42. Time as sequential manifest experience
In the EC/HE theory time is not an independent background dimension that exists independently of experience. Time arises when FOCUS continuously directs itself towards new relations that appear through the Experience Circle.
KNOWING exists simultaneously and timelessly as a whole of relations and understandings. Everything that has been understood already exists as part of the same relational landscape. There is therefore no past or future in KNOWING, only relations and understandings that exist simultaneously.
The experience of time arises only when FOCUS reads these relations sequentially. Each time a relation appears as qualia-experience and understanding through the Experience Circle, a new experience is established. When experience follows experience, the impression of a before and an after arises. This is what we experience as time.
Time therefore does not represent something that “passes.” It is experience that passes. What is experienced as time is the continuous sequence of experiences that appear through the Experience Circle.
Just as a film appears as continuous movement even though it consists of individual frames, time appears as a continuous flow even though it is built up from individual experiences. Each experience represents a threshold transition in which an understanding that already exists in KNOWING appears as manifest experience.
Each completed experience simultaneously establishes the conditions for the next experience. In this way a coherent experience of past, present and future arises, even though KNOWING itself is simultaneous and timeless.
Several modern directions in theoretical physics have proposed that time and space may be discrete or quantised quantities. The EC/HE theory points towards the same conclusion, but for a different reason. Time is quantised because manifest experience appears through sequential threshold transitions in the Experience Circle. Each experience represents a completed moment of manifestation.
Time is therefore not a container in which experience takes place. Time is the experience of understandings appearing sequentially through the Experience Circle. Each new step in the emergence chain thus constitutes a new “tick” of manifest experience — and thereby also a new “tick” of time.
