Section IV — Time, Breadth, Height, and Depth
The Four Dimensions of the Riverbed
The dynamic tension of Force and Flow arises from the fundamental forms that open Reality: Time, Breadth, Height, and Depth – these four shape the riverbed of Reality, a bed that connects Emptiness and the Whole and pervades infinity. They are not merely dimensions in the spatial sense, but living qualities of Change itself.
The needle of Change knits time and pierces into Breadth, Height, and Depth.
A riverbed floating on a sea of Emptiness,
From which forms filled with frozen Potential swell.
The possibilities mirrored in the Whole realize the Potential
In the Beauty of flowing Change.
A pulsing stream of interwoven patterns
That lie in the bed in equilibrium between order and disorder,
Swell, break, but somehow keep flowing onward.
Thus Reality stretches from the graspable shore
Of forms, patterns, and Gestalts,
To the incomprehensible Whole and Empty,
Only made alive through the dance of transient interactions,
Weighed in the equilibrium of attention, mirrored in experience,
Sent by the powerfully flowing will of Beauty.
The flowing pattern-landscape springs from Change,
From the interaction of enclosed forms of Emptiness.
From ordered, predictable interaction
Arise the properties of the ordered,
High Whole with value for the deep flow of Beauty;
From the source that divides infinity, swells the Change,
That sends new forms full of enclosed Potential, from Emptiness, toward unfolding,
In transient Reality toward the overarching Whole.
An eternal state of Between-Being, only to be endured,
To be mastered, to be transcended in the eternal equilibrium of the spindling flow.
Time tears you along
Lost in Breadth
Plummeting from Height
Falling into Emptiness
Ending in Chaos
Go with Time
Search in Breadth
Float toward Height
Flow in Beauty
And yet sink again into Depth
In the spindling flow, where Emptiness and the Whole dance
And Reality weaves itself.
Time: Flowing Change
The first fundamental form of Change is Change itself in its continuance, the continuity with which it pervades everything: time – flowing, continuous Change itself.
When nothing changes, everything stands still, nothing can happen, it is not experienceable and not graspable from our level of Being. The absolute stillness, the infinity of the Whole and Perfect as well as that of Emptiness and Nothingness exist only without Change. An indestructible crystal on one side and a never-ending abyss on the other.
The Whole and Emptiness are both without possibility of Change and thus outside of time. Time springs forth, or rather is, flowing, continuous Change. Infinite Potential for Change slumbers in Emptiness, in Nothingness, yet cannot be realized there without filling it. The Whole above is frozen in full infinity, it is every Potential, every possibility, realized in One.
If one now wishes to bring Emptiness and the Whole into interaction, this can never happen directly, for they would then be neither completely empty nor completely whole. It requires a mediator – a *flowing boundary* that holds Emptiness and the Whole in equilibrium, with connecting forms and qualities both into Emptiness and toward the Whole.
The Measurement of Change
We attempt to grasp time by measuring relative Change in relation to a continuously recurring Change. In the beginning, the continuous Change of sunrise and sunset brought the day, nowadays the oscillation of an atom brings the second.
In science, the second is defined as the duration of 9,192,631,770 oscillations of a cesium atom – thus according to a pattern of Change recurring 9,192,631,770 times at the atomic level.
Atomic clock definition of the SI second
Time is an experience, an experience from within Change itself and the realization arising from it – from Chaos and matter to Beauty in consciousness.
Time is not always the same, it is context-bound and measurable only in the relative sense. Everyone knows this, knows how quickly time can pass in the hectic, in the new, in the fun and beautiful, and how it stands still when nothing changes, when one waits and events mirror and repeat themselves in loops.
It becomes clear that the experience of time depends on attention, perceived Change is experienced relative to actual Change. Time seems to be directly interwoven with the local degree of Change relative to context and is the form that weaves Change into interaction.
Time in the Levels of Life
Take a single human cell: within it swim millions of proteins. The enzymes among them catalyze tens of thousands of reactions every second, which is nothing other than material Change – enzyme-catalyzed reactions that transform molecules.
