THE METABOLISM OF TIME
One of Einstein’s brilliant contributions to modern physics was his intuition that linear time, along with everything happening in it, is superficial. Time seems to flow and move; clocks tick off their seconds, minutes, and hours; aeons of history unfold and disappear. But ultimately, Einstein held, this vast activity is all relative, meaning that it has no absolute value. John Wheeler, an eminent physicist, wrote, “The very idea of space-time is a wrong idea, and with that idea failing, the idea of ‘before’ and ‘after’ also fails. That can be said so simply, and yet it is so hard for the lesson to grab hold in the world.”
One proof that it hasn’t yet grabbed hold is that people continue to age, following a straight-line process as faithfully as if it really existed. Yet if Einstein was right, aging is an illusion. It depends on “before” and “after,” two concepts that have been bankrupt for almost a century. The mystic Sufi poet Rumi understood this truth centuries ago when he wrote, “You are the unconditioned spirit trapped in conditions, the sun in eclipse.” Time and space are conditions, and when we see ourselves bound in them, we have lost touch with reality and bought into a fiction.
Einstein displaced linear time with something much more fluid—time that can contract and expand, slow down or speed up. He often compared this to subjective time, for he noted that spending a minute sitting on a hot stove seems like an hour, while spending an hour with a beautiful girl seems like a minute. What he meant by this is that time depends on the situation of the observer. For physicists, the notion of expanding and contracting time allowed for better calculations of various phenomena occurring near the speed of light, which was Einstein’s absolute, the universal yardstick that could not be changed or exceeded. Time had to expand and contract in order to keep the speed of light constant.
We all have a sense that time expands and contracts, seeming to drag one moment and race the next, but what is our constant, our absolute? I believe it is “me,” our core sense of self. To borrow from Einstein’s example, if two men are sitting with the same beautiful girl, the time might drag for one, because the girl is his sister, while it flies for the other if he is in love with her. This means that each of us has personal control over our sense of time. Consider all the subjective qualities we attach to time. We say things like:
I don’t have time for that.
Time’s up.
Your time’s running out.
How the time flies.
Time hangs heavy.
I love you so much, time stands still.
These statements do not say anything about time measured by the clock. The clock doesn’t lie about how much linear time has elapsed “out there.” But subjective time, the kind that exists only “in here,” is a different matter. All the above statements reflect a state of self. If you’re bored, time hangs heavy; if you’re desperate, time’s running out; if you’re exhilarated, time flies; when you’re in love, time stands still. In other words, whenever you take an attitude toward time, you are really saying something about yourself. Time, in the subjective sense, is a mirror.
In medicine we realize that people who don’t have enough time are probably going to develop health problems. The discovery of Type A behavior, for example, revealed that heart attacks were linked to a sense that there’s never enough time; for a Type A, the next deadline is always a threat, and his struggle with time contributes to his ingrained frustration and hostility. Hostility then sends a message to the heart that constricts blood vessels, drives up blood pressure, elevates cholesterol levels, and generates various kinds of arrhythmias, or irregular heartbeat.
This happens to more people than just Type A’s. As April 15 approaches, tax accountants have been observed to develop temporary elevations in blood pressure and cholesterol that disappear once the tax deadline is past. Their subjective sense of time is enough to put their bodies at risk. This points to a deeper lesson. Ask someone to make an omelet. A skillful cook can accomplish the task in about two minutes. Now alter the situation slightly by saying, “Make an omelet, but you only have two minutes to do it.” This will often make even the accomplished cook feel tense and harried. Time pressure causes stress hormones to be released into the body, which in turn elevates heartbeat. If the person struggles against this reaction, his situation only gets worse. Now his heart has to put up with time pressure and frustration. When heart patients are given demanding tasks under a deadline, a significant number grow so agitated that their heart muscles actually suffer ischemic or “silent” heart attacks (“silent” in this case means that damage is occurring but without any sensation of pain).
