What Is Time

To see the world in a grain of sand,
and heaven in a wild flower.
To hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
and eternity in an hour.

 We are led to believe a lie,
when we see with, not through, the eye,
Which was born in a night, to die in a night,
while the soul slept in beams of light.

 William Blake

 What “lie” do you believe Blake speaks of? I mean, we have eyes, but he’s suggesting we best see “through” them, not “with” them. Are our eyes – is any material thing for that matter – real? What is real? And if one might hold “eternity in an hour”, or at least imagine the concept of eternity, what is time?

I’m not a scientist – I probably achieved my worst grades in science at school – but as I said last week in Zwhipping Through Time, I find it comforting when science and faith meet up, which I believe has happened with the study of quantum physics. Says William Brown from the Resonance Project Foundation, “When General Relativity was first quantized (becoming a theory of quantum gravity) in the 1960s by John Wheeler (a physicist and colleague of Einstein), the result predicted a static state of the Universe, that is – no change, i.e. timelessness.” Static. No change. Timelessness. All proven by science. It is merely our perception of time that makes shit happen.

In his lengthy and enlightening article on the unified field – of which there is no current accepted theory, but pursuing one (like pursuing happiness) has motivated great research – in Waking Times, Brandon West likens our experience of life to that of a holograph. Says West, “If we perceive the universe from the level of the unified field, imagine that the unified field contains everything, and that all of creation and all of the past and future is holographically encoded within the unified field, and that all exists simultaneously, encoded within the structure of the vacuum.”

Interestingly, holographs just came up for me last week in meditation. Encouraging me in visualization, Andy Puddicombe of www.headspace.com told me to bring to mind a loved one. Then he noted how that image is like a holograph and how you can create these for anyone or anything. Ethereal images of what is, what was, what isn’t, what might be. Scientists postulate that this is what goes on around us all of the time.

West says, “So, on the quantum theoretical level of reality there really is no motion, but a flashing in and out of existence of creation, yet from our level it appears like fluid motion. Just like the people on our television screen are not actually moving, but it is the little pixels which flash on and off in coordination with one another so it looks like motion.”

Logically, it makes sense that time would feel different on another planet with a different relationship to the sun. But is it possible to perceive time differently right here on Earth? In an interview with Wayne Dyer in his lecture series Living Beyond Miracles, Deepak Chopra relates a tale about seven miners trapped in a mine in Germany. Only one has a watch. To ease the fear and lessen the wait to rescue, he’d let a full two hours pass before telling the others one hour had passed. They were rescued after seven days and everyone survived, except the man with the watch. Says Deepak, “He had them change their collective agreement about what constituted time, it’s an agreement. And then they aged accordingly and he couldn’t fool himself because he had a watch.”

Time and motion are things we experience on Earth due to one important ingredient: consciousness.  How else do you get a bunch of stuff that just sits around doing nothing to do something? And I believe this is how we know God, how we are assured of the existence of Him/Her/It. Look around and you’ll see that everything in nature – not just people, but animals, plants, bodies of water, etc – are all jazzed (well, some look more jazzed than others) about radiating creativity.

Says West, “Between your thoughts is a silence which is the unified field, and when you become that silence, you become the unified field, and you become universal. Through the practice of non-attachment, and meditation, all of your troubles disappear because you cease to cling to the changing illusion of reality and you become free to experience what you always will be: pure, infinite and universal consciousness.”