—

I’m six years old, in the car with my parents and brother, travelling back from our annual two week holiday in Conwy, North Wales. It’s dark and the journey seems to take forever. I lie in the back seat, watching the orange streetlights and the houses pass by, and wonder if we’re ever going to get home.

“Are we nearly there yet?” I ask my father.

“Don’t be silly,” he says. “We only set off half an hour ago.”

My mum plays the ‘Yes/No’ game and ‘Twenty questions’ with us to make the time pass faster. We listen to the radio for a while. Then I fall asleep. When I wake up it seems like I’ve been in the car for an eternity and I can’t believe we’re still not home.

“Are we nearly there yet?” I ask again.

“Not far now,” says my father.

We play some more games and finally I recognise the streets of our suburb of Manchester. I feel bored and miserable and tell myself that I’m never going to spend as long in a car ever again.

The journey from Conwy to Manchester took two hours when I was a child and still takes roughly two hours now (although slightly less due to improvements in roads). I made the journey again a few years ago and couldn’t believe how short it seemed now, from my adult perspective. Those two hours – which seemed like an eternity when I was 6 – were nothing. My girlfriend was driving, and we chatted, listened to tapes, watched the Welsh countryside give way to the urban sprawl of north-west England, and we were back in Manchester almost before we knew it. It was a little frightening – what had happened to all the time that two hours contained when I was six years old?

A year or so ago I made another journey which gave me an indication of how much more quickly time is passing to me now. This was a 15 hour plane journey, from Singapore to Manchester, which also seemed to last forever. I’m not a very good flyer and it wasn’t a very good flight: we flew into two typhoons over India and it was rocky almost all the way. I hoped I’d be able to ‘kill’ some of the time by sleeping but it was impossible. Every time I drifted off my anxiety woke me up again. Failing that, I hoped I’d at least be able to make the time pass quickly by distracting myself with the in-flight entertainment or with books and magazines, but my mind stubbornly refused to move from the moment to moment reality of the situation. I was aware of every minute passing, and as a result time seemed to drag horribly. Every time I checked the clock – which was every few minutes or so – less time had gone by than I expected.

My subjective sense of how long that journey took is, I realised recently, very similar to my sense of how long my childhood journey to Conwy took. To me they seemed to involve roughly the same amount of boredom and impatience and to last for roughly the same amount of time. This suggests that what was two hours to me as a child is equivalent to 15 hours to me as an adult – which means, rather frighteningly, that time is now passing around seven times faster than when I was a child.

This story appears to fit with most people’s experience. Most of us feel that time moved very slowly when we were children and is gradually speeding up as we grow older. We’ve all remarked on it: how Christmas seems to come round quicker every year; how you’re just getting used to writing the date of the new year on your cheques and you realise that it’s almost over; how your children are about to finish school when it doesn’t seem long since you were changing their nappies…

Questionnaires by psychologists have shown that almost everyone – including college students – feels that time is passing faster now compared to when they were half or a quarter as old as now. And perhaps most strikingly, a number of experiments have shown that, when older people are asked to guess how long intervals of time are, or to ‘reproduce’ the length of periods of time, they guess a shorter amount than younger people.

We usually become conscious of this speeding up around our late twenties, when most of us have ‘settled down.’ We have steady jobs and marriages and homes and our lives become ordered into routines – the daily routine of working, coming home, having dinner and watching TV; the weekly routine of (for example) going to the gym on Monday night, going to the cinema on Wednesday night, going for a drink with friends on Friday night etc.; and the yearly routine of birthdays, bank holidays and two weeks’ holiday in the summer. After a few years we start to realise that the time it takes us to run through these routines seems to be decreasing, as if we’re on a turntable which is picking up speed with every rotation. As the French philosopher Paul Janet noted more than a hundred years ago:

Whoever counts many lustra in his memory need only question himself to find that the last of these, the past five years, have sped much more quickly than the preceding periods of equal amount. Let any one remember his last eight or ten school years: it is the space of a century. Compare with them the last eight or ten years of life: it is the space of an hour.1

This speeding up is probably responsible for the phenomenon which psychologists call ‘forward telescoping’: our tendency to think that past events have happened more recently than they actually have. Marriages, deaths, the birth of children – when we look back at these and other significant events, we’re often surprised that they happened so long ago, shocked to find that it’s already four years since a friend died when we thought it was only a couple of years, or that a niece or nephew is already ten years old when it only seems like three or four years since they were born.

As one 83 year old man told me, “I can never guess how long ago things happened. People ask me things like ‘When did so and so get married?’ or ‘When did so and so die?’ and I’m always way out. If I say it was two years it turns out to be 5 years. If I say six months, it’s two years.” The same holds true for national and international events, like the deaths of famous people, natural disasters and wars: studies have shown that people usually date these too recently as well. And perhaps this is because time is speeding up as we get older. Time is moving more quickly than we think. It doesn’t seem like four years since a friend died or a baby was born, or since a famous person died, because during those four years time has been speeding up without you realising, making every month and year shorter than the one before.

The Proportional and Biological Theories

So why do we experience this speeding up of time?

