Thursday, September 10, 2020

NOTES UPON AWAKENING

 


ABOUT TIME

Let’s start with Einstein’s last, and perhaps most important enlightenment about the two simplest variables of extent: space and time. From the perspective of relativistic quantum field theory, he realized that space and time, or Minkowski space-time in the geometry of the four dimensional physical domain, can “claim”, as he put it: “no existence of their own. They are simply structural features of the field.” What exactly does this mean? To understand this fully requires the application of relativistic quantum field calculus. I developed the Calculus of Dimensional Distinctions (CoDD) for this purpose in 1989. But I don’t expect everyone who reads this to be familiar with my esoteric system of mathematical logic, so let me try to explain this, as best as I can, in plain English.

Every conscious being has a mental conception of space and time. One could not survive long in this world without some awareness of space and time. One would probably get run over crossing the street, or fall into a deep hole in the ground! Space is measured in inches, feet, miles, centimeters, meters, kilometers, etc., and is 3-dimensional, where the dimensions are called length, width, and depth. Time is measured in seconds, hours, days, and years, and is thought of as a one-way dimension. These measurements are called variables of extent because they can be plotted along straight lines extending across a page. Put together as a logical mathematical structure, length, width, depth, and time (x,y,z,&t) are variables of extent in the 4-dimensional domain of space-time. Physical reality also has content, measured in quantal units of  mass and energy, in ounces, pounds, and tons, or micrograms, grams, kilograms, etc., called variables of content. Together, these variables of extent and content, in various combinations, are the variables in the equations describing the laws of physics in the Calculus of Dimensional Distinctions. But I mention this conceptualization just to put what I have to say about time in the  proper logical context. I am going to keep this post simple, and just focus on time, the one variable of our nine-dimensional reality that has the greatest impact on our experience of consciousness, which is the essence of our being.

We are very much aware of time. Time is a major factor in our lives. We eat, sleep, work, and live, by the clock. But do we really know what time is? The answer is: No, we don’t. Time is a familiar unknown. But Albert Einstein has given us a clue: It has no existence of its own. This is fairly easy to understand without any complicated math or abstract reasoning, as follows: If there is nothing happening, there is no time. A static universe would be timeless. Without the energetic whirling dance of bits of mass through space, there would be no such thing as time! In terms of geometry, time is simply the distance between events. Without events, there is no such thing as time. Space, when analyzed, suffers a similar fate. If there were no objects, there would be no space. But that’s for another discussion. We’re just talking about time right now.

You have most likely heard the saying: “Time waits for no one.”  and it seems to be true. But that’s only because most of us don’t know what time really is; or, perhaps more appropriately, what time isn’t. I began to figure this out about 60 years ago, several years before I read Einstein’s words quoted above. I hadn’t worked out the math yet, but I knew how to make time wait for me! When I began the practice of Kriya Yoga in 1960, I began to learn how to slow time down, and eventually how to stop it all together! This gave me some insights into how things work, and eventually into life, consciousness, and time itself, including things like time travel and reincarnation, Do I have any real evidence of this seemingly miraculous claim? I believe I do, but you can decide for yourself. I will be 84 in less than 30 days, but I’ve been told by a number of people, some of whom I believe, that I look and act like someone at much younger.

Let me explain how this works. Time has no existence of its own apart from the other variables that make up physical reality, - particularly the variables of mass and energy. That means that for you, the passage of time is relative to physical events occurring within your body, the contents of which are mass and energy. One of the beneficial effects of the deep meditative state of Kriya Yoga, is the experiencing of conscious exit from your physical body. When I am absent from my physical body, it is in stasis, and if this stasis is complete, there is no movement in my physical body, and with no mass energy events, there is no time; thus  my body does not age.

This may be what the Apostle Paul was talking about when he said: “In Christ I die daily” and “We are confident, I say, and willing rather to be absent from the body, and to be present with the Lord”!

There are three states of conscious that I have experienced during my lifetime, during which the body is in either partial or complete stasis: the Near-Death Experience (NDE), the Out-of-Body Experience (OBE), and deep meditation experiences, known by various names like Samadhi. Satori, Tao, Mystical Union, etc. So the effects of slowing or stopping the apparent march of time on my body may have not been solely from the practice of Kriya Yoga, because I experienced two NDEs and several OBEs before I began to practice Kriya Yoga in 1960.

