An Experiment with Time by J. W. Dunne

One of the most fascinating books I have is a present (as with many of the most thought-provoking books in my collection) from my brother. A 1934 third edition of J. W. Dunne's An Experiment with Time, a book which strikes me as being so amazing as to possess otherworldly properties...

Firstly, a word about the author. A British aeronautical pioneer, Dunne designed aircraft with a swept-wing, tailless configuration. Today aircraft with identical configuration fly as the Northrop Grumman B-2 Spirit and B-21 Raider stealth bombers. [This article from a US Air Force website name-checks Dunne as the designer of the first practical flying-wing.] So in the world of science, engineering and technology, Dunne is acknowledged as a Serious Man, not some proto-New Age purveyor of woo-woo flakiness. 

Below: digitally enhanced photograph of J. W. Dunne at the controls of his D.6 tailless monoplane in 1911, and a Northrop Grumman B-21 stealth bomber, due to enter service with the USAF next year. The similarity in configuration, despite being separated by a century of aerospace evolution, is remarkable.

Dunne catalogues his most noteworthy  precognitive dreams. One that we can easily check today referred to the Burntisland railway accident that happened on 14 April 1914, the fatal derailment of the Flying Scotsman train (contemporary newspaper photo of aftermath, below).

Dunne writes: "The dream occurred in the autumn of 1913... the place was just north of the Firth of Forth Bridge in Scotland. The terrain was open grassland, with people walking in groups thereon. A train going north had just fallen over the embankment. I saw several carriages lying towards the bottom of the slope..." Indeed, just 12 miles north of the bridge. 

The author mentions many other precognitive dreams sufficiently memorable and shocking as to merit inclusion, including one about the naval bombardment of Lowestoft, which went on to happen during World War I – a war which not yet broken out when he had the dream. Spookily, Dunne refers to the 1914-1918 conflict in the book as 'the first world war' 12 years before outbreak of the second one.

The rationally minded reductionist-materialist would dismiss all this as the random firings of random neurons in the random brain of a random human. Given billions of humans each with brains containing billions of possible neuronal connections, yeah, I can see the attractiveness of this argument. Yet reading the book, I sense a consciousness that was unusually open to information from the future, a man who determined to use the scientific method to attempt to explain how this could happen.

An Experiment with Time was written as the final mathematical touches were being applied to the theoretical underpinnings of quantum mechanics were being agreed. Dunne is clearly up to speed with the work of Schrodinger and Heisenberg and the significance of the observer effect. The language he uses is groping towards that used by today's philosophers of mind, but lacking much of their vocabulary.

Dunne was convinced he could see (if only briefly and imperfectly) into the future. I am convinced that indeed he could. But as to how this process works – I have not the slightest clue. Is it something that one day rational science will be able to explain? Or is this phenomenon entirely spiritual in nature?

Dunne considered himself to be a rational man, steeped in the scientific paradigm and its explanatory powers. As such, he sought a scientific explanation to something he clearly felt to be real. His book is an attempt to couch in scientific language results of an experiment framed in the scientific method.

He calls for large cohorts of volunteers to log their dreams as soon as they wake up, with the highest degree of fidelity and detail, and then to see whether any events in the dreams correlate with actual events that happen in future days, weeks, months and years. He presents the results; nothing here that any scientifically trained mind would remotely accept as proof.

Ultimately, I believe that some people, Dunne included, did have the gift of precognition. Other rare cases have other gifts that our materialist-physicalist paradigm is unable to explain. Attempts to use scientific method to quantify such phenomena (the PEAR Lab's Global Consciousness Study) end up proving that there is indeed a statistically significant 'something' going on – but this is roundly ignored by science because there is no scientific framework to suggest why this may be. And so such efforts are sneered at as 'pseudoscience' with efforts made to dismiss the methodology.

Quantum mechanics and consciousness studies may take us further down a road towards an explanation that conforms with the scientific paradigm; on the other hand, it may open the door to an entirely new paradigm. Or it may just turn out that some things are simply meant to remain a mystery.

Precognition – being able to glimpse into the future –

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The psychological benefits of 'place nostalgia'

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This time two years ago:
Keep on keeping on

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Time and Consciousness

This time four years ago:
Altered states – higher planes

This time eight years ago:
Warsaw-Radom line modernisation – Czachówek

This time 15 years ago:
Climbing Mogielica

This time 16 years ago:
Good graffiti, bad graffiti

The joys of an early start

Once upon a time, I'd have bluntly refused the proposition of an 7:50am appointment for a blood test. "Offer me a slot at some civilised time," I would have said. The clinic is 40km (25 miles) away in Wola, a district to the north-west of central Warsaw. 

But having shifted my sleep routine ahead the spring time-change, I thanked the clinic's receptionist for the chance of an early visit, knowing that getting up before sunrise no longer poses a challenge.

And so indeed it proved to turn out. 

I went to bed at nine pm, woke up at 05:07, had a shower, made a thermos of coffee and a packed lunch (or more accurately packed breakfast, as the blood and urine samples had to be on an empty stomach). I fed the cats, and was ready to leave home at six. I caught the train from Chynów to town at 06:18 (below), reaching W-wa Wola station just after seven. Then I took an eastbound tram four stops and walked a bit to the clinic, arriving there at 07:25. 

No one around except the receptionist and the nurse. I got everything done within a few minutes, beating the queues. Beating the queues? Thrashing the queues. Soon I was back on the tram to W-wa Wola and the train back to Chynów. Home before ten (below), with nine thousand paces on the clock.

The sun was shining brightly throughout. A brisk northerly wind put a light chill into the air as I set off to the station, but the sense of aliveness was all-powerful. Sleeping in is no longer an option for the summer months. Grab that dawn!

Think about the terms 'midday' and 'midnight'. The original meanings have slipped, distorted by modern life. 'Midday' is the time when the sun is at its zenith, its highest position in the sky on a given day. Midday is midway between sunrise and sunset. And 'midnight' is halfway between sunset and sunrise. Yet for nowadays, 'midnight' is a time shortly after most folk go to bed. 

Modern humans have been around for 300,000 years give or take, but it's only in the past 100 or so of those years that we've had universal access to electrical lighting. Radio and television have been entertaining our species for slightly shorter, clocks and wristwatches have been informing us of the time for slightly longer. This is the tiniest slither of time in terms of mammalian evolution. 

Our circadian rhythms – our body clocks – have suddenly been thrown out of kilter. The  result is all manner of psychiatric disorders which our rationalist, materialist paradigm says need pharmacological treatment.

But how about changing your sleep patterns instead? Make midnight the middle of your night?