The element of time pressure also alters behavior, attitudes, and physiological responses. So subjective time can be an incredibly powerful force. It’s no accident that the word deadline contains the word dead. A deadline implies a threat: “If you don’t meet this limit, you’re finished.” The threat may be subtle or blatant, but it is almost always present. If it were not, we would not feel anxious under time pressure. Sometimes we expose the threat more clearly in phrases such as “I’m under the gun” or “His time is up” (which may sound like a neutral phrase until you remember that we apply it to people who are about to die).
Some people are much more sensitive to time pressure than others. A nervous cook can get so rattled by the two-minute deadline that he drops the eggs, burns himself, and can’t accomplish a task at which he excels when time is not a consideration. Another cook will blossom under the challenge and finish the omelet even quicker than before. One feels time pressure as a threat, the other as a challenge. One feels thrown out of control, the other feels impelled to test his sense of control and improve upon it.
All of us, however, feel the pressure of a serious, threatening deadline over which we have no control—death itself. If you believe that you have been allotted a certain span of time for your existence, the deadline of death will exert the same kind of stress as that felt by the nervous cook rushing to finish his omelet and botching the job. How much better not to feel any time pressure, to blossom fully despite the fact that death exists. The attitude that life is a blossoming, not a race, can be achieved. But to do that, you can’t believe that time is running out. Sending that message to your body’s cells is the same, ultimately, as programming them to age and die. Yet the fact is that linear time is moving inexorably forward, and to overcome that, we must find a place where a different kind of time, or no time, can be experienced and internalized.
The Quantum Mechanical Body
To a skeptic, this proposition must sound purely subjective, but quantum events that defy linear time take place within our cells continually. DNA’s intelligence operates simultaneously in the past, present, and future. From the past it takes the blueprint of life, applying to the present only the tiniest fraction of the information needed for cellular function (perhaps a billionth of its total data base), and reserving for the future the information that will be relevant years from now. The double helix is the quantum storehouse of your future; here time is compressed and locked away until needed. At the instant you were conceived, your genes gained control of an entire lifetime of events that would unfold in precise sequence. Your hands, for example, emerged in the womb first as amorphous blobs of cells, then as stubby knobs that turned into fishlike fins, amphibian feet, animal paws, and finally human hands. Those blobs, knobs, fins, feet, and paws are still present today as stored data in your genes, as are the hands of your infancy, childhood, adulthood, and old age. At the quantum level, you live all these ages at once.
Because we are both physical and quantum, human beings live multidimensional lives. At this moment you are in two places at once. One is the visible, sensual world, where your body is subject to all the forces of nature “out there.” The wind chaps your skin and the sun burns it; you will freeze to death in winter without shelter; and the assault of germs and viruses makes your cells sick. But you also occupy the quantum world, where all these things change. If you get into the bathtub, your consciousness doesn’t get wet. The limitations of physical life count for much less in the quantum world, and often for nothing. The cold of winter doesn’t freeze your memories; the heat of a July night doesn’t make you sweat in your dreams.
Put together all the quantum events in your cells and the sum total is your quantum mechanical body, which operates according to its own unseen physiology. Your quantum mechanical body is awareness in motion and is part of the eternal field of awareness that exists at the source of creation. The intelligence inside us radiates like light, crossing the border between the quantum world and the physical world, unifying the two in a constant subatomic dialogue. Your physical body and your quantum mechanical body can both be called home—they are like parallel universes that you travel between without even thinking about it.
PHYSICAL BODY:
A FROZEN ANATOMICAL SCULPTURE
“I” sees itself as:
—made of cells, tissues, and organs
—confined in time and space
—driven by biochemical processes (eating, breathing, digestion, etc.)
QUANTUM MECHANICAL BODY:
A RIVER OF INTELLIGENCE CONSTANTLY RENEWING ITSELF
“I” sees itself as:
—made of invisible impulses of intelligence
—unbounded in time and space
—driven by thoughts, feelings, wishes, memories, etc.
To all appearances, the physical body occupies a few cubic feet of space; it serves as a fragile life-support system for seven or eight decades before it must be discarded. The quantum mechanical body, on the other hand, occupies no well-defined space and never wears out. How big a container would you need for the dream you had last night, or for your desire to be loved? Even though a person’s total genetic material could easily fit into a teaspoon, what is most important about genes—their intelligence—occupies no physical space.
