October 2014
In Part 1, we discussed the instant. It was offered that we only perceive things which have happened in the past. Our only knowledge of reality comes from memory. It is the past upon which we act. We introduced the terms NOW! To represent the imperceptible instant of the present and TIP to represent the immediate past which we act upon.

When your mind receives a packet of information from one of your sense organs, it has to figure out what it is. It is receiving a complex set of nerve impulses from a variety of inputs. Then it has to compose and present it to you in a comprehensible format. You never actually see reality, even a slightly delayed version. You never actually see reality, even a slightly delayed version. Our brains reconstruct reality as perceptual images, sounds, smells, tastes and touches. This is the Theatre of the Mind. You see the play. You are an actor in the play in your theatre.

The mind takes the incoming information and tries out different images to judge their fit. Normally there is not an issue. The process flows seamlessly and you do not notice your mind staging this performance. That reconstruction can carry errors and omissions. It can envision the wrong one, one with a similar shape and color, or a similar motion. Most times, it corrects these little glitches in the blink of an eye and you proceed unawares.

Occasionally it gets it really wrong. Magicians rely upon these perceptual uncertainties to convince you that the coin did come out of your ear. If your brain, the great chemical factory, is under pressure, it can hurry up and choose the wrong thing. That is what we call a hallucination at its worst. It is also the source of witness misidentification. The advent of DNA identification has brought to light many souls condemned to prison by this flaw. Your mind can mislead you in its attempt to put on a coherent play.

There is also an actor "You" in your theatre of the mind. All of this applies equally to our vision of ourselves. When we look into a mirror we reconstruct an image in our minds. That may be favorable or not, accurate or not. You never see the world. The hand that stretches out to catch the ball is not the hand you see. It belongs to you the actor, performing in your play of life, perceived by others in theirs.

Where then do our thoughts occur? Are they not in real, instantaneous time? I do not believe so. For as I write this, the thoughts that direct my fingers on the keyboard were scripted in the immediate past. There is a process somewhere in me creating the thought that gets sent into this world. Something translates that thought into English, the language that I think in. But there is another world of thought behind that, somewhere deeper in my mind. It works in concepts. Who knows from where these words that I type emanate. Things do happen in my mind instantaneously, in the NOW!. I am just not aware of them until they float up into what is commonly called consciousness. Then they act in the play of reality upon which I base my life.

Our images of the world can be stored after they are seen, much like scenery and props. We pull these out and use them later- in dreams for one, tests for another. Our only sense of time comes from this history of storing scenes. It is the remembrance of the sequence of which scene followed what. If you look at a clock for the time, you believe it accurately records this sequence. That is true only if you remember that there was a time before, be that only a second. What is yesterday to a mind which only knows today.

What this means to your concept of reality is that your vision of the world is built in your Theatre of the Mind. If our sense organs are not tuned to process an input, then it is not there for us. It is nonexistent in our theatre. Others attempt to place scenes into our theatre. They come from television, movies, lectures, advertisements. We are bombarded by these attempts of others to play in and on our minds. It is for you to realize them for what they are and to judge what to let upon your stage.

In our history, we have developed instruments to overcome some of the deficiencies of perception. Scientific devices have revealed to us worlds beyond our imagination. From distant galaxies to microbes, radio waves to ultraviolet, instruments of science have allowed us to stretch our imaginations to accept the unseen and the unseeable.

What lies yet to detect? Gravity is a big one. It is as obvious a reality as a rock to the head. Yet, thus far, we can only observe its effects and draw conclusions from those observations. Particle, wave or still something unforeseen, no one knows. We have known for centuries that it is the moon which drives our tides. Now we say with confidence, it is the moon's gravity. Yet, we have not a wit of what it is.

We cannot even say with confidence what is reality. It can be considered packets of information which we are tuned to process. As we have seen from science, there are other types of information we are not tuned to perceiving. For all we know, our experiences may just be a small portion of the truth. Remember when the earth was believed to be the center of the universe? Who is to say that it is not the same with our evaluation of reality. We accept that the version of reality in the theatre in which we live is "the real" reality, as if it were the center of the universe. Perhaps it is not. What we perceive are sequential packets of information in our bandwidth. It may just be the comprehensible band of reality in the glissando of realities, like those things visible to us.

In the description of the Unit of the Universe, we have proposed veils, equated to a two dimensional spaces warped about in a manner described in these writings. So where is this thing? A unique feature of our theatre is this imagination. It is easy to create gods and demons and worlds of fantasy with their having no outside input to stir them to life. This may just be mine. There is no medium to host them that has been observed. Yet that same absence plagues the dreams of dark matter and dark energy. What medium hosts light? How does it travel the vast distance from the other side of space? Perhaps veils are just tones which can keep their discrete nature as they dance about the great singularity and rails harmonics with others. One = 0 and all that. There is a clue in my recent article, "Geomath As Art". An equation and a geometric form can describe the same thing. In that vein, they both represent the same information. A linear path or vector can also represent that information, without being the totality of it. So too, a point. Our reality may simply be a song of information packets without need of a place in which to exist. So is the one just one point, a vast sea, a symphony?

So here you are in a place with the illusion of time, floating in a sea of memory of imperceptible instants. Airplanes still fly. Cell phones still work. You eat, drink and fall in love.

Form is harmony.
Function a symphony.
You are an opera.

May the dream go on forever-whatever that is.

It occurs to me that once upon a time when people saw ice turn into water, they had no explanation for it. Molecules where not a known thing. They drank the water anyway.