Time Lapse

As many of you who visit my blog will know, Time is something that intrigues me and that I write a lot about. Well, today, as I sat here working at my desk something rather interesting occurred. For a few seconds, I was back in the mid 1970’s sitting at my bedroom desk in my childhood home doing homework. It seemed to me as if I just flipped into that past moment and back again due to some outside prompt – a sound perhaps? It was a truly bizarre feeling because I expected to look out of the window and see Thornwick Ave in Willerby from an upper vantage point. Instead, I saw my street in Brno. I felt shocked by that somehow too.

Was it all just imagination? Or, did I flip from one time to another and back in an instant? It seemed like the latter to me. I know other people who have had such experiences as well by the way.

For me, time is not real. We live in an eternal moment and at a point in space. However, if that were true, we would experience stasis, stillness and no movement. Space and time are constructs that the human mind uses to create the effect of motion. I can move through space and in time. It could be that every single ‘moment’ already exists alongside every other single ‘moment’ and my consciousness is the flashlight that moves across each of these eternal moments giving the effect of movement – and time. It would be a bit like the way a movie is. Each frame of the movie already exists but the projector lights it up frame by frame to give an impression of movement and time.

If you think about that, it means that everything is already decided. That free will is also imaginary. Or, it could be that there are an unlimited amount of possible or potential moments and consciousness (like the film director) decides which get lit up and which do not. The mind truly boggles at this.

Anthony Peake in his first book, proposed that on death, we drop out of time. To me, it seems logical that when we die, time and space dies with us and we find that we are simply a timeless and eternal moment after all?

See My Haunted Life 3 also for a short story dealing with time and parallel Universes.

08-Eternity

2 thoughts on “Time Lapse

  1. I agree with you that Time is not “real”, that it’s a construct we invented both as an artificial means of comforting (and depressing) ourselves as we move thru the illusion of our days, and as a means of producing a vocabulary so that we can TALK about moving thru the illusion of our days. I’m sure you’ll agree that Stephen Hocking’s A BRIEF HISTORY OF TIME is an absolute must-read on the subject. The author has recently updated the book (first published in 1988) and the entire text is available online at:

    http://www.fisica.net/relatividade/stephen_hawking_a_brief_history_of_time.pdf

    Just in passing, this little book has proven to be one of the most popular books since Caxton invented moveable type in the fifteenth century! It has apparently sold tens of millions of copies and been translated into every major world language. Another critically important book implicitly involving fascinating perspectives on the nature of Time, and one rarely thought-of in this context, is Lewis Carroll’s THROUGH THE LOOKING-GLASS. Time warps, dream states, etc. and poor Alice trying to move thru it all with a semblance of sanity, abound throughout this so-called “children’s story”. It can be read on that level, of course, but it is also a profoundly philosophical book about the ages-old appearance/reality motif, and Time features importantly in that discussion.

    For me, and I suspect for you, Michael, the common experience that everyone reading this piece shares with every other person reading this piece, is the “time sense” in ones’ more vivid sleep-dreams and ‘day dreams’ . Often, people experience minutes when days transpire in the dream state, or they experience days when less than a minute has transpired. When we are once again “awake” and “aware” and “conscious” we glibly dismiss those time-senses as “illusion” and happily get on with our day. Those who would impose more stringent standards of proof, however, ask, “how do we really KNOW we aren’t dreaming right NOW?” In ‘Looking Glass’ Alice is cautioned NEVER to awaken the Red King—because all of the characters and all of the ‘reality’ of their world exists only in the dreams of the Red King. Wake him up and…………..poof!

    Our intellectual constructs of Time and the way in which we live in it and through it enjoy about the same level of provable existence. regardless of the glib common-sense plane that convinces us otherwise.

    • Thanks a lot for the comment and yes – I agree with you. In fact, I have written blog articles in the past questioning if today is my only life….. i.e. yesterday is just a memory placed to give my day relevance. Sorry about the late reply.. I have been traveling.

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