Have you ever felt like you had enough of our modern world, all the complexity, the frantic pace and the intractable global problems? Have you ever wanted to just drop out and go to another world, perhaps an idyllic society somewhere back in time?
For me, it would be visiting Paris in the 1870’s through 1890’s, an elegant, cosmopolitan environment with constant discovery, such as motion pictures, a renaissance of the arts, such as impressionism with men and women who were truly happy to be men and women. Imagine the opera, the ballet, and the erection of the Eiffel Tower, the great cathedrals and museums, the gourmet French cuisine. Who could ask for anything more?
But is it really possible? Can we ever become astronauts in time, not just in space?
What Is Time?
We take time for granted all of our lives, not only on our wrists, but also in our smart phones and tablets. Most of us are quite content to be ruled by the clock. But is time really there? Or do the hour and minute hands just move round and round to no purpose?
If you ask the greatest philosophers and scientists to actually define and explain time, the best they will come up with is that time is our way of accounting for change.
Everything seems to be in flux. We see the four seasons, and we greet the turn of the earth as morning and evening. As we grow older, our world expands and sometimes contracts. The world I was born into is not at all what I witness today.
Time is often thought of as the fourth dimension, after the three dimensions of space: height, width and depth. We never seem to have time without space, nor space without time. Yet, could time actually be the way we experience things, primarily in our minds?
What Is Relativity?
Albert Einstein forever changed the notion that time and space were absolute, that you might consider one without reference to the other. He invented what he called “thought experiments” to illustrate his concepts.
Einstein began with a visualization of actually riding a light beam, going at the constant velocity of 186 miles per second. He dared ask himself, if I held out a mirror in front of me, would I see my face? Or would I be going too fast for the light to ever reflect back upon me?
Einstein kept getting more and more clever with these thought experiments until he realized that space is curved, and what causes gravity is the bending of space around larger objects. He saw things from a planetary perspective way before rockets and jets.
Today, you can’t account for time or space without reference to an observer. When you ask what time it is, are you asking London time, or Tokyo time? In Einstein’s universe, nothing is absolute. We all have to adjust our clocks. In addition, the faster you go, the slower you age.
Why Is Time Travel a Real Possibility for Us Today?
If we study film history, we see how we have been gradually led to accept time travel as a possibility, no matter how dim. We could start with H.G. Wells’ Time Machine, which was preoccupied with traveling into the future. As Wells was a pessimist, the picture of humanity he portrayed was dismal.
Somewhere in Time came out in in 1980, starring Christopher Reeves and Jane Seymour, about a playwright in Chicago whose dream girl walks into his party as an old lady. Jane, as Elyse McKenna, tells Christopher, as Richard Collier, “You’re going to come back to me.” Days later, Richard sees Elyse’s portrait in the Grand Hotel, and falls in love with her. He finally embraces her, thanks to self-hypnosis.
Back to the Future came out in 1985 as the definitive time machine feature: A plutonium-powered DeLorean that can travel into the past or future at just 88 miles per hour. Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox), a resourceful young teenager, makes friends with a mad scientist, Doc Brown (Christopher Clay), who encourages him to take a joy ride. Marty ends up back in the same town 30 years earlier, only to have his adolescent mother fall in love with him.
While these delightful stories stretch our credulity, we find ourselves much more inclined to accept the DeLorean, powered, as it was, by Plutonium fuel, with constant references to Einstein.
It just so happens that the greater an idea is developed, the more likely it is to actually manifest.
One need only think of the delightful prophetic novels of Jules Verne, all but one of which came true, including a journey to the moon.
Humanity today collectively knows dozens of times more than the entire human race in all the ages before it, due to the explosion of information technology. We are intent to actually build a colony on Mars. Is time travel all that more difficult?
How to Travel to the Future
If we can just get the booster rocket to go orders of magnitude faster than 25,000 miles per hour, we can contemplate a joy ride into outer space approaching the speed of light. We just need loop back to earth to see it 50 years later. If, like the Star Trek crew, we don’t like what we see then, we can always jettison ourselves back into outer space, in search of the perfect planet.
How to Travel to the Past
Worm holes can connect us, not only with different points in space, but with different times on the cosmic clock. Our present research suggests they may be only a fraction of a centimeter. However, some physicists think we can expand them like tubes and rocket through them. Black holes are a surer thing, as we are aware of any number of them. We just may figure out how not to be crushed by them.
What Difference Will Time Travel Make?
All of this may seem ridiculously impractical. Dr. Michio Kaku, a prominent physics professor, suggested in his provocative book, The Physics of the Impossible, that it might take us four or five hundred years to work this all out. What is important to realize is that the mathematics, itself, does not prohibit time moving in reverse. On the quantum level, we have actually observed what is called “time reversal symmetry,” where a particle temporarily moves back in time.
If we succeed in travelling through time, we will no longer be bound by time and space. We will transcend our finite perspective. We can get much more accurate accounts of history. We can remind ourselves of alternative life ways, even among primal tribes in the Amazon, that we have long since forgotten. We might even discover a way to save our planet from environmental stress.
Just think about the fact that the light going out from the earth can theoretically travel infinitely in space. If you were 2,000 light years away today, you might be able to view with your ultimate telescope Jesus give the Sermon on the Mount, or Socrates defending himself in the Athenian court, or Buddha getting enlightened under the Bodhi tree. What would you give for that?
The Alternative: The Yoga of Time Travel
Whether we successfully construct an effective time machine in our lifetime that can teleport people to different eras, we have a much simpler way to re-experience time: Through, not only our own memory, but the memory of the Universe.
Hindu legend maintains that at the bottom of everything are the Akashic Records, where every thought, feeling and action is faithfully recorded in intricate detail. It is like one vast DVD, where you can find the right groove with your light beam and totally re-experience it. This is similar to neurologists stimulating our brain in a hospital, and our experiencing precise moments of our childhood in the most vivid way imaginable, multisensory.
Dr. Erwin Laszlo, twice nominated for the Nobel Prize, accepts the Akashic records as an accurate description of Infinite Intelligence. Laszlo is developing a contemporary physics around it. Einstein freely gave away the secret of his success, not as an oversized brain, but unbounded imagination.
Einstein credited imagination for every one of his breakthroughs, not his skills in calculus.
Where to Look for the Source of Time and Space
Quantum physics and Eastern mysticism are driving us to the conclusion that all time and space is encompassed within our consciousness, that within our Ultimate Being, the galaxies spin. We are not constrained by our skin. Our awareness embraces the entire universe. This is what it means to be truly divine.
We can defeat the march of time by realizing that our True Self was never born and will never die. We are the Supreme Being giving unique expression through each one of us, witnessing His own creation through every pair of our eyes.
All the sacred scriptures keep hammering that nothing is impossible. God is a field of Infinite Possibility. Within that field, you can freely flutter like a glorious golden butterfly to any time and place you wish.
As Helen Keller put it, “Life is either a daring adventure, or it is nothing.”
Time Travel: Can We Really Travel Back in Time? appeared first on http://consciousowl.com.
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