Mary Whitney Must Prevail!

By
John Huckel

Foreword

Riding the Time Vault

Time – the great Mystery. After all does anybody really know what Time is? I just took a ride in the Time Vault and had my understanding of Time radically altered. (If you don’t mind, I’d like to go over a couple of things before I tell you about the ride itself. And you might want to rethink what you and 'everybody knows' about Time.)

Let’s take a look. Time: A nonspatial continuum in which events occur in apparently irreversible succession from the past through the present to the future. This is a convenient, dry definition – not too much controversy there, but it illustrates the traditional fallacy in most people’s concept of the word Time. Past, Present, and Future, are offered up as the three definable pieces of the continuum that is Time; they are offered up as if they were of comparable magnitude. They are not! One of the three is of immediate and provable existence, the other two are not – of the other two, one is cloaked in memory, and the other rests on supposition.

Now, or Then – which is the more obvious as fact? Which would you rather try to prove to a jury? All we have is Now; and Now is the Present. We never really have the Past or the Future in the way that we have the Present. The Past and the Future are like Then – they are off at some distance. Whenever the Past or Future do come into view, it is always from the Present. The Past is remembered from the Present, and the Future is imagined from the Present. To offer these three as coequal ingredients of something else is nonsense.

Once you recognize that only the Present is really real, and that both the Past and the Future are created in the Present, you can see the flimsiness of asserting that Time is a Continuum. A good definition of Continuum is: A continuous extent, succession, or whole, no part of which can be distinguished from neighboring parts except by arbitrary division. Here’s another pretty straightforward definition; and it also makes a pretty good hammer with which to shatter the earlier definition stating that Time is a Continuum. Can a Continuum be a sequence of #1 something remembered, #2 something of immediate and visceral experience, and then #3 something imagined? That’s a pretty lumpy Continuum.

I hope I have explained myself well enough for you to see that Past, Present, and Future are in no way arbitrary divisions indistinguishable from each other—no Continuum here! Time is not a fact. Time is an illusion projected fore and aft from the Present. The Past and the Future are both confections. And I’m afraid I will have to shake up some more hallowed concepts. The Past is generally thought to be more substantial than the Future, but I just found out that even that observation is untrue. Past and Future are of equal magnitude – each is as real or unreal as the other. You just plop yourself down in a Present and you can pretty much have whatever Past or Future that you want – you just have to decide in which direction to look.

Now let’s get back to what this is all about—the Time Vault! As I told you earlier, I just recently took a ride in the Time Vault – that new amusement park out by the Airport. And the ride revealed to me what I have just told you – and more!

I have never had such an amazing adventure. Granted, it was a pretty expensive ticket, but the experience was well worth it. After you pay for your ticket, you are ushered into a small room with an intimidating array of high tech machines—accumulators they call them. (If MRI’s make you uncomfortable, this might not be the ride for you.) You stand on a raised pedestal at the center of these exotic looking machines. It is sort of like standing in the center of an involuted sea urchin whose spines are all pointed in at you; the spines quiver and probe as if trying to sense your presence. It’s a little creepy. But when they turn it on – watch out! Those spines radiate out some kind of a blue force field that literally surrounds you and pervades you until you feel suspended weightless by them and within them. It is a strange feeling indeed. (Thankfully there is a handrail to hold on to.)

As I got used to the floaty feeling, I then became aware that the floor of the room had changed and I was suspended above it – not so much as a body, but just me looking at it without my body. That sensation alone would have been worth the price of a ticket, and the ride had not even begun!

The floor appeared to be of a resinous substance, like an almost solid amber gelatin, with an indeterminate depth to it. It was marked out in an inexact grid, the lines of which changed and adjusted slightly when I put my attention on them. And then I perceived what I took to be instructions on how to proceed in the ride. It was like a pull from the different sections of the grid, all bidding for my attention. I understood that I could enter any of the sections, and felt beckoned by them.

There was one section that won my undivided attention, and suddenly I was sitting at the breakfast table looking at my Mom cooking my breakfast when I was ten. It was both wonderful and terrifying at the same instant. And then I found myself suspended above the grids again. Wow! It was so real!

I recognized that I had the option to continue in the ride or to stop it. I got control of myself and again put my attention on that particular section. Bang! There I was again looking at Mom, smelling bacon and thinking I’d better finish my math assignment on the bus.

Wow! I cannot tell you what a sensation that was! Everything was as it was that day when I was ten. I felt everything, sensed everything, and was everything I was that day, plus I was also looking at it from afar. You will have to experience it for yourself – I really can’t describe the feeling. I also can’t tell you how many times I popped out of that section and then banged back in it until I got the hang of it without being so astonished that I would pop out again.