One popular answer is the ‘proportional’ theory, which suggests that the important factor is that, as you get older, each time period constitutes a smaller fraction of your life as a whole. This theory seems to have been first put forward in 1877 by Paul Janet, who suggested the law that, as William James describes it, “the apparent length of an interval at a given epoch of a man’s life is proportional to the total length of the life itself. A child of 10 feels a year as 1/10 of his whole life – a man of 50 as 1/50, the whole life meanwhile apparently preserving a constant length.”2 At the age of one month, a week is a quarter of your whole life, so it’s inevitable that it seems to last forever. At the age of 14, one year constitutes around 7% of your life, so that seems to be a large amount of time too. But at the age of 30 a week is only a tiny percentage of your life, and at 50 a year is only 2% of your life, and so your subjective sense is that these are insignificant periods of time which pass very quickly.

There is some sense to this theory – it does offer an explanation for why the speed of time seems to increase so gradually and evenly, with almost mathematical consistency. One problem with it, however, is that it tries to explain present time purely in terms of past time. The assumption behind it is that we continually experience our lives as a whole, and perceive each day, week, month or year becoming more insignificant in relation to the whole. But we don’t live our lives like this. We live in terms of much smaller periods of time, from hour to hour and day to day, dealing with each time period on its own merits, independently of all that has gone before.

There are also biological theories. One of these is that the speeding up of time is linked to how our metabolism gradually slows down as we grow older. Because children’s hearts beat faster than ours, because they breathe more quickly and their blood flows more quickly etc., their body clocks ‘cover’ more time within the space of 24 hours than ours do as adults. Children live through more time simply because they’re moving through time faster. Think of a clock which is set to run 25% faster than normal time – after 12 hours of normal time it has covered 15 hours, after 24 hours of normal time it has covered 30, which means that, from that clock’s point of view, a day has contained more time than usual. On the other hand old people are like clocks which run slower than normal, so that they lag behind, and cover less than 24 hours’ time against a normal clock.

Also from a biological perspective, there is the ‘body temperature’ theory. In the 1930s the psychologist Hudson Hoagland conducted a series of experiments which showed that body temperature causes different perceptions of time. Once, when his wife was ill with the flu and he was looking after her, he noticed that she complained that he’d been away for a long time even if he was only away for a few moments. With admirable scientific detachment, Hoagland tested her perception of time at different temperatures, and found that the higher her temperature, the more time seemed to slow down for her, and the longer she experienced each time period. Hoagland followed this up with several semi-sadistic experiments with students, which involved them enduring temperatures of up to 65C, and wearing heated helmets. These showed that raising a person’s body temperature can slow down their sense of time passing by up to 20%. And the important point here may be that children have a higher body temperature than adults, which may mean that time is ‘expanded’ to them. And in a similar way, our body temperature becomes gradually lower as we grow older, which could explain a gradual ‘constriction’ of time.

The Perceptual Theory

However, in my view, the speeding up of time we experience is mainly related to our perception of the world around us and of our experiences, and how this perception changes as we grow older.

The speed of time seems to be largely determined by how much information our minds absorb and process – the more information there is, the slower time goes. This connection was verified by the psychologist Robert Ornstein in the 1960s. In a series of experiments, Ornstein played tapes to volunteers with various kinds of sound information on them, such as simple clicking sounds and household noises. At the end he asked them to estimate how long they had listened to the tape for, and found that when there was more information on the tape (e.g. when there were double the number of clicking noises), the volunteers estimated the time period to be longer. He found that this applied to the complexity of the information too. When they were asked to examine different drawings and paintings, the participants with the most complex images estimated the time period to be longest.

I have tested this myself with a simple experiment with music. During a course, I asked the participants to listen to two pieces of music. One was a mad, frenetic piano concerto by Rachmaninov, with notes cascading at a rate of about 10 per second. The other was a piece of ambient music by Brian Eno, which floated gently and sedately across the room. We listened to the pieces for different periods of time and I asked the participants to estimate how much time had passed. If time perception is related to information, they should have experienced more time for the Rachmaninov piece. It contains a lot more information than the Brian Eno piece – many times more notes, tones and different instruments. All of this extra information should have stretched time.

And this is what the results showed. We listened to the Rachmaninov piece for 2 mins 20 secs, and the average estimate was 3 mins 25 secs. We listened to the Brian Eno piece for 2 minutes, while the average estimate was 2 mins 32 secs – still an over-estimate, but a lower one.

And if more information slows down time, perhaps part of the reason why time goes so slowly for children is because of the massive amount of ‘perceptual information’ that they take in from the world around them. Young children appear to live in a completely different world to adults – a much more intense, more real and more fascinating and beautiful one. As the psychologist Ernest Becker writes, in childhood we experience a “vision of the primary miraculousness of creation,” and our perceptions of the world are “suffused… in emotion and wonder.” This is one of the reasons why we often recall childhood as a time of bliss – because the world was a much more exciting and beautiful place to us then, and all our experiences were so intense. Children’s heightened perception means that they’re constantly taking in all kinds of details which pass us adults by – tiny cracks in windows, tiny insects crawling across the floor, patterns of sunlight on the carpet etc. And even the larger scale things which we can see as well seem to be more real to them, to be brighter, with more presence and is-ness. All of this information stretches out time for children.

