The Eternal Recurrence of a Spotless Mind

Everyone is always told that you have to love your significant other warts and all. But what if he or she or it could journey to a parallel universe where none of their positive attributes would be marred by human foibles. Both Nietzsche and the mathematician Poincare believed in the notion of Eternal Recurrence which states that over the infinite expanse of time literally everything and all its mutations would appear as a succession of possibilities. It’s another iteration of the idea that if you put a monkey in front of a typewriter, over infinite time it will spew forth Hamlet. The idea of parallel universes presents a science fiction version of this idea in which chinks in time make it possible to travel to other dimensions where we can be melded into more perfected forms of ourselves. What a savings of time and money. If they could be accessed, parallel universes would prove to be a lot more reliable than therapy. Therapy rarely offers a cure. All that’s being offered the patient is an ability to accept and understand dysfunctional and maladaptive parts of the self—with the dreary hope that under optimal conditions serial murderers, for example, might recognize that they are acting out. If only scientists could find a way of identifying wormholes and other means of accessing the multiverse then we would be able to select from a number of possibilities. Let’s say there had been knowledge of parallel universes back in the day of Adam and Eve. Eve might have been able to find another form of herself which didn’t give in to the temptation to take the apple from the Tree of Knowledge. There would have been no fall or original sin and earth would have been paradise.