And then I moved in it! I mean I stayed in it long enough to eat my breakfast and then get on the bus. The sensation of Time was as real as ever.

I then popped out and chose some other sections to experience. The depth of the experiences from each section I sampled was as real as being with Mom again. The only difference, as I have said, was that I was also constantly aware of watching from outside it all.

Once again, I don’t know how to adequately explain it to someone who hasn’t tried the ride, but I will try. In every section I experienced, no matter when or where, I always felt I was in the Present, but I could see a faint trail from the Past reaching to me, and a faint trail from me into the Future. I got so comfortable in the ride that I could both experience the moment in the ride and also watch myself experiencing it.

I saw that the trails extending from the Past and into the Future described a distinct line, every point of which I could experience as a Present. That line was my life! I could choose any point on it and move from that Present into the Future by following the line. I got so I could whiz through a month in a few seconds, or slow the passage of a few seconds into a ten-minute in-depth excursion into all the details of those few seconds.

Then I got brave enough to choose my motorcycle accident. Ouch!!! Let me tell you that I popped out of that quite a few times before I could comfortably (a very odd use of that word here) experience the terrific pains and emotions all wrapped up in that experience. But after a while it actually was comfortable to experience it all again. When I initially experienced it in “real life” there was too much going on all at the same time for me to handle – talk about a few fun-filled seconds! Here I am zipping along in the sunshine at about 40 mph on a beautiful autumn afternoon… my bike is humming its reassuringly familiar tune… I am thoroughly enjoying the mountain road that leads me onto a graceful swaying dance as I lean into each sun-dappled corner. I’m just leaning into a curve to the right when the very ungraceful wreck happens. There was a mixture of dry leaves and sand on the surface of the road, which in itself I could have ridden through, but there was also a dump truck pulling out in front of me so I had to try to tighten up my cornering, and hit the brakes at the same time. This is where the ouch comes in.

I went down with the bike almost immediately, as the laws of physics trumped my concepts of what ought to be. Those same laws of physics used about three seconds to turn a $12,000 motorcycle into an interesting free-form wad of metal, and me (or actually, my body) into something that caused the poor bastard driving the truck to hysterically tell the 911 operator, “He can’t be alive. He can’t be alive. He’s all broken up. Please hurry!”

In order to not continue to pop out of that one, I had to slow it way down so that I could see what actually took place. It was amazing. It had a gory beauty to it once I could see how it all fit together. After a few times through it, I began to see that it was much the same as any other experience – it just had much more densely packed content than most other three-second periods of my life. And get this! After the pain no longer bothered me, I kept popping out of it a bunch more times because I couldn’t stop laughing! I remembered thinking that my girlfriend would probably be pissed at me if my face was too broken up to take her to the party that weekend. So as my legs were being ground into hash by the truck’s tires, I was considering wearing a mask to a party.

My sides actually hurt from laughing so hard. Those sea urchin tentacles must have picked up that something extreme was going on with me and I got the message that I could exit the ride at any time. Through my laughter, I indicated that I was fine and wanted to continue. But something in the program overruled my wanting to continue, and I found the blue aura dissipating and my perception of the room reverting to normal. A couple of attendants were at my side helping me down from the pedestal and inquiring into my current state of well-being. I assured them I felt great, and that I wanted to continue the ride. I was exhilarated and still laughing about that dance or party, or whatever it was.

WHAT A RIDE!!!

I wanted to take the ride again right away but they said that it was company policy not to allow back-to-back rides. And if I wanted to ride again at all, I had to sign some sort of release. Talk about fine print! I tried reading it but got lost in such terms as discombobulation, pandemonium, and shemozzle. The lawyers who wrote this thing must have been from another dimension. Of course I signed it!

(And please excuse me for repeating that I don’t know how to really describe what I experienced, but I just don’t.)

So, on to my next ride a couple of days later…. This one was more intense than the first one, if you can believe that. It was this ride that really showed me that the differences between Past and Future are arbitrary. You may have already picked up on where I’m about to lead you. A few friends who I told what I have just told you, anticipated where we are going now.

That Life Line that I referred to earlier is not a straight line. It meanders like a stream through a forest. There was something about it that caught my attention during my revisiting the motorcycle accident, that I wanted to check out again. I had noticed that while there is a definite wisp leading forward from any moment on the line, there are also indistinct tendrils leading off in slightly different directions from any point on the line. Moving at ultra slow motion, as I was through the accident, allowed me to see those tendrils more clearly. I was entranced with the possibility that I could leave the Life Line as it is, and travel off the line and follow one of the tendrils.

