Saturday, February 21, 2009

Light is Timeless

Any object, or organism, traveling at the speed of light will not experience the passage of time. Everything around that object not traveling at light speed will experience time (even if at 99.9% the speed of light). So, if a spaceship left earth at light speed and returned in 20 years (our 20 years on the ground), those aboard would not have aged.

In the garden the sunflowers absorb all light but yellow, and so yellow is the only color reflected and is then what we see. In fact, the sunflower is every color but yellow. And yet, our perception of that sunflower--which visually is the perception of the speed of light being reflected--must be timeless. Our visual perceptions are timeless because everything we see, what is reflected to us, is traveling at light speed.

The sunflower will fade and turn to seed, but our perception is timeless, and not only because we remember it or write about it, but because observing it, seeing it, is timeless. Experiencing it is timeless. I don't mean this romantically, I mean this practically. When we allow ourselves to drop into the moment, into perceiving the sunflower, time does literally fall to the side. All of our outward perceptions slip away and all life is the moment, is the sunflower.

We can "lose" ourselves in any moment of course, and not realize the passage of time until we look at the clock with amazement, or we can not look at the clock at all and travel beyond ourselves into the now which has always been and will always be. Through a moment in our lives we can travel at the speed of light and glimpse the origins of the universe.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Where do we board?

Benjamin Vogt said...

Lincoln, NE. Alas.