However, as we get older, we lose this intensity of perception, and the world becomes a dreary and familiar place – so dreary and familiar that we stop paying attention to it. After all, why should you pay attention to the buildings or streets you pass on the way to work? You’ve seen these things thousands of times before, and they’re not beautiful or fascinating, they’re just… ordinary. As Becker describes it, we “repress” this intensity of vision. “By the time we leave childhood,” he writes, “we have closed it off, changed it, and no longer perceive the world as it is to raw experience.”3 Or as Wordsworth puts it in his famous poem ‘Intimations of Immortality’, the childhood vision which enabled to all things “apparelled in celestial light,” begins to “fade into the light of common day.”4 And this is why time speeds up for us. As we become adults, we begin to ‘switch off’ to the wonder and is-ness of the world, gradually stop paying conscious attention to our surroundings and experience. As a result we take in less information, which means that time passes more quickly. Time is less ‘stretched’ with information.

Old and New Experience

And once we become adults, there is a process of progressive ‘familiarisation’ which continues throughout our lives. The longer we’re alive, the more familiar the world becomes, so that the amount of perceptual information we absorb decreases with every year, and time seems to pass faster every year.

There are two basic reasons why this happens. On the one hand, as we grow older there is progressively less newness in our lives. The life of a 20 year old woman is still full of new experiences. She’s still discovering new kinds of music, food, literature and other new hobbies and interests. She might be experiencing her first serious romantic relationship, learning to drive, flying and going abroad for the first time, discovering new towns or the countryside close to where she lives and so on. When she has these new experiences she is free of the de-sensitising mechanism; she perceives the ‘raw experience’ of the world and processes a large amount of perceptual information.

The same person at the age of 30 might still be having a few new experiences. She might be having a baby, going abroad to another country she’s never been to before, learning a new language, or starting a new job. But by the time she reaches 40 the world contains much less unfamiliarity. Her life probably consists mainly of the repetition of experiences which she’s had hundreds or thousands of times before. She works at the job she’s had for the last 20 years, goes home to the same house she’s had for the last ten, devotes her free time to the same hobbies and interests she discovered when she was 20, goes away at weekends to the same countryside, to the same foreign country every year, and so on. Because of this the de-sensitising mechanism has a greater hold over her. She’s hardly ever free of it, which means that she absorbs much less perceptual information.

But if this was the only reason why our perceptions become less fresh – and why time speeds up – as we get older, there wouldn’t be much difference between the time perceptions of a 40 and a 60 year old person. Most of us use up almost all of our ‘stock’ of new experience by the time we reach middle-age, and so there would be no real reason why time should appear to move faster for a person at these different ages. However, the second reason why our perceptions become less fresh is probably that as we get older all the experiences we’ve already had become more familiar to us. Not only do we have fewer new experiences, but the experiences which are already familiar to us become progressively less real. In William James’ words, “each passing year converts some of this experience into automatic routine.”5 As well as experiencing lots of new things, a woman at the age of 20 is still quite ‘fresh’ to the phenomenal world around her – but over the next 20 years, she’ll look at the same street scenes and the same sky and the same trees thousands of times, so that more and more of their realness will fade away.

Incidentally, this link between time and information can explain other aspects of time too. One of the ‘laws’ of psychological time which I set out in my book Making Time is that “time seems to slow down when we’re exposed to new environments and experiences.” This is because the unfamiliarity of new experiences allows us to take in much more information. Another of the laws is that “time goes quickly in states of absorption.” This is because in states of absorption our attention narrows to one small focus and we block out information from our surroundings. At the same time there is very little ‘cognitive information’ in our minds, since the concentration has quietened the normal ‘thought chatter’ of the mind. On the other hand, time goes slowly in states of boredom and discomfort because in these situations our attention isn’t occupied and a massive amount of thought-chatter flows through our minds, bringing a massive amount of cognitive information.

Slowing Down Time

On the positive side though, if we know why time speeds up as we get older we aren’t powerless against it. If we know that this is caused by familiarity, then we make an effort to expose ourselves to as much newness in our lives as possible – not just new environments through travel (although this is very important), but new challenges, new situations, new information, ideas, hobbies and skills. As the expansion of time which we often experience when we go to foreign countries shows, newness and unfamiliarity stretch time. If we regularly expose ourselves to unfamiliarity, we can experience more time in our lives, and so effectively live for ‘longer.’

If you spend all the years of your adult life doing the same job, living in the same house in the same area, doing the same things with the same people in your free time, then it’s inevitable that you experience a swift passage of time. But if you change jobs regularly, regularly travel to new places, keep investigating new ideas and giving yourself new challenges, time will pass more slowly to you. In this way, it’s possible for a person who dies before the age of 40 (like the French poet and explorer Arthur Rimbaud, who I wrote about recently in New Dawn) to live for ‘longer’ than a person who dies at the age of 80.

