Ever since the temporal revolution, time has been flowing backward. It has happened a little by little until people started noticing it. At first it was just fits and starts of such little time discrepancies. Like someone in a fastfood restaurant ordering something, he says his order, the person over the counter asks for the order once again in the exact same tone of voice with the exact same expression.The person orders again in the exact same manner. A mere glitch in time some people choose to ignore without big disruptions to everyday life. Or a train may pull up at the platform and reverse then pull up once again. Some observant people have noticed that something strange has been going on without quite being able to put their finger on it. Sometimes, something repeats itself in the exact same sequence without there being a truly identifiable reversal in time. For example, a mum with a baby was trying to take the bottle from her baby when it fell, she gasped, reached for and caught it. She then gives it to her baby once again, dropping it in process, gasps and reaches for it, catches it and hands it back to her baby. It is akin to watching a strange repetition of events. Sometimes in the same sequence sometimes in differing sequence. Sometimes with the same outcome sometimes with a drastically different consequence.
I have been noticing these strange little occurrences with interest and trepidation. most people do not even see it or have learnt to accept it and even assimilate it into their everyday life. I do not blame them. It is not a thing about being clever or even observant. Time is a tricky thing. Even if many people think they are in control of their time, that their watches never lie or are foolish enough to think that a day is made up of 24 hours or 1440 minutes or even 86400 seconds, they are often wrong. They forget that their measurement of time is not a fixed natural rule. Yes, the sun rises in the east every morning and sets every evening. It does not make everyday the same length nor the duration of the day a fixity. Their clocks may lie. Einstein almost had it right but he was too chicken to take things to their natural conclusion. Time, as so many have said, is an illusion. It is the same with any magician's magic trick. It works as long as most people believe it. The ancients may have had a better system, using concrete objects, like the rate of falling sand, or dripping water or burning wax. Time then had a physical nature not a mere conceptual presence as it has become today. but even the ancients were wrong. Using the placement of the sun only gives you a rough guage, as they found out quickly, the place of the sun varies in length and duration with the changing season. Our constant search to pin down time into standard fixed units have been a unsuccessful project, what we have done instead is to imprison our minds and instead have created tools which will fix our experience so that we may feel the constancy of time. But this lie is not an individual lie. It is not a prank some supremem powerful organziation or god-like being played on us. It is a merely functional phenomenon we have long ceased to challenge. It is a habit that has become a necessity for even survival. Trying to remove this understanding is like trying to turn a herbivore into a carnivore, it violates the human nature to the point that should one fall outside of this way of thinking, the person ceases to be a human.
Now the question gets strange and urgent. Every single human being has the ability to slip out of the trained way of experiencing time, and it happens at least once in a lifetime. Sometimes more often. The opportunity for an alternative understanding of time happens even though most fail to spot it not to mention fail to grab the opportunity. Some time ago, one such man experienced one such moment. His name was M Descurius. As he was stepping off a train, a newspaper boy brushed past him dropping a paper. M swooped down to pick up the falling paper. However as he was swooping down to catch it, he saw the big second hand of the station clock. It twitched then froze. He let the paper fall and it stayed stationary. He thought he had willed time to slow or to stop just by not taking his eye off the clock to pick up the falling newspaper. He did not move his gaze and still the second hand stayed, the newspaper was still falling even though time was for a second divorced from the physical reality. It had shown its stretchable flexibility. Most people, M says, gets distracted by the physical reality. They will react spontaneously to reach for the falling paper. They will by instinct look at the action, respond to it and later attribute the epxerience to the invisible constant flow of time. But M did not take his eye off the station clock and when he did he caught the newspaper in mid air and asked the boy if he had felt that, that inexplicable sense of the extraordinary flexibility of time. . The boy, shocked and scared by this sudden unexpected behavior, took off in fright. According to M it is like seeing through a magician's trick on stage for the first time. It is to discover the trick as it is unfolding. Most people are unable to see through magic tricks because they do not know the direction that the magician is taking them. They are trying to understand what the magician is doing on stage during the performance but not how he is doing it. They are too stuck on why he is doing a certain action that they do not see how he is doing it. The magician gives little clues about his act. so that not being able to piece together the reason for things, people does not look at what he is doing and how he is doing it. That question only comes later. It is the way we understand logics. But by the time we ask the question of how the magician did it, the question has come too late. But M also says it is a bad analogy. There is no magician for the case of time. It is the senses which are fooled. That he could even have spotted the still silent second hand of the clock was a mere coincidence. The only true thing which time cannot yet fool. And the only escape for humans from the illusion of time.
But it is never a choice. One cannot plan a concidence. It is to a large extent a dictate of chances, and chances never follow any pattern. It is not rule bound. Unlike the illusion of time which to our mind follows the strict pattern which we follow all through life. Most people are only capable of such a comprehension for a mere second of their lives. For that mere second when such a divorce happen they will be conscious of the discrepancy but they will not follow through with it, because these seconds usually carry with them the potency of chance. Their life is at stake, they will choose to react to the given choices in front of them. If a vehicle suddenly swerves left, heading right for your own car. You react to save your life. You do not suspend the divorced time. You do not marvel at the flexibility of time but rather at the gravity of the physical event happening in front of you. That is the human response, and to choose to do otherwise you cease to be human. And what follows after only those who can choose it can find out.
To want to see the slow effects of the temporal revolution, only those who have been so favored by chance as to escape can spot these little glitches. Should time the illusion continue to reveal more serious flaws, most will not notice but merely continue adapting themselves to these changes. Afterall, the illusion of time will not collapse as long as most people still believe this illusion. The magician still performs his tricks and the audience are still puzzled and amazed long after the curtain falls.
