I haven’t written. There is no excuse really, except that I am Time constrained. Not writing, for me, is like not brushing my teeth, or not showering. Writing cleanses, and when I don’t write, I feel uncleansed, messy, disorganized. Thank god for my journal, else I’d be even more disoriented than I currently feel.

Over the months since my last blog (my last REAL blog, the last one was just a copied version of my presentation!)  I have contemplated many interesting topics, including one on fashion ! But the will, and the desire were swept away by constraints of Time. Which made me think about Time itself.

Back in 2002, I went to a Vipassana course, and deeply meditated on the concept of Time. I had never really thought about time in any meaningful way before that. It was my first opening into the quest for a definition and the mystery of time.

In places like these retreats, time has a special quality. It stands still. A Vipassana course is a very rigorous endeavor. There is no time for anything except meditation, more meditation, and even more meditation.  I remember another afternoon in 2006.  I had just returned to my cottage after finishing lunch. I planned to sleep for an hour before embarking on another meditative marathon which would take me to 9:00pm. Despite my need for sleep, my feet strayed to explore the beautiful surroundings – over 150 acres of whisper quiet wilderness seemed extremely beautiful on that summer afternoon.  I stole away to a rock outgrowth close to my cottage, and sat on the large rock, amongst the magnificent redwoods, and pines. The surface of the rock had felt rough, and textured against my skin, I still remember. The breeze was cool, and…well…breezy. The breeze lightly caressed my summer tanned skin, taking a part of me with itself and depositing it on the leaves of the majestic redwoods that dwarfed us. Even the redwoods were in touch with my essence in that moment. The magic of the place was spellbinding and the timelessness of the surroundings awed me. I was suddenly reminded of the quantum hypothesis of the universe being a closed system. It occurred to me that if the universe was a closed system, then nothing in it could be lost – it would always exist, in some form or the other. The molecules that brushed against me, must have existed since the beginning of time in some form or another. Who else and what else had they touched ? Billions and billions of people – some that I knew, some that I didn’t know, some that I would never know. They had touched Buddha himself, and Gandhi, and Jesus, and Krishna and Ram before them. They would have silently witnessed events – the birth of the universe, the dynasaurus age, the evolution of species, the wars, the rain, the sunshine – and they must carry something from these events with themselves.

The breeze that touched me,touched the trees, and the skies. And the essence of all that existed before me, was right here, touching me as well. The trees must have silently met millions of people too, some sitting here precisely in the same spot that I sat in. The rock must have held many before me. Their essence was “alive” at the moment – in not just the wind, but everywhere. And I was being initiated into their world. I felt small in contrast to their timelessness and their timeless existence. The body felt so felt transient and temporary, and yet I could experience it all only through the body ! I felt blessed by their proximity, our immortality, and their touch. And now the breeze had touched me and taken a part of me : my essence : with itself and mingled it with all that it had accumulated over the eons and carried with it, in itself. My existence had co-mingled somehow, with that of the universe, in a manner that was beyond spacetime. My ancestors were there, a part of those molecules and I could reach them somehow. My sons, and grandchildren would touch my essence ( and theirs ) in an unthinking manner,  and so would their grandchildren touch all of us.  Nothing was lost – everything co-existed. The feeling was beyond comprehension, beyond words.

I had closed my eyes, as I sat there for a long long time, simply aware of the breeze, and all that it quietly carried within itself for me. The transcendental magic that was made possible by flow. The magic of being connected to something that was greater than me, beyond me, but that which included me in its fold. I was there, it was there, we were connected in an intricate manner, in that moment of ecstasy. And that moment of ecstasy was all there was to it. The whole  creation had conspired, colluded, manouvered, spending millions of years in an effort to reach and realize that moment. And it would continue to collude so that this magic could become possible for my kids, and their kids, and their kids !

Soon the familiar “ding” forced me to return to the real world. And later that afternoon, I thought about Time some more. And since then, Time is a concept that keeps returning to me, like a little child who wants to be understood. To those tugs of consciousness, I pay special attention, and journal my thoughts. I wrote a blog before too…somewhere here it exists.

Why am I writing this ? Why now ? Because I am reading Ervin Laszlo‘s Science and the Akashik Field again. Its a very inspirational book, even though the research work that Lazlo based his hypothesis of A-Field has long since been proven to be flawed. (Laszlo had based his work on the research on Quantum Vacuum, the work of Soviet physicists  Shapov and Akimov. Since then it is well known that the two had committed scientific fraud and embezzled 17million dollars in research funds and their research was a sham). But its still an inspirational book. It makes one wonder what if? And there were many many places in the books that I underlined and where I wrote “Eeeeks !!!” – all referring to concepts, hypothesis and arguments that I myself had documented in my journals over the years. Of course Laszlo also talks about nonlocal quantum coherence and quantum entanglement, and may have labelled these coincidences examples of the same. The idea actually made me smile, and wonder. I think I will meditate on it tonight…:)

But here is an excerpt from my journal from 2002, about Time. It was meant to be read by me, and only by me. It was also the first stirrings of my quests about Time. So if it makes little sense to you, please excuse the flaw. The questions at the end are easier for me now. I don’t have answers for them, but I have hypothesis. Perhaps some day, when they have fermented some more, and are ready to be distilled, I will write some more regarding those questions. Did I share with you I am beginning a referesher course in Quantum Physics tomorrow at Fresno State ? Well, I am!

