Time is that
ever-present and inescapable fact of our existence that we
simultaneously celebrate and rebel against. There never
seems to be enough of it, yet when we contemplate its
illimitable expanses, it reduces us to insignificance. It
represents the ultimate decay of everything, including our
minds and bodies, our species, our planet and star system,
the universe itself, and it betokens the radical rebirth
that can happen perpetually in every moment. Its
repetitive patterns reveal a cyclical tendency and inspire
the hope of rebirth. The eternal moment unfolds the
perpetually new even as the creations of the day crumble
into the slumber of night.
With time, we have the
essence of paradox. We try to define that element in which
we live and have our being but can never directly
perceive.
The first question
that might be asked in confronting the title The
Reality of Time is: Is time real at all? The
elusiveness of the concepts of past, present, and future,
and the philosophical difficulty of proving an objective
present and flow of time apart from individual experience,
are factors that erode our confidence in the possibility
of defining and ultimately understanding the reality of
that which we call time.
There is a
reductionist tendency in much spiritual writing which will
not be found in this book, in its attempt to delineate a
“higher” account of the physical universe. That wonderful
reductiveness of mystical formulae such as “all this is
That” is not necessarily wrong, and may in fact be
supremely right if one’s consciousness is at the level of
That, but this is not the way that is being traveled
here.By the same token, the oft-repeated nostrum that
“time is an illusion,” as a means of breaking out of the
linear lockstep of classical materialistic physics and
common perception, misses the mark.
Time here is not only
real, it is a primary shaping force underlying manifest
reality, a conscious principle that the Godforce itself
uses as a dimensional background for its creative play. We
also, as creators of our personal reality, use time as the
canvas upon which we apply the colors and form the shapes
that eventually compose our picture of the world.
When reading this book
it is necessary to redefine time, to intuit its essence as
fundamentally different from the “referential time” that
is part and parcel of life in the material world.
Referential time is based on measurement of matter: for
example, the distance of the earth in its orbit around the
sun constitutes one year. Essentially this construction of
time refers to an arbitrary measurement in space. We look
at objective phenomena for with chronometric reference
points, as subjective time is extremely variable, as we
know from everyday experience.
The subjective notion
of a “moment” indicates, I believe, a close encounter with
time itself. Insofar as we experience a moment, we feel a
certain suspension in the pure dimensionality of the time
element and step out of the referential mode, walking that
unforgiving timeline. The anomalous nature of that
momentousness makes us alert to new ideas and
possibilities.
Humankind’s
technological quest can be read as an attempt for
liberation from the tyranny of referential time, to escape
the imprisonment of the senses with its inexorable cycles
of beginnings and endings, of death itself. In this, the
scientific spirit is profoundly religious.
The field of “pure
time” though is not devoid of differentiation. It is full
of discrete areas which function as mathematical
variables. There the bits that are processed by our
computer-like nervous systems in the construction of
objective reality. Our perceptual apparatus fills in the
holes—much like persistence of vision bestows continuity
upon the frames of a film—and the result is the known
universe.
The further evolution
of human consciousness, whether regarded from the
standpoint of the mind, heart, or spirit, is dependent
upon opening up the awareness of time to encompass the
dimensional context. We must begin to hear the individual
notes of the symphony and not be entirely lost in the
totality of the waveform of the music of time, for that
engulf true self-awareness as well as the original
perception of “real time.”
Whether this book by
Janet Sussman is judged to be physics or metaphysics
depends on how restricted our definition of science is.
Certainly verification of these ideas lies beyond the
current capability of modern physics. That does not make
them any less scientific. The knowledge is based on
intuitive apprehension of higher mathematical ideas beyond
present-day apprehension. The point of view is
interdimensional—a certain self-evident quality to the
underlying principles of this book is assumed in the
consciousness open to perception of higher dimensions.
Physics in the last
several centuries has endowed us with three major
perspectives on time:
1.
Newtonian: time is an unchanging, absolute background for
physical reality. This is the “commonsense” view, which in
the words of Julian Barbour (The End of Time) is
“like some invisible river that flows uniformly for ever.”
