The Reality of Time main page

Table of Contents

Introduction

Sample Chapter, "The  Skin of Time"

Sample Chapter, "The Celestial Foundation of Time"

Reviews from noted experts 

Time is an ever-present and inescapable fact of our existence. We celebrate it and rebel against it. There never seems to be enough of it, yet when we contemplate time’s illimitable expanses, it reduces us to insignificance. It represents the ultimate decay of everything, including our minds and bodies, our species, our planet and star system, the universe itself, and it betokens the radical rebirth that can happen perpetually in every moment. Its repetitive patterns reveal a cyclical tendency and inspire the hope of rebirth. The eternal moment unfolds the perpetually new even as the creations of the day crumble into the slumber of night.

With time, we have the essence of paradox. We try to define that element in which we live and have our being but can never directly perceive.

The first question that might be asked in confronting the title The Reality of Time is: Is time real at all? The elusiveness of the concepts of past, present, and future, and the philosophical difficulty of proving an objective present and flow of time apart from individual experience, are factors that erode our confidence in the possibility of defining and ultimately understanding the reality that we call time.

Many writings of spiritual philosophy attempt to delineate a “higher” account of the physical universe. The wonderful reductiveness of their mystical formulae such as “all this is That” is not necessarily wrong, and may in fact be supremely right if one’s consciousness is at the level of That, but this is not the way that Janet Sussman travels here. Her vision acknowledges the variety and complexity of the physical universe and the subjective relations we form with it. By the same token, the oft-repeated dictum that “time is an illusion,” as a formula for breaking out of the linear lockstep of classical materialistic physics and common perception, will not be found echoed here. Even physicist Julian Barbour (The End of Time) goes so far as to repudiate the existence of time in favor of a “philosophy of timelessness” based on a static quantum model.

In these pages, time is not only real, it is a primary shaping force underlying manifest reality, a conscious principle that the Godforce itself uses as a dimensional background for its creative play. We also, as creators of our personal reality, use time as the canvas upon which we apply the colors and form the shapes that compose our picture of the world.

When reading this book it is necessary to redefine time, to intuit its essence as fundamentally different from the “referential time” that is part and parcel of life in the material world. Referential time is based on measurement of matter: for example, the distance that the earth travels in its orbit around the sun constitutes one year. Essentially this construction of time refers to an arbitrary measurement in space. We look at objective phenomena using chronometric reference points, for subjective time is extremely variable, as we know from everyday experience.

The subjective notion of a “moment,” I believe, indicates a close encounter with time itself. Insofar as we experience a moment, we feel a certain suspension in the pure dimensionality of the time element, and we step out of the referential mode by which we walk that unforgiving timeline. The anomalous nature of that momentousness makes us alert to new ideas and possibilities.

Humankind’s technological quest may be seen as an attempt for liberation from the tyranny of referential time, to escape the imprisonment of the senses with its inexorable cycles of beginnings and endings, of death itself. In this, the scientific spirit is profoundly religious.

The field of pure or non-referential time, however, is not devoid of differentiation. It is full of discrete areas which function as mathematical variables. They constitute the bits that are processed by our computer-like nervous systems in the construction of objective reality. Our perceptual apparatus fills in the holes—much like persistence of vision bestows continuity upon the frames of a film—and the result is the known universe.

The further evolution of human consciousness, whether regarded from the standpoint of the mind, heart, or spirit, depends upon opening up the awareness of time to encompass the dimensional context. We must begin to hear the individual notes of the symphony and not be entirely lost in the totality of the waveform of the music of time, for that engulfs true self-awareness as well as the original perception of “real time.” To echo physicist Amit Goswami (The Self-Aware Universe), consciousness creates the material world, and this leads to the search for the “quantum mind.” Physics continually reaches into areas that are considered metaphysical.

Whether The Reality of Time is judged to be physics or metaphysics depends on how restrictive our definition of science is. Certainly verification of these ideas lies beyond the current capability of modern physics. That does not make them any less scientific. This knowledge is based on intuition of higher mathematical ideas beyond present-day apprehension. The writing proceeds from a certain level of freedom from temporal structures, as it must do in order to express temporal unboundedness.

Physics in the last several centuries has endowed us with three major perspectives on time:

1. Newtonian: Time is conceived as an unchanging, absolute background for physical reality. This is the commonsense view, which Julian Barbour characterises as “some invisible river that flows uniformly for ever.” Such a notion seems appropriate for the world of everyday experience, in which time is experienced in linear fashion in the familiar form of a definitive past, present, and future common to all viewpoints. However, as classical physics proved inadequate to describe the world of very tiny things, the twentieth century brought a revolution in conceptualizing time and space.

