In this blog I’ve spent a lot of time exploring the attributes of antIs reality and the underlying bio-sensory process that makes it so nearly impossible to accept as an illusory image of totIs reality. Now, I think, it’s time to take a closer look at what it ‘means’, for a totIs universe, that exists in a state where neither a ‘now’ nor ‘flowing time’ exists as we experience them in antIs reality.

In any discussion of ‘reality’ we want to know what exists, what ‘is’. To know this we need to define what it means, ‘to be’. The difference in that definition, between totIs and antIs reality, couldn’t be more stark, or more important. As I have described in previous posts, in a universe where a ‘now’ does not exist, and thus, the ‘flow’ of time disappears as well, the attribute of ‘being’ is completely different from that of the ‘being’ we actually experience in our day to day lives. In a totIs universe, ‘to-be’ is absolute, meaning that being, or ‘is’, is not ‘relative’, whereas in antIs reality, time governs and relativizes existence. What does it mean to say that being is absolute? It means that in totIs, absolutely everything ‘is’, there is no ‘was’ or ‘will be’. This concept alone forces us to try and reconcile it with our antIs experience of reality. What does it ‘mean’, to us, if the universe exists in such a state? This is the constantly recurring question we ask that makes it so impossible to ‘believe’ in a totIs reality, as such. But make no mistake, this question is part of the circular logic forced on a consciousness trying to reconcile totIs reality to its own absolute dependence on antIs reality. Whatever meaning exists for us as antIs observers, no matter how portentous, there is no like meaning in totIs. The very concept of ‘meaning’ does not exist in totIs. TotIs… IS!

To get an inkling of what this would look like, imagine the entire 2400 miles of Interstate 10, from Santa Monica, CA to Jacksonville FL. For our purposes, we must imagine it existing ‘at once’, time does not affect its existence. Even as you read this, it sits there, in it’s entirety. Now, imagine a small family that suddenly awakens to find itself in the proximity of where Phoenix AZ would be, (because I-10 is all there is, it’s the entire universe). They don’t know how they got there, but here they are. I use ‘one small family’ to approximate the dearth of biological and conscious entities in our universe in comparison to the inanimate matter and energy it contains. By the nature of their being, they can only view small, contiguous portions of I-10 in succession. Their exploration and discovery of the ‘nature’ of I-10 will proceed in a protracted manner. It will feel to them like time is flowing, with each conscious ‘moment’ offering new knowledge and information. For I-10, time is not a prerequisite for existence, it simply IS in its entirety. While the family has experiences of  ‘discovery’ and ‘meaning’ in their explorations of their small part of I-10, these will have no ‘meaning’ and there is nothing to be ‘discovered’ by the Interstate itself. Though the family is a part of the Interstate, they are, by their nature, relegated to a separate experience of it in lieu of the process of their particular ‘being’. To the family, the Interstate is a series of separate objects and events. The Interstate itself is One, Unity; it requires no ‘time’ to be and so there is no separation between Santa Monica, Jacksonville, the little family or anything else ‘in between’. I-10 and everything on it always exists at once.

Of course this metaphor is flawed in that we really can’t remove time from our consciously experienced reality, as it forms the foundation of ALL of our conscious experiences. This metaphor does, however, supply a guide in our attempts to imagine a universe where ‘time’ does not function in the way we experience it in our antIs reality. We can suspend our need to reconcile totIs reality with antIs reality and imagine a totIs reality where the ‘now’ and its consequent ‘flowing time’ do not exist. We see that conscious observers can exist only at the single locus of a ‘now’ in space-time, while the totIs universe requires no such ‘now’. Moving into this frame of mind gives us an even deeper insight into what the nature of totIs reality ‘looks’ like.

Let’s look again at how, without a ‘now’ in totIs, the very nature of being is transformed, in comparison to its nature in antIs. Existence, what ‘is’, is absolute in totIs. There are no probabilities, there is no activity, no ‘was’ or ‘will be’. Any concepts of antIs time we use to understand the universe are meaningless in totIs. The totIs universe will not last ‘forever’, it was not created in an ‘instant’, it has neither a ‘beginning’ nor an ‘end’ as we understand these concepts. To describe such a state from our antIs way of describing such a reality, the ‘beginning’ and the ‘end’ of the totIs universe exist ‘simultaneously’, except the concept ‘simultaneous’ comes from our antIs experience. The totIs universe exists ‘outside’ of time and space as we experience them. TotIs reality exists beyond our ability to experience it, as biology. But as I have detailed in my book TotIs, certain experimental results in modern science gives us evidence that such a reality exists.

