The Alchemy of Time - Understanding Time’s True Secret and How To Unlock Its Power
By Joe Rapoza
ISBN: 978-0-9641136-4-0
eBook ISBN: 978-0-9641136-3-3
info@etherworld.com
© Copyright 2023 Joe Rapoza / Etherworld LLC
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What then is time? If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain it to him who asks, I do not know.
-Saint Augustine
Time is the map that controls your way forward, but do not be fooled by its pace - you are the one who controls that. Useful and Useless information fill the same amount of time, focus on the former and you will be the master of your future.
-Xinth 23
The purpose of this book is to make you think differently about time so you can feel more in control of your days.
I know. That’s a high bar.
But I’m up for the challenge.
By the time you reach the end of this book, I hope you will have discovered a new and powerful way to use time to your advantage.
And, I hope that you start to see time more as a guide, rather than something you are beholden to on a daily basis.
No time to waste. Let’s go.
Time is the mind’s way of making sense of the information within our physical world.
Your mind deals with two types of information:
1) Physical (i.e. tactile and spatial information) and
2) Abstract (i.e. chronological and non-material information.)
When the mind processes the two together, it creates a story for us to remember and share.
Sometimes the story is the same, but it can change with each retelling. As our experiences and understanding of the world changes, so do our memories.
And our stories may change with it.
Let’s look at how the mind processes the two types of information.
Physical Information
Physical information is objective. It’s tangible and can be described in several different ways through writing and conversation. Physical information is real and tangible, so it’s easy to describe physical objects to someone because they may have experienced it on their own.
And, if they don’t have an idea of what that physical object is, you can show it to them.
“This is a hammer.”
“Oh, cool. What does it do?”
Abstract Information
Abstract information is subjective, invisible, and stored as amorphous symbols in your mind. There are no tangible items to tie them to in the real world.
This makes abstract information harder for your mind to store. This is why it’s more difficult to remember a person’s name, than it is to recognize a hammer.
A person’s name is a great example. You can match a face to a name, but there are many people who share the same name, but never the same face. These many-to-many relationships adds to the difficulty of pinpointing an index for your abstract thoughts.
When in doubt, it’s always best to write down the abstract information you want to remember. The brain is an idea-generator, not a database.
In order to understand how your mind makes use of time, we need to outline what we mean when new say the word “time” so we can have an agreed upon definition.
I will use the classical definition of time which is the way most people view its properties. This is the ordered, sequential, forward-moving view of time, typically shown as an arrow or line.
There are three general aspects of linear time:
But, I see linear time as just different aspects of now. Like so:
The Past = Past Nows
The Present = All the Nows
The Future = Possible Nows
Remember, there's one thing the past and the future share - and that is the present.
Without the present, the past has no record and the future has no map.
Therefore, it’s the present that controls time's commitments.
Changes and events from the past could have never occurred without the present. And, the future is helpless and forever-dependent on the present.
One key aspect that linear time has is progression. Time passes, right?
And, although time seems to pass, it can never "unpass” or reverse in the physical realm.
Physical information is real, tangible, and conserved. It cannot be unmade, only destroyed and reconfigured. This means that time is a one-way process but giving it a direction is unnecessary.
What?! Why doesn’t it have a direction?
You see, time doesn't pass so much as it's counted. In metrology (the study of measurement) time is an additive process of counting pulses. Watching for change and measuring time’s progression in even, predictable “bursts.”
An accurate way to do this is by using atomic particles. We measure time by measuring the frequencies of these atomic particles, typically cesium or rubidium atoms.
Measuring the vibrations of these particles provides an extremely accurate measurement of time.
These atomic clocks can achieve accuracies of a few billionths of a second per day. This precision allows them to maintain accurate timekeeping over long durations without losing synchronization.
The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) employs measurements from atomic particles that are so accurate they won’t lose a single second in the next 300 million years.
This gives us our standard unit of time that we all know as a second. 1, 2, 3, repeater1.
To mimic the counting of time, we can express ourselves verbally.
“One Mississippi, two Mississippi, three Mississippi."
The word Mississippi, allowing for a close approximation of the spacing needed between each second. At least for small numbers.
This manual method of counting obviously has its limitations and it breaks down when we get to larger numbers that take longer than one second to pronounce, like: 23,001,230 (twenty-three million, one thousand, two hundred and thirty.)
Add a "Mississippi" after these large numbers and your several seconds behind in your counting. Not too accurate.
This is why we use atomic clocks.