2. Relativistic: In this model, time is an aspect of four-dimensional spacetime, which is warped by the presence of matter. Time is also relative to the motion of the observer. The famous “twins paradox” is an example of relativistic, Einsteinian time: If Bob and Sue are twins, and Bob gets on a spaceship leaving Earth and travels close to the speed of light, when he returns to Earth he will have aged many more years than Sue has. This is because time “slows down” for an object in motion, although it is only when its speed approaches that of light that the effect is very noticeable. The relativistic theory of spacetime undermines the complacency of the commonsense referential mind. It opens one up to the syntax of time loops, matrices, and curvatures described by Janet Sussman.

3. Quantum: “Quantum reality” is often used synonymously to refer to the quirky, quarky subatomic world. Quantum physics further contradicts conventional notions of space and time, and cause and effect, in finding instantaneous connections between physical objects widely separated in space, a notion which caused vexation to Einstein. A promising path for the grand unification of quantum theory with relativity is the study of higher-dimensional “superstrings,” described lucidly by Brian Greene (The Fabric of the Cosmos), and which promises to get us closer to the Holy Grail, the “theory of everything.”

Although the quantum nature of time has not been experimentally verified yet, in some theories time, like space, may be “quantized” or differentiated as ultra-tiny units. In the theory of loop quantum gravity as articulated by Lee Smolin (Three Roads to Quantum Gravity), time can be quantized in units of approximately 10^-43 seconds (Planck time). This idea of the discrete nature of spacetime, based on “loops” or representations of the spin of points in diagrams of quantum spatial networks.

In reading Janet’s descriptions of “locator points,” which are akin to quanta of spacetime, one feels one is glimpsing the cutting edge of modern physics from the perspective of the cause rather than from the effect. In other words, we find ourselves existentially geworfen (thrown) into a received reality, a creation that has already emerged and whose causes, physical and metaphysical, we are forever seeking. In this book, reality is not posited as a fait accompli. It is a paradoxical and conscious process like a quantum particle wave whose position cannot be precisely known unless its wave function is “collapsed” in the act of observation. This implicate order that Janet Sussman speaks from and about has no referential value; in terms of human conceptualization, it is unmanifest.

When you collapse the wave function through measurement, quantum physics gives you a definitive value (about where a particle is) but you lose the wave behavior of the quantum system. By doing the measurement, you force the system to lose its indeterminacy. You “pop a qwiff,” in the phrase of Fred Alan Wolf (Taking the Quantum Leap), which refers to the collapse of a quantum wave in an act of perception. Consciousness is inextricably involved in creating what we call reality, moment to moment. We are all plotting a spacetime map of our personal realities, and the process of how this works, from both the psychological and the physical standpoints, is described in detail in the pages that follow.

Quantum physics supports paradox. In the same spirit, the Sussman description of time is paradoxical, metaphorical, and evocative. The purpose is not to provide a linguistic “measurement” of time’s mercurial essence, but to provide a spectrum of possibilities that is so much greater than the reductive referential shadow that time casts upon the mind—a falsely static image. The shift in the perception of time from a fixed, collapsed referentiality to a vibrant, multi-temporal dimensional, high-energy reality where past, present, and future are interwoven, is one to which human perception may eventually evolve to encompass.

The Sussman cosmology specifically affirms the existence of parallel universes. According to David Deutsch (The Fabric of Reality), the “multiverse” constitutes the whole of physical reality and is based on the quantum interaction of parallel universes. This “many worlds” description of quantum reality, in which alternate universes are splitting off at any given moment, may be cognate with Janet Sussman’s frequent discussions of “multidimensional time,” in which temporal regions break off from one another.

Theoretical considerations of time inevitably lead to discussion of higher dimensions, parallel universes, black holes, and the possibility of time travel, which has been a popular field for speculation, both in science and science fiction (Paul Nahin, Time Machines). Janet Sussman addresses many of these topics but not in the manner common to the many popular books on physics, which use as their starting point basic scientific understandings about physics considered as a purely objective description of the universe. Rather, her approach proceeds from the perspective of the unity of consciousness and time—which invests time with a conscious, creative power that she posits as the underlying reality of the universe. The reality of time becomes at once the truth of the universe that manifests as our personal reality—the world as we know it, and the truth of who we are as conscious, living entities.

The writing in this book has a condensed, gnomic quality that allows one to experience it in small bites, and even at random places. Illumination can occur out of the linear context of the chapter sequence, although it is certainly possible to read it that way, as later chapters build on those that have gone before. The text is holographic, appropriate to the multilayered, multidimensional universe we inhabit.