Throughout my life I have made of point of reading books and watching movies about time. Certainly the most popular idea about time is time travel. This is the notion that, by some means, the hero of the story is able to travel back and forth in time. It’s a very attractive idea: to see the future, or to go back in the past and change events. It seems to have captivated our collective consciousness. Every year there are new movies about time travel. Some have been enormously popular, like the Back to the Future series. Two of my favorites are Slaughterhouse-Five and Happy Accidents.

I do believe in time travel. Time travel to the future. Time flows like a river and it seems as if each of us is carried relentlessly along by time’s current. But time is like a river in another way. It flows at different speeds in different places and that is the key to traveling into the future. ~ Stephen Hawking

But to understand if and how time travel is possible, we have to first know something about the dimensions of time. We must also understand how we perceive these dimensions.

Everybody knows that the first three dimensions refer to space: the line, the plane, and the solid. A line has length, but no width or depth. A plane has length and width, but no depth (or height). And a solid has length, width, and depth. We perceive our world in three dimensions of space, and so we can easily imagine all three. We take three-dimensional space for granted; we think of it as reality.

Let’s imagine for a moment a boat traveling on a calm lake. A line in this world will be the projected course the boat must take to go from one side of the lake to the other. The plane is the surface of the lake; and the boat itself can represent the solid.

Now imagine that we can only perceive in two dimensions and see only the surface of our lake. What would we see of the boat? We would only see a slice of the boat where it intersects with the surface of the water. And we wouldn’t know anything about the part of the boat above the waterline or below the waterline. We would be blind to its height and depth. Our perception of the boat would be limited, even flawed. We would know only an infinitesimally thin cross-section of the boat. The rest of it we would have to guess at. The reality of the boat, in three dimensions, would be lost to us.

Now imagine that the perception of our lives as a succession of moments along a line is also flawed. This is because of the limitations in the way we perceive time. We think of our lives as starting at birth and ending at death. We think that everything in between is the line of our life, which is the fourth dimension or the first dimension of time. But if the fourth dimension is a line of time, then our experience of the fourth dimension is flawed. We are generally not aware of our life as a line. In the state in which we are born, we are, at best, aware of the moment in which we are passing through. To be conscious of our life as a whole is reserved for the experience of higher centers.

If we think of consciousness as a light that originates in the moment, we can easily imagine that, if this light was bright enough, it would begin to illuminate the past and, possibly, if really bright, the future. Think of a streetlamp along a long unlit road. If you stand directly under that light and its light is dim, you only see where you stand. But if brightly lit, you will, to some degree, see where you came from and where you are going. The brighter the light shines the more you will see.

With conscious evolution we don’t imagine traveling back to the past or into the future. Instead, we learn to extend our vision from the present to include the past and the future.

In order to know the future it is necessary first to know the present in all its details, as well as to know the past. Today is what it is because yesterday was what it was. And if today is like yesterday, tomorrow will be like today. If you want tomorrow to be different, you must make today different.  ~ G. I. Gurdjieff

When we speak about higher centers, we are talking about a different perception of time. The experience of the fourth dimension, which begins with self-remembering and being present, is the capacity to see our lives in larger and larger segments, and even, in our highest moments, to see our lives as a whole, as one impression.

This is the first sentence of Kurt Vonnegut’s book Slaughterhouse-Five:

Listen: Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time.

The implication is that we are normally stuck in time. But what is stuck in time? Certainly not the mind. The mind can easily remember events from the past and imagine events in the future. That we can imagine time travel at all tells us that the mind is not stuck in time. What’s stuck in time is the physical body. In fact I would say that body is a time machine. It’s a machine that allows us to pass through time, though admittedly only in one direction and at a preset speed. Vonnegut’s genius was to have Billy Pilgrim’s consciousness, not his body, travel back and forth in time.

If the fourth dimension is a line in time, can we say that the fifth dimension is plane in time? And how can we imagine that?