A second way in which we can slow down time is by making a conscious effort to be ‘mindful’ of our experience. There are some people who seem to be as affected by familiarity than others, and see the world with something of the fresh, first-time vision of children all through their lives. These are the kind of people – sometimes seen as eccentrics by those around them – who often begin sentences with phrases like ‘Isn’t it strange that…?’ or ‘Have you ever wondered…?’ They’re the kind of people who might stop in the street to gaze up at a beautiful scene of the sun breaking through clouds or a silver moon above the rooftops; or they might stare intently at the sea, at flowers or at animals, as if they’ve never seen them before. Poets and artists often have this kind of ‘child-like’ vision – in fact it’s this that usually provides the inspiration for their work. They often have a sense of strangeness and wonder about things which most of us take for granted, and feel a need to capture and frame their more intense perceptions. These people will be less affected by the first time law of psychological time than others; time may well speed up for them, but perhaps not to the same degree.

And in a sense, we can cultivate this attitude simply by making a conscious effort to be ‘mindful.’ Instead of focusing our attention on the ‘thought-chatter’ in our heads or on tasks or distractions like TV or computer games, we should try to live in the present, to give our attention to the experiences we’re having and to our surroundings. When you’re having a shower in the morning, for example – instead of letting your mind chatter away about the things you’ve got to do today or the things you did last night, try to bring your attention to the here and now, to really be aware of the sensation of the water splashing against and running down your body and the sense of warmth and cleanness you feel. Or on the way home from work on the bus or the train – instead of mulling over all the problems you’ve had to deal with at work or daydreaming about the attractive girl you met last night, focus your attention outside you; look at the sky, at the houses and buildings you pass, and be aware of yourself here, walking amongst them.

Mindfulness means stopping thinking and starting to be aware, to live in the here and now of your experience instead of the ‘there and then’ of your thoughts. It stretches time in exactly the same way that new experience does: because we give more attention to our experience, we take in more information from it.

In other words, to some extent we can control time. It doesn’t have to speed up as get older. Some of us try to extend our lives by keeping fit and eating healthy food, which is completely sensible. But it’s also possible for us to expand time from the inside, by changing the way we experience the moment to moment reality of our lives. We can live for longer not just in terms of years, but also in terms of perception.

Footnotes:

1. Quoted in W. James, The Principles of Psychology, (New York: Dover Press, 1950) Chapter XV.

2. Ibid.

3. E. Becker, The Denial of Death, (New York: Free Press, 1973), p.50.

4. W. Wordsworth, Poems, (London: Penguin, 1950), p.71.

5. James, op.cit.

.

STEVE TAYLOR is an author and lecturer who lives in Manchester, England. This article is based on his new book Making Time: Why Time Seems to Pass at Different Speeds and How to Control It, published in Australia by Allen & Unwin. The book has been described by Dr. Stanley Krippner as “a major landmark in our understanding of how human beings experience time.” Steve is also the author of The Fall: The Evidence for a Golden Age and the Dawning of a New Era, described as “astonishing work” by Colin Wilson. Steve can be contacted at essytaylor@yahoo.com. His website is www.stevenmtaylor.com.

The above article appeared in New Dawn No. 104 (Sept-Oct 2007).

Read this article with its illustrations by downloading
your copy of New Dawn 104 (PDF version) for only US$2.95

© New Dawn Magazine and the respective author.
For our reproduction notice, click here.

Hypercube

BY JAY WEIDNER

—

The age of iron has no other seal than that of Death. Its hieroglyph is the skeleton, bearing the attributes of Saturn: the empty hourglass, symbol of time run out…
– Fulcanelli

The inspiration for this article comes from my almost nineteen years of research into the Great Cross of Hendaye and the French alchemist Fulcanelli. The unknown, anonymous, alchemist Fulcanelli in his masterpieceThe Mysteries of the Cathedrals first brought the cross at Hendaye, France to the world’s attention.

While the details of this research can be found in other articles written by myself and in the two books I co-authored,1 it can be stated that the Great Cross at Hendaye appears to be describing not only the end of the great four ages of the Hindu Yuga system but also the four ages of alchemical chronological time keeping. According to the cross at Hendaye, the Iron Age, or the Kali Yuga, will be coming to an end with the galactic alignment on the winter solstice of December 21st, 2012.

According to the mythology of the Yuga system, there are four ages of life and time on our planet. It is important to remember there are many cycles within cycles in the Hindu Yuga system so the years mentioned next may have to do with a larger cycle than the one addressed in this article. Perhaps the huge number of years referred to below is the cycle of the solar system as it circles another star, or perhaps it is a portion of the great cycle of one revolution around the galactic centre.

The first age is the Satya Yuga or the Golden Age, according to Fulcanelli. The Hindu texts tell us that this age lasts 1,728,000 years. This is an age of extreme splendour when the beings on our planet appear to live much longer than they do now. In this age there are no wars, famines, strife or evil.

The second age is called the Treta Yuga, or the Silver Age. As in the second law of thermodynamics, or entropy, things begin to slip in this age and the beings on Earth begin to deteriorate. This slippage, at least during this second age, is the beginning of corruption, and evil is introduced into the planetary sphere. This age lasts 1,296,000 years according to the Vedic texts of India.

The third age of this cycle is called the Dvapara Age, or the Bronze Age. This is the beginning of the ‘fall’ of humanity. In this age corruption comes on more fully, evil begins to spread, and things start to fall into disharmony. This age lasts 864,000 years.

