It begins with See Do saying “Time does not exist. But Time is all there is.” Here is what the second part of this apparent contradiction means as it was explained to me by my Spirit Guide:
There are two levels to this statement. The first is in understanding our perceptions within our temporal reality. The second is in understanding how, as one non-dualistic thing, our perceived reality comes to present itself as such an infinitely varied composite of apparently separate “things.”
First, all our perceptions given to our mind are inputs that are Time-derived. In other words, everything we perceive comes in to our mind as a measure of contrast, either in light or dark, hot or cold, color, loudness, even textural, and more. And it is all based on a comparative measure of either Time or Space. And as we saw in the previous chapter, and as science teaches us, Time and Space are inextricably linked. You can’t perceive one without the other. In fact, it is the Time contrast that gives you what you perceive of as Space.
And notice that I didn’t say “conscious mind,” but just “mind.” Our subconscious mind receives something like 20,000 bits of sensory information per second. For our conscious mind, this gets distilled down to between about 12 and 40 bits per second. Our conscious awareness is a pretty blunt instrument.
(Let’s not confuse bits and bytes. The “bits” of information the brain receives are more analogous to your computer’s “bytes.” Or think of a screen’s “pixels.” Each pixel is really the result of an 8 or 12 bit processed “byte” of data. So, each of these “brain bits” is more akin to a pixel, if that makes sense. The brain/mind is not a binary processor, so it really isn’t a fair conversion, but used for comparison and scale.)
So, each of our senses measures a very specific and rather narrow range of Time contrasted stimuli. Popular twenty years ago, isolation tanks allowed users to experience what happens when physical sensory input is stalled at neutral contrast. Combined with darkness and total quiet, the mind soon becomes isolated from physical reality. It’s quite a trip.
Our eyes are built to not only perceive light and color contrasts, but to actually enhance them. And our eye is naturally drawn to the greatest contrast in sight. In fact, the enhancement of contrast states is how we initially perceive movement. Where the contrast gets spiked, we perceive movement and our eyes go there.
Similar things occur with all our senses. A non-contrasting smell soon drops from conscious perception. We turn our heads at a new sound, increasing the contrast in inputs between our two ears, thus increasing the perceptual accuity. Non-contrasting tactile feelings don’t register at all. You probably don’t much feel your clothes, even though every inch of your body is covered with sensory nerves. It goes on.
So the question is: Is Time coming to us from the world, or are we projecting Time onto the world?
And See Do would take me back to the beginning. If you’re having trouble with the question, you might want to review the previous two chapters.
For the second point, we come to understand how the idea of Time relates to the one thing that creates our temporal reality. In my early attempts to understand this I tried imagining all sort of analogs or models. But See Do rejected all of them, and often with a laugh. The difficulty here goes back to something See Do had said in an early chapter (Chapter 7 : The Trouble with Big Numbers). That we have trouble with numbers above about 10 without resorting to simplifying concepts.
The one thing places or projects every particle of our perceived temporal reality out of a single point. Or out of the nothingness, or void, whichever is easier on your brain. (Particle physics is amazingly close to verifying this. I think they call their void quantum foam.) It moves between every point in temporal reality and our perceiving mind, continually creating the contrast states of every point in our reality and the perceived input stimuli data points. Now this might seem impossibly and infinitely complex. And you’d be right, except for the impossible part.
You see, the narrowness of our perceptions helps a bit by focusing in. At any given point of conscious perception, the amount of new input is fairly limited. As we look closer, increasing our resolving power of any given area, more data or stimulus is generated to be perceived. The consistent perception of a cohesive reality beyond any given area of sensory focus comes mostly from memory and is of low resolution. As we look around or move around, the necessary Time contrasted input is there. If it isn’t there, our mind fills in any gap with a low resolution “assumption” or best guess.
We can look in or out to any distance. Use the mightiest telescope or microscope. Peer inside an atom. It doesn’t matter; there will always be more there to see. Try and perceive anything and something will be there, and at a completely consistent fidelity. Look as hard as you like, there is no chance of running out of reality. The one thing will always be there, waiting.
So the one thing weaves this web of Time-and-Space-contrasted points which we then perceive as a cohesive reality – our temporal reality. How we perceive that reality as moving through time on a larger, multiply-perceived, event-based scale is the subject of a coming chapter.
–continued (Next: It’s all really just a memory.)