However, the atom's pulse isn't producing anything that could be considered linear which is why we’re not really moving forward in time. We’re measuring predictability.
An evenly paced, and countable rhythm.
So, time as we know it, only passes because we use atoms to count these pulses and add them together to show that changes happened. This allows for several things, like knowing how long something's duration is and how its duration compares to things with different durations.
Like comparing the average lifespan of a house fly (28 days of life) with the average lifespan of a tortoise (80 - 150 years of life). This means a tortoise is capable of living 2,000 times longer than a fly.
What would you do with that much time?
To summarize, you perceive time as moving forward because it's an additive process. And in order to keep accurate time, you can never subtract from your total time count on a global scale.
You can only subtract time on the relative scale to provide predictions, make comparisons, and determine outcomes.
This makes time abstract, non-tangible, fungible, and non-physical.
But, you can use this to look at time in a new way. In a way that reveals a hidden secret to allow you to bring it into the physical dimension so you can mold it to your will.
Whether time is an illusion or not, doesn’t matter. Because we are all fooled by it anyway. And, we all interact with time differently, yet consider it universal.
“I can’t believe you have the time to have a career, enjoy hobbies, spend quality time with your family and friends, and still have time to travel! I can’t even find the time to make a dentist appointment! It seems I never have enough time.”
Sound familiar?
We are consumed by time. Some of us are paralyzed by it. Many of us controlled by it.
It not only runs our clocks, it runs our lives.
But time is not at all what it seems.
Time hides a secret and I’ll tell you what it is.
Time is a shortcut.
A shortcut for what exactly?
Information. That’s what.
Time is information.
More specifically, time is a short cut to measure, and make sense of the states of change in the information of physical objects.
Time is a wonderful shortcut because you observe and learn from the world through your senses. You make all your decisions with inputs from your senses.
But our five senses can be a bit too trusting and can be tricked and fooled. Tricked into only seeing simplicity and blocking the complex.
Your senses provide inputs into your brain to make sense of the world around you to help you make decisions.
Decisions based on the information you take in. But, what about the information that you don’t take in? Could that be helpful?
Your mind blocks certain information because it likes to keep things simple. It shuns chaos. It seeks order over disorder, and simplicity over complexity. And time helps you do this.
To see time’s true secret, stop seeing time as something on a clock. Start seeing time as the changes in physical information.
When you start to see your life and the world around you as information, instead of timelines, you empower yourself with a different approach.
Here’s a formula to represent this new view of time: ∆S = ∆t
The Greek letter ∆ (delta) represents change in the states of physical information (represented with S) and is equivalent to the change in perceived relative time (t).
Since your mind has time-sensitive biorhythms, it’s easier to use the common measure of time (counting seconds) as a reference to measure change.
Your body requires rest at night, when the sun moves to the other end of the world to wake its other half of the population. Your mind requires sleep to recharge and the night is a great reminder of this.
The sun and the Earth’s rotation also play a pivotal role in syncing your biorhythms. And the consistency of the days, weeks, months, and years helps create a cyclical pattern that’s imprinted on your psyche.
Like time, most changes to physical information is invisible and not something you typically think about. So, you’re trapped in the shortcut that time provides.
Physical information is complex and boring. I mean, who wants to watch paint peel? Or wait for a glass of water turn to vapor over many, many days?
Definitely not me, and probably not you either.
But, viewing time as informational change does have its advantage and is worth exploring.
In fact, even though you may think of time as exact, it’s far from it by most estimates.
Have you ever made a new dinner recipe with an estimated time of 30 minutes but it takes you almost an hour? That’s because it was estimated by someone that can make the recipe without the recipe. The information you don’t have (that the recipe owner does) is the missing ingredient.
When you make the recipe for the first time, you don’t have the same information or experience as the recipe owner. Your brain doesn’t have all the information to make this meal in the estimated time. At least, not yet.
But, the more you make that recipe, the more you’ll understand it. And, with continued experience, you can shorten the time estimate.
Time is information. The more you know, the faster you go.
To experiment with seeing time as information, watch a YouTube video on something you’re trying to learn. Maybe it’s coding, copywriting, UI design, it doesn’t really matter. Find a video and watch it at 2x speed.
Watching a video at 2x speed will be disorienting at first, but you’ll eventually get used to it. A 10-minute video becomes 5 minutes at 2x speed. This means you can take in the same amount of information in half the normal time.
Do this for several days with a few different videos. Then, go back and watch these same videos at normal speed. They’re going to sound strange because your mind doesn’t care about the length anymore, it cares about the information.
