The Underlying Graves-Level 7 and 8 Themes in the Terminator Series

by Nathan Webb

As illustrated in the "General Overview" section of this website dealing with temporal matters (Introduction to Human Threshold Systems), time becomes as complex as all other relationships and interdependencies as one progresses up the ladder of the Graves spiral. The interlationships are easy enough to visualize at levels 1 through 6, because no matter how many timelines there become, the shape and flow properties remain fundamentally the same. It is only at levels 7 and 8 that linear time becomes inadequate to describing the state of the universe. Questions of the importance of sequence and decision come into play, because one realizes that it is not with time that the universe changes any more than it is with space that the universe ages. Time is just another dimension of existence to be taken into account, just like latitude, longitude, and altitude. Time becomes a map rather than a flow-diagram.

To illustrate this point, let’s look at a popular movie series:

Imagine a straight, linear timeline with no loops or feedback, just the straight progression from past to present to future, where all things move within the currently established flow. We'll call it timeline zero, the unaltered timeline. On this timeline, humans created the ultimate artificial intelligence weapon, it became sentient, tried to take over the world, but the humans fought back and destroyed the AI's hegemony. There happened to be a man leading them, and for argument's sake we'll call him John.

This is timeline zero, the unaltered timeline, so John could not have known anything extraordinary, could not have had any knowledge before-hand that it was not possible for him to know in the un-altered timeline.

The AI (we'll call it Skynet), having been defeated, uses its last resources to send a terminator back through time to kill John before he is born. However, the terminator fails, and John's mother is alerted to the coming war, so she trains John for it.

But what if they had succeeded? Well, in timeline zero, there really wasn't anything special about John. He didn't have his mother's training, because Skynet hadn't sent a terminator back through time yet. So if the terminator had succeeded, another general would have taken his place, and had the same chance of beating Skynet as John did. So then, they would have had to send another terminator back for that one. And the process would repeat itself until the war was moved to 1984, with terminators running around everywhere killing everyone they could get their hands on. This would have distracted the designers of Skynet, preventing or postponing the rise of Skynet, and moving us to yet another timeline of events. But separated from their mother mind, the machines would have been at a disadvantage in the past, and would have lost.

So far, then, Skynet loses.

Now we're on timeline 1, the timeline where John has received his mother's training because of the failure of the first terminator. He wants to stop the war, so he blows up the site where Skynet was developed in timeline zero; however, this only postpones the rise of Skynet, because AI research is hot, especially in the military, and, as with his own general commission in the future, if he blows up one site, another will rise to take it's place.

So far, there is a war.

We are now in timeline 2. So far, everything Skynet has done has moved the times and places of battles, but has not changed the outcome of the war. Everything John does moves the times and places of battles, but has not prevented the war. There is a war, Skynet loses.

Why is that?

For several reasons. One thing Skynet is doing admirably (and the humans to their credit picked up the same strategy quickly) is treating time as another terrain on which battles can be fought. However, both sides made the faulty assumption that time was the meta-system, rather than just another dimension. Skynet lost the battle in three-dimensional space, so they took it into the realm of time, thinking they were appealing to a meta-system.

Also, basic physics caught up with them: for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction: Skynet's attempts to win the war make the humans stronger, and John's attempts to prevent the war only postpone it.

So with all this confusion over meta-systems and dimensional time, when and where did the war come into existence?

At first, timeline zero. The existence and outcome of this war was woven into the tapestry of the universe in every possible timeline, because of the events in timeline zero which set the temporal “meta-war” into place. The war could only have been prevented in timeline zero, and skynet could only have won in timeline zero–because timeline zero was when/where all the crucial decisions were made. But once time travel came into play, so did other timelines, but by then, the tapestry was woven and the story was written. In Graves 7 terms, the boxes were opened in timeline zero, and Skynet's cat was dead, for all eternity and throughout the universe. In other words, there was a meta-system in play, and neither Skynet nor John Connor were successful in accessing it to change the pattern of the weave. And when so many timelines flow together like that, you can’t change one thread and expect it to make the tapestry tell a different story. You have to take it apart and re-weave it. Or, to use the time soup metaphor, you’ve already seasoned the pot. The only way to change the flavor of the soup is to start over. Skynet thought they were going back in time and cooking the soup differently, when in fact what they were doing was adding a little more jalepeno to cover over the taste of the cilantro.

If you step off the plane of time and go up above it, and take it in all at once, you can see every battle that took place in the war, where and when it was fought, on what timelines, and what the outcome was, but the story remains the same. There is a war, and Skynet loses.

So any 7 can see the patterns laid herein, and probably is duly amazed by their complexity. However, an 8 will look at this pattern and ask himself or herself what needs to happen to actually prevent the war, or conversely to help Skynet to win it. An 8 on such a mission would first have to have the 7 understanding of this pattern, and would have to change the whole tapestry rather than weaving in more and more timelines. The implication is an 8 has to do this job from outside time, not traveling through it and therefore limited by it. An 8 has to fall back, take in the whole tapestry, and figure out how to re-weave it–a much more complex and skillful task than just pulling out one thread. What this means is the 8 has to have a clear picture in his or her mind what the new tapestry will look like–easy if you’re doing an actual two dimensional tapestry, but much harder if you’re constructing a universe with three dimensional space and God-only-knows what kind of time. For one thing, it requires a point of view meta to the universe. The 8 then has to figure out how all the complex linear timelines fit together to make the picture he or she is envisioning.

Needless to say, this is a daunting task for any human. Therefore, the only way to get it to happen is with the agreement of God and the universe. In fact, the meta POV is only possible with such agreement, because the universe and God have to actually lend the 8 energy to keep the POV from overloading the poor mortal human. This process is roughly akin to temporarily imbuing a monkey with the ability to do triple-integrals on MathCad on a PC.

Neither Skynet nor John would have been capable of such a feat, because both had to operate on the battlefields they were given. Neither were capable of pulling up out of the timelines and off of the 3D chessboard of space, so they both had to settle for working in a system where boxes were already opened and decisions were already made.