At the level of the quantum mechanical body every aspect of an experience is wrapped into one point that is beyond the three-dimensional world. A photograph of a new bride gives us a literal record of how she looked, and a tape recording can capture her voice, but these are the crudest fragments of experience; unless she saves them as mementos, the texture of her bridal gown and the taste of her wedding cake appear to be lost forever.
But in quantum space everything is there at once, and through the simple act of remembering, the bride can recapture a complete world. By some further miracle, every other experience the bride ever has will be tinged with this new addition to her memory. Being a married woman becomes a part of her brain’s view of her whole life from that moment on.
The images imprinted on your quantum mechanical body are as complex as you are. In short, these images are you. You live out your stored images, manufacturing your own version of time, and in the process you program the kind of body required by your version of time. Let me give a concrete example of how this works.
In his fascinating book of psychiatric case studies, Love’s Executioner, Irvin Yalom recounts the story of Betty, a 27-year-old unmarried woman who came to him for therapy. Betty was a very difficult case from the start. Hard in manner, aloof and complaining, she kept up a litany of grievances about the fact that no one liked or accepted her. She worked in public relations for a large department store, and every slight she suffered from customers, co-workers, and bosses was dragged into her diatribe.
As Yalom listened, he was struck by the odd fact that throughout Betty’s tireless description of her miseries, she never mentioned something very obvious—her weight. Although barely five feet two inches tall, Betty weighed 250 pounds. She and everyone else knew that her appearance was disturbing, yet she had turned her entire existence into an elaborate game to disguise this fact. Not mentioning her weight was a shield of silence, covering up the deeper pain she could not confront.
Yalom realized that it would be too difficult for Betty to tackle her obesity without first coming to terms with her psychological distress. He spent months trying to penetrate her defenses, and eventually they started to dissolve. One day Betty announced dramatically to Yalom that she was going to lose weight. She outlined a plan of attack that was remarkably disciplined and well organized. With great seriousness she launched into a diet, joining a support group and religiously avoiding any temptation to binge. She signed up for weekly square-dancing and set up a stationary bicycle in front of her TV. As the pounds quickly began to come off, Yalom noticed a remarkable thing.
As Betty lost weight, she began to have vivid dreams and flashbacks of painful incidents in her past. The underlying traumas that Yalom could hardly budge in therapy were now melting away with the fat. Betty began having wild mood swings, which at first seemed random. Then Yalom noticed that they followed a coherent pattern: She was reliving various traumas that had occurred when she was at certain weights. It turned out that Betty had grown steadily fatter since she was 15.
The last time Betty had weighed 210 pounds, for example, was when she decided, at age 21, to move to New York. She had grown up on a small, poor ranch in Texas, an only child trapped with a depressed, widowed mother. On the day that her diet took her back down to 210 pounds, Betty had a vivid flashback of how difficult leaving home had been. Quite literally, time was locked up inside her, blended into her cells.
“Thus her descent from 250 pounds set her spinning backward in time through the emotionally charged events of her life: leaving Texas for New York (210 pounds), her college graduation (190 pounds), her decision to drop the pre-med curriculum (and to give up the dream of discovering the cure for the cancer that had killed her father) (180 pounds), her loneliness at her high school graduation—her envy of the other daughters and fathers, her inability to get a date to the senior prom (170 pounds), her junior high graduation and how much she had missed her father at that graduation (155 pounds).”
Yalom was quite excited to see how tangible and alive a past memory could be: “What a wonderful proof of the unconscious realm! Betty’s body had remembered what her mind had long forgotten.” I would go even further and say that her body was a kind of mind in itself, a storehouse of memories that had taken physical form in fat cells. Betty’s experience had become Betty; instead of just metabolizing hamburgers, pizzas, and milk shakes, she had metabolized every emotion—sad longings, frustrated hopes, bitter disappointments—associated with each bite of food.
Shedding weight was her deliverance from the past, and as the old body went, a new Betty was created. She rapidly gained insight into herself; she rediscovered deeply buried desires and shed tears over hurts she had concealed from herself for many years. Her body contours began to emerge: first a waist, then breasts, then a chin and cheekbones. With her new shape, Betty found the courage to venture into a social life. Her weight had made her an outcast since her early teens; now she went on her first date, and men in her office were attracted to her, no longer put off by her armor of defensiveness.