The last age is called the Kali Yuga, or the Iron Age. This age is the age we are in right now. Evil and corruption become the driving force as greed, wars, famine and disease spread across the planet like a tidal wave of death and destruction. This age lasts, according to the Hindu texts for 432,000 years.2

What is important to understand while discussing these huge numbers found in the Hindu texts is they are describing the four ages within a context of understanding that each successive age is shorter than the previous age. The Satya Yuga, or the Golden Age, is one quarter longer than the Treta Yuga, or the Silver Age. The Treta Yuga is one quarter longer than the Dvapara Yuga, or the Bronze Age. Understanding these differences in the lengths of the ages becomes important to the following discussion.

According to Fulcanelli and the cross at Hendaye, the alchemical Four Ages comprise the four quadrants of a 25,920 year-long cycle called the precession of the equinoxes. Essentially, the precession of the equinoxes can be explained by the fact that our Earth has a wobble. Like a top spinning on the floor, as it begins to lose momentum this wobble of the Earth takes nearly 26,000 years to unfold. The strange engraving of the four ‘A’s’ (see Figure 5) on the cross of Hendaye is a “hieroglyph of the universe”, according to Fulcanelli. It is “comprised of the conventional signs of heaven and earth, the spiritual and the temporal, the macrocosm and the microcosm, in which major emblems of the redemption (cross) and the world (circle) are found in association.”

The Precession of the Equinoxes

What Fulcanelli appears to be saying here is that the precession of the equinoxes is to be divided into four distinct ages of 6,480 years each (4 divided into 25,920) or, to round off the figures to approximately 6,500 years each. This is also interesting because the zodiacal cycle, which lasts 25,920 years, has four fixed signs. These are the signs of Aquarius, Taurus, Leo and Scorpio. These four signs are separated by 6,500 years each. Also in the Book of Ezekiel and in the Book of Revelation we are told of the angel with four faces. This angel has the face of a Lion (Leo), a Bull (Taurus), a Man (the angel) and an Eagle (in older times Scorpio was represented by an eagle instead of a scorpion). Apparently, according to Fulcanelli, both of these books in the Bible are warnings and messages about the four quadrants of the precession of the equinoxes and appear to be telling us that there is some kind of great change whenever we arrive at one of these four signs.

Of course it is well known that we are currently entering the Age of Aquarius. The Cross at Hendaye and Fulcanelli are telling us there are tremendous changes to be found here on Earth when we enter into one of the four fixed signs. Apparently these changes can be cataclysmic.

Obviously this 6,500 year long dating of the four alchemical ages disagrees with the Hindu Yuga system, which insists that each Yuga is of varying time lengths. It is in trying to iron out the dissimilarities in these two time periods that the hyperdimensional aspects of time can be best revealed.

It is well known in modern physics that four dimensional space, of which time is an aspect, is in the shape of a hypersphere (see Figure 3). This hypersphere appears similar to the shape of a donut, or a bagel. The energy, or the flow of the energy stream, within this hypersphere works like this: As shown in the illustration, the flow comes out of the bottom of the sphere, winds its way up around the outside edge, crosses the outside equator of the torus sphere and moves towards the hole in the top of this torus. The energy flow then begins to fall through the top of the hole and begins to spin in a vortex. This energy flow continues until it comes out of the bottom side of the torus where the energy flow begins its outward expansion again. This flow is continuous and, in a sense, infinite.

The Four Dimensional Hypersphere torus is also represented by the hypercube. A hypercube is a cube within a cube according to physicists. Essentially this cube, also called ‘The Cube of Space’ or the ‘Tetragrammatron’ by the alchemists, is a straight edged version of the donut shaped hypersphere (see Figure 2).

Scientists love to be able to construct objects using straight lines, so they have created the hypercube to help them better understand the hyperdimensional universe that surrounds us. Alchemists, however, like to use the curved lines of nature, so the donut shaped torus or hypersphere, is a better, more natural visual description of hyperdimensional space and will be the one I use in this article.

The alchemists believe there is a hyperdimensional ‘body’ around every living thing on Earth. This hyperdimensional ‘body’ or sphere known to mystics as the luminous energy body, also surrounds every planet and star as well. Each object in the three dimensional world is an affectation of four-dimensional space. Humans, animals, plants, planets and stars are the solid inside of the fourth dimensional energy flow. As you will see, time also travels in this fashion.3

In order to begin to comprehend the topographical nature of time, it is very important to understand the guts of this hyperdimensional sphere. By the ‘guts’ I am referring to the vortexes that make up the energy flow running through the centre of the hypersphere. As the energy flow begins to fall into the vortex that runs through the centre of the sphere, it takes on the shape of a tetrahedron.

A tetrahedron, as shown in Figure 4, is the building block of three-dimensional space and is the founding member of the Platonic Solids. The tetrahedron is the simplest object that can be created in three dimensions. The only object with just four sides, the tetrahedron is also shaped like a vortex.

Let us digress for a moment and discuss vortexes. Back in the Midwest of the United States, where I come from, there is a place called Tornado Alley. This is the flat Great Plains that stretches from Texas to the Dakotas. Each year this area is visited by numerous tornados, which wreak havoc on the farms and towns of this area. These tornados usually start in May and last until early August. Having witnessed several tornados in my early years I became fascinated by them and was once even a ‘storm chaser’. In my young and foolish days I used to chase after tornados with my Bolex 16mm camera in order to capture them on film. I became very familiar with these lethal vortexes.

