Quantum physics, quantum mechanics, quantum electrodynamics—who could possibly keep abreast of that field? Would anyone want to? What do photons, electrons, positrons, quarks, quirks and sparks matter?
One thing, though—they say that matter and energy are fundamentally the same. That’s very interesting. Might there be a third aspect of stuff’? Maybe consciousness is an integral part of the equation. I’m curious about whatever sub-particle it is that carries consciousness on its back.
So let’s invent another science. We’ll add Quantum Consciousness to the curriculum, the science that studies consciousness by examining its quantum-sized units. If you start with a single centre of consciousness (no, I’m not volunteering to step into the cyclotron) you could smash it up into a helter-skelter of apparently discrete centres. They’d be particle-wavelet whatevers that can be assigned attributes of mass, energy and now consciousness.
Who knows?—their study might lead to an explanation of the whole shebang, and maybe rip the veil off Old Mother Maya herself. It might explain how life as we know it has resulted from the explosion of a single, original, concentrated centre of consciousness-essence. For the sake of convenience, let’s refer to that whole before-and-after conglomeration—that it/them/us assembly—as God.
So how do we get a grip on all of that? What are we then as individuals? How are we to regard ourselves? What does each of our lives consist of, and how do we fit into the overall picture? I ask, because most of us feel that we’re helplessly adrift. We’re passengers in a ship in the midst of an absolutely perfect storm. We really need a lifeboat here. Save Our Souls.
Fear not. Help is at hand. As Douglas Adams wrote (in large friendly letters), DON’T PANIC. (Arthur C. Clarke thought that this was perhaps the best advice that could be given to humanity, so it can’t hurt for me to repeat it.) I’ll follow that up with Be Here Now, a phrase that Baba Ram Das used for his book. EckhartTolle advised, “All you really need to do is accept this moment fully. You are then at ease in the here and now and at peace with yourself.” To achieve that, he imagined himself sitting at his shoulder watching himself with detached objectivity.
Now that we’ve calmed a little, we’ll sink further into Czerner’s concepts of ‘eternity’ and ‘total unity’. He claims they lie outside our direct awareness, but let’s examine them anyway.
Tolle, Richard Alpert and others state that the present is all that there is. It is the only time that we have, they say. I would like you to notice something else about it.
Don’t you sense that the present is at one and the same time nothing? It has no substance or duration. The present is gone as soon as it arrives. It lasts not an instant. It lies between the future and the past, thinner than the thinnest skin.
We might easily overlook the meniscus of the present and split time into only the past and the future, if it weren't for the fact that we skate or glide eternally across its surface. Let’s give the present moment a measure of credibility. Let us think of it as having a certain substance. We’ll give it the thickness of one quantum of consciousness.
It is a curious phenomenon, but from any position of the worm’s body we have the ability to look back in one direction only. We are able to ‘see’ along our body in that direction, which we label the past, but we can’t see the other way, upstream, into the future. It’s as though a half of us is buried in mud (out of which we're slowly rising).
We possess theoretical knowledge of our feet underground, but our actual awareness of that part of our body is very limited. Intellectually we grasp that we stretch in that direction, but we have no idea how far. Because we have much less vision ‘upstream’, we declare that it hasn’t happened yet, and we call that the future. But that’s not correct. In reality, there exists just the one continuum. Every point within it is as real as another.
Re-enter the spark. Gentle as a butterfly, it alights along our tube’s length like a finger playing chopsticks. Or, because of the eye-blurring speed with which it performs, it may be imagined as a giant hand playing all eighty-eight keys at once—a chord more powerful than the all the grand pianos at the end of Sergeant Pepper.
Time, then, is nothing more than an illusion. It is the phenomenon that results from our (limited) ability to see or remember along one of the dimensions of our being. It is the equivalent of our ability to look down the length of only one outstretched arm. The other is shrouded in thick mist. Time vision is like a diode that allows electricity to travel one way only.
Suppose that someone is afflicted by not being able to retain memories—neither long-term nor short. For such a person time would have no significance, because you cannot sense the passage of time unless you have the abilty to compare the present with at least one previous imprint. Perhaps it’s like that for animals. Perhaps it’s like that for people with Alzheimer’s. Their lives would be lived entirely in the present. Maybe their perception of life is more accurate than ours.
But we’ve strayed from our brief. Let’s return to the topic thread. We were speaking of the spark that leaped. Very well then, after every such leap our consciousness quantum brings to life its host’s complete store of background memories. It is instantly updated.
However, that moment can occur at any point of the host’s life. Any point is as good as another. There is no objective ‘now’, you see. The present is no more special or real than any point in the host’s past or future. I may have started this book in say 2005, completed the first edition in 2010, be working on the second edition, ‘now’, in 2012, but who knows when you’ll read it? And when you read it for the second time? And when you loan it to a friend?
It’s like the universe expanding a thousand-fold. You wouldn’t be aware of it. You wouldn’t know that time was jumping about at random. At any point in your life, whether it’s your twenty-first, the day of your first marriage, or the day that the doctor tells you that you have six months to live, that instant would be perceived as the cutting face of life thus far. Click your heels together, and you could be anywhen.
You and I, we’re not human beings you know. Get over that notion. Why cling to your ethnicity, race, tribe or nationality? Borders don’t exist in the real world. Species are not ring-fenced. There are no aliens to fear. When all is said and done, we’re jabberwockies: four-dimensional worm-like bodies with flukes for arms and legs, a zygote-sized snout and a somewhat shrunken seventy- or eighty-year-old tail that is rudely truncated (sooner and blunter, if you are cut down accidentally in the prime of life).
Our entirety exists outside of time like a statue in a blurred time-lapse photograph. Life, as we know it, at any instant, is simply a cross-section of the jabberwocky. The spark that does the cutting dances up and down its spine from head bone to toe bone. As it plucks here, there and everywhere it defines the present where we find ourselves at that moment.
But actually there is no present. Neither is there a past nor a future. There is only the subjective present, the one which we’re forever unwrapping.
Judge for yourself. Let’s run a little thought experiment. Are you ready? Just sit back and close your eyes. Right then, try to feel time pass. See if you can feel it slip through your fingers. Are you able to?
I certainly can’t. You say that you can follow the second hand of the clock on the wall? That doesn’t count. You opened your eyes. And even if you didn’t, it’s just a physical event. It is an external action that you don’t experience within yourself.
What I’m saying is that everyone experiences the present only as an instant, albeit an instant with duration. And, like the principle behind motion pictures, those separate instances link up to generate an illusion of time passing fluidly. In actual fact, though, it doesn’t. It is made of granules, quanta, or instants. Life jiggles instantaneously.
As a diversion, try that same thought experiment out for the other dimensions. You’ll get a similar result. No dimension is really real. When you travel any distance north, south, east, west, up or down, it doesn't matter how far you go. You’re always 'here'. It feels like the same place as you were before. You remain at the middle of the universe, not its edge. Whether you walk, drive or fly, your consciousness stays put. The scissoring of your legs doesn’t propel you across the landscape. It pulls it towards you.
But that the fourth dimension doesn’t exist at all . . . isn’t that ludicrous? We needn’t go down that route, surely. Without time, what are we left with? Where would we be? When? What chance is there for us to grow? How could we hope for a change in the weather or in our situation? How could evolution occur (if it is still on the curriculum)?