A human body consists of approximately thirty trillion cells, all of which, in one way or another, are connected and collaborate with each other. In each cell occur 10,000 to 100,000 metabolic transformations per second. This means that in a human being, three hundred trillion to three quadrillion material Changes occur per second.
Cellular metabolic rate
2.6 \times 10^{23} > 10^{21}
If one now assumes that every Change reflects an experience, then every cell, whether it dwells in our body for only a few days, years, or decades, undergoes an unimaginable amount of experiences. A moment of doing nothing, a few seconds or minutes, still means quadrillions of experiences for our cells.
Thus one can become aware that at the cellular level, at smaller levels with a higher degree of interaction, Change flows much faster than at the larger, macroscopic, human level that emerges from them. Thus time passes at the cellular level, relatively speaking, faster than at the human level.
In a certain sense cellular Change creates humanly consciously experienceable time,
And beneath it molecular Change creates cellularly consciously experienceable time,
And beneath it atomic Change creates molecularly consciously experienceable time,
And so on forever down to the source.
Thus it also becomes obvious why time on a journey into space, into vacuum, into nothingness, into Emptiness, should pass more slowly than in the tightly interwoven natural Reality of Earth. It is the velocity of the flow that defines time according to the Change that, in different contexts, depending on the interweaving of the spiral-shaped levels, can flow at different speeds.
This flowing transition that enables the interaction between Emptiness and the Whole,
Lets the emerging flow of Change, time,
And thus also the emerging space – embodied through the qualities Breadth, Height, and Depth –
Flow through the eye of the needle of Chaos into the Whole,
And through the eye of the needle of Beauty back into Emptiness,
Like a river through narrow passes that filters and shapes Potential.
Thus Chaos draws frozen Potential from infinite Emptiness to the boundary at Whole
Melting Beauty realizes enclosed Potential
In the finite flow –
Until it fades in the light of the mirroring crystal
And thus roots back into the dark abyss.
Time comes from Emptiness and flows back there too.
It carries frozen Potential with it in the form of possible Change,
That can be realized in the interaction of forms and patterns.
^^Time is flowing Change itself.^^
Breadth: The Wind of Adaptability
From time springs Breadth, the space of possible paths, the wind of adaptability. We gaze into Breadth, to the horizon or even beyond in our imagination – far-far beyond. We paint paths into Breadth, we see possibilities in it, we act according to it and thus find our flow.
Breadth is like the first glance, the first step onto an empty, untouched playground, where every possibility, every path, every game still stands open and is a potentially equally unfolding possibility.
Mirrored in imagination we see the Breadth of coming Change.
In the interactions of living cells I see Breadth in the sheer complexity of their dynamically interconnected networks, their so-called systems:
Immune system – *the dynamic defense apparatus* Signal transduction – *the perceptual sense of a cell that adapts internal Change to external* Metabolism – *the will, the motor for Change in the cell, which can use a multitude of fuels* Gene expression – *a pattern that newly divides the forms of the entire Gestalt of the cell* Cell cycle regulation – *the mechanism of reproduction, the miracle of new life*
Each cell is broadly diversified in complexity and the capabilities emerging from it, just a cell like every other and yet woven into the Whole like no other. They care for themselves as they care for the ongoing flow of the entire organism. However, not every signal from the level of the organism above must be obeyed. Each cell perceives its context and its Breadth and simultaneously reacts and signals new possibilities, new paths into the coming.
Breadth is the expansion, swelling flow-waves that weave adaptability.
A freely floating molecule or protein in a cell
Is nothing other than a pattern in the state of conformational sampling.
Even planets must bow to cosmic tides.
Breadth is broad, flexible, invites resilience,
Keeps the landscape supple and alive through purposeful disorder
For the benefit of coming, yet fading meaningless order.
Breadth mirrors on one side the past
On the other it sends you into coming Heights.
^^Time is flowing Change itself.^^
^^Breadth: the possible paths of Change^^ – a wind that drives the flow forward and guides it into the bed of Reality.
