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From this 'now' perspective, we can look 'back' at our past, hidden behind the 'southward' spacetime rim .Yet this is illusionary , a hangover of the flawed way we look at time through the ego-self window. The loop of time metaphor shows that when we look forward into the future we are also looking back into the past because the arrow of time traces out the full circumference of the circle, eventually coming back to itself.  
In this 'song of reality'. The distinction between past and future vanishes. The process of 'seeing'is then symetrical in both directions. In  T.S. Elliot's apt words:
                  Time present and time past
         are both perhaps present in time future
         and time future contained in time past
 
If this is what consciousness 'sees' it is 'timeless' in a deeper and different sense than we ever dreamed possible. In real time, such a closing of the loop would play havoc with our notions of causality, cause becoming effect and effect cause."
"…The unexpected feature of the loop of time metaphor is that a signal from the future becomes a signal from the past. Nothing is

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wholly new, for information is always travelling where it has been before. This is why I find the loop of time parable so satisfying. It resonates deeply with a poem cited earlier - T.S. Eliot's 'Little Gidding':                    we shall not cease from exploration
         and the end of our exploring
         will be to arrive where we started
         and know the place for the first time          through the unknown, remembered gate
         when the last of earth left to discover
         is that which was the beginning
The famous line 'know the place for the first time' is critically significant in the context of this book."
 
"…It is said of the renaissance artist Michaelangelo that he approached a block of marble believing that the perfect sculpture he sought to create already existed in the unhewn stone. The artistic act was thus an act of discovery not creation, and the long hours of painstaking work were devoted to revealing what was already there."
"…This is I believe, the stamp of an authentically creative act : one discovers what is already true.
When a human being 'sees' a pre-existing truth, already known to

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the cosmos, in a very deep sense, the universe recognises part of itself,comprehending it at a higher level of understanding. This kind of incremental knowing is the self-realization of the cosmos
In other words, there is a deep knowing about consciousness that is utterly distinct from mere intellectual comprehension. This deep knowing is a remembering of what is already there. One becomes, in the full sense, conscious of what one has always subconsciously been aware of. In terms Eliot's poem the 'gate'is remembered even though it is unknown. We arrive before we started and know the place for the first time!
We do not create the future, we discover it.
Roger Penrose captures something of the flavour of the mode of knowing in The Emperor's New Mind, when he says:
         Recall my proposal that consciousness, in essence, is the
        'seeing' of a necessary truth: and that it may represent some
         kind of actual contact with Plato's world of ideal mathemati-
         cal concepts. Recall that Plato's world is itself timeless. The
         perception of Platonic truth carries no actual information and
         there would be no actual contradiction involved if such a
         conscious perception were even to be                    
         propagated backwards
         in time
The loop of time metaphor goes a long way towards explaining a puzzle that many readers will have picked up as they worked their way through the pages of this book.
The argument I put forward in Chapters 8 and 9 "
 
At another moment  in the now of know time the scribe noted that the line containing  
' The argument I put forward in
Chapters 8 and 9' had 9 further words in the line.
As in
         ' that ego cages consciousness, is not a novel one -'
 
Further the scribe added  8 x 9 is  72
 
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" The argument I put forward in
Chapters 8 and 9, that ego cages consciousness, is not a novel one -
it is an ancient tenet of many religions. In particular, much of what I said in those chapters could be described as a scientific interpreta-tion of a set of  beliefs mapped out in the Hindu Upanishads thousands of years ago. Hindu belief, for example, sees the ego as a deception (maya) which seperates the ' I ' from the ultimate. When the mirage of ego is dissolved, the underlying union is made plain -
Thou art That  (tat tvam asi) is the illuminating recognition of this oneness. This is essentially the message of Chapter 8.
Even the metaphor of the ego-smudged mirror of consciousness that I have used repeatedly ( Chapter 8 to 10 )
has a Hindu parallel. Yoga teaching uses the simile of wind blowing across water to describe the relationship
between self and reality. While the wind blows , the water's surface - the mirror - is fragmented, shift-ing, the 'reality' it reflects continuously disrupted into half-truths

