It’s been reckoned (and don’t ask me how) that we are bombarded with 16 million bits of information every second. We process just 16 bits of that, although recent research in neuroscience has upgraded that to 32 bits. Now, whether it’s 16 or 32 bits, we’re blanking out the vast majority of life.
Scientists say that if we didn’t filter out all this information, we’d go mad. ‘Rationalists’ say this explains why people hold irrational ideas, such as a belief in God or UFOs. Irrational people support their nonsensical ideas by cherry-picking only the data that support their ideas.
Of course, rationalists fail to see that they are also prey to the data–filtering practised by lesser mortals. The same goes for scientists, researchers, mathematicians—everyone is filtering at an alarming rate, even if they think they are adopting the ‘scientific method’. If they weren’t, they would be mad, so either way the argument fails.
This has extraordinary implications: what are we filtering out? What are we missing? And, from a Time-Light perspective, what determines the information we do acknowledge and process? Our focus and attention dictates some of this data, but if it’s true that we also select information that supports our view of the world, how does this happen?
It makes sense only if you see it for what it truly is: as an energy system. Everything that makes you ‘you’ is energy and so is the world around you. As you live and have more experience, the imprinting of some experiences—especially those that impact on the sense of a protective and limited self that develops from having a body—will leave an energetic trace that attracts more of the same from the world ‘outside’.
This is the basis for ideas such as Law of Attraction or even The Secret, but the Time-Light approach has some important differences. For one, ‘you’ are not different from the process—you are the process. And the process isn’t just a blind, unconscious movement—it is seeking a resolution and an ending. That is why it continues to play out in ‘the world’; you will attract more of the same in an attempt to understand that which you didn’t get first time around. The process explains why we keep repeating the same mistakes, or play out patterns of behaviour that can go back generations.
So the rationalists are wrong to suggest that there is an independent ‘I’ who selects data; the process itself is self-selecting. Energy chooses energy according to an empathetic pattern. Only when it becomes a conscious movement is there a possibility of an ending.