The Magical Fluidity of Time

linear time is a fairly superficial construct of the physical world. Interesting you should say that. I've had inklings of this...teases. My spirit tells me that what you stated above is a fact. That's as far as my understanding goes at this point, except... his description of how one particular soul moved from a lifetime in the 1800s to its next lifetime many centuries before that... instantly made sense. When I read that something in my brain lit up. No, it doesn't exactly make sense to me. What makes sense is the idea that it should make sense. I haven't heard of either of the books you mentioned, but I will make a point of finding them. I've had inklings....that an exploration of the nature of time would be part of this before all is said and done. If it's true that time is no more absolute than the other boundaries of our perceived reality, there are some interesting implications. For one thing, even for the majority of folks who believe in reincarnation or metempsychosis the nature of the thing is linear. That's part of the point, that we come back in order to learn certain things, and this is related to time. In this view, having already had future lives doesn't make any sense. This seems to me to have interesting implications for the soundness of a good deal of the world's religious thought patterns. If we consider on the other hand that the whole point of existence is spiritual and not physical, then linearity isn't a logical requirement at all. It's almost as if a soul has the opportunity to select from a menu of places AND times to choose from (or be drafted into) - that or perhaps something like a college catalog. As far as learning and growth go, the focus is what we already understand, but the linearity of time is connected, it seems to me, to the notion of sin and judgment. If we contemplate time beginning with the proposition that our existence is essentially spiritual in nature, then what you're proposing does better than make sense, it illuminates. I will definitely search out those books. Thanks, Fred! 8-D

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...about time in a new way, which is interesting because as I said, I've been having inklings that I would be thinking about this at some point...in time, where else? In fact, I've had several experiences involving time over the last year. Surely someone that I can search out has written a philosophy of time. I'll have to check into this. I'm not sure I've ever thought of time before, except in linear terms. I've had many experiences resembling precognition, some of which I'm pretty sure amounted to genuine perception of things that were in the future. It seems to me that there are ways in which events cast their shadow forward as well as back - and that obviously relates to where they are in relation to the Light. Or a light. In the past, I think I've viewed time as a sort of river, which we are drifting down on a barge or yacht or craft of some kind. Sometimes, because we are experienced river pilots (some of us anyway), we know from the shape of the bank, the bends and the currents, the soundings and way the birds call, that there may well be shoals or a storm ahead. Other times something mystical happens, something we're not normally capable of, and we have a sudden birds-eye view of the river ahead and know exactly what's coming. I can't explain how that happens, but once I suddenly found myself seeing through the eyes of a crow I was observing, for about ten seconds. I could not only see myself looking up, as well as the rooftops and many, many more things than I normally could, but I could also feel the birds outrage at the intrusion. Does this explain anything about how the pilot gets a bird's eye view of the river? I have no idea. The point is that the whole river picture, which has pretty much been my paradigm until this night, is inescapably linear. It has a source and a destination. How interesting to think of time as a field instead of a single dimension. This opens up all kinds of possibilities. It would seem that the linear experience is more or less limited to the physical plane, which makes sense because the physical decays. Entropy is a function of time. On the physical plane there is no such thing as the eternal. How then are we able to even conceive of such a thing, let alone become convinced of its existence, if our entire being is captured in linear time? Obviously we cannot. So obviously we do have some kind of built-in window to this reality, whatever we've been conditioned to believe. It might be argued that observation of new life springing from old, and the endless change of seasons and the procession and precession of the heavens, lead to our belief in the eternal. It's a persuasive argument, but I think that to those sophisticated enough to make this observation, it would also occur that the leap from repetition to timelessness is illogical. At best, the idea of eternity would remain controversial, instead of being a universal foundation of perception. Time's apparent linearity has to be in some sense genuine. It is defined by two directions: forward and backward. Time is also defined by change, which requires the existence of something capable of change - that is, non-eternal - which also requires space. So the time-space continuum is meaningless without matter which of course means also energy. So the conclusion I reach is that time, like beauty, does not exist independently but must instead be an element of a matrix of which constant flux is only a single parameter out of many. Nonlinear time? That's a new idea to me, and really interesting. I can't think of any reason why time has to be linear under all conditions. This is novel thinking to me, and I'm really intrigued. Let's hear some more on this! 8-D

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