The Illusion of Time: What if everything you thought you knew about reality was merely a figment of your imagination?

As long as I can remember I’ve always been a deep thinker. As a kid I’d lie awake at night until all hours thinking about my place in the world and how I fit in. That was by no means unique, given that many of us at some stage ponder the big life questions; who am I? Where do I come from? Why am I here?

My friends and family would tell me “Larry you think too much”, but I didn’t think so. As far as I was concerned they didn’t think enough. Unfortunately for me I didn’t have a tribe around me that thought the same as I did and so I found it hard to blend in. However I worked hard at it, and I eventually did. Blend in that is. I put my universal ponderings on hold in my early adulthood and focused on work and business, and for a while things were good. But it didn’t last.

The big downturn in the economy came in 2008 and I was wiped out. I pretty much lost everything I had built over the previous 8 years and the idea of myself that I had created was gone. I felt lost.
A Re-evaluation

That difficult period was a good time to reconnect with myself, re-evaluate who I was and what I was here to do. Reading material from people like Alan Watts, Eckhart Tolle, Richard Feynman, Carl Sagan and R. Buckminster Fuller helped me broaden my perspective.

On one particular ordinary kind of day, I was going about my business when it occurred to me in no uncertain terms that Time, as thought of as a linear passage of events from birth to death, was not real. From a right now point of view there was no future and there was no past, all there appeared to be was the present.

How could this be? I remember yesterday and the day before. I was born in 1974 and I’m older now, not to mention physically bigger. So how did that happen if there is no time? The clock, the calendar, the seasons in nature, aging, birth and death, what of all of this? What about the Big Bang, was that all bullshit too?

As I examined things, the answers began to reveal themselves.

I realised that the world I lived in was not quite what it seemed to be. Stuff was not stuff at all, rather it was my nervous system’s translation of subatomic vibrations, a fluctuating field of energy, into material forms.

I began to understand not only theoretically but experientially, the basis of Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity (1916), and how things only appear to be a particular way by virtue of the observational point or system of reference. Time, according to Einstein, was a function of the point or system of reference. Therefore Time is a function of individual and not a universal experience. This correlated with my experience.

The accepted Standard Model of The Universe suggests that before time and before matter, the entire Universe was condensed in a single dense speck. Almost every explanation you’ll find suggests that about 14bn years ago, from this single dense point The Universe began expanding outward in all directions at a uniform rate.

In 1933 Arthur Eddington in his book The Expanding Universe, offered an analogy of an expanding balloon to explain the expansion of The Universe. But as Nassim Haramein asks; Who is blowing up the balloon? The balloon analogy is simply not good enough at explaining the nature of expansion of The Universe because it doesn’t account for the multidimensional nature of things.

The truth is that there is no center, no single point from which everything began, at least none that has so far been detected, and won’t in my not very humble opinion. What would actually be more accurate to say is that the center of the Universe is everywhere and the perimeter is nowhere. Now this is a real mind bender and something that most accounts of the Big Bang will not go into, purely because (in my opinion) the authors can’t get their heads around it enough to explain it adequately.