Granted, it can be hard when you're in the nine-to-five. Assuming your midday (sun overhead) is at 12:00, an eight-to-four working day makes more sense... and then there's the whole issue of time change. Clocks going back in the autumn exacerbate the psychiatric effects of seasonal affective disorder (SAD), while the clocks going forward in spring lead to a huge spike in heart attacks and strokes (a 24% jump in cardiac-ward admissions in the week after the time change). 

However, our legislators have shown unwillingness to tackle the issue of daylight-saving time changes. We seem stuck where we were; an overwhelming majority of people across the EU  want to see an end to the spring and autumn time changes, yet the legislators seem unable to act. The European Commission proposed abolishing clock changes in 2018. The European Parliament voted in 2019 to end them (originally by 2021). But the crucial body, the Council of the European Union, has never agreed a common position. And so an indefinite delay is entirely plausible under current conditions. Countries disagree on permanent summer time vs winter time. If countries choose differently, Europe risks a patchwork of time zones, which is politically and economically awkward. Covid, the war in Ukraine and now in Iran have all pushed the issue down the agenda. And so, the EU is not waiting on science or public opinion – it’s waiting on member states to agree with each other. Until that happens, the system persists by default.

So it's up to us as individuals to deal with this each in their own way. In a working world of flexitime and hybrid work, we should be able to get around this.  Of course, much depends how far from the equator and how close to the poles you are. Daylength is the same (just over 12 hours) all year round at the equator, while the two cities nearest the North Pole (Tromsø and Murmansk) have almost no daylight in midwinter and almost no night in midsummer. Warsaw, London and Berlin have (to the nearest hour) seven hours of daylight in midwinter and 17 hours of daylight in midsummer.

The way we sleep depends not only on the time of year, but how far north/south we live. Human sleep timing is governed by the circadian system, centred on the suprachiasmatic nucleus, and the hormone melatonin. Darkness lengthens the melatonin secretion window; light shortens it. Longer nights mean a longer biological 'night signal'. People living close to the equator will tend to sleep the same number of hours all year round, whereas by the time you get as far north as Warsaw, people should be sleeping half an hour more in winter (roughly eight and half hours) and get by with half an hour less in summer (roughly seven and half hours).

The key thing is to aim to keep midday at the middle of your day, and keep symmetrical the times between waking up and sunrise and sunset and going to bed. Ideally, this would mean (for Warsaw, 52° North, 21° East) in summer time (solar noon at 12:30) waking up at 4:45 am and going to bed at 8:45 pm, awake for 16 and half hours of the day, with seven and half hours of sleep, and in winter time (solar noon at 11:30) waking up at 3:45 am and going to bed at 7:15 pm for eight and half hours of sleep. 

This might sound extreme when considering one's social calendar (and the TV schedule for those who still watch), but the above times reflect how things were for the whole of human history until the recent past. Not practical today, to be sure, but a target to keep in mind. An ambition.

Overcome the owl, be more like the lark, for that is our biology. Ah yes. Teenagers and young adults are exempt – their body clocks have been biologically tweaked for a more nocturnal bias, at least until they have found a mate.   

Having said all that – would I readily accept a 7:50 appointment in Wola in midwinter? Not readily, no. It would mean waking up nearly two hours before sunrise. Still, by spreading my eight-and-half hours of winter sleep between quarter to eight in the evening and quarter past four in the morning, straddling the midnight hour equally, it could theoretically be doable...

This time nine years ago:
Changes in Nowa Iwiczna

This time ten years ago:
Tracks to Tarczyn

This time 11 years ago:
Translation and cultural differences

This time 13 years ago:
The demand for Park + Ride keeps growing

This time 14 years ago:
Cycle-friendly London

This time 15 years ago:
The end of the Azure Week

Lent 2026: day 36 – time and the soul

The Ancient Greeks distinguished between elapsed time, perceived time and eternity.

Let's begin with chronos (χρόνος) – measurable, sequential time. This is the closest to elapsed time in the modern scientific sense. Chronos is quantitative, continuous, divisible time, progressing in a linear fashion from past through present into the future, measurable in years, seasons, months, weeks, days and hours. Chronos was used for tracking celestial cycles in astronomy, for marking events in history, and for everyday scheduling. Chronos is not an independent entity, but a measure of change, without change, there is no time to count. This aligns with modern physics – time is a parameter that indexes change in a system, in particular, entropy – the time it takes for example for an ice cube to melt, for milk to dissolve into coffee or a strawberry to decay into mush. The inexorable progression from order into disorder.

Then we have kairos (καιρός) – qualitative, experienced time. It cannot be measured with a clock; it is felt, not counted. This corresponds to the notions of perceived or opportune time. Kairos is not something to be quantified; it is entirely context-dependent. It can feel fast or slow. Floyd Dixon puts it like this: "We was having so much fun/Didn't know it was half past one/Turned round to have one more/Looked at the clock and it was half past four." On the other hand, after holding the plank posture for four minutes, the fifth minute takes what feels like an hour to pass. Kairos is also the moment when something ought to happen. In Greek rhetoric it was the right moment to present the clinching argument. In warfare, the decisive instant to strike. As such, kairos is linked in meaning to opportunity or decision – and the intuition to act. I would put this as the moment of aligned flows; when your flow and the Cosmic flow are congruent. It is the 'now-or-never' moment; the 'sliding-door' moment. Kairos maps directly onto modern psychological notions of subjective time dilation/ compression, flow states and the emotional weighting of moments.

And finally, the Greeks had the notion of Aion (αἰών) – eternal or cyclical time. This is unbounded time, associated with the lifespan of the cosmos. Aion is not sequential in the everyday sense, but is often cyclical or timeless, associated with permanence or totality. Plato defines chronos as “a moving image of aion”. Sir Roger Penrose uses the term Aeon to describe one cycle of endless Big Bangs, cosmic expansions and heat-deaths, from one Big Bang to the next. When the last atom ceases to vibrate, there is no vibration, nothing with which to measure time. Time ceases. Without time, there is no space. And at that instant, the next Big Bang pops up. An eternity of aeons. 

And so – where in time is the soul? Seeing 'soul' and 'consciousness' as the same concept but from different historical ages, I would consider the soul as belonging to the aion, the biological body as  belonging to chronos, and consciously experiencing kairos. Passing through the aeon, chronologically. One lifetime at a time.