In the end, the metamorphosis did not fully succeed. The most traumatic event in Betty’s life had occurred just before her adolescence, when her father suffered a long, protracted death from cancer; she had weighed 150 pounds then and had never managed to get that thin again. Now, as she got down to 155 pounds, her diet became a grim struggle—her body refused to let go of even one more ounce, no matter what, and her flashbacks became harder to face.
“Soon we spent entire sessions talking about her father. The time had come to unearth everything. I plunged her into reminiscence and encouraged her to express everything she could remember about his illness, his dying, his appearance in the hospital the last time she saw him, the details of his funeral, the clothes she wore, the minister’s speech, the people who attended.…She felt her loss as never before and, over a two-week period, wept almost continuously.” This time was very difficult for both doctor and patient. Racked by nightmares of her father’s death, Betty said that she died three times a night; Yalom felt intensely guilty for dragging her back to a time when she had lost not just her father but her dream of happiness.
Betty balked at uncovering any more buried feelings. It became clear that her mind could not cross this last, too-threatening threshold. Neither could her body. Too many griefs and unrealized hopes had turned into Betty. At about that time she quit both her diet and her therapy. The 150-pound barrier held, embodying the loss of a father who would never return to her. Yalom regretted that she was only a partial cure, yet he also had to admit his relief—the ordeal had deeply shaken both of them.
Like Betty, everyone becomes their past, but we also have the power to reverse that process, to free up frozen time and release pent-up memories that no longer serve us and prevent our happiness. You are constantly making and unmaking your body at the quantum level. The word unmaking is necessary because life is not all creation; old, outworn experiences need revision as new ones come along. Sometimes a person feels compelled to try to shatter the entire body of experience he or she has created over the years; people who suddenly change jobs or plunge into divorce without provocation are often motivated by an inability to revise their inner world.
They may project the blame outward, onto an unsuitable job or unloved wife. What has actually become intolerable, however, is their internalized experience. Toxic memories have accumulated inside the person to the point where perfectly neutral situations—meeting the boss at the water cooler, watching the wife brush her teeth in the morning—arouse deep-seated negative emotions. Running away is an attempt to relieve these emotions, but the tactic rarely works because what we want to run away from has become part of ourselves.
Time-bound versus Timeless Awareness
Throughout this book I’ve argued that how you age depends on how you metabolize your experience. And in the final analysis, how you metabolize time is the most important aspect of this process, because time is the most fundamental experience. A key lesson in the spiritual teachings of J. Krishnamurti was this: “Time is the psychological enemy of man,” meaning that we are psychologically undermined and deprived of our real selves by the feeling that time is an absolute over which we have no control. We somehow forget that we can choose whether to make time our enemy in the first place.
It’s possible to have actual experiences of timelessness, and when that happens, there is a shift from time-bound awareness to timeless awareness.
Time-bound awareness is defined by:
• External goals (approval from others; material possessions; salary; climbing the ladder of professional success)
• Deadlines and time pressure
• Self-image built up from past experiences
• Lessons learned from past hurts and failures
• Fear of change, fear of death
• Distraction by past and future (worries, regrets, anticipations, fantasies)
• Longing for security (never permanently achieved)
• Selfishness, limited point of view (typical motivation: “What’s in it for me?”)
Timeless awareness is defined by:
• Internal goals (happiness; self-acceptance; creativity; satisfaction that one is doing one’s best at all times)
• Freedom from time pressure; sense that time is abundant and open-ended
• Little thought of self-image; action focused on the present moment
• Reliance on intuition and leaps of imagination
• Detachment from change and turmoil; no fear of death
• Positive experiences of Being
• Selflessness; altruism; sense of shared humanity (typical motivation: “Can I help?”)
• Sense of personal immortality
Although I have described them as opposites, there is in fact a whole range of experience running from completely time-bound to completely timeless awareness. A person who dreads his mortality, who is consumed by success and deadlines and depends solely on external motivations, would be almost pathologically time-bound, yet we can all see some of these traits in ourselves. On the other hand, the saint who lives only for God, whose experience of Being is constant and certain, represents the extreme freedom of timelessness. Most people do not manifest either extreme; and yet in many ways our deepest traits and attitudes are based on how we relate to time and metabolize it. To discover where you are on the scale of time-bound versus timeless awareness, answer the following questionnaire.
