Life in 3D

 Once you overcome frustration, the world in 3D is not that bad.

Density. The passage of time. Places being so far away. The slowness of travel. These are all characteristics of life in 3D. Light for example, light is so pure that it doesn’t have to sit on an aeroplane for 30 hours in order to get to Thailand. No, light travels fast. It lives in the dimension of the eternal now. How about time?

Time, slow at work, fast when having fun. Supposedly eternal. Time. We crave to grow up and then wish never to be old. Time. It takes TIME to master any craft, any art. And then there is density and matter, a matter that blooms and decays. There is tiredness. Having to feed a body, your body. These, as I said, are all traits of life in 3D. The Third dimension which causes what? What effect can this have on our being, which is so full of wishes and whims which we want immediately satisfied? Full of desires we are. Pleasures and pains. And boom! Here we find ourselves, in the third dimension, the dimension of density, of matter, of the passage of time, of slow travel… what do our desires have to face? Frustration. That’s right. We live in frustration because of our unfulfilled dreams and expectations. Because our mind and being long for an immediacy that is not from this world, or more like, not from this dimension. But don’t get me wrong, its not all bad, this is the only dimension we know in which we can taste food and watch sunsets, so its not that bad.

We just have to get used to the awkwardness. Maybe the elements that our body is composed of, the atoms which are claimed to have belonged to stars, want to live and behave in the same way that they do in space (freedom) and they find themselves trapped in the small confines of 3D life. Maybe our deep mind and self belong to the less denser realms and that’s why we can’t grasp… our own selves? Because we are trapped in 3D. Dense. We see it with our eyes and touch it with our hands.

The third dimension is the dense dimension that gives us matter, and matter, many believe, is us! As in, you are your body! Are you? Are you a being from the 3^rd dimension? I thought so, earthling.

Thus, we deal with the frustration of living life as if we had to cross a bridge in order to do pretty much everything. There is a bridge between our ideas and desires and reality. Time and space are that bridge. So we feel, frustrated. Then we try to beat time. We start to ‘work’ towards things (some call it the process of life). We create habits, we create life patterns in order to organise our life in 3D.

We feed our body with healthy things if we wish to be healthy, we cannot simply wish it, willed it, attract it and be it (or can we?). We turn the frustration into our ally. We can learn to enjoy the passage of time and how with it, we receive our wishes and desires like little drops of mother pearl that come to satisfy our previously frustrated being. Things here are dense and slow, but once you grow some patience and learn to accept how linear time works in the 3^rd dimension, you will be much much happier.

The End.

Eliza Veretilo

Experience - By Ellese Elliott

Experience could experience Experience. Yet, there was only Experience. There was nothing in it, outside of it, in front of it, or behind it.  Experience was very lonely, and bored, so experience created Time.

Now Time was okay, it seemed to give Experience something to look forward to, but it also gave Experience a sense of loss. Experience could only experience Time passing or in anticipation as Time seemed to always leave Experience behind, or not yet arrive. Time never stopped. So upon Experience’s reflection, Experience thought that it was because Time had nowhere to stop; literally nowhere. So Experience created Space.

Vast and always yonder, Space gave something for Experience to explore and a place for Time to stop. Yet Time still did not stop, but now Experience could experience the flux of Time and the freedom of Space. Yet when Experience reflected, on Time and Space, Experience found that it could not distinguish one place from another. All was empty. So, Experience created Energy.

More so in some parts and less so in others, objects and shapes and currents and waves Energy gave difference and variation. Now Experience was able to distinguish things and where it was in relation to Time and Space.  But Experience suddenly realized, in the face of difference, and in the flux of Time, that Experience no longer could experience everything. Experience experienced a loss, as Experience no longer had a complete picture, but loads of different pictures in a long succession which you only get to ever see one at a time. So, Experience cut itself up, into tiny pieces and scattered these pieces all about, placing some pieces in some objects and other bits into other objects. Experience did this so Experience could experience everything. Experience was no longer one, but many

But what Experience did not expect, as Experience had not yet understood how Space and Time worked, was that Experience could only be in one place and not many places at the one time. Experiences were then forever separated and seemed never again to conjoin creating different worlds each time anew. This meant that, unless Time ran out and Space collapsed, Experience would always remain incomplete.

The more Time passed by the more Experience seemed to lose but also gain. Experience tried to put itself back together, but experiences were always being swept away.  ‘Oh no experience, what have you done?’

Ellese Elliott

The Philosophy Takeaway 'Open topic' Issue 40

A simple look at Kant on Time - By Selim 'Selim' Talat

A simple look at Kant on Time

For Kant, experience cannot tell us with absolute certainty that time exists in the world of things as they appear to us. We can observe objects changing, but we cannot say that we fully understand time through these sensory experiences - this is because those sensory experience cannot provide us with the succession of time in an absolute way. This is because Kant does not posit that sensory experience on its own is sufficient to provide us with any absolute truth; we can watch a thousand apples decay on a thousand different occasions, but this can never tell us that an apple will always decay. Nor does it tell us of the (metaphorical!) foundations required for us to experience an apple decaying at all. Yes! Let us plunge deeper into reality.

We must, therefore, consider time prior to our experiences. Time is an inner sense; a pure intuition of ourselves; part of our pure sense of self. Time does not belong to shape, or location - it determines the relation of things we see inside our inner state. Time is not an object that exists in and of itself. Time is not contained in things themselves, as a property of those things. Events do not take place inside of time. Effectively, time is only absolute in our subjective, human reality. If we removed our experiencing the succession of events in the world, time would become nothing. Time needs experience of it in action to prove it exists, and so it cannot be an absolute reality. However, just because time needs our senses to understand it, it does not mean that the senses alone would be sufficient; we need our inner sense. Nor can time be discovered purely by thinking about it (for Kant, pure analysis is worthless without physical evidence). Time is not an idea imposed upon reality by the mind, but is the result of our inner sense experiencing the succession of things outside of us; our minds give form to the chaotic mass of sense data beyond us and allow us to make sense of it all.

Human experience can only discover things occurring within time, thus it has what Kant would call 'empirical reality' (or 'evidence discovered through the use of our senses').

Every sensory experience we have of anything, must represent time; we cannot remove time from appearances. We need time to make sense of the ever shifting flux of matter, i.e. things in motion. This means that time is a condition that must be fulfilled for us to be able to see things changing; time must come before appearances. And so time requires more than just this 'empirical reality', it needs also our inner sense, in order to make our understanding of time complete.

By Selim 'Selim' Talat