1. Most people assume, as if it were self-evident, that space and time exist and that we move around in them.
2. This assumption holds that space is three dimensional (the x, y and z axes), and that time adds another dimension, so that spacetime can be said to be the four-dimensional space in which we all live.
3. We are born at one point in spacetime and, over the course of our lives, move through it as time progresses.
4. This materialist conception of time creates a number of logical quandaries, such as: when did time begin? How did it start? If it started 13.7 billion years ago, with the Big Bang, what happened before then? Did time exist before the creation of the physical Universe?
5. Is time an inherent property of the Universe or does it exist as the result of the will of some divine creator? If an inherent property of the Universe, what makes it progress at the speed it does, and not a greater or a lesser speed? Why progress at all? And – most frightening of all – if it begins and progresses then will it end?
6. All of these questions create great confusion in the minds of materialists and non-Elementalists.
7. The Elementalist, who understands that consciousness is the prima materia and that it explores the Great Fractal to entertain the gods in perpetuity, has no such confusion.
8. To the Elementalist, time is an illusion. It simply doesn’t exist.
9. Time is an illusion brought about by the movement of consciousness through the Great Fractal.
10. Because the sets of perceptual impressions experienced by consciousness appear to change in a rule-based manner, it seems that time exists and flows at a uniform rate. The reality is different.
11. The illusion of a moving picture on film is created by displaying a number of still frames in quick succession. If these frames are displayed rapidly enough, the image on the screen will appear like it is moving. But they aren’t – they just appear to, as if in a flipbook.
12. Our fragments of consciousness navigate the Great Fractal in a comparable manner.
13. Our perceptions cycle through a cosmically large number of static universes in extremely short order. Entire universes blink in and out of perception at such a speed that it feels like we’re moving fluidly through one single Universe.
14. This movement through time is, however, no more fluid than that of a horse running in a motion video. It’s also an illusion.
15. The Great Fractal, in its unspeakably majestic, all-encompassing nature, is static.
16. Because the fragment of consciousness that each of us possesses can only be aware of a tiny section of the Great Fractal, and because the tiny section that we are aware of keeps changing, it seems like time exists.
17. In reality, there is only one ever-present and unchanging now, and it exists within consciousness.
18. In this eternal now, perceptions change, and that’s all that time is.
19. The contents of consciousness are ever-changing, but consciousness itself is not, serving as an unwobbling pivot around which the entire drama of material existence unfolds.
20. The common perception of time as something real follows naturally from the common assumption of materialism – and this assumption is neither accurate nor rational.
21. Dilemmas like the Grandfather Paradox are easily solved by the Elementalist. A world in which your grandfather lives and gives rise to one of your parents exists in the Great Fractal, and will always exist there, and will always be experienced by at least one fragment of consciousness, forever.
22. Somewhere in the Great Fractal are worlds in which your grandfather is killed before reproducing, but this doesn’t negate the fact that there are still an infinitude of worlds in which he was not killed before reproducing.
23. Therefore, you could kill your grandfather a million times and it wouldn’t change a thing.
24. His vibration would still exist in the Great Fractal, so consciousness would still be perceiving him at all times, and would still perceive pathways through the Great Fractal in which he existed and gave rise to progeny.
25. Likewise, dilemmas about how time started and where it will end are easily resolved.
26. To the Elementalist, there is only one eternal now, and in that now we navigate the Great Fractal.
27. Knowing that time is an illusion, questions about how it started or where it will end are meaningless.
28. Consciousness exists outside of time and is more fundamental than time.
29. Therefore, time is a phenomenon limited to the contents of consciousness.
30. All dilemmas of time have Elemental solutions.
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This chapter is an excerpt from Elemental Elementalism, the foundational scripture of the new religion of the Age of Aquarius.
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