QUESTIONNAIRE: HOW DO YOU METABOLIZE TIME?
Read the following sentences and check off each one that applies to you fairly often or that you generally agree with. Some of the statements in Part 1 may seem to contradict others in Part 2, but that doesn’t matter. Even if you have seemingly opposed traits and opinions, answer each statement on its own.
Part 1
1. There’s barely enough time in the day to do all the things I have to.
2. I’m sometimes too exhausted at night to get to sleep.
3. I’ve had to abandon several important goals I set for myself when I was younger.
4. I’m less idealistic than I used to be.
5. It bothers me to let unpaid bills sit around.
6. I’m more cautious now about making new friends and entering serious relationships.
7. I’ve learned a lot from the school of hard knocks.
8. I spend more time and attention on my career than on my friends and family.
9. I could be a lot wiser about how I spend my money.
10. Life is a balance of losses and gains; I just try to have more gains than losses.
11. In a loving relationship, the other person should be counted on to meet my needs.
12. It sometimes hurts to remember the people I have let down.
13. Being loved is one of the most important things I can think of.
14. I don’t like authority figures.
15. For me, one of the most frightening prospects about old age is loneliness.
Part 1 score ______
Part 2
1. I do what I love, I love what I do.
2. It’s important to have a greater purpose in life than just family and career.
3. I feel unique.
4. Near-death experiences are very real.
5. I often forget what day it is.
6. I would describe myself as a carefree person.
7. It’s a good thing to bring sexual issues out in the open, even when they are disturbing.
8. I work for myself.
9. It doesn’t bother me to miss reading the newspaper or watching the evening news.
10. I love myself.
11. I’ve spent time in therapy and/or other self-development practices.
12. I don’t buy into everything about the New Age, but it intrigues me.
13. I believe it is possible to know God.
14. I am more leisurely about things than most people.
15. I consider myself a spiritual person; this is an area of my life I work on.
Part 2 score ______
• • •
Evaluating your score. Although everyone usually checks at least a few answers in both sections, you will probably find that you scored higher in one section than the other.
If you scored higher on Part 1, you tend to be time-bound. For you, time is linear; it often runs short and will eventually run out. Relying on outside approval, motivation, and love, you have not grappled with your inner world as much as with the external one. You are likely to value excitement and positive emotions more highly than inner peace and nonattachment. You may cherish being loved by others too much and lose the opportunity to find self-acceptance.
If you scored higher on Part 2, you tend to be timeless in your awareness. Your sense of loving and being loved is based on a secure relationship with yourself. You value detachment over possessiveness; your motivations tend to be internal rather than external. At some time in your life you have had a sense of being larger than your limited physical self; your life may have been shaped by decisive experiences of God or your higher Self. Where others fear loneliness, you are grateful for your aloneness—solitude has developed your ability to know who you are.
Most people have very little notion of how much effort they expend to keep themselves trapped in time-bound awareness. In their natural state, both body and mind attempt to discharge negative energies as soon as they are felt. A baby cries when it is hungry, thrashes when it chafes, and falls asleep when it becomes exhausted. Once you reach adulthood, however, spontaneous expression has largely been squelched in favor of behavior that is safe, socially acceptable, calculated to get what you want, or simply habitual. This loss of spontaneity is a result of not living in the present, which I discussed earlier. But there is another result I haven’t discussed: the loss of timelessness.
When the human organism is discharging its negative experiences efficiently, the mind is empty of past or future concerns; there is no worry, anticipation, or regret. This means that the mind is left open to Being, the simplest state of awareness. To support the mind in this open state, the body must be relaxed and flexible. Without stored stress, the aging process cannot gain a foothold. Thus, the most natural and easy experience anyone can have is that of timeless mind and ageless body. Unfortunately, normal life is far from this state. We are all time-bound, and only on the rarest occasions—generally when we least expect it—do we manage to break in to a conscious experience of our true nature. And in a world hungry for spiritual contact and so desperately lacking it, one taste of the timeless creates an earthquake in a person’s awareness.
