What is Time and How It Works - Part 1: Your Context Data (ENGLISH)

Za´el: Hello everyone, I send you a big greeting.

I've been thinking and, you know, maybe I'd like to make the videos a bit more intimate, addressing the listener directly. So you who are listening, I salute you and hope you find it enjoyable or curious.

There is little that my colleagues have not said about time before, but it is a subject that is particularly important to me in understanding the workings of your mind, which happens to be the entire universe. I will express my way of looking at it in the simplest and most understandable way possible.

Right there where you are right now, sitting in your chair, your armchair, your couch, your sofa, your bed, cooking, exercising, walking, or enjoying the scenery while listening to me speak, time does not actually have to be moving forward, nor is it moving backwards. You are simply there, doing what you are doing. That situation you are living now, with me playing in the background, is nothing more or less than an idea.

Let's imagine you are painting a picture. Concentrate and draw it in your mind. First, you draw the environment. Where is this scene set? In a house? Outdoors? Then you add the following information: is it night? Is it daytime? Is it sunset, perhaps? Now you start to draw certain elements in that picture. For example, the main character in this scene. Let's say this person is a teenager because he's been living here for 14 years since he was born. We're going to draw that key ring he's had since he was a little boy, the computer he was recently given, and will also draw him looking at a magazine, thinking about the game he's going to buy in two months' time.

Now you have your picture. There is a young man tied to the laws of time inside it. He is 14 years old, he has to wait two months until he can buy his video game, and he hasn't always had that key ring and that computer. Each object was obtained at a different stage of his life. This is when I tell you, that you just did the same thing you do all the time anyway.

That drawing didn't need to exist for 14 years for that teenager to be that age. In reality, everything that we have captured in that drawing is nothing more than ideas represented in a frame of reality that we have called a picture. Right now, you hold the idea that you are of a certain age, that you have a certain amount of time left until this or that, and that you carry with you thousands of memories accumulated throughout your life.

But guess what? All these are those ideas and concepts that you, from a higher plane, decide to capture in this picture of your life, which you have decided to call reality. That is context for your character. This also means that the very fact that one event follows another event and the frame turns into an animation is also an idea, a rule for the game that you have decided that this is how you want it to work. Hence the idea that, from your perspective, nothing is real and everything is. Even so, yes, there is a certain perception of linearity that you have decided to impose on yourself.

What for? Let's just say that playing a video game or watching a movie by jumping to the end, then the beginning, then the middle, then three quarters of the game or movie, and so on and so on is not much fun, is it? So much so that it makes absolutely no sense at all.

Having understood this, and to finish for today, I'll give you one more idea. Imagine now that you have made several variants of your drawing. In one, exactly the same thing is happening, but at a different time of day. In another, it's all the same, but your character never got that computer. And in a third, it's all exactly the same, but he's in a different country.

Now, to each box, add a value or a code. Let's simplify it by numbering them as one, two, and three. Now, I ask you the following question: What happens when someone asks you to travel to Earth where that character of yours is to visit them? They will have to specify more data because there are three different variables in this case.

If you have understood this, now multiply the data as many times as many variables you can imagine. Perhaps this can help you understand a little better why it is not difficult to get lost making time jumps, why time is not really linear, and above all, that all the temporal, geographical, and circumstantial situations that you can imagine can be represented in codes, which in turn keep or represent that contextual information, that context, which will give meaning and life to your painting.

There are still things I would like to say about my way of seeing or understanding how time works, but I think I will leave the subject here for now, so as not to make it too dense.

For now, I'll leave you with the following questions, which I'd like you to think about until next time:

How does time work in dreams? What do you think is the difference between the way time works in dreams and this reality that you are perceiving right now?

It's not for you to answer me, it is for you to think about it.

Thank you very much for listening to me, I hope it has been pleasant for you.

See you soon.

Za´el of Erra.