********

This Sunday, the clocks go forward. The realm of chronos, the quantifiable. Yet what we experience is not an arbitrary hour on the clock, but is predicated by our biological reaction to the sun's rising and setting, and all points in between – our circadian rhythm. On Sunday morning, the sun will rise at 06:17, an hour and two minutes later than on Saturday. We will be robbed of an hour's sleep – and this has health implications (hospital admissions for heart attacks spike by 24% in the week after the time change – it was this time last year that my heart attack occurred). 

So to prepare for the spring time change, I have been going to bed early (as early as 9pm) for the past four evenings, and waking up shortly after 5am, in other words before sunrise, which today was at 05:27. 

The early start is wonderful. I witness the sun rising through the forest next door, and set off for an early pre-breakfast stroll. Early spring, so the young day is full of the year's coiled potential, still waiting to burst open. On an empty stomach (just the one black coffee!) I feel light-headed, alert and alive. An altered state. Quite something! It's sunny, though with a chill wind from the south, a wonderful feeling to be alive and soaking up the qualia. 

Kairos suggests that it's later than it is; my early-to-bed, early-to-rise pre-time-change regime has gifted me an additional hour and half of daylight that I could have wasted by waking at seven am. On Saturday night, I go to bed at 9pm and wake up at 6am, having had a normal eight hours' sleep.

In the balance between chronos and kairos lies the balance between quantity and quality.

Lent 2024: day 36
After death, what's next? (Pt III)

Lent 2023: day 36
Money and metaphysics

Lent 2022: day 36
Losing sight of God

Lent 2021: Day 36
One life is not enough

Lent 2020: Day 36
Accounting for talent

Tonight of all nights... GO TO BED EARLY!

[That is, if you are in the least bit troubled by seasonal affective disorder.]

The prospect of an extra hour in bed is tempting at this increasingly drear point in the calendar. But that hour is merely lent to you by 'them', and 'they' intend to take it back from you at the end of the day. As the clocks go back at two am tomorrow, Sunday 26 October, to be set for one am, the effect is that we gain an hour's daylight in the morning, but lose it in the evening. 

That loss of an hour's evening daylight, every day, between now and the end of March 2026, can exacerbate the mood disorder brought on by the encroaching winter darkness. The condition is more marked (affecting more people more strongly) the further towards the poles one lives. Symptoms of winter SAD often include falling asleep earlier in the evening, oversleeping or difficulty waking up in the morning, nausea, and a tendency to overeat, often with a craving for carbohydrates and subsequent weight gain. There is also subsyndromal SAD (which I get), a milder form, which affects two and half times more people than the full-blown SAD.

Since equilux a month ago, I have as usual noticed that I tend to go to bed earlier and sleep longer (typically being in bed by 22:30 and sleeping for nine hours, waking at 07:30). In high summer, I tend to sleep for just over seven hours.

My remedy to the Hammer of Darkness is to ignore the time change; make the most of the decreasing daylight hours by going to bed earlier and getting up earlier on Sunday morning. Eschew that lie-in. Tonight, and for as many nights as you can, go to bed at least one hour earlier, and wake up an hour earlier. This will mean waking up before dawn, witnessing sunrise, making the most of mid-December's seven-hour days, and going to bed as early as you can. 

Yesterday it rained all day, but this morning was beautifully cloudless, I was up for an early walk (not a long one it must be said) before breakfast, but that walk in the sun set me up for the day, and I caught the sunset too. Today it was at 17:20. Tomorrow it will be at 16:18. Each day sees less and less daylight, until we reach the plateau of darkness (from 9 to 16 December, the sun sets here at 15:24, and from 27 December to 2 January, it rises at 07:43). From the Winter Solstice, the day's net length will start to increase, noticeably by New Year's Day. And then, on 18 March, we reach equilux. The day will be just over 12 hours in length.

Below: morning in the wood next door with my six cats. Czestuś (right), being orange, blends in perfectly with the fallen foliage at this time of year. Photo take shortly after nine am today; were I to have taken it tomorrow, the sun will be casting these shadows shortly after eight am. Make the most of the morning light!

Unlike preparations for the spring time change, which take several days, combating SAD or SSAD at this time of year is simple – just go to bed a little earlier today, and wake up a little earlier tomorrow.

Never mind the time change. The only clocks that count are your body clock and the rising and setting of the sun. Czas jest umowny; time is something we socially agree upon, what time we meet, at what time television programmes etc are shown. YouTube and Play Again functions means we are no longer slaves to TV schedules; if something's on too late, watch it at some other time. But if you are prone to the seasonal blues caused by long nights and insufficient daylight, the least you can do is to benefit from that morning hour and go to bed early.

Stop scrolling. Go to bed... now!

This time three years ago
Public transport improvements

This time last year:
Sublime autumn, Jeziorki

This time six years ago:
New track from Chynów to Warka

This time seven years ago:

The possibilities of a quantum universe

This time eight years ago:
More about sleep

This time nine years ago:
Scenes from West Ealing and Hanwell

This time ten years ago:
Four years of PiS

This time 13 years ago:
High Victorian Manchester

This time 16 years ago:
Clocks go back – but when to set them forward?

This time 17 years ago:
Warsaw's Metro Line 1 reaches Młociny

Started the day well?

The daily routine begins with waking up before dawn, now that it's dark at around half past six, sunrise being a little before 7am now. Slippers on, a wee, make the bed – and then, before anything else, the first set of exercises of the day. Pull-ups. Eight in one go, from full-dangle to chin above the bar. This is now the standard; I remember the elation at managing six for the first time in November 2022, eight in February 2023 and nine on 18 September 2024. 

Doing the eight pull-ups first thing in the morning gives me a real boost and sets me up for the day. If I fail to do this, I feel that laziness has got one over on me; consequently the rest of the day either slips or is coloured by atonement and doubt. Waking up with a headache, the result of dehydration or a heavy night, is the one excuse I give myself for not starting the day with a burst of exercise.

Next up is a review of the to-do list in my day book. This gives shape to how the day is likely to unfold. What needs to be done, what's urgent, travel plans (when I need to leave to catch the train). The list is usually about four to seven points long. Whatever can be put off until the future generally is. Stress is to be avoided, as is guilt.

Now the laptop can be switched on. I like to tune into BBC Radio 4's Farming Today (05:45 UK, 06:45 in Jakubowizna) followed by the Today Programme which starts with the 6am news headlines, a review of the papers and the business news. I switch off with the sports. While listening to Radio 4, I make and drink my daily coffee.

The morning coffee is an integral part of the morning ritual. Grinding the beans (125 turns of the crank, enough ground coffee to fill the basket of my three-cup Bialetti), boiling water, filling the tank to the safety valve, dropping the basket in, screwing the top on and putting it on the hob. I heat it with the lid open, surfing the flame so as to quickly stop the brewing process before the angry sputtering starts (which leads to burnt coffee smell and taste compromising the brew).

