As boring as it might be, most people don't understand even the most rudimentary issues surrounding sight, or how their vision works. Rather than go into a long-drawn-out technical description about vision, which you can find in any good encyclopedia, I will only briefly touch on it here. To begin with, there are minute movements of the eyes that are irregular and of high frequency (30-70 per second). This occurs because if the light falling on the rods and cones remains in the same place for too long, the image being produced will disappear, a result of the retina adapting to the stimulus, which causes the messages being sent to the central nervous system to cease functioning.

We don't notice the constant movement since the brain is continually checking the position of the eyes in relation to the target and automatically correcting the errors in vision resulting from the movement. Vision is also suppressed during movement, otherwise our vision would be severely blurred.

So we are essentially seeing in snapshots, which are constantly being corrected for movement; movement that essentially suppresses vision.

I've always considered that to be one of the reasons UFOs are not seen by some people during major sighting events. The erratic or vibratory shifting of the UFO itself may coincide with the minimum/maximum rate at which the person's vision can adjust.

Most people believe that each eye is sending a picture in its entirety to one side of the brain or the other. In actuality, each eye is communicating with each side of the brain—right and left. Each side of the brain has an important but separate function with regard to cognition.

We also know that the eyes are further affected by light wavelength. Each eye transmits a perception of what the person is seeing to the brain. If both images are somewhat similar, it usually results in a stereoscopic appearance, but some data may be lost, depending on wavelength. As an example, if each eye looks through a different colored lens, the chromatic differences in magnification cause the images to be slightly different in size, creating a condition that might result in stereoscopic "illusion," as it becomes more difficult for the brain to decipher. It can sometimes fool the brain into thinking it is receiving a completely different picture, in which case the brain will usually discard one eye's input entirely, or in some cases, overlay one with the other, creating a third illusion.

What is apparent here, is that in a close-boundary or threshold dispute over what is being seen, the brain will make modifications it can live with. Translation: It will create a false picture.

Cognition, or the understanding of what we are seeing, is an even more complex issue. After the brain has decided what it is going to present as vision, we enter a processing mode that allows a higher order of cognition.

As an example, one of the first things we probably do is compare what we see with what we expected to see.

This is based on our most recent past, perhaps the last pictogram we've recorded in memory. If there are major differences between these two perceptions, we will skip to the question of whether or not we are willing to accept those differences and what those differences might represent. Part of the acceptance of those differences is heavily impacted by our willingness or openness to change and our automatic bias and prejudice. Once we've decided that what we are seeing is acceptable, we acknowledge it as a clear and precise picture of reality, which we always refer to as "now."

The problem is, depending on the cognitive processes and how much time it takes, we are now somewhere in the past and no longer in the now.

What is most interesting, is that our assumed present would probably be more accurately described as a past based on the past. In other words, change, at least as it is pertinent to our perception of reality, is a very slow process, heavily modified and severely controlled by us. What we perceive as the present, cannot exist without its connection to the past—a past that isn't as fixed as we might believe or desire it to be, and one of our own creation.

When we begin to venture into the idea of a future, the situation becomes even more complex.

As this is a book about the future, the future is addressed more completely in a following chapter. At this point, it is only necessary to understand that our future is more than likely a result of actions we are taking in a perceived or personal now.

Because these actions are always based on our perceptions of reality as gleaned from our inventive "now" and modified by our beliefs relevant to the past (which, due to political, social, or theological events, may be changing), it is no longer in dispute that past, present, and future, are inexorably tied together in some holistic way. All are mobile, one affecting the other. Reality probably looks more like a constantly stirred soup, with the past, present, and future being mixed together—all residing within our own pot!