But understanding tornados also helps us understand vortexes and the density of forces in the hypersphere. Tornados (and also hurricanes) are made up of air like that which surrounds us all the time. But as the air begins spinning it takes on a strange solidity. While the swirling air at the top of a tornado is somewhat dangerous, it is the spinning air near the surface of the ground that is really dangerous. Near the tip of a tornado, where it is in contact with the ground, the air takes on the quality of solid iron. The tips of tornados can rip buildings apart, throw cars and trucks thousands of feet, and punch chaffs of wheat into the very centre of trees like a bullet. As the air spins more violently, the tip of the tornado vortex becomes as strong as 50 locomotives engines and possesses the density of the hardest of metals. Yet it is just comprised of air molecules. But these molecules are spinning so quickly they create a mass that is extremely powerful. It is the spin of the air that causes it to densify and take on the solidity of metals.

Getting back to the central core of our hyperdimensional torus, we can understand the vortexes inside this sphere and how time unfolds by using the tornado analogy. As the energy flow begins to dip down into the top of the tetrahedral shaped vortex, it begins to spin. As the energy flow descends, its spin becomes more rapid and compressed. Like a tornado, as it reaches further down, the tip of the vortex ‘hardens’. It could be said that his hardening of vorticular forces is what makes up the solidity of our three dimensional space. Each human, plant, animal and indeed every planet and star alike are the hardened tips of hyperdimensional vortexes, which are flowing all around us constantly.

Like air, these hyperdimensional forces are pretty much invisible to us. It is only when these forces coagulate into a spinning vortex that they can be seen and felt. It is through the rapid spinning of four-dimensional space that the solidity of the third dimension is actually created. The mystics from all great traditions know this and they realised these inner dynamics of the fourth dimension as it interacts with the third dimension. The fourth dimension is the surrounding sphere and the third dimension are the tetrahedral vortexes that make up the central core of the sphere. To the ancients, four-dimensional space was called ‘spirit’ and three-dimensional space was called ‘matter’.

So what does this have to do with time and the topography of time? Remember the dilemma we face in trying to make the four ages of the precession match up with the Ages or Yugas from the Hindu system? By attempting to make the two into one we can not only understand the topology of time, but also we can map time like the ancients and we can know where we are in the river of time.

As shown in illustration Figure 3, imagine that we are coming through the very centre of where the two tetrahedral tornado vortexes intersect at the very centre of the inner hyperdimensional sphere. Moving down the bottom vortex towards the outside surface of the sphere, each spin in the vortex takes longer and is wider and slower than the previous spin in the vortex. In other words, the energy flow expands after it passes the ‘null’ point in the very centre of the hyperdimensional sphere, or torus, where the tips of the two tetrahedral vortexes touch.

This energy flow continues its expansion as it climbs over the lip of the bottom edge of the sphere where the vortex meets the outside edge of the sphere. The energy flow continues to expand until it reaches the outside equator area of the sphere. Once it gets past the equator, the energy flow begins to condense, the flow begins to move faster and the spin density increases. This flow continues until the energy flow reaches the upper lip of the outside of the hyperdimensional sphere where it begins to ‘fall’ into the top of the tornado tetrahedral vortex.

Now as the flow of energy falls down the vortex towards the null point at the very centre of the sphere it begins to harden as it spins faster and faster. This goes on and on until the vortex is so hard it is like iron. This is how the fourth dimensional forces create three-dimensional reality. As the vortex spins faster and faster eventually it compresses down to the point where it has nowhere to go but outwards again. This occurs at the null point in the centre of the sphere and the energy flow now begins to once again expand.

The Golden Age is the time period that starts at the null point in the centre of the sphere and continues through the bottom vortex. As the energy flow expands outwards time appears to slow down. The entire period of the Satya Yuga, or the Golden Age, continues as the energy flow goes down the bottom vortex and rounds across the top of the sphere. It continues expanding until it arrives at the equator.

The equator of the outside of the hyperdimensional sphere is the borderline between the Satya Yuga and Treta Yuga, or the Golden Age and the Silver Age. Now the energy flow begins to contract as it flows upwards towards the north pole of the hypersphere.

The Silver Age, or the Treta Yuga, continues until the energy flow rounds the top lip of the hyperdimensional sphere and begins to fall into the upper tetrahedral vortex. This then is the borderline between the Treta Yuga and the Dvapara Yuga, or the border between the Silver Age and the Bronze Age.

About two thirds down in the upper vortex, where the energy flow is spinning so fast that it becomes as solid as iron, is the beginning of the last Age, the Kali Yuga, or the Iron Age. This spinning continues to gain density, compression and speed as it races towards the central null point in the very centre of the sphere. As it approaches this null point the forces become unbelievably fast, violent and dense. It is only when these forces achieve maximum density and they can no longer compress any further that they begin to suddenly flip and begin the expansion of the flow. This happens in an instant. This is the shift from the Iron Age, or the Kali Yuga to the Golden Age, or the Satya Yuga. The borderline between the Iron Age and the Golden Age is the most distinct border in this topographical illustration of hyperdimensional time. It is the most jarring and is instantaneous.