Once drunk, the coffee does the trick, the digestive process is complete, and having emptied by bowels, I give thanks for my regularity and that everything's working properly, time to experience the sensation of gratitude for my health. 

And another eight pull-ups. After the caffeine jolt, before breakfast, and moving less weight (see above), it's this second set that usually breaks records. This gives me a rush of adrenaline and endorphine, and I'm up for the challenges of the day. Which begins with breakfast. Porridge followed by smoked salmon and scrambled eggs, or a tuna sandwich. Protein and carbs. And fresh apple juice.

Then brushing my teeth, and another reminder to be grateful for health. And to reach out to the Purpose, the Source, the Cosmic Unity, to ask for Alignment.

Generally, my morning ritual is the same across the week – early morning starts and business travel (something I try to limit these days) are the exceptions. This also means being in bed shortly after ten pm, so as I can get in a solid eight hours' of sleep. I do not use an alarm clock. Travel that necessitates the use of one to wake up at stupid o'clock is something I have cut out of my life. Too much stress. And given the clocks going back at the end of this month, once more, I shall not move my daily routine to accommodate the time change; rather, I shall go to be one hour earlier, waking up one hour earlier, in other words at the same time relative to the sun.

This time eight years ago:
The rich get richer – hence Brexit and Trump

This time nine years ago:
Respect for pedestrians' lives? Not among Polish MPs

This time 12 years ago:
Autumnal gorgeousness in Warsaw

Time and Spirituality Pt III: Lent 2024, Day 33

In his book Real Magic, Dean Radin talks about the three forms of magic; clairvoyance (perceiving through space and time); force of will (impressing your will onto the world) and theurgy (communicating with spirits). In each form, one's consciousness has to reach out across time to make its mark.

My take: clairvoyance – be it remote viewing (across space) or precognition (across time) – is a real phenomenon. I'm prepared to accept its existence, though I believe that it occurs naturally in only the tiniest number of gifted people, and to a limited extent, though it's a talent that can be developed by exercise. Force of will – prayer, if you like – can work though only if it aligns with an overall Cosmic Purpose rather than with one's ego. Theurgy – I'm not sure on this one; my experience suggests that departed loved ones do visit you in dreams, which may hold significance if you listen.

I see, however, another form of magic (magic being physical effects without physical cause). This is one that's important in my daily life – the forestalling or preclusion of mishaps by being consciously aware of their possibility. (See this post for more details.) This is willing yourself good fortune, or willing yourself the avoidance of misfortune. 

Again, this means delving into the future, affecting future outcomes. Not wanting to fall ill, not wanting an accident, not wanting to lose your wallet, keys or phone, not becoming a victim of crime, not having something break down (means of transportation, for example); these are goals that can be achieved by conscious thought, reinforced by projection of your consciousness into the future. I do this by offering a silent prayer as I leave the house. And importantly, this is backed up by a prayer of gratitude for stuff not going wrong as I return home.

Even if all that such habits do is reinforce your careful and diligent behaviour, then they work. But I would posit that they work above and beyond the physical cause-and-physical effect level (I return home safe and sound, nothing's gone awry, nothing missing or broken, because I have taken conscious care to ensure that happens). They work because I have willed away misfortune.

The opposite is complacency; the notion that because it all worked out well yesterday and today, it will all work out well tomorrow. Complacency breeds unexpected mishaps – your consciousness was not scanning the horizon. Consciousness needs to be alert.

There are things people badly want in life; health, a decent job, a partner, children; subconscious desires which align with the unfolding universe. A bigger, newer, car doesn't. And when you want something badly enough, that want or need moves from the subconscious to the conscious. Would it spoil some vast, eternal plan if it were to come true? No? Does it align with the Cosmos? Yes? Then pluck it from the future, and it shall be.

Tomorrow: a short series of blog posts about life after death.

Lent 2023, Day 33
Into the Afterlife (Pt I) 

Lent 2022: Day 33
The Search for Understanding

Lent 2021: Day 33
Connecting with the Metaphysical

Lent 2020: Day 33
"On my planet there is no disease"

Time and Spirituality (Pt II): Lent 2024, Day 32

Yesterday I considered the notion of time flattened out across past and future, with the present being a passing illusion. With the notion of the block universe, a hypothesis that Einstein espoused, all is happening at once; spacetime being truly four-dimensional rather than three-dimensions in time. The block universe theory suggests all of spacetime exists as a single, unchanging block. Past, present, and future are all equally real, just with different perspectives depending on the observer. Einstein's theory of general relativity is compatible with the block universe, he came to acknowledge it as a likely consequence of his theories.

But we can posit something different. We can think about time as not being a straight arrow running along a single dimension from past into future, but maybe that arrow can be bent to run forward, but with an up/down vector, and with a left/right vector too. So three-dimensional time, though still in accord with the second law of thermodynamics, cannot run backwards. Entropy-driven, it can to run only from future to past. But if you bend that arrow far enough, and can be made to return to where it came from. The tighter you bend the arrow, the more recently in the past it can end up.

How many arrows of time are there? One, for literally everything, the entire Cosmos, every visible galaxy out there? Or one arrow of time for every particle in the entire Cosmos? And whether one timeline for the whole Cosmos or one timeline for every single particle, are those timelines bendable?

In A Brief History of Time, Stephen Hawking identified three main arrows of time: thermodynamic: (related to increasing entropy/disorder), psychological – our own perception of time flowing forward (we remember the past but can't directly experience the future) and cosmological: time progresses as the universe gets bigger. 

Or is the hypothesis of time's arrow (bendable or not) unnecessary in a block universe in which past present and future are all flattened out, joined together eternally in a singularity of time?

The theological implications of a block universe would point to an omniscient Divinity, an alpha and an omega, existing at the beginning and end of time at the same time (and at all points in between). This would stand in opposition to an unfolding universe, patiently progressing from Zero to One, a universe of emergence and complexity co-existing with entropy and disorder, in which the Divinity would be a guiding purpose, a work in progress, not perfect, but steadily tending towards ultimate unity and understanding. 

A block universe would have implications for reincarnation too – living all lives simultaneously across all time at one go, so flashbacks or dreams would be openings-up to events being experienced in real time elsewhere in the continuum, rather than having any quality of having happened in the past.

How do precognition and retrocausality – if they indeed do empirically exist – operate? By bending the arrow of time this way or that, or back upon itself – or by becoming as one with the block universe and simply reaching out across time in the same way I reach across my desk for my mug?

