FATHER TIME AND ME

Born squawking with a curious furrow in my brow, I had no choice in the matter of my birth. Later, I was to learn I had been born into a large country and into an even larger universe that I am still learning to comprehend.

When I was eight, I had an abdominal operation and was placed under ether. I still remember the vision I had under the influence of the drug. I was running from Father Time, who chased me with thunderbolts shooting from his fingertips as he yelled, “Stop, stop! You are ahead of time. Stop!”

It was a powerful vision that is vivid to this day. How strange this world is to the young: I was born to be myself and not someone else. This is odd enough, but it was even odder to come to conception here in this time instead of somewhere else in another time. Everything was such a mystery. I truly wanted to solve the mystery. I felt this could well be my calling.

It did not take long to discover this fact: everyone is stuck in themselves, the same as I am. Everyone has their own little universe where they are the king or the queen.

Sometimes, while I was in a playful mood, I asked myself, “If you could be somebody else, who would that be?”

When I ran through the history of people I have met or known, I could not choose to be any of them. There was no one I might want to be more than myself, male or female. It’s inconceivable I could be someone other than myself unless I was play-acting the part. Since I have to be me, I might as well make the most of the situation, I decided.

It took a while to understand why I ended up being a player in this era. I surmised that it had to do with time and consciousness, something science cannot yet explain.

It is so easy to miss this vital connection: the now is ever-present, just as awareness is.

Is this a mere coincidence?

Is now not a measure of time?

The now is not measurable at all. It is a micro-fraction of an instant when the past becomes the future. One thing alone is contained in the now: our conscious awareness. Consciousness remembers the past and imagines the future, but always does so in the now.

I came to this realization at a young age, and it left me deeply confused. Did this mean the world is a mental construct?

For a while, I considered the possibility that the universe is actually a vision that comes alive in the intellect. This was a problematic idea. The mind itself is a mystery. How could the mind be only a product of flesh and blood, neural connections, when nature obviously had a mind that did not need a nervous system?

We are the centers of our worlds, yet nature has carried out its miracles for billions of years without human consciousness, through an unconscious process of evolutionary experimentation. This has likely been the case since time began.

The colors we see are wavelengths of light. The mind learns to recognize these as different colors. About me, the people I knew had their own personal mindsets. They, too, were distinct and separate from my own thoughts, though they used much of the same information I used to make their own worldview. The primary difference between us is the type and quantity of the information we process, both in the mind and the body.

Throughout our lives, the now remains stationary. It is not time that moves, but consciousness. Knowledge is constantly being transformed through experiences, interactions, and observations. If time were to move, what would be the speed of time? If time flowed, what would be the volume of the flow?

No fixed universal clock can measure the flow or speed of time. Time is relative to dimensions of spacetime, not to a fixed standard. With no way to measure the speed of time, no method can be devised to measure the speed of the now. The now has no speed at all, nor can it move.

The rational thing to conclude is that time does not flow, and the now does not move. Instead, consciousness changes.

This is a huge revelation.