Time and Space Perspectives

Time and Space Perspectives

The universe is around 13.5 billion years old. Our sun is around 4.5 billion years old and has another 4.5 billion years to go, before it becomes a “red giant” and engulfs the solar system including our earth.

If we were to expand our time and space perspectives to say a 100 billion years and a few trillion light years, the arising and passing of our earth, solar system and universe would just be a brief episode. Everything that has happened in human history and is happening on earth today would be almost a “blink of an eye”.

If we were to expand our time and space perspectives to earth’s geological time scales of a few hundred million years say, we would see the effects of tectonic plate movements, earthquakes, volcanoes, oceanic and atmospheric changes, the emergence and extinction of species, also “in the blink of an eye”.

If we were to shrink our time and space perspectives to a sub-atomic level, we would see that the relative space between subatomic “particles” is enormous, like the space between planets and stars in our galaxy. We would also see that the arising and passing of these “particles” occurs within extremely small fractions of a second of time.

The amazing thing is that we can choose or develop our time and space perspectives, depending on our consciousness or awareness. We can develop an infinite perspective, “outside” time and space, where we can be aware of “everything, everywhere all of the time”. Or we can develop a sub-atomic, quantum physics perspective, where we can be aware that everything is impermanent, arising and passing extremely rapidly and repetitively, and that all the apparent permanence of solid, liquid and gaseous molecules that make up the physical forms of our bodies, things and places on earth are just forms of energy and a projection of consciousness.

We can choose a time perspective of the length of a dream in our sleep, and a space perspective of wherever we travel in that dream. During that dream, everything seems incredibly real. After the dream is over, a fleeting memory is all we have left of it, though it seemed 100% real in the dream at the time.

From time to time, there have been people on the planet who have been able to use their awareness to figure all this out by direct experience, not just by hearing about it from someone else. Gautam The Buddha was one such person, and Vipassana meditation was a technique by which to do so.

As The Buddha said (and was living proof), every human has the faculties to enable the expansion of our consciousness, through dissolution of the ego. If egoic ignorance is zero, then the corollary is that consciousness is infinite. The Buddhist “No self” and the Hindu “Universal Self”, have the same effect. If the ego is infinite, then the consciousness is also infinite, and not limited to a singular mind and body in time and space, nor limited to whatever egoic identity, such as family members, friends, community, province, nation, ethnicity, religion, ideology and so on.

Even without dissolving our ego, we can use the faculty of the pineal gland in the centre of our head, that allows us to open our “3rd eye” in our forehead, which enables us to see things at different perspectives, from the sub-atomic to the galactic.

We need our ego and our senses, to be able to function within our mind and body, and to experience the illusion and projection of “me and you, here and there, past and future”, in a world of time and space. However, by being unaware of our ego's limitations, our perspectives remain limited. We think that we are "in" the universe, and that the universe is something "out there". We are not aware that we "are" the universe, an expression of consciousness that requires a time and place for expression, a "playing field" of the universe.

If and when we shift our awareness to be free of the ego’s limitations, anything would be possible. We would not be bound by the limited time and space perspectives of the ego. Just imagine the endless possibilities and opportunities that would open. How differently we would see and think about political and national boundaries, differences of ethnicities, gender, skin colour and so on? How differently we would deal with egoic, charismatic and/or autocratic leaders? It would certainly be a different and better world, with a consciousness shift.