Frontpage Summary Full text (free) Audiobook (free) Buy the book Videos Podcasts

15.19. Outside time and space

Spacetime is a mental pattern, knowledge. Since knowledge is pure abstraction, it is not limited by time and space, as little as your thought is. Spacetime arose in zero time to infinite «size» the moment the knowledge emerged about how spacetime is constructed. The experience of space and time, on the other hand, is the experience of the pattern – the qualia. That is experienced as – well, space and time.

The Experiencer knows no limits in space and time.

You can experience this for yourself here and now.

Can you imagine holding a banana in your hand? Can you imagine this banana with a snap suddenly on a planet two million light-years away?

It may take a fraction of a second to form an inner image of this foreign globe and the banana now sitting there. But it does not take two million years, which the banana would otherwise use to get there if it hitched with a beam of light.

The Experiencer's concepts are not limited by distance, speed, time, quantities, or anything else. The Experiencer is unlimited in absolutely every conceivable (sic) way, for what should limit it?

The Experiencer is immediate, infinitely fast. But everything that happens in the universe, as we observe it from our earthly perspective, apparently takes time – is experienced as taking time.

Time is an experience, a quale.

A «real» banana that flies through «real» space to a «real» planet is inside the notion of space, time and motion. Then it takes two million years – understands and experiences the Experiencer.

Imagine a book. It describes events that take place over one year. The description is so realistic and detailed that it also takes a year to read the book.

But it did not take a year to write it. The book was written in virtually zero time by a computer with artificial intelligence that knows the art of «writing» silly books about bananas on tour.

Such is the relationship between the mental pattern, the book of life – and the reading of the pattern, the experience of living.