Both are fascinating ideas. We have no more than a intimation that precognition and retrocausality are real phenomena. Even if proven across thousands of experiments that a tiny, though statistically significant, effect exists, scientists have no idea how these phenomena could possibly work, and so dismiss them as pseudoscience.

Seeking a theoretical framework, I would join those panpsychists who posit the work of consciousness – both the Big-C Consciousness, the prime-mover, the reason, the purpose, the direction of the Cosmos, but also small-c consciousness of individual biological entities, willing an outcome which aligns with the Big-C purpose.

Lent 2023, Day 32
The Practice of Gratitude

Lent 2022: Day 32
The Search for Perfection

Lent 2021: Day 32
Meditation

Lent 2020: Day 32
Divine Intervention

Time and Spirituality (Pt I): Lent 2024, Day 31

My thinking on the subject of time has progressed significantly since last Lent. I have grappled with the concept of the block universe, the notion that the past, present and future are occurring simultaneously. The corollary to this is that time is an illusion (and, to quote Douglas Adams, lunchtime doubly so). Physicist and philosopher Bernard Carr talks about the specious present – a present that's never really there, happening at Planck-time, so what we really have is the past and future separated by the shortest-possible sliver of 'nowness' that we're capable of experiencing.

That shortest sliver of can be described in terms of physics as the shortest possible unit of time, the Planck time (5.4 x 10^-44 seconds, the time it takes a photon to cover one Planck length, which is 1.6 x 10^-35 metres), or in biological terms, around a twentieth of a second (think of individual frames of a film perceived by our brains as moving pictures). So 'now' has come and gone; 'nows' continue to pass from future into past. There is, practically, no 'now'.

I wrote earlier this Lent about how the direction of time's arrow is said to be determined by entropy (leave an ice cube on a table at room temperature and it will melt; even if you freeze the room, you will never reconstitute the form of that ice cube). But at the same time that entropy is busy creating chaos, the Universe is creating complexity. The Universe could have been a uniform soup of evenly distributed hydrogen atoms – but isn't. Instead, it is galaxies, star systems, planets – and life. And before time – before the Universe was born – there was Consciousness (Big-C Consciousness, as opposed to the small-c consciousness that we individually experience). To Big-C Consciousness, time is irrelevant and meaningless. 

There can be no time without memory. 

And there can be no memory without small-c consciousness. 

And so, without consciousness, without a conscious observer to notice its passage, we cannot have time – we can only have a block universe, where all time is equally real, past, present and future, simultaneously. Spacetime without small-c consciousness shrinks from three dimensions modulated by the passage of time to four static dimensions.

The need for an observer to consciously experience the passage of time is like the conundrum about a tree falling in a forest with no one there to hear it – does it make a sound? The answer is, of course, no – because the experience of sound requires an ear to collect the vibrations of air, a brain to process the signals sent to it, and consciousness to be aware of this sound.

And so without conscious observers around to subjectively experience time, everything is happening simultaneously, from Big Bang to the heat death of the Universe and all points in between. This is how Big-C Consciousness, which I would take as the Divine, perceives the Cosmic Entirety.

Consider this – it takes eight minutes for a photon to travel from the Sun to you. And yet, from the perspective of the photon, travelling at the speed of light as it does, that journey is instantaneous. As is a journey of billions of light years from the most distant star we can observe. From the photon's point of view, there is no travel time; it is instantaneous. Neutrinos also travel at or about the speed of light; I have postulated that cosmic neutrino background (CNB, the universe's background particle radiation composed of relic neutrinos, may somehow act as a timeless carrier of Big-C consciousness. The CNB is a relic of the Big Bang; relic neutrinos separated from matter when the universe was around one second old. 

Here's how Big-C Consciousness, then, can perceive past, present and future, as one. Permeating through the Cosmos at light speed. (Tap in to Big-C Consciousness, and you too, feel the past and the future?)

And I have come to question the notion of an eternal afterlife lived in the blissful perfection of having achieved a teleological end-point. Instead of 'life everlasting', I have posited that at the precise moment of the final culmination of the journey from Zero to One – the Cosmos returns to its Zero state at Big Bang. And the cycle begins all over again.

But in a time-flat block universe, eternity is an instant, and that instant could last an eternity.

More tomorrow.

Lent 2023, Day 31
Science vs. the Paranormal

Lent 2022: Day 31
Consciousness - fundamental and universal?

Lent 2021: Day 31
I'm better than you - no really, I am!

Lent 2020: Day 31
Divine Inspiration

Do we become more spiritual as we grow older? Lent 2024, Day 16

Looking back over my blog, which has been running almost 17 years now, I can see a definite rise in the frequency with which I post on the topic of human spirituality. That label was applied to just two posts from 2008 (out of 280). Last year, it was 79 (including 46 across the duration of Lent). 

Does this indicate a shifting worldview? Looking for comfort to assuage a subconscious fear of the oblivion of biological death? A need, a calling, a desire for the numinous? All three? Let me sift through in this post.

It's not just me. Church pews tend to be occupied by the elderly rather than by the young.

I remember a TV show from the 1960s called All Our Yesterdays, hosted by Brian Inglis, which featured newsreel footage from the run-up to WW2 and the war itself. His catchphrase, "Twenty-five years ago this week..." prefaced news headlines from the time, which he discussed. The show came to an end in 1972, as it ran into post-war austerity which no longer drew the viewers that wartime footage did. Anyway, Brian Inglis - a serious, respected journalist and historian, then turned his attention to the paranormal. Reading about this (probably in my parents' Daily Telegraph), I concluded that old age and fear of death had prompted him to seek the paranormal as a crutch. Yet... at the time, he was ten years younger then than I am today!

Another Brian – physicist Brian Josephson – professor emeritus of physics at the University of Cambridge, known for his work on superconductivity and quantum tunnelling, won the Nobel Prize in 1973. Then he turned his attention the relationship between quantum mechanics and consciousness, and the synthesis of science and Eastern mysticism (quantum mysticism), thus drawing criticism from the scientific mainstream. Prof. Josephson is still alive, aged 84; and there are fairly recent interviews with him on YouTube in which he talks about extra-sensory perception and the unity of mind and matter. This, from a Nobel Prize winner in Physics.

Pim van Lommel, a Dutch cardiologist, born in 1943, is known his studies of near-death experiences covering hundreds of survivors of cardiac arrests. This work led to him writing Consciousness Beyond Life: The Science of the Near-Death Experience, published in 2007 to become a best seller. However, Dr van Lommel's work drew widespread criticism from the medical profession; they said it was pseudoscience, full of misunderstandings and misinterpretations. He is also around on YouTube (and worth a watch).