I’d like to offer an example of someone whose life was completely changed by such an experience, the spiritual teacher and writer Alan Watts. As a young man, Watts was inspired to try to find the right attitude toward meditation. He knew that meditation was practiced in the great spiritual traditions so that a person could escape the bonds of everyday existence, but his meditations were uncomfortable, boring, and did little more than remind him of how limited he was.
Watts had noted that many of the methods of the East are contradictory and mutually exclusive. Some masters say the mind should watch itself, some say that it is absolutely forbidden for the mind to watch itself. Some say that the mind should be controlled like a wild elephant tied to a stake, others say it should be allowed to run free. In sheer disgust he decided to reject them all. One day he took no special attitude and found, amazingly, that this letting go of expectations was enough to free him.
“In the force of throwing them away,” Watts wrote, “it seemed that I threw myself away as well. For quite suddenly the weight of my own body disappeared. I felt that I owned nothing, not even a self, and that nothing owned me. The whole world became as transparent and unobstructed as my own mind. The ‘problem of life’ simply ceased to exist, and for about eighteen hours I and everything around me felt like the wind blowing leaves across a field on an autumn day.”
This is a wonderfully evocative depiction of what it is to go beyond time and space. The sense of freedom, of throwing away the old baggage, arises automatically once a person stops relating only to his limited self. What is this thing you call “me”? A reference point built up from memories. Just as a bride has a specific reference point that she can call on to relive her wedding day, the content of your mind is built up of similar reference points—holographic packages of old experience—that you use to define who you are. “I” am the one who was born in 1946, went to Catholic school, was afraid to tell my mother I wet the bed, got a stuffed elephant for Christmas when I was 8, married too young, dropped out of college, and so on, endlessly. The buildup of memory accumulates until a rigid structure has been amassed. This is your self-image.
In moments of deepest awareness we completely transcend self-image. Paradoxically, this is when the spiritual masters say the Self is truly experienced, for the total absence of self-image leaves pure selfhood exposed. Compared to the rigidity of your ordinary sense of “I,” the Self is a living, flowing sense of identity that is never exhausted. It is a state beyond change, no matter whether you experience it as a baby, a child, a young adult, or an old man.
Alan Watts had an unobscured experience of the Self, which is available to everyone. You don’t have to do anything to find the Self—you have to stop doing anything. You have to stop identifying with your self-image and its context of memories and linear time. “I use memory,” an Indian master once remarked, “I don’t let memory use me.” This is a crucial point. Memory is just frozen time. It is impossible for the time-based mind to see the timeless, for what we call time is actually quantified bits of immortality. Reality is an ocean, but we take it away in teacups.
When Watts fell into Reality, the ocean of timelessness, his perception changed. Instead of feeling bound up and suffocated (which is how all of us feel, although we might not be able to articulate it), he had an “oceanic feeling,” a phrase coined by Freud to indicate the sense of merging with the whole. Time-based existence isn’t whole and never can be, because it is by definition made of fragments.
Toppling Linear Time
When Einstein popped the bubble of the space-time illusion, he didn’t do it just in his mind; something very real happened. One of Nature’s absolutes was suddenly gone. By taking down linear time, Einstein took down three-dimensional space with it, for our perception of space from the air, showing us that the runway lights are ten feet apart, totally changes when the observer changes his position. From the vantage point of a higher altitude, the runway lights get closer and closer together, until finally one rises to outer space, and the lights disappear.
At the core of reality, Einstein said, linear time evaporates completely, pooling out like a stream overflowing its banks. In the physics before Einstein, a particle whizzing past an observer was thought to follow a straight-line trajectory, the kind that arrows, cannonballs, and bullets follow after they are fired.
Here are two points separated in time, and the arrow represents the most basic event in the universe, the passage of time from point A to point B. The reason why you can move through time is that particles and energy waves do, forming the basis of past, present, and future. Some particle was once at A, is now traveling toward B, and eventually will get there. But with great mathematical precision, Einstein (aided by a pioneering generation of other great physicists) proved that reality looks more like a pool of expanding rings (see this page). Time turns into probability waves, and space is filled with ambiguous, foggy regions where a bit of matter might once have passed through or could be expected to show up.
