created (e.g., it forces folks to find a more effective fuel). When a partnership breaks down, new opportunities open up. When we screw up the planet, we’ll find another place to live and inch our way out of the ever-expanding solar system and galaxy.

For me, there’s a spiraling-up thing going on; things go round and round, and back and forth, sure—but they are getting bigger and better. The dialectic inherent in life is about progress, and it involves the creation of new meta-levels as former tensions are resolved and from which new tensions emerge.

This core philosophy of optimism being embedded in the fabric of the universe is not really foreign. It sort of follows from the big bang itself. The big bang moment didn’t just get time going forward; it galvanized exponential expansion towards bigness and, thereby, the possibility of notions like bigger and better.

We participate in space and time, and take them for granted. Similarly, we participate in, and take for granted, the basic principle of value—that some things have greater quality or value than other things. We’re swooshing towards higher quality, one way or another, even when things go wrong, right now. Enjoy.