What about time travel? Actually, we do that all the time. Just as we move from point to point in space in the physical world, we move from point to point to point in time. But in the physical world, the motion is confined to a one-directional timeline. To travel back on the timeline of our experience, or forward in an accelerated way is not possible without involving other dimensions of space, time, and consciousness, not to mention the dynamics of mass and energy. What science fiction writers and others are talking about is not travel just in time, but in space, time, and consciousness, because time has no existence of its own.

Can I travel back to a day in my youth and correct something that I wish now I hadn’t done? Probably not; at least not in the way science fiction writers think of it. Why? Because time has no existence of its own. On a particular day, at a specific moment in the past, what made up reality at that point in time, was a specific configuration of all of the mass, energy, and consciousness interacting at that moment in space-time. If I truly visit that moment, I will be the same part of the reality of that time that I was then, and I will experience everything exactly as I did before. Thus I wouldn’t even know that I had traveled back in time. I probably wouldn’t be able to change anything, and if I did change things by making a different choice, or by accidentally doing something different than I did the first time, it might have all kinds of unexpected effects on the future from which I came. This is just one reason that Jacqui asked me not to build a time machine when, after my experience in the Great Pyramid, l told her I thought I could. (I wrote about this in Secrets of the Sacred Cube and my upcoming book Survival.)

Can I travel back in time to a time before I was born? Maybe, e.g., to the year 1875 and meet Mark Twain when he was writing Tom Sawyer? Probably not; at least not in the way you might think of it. Why? Because all the other aspects of reality would have to be involved, including consciousness. Then one has to ask, where was my consciousness at that time?  What if I was actually Mark Twain? In fact, Mark Twain believed in reincarnation. He said “I have been reincarnated more often than anyone, except maybe Krishna!” (See Secrets of the Sacred Cube for the quote and reference.)

So, is time travel possible? Yes, within certain parameters. What is time? Nothing at all without mass, energy, space, and consciousness.

ERC 9/10/2020


2 comments:

  1. Hi Edward.
    It's interesting to see that what you just said aligns very well with my own current views.
    These (views about space and time) changed a lot during my life, but since I've read Mc Taggart's treatise on the illusion of time, I basically settled on the idea that "there is only change (of content)". Both space and time are therefore mere aspects of change. Or as some like to put it, they emerge from the changes undergone by things.

    But then, what about the rate of change? is that a thing on itself? is it fixed? can that be accelerated? suspended? is it universal or individual?

    My take on that is that the rate of change is individual and variable. Individual to each and every consciousness (and by extension to everything), and variable in the sense that it can accelerate or slow down (but never completely stop, change is unstoppable).

    Because of the individual and variable nature of the rate of change, it can totally occur that from the view of one consciousness, "time stopped" because that's just the case of his rate being much much greater than everyone else's. And, in particular, the rate of change of something in physical state (like your body)" is comparatively much much slower than that of something in a spiritual, or ethereal as I prefer to put it, state.

    Now... if a change starts going anti-symmetrically (that is, I retraced my steps backwards), would that be like a form of traveling back in time? Not really, but because of one thing that I think should be added to this discussion:

    *Experience is strictly cumulative*

    That is, as conscious entities, everything that happens is retained and accumulated in the form of experience.

    So, even if any path of the trace of change, considering any set of variables, whereas energy, mass, distance, or whatever... can have an arbitrary topology, and can even loop itself back and forth, there is still a strictly forward direction to change in the fact that we experience it cumulatively.

    And since one of the most practical definitions of "me" is that I am the accumulation of my experiences, the fundamental consequence of change is that I'm never the same even if the events themselves were to play out again exactly as before.

    It is, in my view, this strictly accumulative, forward nature of experience where the notion of the arrow of time comes from.



    ReplyDelete
  2. Meme of the moment : "One could not survive long in this world without some awareness of space and time."

    Spacetime has been invented by natural selection!
    chemicalgorithms.blogspot.com

    ReplyDelete