Take notice of the hourglass shape of the two tetrahedral vortexes inside the hyperdimensional sphere. Is this why Fulcanelli tells us about the hourglass in the quote at the beginning of this article? In Hindu mythology the God Shiva dances the world into and out of existence playing his dhamaru which is a two sided drum shaped like an hourglass.

Notice that, like the number of years in the Hindu Yuga system, the distance travelled through our ages in the hypersphere is similar; the Golden Age, which is the distance between the null point in the centre and the outside equator is twice the distance as that travelled through the Silver Age which is the distance from the equator to the top of the lip of the upper vortex. Equally, the distance travelled from the top of the vortex to two thirds down, which is the Bronze Age, is half the length of the Silver Age. Finally, the tip of the vortex is half the length of the Bronze Age.

This part, called the Iron Age, is the Age in which we live. This is also why, in the Iron Age, each second feels shorter than the second before. This is why each day, each month and year appear to be going faster than they did previously. In the topology of time this effect can be easily understood and explained.

Also remember, even though the distance travelled is much further in the Golden Age than it is in the Iron Age, the number of years it takes is the same. It takes 6,480 years to go through the Golden Age just as it takes 6,480 years to go through the Iron Age, but it feels much different. In the Golden Age each second, each day, each month and year appear to be longer than the previous day, month and year. Time is expanding in the Golden Age and with that expansion the anxiety and tension of the Iron Age disappears. It is a paradise, especially to those who may have survived the passing through the wormhole, or the null point at the centre of the hyperdimensional sphere.

Therefore, the years listed within the Yuga system are actually symbolic times that explain the lengths of time as it is felt not as it is lived. So the Golden Age or the Satya Yuga feels like it is much longer than the Kali Yuga, or the Iron Age.

The shamans in Peru tell us that we are approaching the Pacha Cuti, which means literally ‘the world turned upside down’. They say that it will arrive in the year 2012. This is also the year when the great Mayan calendar reaches its end point. The cross of Hendaye is quite explicit in saying we are reaching the very end of the Iron Age. I would suggest that the null point, or the wormhole at the very centre of the hypersphere, is very likely the 2012 date. Our hypersphere appears to be regulated by the periodic alignment of the galactic centre with the Sun. This also matches the four fixed signs of the zodiac and explains why the Christian tradition is preparing for the endtimes.

Oddly enough, it also appears that Stanley Kubrick is trying to tell us about the end of our Age in his masterpiece film 2001: A Space Odyssey. The Starchild at the end of the film has passed through the Star Gate of the black monolith and is returning to Earth to create a new world or a new Age.4

It is through our understanding of the Four Ages, the fixed signs of the zodiac, and the Yuga system that we can finally appreciate the message our ancestors have handed down to us. We are about to pass through the Star Gate, the wormhole, and the null point of hyperdimensional space.

The Cross of Hendaye reveals the most important knowledge of all, which is the end of time and the beginning of the Golden Age. Awareness of this knowledge helps us all to more fully comprehend the nature of the times in which we reside and the destiny of the human race.

The Quality of Time

At the very core of all the great spiritual traditions to be found across the planet from the ancient Egyptian to the Incan and Mayan, Indo-Tibetan, Alchemical Europe and even the Hebrew Kabbalah lies the knowledge of the secret of the alchemy of time. Unencumbered by the excessive demands, stresses and speed of the modern age, our ancestors spent lifetimes in contemplation of the essential mysteries of our world.

One of the great mysteries they discovered was that time is not stagnant or linear but flows in great transformative cycles. In fact, it is only recently modern historians have begun arguing that time travels in a straight line. Within the limited period of historical examination these modern historians are viewing a snap shot of history and believe this snapshot represents the entire picture. But does it?

The alchemists of Egypt and Medieval Europe knew that time moved in great elongated cycles, and that each part of the cycle had a ‘quality’. This quality shaped and reformed the world. Just as sunrise has a different quality from midnight, so too does each aspect of the great cycle possess a quality that distinguishes it from other parts of the cycle. When the cycle of time changes, so too do events change here on Earth.

These sacred scientists and alchemists of our past used various devices and practices to mark the changes in the quality of time. Astrology, divination and prophecy are some of the more obvious processes that our ancestors used to understand the mysterious process of time.

At the heart of the secrets traditions of the Egyptian and Greek mystery schools they knew that a process, which they called the precession of the equinoxes, measured the Great Cycle or the Great Year. What they understood was that the stars in the night sky are not fixed. Through their long observation and meditation upon the heavens they came to realise that the stars and the constellations were slowly changing their place in the sky above us. Creating the zodiac to assist them in these huge measurements of time they used the twelve signs to act as a giant time clock. Through this they began to understand the Great Cycle. They realised that it took 2,160 years to move through each sign of the zodiac and that it took 25,920 years for the equinoxes to move through all 12 signs. The creation of the Great Year of nearly 26,000 years gave them a clock that allowed them to measure time.