The fact that these men followed their intuition in face of public ridicule, having achieved success in their field, suggests that the draw of the unknown and the power of their curiosity can be greater than simply wishing a quiet retirement or mainstream popularity.

The rabbinical injunction not to study the Kabbalah until one reaches the age of 40 makes sense. Truly appreciating the esoteric requires a mature mind. Coming back to the seven stages of life, there are times when the key thing is to put bread on the family table, raise children, pay off the mortgage – getting on with it is all. With small children round the house, it's not a time for spending in quiet contemplation of the metaphysical. That time shall come. And once it does, those dreams and visions kept quiet from one's earliest days, need to be explored. They cannot be ignored.

Everyone who seeks God shall find God in their own way. For some, regular churchgoing will suffice. It provides fellowship, sense of community, the order and stability of tradition; I can understand the draw of such a way of life far more than spending money on status symbols. That stage of life, the social self, should disappear in the rear-view mirror as one moves towards acquiring wisdom, enlightenment and transcendence.

If your intuition takes to you explore unconventional areas of research that you hold to be the right direction on your path toward the numinous, then so be it. Physicalism, or reductionist materialism, is but an alternative point of view, and not the ultimate reality of the Cosmos. Shrug off the nay-sayers.

Time might feel like it's not on our side as we tread this path, which seems to stretch out further and further upon the horizon; the longer one travels, the further ahead into the distance the destination seems to disappear. The chart below shows that the perception of time should be slowing down, not speeding up the older we get. For a ten-year-old, one year is 10% of their total life experience; for a 50-year-old, it's but 2%. But over the next 50 years, it will only halve. Each passing year should only feel slightly shorter than the past one, once you hit middle age. Yet subjectively, it feels like this graph has been flipped horizontally.

Once living a comfortable life, seek not a life of luxury – dedicate it instead to a search for meaning, purpose, wisdom, enlightenment and transcendence. 

The reward is joyous.

Lent 2023, Day 16
Intuition – is it magical?

Lent 2022: Day 16
The difficulties of focusing on the spiritual

Lent 2021: Day 16
This planet is my home, today and tomorrow

Lent 2020: Day 16
My metaphysical journey, as I see it

Time, memory and consciousness.

We start another year; my 67th in this particular incarnation. A good time to ponder once more upon the nature of time.

There can be no time without memory. 

And there can be no memory without consciousness. 

And so, without consciousness, without the conscious observer, we cannot have time – we can only have a block universe, where all time is equally real, past, present and future, simultaneously. Spacetime without consciousness shrinks from four dimensions down to three.

The need for an observer to consciously experience the passage of time is like the conundrum about a tree falling in a forest with no one there to hear it - does it make a sound? The answer is, of course, no – because the experience of sound requires an ear to collect the vibrations of air, a brain to process the signals sent to it, and consciousness to be aware of this sound.

And so without conscious observers around to subjectively experience time, everything is happening simultaneously, from Big Bang to the heat death of the Universe and all points in between. Consider this – it takes eight minutes for a photon to travel from the Sun to the Earth. And yet, from the perspective of the photon, travelling at the speed of light as it does, that journey is instantaneous. As is a journey of 13.8 billion light years. It is instantaneous from the photon's point of view.

Your perception of time is subjective; deeply subjective. Consider this - we all notice that time seems to rush past faster the older we get. For a two-year-old, a year represents 50% of their entire life's experience. Yet for a 50 year-old, it is only 2%. I pondered upon this and drew the following graph (below), which shows that the subjective acceleration of the passage of time slows right down once a child hits adolescence, and then the year-to-year difference becomes marginal. As a 66-year-old, one year represents 1.5% of my total life experience; yet by the time I reach the age of 74 it falls away to 1.4%. Hardly any difference... and yet... and yet... 

So, looking forward into the near-term future; no more than one year at a time. The future seems to be a lot further away than the past, which rushes into to the far distance like a point in the rear view mirror. Spring typically switches on in mid-April, that's three and half months away, as distant as mid-September, which I now struggle to recall, it's so long gone. The events become less important than the flavour of being there – the qualia. It will be those that define our consciousness's attachment to a time and a place in time. And just two weeks ago, I was ill with Covid. That now seems a long time ago. The bad things that happen to us, we tend to stuff away into the past.

The sensuous joys of summer (here, here, here, here and here) feel so far away, yet they will come and go. All good things come to an end – autumn brings duller, shorter days, and an intensive work schedule in the run-up to Christmas. The mill-wheel turns, life goes on, we live, we learn, we remember, those memories embed, they abide, they imbue our consciousness, individually and collectively.

This time last year:
Hottest New Year's Day in Warsaw ever 

This time two years ago
"Communication/this is the gift you must not lose"

This time three years ago:
Wealth and inequality - an introduction

This time five years ago:
Gratitude for a peaceful 2018

This time seven years ago:
Fighting laziness - a perennial resolution

This time seven years ago:
A Year of Round Anniversaries

This time eight years ago:
Walking on frozen water
[Daytime high, 1 January 2016 was -6C]

This time nine years ago:
Fireworks herald 2015 in Jeziorki

This time ten years ago
Jeziorki welcomes 2014

This time 11 years ago:
LOT's second Dreamliner over Jeziorki

This time 13 years ago:
New Year's coal train 

This time 15 years ago:
Welcome to 2009!

This time 16 years ago:
Happy 2008!

An Eternity in Heaven?

Imagine heaven. We (of metaphysical nature) all have our own personal ideal of an end-state, of a final spiritual closure, but there are certain features that most people would buy into. The notion of unity, of becoming one with everything; the notion of being at one with God - and, being in that state, having total understanding of all things - past and present. 

But once there - then what?

Staying in that state for one eternity? Eternity, as Woody Allen famously quipped, is very long, especially the last part. Our subjective impression of time is that it compresses over time. At 66, my current experience of one year, as a sixty-sixth part of my life, is that it is half the length it was when I was 33, and six times shorter than the year I experienced aged 11. (At 11 years old, a year is 9% of one's hitherto experienced life, at 33 it is 3%, at 66 it is 1.5%, at 100 it is 1%). Subjectively at least then, the conscious experience of time in the lead-up to the singularity at the end of Eternity would accelerate, though at a ever decelerating pace to the point where it would slow down to nothingness. 

Then what?

The Singularity having been reached, the Unfolding Universe has finally unfolded. The Cosmic Purpose has been fulfilled. We have become a part of the Deity. We have achieved ultimate unity. We spiritual beings who have quested (presumably over countless lifetimes) have reached our goal, our ideal. We are in heaven, we are finally with God, and in God. 