In Slaughterhouse-Five the idea of free will or choice is a major theme. Billy Pilgrim doesn’t try to change his life. He slips back and forth along the line of his life without ever trying to change its direction. He is a passive observer. In Vonnegut’s world events like war, and even the destruction of the universe, are inevitable. There is no fifth dimension in Slaughterhouse-Five, only the fourth.

When we begin to talk about changing the past, about traveling back in time and changing the events that shaped our lives we are talking about the fifth dimension or recurrence. But not recurrence as Nietzsche understood it. To Nietzsche eternal recurrence was the greatest burden.

What, if some day or night, a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: ‘This life, as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh… must return to you—all in the same succession and sequence—even this spider and this moonlight between the trees and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence turns over again and again—and you with it, speck of dust!’ Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

Ouspensky saw the possibility of change within the idea of recurrence. But he thought it far from certain that most people would be able to take advantage of the changes that were possible.

Some people may have exactly the same recurrence. Other people may have different variations or possibilities. Some may go up and others may go down, and many other things. ~ P. D Ouspensky

Within the line that forms our life, there are many possibilities for deviation. For the purposes of illustration, let’s take an extreme example. A woman I know recently decided to stay home instead of going on a trip with a coworker, and the next day she found out that the coworker had been in a serious automobile accident. From the point of view of the fourth dimension, we would say that she was lucky or that it was fate. But from the point of view of the fifth dimension, she went on that trip; she was in that automobile accident. In the fifth dimension the possibilities that don’t happen to us exist. All the roads or lines that we don’t take continue down their natural course.

The fifth dimension means that even though recurrence requires us to live the same life, it doesn’t require us to make the same choices. Recurrence, as Ouspensky understood it, gives us the possibility to live out the choices we don’t actualize in this life. For instance, if you deeply regret certain choices you made in this life, you may recur to explore other choices.

Unfortunately this is not as simple as it sounds. It is not simple because the choices we make depend on our being. And if we don’t change our being, we cannot make better choices. From another point of view you can say that recurrence is about creating tendencies. For example, you might create a tendency to be strong and disciplined in this life. Then when, or if, you recur, the choices you make the next time will be the result of your being, which will be stronger and more disciplined. If, on the other hand, you create a tendency to be idle and lazy in this life, the next time around you will be more lazy and idle.

All acquired tendencies are supposed to repeat themselves. One person acquires a tendency to study or be interested in certain things. He will be interested again. Another acquires a tendency to run away from certain things. Then he will run away again. ~ P. D. Ouspensky

From the point of our spiritual evolution I tend to think of recurrence as supplemental to reincarnation. I don’t think an evolving being would wish to recur endlessly in the same life. Given that one life would, in the end, have a very limited framework of possibilities, it just seems more likely that, after a few recurrences, a being that was interested in growth would want to move on to a new and wider experience.

So is our dream of time travel just that, a dream?

I think the main thing to understand here is that our experience of the universe is not objective. We cannot get out of ourselves and study time because we are time-perceiving beings. And we can’t physically travel back to the past or forward to the future. This is because our bodies, which are made up of a certain kind of matter, cannot withstand the laws that dictate time travel.

If we want to visit other times and remember what we experienced, then the only real possibility seems to be to connect our perception to an entirely different level of matter. And we can do that. We can do it through conscious evolution, through the creation of an astral body that is free from the laws that restrict the physical body.

Our perception of time is more variable than we think. The fourth dimension is within our grasp. Think about your experience. Haven’t you at one time looked at another person and seen, not just that person in that moment, but their history—their suffering, their anger, their compassion, their whole experience of being human on this planet? That’s the fourth dimension. What we feel in that moment is not just a point in that person’s life, it’s a collection of points, which together, make up a line in time.

And if reincarnation and recurrence exist, which seems likely to me, then we will be able to travel to the future and the past. Only first we have to do the work of the moment; we have to be present and use our attention and focus to fashion a lighter and more durable vehicle.

Really, we are all time travelers, and our physical bodies are the time machines that we so badly want to invent.

For the full article by William Page, on his website BePresentFirst.org, read here: https://bepresentfirst.com/recurrence-higher-dimensions-and-time-travel/.