In closing todays work, I would like to thank my readers who have kept up their visits, and their interest in my weblog. I am touched, and moved by your presence, and your interest. An average of 250 – 800 hits per day is phenomenal indeed. I feel blessed. I write because it is read. If a tree falls in the forest, does it make a sound ? As Laszlo and any Quantum physicist would tell you, my writing has no real existence unless and until it is observed. So thank you again.

——-snip———

Feb 2002

What would it mean to say time does not exist?

Time is within my body. It is in my mind. It is first created, it is switched on, triggered when I take my first breath. The first breath stimulates the notion of time.

Depending on my development, the brain selects a pace, a speed, a way of being. The way of being depends on the samskaras. That way of being interacts with my genetic potential, to create a notion of time. Time that unfolds itself in the development of my mind, and my body. In some way it too has genetic roots. The way we experience time will depend on how we have endured in the womb, and before…

This time is personal. Like Kairos. The Kronos is just a constructed myth.  The personal time is what I use is judging and figuring out others. If I am developmentally impaired, and live like a 5 year old, I will judge everyone as a five year old. Time has the same meaning for me as it has for a 5 year old. And this will continue until my psyche moves to the next developmental stage. In this way, time is also interlinked with the notion of health, as well as trauma.

The psyche does not really behave like a 5 year old or a 6 year old. I use these outwardly measures to indicate the helplessness that arises in perceiving anything except Kronos. Our struggles in defining what time is, and how to measure it. We have to be careful so that we don’t fall into the pit of preconceived and learned notions of time. We have to remain open to questions. We have to discard standard responses. We have to test each response that arises, test it to make sure our mind is not being deceived by the predictable, by the learned, by the civilized.

The psyche has its own measure of time, a developmental measure. Time grows like a tree grows perhaps, measured by rings, or some internal milestone. Possibly experiences. Perhaps there are experiences that we have to go thru that provide developmental food to the psyche. And these developmental achievements are irrespective of the chronological time and age. The primitives had it more correct – they went by psychic abilities rather than by the chronological age.

The unfolding is within. A timed sequence of development unfolds from within. It is outwardly measured in terms of chronological time, but it may have nothing to do with time itself. Perhaps that is why it is useless to push little kids to do things that are not age appropriate for them.

But even within me, time is not homogenous. It has its own ebbs and flows. It waxes and wanes depending upon the organ in question. Time does not belong to the body as a whole, but to the constituents. And within those constituents, it is further divisible and belongs to the constituents of the constituents, and so forth. Ultimately, it belongs to the most elementary particle. But at each stage of constituting, the time is differently defined and constructed. So I understand time differently than do my kidneys, for example. My kidneys have their own construct of time, and kidney cells have their own way of constructing time, and the elementary particles that constitute the lowermost physical layer of materiality – electrons, fermions – construct their own model of time. This matrix looks much like the fractals. Time matrix itself looks much like fractals to me. Life is lived in fractal geometry.

On the deeper level, time is the measure of the interval that each cell survives for. Or changed over its life. Since each part of the body has different cells, with different longivities, the notion of homogenous time itself is flawed. My heart cells measure and respond to time differently than do my kidney cells for example.

Time brings with itself the notion of change. So the change in any cell constitutes time. When there is no change, there is no time. We often experience this feeling intuitively when we say “time stood still”…in other words there was no change and hence no flow of time. Because the body is like a machine, and it evolves, it understands the construct of time. But the psyche is unchanging, it is dissociated from the body time. The psyche changes according to its own timetable, its own schedule. It therefore constructs time differently. Just like music made by each person is different even if the instrument is the same, time is like music made by each cell, each organ, each person, each social and cultural entity, and it is constructed differently by each one of them. But if so, it must have some basic notes ?

I think we are duped into learning the chronological notion of time. And by the time we are adults, the belief is so perverse, that it has become a part of our subjectivity. It is impossible to imagine anything else. Time becomes like mitochondria which is not part of our body – it is an alien with its own complex dna – but it has now become part of our biology because our body no longer has the organ that converts food into oxygen. Our own biology is subservient to the intrinsic clock of our own but we now seem to be losing that to externally guided clocks.

What is time then? Where does it exist? How is it revealed? And how is it stored ? I wonder !