Then what?

Do we remain in that state of supreme bliss, totally united with everything, all-wise, all-seeing, all-knowing for ever more? If we look at the physical cosmos, it has a lot of life left in it. Science (as of July 2023) considers that the Big Bang occurred a mere 13.8 billion years ago; meanwhile a heat-death of the Universe (Big Freeze), or a Universe that finally collapses in on itself as one black hole swallows another until the last one's gone (Big Crunch) - two putative end-of-time scenarios - are both thought to be trillions of years into the future. 

So, the physical Universe has a long run ahead - and in any case, there is the likelihood that a Big Freeze and a Big Crunch would both lead to another Big Bang, and so a cyclical Cosmos would - physically - be as eternal as a spiritual realm. And why ever not?

But what about your soul, after having reached Heaven? It's there for, like, literally, all time? Wouldn't it become a teeny-weeny bit boring after a while?

It occurred to me while on a twilight walk a few evenings ago that our experience of Heaven might only last an instant - just long enough to realise that you've finally made it, before snapping back to the lowest form of consciousness. This can take the form of either the discrete awareness of being a sub-atomic particle, or being a part of the background conscious substrate that fundamentally underlies the Universe. Two versions of panpsychism there - consciousness as granular in nature - or - the vast cosmic conscious sea in which all matter exists and evolves. I'm still torn as to which I would tend to believe in or consider to be more likely. 

And having tasted Heaven for an instant, one is back at a beginning, armed perhaps with the vaguest qualia memory of having been in heaven; the next round of spiritual evolution begins. From quark to atom, to molecule, to simple life form, to complex life form, to intelligent, technologically enabled life form. Onwards and upwards, once again. On the journey towards God-hood, God-ness another time.

Suddenly, I understand the Christian notion of Lucifer being banished from Heaven by God for being too proud. Although the Bible does not explicitly mention this episode, the idea of fallen angels is rooted in Christian tradition and theology. A turnstile Heaven then? A quick peak of Paradise at the end of an eternity's questing, then out again - Paradise Lost - to work one's way up, evolving spiritually once more - presumably endless times? 

Or an instant that lasts eternity - but an eternity that lasts only an instant?

Something to ponder upon, between now and Lent 2024.

This time last year:
Habit or obsession?

This time two years ago:

Dust to dusk

This time four years ago:

My father's last arrival in Warsaw

This time five years ago:
What makes scenery scenic?

This time six years ago:
Theresa May flies into Warsaw

This time seven years ago:
Announcing the start of the Radom railway line modernisation

This eight years ago:
In praise of the (Polish-built) Fiat 500 

This time ten years ago:
Llanbedrog Beach and a farewell to North Wales

This time 11 years ago:
To the Polish seaside, by night train

This time 12 years ago: 
Accounting for the past - 20 years on from PRL's fall

This time 13 years ago:
An introduction to fine British cheefef

This time 15 years ago:
Over the Peaks by bus 

Time and Consciousness

I wrote two weeks ago about consciousness and spacetime; I'd now like to separate time from space in the context of consciousness.

A few recent podcasts, in particular Lex Fridman's conversation with Donald Hoffman, have reinforced my appreciation of consciousness as the fundamental property of the Universe. Consciousness, I believe, is not something that emerged as a result of the evolution of life, but something that sparked the Big Bang and drove evolution. Donald Hoffman posits that spacetime is a product of consciousness, and not merely something found within spacetime, here and there, exclusively on planets hosting sentient life.

I want to consider the nature of Time in the context of Consciousness. Stephen Hawking's well-known A Brief History of Time, and Carlo Rovelli's (better, in my opinion) The Order of Time. Hawking's approach is purely scientific - attempting to define time in an objective, empirical manner. Full of black holes and entanglement, the book is the approach of a mathematician and physicist anchored in the 1980s. The term 'consciousness' does not enter in to it. 

Rovelli has the advantage of writing 30 years after Hawking, and so his book is more up to date with recent scientific thinking. Rovelli's big insight is that entropy is the only way of telling the direction of time. A mouldy strawberry will never recover its prime. A strawberry in its prime can only rot - it will never return to its seedling state. Hence, the Universe can never run time backwards. Most reactions are reversibly -  entropy is not. Interestingly, entropy hardly figures in Hawking's book; its first mention is on page 102, and then mainly in the context of black holes.

There's objective time, moving from past into future at the steady rate of one second per second. But - as Hawking and Rovelli both point out - that 'objective' time can be distorted by gravity. From Einstein on, the Newtonian notion of time being fixed across the Cosmos vanishes. Instead, the notion of time as witnessed by an observer at one specific location in the Cosmos takes over.

So time is subjective, rather than objective? Subjective time - time as perceived by you or me. This time cannot be measured by a clock, it can only be felt. We all feel that time passes more quickly as you get older. This is because at the age of 50, a year is just 2% of the life you've experienced thus far, while at the age of ten it is 10% - so at 50, a year feels five times shorter than it did when you were ten. And here, I believe, entropy kicks in. We feel we're getting older, there's less and less time left. So we are more determined as middle-aged adults to get stuff done - pressure a child does not feel. [As an aside, if you stroke your purring cat for five minutes, and then feel guilty that you must leave it and do something else, remember - you've been stroking it for 20 cat-minutes. From the cat's subjective experience, of course.]

You can slow down time, subjectively. Assume the plank position - legs and back ramrod straight, propped up on your elbows. Before you start, open the clock app in your phone, place it on the ground in front of you, select the stopwatch function and press 'start' as you begin holding the plank. And hold. Minute, two, three... four... five? Time's dragging... every tenth of a second that passes seems to do so more slowly. While I'm holding the plank, I listen to podcasts - ones that grip my attention. I focus on what I'm listening to, rather than looking at the stopwatch. Or toggle between the two for an interesting effect of time passing slowly and quickly, simultaneously.

[British spiritual philosopher, Rupert Spira, says that the past is where our forgotten memories go. If you still remember something, it remains - as a memory - in the present. I like this concept.]

Subjectively, your consciousness looks forward in time to an event or events, whilst elapsed time is measured in memories. When did that happen - two weeks ago or three weeks ago? A diary, calendar - or indeed blog - is useful for recalling the objective moment in time, but subjectively, some events stand out more than others. Qualia memories that have a habit of resurfacing from the past. I lived (as I wrote the other day) in Coventry for two academic years, but two specific days stand out far more strongly than all the rest.