Our two points A and B are known to be somewhere inside these expanding rings, but there is no definite past, present, or future, only possibilities of position. Maybe a particle is here, maybe there. When the position is determined, then the time scale emerges with it. A and B could be close together at the center or apart somewhere farther out. Linear time fools us into thinking that one minute follows another with equal spacing, but change your reference to subjective time: Two seconds sitting on a hot stove are much further apart than two seconds with a pretty girl. Einstein proved that the spacing between any two events is totally arbitrary; in reality there is only the possibility of intervals.
Toppling linear time didn’t make Einstein very happy—he personally preferred to believe that three-dimensional things and events were real. Nonetheless, a supreme act of liberation was achieved for science. Younger physicists were jubilant, and in Einstein’s wake we now have “superspace,” a realm exploding with new dimensions, new geometries, and any kind of time one can imagine. In superspace, stars are no longer separated by black emptiness; infinite energy pulsates through the void, spinning itself out along invisible strings and loops. Time can get sucked into black holes and spewed out of “singularities,” compressed seeds of space-time that enfold infinite duration in zero space.
In superspace time does not have any fixed direction; it can just as easily go backward as forward. A particle departing from A can show up at B before it left, defying our linear expectations. This may seem impossible to comprehend, but imagine a jet taking off at night. As a passenger sitting inside the plane, you see the runway lights rushing past you in a row, following a sequence in time. Once you are airborne, however, you can look down and see that the lights weren’t moving at all. They exist in a pattern that you experienced as moving time. Linear time always appears to be moving, but when you break out of the three-dimensional viewpoint, it is possible to look down, survey the larger picture, and realize that time itself does not move.
The standard picture of Nature endorsed by most physicists has two layers that we can understand either through the senses or through scientific theory:
PHYSICAL CREATION
QUANTUM FIELD
The physical world arose from the quantum field, which is the source of all matter and energy. But that raises the obvious question: Where did the quantum field come from? Quantum reality is already at the very edge of time and space; beyond it there is no where or when. Therefore, the source of the quantum field must be nowhere and everywhere, and the date of its birth was no time and anytime. In other words, the question has no answer that makes sense within our ordinary framework of space-time.
Here again, Einstein offered a solution. When he had completed his work on the General Theory of Relativity, which some physicists consider the most profound act of thought achieved by any single human being, Einstein went on to postulate a unified field theory that would draw together all the laws of Nature and give them a common foundation. His famous theorem E = mc2 had proved that matter can be converted into energy—in the terminology of physics, Einstein had unified the two—and now he set out to unify space and time as well. In essence he would replace the two-layer model of the cosmos with a three-layer one (see this page).
Since he had already proved that space-time is an illusion, this new layer of the unified field had to be the Reality behind the illusion, the wholeness beyond all dimensions. Unfortunately, Einstein died before he was able to find mathematical expression for his unified field theory. Thirty years after his death, younger colleagues such as John Wheeler and David Bohm took up the task, despite the fact that most physicists were extremely skeptical. It seemed impossible to come up with a true unified field theory, because it would have to be nothing less than “the theory of everything.” Today, skepticism has turned to hope, and a theory of everything is considered a viable goal by such notable thinkers as Stephen Hawking and Roger Penrose.
PHYSICAL CREATION
QUANTUM FIELD
UNIFIED FIELD
However, we do not have to wait for the theory of everything to be proved in order to grasp that the unified field is identical to the It of Alan Watts’s timeless experience, the totality that is perfectly ordered and that includes all space-time events in a seamless web. When the spiritual masters declare, “I am That,” they are affirming the most complete sense of belonging. They realize that the unified field exists in, around, and through them. However, for us to share this experience we have to overcome a very imposing obstacle—the fear of death. For the vast majority of people, death represents the cutoff point where life ends and the unknown begins. But the post-Einstein universe has no beginning and end, no edges in time and space. To join this larger reality, each of us must redefine where our own life begins and ends—or whether it begins and ends at all.