March 14, 2006

Time

My teacher took me aside and told me, "Duncan, you know, there's a fine line between genius and insanity." I'm not sure what I was supposed to do with that, except remember it so that I could write it here.

Later in life, my friend John Page told me, "Duncan, you know, there's a fine line between being in a groove and being in a rut." So I guess the message keeps coming back to me.

It turns out that my teacher was insane. But only as insane as most of us; I mean, just look at the way we act. We make ourselves unhappy, we complain, we blame, and we self-sabotage; yet we say that we want to be happy and at peace. The only difference between us and the people in a mental hospital is that we cook for ourselves.

I can't speak for John Page; he'll have to pipe up and claim his insanity for himself. I have had doubts about him in the past, and at one time began to suspect that he was a Zen master.

Back at school, I was nine years old. We had been assigned some homework: write down a list of things that you do in the morning before you come to school. We each read our list out in front of the class the next day. The other kids had written things like, "I got up, had a shower, got dressed, ate my breakfast, and then walked to school." Isn't life in a sentence sweet?

When it was my turn to speak, I said, "I awoke, opened my eyes, looked at the ceiling, became aware that I was in a room, moved my right leg toward the side of the bed ..." The teacher stopped me after a minute or so, by which time I had only got to the door of my bedroom.

Perhaps it was because my hobby was programming the Atari ST in machine code, and I was into the idea of breaking everything down into logical shifts and register loads; or perhaps it was something more profound: perhaps I really was insane. Well if I was insane, I can state as convincingly as any insane person that I am now relatively sane.

But this article isn't supposed to be about insanity, so stop it Duncan. Okay, sorry. And stop saying sorry all the time, there's nothing to be sorry about. There isn't? No, there just is; we're all responsible but no one is to blame. Okay, I got it. I love you, ya know. I know, and I love you too.

Life seems to go faster as we grow older; most people agree with this. When we were little kids, days lasted for weeks and weeks lasted for years. But now, as the sun reaches the zenith of our lives, months pass like days, and years like weeks. Why is this?

I suspect it's because our awareness tends to decrease as we grow older. Our once novel actions become subconscious and automatic. Our schedules, that in the past we had to figure out, are ingrained in our spinal chords. But I have noticed that as my awareness increases in general, time slows down. Do you remember when you had that accident and everything went in slow motion? That was an acute increase of awareness.

Time does not really exist in the concrete sense that we often think it does. Little kids don't understand time; and rightly so, since it is nonsense. It only has meaning for people who are technically insane. By that I mean: it only has meaning for those who do not realize that they are everything.

Time exists because of space. It takes time for something to travel from one point in space to another. Without space, time cannot be experienced or even defined. Space is experienced from a perspective of limited being: I am here and you are there; one end of the ruler is at this point and the other is at that point, and I am holding the ruler here. So the perception of space is relative and thus also is the perception of time. As objects move faster their perception of time changes. Relative to the rest of the universe, time seems to slow down for the fast moving object and the size of the fast moving object appears to increase. In the physical world, if we moved at the upper limit: the speed of light in a vacuum, we would become infinitely large and time for us would stop.

And then space only exists because of the illusion that there is something other than just love. As our awareness increases, we find that space does not exist since there is only one thing. And that one thing is both infinitely large and infinitely small. Every point in that one thing is the same point, existing at the same location and thus also at the same time. So as our awareness increases, time slows down. And eventually time stops. And then there is only now, forever.

Consider what is happening in your mind in any five second period; perhaps one or two thoughts will come. Now consider what is happening in the fifty trillion cells in your body: the chemical messages, the electrical signals, and the oozing fluids. Now consider what the deal is with the googol (10^100) atoms in the universe. What are they all doing? How much stuff is happening in those five seconds? Is that a rich five seconds?

As our awareness decreases, time speeds up. The universe is self-adjusting. The universe is becoming self-aware. Time moves faster for the parts that are less aware, propelling them forward to their destiny. We will all meet as I in the end; perfectly dove-tailed together; arriving on the dot; stopping on a dime; meeting where we are.