The TIME of Your Life

A child can tell you what time it is; but few, if any, can tell you what time is.

Why do we need time? What is its purpose? What is the function of time in our life and in the universe? What is its form... if indeed, it has one? Does time have measurable attributes such as color, temperature, direction, etc.? Or... is time another attribute or dimension of matter and energy? Perhaps time is so elemental that there are no adequate metaphors to position its nature in our mind, or to help us understand its meaning.

Prepare ye, to abandon the myths of time.

If we could go back in time... If we could know the future.... If we could forecast or prophesy the future... If only we could find a way to project ourselves into the future or regress into the past...

The language we use when we speak of changing or prophesying the future, or trying to “project ourselves into” the future or “travel in” the past, assumes that time is an entity, much like a cosmic stream.

“Time, like an ever-rolling stream,

bears all his sons away.

They fly, forgotten, as a dream

dies at the opening day.”

Isaac Watts (from the hymn re: Psalm 90)

“ The Time Machine” by H. G. Wells, “A Christmas Carol” by Charles Dickens, and many cinema productions and poems, have led us to the belief that time is like an ever flowing stream. A stream in which we might move forward or backward just as soon as we have a time-machine with which to navigate such waters. With a time machine we could, at will, visit our childhood and observe as Scrooge did in “A Christmas Carol” our own selves at play... or perhaps see that we are beginning to develop attitudes that will, in large part, determine our future.

But what is that which we call time? And what is now... and the past... or the future?

Time

Perhaps, long ago, man thought it would be helpful to have some idea of the number of days he would live, as well as when planting season would begin and end, how long winter might be and how many heartbeats would be counted out before the birth of a child. He recognized a need to measure the duration of an ongoing activity, as well as the intervals between actions and changes. He saw that a day ended and the night darkened the world in a repeating continuum. If he counted the daily cycles, he could comment to a friend, “Many moons have passed since last we last hunted together.”

Like today’s modern man, timing his move into a stream of traffic or sensing how long a traffic light should stay on red, he sensed his own internal clock ( clock genes are expressed in the cells of the suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN) of the hypothalamus ), and as he arose each morning he began planning activities to accomplish by day’s end.

Down through the centuries man learned to make devices which would mark portions of the passing day from sunup to sundown: the drip of water from a tank, the length of a burning stick or candle, or the swing of a pendulum attached to a ratcheted wheel... anything to count out equal intervals which could easily be repeated.

From the first moment that he could hear any sound at all, until his birth into this world man listen to the beat of his mother’s heart. And that beat, 60 per minute, it turns out, is the same as the beat we have set our clocks throughout the centuries to measure our lives... second by second.

We measure time and check time so that we can be in concert with each other and with all things important to us. And we give time and take time; and, above all, must be on time... without knowing what time really is. We invented clocks as our first robots and then became slave to them. Now clocks measure us.

We make and use rulers that have the same size centimeters or inches so that we can all agree on the size of a doorway. We keep clocks, whose ticking is of the same duration so that we can rendezvous at the same part of the day. If I tell you that the time is 7:30 AM you know, by convention, that I mean 450 minutes have been counted since the middle of the night that just past. And twenty seven thousand heartbeats have ticked away as you are just waking from a refreshing sleep.

We use a standard length of matter (ruler) to measure the length of other material. We use a standard interval (pendulum swing) to count out or measure other intervals, or what we may call a measure of time.

The time units of seconds and minutes, have no being, just as meters and kilograms do not exist beyond mental constructs applied to matter. Intervals between actions and the duration of a given change, as well as matter itself are realities that we observe and experience. Perhaps time is just a measure without substance and when we are without substance, as pure spirit, there will not be a problem with simultaneity and time will not be an attribute of existence.

In order to observe and measure an interval, a time-span, there must be a change to the physical world through an expenditure of energy. Two actions produce an interval just as two fence posts are needed to mark a length of fence. With our clocks we count the seconds between the “fence posts” and say that we have measured the time between two actions. And just as length would not exist without matter, time, as measure, would not exist without energy. A frozen universes devoid of energy would also be without any way to measure time... if indeed, time really exists.

Albert Einstein, expressed his own faith in a timeless universes when his lifelong friend Besso died. In a letter to Besso’s family, Einstein said that although Besso had proceeded him in death it was of no consequence, “...for us physicists believe the separation between past, present, and future is only an illusion, although a convincing one.”

Measurement of time ( it is 3 o’clock or 3 hours have passed ) can get confused with time itself, and yet... time may simply be the measure itself. Measuring does not tell us what the nature of the measured might be. But measuring time does give us one more attribute of the world in which we live to help us cope with our environment.

