Author name: Bryan Hubbard

After a talk I gave the other week, a woman came up to me with a very well-thumbed copy of Time-Light, with lots of underlines, and pages earmarked. She reads it and re-reads it, she said, and she gets ‘it’, and then forgets ‘it’ again. So what can she do so that she always gets ‘it’?

We all ‘fall asleep’ and get trapped by the very powerful illusion that we are thinking when, in fact, the thought thinks us, as one of the central tenets of Time-Light suggests. So why does this continue to happen, even when we ‘get’ the Time-Light philosophy?

Many of us ‘get’ it at the intellectual level; it makes perfect sense, and the philosophy behind it is satisfying and logical. But can you taste it? Is it alive and vibrant in you? Are you aware of the energy pulses coming from each of the three selves, and how they create feelings and thoughts? When you do start to wake up to these processes, the question transforms from, “Why don’t you get it?” to, “What doesn’t get it?”

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.

A mystery lies at the heart of everything.  We’re very rarely aware of this because of language, and the words and syntax we use every day.  

Words are merely pointers, and yet we use them as though they were defining the thing.  So, when we say the word ‘tree’ we believe we have somehow explained what this strange and wonderful ‘thing’ actually is.

We get further from the mystery when we use sentences, often starting with the first person pronoun, ‘I’.  A simple sentence could be: I see a tree.  But break this down, and the mystery starts to reveal itself, and it goes something like this:  I (an undefined subject) see (unexplained phenomenon) a tree (an undefined object).  Yet, when we speak sentences like this and without proper reflection, the world seems very solid, and there’s great certainty about everything. 

Have you heard the one about the London taxi driver who recognised the passenger in the back of the cab as the famous philosopher Bertrand Russell. “So I turned to ‘im,” says the cabbie, “and I say to ‘im, ‘Bert, Bert, what’s it all about then?’ And do you know what? The bugger didn’t know!”
Then there’s the world’s greatest hotelier, Basil Fawlty (I think John Cleese’s TV comedy series Fawlty Towers made its way to the States) who was constantly railing against the slings and arrows of misfortune, shaking a fist at the heavens, and asking: “What’s the point? I mean, what’s the blooming point?”
The question has been asked down the ages, usually more seriously, and it boils down to this: is there a purpose to life?

Philosophers call them naïve realists, although in the time of Kant they were known as dogmatists. They’re the folk who believe in an absolute, objective world. When asked the age-old philosophical question, ‘Would the world be the same if you weren’t in it?’ they answer with an emphatic ‘yes, of course it would be’.

But of course, it wouldn’t be, and couldn’t be. The world is our creation, both metaphorically and physically. In fact, the material world of hard objects is entirely our interpretation or imposition.

As physicists and quantum physicists remind us, the material world of ‘stuff’ is made up of atoms and these in turn are made up of sub-atomic particles. At this level, space and time become, well, interesting.