Precognition and Time

I’ve written on this subject before (see Precognition under Labels). The subject fascinates me because awareness of the future is the clearest, most compelling sign that our conventional views of reality are incomplete. I’ve argued earlier that the experience of precognition, for those who’ve had it, is compelling. The only way to avoid this subject is by burying one’s head in the sand. The last entry here, pointing to a case of premonition, got me to thinking about the subject again. I avoid it by and large because no answers seem possible. Yesterday I had a bit of idle time waiting at the doctor’s office, and these stray thoughts occurred to me. They are in the category of pondering the nature of time.

I was remembering earlier sessions of thinking about the subject. Time and again, I start by dividing the concept of time into two categories. One of these is that time is the necessary complement of enduring existence, meaning that we can’t imagine anything being unless we envision a kind of invisible environment in which the persistence of something continues. From this comes my notion of time-as-endurance.

We know this time because our consciousness is capable of retaining memories of past moments. The power of remembering is itself something dynamic, however, something analogous to motion. The experience of this moment is stored away—picture it as being put on a shelf. And we can look at the shelf and note a past action, the action of putting the memory there. Never mind that it happens automatically. From this I derive another concept of time, time-as-motion. Just as we cannot imagine persistence without time so, also, we cannot imagine motion without a container in which it takes place. Mental motions, unlike physical, do not require space. To be sure, a purely materialistic viewpoint would deny this. The materialist derives mental actions from neural motions. But I’m personally persuaded that mental actions do not require space—but do require a time container. In physics we speak of a fusion of space and time, spacetime. It is the container. In the mental sphere, time alone suffices as a necessary environment for motion.

Our mental states—as we experience them in this life—are also fused with the physical. For this reason we experience time as spacetime. Now the thought occurred to me yesterday that the experience of time may be closely bound to the dimension we inhabit. Thus in this life, welded to bodies, we may experience time one way—but, possibly, outside of bodies, in another “mansion” of reality—say across the border that I stare at in this blog—it may be quite different.

The justification for this strange thought is that we measure time by motion here. Motion has a speed dimension. And, in this dimension, anyway—if we take Einstein seriously—there is a speed limit. It is the speed of light. Nothing with any kind of mass can travel even at the speed of light. A photon is considered to be a mass-less something. Now if time is measured by motion, in the cosmos we inhabit the passage of time (time-as-motion) is limited to the speed of light at one extreme.

But let us now suppose that other dimensions may very well exist—characterized by different existential laws than those of matter. And let us suppose, just as a thought experiment, that we may have originated in another dimension and are merely temporarily (that word again) encased in matter. Suppose that we are capable of another, higher or different, time perception. Not that it is readily available to us; let’s just assume that we have the capacity, under certain circumstances, to perceive it—and to have that power because we are not originally from this dimension. Most precognitions, for example, reach us in dreams, a state in which, to some extent, we are much more tenuously linked to the physical dimension than we are when awake.

Precognitions may arise from glimpses of this world from another. And from that perspective, which may operate at much higher speeds of change, we may see more of what is already firmly realized than is visible from this dimension while embedded in it.