It seems appropriate for the world of everyday experience.
However, as classical physics proved inadequate to
describe the world of very tiny things, the twentieth
century brought a revolution in conceptualizing time and
space. Barbour goes so far as to repudiate the existence
of time; he is referring, however, to time in the
Newtonian sense.
2.
Relativistic: time is an aspect of four-dimensional “spacetime,”
which is warped by the presence of matter. Time is also
relative to the motion of the observer. The famous twins
paradox is an example of relativistic, Einsteinian time:
If one of two twins gets on a spaceship leaving Earth and
travels close to the speed of light, when he returns to
Earth his twin has aged many more years than he has. This
is because time “slows down” for an object in motion,
although it is only when its speed approaches that of
light that it is very noticeable.
3. Quantum:
Although the quantum nature of time has not been
experimentally verified yet, in some theories time, like
space, may be “quantized” or distinguished as ultra-tiny
units. In the theory of loop quantum gravity, time can be
quantized in units of approximately 10-43 seconds (Planck
time). This idea of the discrete nature of spacetime,
based on “loops” or representations of the spin of points
in diagrams of quantum spatial networks.
In reading Janet’s
descriptions of “locator points,” which are akin to quanta
of spacetime, one feels one is glimpsing the cutting edge
of modern physics from the perspective of the cause rather
than from the effect. In other words, we find ourselves
existentially geworfen (thrown) into a received
reality, a creation that has already emerged and whose
causes, physical and metaphysical, we are forever seeking.
In this book, reality is not posited as a fait accompli.
It is a paradoxical and conscious process like a quantum
particle wave whose position cannot be precisely known
unless its wave function is “collapsed” in the act of
observation. This implicate reality Janet speaks from and
about has no referential value; in terms of human
conceptualization, it is unmanifest.
The “many worlds”
description of quantum reality, in which alternate
universes are splitting off at any given moment of time,
may also be validated by Janet’s frequent discussions of
“multidimensional time,” in which temporal regions break
off from one another. Her cosmology specifically affirms
the existence of parallel universes.
When you collapse the
wave function through measurement, quantum physics gives
you a definitive value (about where a particle is) but you
lose the wave behavior of the quantum system. By doing the
measurement, you force the system to lose its
indeterminacy.
Quantum physics
supports paradox. The Sussman description of time is of
necessity paradoxical, metaphorical, and evocative. The
purpose is not to provide a linguistic “measurement” of
time’s mercurial essence, but to provide a spectrum of
possibilities that is so much greater than the reductive
referential shadow that time casts upon the mind—a falsely
static image. The shift in the perception of time from a
fixed, collapsed referentiality to a vibrant,
multi-temporal dimensional, high-energy reality where
past, present, and future are interwoven, is one to which
human perception may eventually evolve to encompass.
Theoretical
considerations of time inevitably lead to discussion of
higher dimensions, parallel universes, black holes, and
the possibility of time travel. This book addresses many
of these topics but not in the manner common to the many
popular books on physics, which use as their starting
point basic scientific understandings about physics
considered as a purely objective description of the
universe. Rather, this approach proceeds from the
perspective of the unity of consciousness and time—which
invests time with a conscious, creative power that Janet
posits as the underlying reality of the universe. The
reality of time becomes at once the truth of the universe
that manifests as our personal reality—the world as we
know it, and the truth of who we are as conscious, living
entities.
My own confirmation of
the truth of this book lies more in intuition than in
direct experience, I sense rather than see the logic and
clarity of Janet Sussman’s words. This gives me faith that
this book will still be around to be read by future
generations, whose comprehension of it will doubtless be
far more profound than our own.
This is the textbook
of the future in which we can glean today the
understanding of a unitary physics, metaphysics,
philosophy, linguistics, psychology, and spirituality. The
truths embedded in this text will be like time-release
capsules, dissolving in the higher mind of readers,
activating their imaginations, and imparting a profound
and lasting appreciation for the ultimate mystery of our
existence in the landscape of time.