Height: The Lived Experience of Eternal Finiteness
From Breadth rises Height, the front of the wave of streaming Change. We strive for Height, we see much from there, yet can barely breathe up there, let alone live well.
Height is the foremost front of the wave of streaming Change, Potential that is realized upon the ground of preceding Change. Yet realization takes place in finiteness, it flows steadily into the transient. There Reality gains Depth and roots downward, where old blossoms lift a new time from Emptiness.
The fiftieth floor of a high-rise builds upon the forty-ninth floor. This upon the forty-eighth, down to the cellar vault beneath the flood – filled with empty space, down to the bottomless foundation. A bird flies through the heights of the air because wings were given to it in previous time. And of course, because it swings its wings supple through the air, in which nitrogen and oxygen atoms provide the necessary weight to bring forth the property of lift from the interaction of wings and air.
Change depends on Change, the coming on what was, and the Height of experience, the lived Real, lies between.
A finite infinity in the eternal flow.
At the cellular level, trillions, quadrillions of Changes happen in seconds, between them lies the Change at the human level, in this complexity lies human Being, the Height of the next Change.
The Height of Reality flows over mountains into valleys of experiences
And freezes in memories.
In Height, imaginations and possibilities
From the entire Breadth gain their conscious adaptability
With which they stream over the flowing boundary
To hover in a realized blossom of Being.
^^Time is flowing Change itself.^^
^^Breadth: the possible paths of Change.^^
^^Height is realization itself^^, the experienceable finiteness in the form of Change.
Depth: Stabilizing Renewal
Height leads to Depth, where renewal roots – the reflection that leads old flow to new sources of time. Change, and thus time, arises from Emptiness beneath something Whole.
It flows toward the Breadth of possibilities, realizes itself in experience, and returns to Emptiness after its blossoming in Height. Change flows in a rising and sinking circle and roots through Depth, the length of its never-ending self-building interactions in the Whole, back into Emptiness, into its source and origin. Thus arises continuity, Change without fragmentation, not many single images but one experience, without clear boundaries or gaping leaps.
Thus rises the Spindle of Reality, Being, from flowing Change, anchors and roots itself deeply, weaves a mountain into the Height of crystalline complexity, as it like a fabric forms a landscape in which patterns rise and sink in the equilibrium of order and disorder, often mirror themselves but never repeat.
Depth consists, in a sense, of faded patterns that lift new Potential from Emptiness. Like a thought pattern, a habit that was broken, and the initiated Change through the breaking of the pattern rebuilds the new neuronal structures in the flow of context upon the old core – or like neuronal paths that newly arise from broken habits and transform old experiences into fresh potentials.
Depth mirrors a self-renewing process,
It is a reflection of the blossom
To lead the finite flow of Change into eternity,
And thus to mirror in it the infinity of Emptiness and the Whole.
This mirroring is woven into the Spindle of Reality, into Being,
Through the eye of the needle of Chaos and the eye of the needle of Beauty,
Between bottomless Emptiness and the all-encompassing Whole.
Depth is a return to the source, roots of Reality that reach to the seeds of creation – mirrored in the hot core of a star that draws old creation to itself and hurls new elements into the cosmos. According to the principle: *The old is mirrored, the new is sent.*
But since truly beautiful patterns carry a whole seed in their empty core,
The source of the Spindle is the place
Where whole infinity and empty infinity end and begin.
Like the deep roots of a tree, Depth moderates the momentum of Change, steers it, creates a rock upon which complexity arises and against which it breaks.
^^Time is flowing Change itself.^^
^^Breadth: the possible paths of Change.^^
^^Height is realization itself^^, the experienceable finiteness in the form of Change.
^^Depth mirrors the reflection of experience^^ into a new flow of time.
These four fundamental forms – Time, Breadth, Height, and Depth – form the framework in which Reality unfolds. Yet they alone do not suffice to grasp the full complexity of Being. The question presses upon us: Where are the boundaries of this flow? Between which shores does Change stream? This question leads us to the next contemplation – to that tension between the absolutely Empty and the absolutely Whole, between which everything experienceable weaves itself.