Parting with the past

[Excerpt Be and Become, © ProCreative, Sydney 2000]

It should be reasonably straight forward to recognise that anything which is being observed is already in the past. Light travels at a speed of around 300 million metres per second. Anything we see has required a certain amount of time for the light to bounce off the object and travel to our eyes, which then forwards the signal to our brains for it to be interpreted.

If the object is millions of light years1 away (as are some stars in the night sky) we are looking millions of years into the past. As far as we know, the object might not still exist in the immediate now-moment. Even though an object might cease to exist, its light will continue to travel towards us for many years (or millions of years). And even if the object is in our vicinity, say within 300 metres, the light will still take up to a microsecond to travel to our eyes—it will still be in the past when we interpret what we see. For this reason, Past is correlated with physical reality, which includes all material things.

Physical reality, as we perceive it through our physical senses is only ever sensed after the now-moment. In other words, physical reality, as it is normally perceived through the physical senses is an end-result product of some unknown process that converts the future (boundless, unknowable) into the physical (finite, known, local past).

Physical reality as it is normally perceived through the senses is therefore an after-effect of an on-going unknowable cause. It is an unknowable cause because we cannot absolutely know (define, measure, prove or verify) what causes physical phenomena.

Clearly, our choices and actions have something to do with the reality we experience, but the actual mechanism which converts future possibility into lived actuality is unknown to us.

This unknowable cause must be in part knowable (explainable), for otherwise the basic model of existence (being the inseparable duality of the known and the unknowable) would be incorrect. There must be some linkage or connective tissue between the two, for otherwise we could not ever know of, or enter into (discover more of) that which remained entirely disconnected from it (the unknown in the form of new information, creative insights etc).

Recall from Chapter One how I found that my awareness was the only common element throughout all my experiences. I concluded that my mind must have something to do with the reality I experience. We can reasonably expect that this unknowable cause will have something to do with our mind, or awareness. We might reasonably respect the ancient sages advice that there is a spiritual-psychological dimension to existence which is behind (or the cause of) our physical existence. Hence, Figure One, below (explained in more detail in Chapter Four).

 

• 1. A light-year is the distance light travels in one year (~9,461,000,000,000 km)