Einstein’s thought experiments, like his own observation of a clock as he moved away from it or approached it on his way to the patent office, assume that a clock is time, and not just a measurement of time. The experiments depend on observers and information transmission, and how things appear to observers, but not on what is actually happening in the universes. “Einstein took an operational viewpoint that time is what clocks measure and nothing more.” ( Clifford Will, a physics professor at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. ) But what, in fact, is the nature of what clocks do measure?

Some experimenters found that a clock sent on a rocket ship returned slower than clocks that were not sent on the trip, proving that time slowed down due to traveling at speeds nearer the speed of light. But what of the boundary conditions during acceleration and deceleration? Did the g-forces change the mass of the clock. And what if the clock was changed? Time did not slow down... only the clock slowed.

Experience shows that the simultaneity of position of two solid objects is impossible. That they will not fit inside of each other, at the same instant, might be used to prove that time exists as a special reality. Your body cannot be in the same place as my body, one boulder cannot be inside another bolder. It doesn’t matter what the time is or time frame, or the place, two pieces of matter, be they atoms or boulders, do not occupy each other. They can occupy the same location at two separate times, but they would have to move or be moved ( one out of, and the other into, the designated spot ). These events: body-1 moving so that body-2 may occupy the space as previously occupied by body-1, demonstrate sequencing as an attribute of matter. Matter, thus, demands time as a necessary attribute to define motion and relative positioning.

And fortunately, the same sequencing occurs in the rhythmic changes that produce sound and electromagnetic waves for data and energy transmission and beautiful music. Sequencing also allows our sequentially ordered brains to learn in a fashion that builds upon previously learned, and dependency structured systems.

From a personal perspective, what we call time is our own observance of continuous change. We sense time internally with brain clocking functions. And history is always measured in terms of our own age just as height is estimated in terms of our own height.

We know that time can be used to our advantage as a powerful and effective tool with which to manipulate our environment… especially the mind. Your own mind as well as those of others around you are susceptible to songs and poems, and dramatic speech, which employs pauses and rhythm in sequential delivery making it cogent to both decoding the message as well as providing an unearned sense of understanding and allowance, even agreement, within the subconscious, servant mind.

Our brain interprets and long remembers messages that ride on syncopation, rhythm and rhyme, and on dramatic pause. These time-dependent tools are well employed in hypnosis to imprint the servant mind with goals to seek and imperatives to obey. Unsuspecting audiences have often been persuaded by the use of such tools in broadcast advertisements and political speeches.

We can measure and examine matter. But time is only a measure... as we understand it today. Perhaps when we readmit the intangible back into scientific study we will know what time really is.

The Past and The Future

Time as a receding roadway on which we travel with our companions is a figment of the novelist’s romantic imagination. If time travel were really possible wouldn’t someone from a future time have traveled back to the morning of that fateful November 22nd day in 1963 to thoroughly search the Dallas School Book Depository overlooking Dealey Plaza?

The past is not a place that we leave behind to be revisited someday when technology has unlocked the mystery of time-travel. We do not leave behind us a trail or a copy of ourselves in each slice of time. We make changes and capture images and memories of the state of matter preceding the immediate. Time of itself, standing alone as a tangible or navigable entity, does not exist. If it did we would be able to visit our youth and there make genetic remedies that would allow for longer life. The past exists in minds and is recorded via several media lest we forget it and the lessons learned.

Unlike the past, the future isn't even recorded because it doesn’t exist except in minds which individually imagine how furniture and thinking will be arranged when everyone and every thing has moved through a specified number of ticks of our clocks. If we write about at all about the future, we call those writings plans or prophesies.

The future exists differently in everyone’s mind. The future is the projection of our hopes and intentions, and our fears. The events that actually happen, and the way in which the furniture of the universes gets rearranged, will depend on the power and will of each spirit and the forces of Nature.

Consider the following thought experiments.

First, The Eternity Paradox, which says that if time is like a stream then each event or change must mark the middle of eternity. One period of time exists before the event and a second one after the event. But we say that there was no beginning so that the time previous to the event must be infinitely long and so must time after the event. Thus any event would have split infinity and created two eternities.

Second, The Grandfather Paradox, which says that if we could go back in time we could kill our grandfather before he met our grandmother. Our grandfather being dead, we could not exist to have time-traveled back to do the deed. In similar fashion, a trip into our future might find that we are dead and unable to return... we would have vanished without a trace.

If time existed as a medium to be navigated we would be stuck in every portion of life that we have ever lived or ever will live, like the images in each frame of a motion picture film.

Third, do you know of anyone who has entertained a visitor from the future? If time travel were possible then surely someone in our future would have discovered the means for such navigations. No one has, or ever will, because you cannot navigate what does not exist.

