Page 139 - Matter: The Other Name for Illusion

Because our brain works by arranging things in a sequence, we do not
believe that the world works as described above; we think that time always
moves forward. However, this is a decision our brain makes and is therefore
totally relative. If the information in our brains were arranged like a film being
projected backwards, time would be for us like a film being projected

backwards. In this situation, we would start to perceive that the past was the
future and the future was the past and we would experience life in a way
totally opposite than we do now.
In fact, we cannot know how time moves or, indeed, if it moves at all. This
demonstrates that time is not an absolute reality but only a kind of
perception.
The fact that time is a perception was proved by the greatest physicist of

the 20th century, Albert Einstein, in his "General Theory of Relativity". In his
book, The Universe and Dr. Einstein, Lincoln Barnett says this:
Along with absolute space, Einstein discarded the concept of absolute
time – of a steady, unvarying inexorable universal time flow, streaming
from the infinite past to the infinite future. Much of the obscurity that has
surrounded the Theory of Relativity stems from man's reluctance to
recognize that sense of time, like sense of colour, is a form of
perception. Just as space is simply a possible order of material objects, so
time is simply a possible order of events. The subjectivity of time is best
explained in Einstein's own words. "The experiences of an individual" he
says, "appear to us arranged in a series of events; in this series the single
events which we remember appear to be ordered according to the
criterion of 'earlier' and 'later'. There exists, therefore, for the individual,
an I-time, or subjective time. This in itself is not measurable. I can, indeed,
associate numbers with the events, in such a way that a greater number is
associated with the later event than with an earlier one. 42
From these words of Einstein, we can understand that the idea that time
moves forward is totally a conditioned response.

Einstein himself pointed out, as quoted in Barnett's book: "Space and time
are forms of intuition, which can no more be divorced from consciousness than
can our concepts of colour, shape, or size." 43
According to the "General Theory of Relativity", time is not absolute; apart
from the series of events according to which we measure it, it has no
independent existence.

Time is a Perception Too 137