What Time Is It?

Our experience of Time is closely tied to our illusion of personal separateness. To a corporeal consciousness experiencing the daily drama of life in Assiah (the physical world) experience is divided into a million separate but consecutive slices. Each slice is experienced momentarily as "now" or the Present, then immediately joins that collection of memories we call the Past. The "now" slices are very thin, and pass through the sensorium quickly like film through a movie projector. This creates an illusion of activity and change, just as frames of film seems to come to life when run through a projector.

But what is the Present moment? It's as slippery as quicksilver. As soon as you focus attention upon it, it's already gone into the Past. You cannot grab hold of it no matter how hard you try, at least not using ordinary states of consciousness. Through meditation it is said to be possible to experience "the moment". But when one tries to do this, what you actually experience is a sensation of unbounded timelessness. No separate present moment; all moments are Present.

Time is necessary because it enables consciousness to experience change & growth, and change & growth are the purpose of physical life in Assiah. The arrow of time constrains how we experience change, causality, and entropy. It gives us our past and future. It enables all the changes we experience, from a teacup dropping to the floor, to a baby growing into a man.

In meditation we can briefly experience a timeless frame of reference beyond normal Assiah consciousness. Is it real? To make sense of this, imagine an omniscient consciousness that observes the entire 4-dimensional universe simultaneously and in its entirety. Physicists call this the "block universe"; a 4D block containing the entire history of our universe with time as just another static dimension. Nothing changes in the block universe. It has no Past, Present, or Future.

Of course the words "real" and "illusion" are slippery. It is more accurate to say all frames of reference are relative. In the timeless frame, time seems to be an illusion. But to us in Assiah, static eternity seems like an illusion. Both points of view are correct.

For an omniscient consciousness to experience change within the universe, it would have to make its awareness finite like ours. Only consciousness bound to the arrow of time can watch the universe play like a movie, with movement, change, & growth. A movie whose end is unknown.

But we are much more than spectators watching a movie in the darkened theater of the sensorium (or Plato's cave). We are the ones making the movie as well as watching it! For it takes consciousness to collapse the infinite potentialities of Future into a Present moment, just as quantum physics requires consciousness to collapse a waveform into a particle/wave with definite properties. The act of observation affects the outcome (Heisenberg Principle). The act of watching the movie changes the movie. So you are both the director and audience of your movie.

In the Assiah frame of reference we have free will, which certainly makes the movie more interesting. In the omniscient block universe reference frame, every decision that will ever be made has already been made, so there are no surprises. But that doesn't necessarily mean free will is merely an illusion. To the extent that time is real, so is free will. Just because I know I had waffles for breakfast this morning, doesn't mean I didn't choose waffles freely.

This is our culture's creation myth: Before the Big Bang, all of the universe's space & energy was packed inside a tiny seed the size of a single subatomic particle. It was in a state of indeterminate quantum superimposition, as are all quantum objects until consciousness collapses them. Some unknown consciousness touched the quantum seed, causing its waveform to collapse into physical manifestation. Immediately it was in a physical state of such extreme energy density that it had to expand violently. That Big Bang created 3-dimensional space which is continuing to expand all around us to this very day. It was also at that moment 13.7 billion years ago that Time began for all practical purposes.

Every time your consciousness interacts with the physical world, something like a little Big Bang (Small Bang?) happens again. You make observations and choices. Your observations and choices collapse the myriad possibilities of Future into a Present that immediately solidifies into Past. You collapse the waveform. You are co-creating the universe. Which is not too surprising, because the original consciousness that triggered the Big Bang was ours. This may seem like a chicken & egg paradox. But if you can meditate, and release your awareness from the illusions of time and personal separateness, you will see how this is so.

So which came first, the omniscient chicken or the cosmic egg? :-)