So I went back to just before I committed myself to taking that fateful corner. I saw that there was a vague tendril from that Present into a Future where I slowed way down because I thought I heard something up ahead. Well, I did hear something – it was the dump truck! As I rounded the corner, I came to an easy stop. I waved to the truck driver and continued along my way. OK, let that settle in for a moment…. An alternate Future... pretty cool! But what blew my mind is that in that alternate Future my mind wasn’t blown. I mean, I felt regular, normal. There was no recognition that I had just avoided becoming mincemeat, and needing to devote the next ten months to learning all about hospital physical rehab units. The blown mind was me watching it from outside. I realized that any Life Line I choose is as “real” from within it as any other.

I followed a bunch of tendrils from many different points on my Life Line. Once I got the hang of it, I got daring. Just for fun, I selected a quiet afternoon last month and by making a series of 'bad' decisions to take less than optimum tendrils as they presented themselves, I alternatively wound up in jail, shot, and in one—dead! That was interesting!

I must have gotten better at it, or the program changed something, but I became very aware that from any point on my Life Line there were numberless alternatives I could have chosen. And similarly, from those alternative lines, at each point there were again numberless alternatives that presented themselves as options to take. Any Present chosen held an infinite number of Futures branching out as the process of potentiality unfolded. And another wild thing was to live a Present which sprang from different Pasts. That is exhilarating, even in the most mundane of experiences – to see oneself in the same moment, yet see it as different because of the momentum of different Pasts suggesting different Futures.

Remember that amber resinous floor with a grid overlaying it? Well, I was just floating above it marveling at the infinite set of possible lines, when my Life Line ceased to be the dominant line, and I saw that from any point on any line there are an infinite number of roots leading to it and an infinite number of branches leading from it. Studying it, I suddenly felt in touch with every single one of those infinite possible Life Lines. I saw it all, all at once. I was thunderstruck! I felt like I had glimpsed infinity! It was a sort of a whiteout of understanding that rocked my universe. I was stunned! Stunned! I felt that I understood everything, and that everything made sense, and that everything was OK, and, and, and…

As much as I continue to excuse myself to you, when I say I won’t be able to adequately describe my experiences so you can understand them, in this case I cannot myself reclaim the state of exalted awareness that I experienced on that last ride. I know I became aware of something that I can no longer quite grasp. Oh, my Lord, what a ride!

When it was over, I wasn’t even aware of the attendants leading me into the recovery room. I was blown away. I signed some forms they handed me; I didn’t bother looking at them. I just sat there trying to absorb what I had just experienced. I sat there for quite a while. Later as I was leaving, they told me that I qualified to go on the ride next time with as many as three other people who had reached my level. I don’t think I said anything; I think I just looked at them kind of goggle-eyed and left.

My brain has had all the fun it can have for a while. I’m sure that I’ll go back one day and maybe go for a multiples ride, but I’m not up to experiencing someone else’s life as my own just yet. I still haven’t assimilated what I’ve tried to describe here to you. And I’ve got a bunch of questions about the Present I’m talking to you from right now – is it also the Past of an infinite number of Futures? And I guess the Future of an infinite number of Pasts. Will the ride allow me to experience a Future Present? What happens when the body dies? (The line I looked at seemed to have tendrils flowing from it beyond that dead body to various Futures, but I felt inhibited from looking farther.) Lots of question, lots of questions….

Unanswered questions aside, I hope you have enjoyed this as a vicarious ride. I’ve certainly enjoyed organizing it in my own mind to be able to tell it to you. And if I do go for another ride, I will definitely report back to you all about it.

And since the rides, my current Present has been as charmed. I marvel at almost everything, and get upset at almost nothing. Talking to folks like you, has become very dear to me. (Thanks for listening.)

I really recommend you get on down to the Time Vault yourself. (It’s out there by the airport.) Take the ride and see how you like it. But until then, please take my word for it – the Present is all you’ve really got. The Past and the Future are miraculous arrays of possibilities, but really just a means for you to know yourself in the Present. And remember to have fun! Maybe later we could do the multiples together.

Coming Soon (probably in a few days):

Part I

Headlines

Suez and Panama Canals Fall to Internet Terrorists

Terrorists Threaten 15% of International Shipping

Terrorists Call for Internet Mob Rule

Intl Cyber-Court Gives Peace a Chance

Terrorists Press for Peace?

Populist Gun Control

If you can't wait for the next part and would like to download the complete book, please comment below & i'll give you some options to do so.

Sat Nam
Atma

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