Time - how we think of it.

People, especially of the Eastern/Asian mindset, think that time is a derivative of the life flow. We (as Asians) view time as just another coordinate or parameter or just a context of our daily affairs, dealings, work, leisure, etc., just like our location in space, emotional background, health status, number of people or friends surrounding us, weather, clothes we are wearing at a given moment of time, etc. The good or bad news is that time itself is the meta life or meta matter - simply because any materialization of matter has time structure. For people, for whom time is just a funny joke time is just like a ruler (линейка) and these people are merely recording or ticking the mileage marks just like on highways. For these people the time is fixed and there is no flow of time - instead, they are moving along the timeline and they mistakenly think that THEY CHANGE ANYTHING. People who SEE time moving have a different approach to time. They try to ATTEND TO time and notice things changing DUE TO FLOW OF TIME. People cannot make or create anything new - they can only DISCOVER something NEW TO THEM, which have always been there. This can be done only if and when the person CHOOSES the time. Choosing the time is not a simple exercise. And for 99% of people and for 99.99% of time people go the other way round - they leave the time to choose them. But the time never chooses anything - he just forgets about these people and so they found themselves walking or running on their imaginery highway with dead milestones of time. People think that the speed of running is decisive for the magnitude of outcome. No running brings about outcome. The truth is that when you are running you are running along ONLY one single time line and ON ONE SINGLE TIMELINE you can find only ONE, at best, copy of each and everything. When you choose time you are running along and next to and in front of and behind and on and under whatever you want WITH THE HELP OF TIME that you just chose. Everything has a time structure in our conventional understanding but the correct statement is that it is time that has numberless structures in terms of numberless factors. Time is a matrix of possible starts, scenarios/paths, outcomes, etc. Another mathematical analog is distribution – i.e. possible values with respective probabilities. Time can be thought of as the term "negative space" from the domain of visual perception (for whomever this is a new term - you can make a simple search in Google or Wikipedia for definition/explanation). People think of time as numbers - numbers on the clock display roll back after one full cycle and that's it. People are used to think of time as a model in which there are REPEATING HOMOGENOUS minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years which are represented just as numbers. This is too far from being more or less accurate model as far as time is concerned. Time has nothing to do with numbers which are - even worse - RECURRING. This model of time has arisen from the biologic habit of humans and other animal life to act in daytime and sleep in nighttime as well as other periodics in conditions of the environment (like seasons). However this model has emerged from the phenomena of inorganic and unconscious life. Therefore it is not appropriate for the mind/intellect to think in these terms. Simple and fair enough? Think about this! From this point of view it seems just unbelievable that the human of the 21st century (!) thinks of time as a nice circle of sectors on the clock display or a dull sequence of digits on the calendar?

The good news is however that time warp (искривление времени) is possible – in psychological sense (let alone the physicsJ). When you allow yourself to drop out of time you free yourself from the helpless exercise and habit of following the time line and start warping the time. More specifically, by dropping out of time we mean modifying the structure of time in terms of the reality’s content and its flow. You liberate yourself from the belief that the time structure is shaped by time. This is a great misconception. The structure of time is not shaped by merely the time itself, it is though more often is not but can be shaped by the person himself. Bringing a rough example. You decided to complete a task by Friday evening. Then, thanks to some occasional nice mood that came to you Friday morning or which you have brought to yourself by yourself deliberately, you suddenly completed the task in the first half of the day. So what happened? You stepped ahead of time. You changed the time structure. You also help the reality in that way – you release the burden or tension from it by discontinuing passively expecting the realization of the value of the given point of time – the reality is not there to fulfill your goals or desires, so it suffers tension coming from your urge. The reality itself does not have feelings or emotions or mind – it cannot understand the notion of goal or desire or urge that is why it transforms your desire or urge into a mere expectation for you.

Here in this regard, we can state that people very often confuse REALITY and TIME. The human can sense the reality and it is exactly what he does for the 99% of its time but he can really sense the time only when he leaves the TIME OF REALITY. By releasing the grip from time you thereby inject soul or mind into time and it starts working for your benefit and in particular creating new reality using the material of irreality which is way richer than its younger “blue-collar” brother. Time can also be thought of as CHANGE of/in reality. Similarly, in ONE SINGLE reality there is no time defined (except for on the clock or the calendar).

Much like in relativist theory, with the case of absolute, non-relative speed of light – time embarks (if ever) on you and locks back to you and it performs and lives only in your closed system. Your time is just a mere reality for the other and vice versa. Your time does not make any sense to others and vice versa. So the only resource you have in your hands is YOUR time not the others’. Times of all make up the reality. Like with agent and spy dilemma – agent is ours, spy is theirs (their agent). So here it is the same, time is ours, reality is theirs (their times). The means of doing all this is productive thinking.

For Asian/Eastern mindset, the treatment of time is such that we think that even if you do not do anything the time will still elapse, i.e. you will still encounter changes in reality, and if you are "tough" you should hurry and manage to do something which will then act as objects of encounter for others (i.e. changes). This loop is stronger in the Asian context because of closer family, relative and friendship ties. However, the problem with that is the principal inconsistency of times of different people - even be them the same family members. Another example of such setup is why the time value of money is so often failed to be understood by businessmen of this mindset and this often even results in failure to understand the value of money altogether! Instead, they are good at hurrying with AFFAIRS not with TIME. Protestant Europeans, on the contrary, assign great value to time. They know that if you do nothing the time will NOT flow, i.e. nothing will happen, nothing will change in the reality - at least in the region thereof in one's immediate adjacency. So they perform - so that time can flow and perform. They somehow (individualism, cultural values, etc.) have come up to demonstrate principally less sticking to realities of others, instead, focusing more on their individual times.

The present - how it is perceived by the human.

The fundamental fallacy of all times that has not been revealed till now is that the present is real. But the truth is that only past and future are real – the present is not real for most of the time. The present is unknown and not perceived most of the time unlike past and future which are fully perceived. By the present we mean the very existence, presence or the chances that it can affect the past and future in what the latter mean to the self. The present exists only when and to the degree the future is not shaped by the past – only in this case we can speak of existence of present. Otherwise, past becomes future without any principal (structural) change or modification i.e. without obtaining new properties/qualities - it just undergoes transformation due to time.  In a sense the present is the most lost time for the person. The present is the only time when the soul can peform but it often gets lost when the present is lost. For the conscious the past is represented by structured and objectified experience and the future represents a set of structured logical inductive and deductive forecasts. So there is a mistery of presence on one hand and fear of presence on the other. The self-preservation instinct operates in the present and crucially limits the psyche of the person. In a sense the future is equal to past and person always tries to get lost between these two in his present. He knows how future becomes past and seeks to have a smooth transformation of future into past. The present is a great challenge for the person. As the person does not know whether the present is going to bring about positive or negative balance as well as the extent of such outcome, he tries to manage that intersection as much as possible because the person as he thinks can interact with the matter only in the present and can exercise a certain degree of control over reality. The person thus, in the present, is preoccupied with the task of interacting with matter, however funnily enough he can in the present interact only with the matter of past and future. In the present he has no means of interacting with the matter because in the present he is only on his “own side” of reality, in other words in the present he can do only what comes out of his inner self, and then what comes next i.e. interaction with matter is already past as is essentially merely a feedback. That is why the only way the present can be perceived is to focus on one’s own inner self rather than the surrounding world and its different materializations which have either been already reflected on in and as the past or not been felt yet with either of senses while still having been in existence objectively no matter the person has felt them with either of senses or not. In this regard there is no way to apply the notions of past, present and future to bare matter but to changes/modifications thereof. This is the meaning of present from the point of view of the human.