What is a Universe?

For a while, my favorite definition of a universe was a complete system of space and time. After completing Filbert's Epilogue Processes, I've come to prefer something closer to "a complete fabrication" or "an allness known of itself."

In any case, there is your personal universe, complete in itself, though it might be in pretty rough, whored-out shape. There is also this physical universe, operating at Accountability, an emergent system following the collapse of so many others, including for most the Home, Symbols, Thought, Magic, and Games Universes. There were other universes, too, through which most have come down, though meta-patterns of decay vary less than the details of individual time spent and pathways across specific universes.

There were a series of penalty universes, as well. These were places that beings were thrown into for "breaking the rules." Since any universe is a "penalty universe" when one is force-located there post recrimination, the delineation can be misleading, though some of them were little more than multidimensional rooms in which one had to remain for a time, often into which others could see but from which you couldn't (or weren't supposed to) "see" others.

Time is another dimension of space, but this detail is experientially irrelevant. Time is also incomparable across contexts; other universes can only be said to have been going on "a while." Experiences with them appear to be sequential, though a perfectly fine way to conceptualize these "universes" is as clusters of orientation and experience. If I'm playing a player-versus-player game projecting thought symbols from a doll body within a magic universe to which I have been cast until I collect something, what universe am I in, precisely?

Only the analytical minds of degraded beings whose faint memories stir more life than their present  would care. As a rule, those whose experience is/was created by others regard places as prisons instead of opportunities. Abdication of responsibility and loss of creative ability can be difficult to confront.

More importantly, over time, universes have become increasingly solid with lower quality of play, non-negotiable rules, more suffering, and lower-capability beings. Games and interactions have become more automated and prescriptive, with less mobility, creativity, free attention units, and life. This has more to do with the state of beings in each universe --their degrees of freedom and retention of creative, originative power-- than the specific qualities of each "universe" itself; ceding to unconscious robotism has degraded both ourselves and the quality of our games.

This current universe is referred to by some Boomers as the "Space Opera" universe, the same lot who attribute single prevailing goals to each universe. For starters, this latter perspective is insane: the highest goal for any being in any universe has always been whatever he has decided is that highest goal. It can also change.

I'm going to go through cross sections of a few universes, to give a flavor of my own experiences with them.

It can also be fruitful to manage the universe of all other universes acting in opposition to one's own. The point here isn't semantical.