You can do this with audiobooks too. Listening to an audio book on 2x speed will help your mind focus on the important information and you’ll start to ignore the unnecessary words and passages.
Let’s do a thought experiment together to get a better sense of time as it relates to physical information.
Imagine a friend asks you to complete a task. The task is to retrieve your mail.
They ask to start in your kitchen, walk towards your front door, open it, proceed down 4 steps, walk across your yard, and check your mailbox.
When you get to the mailbox, open it.
Assume there are 5 pieces of mail (a magazine, a letter, 2 bills, and a post card).
Grab the mail and sort them by size (largest items on the bottom).
Close the mailbox, walk back across your yard, and re-enter your front door, then close it behind you.
Then, walk back into your kitchen, and put the sorted mail on your kitchen table.
As you listen to your friend describe this, you visualize doing these things. You arrange these steps in your mind and commit them to your short-term memory.
You say to your friend, “Okay, now what?”
Your friend replies, “Can you do everything I just described in 5 seconds?”
Now, assume there’s a 5-second countdown timer that will start automatically as you start moving towards your front door.
Think about this experiment for a few minutes and answer this question:
Are the tasks your friend asked you to do possible in the stated timeframe? Explain your answer.
Write down your thoughts if you think it’ll help.
You can find my answer in the Final Thoughts section towards the end of this book. Compare it with yours.
The universe is always moving, breathing, fluctuating, morphing, pulsing, and adapting. Our perception of time is how we make sense of this.
Everything in the universe has a rhythm, a pulse, a wave-form emulation. A pattern, an imprint, a vibration.
Human Time is a measure to bring order to the chaotic universe. Since the chaos is perpetual, mankind must make tools and ways to control the chaos, to bring order to it.
Without time, how could we function as a society? How could we plan a trip, meet a friend for lunch, or plan a wedding? Time’s movement and consistency brings order.
But, time’s passing, and even time itself, isn't real. We make it real, we will it into being so we can have order and provide social contracts for living our lives with others.
The one thing that we often most forget as a species, is that we are connected by the fabrics, materials, energies, and atoms of the universe. From quantum particles to the largest black holes, pulsars, quasars, and star clusters trillions of light years away, we are all the same connected energy. This cannot be doubted or separated. The distances and differences are vast, but the connectedness and physicality of these things are comparable.
The universe will never be static, it will always morph by creating and destroying simultaneously and instantaneously. Informational change of the physical is perpetual and impossible to capture. This is why we use time.
Creation is algorithmic functions with unique inputs based on what’s available in the environment. For example, nature’s function for growing a tree is standardized, but the inputs can vary. Inputs like the nutrients in the soil or the weather conditions, environment, and position of the sunlight that’s available based on the latitude and longitude. These are some of the inputs that helps or hinders a growing tree.
Change happens not because of time, but because we measure the change through time.
In order to simplify a physical object (any object) you must break down the amalgam of what it’s made from and compare it to what it currently is.
Depending on your analysis, this could range from the simple (determining the state and properties of a small rock), to the ultra complex and nearly impossible to predict without sophisticated instruments (like analyzing speed, direction, and gale force winds of a tornado).
Grab a nearby physical object and analyze it. What came together to form this new whole of an object? What do you see, hear, smell, touch, and taste about the object? Would the separate pieces of the object have the same properties?
In alchemy the term Solve et Coagula means to dissolve and coagulate. To take apart and reconfigure. Deconstruction to form a new and different construction. Everything is a splinter of a former state. Can you see these states? If not, start to look for them.
Separate the parts to see the whole and align the parts to see its past. Re-align the parts with other parts you have previously separated to see a potential future.
These are the steps to creativity.
How cool would it be to predict the future?
The idea of possible time travel comes from the notion of using available information as a predictor of future events. The future is just unrevealed information, so why not use the information of the present to help predict the information of future events?
It’s not at all outlandish if you follow a few simple guidelines.
First, you should project yourself into the future by envisioning yourself there. Project yourself into a situation that you want to come to pass. You will guide yourself from the future, backwards to meet yourself in the present moment.
There are an infinite number of paths available to you from the present moment and into the future. Right now, you’re reading a book. But, what will you be doing in 5 minutes? It’s your choice, because you’re the one who will determine the next steps toward your future vision.
You control the outcome.
The way this future jumping works, is that you “advance” yourself into a future event using your mind’s eye. Where are you? What are you doing? Who else is there? What’s around you? How do you feel?
Explore this for as long as you need.