Fourth, Consider your own point of reference. At any stage of wakefulness, your perceived consciousness has only one set of coordinates in space-time. You are always here on Planet Earth, at some given latitudinal and longitudinal coordinates at a time specified by your atomic clock. Your contemporaries would report the same. We never sense that we’re in a past or future period... unless, of course, we have lost our senses! And though we may dream of the past or hope for our future, our own self, reports that we are always in the now.

Now

In her autobiography, Little House in the Big Woods, the great story teller, Laura Ingalls Wilder, relates, in her closing paragraphs:

She (Laura) thought to herself, “This is now.”

She was glad that the cosy house, and Pa and Ma and the firelight and the music were now. They could not be forgotten, she thought, because now is now. It can never be a long time ago.

What is this one special piece of time we call now which is neither the past nor the future, but rather the fleeting and ephemeral present, ...the wavefront of change? Yet every present instant,... every now..., becomes the past faster than we can capture the thought of it... like the glimmer of sunlight on crested waves, and vanishes ever more swiftly.

Physicists might say that now is the slice of time so thin that it has only a delta “thickness” between start and finish. Delta can be as small as you care to make it, but not zero. Others would say that time is not continuous and that there exists a definite or discrete size for each delta. Most would agree that time, matter and action are at least functionally related in a linear fashion so that simultaneity is ruled out. If action is a linear function of time, the derivative thereof becomes the unit one, which is the universal mantra.

We often hear older people saying, “It seems like only yesterday that I was just a child.” And since thee is no “yesterday... only the on-going now” they are more than accurate.

“There is no time like the present”, is sage advice. All that we ever have are little slices of now in which we may change or influence others to change our world and ourselves. And when you add up all of the nows, the integral of them you may call a minute or an hour or a day, a year or even a lifetime, or ...an eternity.

Time’s Purposes

From a spiritual point of view time provides a stepwise process that allows love to mature within a finite boundary, while science needs time to build complex structures that promote knowledge and useful invention. The universes needs time to evolve and to transition matter and energy. And society needs time to evolve political structures that enhance our ability to cooperate for the good of all while respecting the rights of each. And in our individual relationships we build trust over time (and possibly see it destroyed in one instance of deceit).

Spiritual events do not require time and so Heaven doesn’t need time. But what would a heaven be without music?

Summary

Time does not pass... You, the observer pass. You exist within this universe, changing physically and spiritually. You leave behind atomic particles belonging to the universe. You, the observer, are, your own time machine. You are, at this very moment, living in what will soon be your past. You can make changes in this now that will alter your future and the future of all those whose lives you touch. And you are visiting that future as fast as the receding nows will take you there.

Our desire to believe time to be a medium in which we can move forward or backward is merely a wish for another chance to put right those wrongs, the sins, we have committed. For others it is a wish to take advantage of situations and people that they failed to realize were easy pickings. “If only...” is a phrase that drives healthy minds to insanity. We all have our own regrets. In the words of Omar Khayyam/Edward Fitzgerald,

“The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ, Moves on: nor all your Piety nor Wit Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line, Nor all your Tears wash out a Word of it. “

We can never unsay an unkind word, and we have only this now to move what we can, to rig the odds in favor of the next scenes becoming as we imagine them.

The movie, “Its A Wonderful Life”, dramatizes how those next scenes depend on each one of us... In it we see that many lives are touched and altered, for good or for evil because of each life. Many people depend on the choices that each of us make... and those choices depend on our beliefs... our attitudes... our priorities... our ability and willingness to love... our choice to love ourselves and all those around us.

By planting seeds in each now, real seeds that grow into flowering plants, each one of us can alter the future. More importantly we can plant seeds of peace and kindness that grow relationships. And each can become what we want to be, and bear fruit accordingly by planting suggestion seeds into our own subconscious, servant mind in the only time we ever have to do it, ...in the ever present now.

-*-

Sidebar: The author, Patrick J. Williams, is a student of physics, psychology and artificial intelligence and holds a B.S. From Xavier University in Cincinnati, Ohio. He is president of American Computer Technics, Inc., a member of Mensa, a professional hypnotist and computer consultant in medical applications, forecasting, and real-time systems. He is also designer and author of the web sites MyHypnotist.com and P2K.us

In 1964 at the Xavier University Physics Department afternoon tea, the author asked his professor, Boris Podolski (see Einstein, Podolski, Rosen or EPR paradox in Quantum Theory) if physics could be defined as “The study of inanimate nature in order to formulate laws that will enable us to predict future occurrences.” Doctor Podolski agreed, and I humbly submit that although we can predict some outcomes, we cannot see, nor can we visit what some call: the future.