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and confusing images. However, when the wind stops, the surface of the water like that of the mirror, becomes still and perfect, reflecting the wholesome majesty of God, beheld in motionless serenity.    
Hence, the origin of the much misunderstood word 'nirvana', ( nir = beyond;  vana = wind ).
Moreover, Eastern religions seem to have arrived by mystical contemplation and insight at an understanding of the deep structure of physical reality that Western science has only recently been able to formulate in empirical mathematical terms . Consider these two descriptions of the nature of time, as quoted by Fritjof Capra in his well-known text, The Tao of Physics



It is believed by most that time passes; in actual fact it stays
where it is.This idea of passing may be called time, but it is an
incorrect idea,for since one sees it only as passing,one cannot
understand that it just stays where it is.
                                                                 Zen master Dogen    
 
This passage captures the essence of the relativistic picture of time.
A further insight into time comes from a Buddhist text:
  
It was taught by the Buddha oh Monks that …the past, the future
physical space… and individuals are nothing but names, forms
of thought, words of common useage, merely superficial realities.  
 
This passage not only encapsulates the modern scientific view of our subjective sense of time , with its false tense structure (past present future); it also aptly summarises the formative role of language in the creation of the ego-self.
Is all I have done in this book retell, in the imagery of science, a story of reality that has been known to mystics for centuries? In one sense the answer is no. I have tried to derive my argument entirely from known scientific premises, attempting at all times to keep my logic internally consistent. However, in another sense the answer is yes. I have already said that the linear logic of the left brain has, from one point of view, been compelled to create science so that it could 'see' in its own conceptual way, the image of unity that the right brain had, through intuition, glimpsed aeons ago.
This leads me to an adventurous speculation. The time when many of the 'deep myths' of our species crystallised out - about 5000 to 3000 years ago in the West - corresponds remarkably with the period of the Fall, the emergence of the ego-self. At this

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transition stage of human evolution, consciousness was by the definition of my argument, ber in highly evolved individuals because the confounding distractions of the still evolving ego had not yet hardened into their final form. It is not surprising that the visionaries or prophets of that period possessed a more powerful insight than we do today, submerged as we are in the fallacy of our tick-tock time.
What I am suggesting is that the prophets who formulated the deep intuitive insights common to the major religions of humanity were in some sense tuned in to the future,'seeing the dim and far-off image of knowledge still unborn, listening perhaps to the holistic message of a science thousands of years away, in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries of the modern era I propose that this is precisely what consciousness recognises, not just a premonition of the past but a memory of the future.        
 

Page 95

" A few physicits like to make a connection between an observer-dependent universe and some of the ideas in Eastern mysticism: Hinduism, Buddhism, and Tao-

/ Page 96  /

ism. They get no encouragement from Hawking, who says "The universe of Eastern mysticism is an illusion."  
 
 When they parted from Brother Reanney they did so with great sadness, knowing his work was coming to an  end. They had talked well into the night, and, unless you had actually been there you would never have known the joy of it all. Remember how they had laughed, oh my goodness me, how they had laughed, cried their eyes out.
Then he was gone.
Hence the sadness.
 
 The scribe writ dog spells god backwards
 
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" The father of the so-called 'Copenhagen interpretation'of quant-um mechanics , Niels Bohr speculated as far back as 1958 that key points in the regulatory mechanisms of the brain might be so delicately balanced that they could be affected by quantum me-chanical events. Significantly, eminent brain biologist John.C.Eccles seems to agree. As Eccles has observed :          If one uses the expressive terminology… the 'ghost' (the quantum mechanical event ) operates a 'machine'      (the brain), not of ropes and pulleys, valves and pipes, but of microscopic spatio-temporal patterns of activity in      the neuronal net woven by synaptic connexions of ten thousand million neurones, and even then only by operating      on neurones that are momentarily poised close to a just-threshold level of excitability.    
This means  that the Y node choices that are almost evenly

