PERCEPTION OF TIME AND THE BIRTH OF RESPONSIBILITY

PART 1

PERCEPTION OF TIME

Time is a very difficult concept to understand. And yet it seems fundamental to our life, we say, "time is money", "I don't have enough time", "time flies", "time drags". and I think we ought to question what time really is? Because in our ordinary common sense, we think of time in a linear manner - as a one-way motion, from the past through the present and onto the future. Such perception of time, marks an impression that life moves from the past to the future, in such a way that what happens now and what will happen is always the result of what has happened. In other words, we tend to perceive events as having a BEGINING and ENDING – a segmented narrative, explained in terms of causality. As if we are driven through time in a sequential manner. But could it be that there are no sequenced separate events, but rather a continuous one whole flow of events across dimension(s) of time, with no beginning or ending?

Suppose, this universe started with a big bang, from an infinitesimally dense single point, as some cosmologist’s belief. If that big bang happened, when it happened, it was the present. So, the universe began during the big bang, then the universe expanded & evolved – forming elements, planets, spiraling galaxies filled with stars and life as we know it - the present event, evolved out of the past, from that beginning, the big bang. Time is described in terms of causality and is perceived as if it has a beginning, the big bang, and perhaps an ending.

The fallacy of explaining time in causality - the common-sense idea that events are caused by previous events, from which they’re formed or created, is that there are no separate events, called the past, it's all one event.

To see this fallacy, we must understand what I mean by “events”. Suppose a simple event of a new born baby, now when does this particular event exactly begin? does it occur at the point of birth? or does the baby begin at the moment of conception? or does the baby begin when the sperm were generated in the father ? or the ovaries in the mother? or could you say a baby begins when its father was born or when its mother was born? or perhaps it was way back from our ancestral “apes” or “alien”, or farther back down on the evolutionary timeline, from a single celled organism. or as some believe, it was when the almighty decided to create Adam and Eve. All these things can be thought of as beginnings.

By default, causal perception of time makes it seems like events are divided into certain periods. For instance, according to the theory of evolution, the first human (homo erectus) appeared around 1.5 million years ago, and around 30,000 years ago modern humans (“homo sapiens”) appeared. Now Actually, who were the first homo sapiens or homo erectus or the first primate who diverged from our ancestral “monkey”? In other words, where EXACTLY along that timeline does the first human show up? Take yourself for example, assuming you are present human, then your parents, they must clearly be humans too. your grandfather, human. Your great-grandfather and great-great-grandfather? must all be humans without a doubt. But your grandfather 185 Mi1lion generations removed? Not a human. He probably was a fish. Imagine you could have pictures of every ancestor down the timeline and you put them in a big stack. Every father’s father’s father’s [etc.], mother’s mother’s mother’s[etc.] with you at the top and you’re fishy grandfather/grandmother at the bottom of the stack. Now, if you journey back in this stack: where along the stack was the first human? There wasn't One. There's no single point where one became the other. Every photo that we pull from the stack looks pretty much like the photo on either side. Every gene-ration is the same species as its parents and the same species as its children. Homo erectus had Homo erectus parents and Homo erectus kids. Our fishy ancestors? who had fishy fathers and fishy children. You can never pin-point the exact moment that a species came to be, because it never did. Just like how you used to be a baby, and now you're older. But there was no single day when you went to bed young and woke up old, although sometimes it feels that way.

Dividing events from one another in such arbitrary causal way creates a puzzle of how events lead to each other. But there are no separate events, life flows along like a stream of river. And it's all intrinsically interconnected in the web of the collective universal consciousness.

So, all events are really one event(s) streaming on time. And the whole point of measuring time is to pinpoint specific event in the flow. But we don't need causality to explain evolution. when we talk about different events, we're looking at different section, different snapshot, of one whole continuous happening. And therefore, the idea of separate events which must be linked by a mysterious process, all cause and effect is completely unnecessary. The ideology that present events has been caused by past events is an outdated model of thinking. Because such perception of time completely removes personal responsibility of subjective experience out of the equation. In such perception of time we tend to regard ourselves as the puppets of the past, as if we are being driven along by something that is always behind us.

Now if one wants to overcome this impression, it may help to approach reality by closing your eyes and perceiving the world through your ears. If you shut your eyes and contact reality, solely with your ears. It may sound silly to shut your eyes when you're watching TV, but attempt it. Once you close your eyes you will realize that the sounds you are hearing are all coming out of silence, you hear it and then it fades away. It fades into the oblivion, to finally disappear.

This isn't fascinating not because you perceive reality through sounds coming out of void space but rather you don't see any reason for the sounds to begin, they simply appear and then they just echo away through the corridors of the mind that we call memory. While perceiving the world of pure sound, reality may appear to be unreasonable & unexplainable. Now if you open your eyes, it may be a bit harder to see the irrationality of the universe with open eyes - because unlike sound, the eyes rather look for colors, everything may look still to your eyes, but the world you are looking at remains still only because you are focused at the light.

In visual perception of reality, visible light is traveling through space, passing through your eyes onto the visual cortex, to be made into a snapchat of a movie of one’s narrative, before vibrating away into the oblivion past. So, the course of time is just a visual and audio memory of the past, bending and looping time, infinitely, in infinitely different variations.

All material objects are vibrations and they are vibrating at you now. In the same way as the sound waves were echoing in your ears, the now that you see is made up of vibrating photons. Just as the sound comes out of silence, the light comes out of your imagination.

It may take an extraordinary effort, persistency and tenacity but if you wish to realize that what you see is just a figment of your imagination; Simply observe your thought process, look for patterns, and how it’s reflected in your reality.

PART 2

THE BIRTH OF RESPONSIBLITY

When one becomes so accustomed to perceiving time as sequential events, one tends to think of their behavior in terms of causality, with no self- accountability. It may have been fashionable to describe human behavior in terms of instincts, i.e. instinct for survival. Psychologist use to believe instinct for survival made life so and so. But, in modern psychology, it's common to describe human behavior in terms of being driven. In other words, we speak of our need for food, survival, sex etc.… as a drive for our behaviors. That's significant, and it's isn't brought out by people who feel driven per-se, but by our sequential perception of time.

So, the whole notion of I- the subjective self, being driven relates to the idea of causality of life. Life moving under the power of the past, and that is so ingrained in our common sense, it's becoming very difficult to Erase!

But when you stop explaining behavior in terms of causality, that is real freedom. It involves erasing the habit of thought. Whereby you define yourself as the result of what has gone before and instead get into the more plausible a more reasonable term, of which you don't define yourself in terms of what you've done before but in terms of what you're doing is really liberating. At times, we may get a glimpse of loneliness in this ambiguous, arbitrary universe. And you are creating it at every moment. Because you see: it starts now. It didn’t begin in the past. There was no past. If it did, when it happened, that would have been now. But it is still now and the universe is still beginning now.

Things are not explained by the past. They’re explained by what happens now. That creates the past. And it begins in the “here” and the “now”, at this place at this moment.

That’s the beginning of responsibility. Because otherwise you can look back to the “past” and say, ‘Well, I am the way I am, because my mother dropped me. And she dropped me because she was neurotic, because her mother dropped her. And the excuse goes way back to Adam and Eve/Steve, or to a disappearing monkey or our ancestor aliens from the distant galaxies.

Ultimately you can’t blame anyone else for the kind of world you’re in. And if you know, that the I — in the sense of the ego — really doesn’t exist, then it won’t be too much of a bad surprise, if one day you wake to discover that you’re life, for whatever that means for you.