They then came to understand that each of the signs, or places on the clock appeared to bring forth changes in the quality of life here on Earth. So they came to realise that every 2,160 years the quality of time changed. They also began to understand that the four quadrants of this great chronological clock appeared to bring forth even sharper changes in the quality of time. The four signs associated with these four quadrants are the signs of Aquarius, Taurus, Leo and Scorpio. There does seem to be some historical linkage between this idea that passing through the edges of these four signs brings great changes here on Earth. About 6,500 years ago we passed through the sign of Taurus. Coincidentally, the human race began domesticating cattle, building walled cities, developing agriculture, fighting wars and beginning the city-states that would evolve into governments and monarchies. Thirteen thousand years ago, as we passed through the Age of Leo, great changes occurred including a dramatic climate shift as the ice ages began to end. The extinction of many animals including the Woolly Mammoth, the Saber Tooth Tiger, the Giant Tree Sloth, and many other species happened at about this time. Interestingly, according to anthropologists, the emergence of Cro-Magnon Man appears to have occurred about 26,000 years ago, the last time we passed through Aquarius.

The Great Cross at Hendaye is a 350-year-old alchemical monument to the end of time. It sits in a churchyard in Hendaye, France. The Great Cross at Hendaye appears to be a symbolical construct that explains this science of the cycles of time. The Cross at Hendaye describes the extraordinary changes that are about to occur in our present era. It speaks of the end of our current Age of Iron and the creation of a coming Golden Age.

The great cosmic time clock in the sky is changing. We are now entering the quadrant of Aquarius. From what the alchemical Cross at Hendaye is saying, this change is sure to have a dramatic effect on our species and on our planet.

What these changes are, or will be, is anybody’s guess. But they are sure to be spectacular and remarkable. The end of time, the end of this age and the great transformation of humanity is at hand. This change in the quality of time will govern and dictate the changes here on our fragile planet. The changes in the quality of time cannot be forestalled. The fundamentalist revival taking place all over the world reveals more about the quality of time from which we are emerging than it does reveal anything about the quality of time for that which is coming.

The Peruvian shamans living high up in the Andes Mountains have come down to tell us that a new species of human being is about to appear. They call this being ‘Homo Luminous’. They tell us that forerunners of Homo Luminous are already among us right now. Like Cro-Magnon Man of 26,000 years ago, the last time we passed through the cusp of Aquarius, so too now a new human is emerging.

This new human will possess entirely new qualities that we do not have. The great Avatars, Jesus Christ, Krishna and many others may have been early arrivals for this newly emerging species. Aquarius is the only one of the four quadrant signs that is symbolically represented by a human, and this human carries a container of water. This symbology is interesting as DNA can only be activated in water. So even the symbolic nature of the sign of Aquarius seems to suggest a change in the genetic structure of the human race.

Our spiritual existence is really a unique combination of free will and predestination. While we possess the ability to act freely within the moment, there is little we can do about the larger cycles of time and the qualities that emerge at the cusp of each of the four great signs. So as the hand on the great cosmic time clock passes into Aquarius one can expect massive changes to occur. While the ancient art of alchemy is concerned with many aspects of our existence including the extraction of light from plants and minerals, the transformation of the dark lead of our physical being into the pure gold of enlightenment and much more, alchemy also is a symbolic ontology concerned with the observation in the changes of the ‘quality’ of time through the 25,920 years-long duration of the Great Year.

The world is changing. The past will disappear and history will become legend and finally myth. Our destination is unknown. The only thing we know for sure is that it will change.

Footnotes:

1.  See www.jayweidner.com; The books A Monument to the End of Time: Alchemy, Fulcanelli and the Great Cross and Mysteries of the Great Cross of Hendaye: Alchemy at the End of Time are authored by Jay Weidner and Vincent Bridges.
2. For more information, see ‘Tolkien at the End of Time: Alchemical Secrets of the Lord of the Rings’ by Jay Weidner and Sharron Rose in New Dawn No. 82 (January-February 2004), and ‘Reflections on the Cycle of the Great Yuga’ by Sharron Rose at www.sharronrose.com.
3. For more information on the luminous energy body, see my films Healing the Luminous Bodywith Dr. Alberto Villoldo, ArtMind with Alex Grey and Yoga of Light with Sharron Rose.
4. See ‘Alchemical Kubrick: 2001: The Great Work on Film’at www.jayweidner.com.

JAY WEIDNER is a writer, filmmaker and Hermetic scholar. He is the co-author of Mysteries of the Great Cross at Hendaye: Alchemy and the End of Time and A Monument to the End of Time: Alchemy, Fulcanelli and the Great Cross. His documentaries include Artmind: The Healing Power of Sa­cred Art, featuring Alex Grey, Healing the Luminous Body: The Way of the Shaman, featuring Dr. Alberto Villoldo, Healing Sounds, featuring Jonathan Goldman, The Secrets of Alchemy which discusses the Cross at Hendaye, and many more. For more information on his work, go to www.sacredmysteries.com.

The above article appeared in New Dawn No. 92 (Nov-Dec 2005).

Read this article with its illustrations by downloading
your copy of New Dawn 92 (PDF version) for only US$2.95

© New Dawn Magazine and the respective author.
For our reproduction notice, click here.