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balanced between two outcomes are most likely to be susceptible to quantum influences because it is only in these near-equipoise situations that the quantum flunctuations are the 'feather on the scale' that tips the balance one way or the other."  
"…Quantum fluctuations could also express those thoughts that come to us 'in a flash'or 'out of no where'. I wonder what role, if any, they play in intuition. It is possible that the neural centre that 'sees' unity, no matter how much it is 'perfected' by unselfishness, is incapable of determining when it will have its deeper insights. That may well still be a matter of complete chance, or, on the above hypothesis, of quasi-chance and non-causal cross-linkaging. If some Y node choices were quantum in nature, a profound and enduring link would be established between the dynamics  of con-sciousness and the structure of the cosmos itself. It is not in the sense of a presently available scientific theory that I intuitively sense a 'rightness' in Hoyles idea but in the sense of a song of truth, an insight. It may take science years to formulate such a concept in a mathematical way that will win acceptance.
However one prediction does seem possible now. The con-straints placed on quantum events by the need to maintain
consistency in the loop must constitute one of the great ordering principles of nature. Such an ordering principle could require a profound modi-fication of the laws of quantum mechanics which are rooted in and dependent on the statistical principals of probability and randomness. (It was this indeterminate character of quantum mechanics that caused Einstein to complain that God 'did not play dice with the world'.) To maintain consistency in the loop, many quantum events could not be random: they would have to be linked, in the non-local way so characteristic of quantum mechanics. Could this linkage correspond to (and explain) the principle of synchronicity formulated by psychologist Carl Jung and quantum physicist Wolfgang Pauli and others ? "  
 
The scribe felt like writing Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart .
 
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" Synchronicity refers to the apparently inexplicable coincidences that crop up from time to time. We all have experiences of this type.

Page 220

For no apparent reason you may suddenly think of a friend you have not seen for years at the very moment
When the phone rings and you discover he/she has just landed in town and wants to visit  The quantum event that caused you to think of the person at the very instant he/she was thinking of you may result from the need to preserve the internal consistency of a quantum world closed back upon itself to form a loop of time.
The self-consistency concept may also help to explain what scientists call the anthropic principle. This refers not just to the coincidences of human life, but to cosmic coincidences.  
"…If the fundamental constants of physics were readjusted by just a tiny fraction, the universe would become inhospitable to life…"
"Physicists from Paul Dirac to Paul Davies have also pointed out that the cosmos seems to be sensitively built on a number of quite amazing coincidences. In particular, the large number10/40 crops up in some of the most basic relationships in physics."
"…The letters and numbers on the left refer to qualities or relation-ships that have fundamental importance in physics; their meaning need not concern us - it is the fact that the number 10/40 crops up so regularly in the context of the parameters which determine the structure of the universe that is so remarkable.
The anthropic principle says that all these 'coincidences'create the special kind of cosmic conditions needed to produce us. The puzzle this presents dissolves, however if consciousness inter-

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acts with matter by means of quantum events in the brain because the spacetime loop can then only maintain its self- consistency by creating and preserving just those conditions which permit consciousness to flourish.
Consciousness, in this context, does not mean the average mode of human consciousness at this moment in evolution, it means whatever completed limit consciousness may reach in future time. The cosmos then emerges as the ultimate feedback loop and consciousness is a created product of its own antecedent activity.
This idea has many similarities to the bootstrap principle formu-lated by physicist Geoffrey Chew (which defines all basic constituents of the real world in terms of their mutually self-consistent relation-ships) It is also a cousin of John Wheeler's concept of the universe as a 'self-exited circuit' in which the cosmos comes into being by retroactive causation, that is by events in the future propagating backwards in time to cause events in the past.
This is a very bold, almost rash speculation and it invites the obvious criticism from a scientific cynic, 'if these synchronicities which underpin consistency are real, if they exist they must show up somewhere as mathematical regularities. OK where are they ?'.
To explore this issue, we must look at the mathematics of randomness. And up front, we encounter a suprising fact.
It is difficult, if not impossible, to say with confidence that a given number sequence that appears random in any one context is in fact random in an absolute sense Most seemingly random numbers when compared, for example by adding or subtracting, would give further numbers which themselves would seem to be random.
However, consider the sequence  31415926535897 (1)
This passes all currently-available tests for randomness.
     Now com-pare it with the sequence 20304815424786 (2)
Which also qualifies as a wholly random number. On the face of it, we simply  have two random numbers. However, if we subtract the lower sequence (2) from the higher (1), with the 'wrinkle' that if we get a negative number we add 10 to the result, we obtain the sequence  111111111111111
This is strikingly non-random.These two 'random' numbers thus have a special property. Heinz Pagels,who gives this example in his book The Cosmic Code, draws from this illustration a conclu-

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sion that goes to the heart of my argument about synchronistic cross-linkaging . He says:
                
     This illustrates that two random sequences can be correlated-
     each is individually chaotic but, if properly compared by using
                   some rule, then a non-random pattern appears.
 
