TIME
Throughout history, time has meant a lot of different things to a lot of people. It's been a place in history, an event marker, a healer, sometimes fleeting, sometimes stretched far beyond our sight. It's old beyond reason, newly born, the length of a prayer or a hope, shared or unshared. Time is something we blame wrinkles on. We wait on time, share the time, and use it to make sure our eggs are done. Time is integral to how we recognize events, when they start and when they end, birthdays, anniversaries, and deaths. Time tells us something about where we are in relation to the things we've experienced, are participating in, or have yet to imagine, whether we liked them or not. Sometimes we even run out of it.
Time is important to each and every one of us. It allows us to put things in perspective. It permits us to share information with others in a way that we can all understand, in a way that supports our general consensus or agreements about reality and, more specifically, how we think reality might operate.
A formal definition of time can be found in any dictionary. The tenth edition of Merriam Webster's Collegiate Dictionary defines time in this way: "1 a. the measured or measurable period during which an action, process, or condition exists or continues . . . b. a nonspatial continuum that is measured in terms of events which succeed one another from past through present to future."
But is it? Does action have to occur in the present to create the past? Can the future be predicted when it hasn't yet happened? Is there really something called the present?
To address the past, present, or future, we have to first establish what those words mean. All three apply, or are related to, time. Everyone's perceptions of what time might mean will vary, based on what they have experienced, were taught, or believe. Perception of time will nearly always be the way in which it directly relates to our own more personal view of life and how we have come to know something. In fact, most thesauruses provide another word for time—"life."
So, we either view time as the brackets that encapsulate a single or complete event within our lives, like a birth, death, or football game. Or it is a summation of events, a linear string of happenings that represent a specific period or duration—like our school years, time spent in the military, or on a vacation.
Clearly these definitions lend great support to many of the scientific views about time and how it functions within reality. Time limits, fences, or brackets observed events, thereby helping to quantify the relationships that might exist between them. Where groups of events occur, one can observe them in a linear fashion, and in some cases, see the cause-and-effect relationships between them. This gives rise to a belief that somehow time flows, and even more uniquely, always it seems, in a singular direction.
While such simplistic definitions might support normal human processing or maybe our own actions as they might relate to our existence, I believe that time is a far more complex issue than we know. Within the components of time, additional factors exist, which have not yet surfaced. There is probably some "X" factor, if not "Y" and "Z" factors, that have until recently remained hidden from us.
To understand how time operates, we must first evaluate our meanings for and relationship to the past, present, and future, and what effect they might have on us as cognitive beings. As a remote viewer, these have come to represent entire new concepts for me.
A common view of the past, present, and future states that we can evaluate each separately and that their operating parameters are pretty much fixed, at least within reality as we understand it.
a) The past has happened. It can't be undone, so therefore it can't be changed. The past is and always will be irrefutable or fixed.
b) The present is happening as we speak, and we clearly have some control over it through the expression of free will.
c) The future hasn't happened yet, so no one really knows anything about it. While sometimes we can make a reasonable guess about the future, it is generally not very predictable, and we will usually be surprised by it.
Most people would agree that when we talk about the past, we are referring to an event or period of time that, in our perception, has already happened. Dealing with an event in the present suggests that it is occurring in the now, or that it is being perceived as it unfolds or happens. And the future? Well, we normally don't even address the future except in the hypothetical, because everyone assumes it hasn't yet occurred.
The need to create a linear perception of time—past, present, and future—probably has something to do with how we process information. But this belies the complexity of the web lying just beneath the surface. I believe the strands of this web tie all events—past, present, or future—together, creating a holistic construct we call reality. A slight tug on the end of any one part of the web shakes the whole, and changes the very fabric of reality as we understand it. So, if we are ever to make sense of this, we'll have to look at the entire web from a new perspective.