Another attribute of the totIs universe has to do with its locus. In our antIs universe, everything exists within a larger framework. My house is on a block, this block is in a neighborhood, this neighborhood is in a town, etc. etc. etc., all the way to the (conceptual) ‘end’ of the universe. In our antIs conceptions we want to know what is on the ‘other side’ of the end of the universe; within what does our universe exist? In totIs, because being is absolute, so too is ‘non-being’. What is, is, what ‘is-not’, is not, absolutely. It is as meaningless to ask “what exists ‘outside’ of the totIs universe?” as it is to ask “how much does 3 o’clock weigh?” Non-being is different from ‘nothing’. Our antIs conceptual understanding of ‘nothing’ is as an ‘absence of something’. Non-being, from a totIs perspective, as ‘absolute’, has no connection to ‘being’ at all. It has no attributes, it is not the ‘ground’ or ‘medium’ for anything to ‘appear’ within it. It ‘is-not’, it ‘never-was’ and it ‘never-will-be’. In actuality it can’t even be ‘named’. Non-being has no existence.

To a consciousness that depends on a ‘now’ moment for its existence, these ideas are impossible to reconcile; but, one of the most important insights we gain from an acceptance that antIs and totIs reality are actual, is the concomitant understanding that the attributes of totIs reality are not constrained to comport with the ‘rules’ that appear in antIs reality. Those antIs rules state that ‘being’ and ‘non-being’ are not absolute, but are dependent on the co-incidence of a single locus in space-time on the hyper-surface of the ‘present’, in other words, the ‘now’ moment of an observer. We are driven to accept our experience of antIs reality as ‘actually’ real and any other possibility as theoretical because antIs reality is the one and only access point we possess to ANY experience of reality.

So, in a universe that exists, in absolute terms, every point in spacetime exists. Translated to our antIs way of looking at the universe, every point in space-time, both past and future, exist, they are existent and real, ‘now’. But there’s another more problematic rub for us beyond whether everything in our future exists and is as real as our experienced ‘now’. In a universe that exists ‘outside’ of space-time, as we experience it, we have no way to gauge how ‘big’ space is, let alone, what it is.

This is where the power of the antIs ‘illusion’ of reality exerts an enormous impact. It is one thing to accept that loud/quiet, red/green, pain/pleasure, etc., are all interpretations of our interaction with totIs reality, creations of our biology for our biology, but it is quite another to accept that the very space and time we actually exist within is an interpretation as well. But, with the advent of Relativity Theory, space-time’s unquestionable sovereignty was banished from its throne and relegated to exist as just another proximate point in a universe of other equally random and numberless points, each a reference for equally random observers. Far from being hallowed, space and time can no longer be measured in ‘absolute’ terms. No single ruler or clock has the ability to provide an ‘ultimate’ measurement of space or time that would be the standard for all other measurements. There is no way for us to know how ‘big’ space is or the actual ‘duration’ of the tick of a clock. The size of space and duration of time that we experience as ‘real’, (and so they become, a priori, the ‘standard’ for all of our measurements,) is just one of an innumerable set of scalar possibilities. But, though Relativity is profound in its illumination of the ‘reality’ of the universe, it is an illumination of the universe from an antIs perspective.  Once again, totIs reality is not constrained to conform to our antIs experiences and the attributes of reality they create.

Without a ‘now’ and its subsequent flow of time, any meaningful measurement of space becomes – meaningless. Without a ‘now’ all points, in what we experience as ‘space-time’, are functionally connected, both ‘past’ and ‘future’. This is the ‘unity’ of the totIs universe. All points in space-time exist in ‘instantaneous’ and ‘direct proximity’ to one another (still have to use antIs concepts to describe such ‘points’ in such a ‘state’), in a perfectly still and balanced one-ness.

The question of existence has been a conundrum for conscious humanity since consciousness became a hallmark of our species. For generations this question has resided in the domain of the mystic and spiritual realms. Within those realms two crucial ideas have usually been present; this world we live in is an illusion and this world is ultimately a unity. But only a chosen few were capable of delivering such a revelatory message. With the ‘recent’ advent of ‘reason’ there developed a more democratic philosophy of being, based on logic, which has led to the creation of the secular sciences. These sciences have propelled us to the, seeming, brink of discovery of the deepest secrets of the universe and its ultimate reality. But through it all we remain unable to peer past the opaque and illusory surface of our experienced antIs reality to see the unity that the totIs universe is. Albert Einstein once said “The only reason for time is so that everything doesn’t happen at once.” In fact, everything ‘happens’ even faster than that, and it all ‘happens’ at the same ‘locus’!