Time is an engineered concept

Time is defined by humans as something that moves in a neat straight line manner at constant speed.

By defining it, and implementing and honouring the definition, we breathe life into "time".

So we 'create' time. Breathe life into it. By consensus. And so it exists.*

Consensus Reality is a powerful concept. These links cover it quite well:

1. Princeton:Consensus Reality

2. Wikipedia:Consensus Reality

3. Huffington Post:Challenging Consensus Reality

If we did not create time, if we did not define and honour a neat, simple, straight line time, we would not be able to make sense of the world.

If we gave up time, it would destroy the civilised world. Back to the caves.

You can challenge consensus reality - but do it only when you have the strength to sustain your opposition.

What I like about 'time' is, once you understand it....you can be in it and out of it, both at the same 'time'.

Refer Eckhart Tolle speech on OPRAH and TOLLE.

You can define your own time*. Or lack of it. But consensus time (or clock time) must be honoured.

*If you want. Nothing wrong with it fundamentally.

HOW TIME IS DEFINED AND MAINTAINED BY HUMANS
In 1967 the Thirteenth General Conference on Weights and Measures defined the SI second of atomic time as:

the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium-133 atom.

The definition of the second was later refined at the 1997 meeting of the BIPM to include the statement:

"This definition refers to a caesium atom at rest at a temperature of 0 K."

"over the years UTC [which ticks SI seconds] has become either the basis for legal time of many countries, or accepted as the de facto basis for standard civil time"."

The River Of Time

Chaos Theory, a beautiful science, tries to instill in us that the perfect shapes of Euclidean geometry like straight lines, circles, cones, cylinders, are only human imagination, and do not manifest in nature. They are just references we use to measure our surroundings.

In fact, you can't even draw these shapes if you tried. No machine can ever produce a straight line, since drawing a line would entail giving it a thickness, and a thickness means it's not a 'line'. Further, every machine, no matter how refined, always deviates from its design trajectory.

So the drawn line will have a varying thickness, as well as deviations from the mathematical formula for a line, so, whatever it is... the drawn line is not a 'straight line'.

So if neither man made machines, nor nature produce straight lines, or straight anything - if we apply this concept to 'time' as we think it is ---

----then time flowing at a constant speed, in a 'straight line', progressing neatly from one year to the next -- this might not be true.

Time might be twisted, discontinuous, broken, looping, zig-zagged etc.

And if indeed 'time' has the above mentioned bizarre nature, it only means that the flow of events may not be a neat linear chronology that follows cause and effect.

i.e. the dream perspective... that mystics keep talking about.

Whatever this universe is, it's not what we are traditionally trained to think it is.

I have pondered parallel lives often...and I feel that in case the flow of time is not a 'straight line', and it doesn't look like it is, then there is no reason why time can't flow in parallel streams. That can converge, diverge. Converge again.

Perhaps time can be likened to a river. Has a flow but only if you are in it or observing it from close range. And like a river, consists of meanders, multiple streams, creeks, brooks, rivulets...






Recommended:Is Time a Straight Line