Non-local consciousness is a supposed phenomenon that gives rise to remote viewing. The US government's Project Star Gate (parodied in the film The Men Who Stare At Goats, starring George Clooney) is claimed to have had one major success to its credit - finding a Soviet nuclear bomber that crashed in the jungle in the Democratic Republic of Congo in 1979. This is an example of remote viewing across space, but another project the US government (allegedly) embarked upon dealt with remote viewing across time - the recruitment of 4,000 people who claimed to have the ability to see into the future to ask them to 'view' the year 2050 - from 1978 to 1991. What the experiment's organiser, Stephan A. Schwartz, was looking for was a consensus; salient points that featured across many of the remote viewings. Having predicted - or rather foreseen - the breakup of the Soviet Union and numerous pandemics, it seems they are on to something. [If this tickles your interest, here's a recent talk about it.]

My personal belief is that some of us do indeed have psychic powers to 'see' across space and time, but those powers are weak and they occur rarely across society. But collectively, there could be something in this approach.

The question is - to what extent is this intuition, to what extent educated guesswork, and to what extent a genuine supernatural power to peer accurately into something that hasn't happened yet? If the latter, then how does consciousness permeate across time? If, as some panpsychists claim, consciousness is uniformly spread across space - could it not also be said to be uniformly spread across time? 

And if consciousness exists simultaneously across time - what does that mean for notions of reincarnation and spiritual evolution? From this point of view - my long-held belief in a journey from Zero to One must be examined to consider whether we're at Zero and One at the same time - or is it neither and both? I suspect that the unfolding of the Universe is a one-way process that does indeed follow time's arrow from (imperfect) past to (perfect) future. There's only one way to find out... Live on, in curiosity, in observation.

One for me to ponder on for future posts.

This time last year:
Altered states - higher planes

This time six years ago:
Warsaw-Radom line modernisation - Czachówek

This time 12 years ago:
Climbing Mogielica

Time - religion and metaphysics

Lent 2020 - Day 30

How religion sees time is interesting. I was thinking about the second verse of the traditional Polish carol Wśród nocnej ciszy while writing yesterday's post about prophesy, and in it pops the notion of time:

Ach, witaj Zbawco z dawna żądany,
Cztery tysiące lat wyglądany
Na Ciebie króle, prorocy
Czekali, a Tyś tej nocy
Nam się objawił.

"We greet ye, Saviour, desired for ages,
Looked out for for four thousand years,
For you kings and prophets
Waited, and you this night
Appeared to us."

Jesus's birth to a virgin was foretold for a period of time twice as long before his birth as the time between His birth and our age. But four thousand years - to be more accurate, four thousand and four years, was the span of time between the creation of the Earth by God and the birth of Jesus, according to Archbishop Ussher, Primate of All Ireland, in 1650. The Augustinian notion of the Six Ages of the World, which inspired Ussher, stems from II Peter 3:8 - "One day with the Lord is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day." The interpretation was taken to mean that mankind would live through six 1,000 year periods, with the seventh being eternity in heaven. Taking this literally, Ussher indicated that Jesus would come again in glory to judge the living and the dead around 2000 AD.

Pre-Enlightenment Man lived in the here and now. A lifetime was, well, a lifetime. There was no notion of bigly huge numbers; there were stars and there were planets, but these were just 'up there', rather than billions of light years away. Time passed with the seasons. A time to sow, a time to reap. And after a gruelling life of toil, a time to die, and then hopefully to rest in God's eternal home.

Science has given us a grasp of the enormity of the universe, helped by mathematical notations such as orders of magnitude. We understand time better than our forefathers, and yet... and yet.

I have written about the late Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time and Carlo Rovelli's (much briefer) The Order of Time. Rovelli's more recent work (30 years after Hawking) has the advantage of being easier to grasp conceptually and of benefiting from 30 additional years of theoretical physics to draw on. Both books advance our (layperson's) perception greatly.

The key lesson from Rovelli is that time goes from past to future, in one, irreversible direction only, because of entropy. Rudolf Clausius's equation for entropy change, ΔS ≥1 is, according to Rovelli, "the only equation of fundamental physics that knows any difference between past and future. The only one that speaks of the flowing of time." This is is significant in the age of quantum mechanics; other equations are reversible, whereas if you leave a glass of hot water in a cold room, the water will only tend to get cold. It is here we can witness the passage of time.

Time is granular; it comes in units. The shortest unit of time is Planck time (5.39 x 10^-44 second), the time it takes light to travel one Planck length (1.616 x 10^-35 metres, the shortest unit of distance in the universe) in a vacuum. Both being discrete units, there is no thing as half a Planck time or a third of a Planck length; they are absolutes.

All well and good, but how do we perceive time and why is important to religion, especially in the context of prophesy? As we age, we perceive time to accelerate. This is because our consciousness has experienced more of it when we're older; for a ten year-old, one year represents 10% of their lifetime. For a 50 year-old, one year represents but 2% of their lifetime. You are accelerating towards the end of your days, from the moment you become conscious of the passage of time as an infant.

For religions, the End of Days has to be sufficiently close at hand to be scary - this makes the social control function easier to apply. I am an optimist; I do believe there's an infinitely long-term plan for our universe. Stretch out your horizons beyond one human life-span and eternity sitting on a cloud with a harp praising God sounds a bit limited.

The past, on the other hand, is as illusory as the future. When I wake up each morning, the past (the recent past, the distant past) becomes nothing more than a tool-bag of useful experience needed to live out the rest of my life. Artefacts are on the shelf; books, photos, mementos that nudge the memory and draw out memories. But memories - those qualia memories of subjective experiences from the past - can come unbidden, or can be triggered by smells, sights, sounds, sensations or tastes.

These form the thread that link the current you - the current assemblage of atoms, molecules and proteins - the stuff that knit you - and what you once were. The notion that there's not a single atom in you that was there nine years ago (quoted by Bill Bryson) or seven years ago (quoted by Richard Swinburne) becomes significant. Rationalists would say that your long-term memory is stored somewhere within your brain. However, science has yet to pin it down, or even define 'memory' on agreed terms. Those memories from your past abide within you, despite the 'youness' of you having changed over time. So when you reach back to a memory from decades ago - an embarrassing childhood moment that can still make you cringe - and there you are - that's your soul.

This time four years ago:
Easter Everywhere, Lent reaches an end

This time eight years ago:
Sunset shots, first bike ride to work

This time ten years ago:
Poland's trains ran faster before the war

This time 11 years ago:
Winter in spring: surely this must be the last snow?

This time 12 years ago:
Surely THIS must be the last snow?