Time and Attention

This will meander a bit, but I will attempt to point to the relatedness of all of the pieces by the end, though they will not be tidily wrapped up.

I’m going to start this first piece with a notion that I have expressed on many occasions, that we, as focused points of attention, are the result of 13.8 billion years of choices, or something energetically akin to choices. It is common knowledge that the physical Universe began when a Singularity burst forth in a Big Bang. [This may or may not be true but it is widely accepted in cosmology so I have used it as a framework] I have posited that something like “let there be light” was the first choice and that everything else has formed, evolved, differentiated from similar subsequent emanations.

And it is fairly common knowledge that without mass there is no gravity and without gravity there is no time. A photon, for example, has no mass so does not “experience” time. I saw a short video with Neil DeGrasse Tyson where he says that it takes about 30K years for a photon to get from the center of our galaxy to a telescope here on Earth, and from the perspective of the photon, the instant that it is created in a star and the instant that it reaches our telescope is the same instant. So, they seem to exist in an eternal “present” of some kind.

But our telescopes are also capturing photons that were emitted billions of years in the past, which is also the same instant for them. So, I’m wondering if we, like photons, could move towards an eternal present experientially if we became more photon-like…en-light-ened perhaps? I do experience time passing at different rates. This was most dramatically experienced in the LSD days of my youth but I notice it often in a variety of ways and settings. The experience of personal time slowing, as the world around me appears to speed up, has become much more obvious as I have aged and have been “lightened” by many decades of spiritual practices. If this is so generally, we should be able to swim back “upstream” in time by becoming less dense and, in the process, retrace all of our individual and collective choices. Each layer that I transit in this fashion will lighten me, bring a vaster view of the universe as I move back towards a less differentiated time, and accelerate my awareness towards the direction of light speed. In effect, it has the possibility of re-presencing moments of experience that a less differentiated “I” had “then.”


Next piece: I have also argued that attention has a gravitational force to it. So, the process of “lighten-ing” is one of releasing attention, beginning in the locale of my current frequency range and continuing onto the perceptual range of longer wavelengths. Part of the difficulty is that what we choose has the power and force of the energy of Becoming, which is its source, and that it creates an energetic wake that continues on after our more immediate focus is shifted to something else. The gravitational force of our choosing continues to pull in some of our attentional energy, which provides substance and sustenance to it “over time.” Its experiential impact on us, and others, will depend on both how much intentional energy we used when we made that choice, and the amount of deliberate attention we continue to apply to it. As an example, choosing to pursue a Master’s degree has much more long term pull than deciding what to have for dinner. One will continue over many years and the other will be effectively gone by tomorrow.

At birth you were given a name and you are bound to the gravitational force of that sound. It will always draw your attention. You have added many descriptions of yourself, such as introverted/extroverted, strong/weak, smart/stupid, and to varying degrees you are how you see yourself because of the attentional gravity of those applied labels. “That is just who I am” is not really true. Who you really are, if that even applies, is too vast and too experiential for labels, but those labels, and certainly your body, do seem to be what holds your identity in place.

Here is a downstream example from the Post The Gravity of Habitual Attention
“When we show up here as infants, we are raw and open. We have no mental cognition but are energetically attuning to the natural frequency ranges of physicality and the basic hominid instincts that our consciousness cannot avoid. Over time, societal and personal enculturation comes into play and those manifestations are formed downstream from the built-in hominid features. Our narrowing of attention continues to create many streams of focused attention in order to handle the wide variety of circumstances that we encounter in individual and societal situations. The narrowing of our attention towards these focal points constricts the full flow of what I will call our essential, or core selves. All of the thinking and planning that goes into creating, firming up and justifying these habits will further dilute the essential energy of the core self. All aspects of our lives are still fed from that essential self. It’s just expressed in a less purified form.”


From this perspective, our relative eons of upstream choices have the same kind of force as the ones that we have applied in this place and though they are less visible, it is just as difficult to extract ourselves from them. It is virtually impossible to avoid having the instinctual reaction of fight/flight/freeze when imminent danger appears suddenly, as well as whatever tendencies a “soul” might have when not in a body. Habits are a result of continuous focused attention over “time” and their gravitational pull can be sensed in every frequency range downstream from where it was chosen. And the downstream currents of those many choices make the upstream terrain less accessible due to the downward flow of their currents. It’s like trying to swim upstream in a fast-flowing river. But making yourself more porous (lighter) allows more of those currents to flow through without the resistance that might impede your upstream journey.

Next piece: During a recent breathwork practice I reached a state where it became apparent that at some point “in time” along my choice-stream I began to prefer the Witness/Observer space and that it was time to let go of that. A point of certainty, that could be described as the most coherent I, recognized this and presented the option to choose to deliberately let go of “having to be” the Observer. It felt like one of those so called “choiceless choices” but unlike some that seem to have already been made by the time that I become aware of them, this one did allow for the possibility to not make that choice. It did, however, seemed clear to me that if I did not, that choice would continue to present itself until I did. A thought that came to mind was that my longtime introverted nature, tending to simply taking things in, was completing a sinewave-like cycle and was beginning the gradual polarity shift in the opposing direction, towards outflow. It felt like letting go of that old Observer choice was allowing me to move back in experiential time to before I made it. This lighten-ing is like reverse engineering the choice stream that brought me into my current frequency ranges. I think that in this way the choices that we have made along the way can be revisited at their inception point, where other options can become visible and chosen, or not. If I pass that point in time without action, perhaps it’s as if that choice was never made in the first place.

Next piece: I have also spoken of the oscillation of attention. It appears to narrow and widen in all timescales/frequency ranges representing the many, many back and forths of Being and Becoming. With all of that motion, it is sometimes hard to imagine how we maintain any focus at all. Yet here in this region it does appear that some form of an I-ness oscillates from being a more narrowly focused one that can deliberately participate in this life, to being permeable to, and thus blended with, the wider energetic environment (the Many) where attention is very broad and the I seems less coherent. And there is a kind of strata of currents that are all flowing downstream in a way that generally keep my focal range oscillating within certain confines that I have chosen over time, though I am experientially oblivious to the majority of those flows as well as my choices that generated them.

Next piece: In the Post Mindfulness and Mindlessness I point out that in my experience there is time dilation at both ends of the spectrum of Being and Becoming, emptiness and fullness. It is apparently true that time dilates in the vicinity of a black hole, whose center is believed to have infinite gravity. From a video on black holes Chris Imey said “when things fall into a black hole their gravity slows down asymptotically, infinitely…” You are, in a way, frozen in time from the perspective of an outside observer. So, time stops in some way both with the no gravity of a photon (emptiness) and with infinite gravity of a black hole singularity (fullness) but that dilation seems to be different somehow and is certainly beyond my capacity to understand.

The closer to the beginning of time – closer to the no-time before the Big Bang – the less difference there should be between frequencies since there has been less “time” for differentiation. This should also mean that the farther back in experiential time I go, the less differentiated, and thus the more whole, I will become.

It seems plausible to me that time is somehow a function of attention – personal, global, solar, galactic or universal – that focused attention, and intention, results in a gravity field that both gives “thought form” substance and generates time in a way that allows for that form to appear to exist to those who are operating within a similar timeframe. And that we can, and do, constantly move in perceptual time as our attention oscillates. It seems possible that the attention of consciousness creates time and that all that we experience is the shifting temporal flows of consciousness.