Then, backtrack from that future vision into the present moment. How do the two places meet? What information do you need to make this a reality?
This is the way to predict future states of change. By using your current awareness and knowledge of known information as your guide.
This “advancement” is part speculation, part intuition, part mathematics, part luck, and part chance. But, more than half of this equation involves pure will and the informational distances between the current now and the future now.
The closer the future is to your current "now,” the higher the probability in accuracy and success. The more distant the future is from your now, the lower the accuracy and the higher chance of a failed prediction.
The following methods combine to form something I call the Sherlock Holmes Effect. And you can use these techniques to help guide your future predictions.
There are 5 key parts:
You can use your intuition and your current environment to predict future events based on acquiring local information that most people would tune out.
You can’t make good predictions without the right information to inform you. And, you would never be making a prediction without the awareness to do so in the first place. The awareness of wanting to travel into the future is an important part.
This awareness gives you an edge over others who are tuned out and not thinking about their futures, because they’re staring at their phones.
Greater attunement of yourself within your environment will give you opportunities and advantages that others will miss. Most people’s attention seeks pleasurable information first and today’s world makes these distractions super easy.
But, being hyper-aware and focused in the present moment is the best way to self direct your attention and stave off distraction.
Let’s say that you’re in a theater about to watch a subject matter expert who’s about to present on an obscure and complex topic. The speaker is scheduled to speak in about 5 minutes, for the next hour.
Based on who you see in the crowd, you speculate the topic will bore much of the audience and over half of them will pull out their phones as a distraction after 10 minutes.
However, you’re extremely interested in this topic and plan to pay close attention and take notes.
Earlier, on a break between guest speakers, you struck up a conversation with this upcoming presenter and discovered that they had a slight cough. They mentioned that their allergies were acting up but they had forgotten their allergy medication at home.
“This will be interesting,” they say with a grin.
As you walk to your seat, you notice the jug of water that’s put on stage for presenters to quench their parched throats, hasn’t been refilled since the last speaker left the stage. The speaker with the allergies is next and walks on stage to begin their presentation.
Using all of this information, could you make some logical deductions as to what may happen as the speaker starts to present?
Indeed you can. Using the information at hand, you can make some pretty good predictions. You’ll be doing a lot of guessing, but if the presenter starts coughing uncontrollably, you won’t be as surprised by this. In fact, you may have already came to this conclusion as you were reading the description above.
The more you use your senses of awareness, the better you’ll be able to handle the unexpected.
Here’s my answer to the thought experiment.
To refresh your memory, I’ll repeat the question.
Question: Are the tasks your friend asked you to do while retrieving your mail, possible in the stated timeframe? Explain your answer.
My answer is: Both no, and yes.
No, because the task your friend asked you to do was too complicated to physically accomplish in 5 seconds. Unless you were The Flash, it would be physically impossible to manipulate physical information in this way. And since The Flash isn’t real, neither is this.
Also Yes, because you’ve already done it. When you read the question, you were processing the information as though I was telling you a story. Even though it may have taken longer than 5 seconds to read that passage, you could easily think of it right now and do it all in 1 or 2 seconds just by thinking it.
Let me prove it another way. I’ll be right back…
…OK. I’m back.
Any idea where I went?
I won’t keep you hanging. I went to the moon. I was walking around there just now and searching for golf balls. I found 3 balls and then came back home. Here I am.
The power of the mind is incredible. The physical neurons in your brain can process vast amounts of information in no time. Imagine what you could do if you put your thoughts into practice on a daily basis to create physical things with your five senses and focused will to guide you.
You’d be unstoppable. And time wouldn’t matter with information on your side.
Perhaps you already are unstoppable? If so, that’s awesome. Keep going.
I want to leave you with this.
Just like there are 3 aspects of linear time, there are 3 aspects of Creative Time:
In. That. Order.
That is everything required for a creative and fulfilling life. A life that you rule, and not time.
This is the Timeless Method of Creativity. I urge you to try it.
Creativity is the alchemy of transforming time and manifesting new information. This is all possible through the philosopher’s stone known as your mind, which is an amalgam of information, curiosity, creativity, and will.
If there’s only 1 thing you retain from this book, let it be this:
Take your time or it’ll be taken from you. View your time as information and you’ll control your future. Time is only necessary because the universe is too vast to absorb in a single day.
Set goals. Create. And patiently wait.
Thank you for reading. May time forever be on your side.
The Alchemy of Time - Understanding Time’s True Secret and How To Unlock Its Power
ISBN: 978-0-9641136-3-3
info@etherworld.com