As Brother Reanney continued his tale the scribe looked on in some amaze though not as mazed as some 
If I am right, analgous cross-linkages at the quantum level may be the fine gossamer threads, fragile in themselves, but indestructible in their collective strength, that hold the cosmos in a self-consistent loop of becoming.
Y nodes, choices, thus emerge as the determinants of the pattern of our psychological development. Because of them,
we create our own heaven, our own hell, we create ourselves, we create the very fabric of the world."
With this discussion of synchronicity and self- consistency, we have arrived at the point where we can begin to see the strange relation-ship between consciousness and the universe, between the 'thought' within and the 'thing' without.
We have established that consciousness cannot be treated sepa-rately from the 'reality' it observes. We can assert this confidently. It is now a (virtually) unchallengeable maxim of quantum mechanics that each act of observation
causes the ripple of possibilities of the quantum wave to 'concretise into entities with an observable and measureable existence. In Chapter 9, I postulated that consciousness is that unifying activity in the brain that 'sees' one in many.
However, conscious-ness is not just a passive reciever. By its choices, it creates unities. Indeed, its very essence is that it acts as a nodal integrator between the quantum ripples of possibility that emanate from both past and future. It is if you like, the reality slit into which multiple ripples

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of possibility enter, leaving the temporally symmetric quantum world and 'falling' into the one-way world of matter which decays with time.      
       Wolf has summarised this viewpoint admirably:

      
Our minds [i.e. consciousness] are thus tuned… to multiple realities. The freely associating mind is able to pass across time barriers, sensing the future and reap-raising the past. Our minds are time machines, able to sense the flow of possibility waves from both the past and the future. In my view, there cannot be anything like existence without this higher form of quantum reality.
 
All this sounds highly abstract, remote from the kind of consciousness you and I experience now. So let me
bring the message closer to home. Think back again to a moment when you suddenly felt you really understood something you had not understood before.It may have been a mathematical problem you had been a mathematical problem you had been wrestling with for days. Suddenly, after hours of frustration, the answer was there-complete and perfect.  
This is the essence of insight. Things hitherto separate and unconnected suddenly 'click together'. The pieces of the jigsaw slide into place. As I have stressed, this integrative faculty is the hallmark of consciousness The understanding that follows a 'Eureka' moment is not a surface comprehension; it is a 'deep knowing'  with you for life precisely because it is part of a wider multiform consciousness, of which your mind is but a single unit. In deep knowing you become part of the self unfolding of the cosmos.
Think about this in terms of time.The answer you sought existed prior to your discovery of it. What happened in your flash of understanding was that your individual consciousness suddenly 'caught up'with a truth already 'known'. It tapped into the completed, unitive consciousness that underpins the closed feedback loop of becoming . What you experienced was a faint fore-taste of the final act in the evolution of  
Consciousness, a memory of total togetherness, when the distinction between observer and observed vanishes completely.
One of the founding fathers of quantum mechanics, Werner Heisenberg, said of his subject 'The common division of the world into subject and object, inner world and outer, body and soul, is no longer adequate'. In saying this he, a scientist found himself using

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the language of mysticism. Compare Heisenberg's words with those of the Dominican monk Meister Eckart, 'the knower and the known are one'. or the words of the Indian philosopher Krishnamurti, 'consciousness is its content'and ' there is neither the outer nor the inner but only the whole. The experiencer is the experienced… the thinker is the thought'. "  
Here then is the longed -for end of the age old road. Here science and religion speak with the same voice, each subtending and validating the other. Here confusion ends and contradictions cease. All things are one.
Even the distinction between the inner and outer, singer and song fades in the full light of completed consciousness.
Even now, today, here, still trapped in time, if we strain our ears to their  limit, we can just hear the strains of that different music'from the far shore the final chorus sounding' as Whitman said Awhisper of tomorrow reaching into today. More than a beacon of hope, more than a promise of things, a commitment from our higher selves to their lowlier foundations, a conviction that the creative evolution which fashioned man from microbe will fashion God from man,no, has fashioned God from man.From round the closed arc of time, the time free God speaks to his time trapped children, who are both his parents and his heirs.