The Cylinder and the Clay: A Personal Insight into Dimensions, Time, and Existence

Watch this article a Story board video

I was watching a documentary on the lost oasis civilisations when a small, almost throwaway detail caught my attention. Archaeologists were explaining the use of ancient cylinder seals, carved cylinders that were rolled across soft clay to imprint text or images.

At first glance, it is simply an early form of printing. But the longer I watched, the more the object stopped being historical and started becoming conceptual.

That cylinder quietly contains one of the most profound models of existence I have ever encountered.

---

One object, two realities

On the cylinder itself, the information exists as a continuous whole.

There is no beginning or end.
There is no left or right.
Any point on the surface can be reached directly.

Yet when that same information is rolled into clay, it becomes something entirely different.

Suddenly:

• there is a start and an end
• there is distance
• there is sequence

To reach one side of the message, you must travel the entire length of the clay. Time has appeared, not because the information changed, but because its dimensional expression changed.

Nothing new was created.
Nothing was lost.
Only the perspective shifted.

---

Direction creates time

On the clay, the message unfolds.

On the cylinder, the message simply is.

What struck me was this:
on the cylinder, the start and the end are the same place. If you travel far enough in either direction, you return to where you began.

The idea of a beginning only exists once the information is forced into a linear dimension.

This immediately reframes how we think about:

• time
• causality
• origin
• endings

What if time itself is not a fundamental property of reality, but a consequence of being embedded on the “clay” rather than the “cylinder”?

---

The overlooked dimension: inside and outside

Then came the second realisation, one that deepened the metaphor further.

The cylinder is not just curved; it is hollow.

The carved outer surface is one domain.
The empty interior is another.

To move from the outside to the inside, you must break through the boundary. They are not adjacent in the usual sense, yet they occupy the same object.

This suggests something profound about dimensions:

Dimensions do not have to be layered sequentially.
They can be co-located yet inaccessible.

This mirrors our own reality uncomfortably well.

There may be aspects of existence not hidden by secrecy, gods, or laws, but simply by dimensional separation. Not forbidden. Just unreachable from where we stand.

---

Why we may never see the whole

This is where scale becomes unavoidable.

I do not believe humanity, or any civilisation anywhere in the universe, will ever grasp the full structure of existence. Not because of religion, and not because of imposed limits, but because of sheer scale.

Even if a civilisation survives:

• its own technological adolescence
• its environmental pressures
• its internal conflicts

it still faces a deeper problem: time itself.

To traverse even a tiny fraction of cosmic scale requires durations longer than civilisations endure. By the time meaningful progress is made, the culture that began the journey is already gone.

If not from self-harm, then from entropy, stellar evolution, or cosmic dynamics beyond control.

No intelligence escapes this.
No species outruns the universe.

---

Civilisations as brief imprints

Seen this way, civilisations resemble the clay more than the cylinder.

We experience:

• sequence instead of totality
• progress instead of presence
• history instead of structure

We leave impressions, partial, linear, incomplete, of something far larger than ourselves.

The cylinder, meanwhile, remains untouched.

---

A quieter conclusion

Perhaps existence does not begin and end at all.

Perhaps those are artifacts of direction, not properties of reality itself.

We are not moving from creation toward destruction.
We are unfolding a pattern whose full shape exists beyond our dimensional reach.

The ancient cylinder seal was never designed to explain the universe.

Yet in its simplicity, it reveals a humbling truth:

Reality may already be complete, and we are merely tracing it, one dimension at a time.

Latest Science Articles