Bigger on the Inside

Your brain, your mind, in my opinion should and does act like Doctor Who‘s TARDIS.

It’s impregnable. It can take you anywhere and it’s vast, so infinitely vast that it defies sense. This TARDIS, your space-time capsule, is parked within a larger, more traditional vessel: your body. Let’s break it down further into sci-fi analogies: you are a Doctor Who timelord – immortal and with a complicated lore – inside a TARDIS parked in the Emperor’s chair of Star Wars‘ Death Star with it’s millions of moving parts and crewmembers – not unlike the brilliant flow of your own biology. You, this grand instillation of craftmanship are an institution in a single point in space and time wholly present in its own environs yet with infinite potential to wherever, whenever, anywhere in time or space within.

I’m not an expert on biology so the analogy there is loose but like the Death Star, I know for a fact that I too have a vulnerable exhaust port.

Let me break down the known lands of your TARDIS:

The Console Room: this is where the magic happens. All the drama and big decisions are made here and it’s your waking mind where you see everything. It reflects your personality; it can be clean and crisp and ordered or a little grungy and a mess but loveable, nonetheless.

The Library: here is the ever expanding databanks of your mind. Within is stored everything you’ve ever experienced and learned. Of course some of the books are a little dusty and a few of the servers at the back have gone offline after years of neglect, but they still hold the data that makes you you.

The Secondary Console Room: here all of your subconscious thoughts are directed without you even knowing. They work tirelessly without reward to keep you going and learning even as you sleep, as the main console room is vacant for the night.

The Engines: this area is another unseen hero. As you think and do, the engines keeps everything else powered and moving, using a labyrinth of wires connected to the grander “Death Star”, directing more mechanical decisions. That spark of life, that electrical charge begins here and directs everything else.

Living Rooms: rooms of requirement for particular personal needs or reasons to hold specific memories, purposes or responses.

The Wardrobe: is where we see ourselves, the masks we wear, the cultivation of our identity and sense of self.

The Bedroom: where we retreat within to sleep, truly sleep and dream while the Engines and Secondary Console rooms keep ticking over. This is a room perhaps we all recognise the most, spending 1/3 of our lives here.

The Zero Room: the perfect zen place where we return to in meditation free of thought and all feeling. Here we can heal ourselves and float in the nothingness. Here the laws of physics do not apply even in by our own metaphysical understanding, where telepathy is the only form of communication with the outside.

The Eye of Harmony: the clue for this is in the name. In Doctor Who the Eye is practically the soul of the TARDIS that connects it with the multiverse. We have a similar mechanism in spiritualism: The Third Eye also known as the pineal gland. While in the show it’s a angry orange star, for us, it is a deep indigo expanse much like the very vortex of time itself that can take us anywhere in the multiverse.

Finally, there is the timelord: you. The immortal soul inhabiting this TARDIS, pottering around, having adventures, going everywhere at once but never moving from your point in space. Through the rewrites and reincarnations, you evolve and may find yourself in new TARDIS’ with different interiors, different Death Stars that are not at all Death Stars and more like the Enterprise-D from Star Trek. And so, when it is time to leave to a new incarnation, do so with the grace of a true series finale and a spectacular bow out.

To close, and like a bad habit, I shall echo the words of Marcus Aurelius to remember:

“Things of themselves cannot touch the soul at all.” – Meditations 5.18

Like the well-dressed timelord you are, you soul is, despite the threat of danger: you’ll be fine and you’ll be back.

Z3N0