(1) The Universe is a Constant Instant. Every instant is 'forever' for having been at all. (2) The size of an idea bears no relationship to the time given thinking of it. (3) Conceptual thought is like the universe was before matter gave it time or space. (4) Our relationship to the universe of seeming matter is similar to our relationship to our own subconscious - both are total recorders except that our subsconscious recorder is not yet as reliable or as factual as that of matter.
To expand on these four observations:
(1) An example is that of astronomers listening and thinking that they had found the echo of the original Big Bang still ringing in radio waves. So that is one instant that has been fairly constant in its cause and effect ever since.
A couple of years ago, scientists managed to achieve star heat of 15 million degrees for a billionth of a second with lasers. It was over in a flash but will for ever remain as a high point of achievement. Photographs are a recognition that we can capture an instant of time and freeze it. Dr Wilder Penfield, Montreal's famous neuro-surgeon, found that by stimulating different parts of the brain, it had total recall of sight, sound, smell, in fact a practical re-living of an event.
(2) We can think 'atom' or 'universe'. Therefore you can think 'for ever' before you do something that changes 'for ever'. The mind, with practically infinite capacity, compresses its ideas and thoughts into material action and in reverse sees the universe in the drop of dew on a rose petal.
Many years ago, I tried to illustrate this 'size of an idea' concept in Vermont: to show the children of Swanton that the whole world is in their back garden I wrote around the world and obtained eighty-five stones - from the road to the Parthenon, from the road to the pyramids, a stone blessed by a shinto priest, etc. These were built into a cairn, so that people could touch many parts of the world right there in Swanton.
The stones had been separate from a time before the planet was formed and had lain roughly where they were for some four billion years and now 'in a flash' they were cemented together and likely to remain roughly in the Swanton area for the next umpteen billion years.
I can only hope that future geologists, archaeologists or visitors from elsewhere will realise that they are looking at a conscious materialisation of a concept.
The fact that we do the same sort of thing every day in a supermarket is inclined to elude us.
(4) As Carl Sagan said, 'humanity is the universe becoming aware of itself'. A hundred and sixty one billion miles back down the track of this planet, Christ pointed out the same concept that man was the light of the world. Both these statements, nearly two thousand years apart, are becoming part of your life as you read them and incidentally illustrating the theory-proving statement, 'my words will be with you for ever'. You cannot do anything that is not for ever.
The principle of every instant becoming constant or a space-time continuum has allowed us to get where we are more by accident than design, hence our sudden global recognition of the consequences of not having been aware of the damage we are doing to the only planet we have to live on.
Did we really say to ourselves 'Let us build a world brain that would work at the speed of light bringing true the prophecy that 'the son of man will go from East to West as summer lightning' ' and then invent radio and satellite TV to link the ten billion neurons in the heads of six billion people and add computers for good measure?
Instant communication and the ability to record and recall means that we are literally living in a constant instant.
Add to this Fritjof Capra's estimate that the average speed of an electron around a nucleus is 650 miles per second, which means that everything, including us, is being reassembled every split second.
To take a film of a person's seventy-year life but with the film going through the gate of the camera at 650 miles per second instead of the usual two feet per second, would take more than a billion years to watch. A sort of time equivalent of E equals Mc2.
We cannot move a split second back into the past or a split second forward into the future. We can only be synchronistically aware of the strange phenomenon that suddenly allows the split second of now to become eternally permanent. The concept has been around in man's intuition for a long time but it is only in our now that communications and science and intuition have come together to allow the recognition of the principle of the constant instant - changing our perception in the prophetic twinkling of an eye. It is possible on a world that is only a seventh of a second big.
Michael Hildred, Flint Lodge, 2 Villiers Road, Southsea, Hants PO5 2HQ (tel 0705 734 829).